A Short Walk from Harrods (5 page)

The mayor of Saint-Sulpice, Etienne Ranchett, a fierce little man with a face like a loganberry, was rumoured to keep a young (and disagreeable) mistress in a hideous little modern villa on the edge of the village. To make life more tolerable for his wife, and avoid gossip, he permitted the erection of the Mini-Market on the old vegetable garden of the house which belonged to his mother-in-law. His wife, a warm-eyed, splendid figure of a woman, Florette Ranchett, became the owner. It shut her up: she turned a blindish eye to the mistress on her doorstep and threw herself with alacrity into the role of shopkeeper in this unlikely modern box set among the olives and rough-walled vegetable garden of her mother's house.

The trouble was that, even with the imposing awning in brown and orange with
Mini-Market
in gold all along its scalloped edge, the glitter and the hum of the freezer, the sparkle and shine of the brilliantly tiled floor (mashed carrot and spinach), in spite of all these attractions no one very much came into the place. Its very glamour put them off and inhibited them. They much preferred the cold, cruddy, dark little shop which had apparently originally stood in its place, run by Madame Ranchett's mother. It was comforting, it had worn linoleum, I was told, fly papers, good bread, and gave credit. In the new shop a new and alarming machine rolled out your bill, all figures and signs, and at the end, after
Thank You for Shopping Here
(in English) there was a more alarming note which, hastily translated, simply said NO CREDIT.

No good French peasant could put up with that for long. And they didn't. They went elsewhere, even if it meant taking the local bus, and Florette Ranchett sat stoically behind her counter, among mountains of lavatory rolls, kitchen
paper and serried rows of Harpic, Tide and Omo, on her own. Sometimes, very occasionally, someone would hurry in for something they had suddenly found themselves to be short of, and tourists parked to buy stuff for picnics to take down to the beaches or up into the hills. Otherwise the tins and bottles gathered dust, the stall of vegetables outside under the awning wilted, and Madame Ranchett read
Nice-Matin
from cover to cover six times a day.

I think that the first thing I ever bought from her was a tin of Kiwi dark brown. Her warmth and gratitude was such that I had the distinct impression that I had, by mistake, bought up her entire stock of champagne. She handed me change from my twenty-franc note and explained that the machine was American and that she really couldn't help what it printed on the receipt. Of course she gave credit! In an agricultural village how could she not? They were not million-aires here, depending on the
rose de mai,
jasmine and olives for a living, and sometimes the corn for feed. She was convinced that with patience she could sit it out and that business would become brisk. After all, they all knew and liked her, the mayor's wife and all. Give them time, she'd say, they are as suspicious as goats, and as silly. She was right of course: in time people did begin to drift back - the added bother of the bus, the extra money for the fare, the red pencil ripped through NO CREDIT (a modest suggestion of mine) made it easier, and pleasanter, to run down the hill, across the road, or walk up from the crossroads to do the shopping. Also she had a varied selection of things. She was brave, wise and very handsome. We got on extremely well together, and as soon as she found out that I was a
propriétaire,
had already applied for my
permit de séjour,
and intended to remain in the
area for the rest of my life, we eased into a close and affectionate friendship. She never came to my house, I never went to hers. That is not the way in France – a failing of many English people who are neighbourly, if not nosey, and simply don't understand the laws of French family privacy. It works splendidly if you do: you eat together in restaurants but seldom, if ever, dine or break bread at their table. Sensible and a great saving for the cook.

Stuck on a shelf behind the till, with a strip of Sellotape, there was a battered photograph of Madame Ranchett, hair piled high, arms thrown round a dusty American sergeant, laughing with delight. A really pretty woman, enjoying herself on Liberation Day. It was no wonder that Etienne Ranchett had married her, but extremely odd that she had ever married him. However, power comes with the office of mayor, and perhaps that was in the air then. I never asked. But she did admit, one day when I took a closer look at the photograph, that, frankly, the war hadn't been a problem in the village. Until
we
started mucking about down at La Napoule and sending tanks and planes all over the place. They were very handsome, very correct, kind to the old and especially to children. Madame Ranchett had no complaints about the Germans at all.

