The Little Paris Bookshop (26 page)

On 4 September Jean set off early so that his regular stroll along Rue de la Colline and around the fishing port would bring him to the bookshop on time.

Autumn was on its way, bringing visitors who preferred to build castles out of books rather than sand. This had always been his favourite time of year: new publications spelled new friendships, new insights and new adventures.

The blinding light of midsummer grew milder with the approach of autumn – mellower. Autumn shielded Sanary from its parched hinterland like a screen.

He breakfasted alternately at the Lyon, the Nautique and the Marine on the harbour front. The resemblance to the town where Brecht had once performed his mocking songs about the Nazis had naturally faded. And yet he could still detect a whiff of exile. The cafés were welcome islets of entertainment in his solitary life with Psst; they were something of a surrogate family, a hint of Paris. They were a confessional box and a newsroom where you could find out what was going on behind the scenes in Sanary: how the fishing was holding up despite the algal bloom; how the
boules
players were building up to their autumn tournaments. The players on Quai Wilson had asked him to be a substitute ‘pointer’; it was an honour to be asked to step in for a tournament. In the cafés Perdu could be in the middle of town life without anyone caring if he didn’t talk or play an active role.

Sometimes he would sit in the corner at the back and speak to his father, Joaquin, on the phone, as he was doing that morning. When Joaquin heard about the tournament in La Ciotat, he was raring to polish his
boules
and set off.

‘Please don’t,’ pleaded Perdu.

‘Don’t, eh? Well, then. What’s her name?’

‘Does it always have to be a woman?’

‘Same one as before?’

Perdu laughed. Both Perdus laughed.

‘Were you keen on tractors when you were a kid?’ Jean asked next.

‘Jeanno, my lad, I love tractors! Why are you asking?’

‘Max has met someone. A tractor girl.’

‘A tractor girl? Fantastic. When do we get to see Max again? You’re fond of him, aren’t you?’

‘Hold on, who’s we? That new girlfriend of yours who doesn’t like cooking?’

‘Oh, hobgoblins! Your mother. Madame Bernier and me. And? Speak now or forever hold your peace. I’m allowed to meet up with my ex-wife, aren’t I? Well, actually, since the fourteenth of July … we’ve done a bit more than meet up. Of course, she sees things differently. She says we simply had a fling and I shouldn’t get my hopes up.’ Joaquin Perdu’s smoker’s laugh descended into a jovial splutter.

‘So what?’ he said. ‘Lirabelle’s my best friend. I like the way she smells, and she’s never attempted to change me. She’s a marvellous cook too – I always feel so much happier with life when I’m there. And you know, Jeanno, the older you get the more you feel like being with someone you can talk to and laugh with.’

His father would presumably have signed up without hesitation to the three things that made you really ‘happy’ according to Cuneo’s worldview.

One: eat well. No junk food, because it only makes you unhappy, lazy and fat.

Two: sleep through the night (thanks to more exercise, less alcohol and positive thoughts).

Three: spend time with people who are friendly and seek to understand you in their own particular way.

Four: have more sex – but that was Samy’s addition, and Perdu saw no real reason to tell his father that one.

He often spoke to his mother on his way from a café to the bookshop. He always held the phone up to the wind so that she could hear the sound of the waves and the gulls. That September morning the sea was calm, and Jean asked her, ‘I hear Dad’s been eating at your place a lot recently.’

‘Well, yes. The man doesn’t know how to cook, so what am I supposed to do?’

‘Dinner and breakfast, though? Overnight too? Doesn’t the poor man have his own bed to go to?’

‘You say it as if we were up to something obscene.’

‘I’ve never told you I love you, Maman.’

‘Oh, my dear, dear child …’

Perdu heard her open a box and close it again. He knew this noise, and the box too. It held the tissues. As stylish as ever, Madame Bernier, even when she came over all sentimental.

‘I love you too, Jean. I feel as if I’ve never told you that, only thought it. Is that true?’

It was true, but he said, ‘I noticed all the same. You don’t have to tell me every few years.’

She laughed and called him a cheeky so-and-so.

Great. Nearly fifty-one, and still a kid.
 

Lirabelle complained about her ex-husband a bit more, but her tone was affectionate. She grouched about the autumn book releases, but only out of habit.

Everything was the same as ever – yet so very different.

As Jean walked across the quayside towards the bookshop, MM was already rolling the postcard racks out into the open.

‘It’s going to be a beautiful day!’ his boss called to him. He handed Madame Monfrère a bag of croissants.

‘Yes, I think so too.’

 

 

Shortly before sunset he retired to his favourite spot in the corner of the shop. The one from where he could observe the door, the reflected sky and a scrap of sea.

