Billy grins. ‘Rather the dreaming towers of medieval rape, pillage and slaughter,’ he says, wiping up the last of his egg with the last of his baguette. ‘I don’t think you’ve done your homework, old lad!’ Billy’s certainly been doing his homework. He catches my glance. ‘You coming, Starr? To Carcassonne?’
I’m already shaking my head. ‘Not me. I’ve work to do.’
Philip gathers up Mae and Billy’s plates and stacks them neatly in the dishwasher. ‘Our Stella always has work to do, doesn’t she?’ he says. ‘Or – my God – she’s gotta sleep! Or she’s gotta look at the stars. Our Stella’s not on the same planet as us more ordinary guys, Bill.’ These are bitter words and his tone is uneasy. I feel sorry for him. It really sounds as though he’s giving up on me. You can’t blame him really.
I walk with them all down to the car park and watch them climb into the car, kitted out with everything they might need for a whole day away. Philip has packed a superb picnic. As she settles into the car Olga turns and gives me this deep look through her round glasses. I know she’s thinking of Virgo and Ursa Major. And me, I am thinking of Siri.
I wave them off and turn towards the Café Plazza, finally allowing myself to look forward to seeing Madame Patrice. Neither she nor her bicycle is in place when I arrive, so I order my coffee and settle down to wait. I’m still waiting half an hour later but Madame Patrice does not arrive. I fight hard against the familiar, poisonous panic that floods through my body and makes the world black around me. I’m better now at dealing with this. I have to do it to survive. Not give in. Not end it all.
Find Madame Patrice, I tell myself, find her. Find out where she is. Go to the Presse and get a map of the town. She said she lived on rue de la Poissonnerie. I run down to the shop, bumping into people in my haste. Buy the map, open it up and look. That’s when, standing there in the street, I laugh out loud. Two women raise their eyebrows and carefully walk around me. There it is on the map. Her street. It’s only a dozen steps away from where I was sitting yesterday – it seems so long ago – with the man called Louis, on la Place de la Marine.
As I make my way to that end of the town, I find it more dilapidated even than the rue Haute of the Maison d’Estella. I remember what Madame Patrice said: ‘the poor gather there, of whom I am one. Bad things are said of them but they are wonderful people.’ I pass a rather grand restored house and other even grander doors, portals to big houses, now battered and broken. Some are patched with plywood. Others are daubed in graffiti. On one door there is a white handprint on the faded green paint.
I wander into a side street only to be stopped by two boys playing football, immaculate in pristine Nike strips. Madame Patrice said of the people here ‘they look after their children, you know. That’s a good sign.’ As I pass the boys they stand aside politely, football in hand. And they smile knowingly when I pass them on the way back, having been thwarted by a dead end. I push right to the back of my mind the thought of those two other footballing boys, locked up now in a cold British prison in some town in the north of England.
At last I find her. Mme Patrice Léance written in neat script beside one of the bell pushes. The names on the other bells are scribbled out. The doorway is painted a gingery moth-eaten brown, the last glossy layer on top of as many as twelve earlier layers of paint. I push open the door and see Madame Patrice’s bicyclette in the dank passageway. I ring her bell three times. No answer. Again. Again. No answer.
I stand back into the road then go to peer into her window through a jungle of plants. Between the customary protective bars, I can make out a neat table with a flowered cloth; a crystal jug; high bookshelves; a daybed in the corner. I take a breath and concentrate, willing Madame Patrice to come to me, to tell me where she is. Then I hear the high-pitched bark of a dog and the clanking of elaborate iron window furniture. I look upwards and in a high window see the head of the man called Louis above a high-buttoned white shirt. ‘Starr?’ he says.
‘I’m looking for Madame Patrice,’ I call up. ‘I thought I’d see her in the café but she’s not there. She’s not anywhere.’
He stares down at me. ‘Come up,’ he says finally. ‘Climb up as far as you can.’
I’m gasping by the time I’ve climbed the fourth flight, holding my breath against the latrine smell that seems embedded in the walls of this place. Louis is standing by an open door at the very top, the little dog Misou in his arms. He hasn’t bothered to fasten the cuffs of his shirt and they’re dropping from his muscular forearms, loose, like flags.