The Americans, when they arrived, were
far
worse: drunk, stole the chickens as well as the eggs, behaved incorrectly with the young women and cut down the most fruitful olive branches for tank camouflage. They were glad to be free, because it meant that
all
France would be free, but they were quite glad to see the back of the liberators when they finally left.

‘Perhaps', I ventured mildly, ‘it was different up north?'

She shrugged, sighed. ‘Perhaps. But I was not there. I believe in Paris it was bad. Very bad. No food. Deportation. Down here it was easier. They left us alone. Of course we had the Resistance … but
they
caused a lot of trouble too, really. If they blew up a bridge, well … how could the farmer get to his stock … the sheep and goats, the harvest? And then, and then! They would take hostages, the Germans. If you live with the hornet you don't poke sticks into his nest!'

‘Well, anyway. It's finished.'

‘Thank God. It was bad in England too? Bombs … the mayor and I went to England. Once.' She shuddered pityingly. ‘Never again.'

‘Oh. I'm sorry! Why?'

‘Look. The ferry was late. It was dark. No signs to London after Ash-Furd. We got lost in some development called Addy-Coombe, I will always remember the name, no one would help us, they looked at us as if we were mad and went away. It was awful. Awful. Then we saw a sign that said
Hotel
... no food. We were too late. Too
late
at
nine o'clock!
We had to find a café in the dark and we had some white chicken like rubber, and frozen peas like emeralds. And as hard. It was a disaster. A disaster. We drove back to the ferry the next morning. We had to sleep in a terrible place one of your policemen told us about. Bed and Breakfast. Horrible! But there was a big bed. I cried myself to sleep, the mayor drank half a bottle of Scotch he bought on the ferry. In the morning we came back to France. You understand me? I understand why you came here to live. Intolerable! Intolerable! Those peas. My God! I wouldn't even string them on a nylon thread as a necklace. I'll never forget them. Never.'

*

On the west end of this enchanted triangle of villages there was a small area called Quartier des Groules. A narrow road wound downhill, lined with stone plaster-faced houses. Each had a mounting-block of solid limestone just outside the front door, making it easy for the occupants to mount their ass or donkey, or horse very often, but making life almost out of the question for motorists. The only reason that I mention this is that I had to go to the Quartier every two weeks to take and collect the laundry, for my laundress (and that was her permanent job) lived in a three-storeyed house right at the end. So the hazardous narrow road, bristling with mounting-blocks which would easily have wrecked a tank, had to be negotiated with extreme prudence.

In the first years the Simca Brake just made it; Forwood's Maserati (a fearful bit of showing-off which he loved keenly) never made the first yard, but, later on, the sturdy Peugeot just, by extremely skilful navigation, managed to get down to Madame Mandelli's pretty little terrace. Every two weeks a vast basket of ‘dirty' was hauled out of the car, and an equally vast basket of ‘clean and ironed' was taken on.

Madame Mandelli laundered like an angel: sheets were ironed and folded into eighteen-inch squares of pristine, crisp splendour, shirts lay flat, ready for stacking. There was a delicate scent of some kind of soap powder, but mainly they smelled of the clean hillside air in which she dried them. At the back of her house, in an area where there was no sign of a flower, rabbit hutch, chicken coop, where no tree existed, where only the blue nylon ropes and coloured pegs reigned supreme, sheets and shirts and pillowcases flew and flapped like bunting at a regatta. Free to the winds of heaven.

In the first months of my life at Le Pigeonnier (that was
the name of my place - I don't think I've mentioned it before), a cherished friend and his wife were determined to be ‘the very first guests in your new house'. The appalling fact is that by the time they got to me he was already dying from terminal cancer, and his wife was grey with fatigue and despair, desperate to please him, but terrified.

Nevertheless they came. He was determined - his doctors knew there was no hope: they arrived. But it was folly. Almost as soon as he had staggered off the Train Bleu at Cannes he was only capable of being got into bed. The terrible journey had done for him. So, a doctor: rapidly sought in the telephone book by Forwood, who sensibly picked the one nearest to us.

