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The Website of Author Marilyn Z. Tomlins … Whatever you ever wanted to know about Paris … France … the French … and Marilyn Z. Tomlins
Category:
Romance
Publisher: Raven Crest Books
ISBN-10: 0992670039
Type: Fiction
Pages: 296
Copyright: Dec 16, 2013
ISBN-13: 9780992670030
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
How the French fall in love ... and out of love.
In 'Bella ... A French Life' Bella tells her story.
Once a successful paeditrician in a Paris hospital, when the reader meets her she is the owner of a luxury guest house that clings to the cliffs above the scenic Saint Michael's Mount (Mont Saint Michel) in France's Normandy region.
Two tragedies had sent her fleeing from Paris to Normandy.
One had occured in the hospital where she worked.
The other was that her lover - Jean-Louis, dashing, and a successful and wealthy lawyer , but married - had left her to return to his wife.
Already stigmatised because of the circumstances of her birth - she was born of a French mother and a German Nazi soldier - she wonders if she will ever be totally happy.
Will she ever be able to forget Jean-Louis and find love with another man.
Mean leave, she tells herself.
Then, Colin - English, a writer, cultured, kind and protective towards her - steps into Bella's life, but in his own words, "I always run. I always have to be elsewhere, in some other place."
Will he this time not run?
Will he this time stay and will Bella know that when he holds her, it is because he loves her?
Excerpt
We were to meet on Place du Tertre.
I doubted the wisdom of meeting on the square because of its popularity with tourists, and I was right, there was something like a crowd mulling around.
I spotted Jean-Louis in conversation with two couples of the well-to-do tourist kind; the women had designer bags slung over their bony shoulders, and between the men’s fat index and middle fingers hung burning cigars.
Seeing Jean-Louis I felt a flush of excitement rising from my chest: I’d forgotten how good-looking he was. He wore jeans, white shirt and a navy blazer and pointed black shoes. Marion would have described him as ‘smart casual’. To me he was simply gorgeous.
He put both his hands on my shoulders and kissed me in greeting on both my cheeks.
“You look great, Bella.”
I wore beige slacks, a black blouse and a black velvet poncho which I’d bought when at a medical conference in Milan, and yes, I had tried to look good - good for him.
The tourist menus of the restaurants that lined the square offered things like an assiette de charcuteries or a petit pâté chaud de lapin which they suggested should be followed by a main course of suprême de poulet or a rôti de veau forestière. Starters, main course and dessert cost the meagre sum of twelve francs.
A waiter with a black bow tie which needed straightening directed Jean-Louis and me to one of Chez Eugène’s red-checkered tables set out in a marquee on the square.
“I am not a habitué - I want you to know,” said Jean-Louis.
Shards of coloured light from overhead decorations illuminated the façades of the three- or four-storey buildings which bordered the square. A bearded artist in a navy-blue artist’s blouse came to our table and offered to do a sketch of me for fifty francs. I said no and he approached another table where, having received the solicited agreement, he sat down on a folding stool which had been slung over his shoulder. He opened an easel which had been flung over his other shoulder. His model sat in solemn pose while he produced with nimble strokes a perfect duplication of her heavy-jawed, double-chinned, middle-aged face with a stick of charcoal on a white sheet of paper.
A woman in a long white dress, her hair under a black turban, walked up to our table. She slapped a deck of tarot cards down in front of me and asked me to draw a card so she could tell me what the future held for me. She wore a death-head silver ring; the eyes were red stones.
It was strange but before the woman walked up to us, sitting there opposite Jean-Louis at Chez Eugène, I wondered what the future held for him and me, indeed whether we had one - as a couple.
When I was at the high school in Nantes I had dabbled with mysticism. My mother nearly fainted when I started to speak of guardian angels, spirit guides and the beyond. I was doing that because there was this girl in my class whose mother was a medium and one weekend when I stayed over at their house her mother had held a séance. My classmate, her mother, I and some neighbours of theirs sat at a table holding hands and suddenly a man’s voice came from what sounded like underneath the table. The man spoke in a drowsy, heavily-accented voice. He said he was Bella’s grandfather. He said his name was Johann Wolff. He wanted me to listen to what he had to tell me. It was that Adolf Hitler was a good man. My grandfather had been a Brown Shirt during - no - before World War Two had broken out even, but as it was something which was never mentioned at home, there was no way my classmate’s mother could have known that or anything else about my grandfather. I had told my mother what my Grandfather Wolff had told me and she had very nearly fainted again. “Bella, all I need in my life is for you to go believe in such crap!” she shouted. I do not know whether she had told my father what his deceased father was seemingly up to.
My classmate’s name was Flora and she was as dainty as her name implied and she telephones me occasionally to offer me guidance because she claims to possess the power to speak to the deceased as her mother had done. I, however, no longer believe in such things. Not after I had kept my eyes closed for hours on end trying to get my guardian angel to speak to me, to tell me which questions I would be asked in my baccalaureat school-leaving examination, and to give me the answers into the bargain so I would not have to do any revision, but no one had replied.
