Bella... A French Life (2 page)

“What I want to know, Father, is what kind of hospital is this? My wife gives birth to two healthy boys, and what do you know, one kicks the bucket,” asked - stated - Mr Brissard.

“I am sure,
monsieur
, your son is with our Heavenly Father,” replied the priest.

“
Merde
! Heavenly Father! My arse! He should be here and nowhere else! There is going to come a day when I’m going to need help on the farm ...”

“Now,
monsieur
... I …”

Anxiously the priest brushed sweat from his unlined forehead.

I felt sorry for him. I touched his nervously twitching arm.

“Thank you, Father. You may go now.”

“This is most unfortunate,” Mr Raisse, the hospital director, kept on saying to me.

He and I were in the morgue, standing beside each other at the autopsy table, an overpowering odour of disinfectant rising from it. The Brissard twin’s tiny, lifeless, naked body lay on the table, ready to be cut open.

The autopsy surgeon pulled at his white surgical gloves and a powdery dust rose up in the air.

“If the parents insist. But why do this to the poor little blighter.”

I closed my eyes. I had attended autopsies before, but none had been on a newborn.

The autopsy surgeon shot me a worried glance.

“No need for you to stay, Doc.”

I ran up the stairs, ignoring the elevator, back to the third floor and the maternity section. Mr Brissard was showing André off to admiring relatives. Mrs Brissard, sitting with her legs hanging over the side of her bed, was drinking coffee from a goblet on which was the hospital’s name:
CHU Hôpital des Chartreux
. She was swallowing noisily. André was no longer naked but in a yellow suit with white buttons. Blue lambs danced on the buttons. He was asleep and I wondered how he was managing to do so because his father kept pulling his tiny bent baby legs.

A week passed and Mrs Brissard and André had already returned to the farm, and Mr Raisse called me to his office.

The Brissards were accusing me of negligence.

“I tried to keep this unfortunate incident within the hospital walls.”

He moved his thick-lens glasses down over his nose and stared at me with his short-sighted brown eyes.

The autopsy had shown that the baby died of asphyxiation.

“Asphyxiation?”

My head whirled: could I have been so stupid?

“Yes, there was a lump of phlegm in his windpipe. Of course, you could not have known. It was something which had happened during the process of birth. But the parents are going to go to the papers. Most unfortunate. Never has Chartreux Hospital had something like this happen.”

“Mr Raisse, he died more than two hours after he was born, so it could not have been phlegm which killed him. There must have been a heart or lung anomaly.”

I held onto his desk so that I would not topple over.

“All the same. Unfortunate. Unfortunate. What can I say?”

There were rumours that President Giscard d’Estaing was going to offer him the position of minister of health in Prime Minister Jacques Chirac’s government.

“What would you like me to do, sir?”

“What would you like to do?”

“I am a doctor ...”

“And a very good one too.”

“Are you’re blaming me for the child’s death?”

My lips had started to twitch uncontrollably.

“The parents are upset. They want heads to fall. Mind you, they are not after money, so Chartreux Hospital would not have to pay them any compensation. But to use the word blame, well, blame’s a strong word.”

The Paris daily
France-Soir
ran the story on their front page the following morning and that evening at eight o’clock
Antenne 2
news led with the story. Anchor Léon Zitrone said that the parents wanted a police enquiry.

Two uniformed coppers, one a captain, came to the hospital.

The captain, a tall dark man in his forties, looked ill at ease with this task he had been given.

“I beg your pardon, Madame … Sir…”

Mr Raisse offered the captain his hand.