I peer behind him. ‘Is she here, Madame Patrice?’ I can’t explain to him why I’m demented by losing sight of this woman I’ve only met twice. ‘Where is she?’
He stands back to let me into the room. ‘She’s well enough.’ He pauses. ‘She had to make a little visit to . . . the hospital.’
I move into the room. ‘What happened?’
He frowns for a moment. ‘She fell off her bicycle.’
He shakes his head. We both smile, liking the woman, not wanting her to hurt herself.
I glance around and the room whirls round me like a roundabout on fast forward for a second, then settles down. I’ve never been in a room like it, although I feel that I’ve images and paintings of rooms like this. It’s small, no more than twelve feet square. Every surface is painted white. In one corner stands a bed, more like a soldier’s cot; beside that a square cupboard. That’s it; no other storage for clothes or anything else. Under the high narrow window is a large table made of thick planks placed on a trestle. On the table is a state-of-the-art laptop, a small printer, a pile of printed paper, a pile of blank paper and three folders bulging with documents. The chair pulled up to the table is the only one in the room. The wall to the side of the desk is covered with maps, some of them very old, flagged up with post-it notes. Stuck on to the wall alongside the maps are images of old rowing and sailing vessels.
On the opposite wall is a white ivory crucifix. In a niche beside it a statue of the Virgin Mary. Below that is some kind of low kneeler. I’m suddenly embarrassed at the earthly thoughts I’ve been having about this man.
‘You’re a priest?’ Despite my good intention it comes out like an accusation.
He gestures for me to sit on the desk chair. He crouches down on the kneeler, his knees nearly to his chin. ‘I am as I told you, Starr. I am a scholar.’
I absorb that, close my eyes and concentrate. Do it, Starr. Do it, Mummy. See what this place can tell me. See it properly.
Misou yelps. I open my eyes.
Louis is grinning, his blue eyes sparkling. ‘Steady! You should be careful with that powerful stuff when Misou is around. It makes him prickle.
I close my eyes again. I can see a pair of hands with tapering fingers, light coming outwards through them. The hands open and a small bird flies upwards and perches on the window frame above the desk. It is plain brown with a reddish tail and a white breast. A nightingale.
I open my eyes and there is no nightingale. ‘You’re some kind of a guardian,’ I say to Louis, suddenly sure. ‘You are the boy’s guardian.’
Misou has now crawled on to his shoulder and has coiled round his neck like a collar. Louis puts a hand up to stroke him. He stays silent.
‘Madame Patrice? She’s not really in hospital, is she?’
‘She’s gone,’ he said. ‘Passed on, you would say. She’s been gone for a week.’
‘But I saw her. I’ve seen her twice.’
‘You did, didn’t you? But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You see them, these people who are not properly gone.’
‘But I haven’t been able to do that. Not for . . . a long time. Three years now.’
‘But it’s beginning to happen again? You made it happen?’
I stare at him. ‘Yes. It’s beginning again.’
‘So . . .?’
I know now that he knows about Siri without me telling him.
‘And Madame Patrice is still around?’
&nb
sp; ‘She’s taking care of you.’
‘What do you mean, taking care of me?’
‘Wait,’ he says. He stares at me for a while, then blinks, as though he is forcing himself awake. ‘Where are your visitors today?’
‘They’ve gone to Carcassonne.’
He stares at me. ‘Would you do something for Madame?’
‘Anything.’
‘Will you take care of Misou? We’re not supposed to attach ourselves . . .’
We? Supposed? I don’t comment aloud on this. I just say, ‘I’ll take care of him for her. Just for now. I’ll take him for a walk by the canal.’ I pause. ‘I don’t know what they’ll think of me, taking Misou to the house.’
In the end it’s all very businesslike. Louis finds a plastic bag, fills it with dog bowls and packets of food and hands me Misou’s lead. Then before I can protest I’m out of the door and on the pavement. I look upwards to see the flash of a white shirtsleeve as the narrow window is closed again.
Misou tugs on his lead and I follow.