I smiled at the tarot reader.
“No thank you.”
“Pity,” she said, “because my spirit guide tells me you will very soon be very happy.”
“I hope you do not believe in nonsense like this, Bella,” said Jean-Louis.
He motioned to the woman to leave me alone, and she, her black turban having slipped over her eyes and temporarily blinded, she stumbled as she walked away.
I felt sorry for her.
-0-
“Why are you single, Bella?”
We’d finished our first course of avocado and were cutting our way around the leg of the duck of our main course - a confit de canard - and at a nearby table, the tarot reader, having pushed the turban away from her face, was telling the future of the lady who had had her portrait painted earlier.
“Of course you reply only if you want to,” said Jean-Louis.
I put my knife and fork down.
“I’ve never loved a man enough to marry him.”
“How much must you love a man for that?”
“I must believe that without him the sun will never shine again.”
I had replied without hesitation.
He swivelled the wine in his glass.
“Could you love a man like that?”
He’d been looking down at his wine glass, but he looked up and straight into my eyes.
Quickly, I looked down, swivelled the wine in my glass and suddenly the wine looked as red as freshly spilled blood. The thought of spilled blood, so much part of my life, made me shiver slightly.
“I do not know if I could, Jean-Louis.”
“Come on, look at me,” he urged.
He took the glass from me and put it down on the table.
I looked up.
“Jean-Louis, I do know my mother loved my father like that. He was a Wehrmacht soldier. She had become a horizontal collaborator for her love of him.”
He put his glass down beside mine. The wine in it also looked as red as freshly spilled blood.
Again, I shivered.
He sighed.
“Bella, love is not ideal,” he said. “It is a road covered in potholes.”
What to say?
A woman in platform heels and lacquered chignon, her eyebrows thin black arches, walked over and stopping at our table she began to belt out Edith Piaf’s Non, Je ne regrette rien to the accompaniment of an accordion played by a man in baggy grey flannels, black hair greased back and greying sideburns.
Non, rien de rien ... Non, je ne regrette rien … Ni le bien qu'on m'a fait … Ni le mal; tout ça m'est bien égal … Non, rien de rien … Non, je ne regrette rien … Car ma vie, car mes joies … Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi …
She had the pronounced guttural r of Provence just as Piaf used to have.
“Beautiful,” said Jean-Louis. “I adore the late Piaf.”
The waiter with the crooked bow tie rushed up and appeared to enjoy the performance as well but after the woman’s final aujourd’hui, ça commence avec toi, which had drowned all conversation at the tables, he whispered something to her and she and the accordionist walked away, her platforms noisy on the cobblestones.
“Too much disturbance here tonight. I apologise,” said the waiter to no one in particular.
“We enjoyed that,” Jean-Louis told him.
“Sorry …,” said the waiter, “but the boss does not want the guests to be disturbed.”
Some new arrivals sat down at the table next to ours and a red-faced man took a packet of still sealed Gitanes from his pocket. He ripped open the blue packet and lit up, and turning to face our table, he blew white rings of smoke into our faces.
“Now, this is disturbance,” I said.
Jean-Louis asked the waiter for the bill.
“And no halving, Bella.”
It was close to midnight and Place du Tertre’s artists had already packed up their easels and had wandered off, and the tourists had also begun to leave and the waiters were clearing the tables and chatting and laughing at whatever they were talking about.
Jean-Louis pointed in the direction of Sacré-Coeur Basilica. Only the spire of its tallest bulbous white dome could be seen over the rooftops.
“Let’s walk that way, Bella.”
Overhead clouds had gathered and at the foot of the Montmartre hill Paris was shrouded in a dark veil like a woman, her religion obliging her to cover herself from the world.
The funicular from the hill down to the cobbled streets of the Butte had already stopped running for the night and Jean-Louis and I descended by the steps to red-light Pigalle where the p’tites femmes were still plying their trade, their mascara-lined eyes red with too many pastis or perhaps only with exhaustion after having had to satisfy too many men for one night.
“I’ll go home now,” I told Jean-Louis.
“So will I.”
I still did not know where he lived.
“Where is your apartment?”
“Eiffel Tower. Bordering the Seine. ”
It was a long Métro ride from Pigalle and a noisy drunk made conversation impossible. We reached Concorde station where both of us were to change to different lines but Jean-Louis said he will escort me to Saint-Michel station, there where I had bid him goodnight a week earlier. At the station we both descended.
“Shall we do this again?” Jean-Louis asked.
We were standing on the same spot where we had stood the week before.
“That would be nice,” I replied.
“If this were a Claude Lelouch film this is where we kiss, Bella.”
Above our heads the moon had crept from behind a white cloud.
“But life is not a Claude Lelouch film, Jean-Louis.”
“I know, dear Bella, I know,” he murmured.
Like the week before, he planted a kiss of goodbye on each of my cheeks, and I, on his, and he ran down the steps back into the station, but he halted and turned around.
“Thank you, Miss Wolff.”
He waved.
And I waved too.
I quickly turned and set off for my apartment.
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