Dr Poteau was a saint. I suppose that is the cliché word, but it, like all clichés, is true for that is what he was. He sorted things out for Robin, as far as he was able medically, but, and this was the worry, he asked if I was capable of changing a bed
three
times a day? I said that I could, I was pretty good at bed-making, mitring all the corners and so on. But what Poteau actually meant at that time was could I wash the sheets? The patient would need changing twice, if not three times, a day because of raging fever. Pyjamas, everything? Had I the means to accommodate this problem? Of course I hadn't. There was no washing-machine. I could iron teacloths and T-shirts fairly neatly, but that was all. There were absolutely no facilities for a dying man with a pile of sodden sheets.

Dr Poteau gave me
his
laundress, Madame Bruna Mandelli, a gesture of the utmost generosity and goodness: I, the English stranger, was overwhelmed. Madame Mandelli had a washing-machine, could take me on – she ‘did' for the
doctor, his family (his wife having only one arm she could not manage laundering), the local priest and two exceptionally grand ‘old families' in the district - for a short time only. She was quite prepared to deal with two sets, or three, of sheets and pillowcases and Heaven alone knew what other bits and pieces. But, she wanted to make clear, she had her regular clients, a limited amount of time, and when my patient had either died or gone back to England, then she would reluctantly have to close my account. As it happened she never did close it: as with Madame Ranchett and Madame Pasquini at the
bureau de poste
(I'll come to her a bit later), my life was enhanced and made glorious by their kindness and affection. One can't do better in life than that.

Bruna Mandelli was a small, compact woman. Italian, from Cremona, she was a superb cook, an industrious house-keeper, a doting mother of two (a son of four and daughter of two), a loving wife. Her house (actually I only ever got as far as the parlour-kitchen in all the years) was immaculate, sparkling, crammed with china ornaments, flowers and green plants in pots. It was always pungent with the scents of tomato, orégano, basil and freshly made pasta, which she hung in sheets over a broom handle, supported on the backs of two chairs, with a double page of
Nice Matin
beneath: if you could read the small print through the pasta then it was acceptable. Not otherwise.

Madame Mandelli's hair was vivid henna-red, her strong arms were freckled as a rainbow trout, and she carried a pair of eyebrows, carefully pencilled in maroon half-circles, exactly one inch above the place where her real eyebrows (which she seemed to lack) should have been. Thus she appeared to be in a condition of permanent surprise.

The first two weeks of Robin's visit passed slowly, but moderately well, considering nurses, and potions, and the excellent Dr Poteau. I stripped the bed two or three times a day (for his fever would not abate), pyjamas were changed constantly, towels slung into heaps, and I carted everything off to Madame Mandelli in the big willow laundry basket. Her terrace, at the far end of the little street, was crammed with pots and old enamel pans rioting with impatiens, geraniums, white daisies and cascading pelargonium. They were sheltered from the blazing sun by an ancient mulberry which stood, a bit lopsidedly, dead centre.

This particular morning there seemed to be no one about. The sun burned down, casting dark shadows, but there was no sound of the singing, which was usual, if monotonous; no odours from the kitchen, as there always were, no cheeping and chittering from the budgerigar's cage which normally hung on a hook by the front door. No cage.

Ominously, I saw the basket of ‘clean and ironed' standing deliberately on the terrace beside the closed front door. The little red exercise book, used for the laundry list and the account, lay on the top of the folded sheets. The bamboo-bead curtain hung still. No rasp and clatter in the morning wind. Maybe she had gone to town? Unlikely at this hour. I set down my basket of ‘dirty' and called out. No response. I called again, louder. Forwood leant out of his car window curiously. I shrugged, called again: ‘Madame?' I had to pay for the ‘clean and ironed' and check with her the list of ‘dirty'.

I was about to make a final attempt when a shutter above my head opened cautiously, and through a frill of medlar leaves, looking rather like a gargoyle, an anguished head peered down. The face was drained. Tears fell.

‘Disaster!' she murmured. ‘Oh!
Dio! Oh! Dio! Catastrophe!'
And shaking her head she recommenced what she had obviously been doing until my arrival, indulging herself in most unattractive weeping.