by Michelle Wan
“Look, I’m really not interested—” He backed away as Adelheid Besser accosted him again with her enormous anatomy.
“I would not,” she said ominously, “wait too long.”
• 5 •
Julian drove back to Ecoute-la-Pluie at the end of the afternoon. His encounter with Adelheid Besser had left him feeling paranoid and helpless. Paranoid because he was desperate to protect his orchid from people like her; helpless because in order to protect it, he first had to find it. It would not come into bloom—if it bloomed at all; orchids could be bloody temperamental—until early May. Until then, there was little he could do. Without its flower, Cypripedium incognitum would be hard to spot.
Mara was in the kitchen assembling a gratin dauphinois when he came into the house. They alternated cooking nights. Tonight was her shift, and when she cooked she was typically distracted, if not downright cranky. Julian exchanged quick pecks with her and edged between their two dogs to get a beer from the refrigerator.
“How’s Joseph bearing up?” He did not know the Gaillards well but had liked Amélie, was sorry his book signing had made him unable to pay his last respects.
“Not well. I passed on your regrets. A nephew and his wife are with him now.” She squinted at an opened cookbook through a pair of varifocal glasses that she had never learned to see through, near or far. “But they can only stay for a few more days. After that, until some kind of regular home care is set up for him, Jacqueline and another nurse will rotate to visit him daily, and Francine Boyer, Huguette Roche, Suzanne Portier, and I will work in turns to drop in, see to shopping and his evening meals. I’m taking some of this over to him later.”
“Poor old boy. Who’d have thought she’d go first?” Julian echoed everyone’s sentiments. He dodged around her, getting a glass, rummaging through drawers. Her kitchen, a model of good design, boasted color-coordinated appliances, strategic track lighting, and a center island table with matching stools that were too low for him. Interiors were Mara’s profession, and she had successfully transplanted her Montreal practice to the Dordogne, where her services were much in demand. However, Julian still had not figured out where things like the bottle opener were kept.
“Here.” She found it for him in the dishwasher. “Now stop hovering.”
So he backed off and stood watching her, sipping his beer and feeling a bit at loose ends.
The problem from Julian’s perspective was that the rest of her house was like her kitchen: a showcase.
“You have to understand,” Mara had told him when he first moved in, “my home is my shop front, my display window.”
“Yes, but the display keeps changing.”
This was because she ran a sideline in one-off furniture and accessories. She was forever picking through junk shops and vide-greniers, unearthing an old farm cupboard, a fire surround, an antique standing clock, all of which took their places in her dining room or salon or vestibule, waiting to be sold on. Other things would take their places. It was very hard for Julian to feel settled.
However, his grievance with the furniture was nothing compared to the running battle he had with Mara’s cleaning woman, Madame Audebert. She was a gaunt person with a rotten temper who had taken a dislike to him from the start. On her days in, she glared at him with eyes as black and sharp as olive pits and went about with a disapproving mouth, puckered like a knot of worms.
“You leave your things everywhere,” was a frequent Audebert complaint. “And then there are your plants.”
Julian was a lover of growing things. He had brought with him a legion of potted plants that dropped leaves and had to be moved each time the woman wanted to polish the furniture.
“And your dog. I find his hairs everywhere.”
Initially, he had tried hard to win the heart of the steely femme de ménage. He had bobbed and smiled like an idiot as she drove him inexorably from room to room with thrusts of a vacuum cleaner that roared at him like a windy, Jurassic beast. He had tried conversation. Madame Audebert wanted no part of him. Her grumbles had escalated from the olive-pit looks and the mouth to outright war. Soon Julian gave up trying. He knew that good cleaning women were hard to find and even harder to retain. Sometimes he actually wondered, if push came to shove, whom between them Mara would shove.
