The Secrets of the Bastide Blanche

by M. L. Longworth

  “I’m so sorry, M Barbier,” she said. She looked up at the house, and I wasn’t sure if she was sorry that she was inconveniencing me or she was afraid to sleep in La Bastide Blanche. She shrugged and said, “At least I’ll be here if EDF shows up early tomorrow morning.”

  We walked back to our chaises longues, and I went into the house to get my cell phone and a bottle of wine. During one of my walks into Puyloubier, I had put the pizza place’s phone number in my phone. The village was only a kilometer or so away, but I didn’t feel like walking, and it would soon be dark. Sandrine went into the house and brought out two wineglasses and a corkscrew; she was definitely a take-charge kind of woman. I asked her what kind of pizza she wanted, and we agreed on chorizo with mushrooms and red peppers. The call made, we sat back again, and I poured some wine. “M Barbier,” she asked, “what made you decide to start writing your wonderful romance books?”

  This is a question I have been asked over and over again, but I guess Sandrine hadn’t read my standard answers. “I was heartbroken after Agathe’s death,” I said. “I wrote the first romance—”

  “Another Day!”

  “Right,” I replied, “as an homage to Agathe. I wasn’t thinking I’m going to switch genres. I was just writing what was in my heart, and what I thought I needed to say.”

  “Your older books you didn’t write with your heart?” she asked. She put her hand to her chest for extra effect.

  “No,” I answered slowly. “They were more up here,” I said, pointing to my forehead. “Émile Zola once told his friend Paul Cézanne that he, Cézanne, was more talented because he painted with his heart while Zola wrote with his head.”

  Sandrine listened, furrowed her brow, and then smiled, understanding what Zola meant. “And you kept writing romances.”

  I wished she would stop calling them romances. In the trade they’re referred to as “contemporary women’s fiction.” “I did. Especially after the success of Another Day. I found writing those books an emotional release. Cheaper than therapy.”

  “They made you feel good.”

  “Exactly.” I didn’t add, “and rich.”

  “That’s why I love cleaning,” she said. I tried not to look surprised. She went on, “I’m helping other people, and it makes me feel good. I can organize their stuff, so they feel better about themselves too.”

  I lifted my glass to hers and gently tapped it. “You have already, Sandrine. Thank you.”

  “How did Mme Barbier die?” This question, people usually don’t ask. They either know, because it was all over the press, or they don’t want to ask.

  “We’re not sure.”

  Now it was her turn to look at me, surprised.

  I continued, “The case was never solved; in fact, it’s still open. Agathe fell into the sea. At least that’s how I remember that night. We were on my publisher’s sailboat—Alphonse Pelloquin was his name. He died of cancer a few years ago. We had all had a lot to drink, and it was late. The waves were choppy, though they hadn’t been earlier. I was down below, having a nap . . .”

  Sandrine stared into her wineglass, silent. A whining noise and the sound of crunching gravel came from off in the distance. Soon a tiny light approached the house, getting closer and closer. It was our pizza.

  The little moped, with one of those bright-red wooden boxes attached to its rear, stopped about ten feet from us, at the end of my driveway. The delivery guy got off, and took our pizza from the box. I had the money ready, and we met halfway. He slowly took off his helmet, and I could see he was a kid, maybe twenty. He stared at me, and gulped before speaking. “M Barbier,” he began, “it is . . . an honor.”

  “To bring me my pizza?” I asked, trying to laugh. I think the whiskey and wine were getting to me.

  The kid laughed and handed me the pizza. “No, it’s an honor to sort of meet you,” he said. He reached out with his skinny hand, and I shook it. I was going to ask him if his name was Dylan, and then chastise him for writing on the living room walls, but he introduced himself as Thomas.

  “How do you do, Thomas,” I said. I realized that in all the commotion I had used my real name when ordering the pizza. Usually I’m M Dupin. George Sand was born Aurore Dupin.

