Blame It on the Bossa Nova (19 page)

We couldn’t find a taxi at Limoges at two in the morning so we stayed in the ticket hall of the station. We leaned against one another and Pascale fell asleep almost immediately but before I finally dropped off I’d resigned myself to watching the dawn come up. I remember hearing a clock strike half past four. At round about seven, after a stand up breakfast in a bar near the station we took a country bus heading for Pascale’s village. We passed through flat, agricultural countryside, peopled as always in France by out of work models practising for Millet Sons of the Soil type paintings. Bent double, heads down. De Gaulle hadn’t changed their lives yet, but neither had Hitler, Stalin, Hiroshima or the conquest of Everest. These people were the outer sentinels of the village. It sat among them and their fields - Four hundred houses, a church and a cinema, five bars, some shops, an elementary and secondary school. But to me even the pavements had a magical quality, for this was where Pascale had grown up. She had looked at the church, the houses, the bus shelter, with the eyes of a virgin. Once she had been innocent. Then she had gone away and the world had helped her to become an adult.

The bus dropped us at a spot where the street expanded briefly to embrace a war memorial and a few trees and thus form a kind of impromptu square. We made our way across the road to the other side but before we had reached it a passing cyclist, a middle-aged woman, had stopped, and clutching Pascale’s hand, welcomed her. Further on, down a small side turning, a young kid shouted greetings to her as we passed him. We turned a corner and I saw a road curving away. On one side the concrete walls of a small factory, a single storey building, old and dilapidated, emitting the sounds of metal being struck dynamically but irregularly. Facing it on the curve of the bend some garden railings seven or eight feet high sitting on a small wall. A pair of wrought iron gates was in the centre of the railings.

“That’s my home,” said Pascale. From the gate I saw a typically vernacular continental farmhouse that could have been almost any age above fifty years. Its walls were whitewashed and it was roofed with terracotta pantiles. It was asymmetrical with two sets of grey shutters on one side of an open staircase and one set on the other, both at ground and first floors. The staircase itself was enclosed in the volume of the building and covered by the roof. It was in a dog-leg form so that it disappeared into the gloom of a half landing and then re-presented itself triumphantly to serve a cast iron balustrade to the first floor balcony that ran the length of the house. The adjoining houses had obviously been built at different times but they were physically connected to Pascale’s house to form a small terrace. The shutters were all closed and no one came out to greet us as we walked down the narrow garden path, which led through the empty vegetable patches.

“I wonder why they’re not coming out,” said Pascale.

As we arrived at the building I noticed a door in the side of the stairwell next to us, and another facing it. These were the ‘front doors’ of the two ground floor apartments. The door opened and I saw a coarse peasant woman of about fifty-five. A lifetime of hard work had drained her face of any self-indulgences or social mannerisms that others might regard as necessities. This was my first impression, visual and mental, of Marie, and I did not come to change it as I got to know her better. She looked at us both and turned to Pascale speaking, almost shouting, in harsh tones. Then she embraced her, pressing Pascale to the dirty flower print apron that covered her black dress. It was an embrace that had a tragic character to it and I could see that Pascale had tensed up considerably. When they broke apart Pascale rushed up the stairs and Marie looked at me in a long measured way before offering me her hand and proffering first one cheek and then the other for a kiss. I felt the roughness of her skin as my lips brushed it briefly and I admit I felt aware of a gulf between us that I had no wish to bridge.

I heard Pascale rattling a door upstairs on the balcony, again a door let into the wall that turned to enclose the staircase. I left the bags downstairs and climbed the stone steps to see what was happening. As I did so a man’s voice shouted out and I saw another peasant face, this time not worn down with work, nor on a figure embracing all the traditional features of peasant dress. By the looks of him a man who had forsaken the land, but only recently. It was Louis, both he and Marie were cousins of Pascale and lived in the farmhouse with their spouses - I found this out later. Pascale spoke to him and as I came up she introduced me and he shook my hand with an ultra firm grip. He gave Pascale a key and hovered nervously as she opened the door of her home. There wasn’t much to it, two rooms - a bedroom and a living room, the toilet was outside in the yard, we’d walked past it but I hadn’t noticed.