That was probably why he felt the need every so often to return for a few days to his poky little cottage outside the village of Grissac—to check up on things, he said, but really to be at his ease, to reassure himself that if things got too bad in Ecoute-la-Pluie he still had somewhere to go. It was a kind of unofficial Time Out during which he reacquainted himself with his books (he had an enormous quantity of them), his old leather armchair (it sagged to the shape of his body), and his smoky fireplace. He did his laundry, puttered, mused about the state of his roof, and checked the garden for winter’s damages. Mara seemed to accept these breaks, maybe even welcomed them. It was what made his living situation so peculiar. Neither here nor there. Like camping out, he thought sadly.
From Mara’s viewpoint, the ménage à deux was a necessary experiment. Both of them had survived unhappy past marriages; both of them had become used to their own company. After months of dating, this trying out of each other at close quarters was something she really felt was the logical next step.
“A relationship is like a shark,” she often said. “It has to move forward or it drowns.”
But there were times when she actually wondered what she and Julian were doing together.
“We have such different approaches to life,” she had complained to him more than once.
“Yes,” he had agreed. “You like to move things around, rearrange space, even between people.”
“I like to make a bad layout better. It’s my métier. Nothing wrong with that. But you seem content just going with the flow.”
“And I suppose, seen through the shark’s eye, that’s tantamount to drowning?”
“Well, sometimes it’s important to be proactive. Take Madame Audebert, for example.”
“You can have her, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Please, Julian. I’m serious. I at least tidy up before she comes. I need this place to look good.” It staggered her that Julian, with unbelievable nonchalance, simply left his whisker hairs in the bathroom sink, his clothes on the radiators, his reading material everywhere, and always seemed surprised at the consequences.
“Or communication. I happen to think it’s important to talk about things, to get down to the real us. Whereas you take everything, even me, at face value.”
“Oh, give me strength,” he had objected.
He also had an annoying habit of standing about, as he was now, looking long, shaggy, and slightly displaced. And then there were his botanical passions.
Normally, Mara could have off-loaded by email to her best friend and touchstone, Patsy Reicher, formerly resident in the Dordogne, now returned to New York. >Patsy, she could have written, what am I doing with a man who gets more excited about a flower than me?< And Patsy would have shaken her wise, frizzy, iodine-colored head and written back, as she had done before: >You’re with him because, despite everything, he’s a sweetheart, and there’s something about him that tells you in the long run he’s a keeper. Stick with him, kid.<
Except that Patsy was not in New York. A gum-chewing psychoanalyst–sometime sculptor with a patchwork history of relationships of her own, Patsy was with a new partner of the heart, a burned-out fellow shrink named Stanley, on a journey of the soul in Nepal. Which was good in a way, because it had allowed Mara to arrive, uncoached, at the conclusion that she really did want a life with Julian. It was just the getting there that was difficult.
So it was that the only ones really comfortable with the living arrangement were the dogs. Bismuth, Julian’s bony, sad-faced mongrel, liked the larger space; Jazz, Mara’s white and tan pitbull (also Bismuth’s sire) welcomed the company.
She was now bringing a liter of salted milk to the boi
l and grating nutmeg into it. Then she had to do something with 50 centiliters of crème fraïche and 80 grams of butter, but that came later. She had already peeled and sliced the potatoes into rondelles, which lay ready on the cutting board. Spuds and milk, she thought. Can’t go far wrong with that. It was the main problem with having a housemate: she, a rotten cook, felt obliged to come up to some minimal standard where meals were concerned.
“How did the signing go?” she asked.
“Oh, fine.”
“Sell many books?”
“Er—no. But I met the most bloody awful woman. Adelheid Besser. Big orchid collector and breeder. She also dabbles in the food and medicinal properties of orchids.”
“Oh?” Mara, studying the glossy photograph of the prepared dish, which looked brown and rich and crusty, wrinkled her forehead. “I wonder if I cut the potatoes thin enough.”
“She actually had the nerve to try to commission me to find Cypripedium incognitum. Can you believe it?” From where he stood Julian eyed the photo, too. “That looks good. I’m starving.”
“Well, you pretty much put your orchid up for grabs by including it in your book.”
“That was in the hope someone might have information on it.”