  “I just want to say,” Thomas said, his voice cracking, “that Red Earth is my favorite book of all time.”

  I turned around, hoping that Sandrine wouldn’t burst in and want to talk about Postcard Romance, but she was busy lighting candles on the terrace table.

  “I’m thrilled,” I replied earnestly.

  “We had to read it in high school,” he said. “But I want you to know that I’ve kept reading it, over and over, since then.” He gestured toward the scooter and said, “I’m doing this for a summer job.”

  I nodded. “Good man. Having a summer job is important. What are you doing in the fall?”

  “Going into my second year of prépa.”

  * * *

  “Clothilde did prépa!” Justin cut in. “Pure hell, she called it.”

  “That’s exactly what it is, a hellish two years of study—préparation, in order to try to pass the entrance exams into une grande école.”

  “Yeah, but if you get in, those elite schools are free, aren’t they?” Justin asked.

  Valère chuckled. “If you gain entry into one of them, they’re not only free; you’re paid a salary. For being a student! I asked Thomas which school he wanted to go to.”

  * * *

  “Sciences Po,” Thomas answered. “I want to be a journalist.”

  Sciences Po is—yes, you’re right, Justin—a political science school, with lots of courses in the humanities. “I wish you all the very best,” I said to Thomas, shaking his hand again. “And please be careful on that contraption.” I pointed to the scooter.

  “I will, M Barbier!” he shouted, as he put his helmet back on. I wanted to offer him some kind of job around the house, gardening or something, to get him off that thing. Maybe I would. I was a new man, one who wasn’t getting any sleep, but one who was very different from his former depressive Parisian self.

  “Oh là là,” Sandrine called over. “Are we eating a cold pizza or what?”

  Chapter Seven

  Aix-en-Provence,

  Monday, July 5, 2010

  Instead of taking the tiny passage Agard, normally the quickest way back to the Palais de Justice, Bruno Paulik walked along the rue Thiers, one of his favorite streets in Aix. He liked the elegant but faded hotels that lined the curved street, and the fact that here there were still mom-and-pop stores that had been around for decades. He walked into one of them now, a shoe store called Cendrillon, which he remembered being dragged to by his mother and older sisters on Saturday shopping trips into Aix. “Bonjour, mesdames,” he said politely to the other shoppers—all female, all looking at him curiously—as he carefully closed the door behind him.

  “Ah, bonjour, monsieur le Commissaire,” said a well-preserved woman in her late sixties who was helping another woman choose a pair of dress shoes.

  “I’m here for my daughter,” he explained.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute,” the saleswoman answered.

  “You go ahead,” her client said, “while I try walking around the store in these shoes a bit.”

  “Merci, madame,” Bruno said. He looked around the shop and swore it hadn’t changed in decades, except for the prices, which were higher and no longer in francs. But the summer sales were on, and Léa needed new sandals.

  “Et votre maman?” the saleswoman asked, and Bruno realized that she must be Anne-Marie, the shop’s owner. “Vos soeurs?”

  “They are all well, thank you,” he replied. Anne-Marie had somehow recognized him and knew that he was a policeman, but he hadn’t recognized her. “Maman and Papa are still very active,” he went on. “I’ll tell her you said hello.”

&
nbsp; “Likewise,” she said. “And if you could tell your mother that we’re closing in two months, and we’ve appreciated her business over the years.”

  “You’re closing permanently?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she replied. “Early retirement. We just can’t compete with . . .”

  Bruno nodded. “The chain stores. I’m so sorry.”

  She shrugged. “You’re looking for shoes for your daughter?”

  “Yes, sandals, in size 36. She wants the ones made in Saint-Tropez,” he answered. “I have specific orders. She wants them in light-brown leather.”

  Anne-Marie smirked. “I’m not sure if I have any left in brown in 36, but I’ll check.”

  She went in the back room, and Bruno smiled as the other client walked around the room, testing her new heels. “A summer wedding,” she said. “My niece.” She walked over to Bruno and whispered, “It’s costing a fortune. They’re renting the Château Grimaldi in Puyricard.”