We were in the room that served as living room and kitchen, twenty foot by fifteen, a sink and cooker in the corner, a Formica topped metal legged table and four plastic topped metal-legged chairs, a newish looking divan, a television on a small cupboard and, finally, taking up almost one side of the room, a grotesquely ornate mahogany wall unit, with drawers, a counter, a built-in mirror flanked by smaller shelves- It was modern, but traditional in design. Pascale had come home.

I felt a bulky package in my hand and looking down saw the packet of two hundred Gauloise that we’d bought on the boat, gifts for the Indians. I put them down on the table. Pascale moved towards the monster and took out three small glasses and a bottle. She offered Louis a drink but he declined making a profusion of excuses and saying he had to be going. Pascale poured me one without asking and then knocked hers back in one go.

“My father’s dying in the hospital, he had a heart attack last night. My mother’s with him.” She sat down and looked at the sink. Two taps came out of some white tiles. One of the tiles had a picture of a Victorian courting couple on it. I broke open the cigarettes and gave her one. Then I sat down and looked at the dusty floor of old quarry tiles that undulated and sloped where either the floor or the entire building had settled. She was still in the white mac and black corduroys that she had put on when she got out of my bed at Battersea. It was hard to believe that Battersea existed or that anything existed outside of these four intense fading pastel green walls. An older man came in and hugged Pascale. He had tears in his eyes. He was Pascale’s uncle, her father’s brother. They spoke quickly and lost me. He was wearing big baggy trousers bunched together with a leather belt, a check shirt. He had curly grey hair. His name was Philippe. Pascale said she wanted to go to the hospital, that she wanted to go alone. I understood. She left with Philippe and I wandered out onto the balcony. A minute later they reappeared down in the courtyard with bicycles which they mounted and rode up the path, two ceramic tiles wide, that we had walked down half an hour previously. From across the road the sound of intermittent hammering continued. A church bell rang and I saw a spire to the left of a row of tall trees. The light was a bright grey filter that came down and muted everything and made the dull winter tones of nature soft. A door opened and someone came out and walked across the yard, an old woman whom I hadn’t yet met. She looked up and saw me and then carried on her way as if I didn’t exist. I wondered if that meant I was one of the family.

Pascale didn’t come back for a long time. It had been eleven when she’d left for the hospital. She came back at five. Meanwhile I had been fed by Louis and his wife who had taken me into their flat. It contained a lot of the appendages of modern French bourgeois life so noticeably absent from Pascale’s: Impressionistic water colour prints of Paris squares, a couple of deep leather armchairs, an ashtray stand, the kind you normally only see in airport lounges, a record player with a plastic disc rack on top. I just took it all in without attempting to edit. They gave me a kind of thick minestrone soup and bread and wine followed by a strong coffee and brandy, and we spoke briefly about Pascale and London. I told them a load of crap, the sort of crap relatives want to hear. I wasn’t putting them down, I liked them, that’s why I told them crap.

When Pascale got back, and after she’d spoken one by one to all the members of the family who lived in that house, we went and sat alone in her flat. Her mother was still at the hospital and Pascale had only come back to get a few things for them both before returning.

“He’s dying... He’ll probably go in the night. He doesn’t know.”

“Are you very close?” In London she’d never spoken about her family. She nodded her head. She said, “Have you got a glass of water?”

I went to the sink. A clean cup was upturned on the draining board. The cold tap had been turned off by a supernatural strength and I had to put my handkerchief round my hand before I could move the capstan. Pascale sipped at the water moistening her lips with her tongue.

“My throat’s dry,” she said. I nodded. She absently pulled the tray of a wooden coffee grinder in and out and flicked the metal lid open and shut with her index finger.

“Will you be alright at the hospital?” I said.

“Yes......” After a while she got up and collected a shawl of her mother’s and a pair of her mother’s glasses and some other things. She took a packet of cigarettes out of the pack on the table, and then she went back to the hospital.

Marie came and invited me downstairs and I sat and ate a little at the table with her and her husband and their teenage son who was reading a schoolbook. I didn’t want to put them out and there wasn’t much to say, so as soon as I could politely do so I said I would go upstairs. Louis came later and asked if I was alright and I told him I was and he went away.