“And if they did, do you think they’d tell you? You know what orchid freaks are like. Obsessive, secretive, and paranoid.”
Fleetingly, Julian wondered if she meant to include him. But he said, “Like Géraud, you mean.” Géraud Laval was an irascible man and Julian’s bitter rival when it came to things botanical.
“And this Adelheid. You were bound to attract kooks.”
“She’s not just a kook. She’s downright scary. I think she’d be capable of reducing the entire population of European orchids to a tincture.”
“Yes, well—” Mara gave a small scream as a rapidly forming head of white froth suddenly caught her eye. She snatched the saucepan from the fire, but not before most of the milk had cascaded over the sides.
“Merde!” She made an attempt to wipe up the spill before it crusted on the range top. Then she said, “Oh, flûte!”
“What now?”
“It says here to cook the potatoes in the boiled milk.”
Julian considered the great mound of potatoes on the cutting board.
“Your pot seems very small,” he ventured.
“I know that,” Mara snapped, and lunged into a cupboard from where, with a great deal of clanging, she extracted a larger vessel into which she transferred the milk and the potatoes. She stared at the mixture for a moment, then banged on the lid, adjusted the gas fire, and expelled a gusty sigh.
“Sorry.” She turned to him, looking sheepish. “Pour me some wine, will you? This has to cook for ten minutes.”
They went into the dining room where they sat down on flimsy-looking chairs that went with a round table with fluted legs, recent acquisitions from a brocante in Villeréal.
“God, what an awful day,” Mara said, shoving Bismuth away with her foot. Jazz had gone to sprawl in his usual spot on a costly Aubusson rug of floral design that dominated the front room. “First, the daughter, Christine, didn’t come, but then the O’Connors did. All the way from Florida.”
“The O’Connors?” Julian started to lean back but stopped; he was never sure if the new chairs would take his weight. He had met the Americans twice. Donny struck him as a decent enough sort of bloke with whom he had nothing in common—the man was in “development,” whatever that meant, and golf. As for Daisy, he could not get past her scent. It preceded her into a room and lingered heavily after her departure. Oddly enough, it had a bitter underlay that he could almost taste on his tongue.
Mara took a sip from her glass. “Daisy is very attached to Joseph, you know. In fact, she was all over him with TLC at the reception.” She added drily, “Even to the point of feeding him. He kept having to open his mouth so she could cram food in it. And she spent most of the afternoon telling me about Amélie’s virtues, as if I didn’t know her, too.”
Julian caught her tone. “You don’t like Daisy much, do you?” “No, I suppose not.” Mara used to think it was because Daisy laughed at her French. Like many québecois, Mara was a mix of things (Scottish father, French-Canadian mother) and fully bilingual. Her English was indistinguishable from standard Anglo-Canadian. Her French, however, was pure montréalais, where words like même came out mime, where whole syllables slid precariously together and consonants got strained through the teeth. Daisy, whose French was near to perfect, had thought it necessary to say to Mara, on their first meeting and in English, “Wherever did you get that darling twang?”
Now, however, Mara understood that her dislike had deepened to something more elemental: fear of loss.
“Daisy has a way of taking people over,” she said, “of reshaping them according to how she sees them. I don’t want that. I want to remember Amélie as she was for me—not a saint, but big and bossy, a real stickler for proprieties. You didn’t want her to catch you doing the wrong thing. But she was generous and warm, and I loved her.” She reflected wistfully, “You see, Julian, when I first moved here, everyone was nice, but it was the Gaillards who really took me in. Amélie set me up with her butcher, her market vendors, her cheese merchant. At first I didn’t know a cabécou from a brebis. We formed a mutual bond of affection. She was always interested in how I was doing and usually keen to tell me how to do it better. And Joseph, before his Parkinson’s got bad, was always ready to help me out.”
Mara felt the tears coming again. Sympathetically, Julian took her hand.