  “I’d better start saving,” Bruno said. “My daughter is almost twelve.”

  The client laughed and walked over to a mirror to look at her shoes. Bruno realized that one of the most pleasant weddings he had been to recently was Antoine and Marine’s, a year ago, in a tiny Ligurian village. Anne-Marie came back with a shoe box in her hands. “Great,” Bruno said.

  “Not exactly,” she replied. “They’re not brown, and I know how selective little girls can be. They’re the Tropeziennes brand, but in silver. It’s a very chic color right now.” She pointed to the small metal emblem on one of the straps, to prove the shoe’s authenticity.

  He looked at the sandals, flat with five delicate straps that surrounded the foot. They had been favorites since Brigitte Bardot made them famous in the late 1950s. His sisters had always worn them, and he noticed that girls and women in Aix still did. “I’ll take them,” he said.

  * * *

  Marine left the café, kissing Verlaque good-bye and wishing both him and Jean-Marc a good day, and made her way up the rue Clemenceau in the direction of their apartment near the cathedral. For the first year of their married life they had each kept their apartments, but she recently sold hers, located in the chic quartier Mazarin, and they had just begun to look for a house in the countryside. The prices made her stomach flip, as did the fact that her husband didn’t flinch seeing renovated farmhouses near Aix selling for multiple millions of euros. He claimed it was because he was used to Parisian prices, but she knew that it was really because of the wealth he had grown up with. Antoine’s grandfather, Charles Verlaque, had earned the family fortune in flour mills, Antoine’s father, Gabriel, halfheartedly took over in the late 1970s. The mills were sold to a multinational in the late 1990s.

  Marine cherished mornings in Aix, especially in summer, before the tour groups arrived. When she was a girl, she dreamed of living in a big city, Paris or Rome, and wished that her hometown wasn’t so sleepy. Now she found herself wishing there were fewer people in Aix. In a few minutes she arrived at the place de l’Archevêché, now called the place des Martyrs de la Résistance, but the former name would always be engraved in her mind. It was the one she had grown up with. Instead of turning right, toward their apartment, she decided to walk on and visit the cathedral. She had a long day ahead, researching the war years of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and needed a few moments of inspiration. When her book proposal, a biography on the couple’s working, and loving, relationship, had been accepted by a prestigious Parisian publishing house, she resigned from her position as a law professor at the Université d’Aix-Marseille. Quitting her job hadn’t been a rash decision—she had been thinking seriously about it for over a year—and with Antoine’s blessing her book deal helped her deliver her letter of resignation to the dean. Almost a year on, ex-colleagues told her that the university still hadn’t hired a replacement, and she felt relieved to be away from the slow-turning wheels of French academia.

  Saint Mitre’s carved face greeted her as she stood outside Saint-Sauveur. The saint was beheaded in the fifth century, and he held his own head in his hands. It was so much more elegant, mused Marine, than having it lie on the ground at his feet. Or perch on a platter, as Judith often does with the head of Holofernes. She stopped to give a beggar beside the front doors a euro. The beggar said merci, and Marine saw that he was blind. She went inside, leaving the bright sunshine for the darkened church. It was mercifully cool, as the morning was already hot. As much as she loved living downtown, she relished the idea of their future country house, whose thick walls she imagined would keep them cool. She frowned, realizing that her guilt about the probable cost of the new house was quickly diminishing.

  The chapel of saint Mitre was on the left-hand side of the nave, and Marine walked through the church with purpose. Her aim wasn’t to visit the saint’s sarcophagus, which was in the chapel (Who knows whose body is under all that stone, she thought). She wanted to do something she had been doing since she was a child and had always brought her luck—or at any rate helped her to think straight. On the column to the right of the tomb, about three feet off the ground, was a hole about the size of a large coin lying on its side. Legend said that the hole released a miraculous liquid that could cure eye diseases. She bent down and slowly put her finger in the hole, thinking of the beggar outside, and closed her eyes. Blocking out the noises in the church, she tried to concentrate on her book. But visions of a stone country house kept interfering with her attempts to organize the next chapter. Opening her eyes, she slowly felt along the smooth cold surface of the hole’s interior. She sighed. She couldn’t feel any liquid, but, then, she never had.