As I walk away I know I’d have liked to stay, to sit there in Louis’s cell-like room and talk. I’d have liked to ask him about his scholarship and what it was he believed in. Ask him about the boy, and Madame Patrice. I could have told him properly about Siri. How the lovely midwife told me Siri had been here before, that she had an old soul. How nice and down to earth Philip was when we first met him. I would have told him how being without Siri had been a kind of death in life but how here in this place I could feel her around me. I would have asked him about limbo, the interim place for the un-baptised. Louis is probably an expert on limbo. I definitely should have asked him about limbo.
‘Starr!’
I look back to see him leaning out of the high window.
‘Come back,’ he says. ‘Come back, will you?’
When I get up the narrowing staircases to the high room the door is open. Louis is leaning against the opposite wall, as though to make the greatest distance between us. His pale blue eyes scorch into mine. Heat rises from my neck right up to the roots of my hair. In one part of my mind I realize my face must be lobster red. Very unattractive. How long is it since I’ve cared what I looked like?
He relaxes then, and goes to sit on the bed. Misou settles down on the table beside the laptop and closes his eyes.
‘Sit with me, Starr,’ says Louis quietly. I’m glued to the spot, just inside the door. He comes and takes my arm and unglues me. After that it’s all very simple. He pulls me down to sit by him. His hand goes to my hot face and I cool down. Then I kiss him cleanly on the lips, then on the flesh of his cheek and his brow. Then I kiss him again and Philip is in my mind. How wonderful he was with Siri. But we never, never kissed like this. Then I forget all about Philip. And Siri.
Now he’s grabbing my shoulders and great heat comes from him. His sweat tastes of honey. With my lips still on his I peel off my shirt and his lips move on to my throat, down my body. He groans and over his head I catch sight of his crucifix. Now I wonder whether it’s guilt, not passion that makes him groan.
His lips are hard on mine again and there is no objectivity, no observation. I am pulsing with life in a world only alive because of his lips on mine, his skin on my skin. Now we crash in an untidy heap on the narrow creaking bed and smile into each other’s eyes as we sort ourselves out and begin again. Slowly, slowly we become one creature without beginning or end shuddering with life: one body and one mind, a universe unto ourselves.
After that we drop into a zone of forgetfulness that some might call sleep. When I snap into wakefulness he is propped up on one elbow staring down at me. I must look a real mess but I feel like the princess in the forest. One kiss and, after three years of sleepwalking, I am now awake.
I look into the face that is now so dear to me. But he is shaking his head. ‘That shouldn’t have happened.’
I glance across at the crucifix. ‘Not the kind of thing you should do?’
He pauses. ‘That’s one explanation, but it’s even more complicated than that.’
‘I’ve always thought they were strange rules to impose on human beings.’
He smiles. ‘They say they’re rules made by man, not by God. But all people need codes of one kind or another to live by. That’s what makes us sophisticated, civilized.’
He runs one light finger down the side of my face and my body starts tingling again. I sit bolt upright. ‘I have to go. They’ll be waiting for me.’ I don’t know why I say that. They’re in Carcassonne after all.
‘They?’ he asks. I am pulling on my shirt. ‘Bathroom across the landing,’ he says.
Five minutes later I am back, washed and clean with my hair held tight on the top of my head by the tortoiseshell barrette I bought in the Thursday market. He’s pulled on his shorts and the bed is smooth. Misou is prowling, ready to go.
Louis looks at me, his eyes clear and untroubled. The last hour might not have happened. Or it might . . .
This time when Misou and I walk back along the rue de la Poissonnerie we don’t look back. Later, we are just crossing the road when a bus passes labelled Grau d’Agde. Sitting just behind the driver is the boy. I stare at him and he touches his brow and treats me to a mock military salute, just like Mae did yesterday.
He is everywhere, this boy.
As we pass the Café Plazza, I have to hang on to Misou because he’s leaping high, pulling and jumping left and right between the tables, looking for Madame Patrice. I know just how he feels.