“They taught me so much,” she mourned. The virtue of patience, the value of local gossip, the many ways of beating a system that often drove you crazy. Best of all, Amélie and Joseph had revealed to her the litany of their quiet but rugged existence built around food and governed by the seasons: the race for morels after a spring rain; the succession of summer vegetables; the autumnal activities of harvest and hunt; the secretive search for cèpes and truffles; the bottling and the canning; and the cracking of walnuts around a neighborly winter fire. In so doing, they had given her a precious gift: they had enabled her to become part of life in Ecoute-la-Pluie.
Whereas—her chin snapped up—Daisy and Donny were visitors. They did not live there year-round but came and went as they pleased, taking the best and discarding the rest. Mara shook her head. She knew she was being petty and unreasonable. Visitors or not, Donny and Daisy had known the Gaillards for years, far longer than she. They had earned their place in the Gaillards’ lives.
“Sometimes,” she mused, “I wonder if I haven’t been more of a daughter to Amélie and Joseph than Christine.”
“It really is too bad about her,” Julian said. “She should at least have made the effort to attend her own mother’s funeral. Was Joseph upset she didn’t show?”
Mara considered this. “I don’t know. To be honest, I think he was more worried about what Amélie had been doing up on the Two Sisters’ porch.”
“Good question. It’s a godawful place for a restaurant, unless you’re a mountain goat. Those stairs are really steep.” Julian drained off his beer. “Maybe Amélie was checking it out for lunch.”
Mara said doubtfully, “The Two Sisters is a pretty upmarket spot. Not the Gaillards’ kind of thing.”
“All right. She went up there to meet someone.”
“No. They’d gone to Beaumont simply to do their marketing. Anyway, Joseph would have known if it had been anything like that.”
Julian stroked his beard. “The way I heard it, Amélie took Joseph to the WC. Then she went off to get her vegetables—”
“Unless it was someone Joseph wasn’t supposed to know about,” Mara mused. “I wonder if that’s what he meant when he said ‘they won’t tell me’?”
He gazed at her suspiciously. “You’re at it again.”
“What?”
“Ferreting.”
“Ferreting?”
“It’s what you do.”
>
“I do not.”
“You do. You invent puzzles where none exist.”
“I’m not the one asking the question. It’s Joseph.”
Julian shifted in his chair. “All the same, I think you’re making it unnecessarily complicated.” He drew on his botanical background. “In plant classification—”
Mara closed her eyes and made a sound between a growl and a groan. Julian heard it but went on.
“In plant classification there’s a thing called the tenet of parsimony. It says you should go with the simplest hypothesis that squares with the facts. I’d say”—he broke off to sniff the air—“the most straightforward explanation is that Amélie took Joseph to the gents, lost him in the crowd, and climbed up the stairs to have a squint round for him.” He sniffed the air again. “Something’s burning.”
“Merde!” Mara leaped up, knocking her chair over in her rush for the kitchen. When she lifted the casserole lid, she saw that the milk had boiled dry. The potatoes on the bottom were crackling dangerously while those on top still had a raw, slimy look. Smoke rose from the mixture.
“Oh, damn and blast!” she yelled and punched the exhaust fan button. Who said you couldn’t go wrong with milk and potatoes?
• 6 •
The Ismets’ Turkish food shop was situated between an ironmonger’s and a tabac on the main street of the town of Brames. The front was painted green, and the word Lokum, Turkish for the gummy, sugared confection known in English as Turkish delight, was lettered in flowing script on the display window. Julian, with his sweet tooth, was a valued customer of Lokum. Whenever he was out that way, he always dropped in to buy squares of Betul Ismet’s baklava, which oozed honey beneath the tooth and left telltale shards of pastry on his beard. He treated himself to little tubs of mulhallebi, a cold, fragrant milk pudding dusted with ground pistachios, or savory, multi-layered borek stuffed with red peppers or eggplant. The latter were sprinkled with sesame seeds that he liked to pop between his teeth. Some of the seeds lodged there, affording (although he would be ashamed to admit this publicly) a delightful reserve for popping later.