And then, in the midst of his thoughts, he saw her. He watched her reflection. She looked as though she were stepping straight out of the clouds and the water. Unbridled joy surged through his veins.

Jean Perdu stood up. His pulse was racing. He was readier than he’d ever been.

Now!
he thought. Now the times were converging. He was finally emerging from his period of numbness, of standing still, of hurting. Now.

Catherine was wearing a bluish-grey dress that set off her eyes. She walked with a swing in her stride, upright, her tread firmer than before …

Before?

She has made it from the end to the beginning too.
 

She paused for a second at the counter, as if to get her bearings.

MM asked, ‘Are you looking for something in particular, Madame?’

‘Yes I am. I’ve been looking for a long time, but now I’ve found it. That particular something there,’ said Catherine and beamed across the room at Jean. She walked straight towards him, and, heart pounding, he went to meet her.

‘You cannot imagine how long I’ve been waiting for you to finally ask me to come to you.’

‘Honestly?’

‘Oh yes. And I’m so hungry,’ said Catherine.

Jean Perdu knew exactly what she meant.

That evening they kissed for the first time – after they’d had dinner and enjoyed a wonderful long walk by the sea, long, relaxed chats in the hibiscus garden by the veranda, during which they drank a little wine and a lot of water, and above all enjoyed each other’s company.

‘This warm air is so comforting,’ Catherine said at one point.

It was true: Sanary’s sun had sucked the cold out of him and dried all his tears.

‘And it gives you courage,’ he whispered. ‘It gives you the courage to trust.’

In the evening breeze, confused and entranced by their bold faith in life, they kissed.

Jean felt as though it were his very first kiss.

Catherine’s lips were soft, and they moved with and fit his perfectly. It was so wonderful to eat, drink, feel and caress her at last … and so thrilling.

He wrapped his arms around this woman and kissed and bit her mouth gently; he traced the corners of her mouth with his lips; he kissed his way up her cheeks to her fragrant, delicate temples. He pulled Catherine towards him; he was overflowing with tenderness and relief. Never again would he sleep badly as long as this woman was beside him – never. Never again would loneliness embitter him. He was saved. They stood and held each other.

‘Hey?’ she said eventually.

‘Yes?’

‘I looked it up, and the last time I slept with my ex-husband was in 2003. When I was thirty-eight. I think it was an accident.’

‘Great. That makes you the more experienced of the two of us.’

They laughed.

How strange, thought Perdu, that one laugh can wipe away so much hardship and suffering. A single laugh. And the years flow together and … away.

‘I do know one thing, though,’ he said. ‘Making love on the beach is overrated.’

‘Sand in all the places it shouldn’t get.’

‘Worst of all are the mosquitoes.’

‘You don’t get many on the beach, do you?’

‘You see, Catherine. I don’t have a clue.’

‘Then I’ll show you,’ she murmured. Her expression was youthful and reckless as she pulled Jean into the spare bedroom.

He saw a four-legged shadow scuttle away through the moonlight. Psst sat down on the terrace and politely turned his ginger-and-white striped back to them.

I hope she likes my body. I hope I haven’t lost my old vitality. I hope I touch her the way she likes, and I hope …
 

‘Stop thinking, Jean Perdu!’ Catherine ordered tenderly.

‘Can you tell?’

‘You’re easy to analyse, darling,’ she whispered. ‘My lover. Oh, I wanted you so … and you …’

They continued in whispers, but their sentences had no beginning and no ending.

Slowly he peeled off Catherine’s dress. Underneath she was naked apart from her plain white knickers.

She unbuttoned his shirt, buried her face in his throat and chest, and drank in his scent. Her breath tickled him, and no, he didn’t need to worry about his vitality, because it was there when he saw the flash of the white, cotton triangle in the dark and felt her body move in his hands.

 

 

They savoured the whole of September in Sanary-sur-Mer. Eventually Jean had drunk his fill of southern light. He had been lost and he had found himself again. The hurting time was over.

Now he could go to Bonnieux and complete this stage.

By the time Catherine and Jean left Sanary, the fishing village had become their home away from home. Small enough to fit snugly into their hearts, big enough to protect them, beautiful enough to be a permanent touchstone as they got to know each other. Sanary stood for happiness, peace and quiet; it stood for the first stirrings of empathy with someone who was still a stranger, someone you loved without being able to say why. Who are you, how would you, how do you feel, and what is the arc of your moods over an hour, a day, a few weeks? These things they discovered with ease in their heart-sized home. It was during the quiet hours that Jean and Catherine grew close, and so they tended to avoid loud, busy places such as fairs, the market, the theatre and readings.