“Let’s get this unpleasantness over with, Captain
.
”

For eight months I waited for the police to complete their investigation. Mr Raisse, who had not been offered the job of Minister of Health after all, had become more and more agitated as the weeks passed, and on the day of the court hearing he, dressed in his best suit, ignored me, had not even shot a brief glance in my direction, not even once. My brother and Marion, his girlfriend, accompanied me to the courtroom in the
Palais de Justice
building. On our arrival there were half a dozen journalists on the avenue in front of the building. They shouted questions at me. Two press photographers snapped me when I left the court after the hearing. I was cleared of the charge of negligence, but as Mrs Brissard said, holding eight-month-old André to her generous bosom which was covered in black mourning, “His little brother is in our thoughts all the time. We can’t stop thinking of him, of our little Antony. Oh well, he’s with
le Bon Dieu
now at least, and should one not be thankful for small mercies?”

Mr Raisse had not wanted me to resign while the case was still pending, but once the verdict was given, he made it clear that I would be much happier working at another hospital.

“Not that I would request your resignation.”

“If you really want to come and help me, who am I to turn you down,” said my mother.

I had told her I was finished with doctoring and I was heading for the guest house to work with her.

“Bella, you are such a good doctor. You should not throw in the towel. Believe me, I understand how you feel, but give the matter time, think about it,” advised Marius.

He too is a doctor.

I told him I have done my thinking.

I left Paris.

-0-

Chapter Three

It is Thursday.

I enjoy breakfast in the kitchen these days and have done so since I have started closing the guest house for the winter and do not reopen it until Easter. Breakfast though is too sophisticated a word for what I have: a croissant and a bowl of black coffee. No butter. No jam. Several bowls of coffee.
I must cut down on the coffee, but what the hell.
 

This morning, I am driving down to the village. I always go there on a Thursday - market day. The first time I did so, in 1976, the year of the Brissard twin’s death and the trial, everyone looked at me. I cried driving back to Le Presbytère. The problem that morning, which is ten years ago, was Miss Bernadette Jambenoire, village spinster, school principal and grapevine, but also World War Two Resistance heroine and concentration camp internee, and, accordingly, untouchable.

Miss Jambenoire had always hated my parents: my father, because he was a German, and my mother for having betrayed her people by marrying him. She hated me too. To her I was venom from the loins of
un sale Boche
. A filthy German. She first called me this when I was just six years old. It was my first day at school and she walked into my classroom, her grey hair pulled into two buns which clung to the back of her ears like large warts, and when she and Miss Matigot, my teacher, stopped at my desk, that was what I heard her call me.

“What’s
un sale Boche
and what are loins?” I asked my mother.

“Watch your language, Bella, or I will rinse your mouth with soap?” she warned.

As my mother threatened me with a soap mouthwash only when I had said something really bad, like
merde
, I knew what Miss Jambenoire called me must be very bad. I therefore decided I had to know what it meant and I asked one of those uncles of mine who had dragged my mother to the barbershop to have her head shaved, and, smiling mockingly, he enlightened me, and the next day at school I stuck my tongue out at Miss Jambenoire. Behind her back though, so there was no reprisal, but … Jesus, did it make me feel good.

But that morning, ten years ago, at the market, it was Miss Jambenoire who had the upper hand.

I was buying quail eggs from a farmer’s wife.

Miss Jambenoire walked up.

“I heard you were back.”

No salutation.

“Good morning, Miss Jambenoire.  Yes, I’m back. I’m going to help my mother with the guest house for a while.”

I tried to smile.

She cracked the knuckles of her left hand against the palm of her right hand.

“
Ooh la la!
In that case you must watch it with those tiny eggs. We wouldn’t want anyone choking to death at Le Presbytère, do we? And those eggs. So small. They can so easily get caught in the windpipe,
non
?”

She had lifted her voice and every eye focused on me.

I have tried since to ignore this woman, not always, I admit, successfully.

-0-

It is half past nine.

I wash the bowl and the cutlery and leaving it to dry on the drying rack, I throw a cardigan around my shoulders, and I head for the parking bay; Le Presbytère’s kitchen opens onto an inner courtyard and the underground parking bay is at the other end of it.

