Bella... A French Life Read Online Free

these destined to become our local speciality - agneaux pré-salé. Roasted leg of salt marsh lamb. Our guests loved my mother’s agneaux pré-salé which, in my child mind, was excellent only because I had helped her with the cooking when in reality my only contribution had been that I inserted cloves of garlic into incisions she had already made in the meat. Since her death six years ago, it is Gertrude who does all the cooking at Le Presbytère. Gertrude - Gertrude Duc - Fred and Frascot’s cousin.   Like Fred and Le Presbytère’s housemaids, Honorine and Martine, she is off until my Easter re-opening.
    Once through the pastureland, the road starts to climb and becomes somewhat potholed. I look back towards the coast, towards the Bay of Saint-Michel, down below. I open the window on my side by a chink, and a little wind caresses the back of my neck. Some evenings, after Gertrude had finished her shift, I’ll drive her back to her home in the village, and whenever I open a window, she warns me about the dangers of a draught.
    “Bad if you have your menses or if you’re in the other way.”
    The other way: pregnant .
    “Gertrude, I am not pregnant,” I will say.
    In my side mirror, a Brittany Ferries boat is sailing towards Saint-Malo. Its passengers will be gathering together heavy luggage and boisterous children, ready to start another sojourn at the expatriates’ B&Bs. On days when the wind blows hard this way, we, here on land, hear the warnings over the ship’s loudspeakers asking the passengers not to block the doorways. The tourists will be bringing whole nut chocolate bars, lemon cream biscuits and pots of Marmite to their ex-pat hosts. “Allow me to pay you for these,” Mrs Ex-Pat will say, and the holidaymaker will reply: “Not on your nelly, love. Just enjoy the stuff. You must so miss England.”
    The holidaymakers will go to Saint Michael’s Mount, pantingly climb up to the abbey, browse the souvenir shops for fridge magnets and embroidered tea doilies, eat a Mêre Poulard omelette and a crêpe , complain about the fucking French overcharging as always, and complain even more when they pay a franc to spend a penny. But, back in England, they will show relatives and friends the photographs they took. “God, but France is beautiful,” they will say.
    Behind me, the sun, high in the sky, turns the golden statue of Archangel Michael atop the spire of the mount’s abbey into a ball of golden flames. I am reminded of how Joan of Arc had described him to her English judges in 1431.
    Was he naked?
    Do you think that Our Lord had nothing in which to clothe him?
    Did he have hair?
    And why would they have cut it ...? But no, I do not know if he has hair. He had wings on his shoulders, but no crown on his head. I saw him with the eyes of my body, just as I see you... I saw him with my corporal eyes.  
    How do you know it was him?
    He told me, “I am Michael, the protector of France”.
    Here, on the spire, he stands with those wings stretched to the sky. But not only his wings, so too his sword, perhaps yet again ready to protect France, perhaps from those English tourists on the ferry.
    The bay’s tide is not yet in and cars and coaches are driving along the causeway linking the mount to the mainland. When I first returned after the Brissard twin’s death, the speed with which the tide rose at the equinoxes used to fascinate me; à la vitesse d’un cheval du gallop - at the speed of a galloping horse - according to Victor Hugo. There are always tourists who try to beat the tide to the mount.
    Jean-Louis and I too once tried to do so.
    It was in a month of June, and it was in the year before the Brissard twin’s death. Jean-Louis and I had been lovers for just a month and he had not yet met my widowed mother and I suggested he should come with me to Le Presbytère for the weekend. We drove down in his metallic silver Porsche which he had bought just the month before. It was his first major purchase