NINETEEN
Walking with Misou
Back at the house I lay out Misou’s things in the inner courtyard and set him up with a big bowl of water. I am full of energy. I have another shower, wash my hair, tidy the courtyard, make a potato salad and a large salade niçoise, put the food in the cool shade of the inner courtyard, and lay the table for six.
I’m sitting here at the table with Misou when the others get back from Carcassonne. I glance at Billy – first through the door with an exhausted George on his shoulders – and say, ‘Well, Billy, how was Carcassonne?’
He grins. ‘Very picture-book, but those tiny streets still flow with the echo of blood,’ he says. I think again that Mae’s very lucky to have Billy, even if she doesn’t know it. But he’s lucky in her. She’s an odd kind of life force.
Olga follows her father through the big door and shouts with delight. ‘A puppy! Auntie Starr has a puppy!’ She kneels down and tries to stroke Misou. He looks up at her, his head on one side, and she is lost in joy. I explain briefly that Misou is a grown dog but rather small. Then Mae comes in wearing a low-cut sundress that makes the most of her generous curves, followed by Philip, who takes one look at the set table and Misou and throws up his hands. ‘What now, Stella? What have you gone and done now?’ He sounds oddly disappointed that I’ve made such an effort.
‘I’ve made supper, Phil,’ I say. ‘To save you the bother.’
I stand up and start to bring the food in from the shade of the inner courtyard, putting out plates, two jugs of lemonade and a bottle of local rosé jammed into a full ice bucket. Philip looks from me to his kitchen, back to the table. At a stroke I’ve taken his world from under him. Honestly, I hope you don’t think I’ve done this vengefully because of all his messing about with Mae. It’s just because of all this energy I’m feeling. I’m no longer the madwoman who needs to be calmed down, fed fine foods, protected from the world.
The courtyard stills to a tableau. Olga is stroking Misou, talking to him, asking his name and where he’s from. Billy is sitting with the wakening George on his knee. Mae is lighting a cigarette, her eyes bright with anticipation of dramas to come.
In the end Philip catches my arm as I come in with a bowl of fresh fruit and a jug of crème fraiche. ‘Where’s it from, Stella? Whose dog is this? What are you going to do with a dog?’
‘His name is Misou. And I’m taking care of him for someone.’
‘Someone? Someone? You don’t know anyone.’
‘Misou!’ says Olga in a strange purring growl. ‘Misou, Misou, Misou.’ She must think she’s talking in dog language.
‘Who?’ he says. ‘You don’t know anyone in this city.’
Full of life now, I really resent the contempt in his tone. ‘How on earth d’you think you know who I know in this town? Have you spent any time with me here? Let’s be honest, you’ve spent your time running away from me. That is, apart from putting food out for me, like you would with a favourite cat.’
‘That’s not fair, Stella,’ Mae bursts in. ‘Phil’s only trying to—’
‘None of your business!’ I flash back.
She screws out her cigarette on to a plate. ‘Look, Stella, how long do you want us all – Phil, me – to go on pussyfooting around you? We know the thing that happened to Siri is the worst thing that could happen to anyone. And we – especially Phil – have held your hand through that. Don’t you think other folks have felt pain for themselves and for you? But it can’t go on. You’ve got the poor lad so that he has to get blind drunk to enjoy himself . . .’
‘Stop!’ I hold up my hand as though to ward off a blow. But she’s right. I feel like falling through the floor. Phil is shaking his head in protest.
Billy coughs. ‘Starr’s right,’ he says. ‘Mae, leave it! Mind your own business.’
She turns on him like a viper. ‘You! You slug, you! Why do you never stick up for me? Oh no! Stella’s the little starry-eyed girl, isn’t she? The interesting case: A Study In Grief . . .’
Now Billy stands up, puts George carefully on the ground. He walks to the glass door that leads to the salon where, yesterday, Olga played with her Gameboy.
He turns to her. ‘A word, Mae,’ he says evenly, then turns away from her and walks through the door. In a single moment Billy has evolved from the easy-going, mild, over-motherly spouse to the quiet man who’d been top of his year at medical school and, further back, the boy who captained his county team at rugby. Billy’s bringing out his own personal big guns: a thing he rarely needs to do.
Englishwoman in France Page 11