  * * *

  To sell the book idea, Marine had organized the chapters as simply as she could. The book would cover two long lives, in one of history’s most tumultuous centuries, so she ordered the chapters chronologically. Once the contract had been signed, she thought she could be a little more daring with the narrative and perhaps go back and forth in time, but in the end it proved logical to keep the chapters as they were. All day she worked on organizing chapter 3, 1937–39, and toward the end of the day typed in a chapter title, “The Oncoming War,” before closing her laptop. Verlaque had transformed the mezzanine, which gave onto his living room, into an office for Marine. “What about your office?” she asked. “I have an office already,” he said. “At work, at the Palais de Justice. The only work I do at home is bill paying, and that I can do at the dining room table.”

  Conscious of the fact that she was about to go out into the scorching heat, Marine drank a tall glass of water. She then grabbed her car keys and purse, and headed out of the apartment to pick up her goddaughter, Charlotte. Charlotte and her mother, Sylvie, Marine’s best friend, lived around the corner. Twelve years ago, Sylvie had had an affair with a married man and kept the resulting pregnancy a secret from him, against the advice of almost all her friends, including Marine. That evening, Marine and Charlotte were invited to dinner at Hélène and Bruno Paulik’s, as Léa and Charlotte were good friends. Verlaque was going out that evening, with cigar friends, visiting downtown apartments in the hopes of finding one suitable to rent as a clubhouse.

  Charlotte was waiting in the street, beside her front door, when Marine arrived. It shocked Marine to see Charlotte standing there alone, and she forgot how grown up she was at eleven years old. “Where’s Sylvie?” Marine asked after exchanging the bise with her goddaughter.

  “She had to leave,” Charlotte answered. “She was late for an appointment.”

  Marine nodded and said nothing, thinking that “an appointment” probably meant a date, and Charlotte didn’t want to talk about it. Charlotte had never met her father, but Marine knew that he was a well-known photographer from Berlin, with children of his own.

  “Maman spent hours in the bathroom getting ready,” Charlotte said.

  Marine looked at her goddaughter and smiled. “Oh yeah?”

 
“I had to brush my teeth at the kitchen sink.”

  “Poor you!” Marine said, trying to have fun with it. She was unsure where the conversation was going, and if Charlotte’s feelings were hurt.

  “She finally came out of the bathroom and then ran right back in again and wiped off most of the makeup she was wearing,” Charlotte said, “and then changed her clothes for the third time.”

  Marine whistled. “Sylvie looks good no matter what she wears. She needn’t worry so much.”

  Charlotte smiled. “Yeah, Maman is really pretty.” She reached over and held Marine’s hand, and they walked toward the underground lot where both Marine and Antoine kept their cars, their arms swinging in motion as Charlotte told Marine about school. Next year Charlotte would be in junior high, and she was determined to take the exams to enter into the bilingual French/English class at Collége Mignet. Antoine Verlaque was her English tutor. Léa Paulik would surely be admitted into the intensive music program, also at Mignet, and the girls were thrilled at the possibility of studying at the same downtown school.

  In less than twenty minutes, they were driving up the dusty gravel road leading to the Pauliks’ house. Verlaque had convinced Marine to buy a new car, showing her photographs of small, sleek Italian and German race cars. She instead bought a small four-door Renault Clio. “Made in France,” Marine said, “plus my parents always buy Renaults.”

  “I know,” Verlaque said, his expression exaggerating the sadness in his voice.

  Marine laughed. “My family has been a customer at the Aix Renault garage for years, and I know they won’t rip me off when it comes to repairs.”