A change I brought to the guest house on joining my mother was, that I, inspired by Frida Kahlo, had a tile maker from the nearby region of Morbihan, transform what was a bare, cemented courtyard into that of a Mexican
hacienda
. My mother, I must say, never took to the look of the new courtyard - to the clusters of exotic plants with their colourful flowers, to the mango tree which rapidly grew tall - obviously in search of light and hot air - but which has to this day not offered me its fruit, to the palm tree of which the branches droop in the rain, to the hanging baskets of dark-green ferns, to the red terracotta walls, the blue-tiled floor, and to the yellow-tiled sundial which is draped in a climbing rose, which just does not flower and of which the buds wither each time the palm’s branches begin to droop, as if in commiseration.

The parking bay is large and looks even larger this morning, because, with no guests in residence, there are only three vehicles parked here. One is the guest house’s yellow Volkswagen
Combi
in which Fred, my porter, gardener and overall handyman takes guests on excursions, most of these to Saint Michael’s Mount, the mount being just a few kilometres away and this area of Normandy’s main attraction. The second is my mother’s grey Citroën
Deux Chevaux
, old and dented and rusting, which stands on blocks these days. I should sell the car, or give it away, but I don’t have it in me to do so. I have already stuck ‘for sale’ notices in the display window of several of the village’s shops, but I never go through with a sale because to do so will be like discarding with part of my mother. The third car is my new Mercedes. It is the appetising dark green of a Mediterranean olive.

It is just a ten-minute drive from Le Presbytère down to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque, and often have I jogged the distance, even walked it despite it is uphill on my return, but I will be buying a few things at the open-air market this morning, so I will take the car.

I run the wipers over the Merc’s windscreen. Because of the mist that rises from the sea down below all the windows up here need a regular wipe.

While the wipers swirl, I turn the ignition key.

My father taught me to drive when I was still at ‘uni’. I planned to open a practice somewhere around here and as a country GP I would have needed to be mobile. I remained living in Paris: I loved going to museums and one day I met a man and loved him too, and, all plans of leaving the capital, vanished. Jean-Louis was the man’s name.

Will I ever get him out of my head?

I park on narrow, cobbled Rue Charlemagne which runs from Le Square, Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque’s only square.  It is here that the farmers and second-hand dealers set up their stalls.

This morning, some of the stalls are already under winter canvassing. Thanks to Alphonse Pares, our energetic socialist mayor, strings of coloured lights twining between the stalls throw a rainbow over the carcasses, cauliflowers, camembert cheeses, clothes and bric-a-brac to be sold here today.

On the eastern side of the square stands our Notre Dame Sainte-Marie church, there where my parents baptised Marius.  Tourists always say that the design of the church is most unusual. Built with the grey granite of our surrounding hills, it is circular like the crown of a bowler hat, a triangular wooden bell-tower perching on the top. A red-tiled porch shelters the church’s double wooden doorway, there where our village priest, old Father Pierre, stands on Sundays after early morning mass holding a dented empty
petit pois
tin which he expects the worshippers to fill, but not with peas, but with shiny five-franc coins. The porch has been here for as long as I can remember, its sole purpose, as far as I can tell, to offer the suppliant priest protection from wind and rain, and the occasional snow.

A tin sculpture of the Holy Virgin stands in the middle of the square. Everything about Jesus’ mother is peculiarly long and thin: face, torso, limbs, fingers, feet. She was a gift from the children of a late Swedish sculptor who used to holiday in the village each summer, and, as Mayor Pares is forever telling us, one should not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Jesus’ mother stands on a piece of granite which matches that of the church, and she looks east towards God’s House. Although Father Pierre denies that this is so, we all think that he had a hand in which way she was to face, because her back is turned on the Vaybee; La Viérge-sur-Brecque bar and restaurant. Le Vaybee belongs to the portly Frascot, Fred’s brother, best cook in the whole world of veal
à la normande.
 Father Pierre though is not averse to a free
ballon de vin rouge
at the counter each noon before Mrs Celeste, his housekeeper, serves him lunch.

I start my visit to the market at the Vaybee with my third or fourth black coffee of the day: I purposely do not keep track of how many I drink.