September bathed their calm, intense period of getting-to-love-each-other in a spectrum of tones from yellow to mauve and gold to violet. The bougainvilleas, the rough sea, the painted houses by the harbour that oozed pride and history, the crunchy golden gravel of the
boules
area: this was the landscape in which their affection, friendship and deep understanding of each other could thrive.

And they always took it slowly with each other.

The more important a thing is, the slower it should be done, Jean would often think as they began to caress each other. They kissed lingeringly, undressed slowly and left themselves time to stretch out, and even more time to flow together. This careful, focused concentration on the other called forth an especially intense physical, spiritual and emotional passion from their bodies, a feeling of being touched all over.

Each time he slept with Catherine, Jean Perdu drew closer to the stream of life again. He had spent twenty years on the far bank of that river, avoiding colours and caresses, scents and music – fossilised, alone and defiantly withdrawn.

And now … he was swimming again.

Jean was a man revived because he was in love. He knew a hundred new little things about this woman. For instance, that when Catherine woke in the morning she was still half caught up in her dreams. Occasionally she would flounder in the fog of the blues; what she had seen in the shadows of the night would make her irritable or ashamed or irksome or gloomy for hours on end. This was her daily struggle through the in-between world. Jean discovered that he could chase away the dream-ghosts by brewing Catherine a cup of hot coffee and guiding her down to the sea to drink it.

‘Because of your love I’m learning to love myself too,’ she said one morning when the sea was still a sleepy shade of grey-blue. ‘I have always taken what life has offered me … but I’ve never offered myself anything. I was never any good at looking after myself.’ As he pulled her tenderly to him, Jean thought that he felt the same: he was only capable of loving himself because Catherine loved him.

Then came the night when she held him close as a second great wave of anger smashed over him. This time it was anger at himself. He showered insults on himself, crudely and desperately, with the wrath of a man who realises, with terrifying clarity, that he has irrevocably wasted a part of his life, and the time remaining is all too short. Catherine didn’t stop him, she didn’t mollify him, she didn’t turn away.

Then peace flooded through him. Because that short time would still be enough. Because a few days could contain a lifetime.

 

 

Now to Bonnieux, the site of his distant past, a past that was still embedded deep within Jean, though it was no longer the only room in his emotional household. At last he had a present with which to counter it.

That’s why it feels easier to return, thought Jean, as Catherine and he took the narrow, rocky pass from Lourmarin – in Perdu’s opinion, this town was like a leech, sucking the blood of tourists – to Bonnieux. They overtook cyclists as they drove, and heard the crack of hunters’ guns in the craggy mountains. The occasional near-leafless tree cast a tattered shadow; otherwise the sun bleached out every colour. After the relentless motion of the sea, the inert bulk of the Luberon mountains made a stark, inhospitable impression on Jean. He was looking forward to seeing Max. Really looking forward to it. Max had booked them a big room under the roof in Madame Bonnet’s ivy-clad home, formerly a Resistance hideout.

When Catherine and Jean had put their luggage in their room, Max came over and led them to his dovecote. He had prepared a refreshing picnic of wine, fruit, ham and baguette on the broad wall by the fountain. It was the season for truffles and literature. The countryside was redolent of wild herbs, and glowed in autumnal rust reds and wine yellows.

Max was brown, Jean thought. Brown and looking much more of a man.

After two and a half months alone in the Luberon, he seemed at home, as if he had always been a southerner at heart. But Jean thought he also seemed very tired.

‘Who sleeps when the earth is dancing?’ Max mumbled cryptically when Jean brought it up.

Max told him that Madame had hired him without further ado as a ‘general dogsbody’ during his ‘sickness’. She and her husband, Gérard, were over sixty, and the property, with its three holiday houses and flats, was too big for them to contemplate growing old there on their own. They grew vegetables, fruit and a few vines; Max lent them a hand in return for board and lodging. His dovecote was piled high with notes, stories and drafts. He wrote at night and in the morning until noon. From late afternoon onward he helped out around the bounteous estate, doing anything that Gérard asked him to do: cutting vines, weeding, picking fruit; mending roofs; sowing and harvesting; loading the delivery van and driving to market with Gérard; looking for mottled mushrooms; cleaning truffles; shaking fig trees; pruning cypresses into the shape of standing stones; cleaning the pools; and fetching bread for the bed-and-breakfast guests.

‘I’ve learned to drive a tractor too and I can recognise the call of every toad in the pool,’ he announced to Jean with a self-deprecating grin.