It was a strange feeling sitting alone in charge of a home where I was completely unknown. I didn’t go into the bedroom, it seemed sacred, but I did piss in the sink rather than disturb the family by asking where the bog was. I flushed it away with the tap water, being careful not to spray the invisible germs over the edge of the porcelain. Time passed slowly. At eleven I tried to lie down on the divan, I put a cushion behind my head and turned the light off. The room was warm, heated by an old gas fire, but I didn’t sleep. I got up and took a book out of my jacket pocket, which I’d taken for reading on the journey, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. It wasn’t sorrow for the dying man - I didn’t know him. It was for Pascale. I visualised a provincial French hospital, although I had never seen one, and tried lying in different positions. I put the light off again and tried to make out objects as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark.

At three twenty by my watch, a phone rang somewhere downstairs. There was one phone in the place, it belonged to Pascale’s aunt, the old lady, Jeanne. I heard doors opening and people saying that he was dead. I listened, I didn’t go down and join them. He’d died ten minutes previously I heard them saying. It was Pascale phoning. They’d been with him, her mother and her. I heard women crying and a man cry as well. Then after a while, as the family went back behind their respective doors, it became silent again.

It’s very inconsiderate to die on Christmas Day. It complicates matters. Pascale was too busy to relapse into unrestrained grief, and by the evening the funeral had been arranged for four days time, the various notaries and officials had been informally told of the event and the further flung cousins, uncles and nieces had been telephoned. The body remained temporarily at the hospital mortuary. I was introduced to Pascale’s mother, but she remained mainly closeted with her sisters, the one downstairs and another from the village. We didn’t eat much and hunger became an almost indecent sense. I took a bicycle and went on rides round the village and, once, to the next village where I stuffed myself in a cafe.

I left Pascale well alone. I offered to leave but she asked me to stay, but I didn’t feel comfortable. From high on the sideboard a photograph of an uncle of Pascale’s, deceased twelve years previously, glared down at us, the span of his life indicated below his portrait. A formal photograph, possibly pre-war, celluloid collar, best suit, a hunted yet proud look that the peasantry used to affect for photographic events, his entire personality and life encapsulated into that single framed photograph. After that was taken he could have called it a day, history had taken its hostage.

The day of the funeral was cold and overcast. In the morning Pascale and her mother went to the hospital to see her father for the last time. Later his brother went and witnessed that everything had been done correctly and that he had seen the coffin sealed with smelted lead. The clothes I had brought for the trip were inappropriate for a funeral so I shaved, put on my only tie and stayed out of the way. Behind the farmhouse the local commune was building a twelve-storey high slab block of public housing. They had compulsorily purchased most of Pascale’s back garden to do it. I sat on a step at the back of the house and surveyed the scene. A small group of apple trees that had been at the end of the garden, stood unprotected in the middle of the site. They were at the mouth of an underground car park whose roof was the podium deck of the slab block. It was obvious they were coming down. They’d given up their last apples, dropped their last leaves. They were already incongruous and yet they still stood there. After their removal and the laying of the concrete and asphalt road, recollection of their existence would be an ever-increasing feat of memory. The village was changing. It had resisted change long enough but the old world was slowly passing. A world of trees and people with names.

I walked back and saw from inside the house that the coffin had been erected on a trestle in the courtyard and that the mourners had begun to arrive. They went and spoke to Pascale and her mother and then went and stood in small groups. More and more people came until the garden seemed full. A priest arrived and a silence descended broken only by his voice as he spoke over the coffin. The pall bearers, old men with medals on their overcoats, struggled with the heavy rectangular, hardwood coffin - it looked as if it had been designed by the same guy that did the sideboard - and led the mourners back down the garden to where the entrance gates had been left open. Pascale and her mother and the immediate family were at the front. Pascale was wearing a simple black skirt which she must have had long before she first came to England, probably before she’d even left the village. It must have been waiting in the wardrobe for her touch for many years - the Pascale I’d never known, and I wondered as I watched her what happened to turn her into the one I did.