The sun, the winds and shuffling around on his knees over the Provence soil had changed Max’s youthful city face into that of a man.

‘Sickness?’ Jean enquired as Max, having finished his account, poured them glasses of white Ventoux wine. ‘What sickness? You didn’t mention that in your letters.’

Max turned red beneath his tan and became a little fidgety.

‘The sickness a man catches when he’s deeply in love,’ he confessed. ‘Sleeping badly, nightmares, not being able to think straight. Not being able to read or write or eat. Brigitte and Gérard obviously couldn’t stand by any longer so they prescribed me some activities to stop my mind from going to pot. That’s why I’m working for them: it helps me too. We don’t mention money, and that suits me just fine.’

‘The woman on the red tractor?’ Jean asked.

Max nodded, then took a deep breath as though he were building up to an announcement.

‘That’s right. The woman on the red tractor. That’s a good cue, because there’s something about her I have to te—’

‘The mistral’s coming!’ Madame Bonnet called to them anxiously, interrupting Max’s confession. In shorts and a man’s shirt as always, and carrying a basket of fruit, the small, wiry woman came towards them and pointed to the spinning windmills planted in the ground beside a lavender bed. For now it was merely a breeze tugging at the stems, but the sky was bright and the colour of deep-blue ink. The clouds had been swept away, and the horizon appeared to have closed in on them. Mount Ventoux and the Cévennes stood out, sharp and clear – a typical sign that the strong northwesterly wind was rising.

They greeted each other, then Brigitte enquired, ‘Do you know about the effects of the mistral?’

Catherine, Jean and Max looked at each other in bemusement.

‘We call it
maestrale,
the ruler. Or
vent du fada,
the wind that drives you mad. Our houses keep a low profile’ – she gestured to the layout of her buildings, their shorter sides facing the prevailing wind – ‘so that it won’t take any notice of them. The weather doesn’t just turn cooler; it makes every noise louder, and every movement harder. It’ll drive us all crazy for a few days, so it’d be better not to discuss anything too important – you’ll only argue.’

‘What?’ Max said quietly.

Madame Bonnet looked at him with a kindly smile on her nut-brown face.

‘Oh yes. The
vent du fada
makes you feel as crazy and stupid and edgy as when you’re unsure if your love will be reciprocated. But when it’s over, all the cobwebs have been blown away – from the countryside and from your head. Everything’s spick-and-span again, and we can start life afresh.’

She took her leave, saying, ‘I’ll roll up the parasols and tie down the chairs.’ Jean turned back to Max and asked, ‘What were you about to say before?’

‘Um … I’ve forgotten,’ Max said quickly. ‘Are you hungry?’

 

 

They spent the evening at a tiny restaurant in Bonnieux called Un Petit Coin de Cuisine, which had a wonderful view of the valley and of a red-and-gold sunset that gave way to a clear night sky strewn with stars glistening like ice. Tom, the cheerful waiter, served them Provençal pizza on wooden boards, and lamb stew. There, at the wobbly red table in the cosy, stone-vaulted room, Catherine added a new and positive element to the chemical bond between Jean and Max. Her presence spread harmony and warmth. Catherine had a way of looking at people as though she took every word they said seriously. Max told her about himself, about his childhood and unrequited crushes on girls, and how he came to be on the run from noise, which was something he had never told Jean – or, presumably, any other man.

While they were deep in conversation, Jean was able to slip away into his own thoughts. The cemetery lay barely a hundred metres above him on the hill, next to the church; they were separated by only a few thousand tonnes of stone and timidity.

It was only as they started down into the valley through the noticeably stronger wind that Jean wondered whether Max had been saying so much about his childhood to conceal the fact that he didn’t wish to say any more about the tractor girl.

Max escorted them to their room.

‘You go ahead,’ Jean said to Catherine.

Max and he were standing together in the shadows between the main house and the barn. The wind hummed and wailed softly but constantly around the corners.

‘Come on, Max. What did you want to tell me?’ Jean asked him cautiously.

Jordan was silent.

‘Don’t we want to wait until the wind’s dropped?’ he said at last.

‘Is it that bad?’

‘Bad enough for me to wait till you got here before telling you. But not … fatal. I hope.’

‘Tell me, Max, tell me, otherwise my imagination will get the better of me. Please.’

I’ll imagine, for instance, that Manon is still alive and was merely playing a trick on me.
 

Max nodded. The mistral hummed.

‘Manon’s husband, Luc Basset, married again three years after Manon’s death. Mila, a well-known local chef,’ Max began. ‘Manon’s father gave him the vineyard as a wedding present. They produce white and red wines. They’re … very popular. So is Mila’s restaurant.’