4
I have made zero progress with the village baker. Sabrina Rousseau is as frosty with me now as she was when we arrived a month ago. Honestly, I don’t know who inserted the giant rod up her arse, but it’s not coming out anytime soon. Still, I continue to go to Utopie every day after dropping Ari off to his new school because it’s the only boulangerie in town and the things that woman can do with butter and flour border on the preternatural.
Today, I buy a couple of croissants, wishing Sabrina a nice day as I leave. As usual, she looks physically pained by the exchange. Outside, Cordes is gearing up for the day ahead. The owner of the épicerie across the road fills wooden crates with heritage tomatoes and shiny aubergines; at Chez Colette, the bistro next to Utopie, three old men are talking politics over shots of espresso.
I make my way back to La Maison Bleue, past the pharmacy and the old-school quincallerie , its window displays heaving with everything from doorknobs to oven scrubs, stopping to check out the latest additions to the phone-box library. It has an eclectic mix of titles – Voltaire, Lee Child and half a copy of something called Brioche and Balls: A Gastronomical History of the Cathar Resistance in Cordes . A self-published work by a David S. Perkins (who, according to the comprehensive biography on the back, enjoys Mozart and backgammon, and moved to the region from Gloucestershire in the early noughties), the 250-page recipe compendium-meets-historical tome is but a mere sample to whet the appetite. There’s a Post-it note on the cover saying that should the reader wish to enjoy the remaining 150 pages, they’ll have to part with twenty euros at the author’s book signing in Chez Colette next week.
Here, in the lower part of the village, daily life unfolds for Cordes’ inhabitants, a mix of around a thousand locals, anglophones and big-city dwellers, looking to escape the rat race. And blow-ins like Ari and me, looking to escape full stop. Every Saturday, leather-clad bikers arrive for the weekly farmers’ market, piling into Chez Colette for a shot of pastis before hitting the road. Above the main square, a series of narrow, cobbled streets, gothic facades at every turn, wind their way up to the fortified old town.
I’ll admit, it’s hard not to be seduced by the place. Albert Camus was among the influx of artists and bohemians who arrived here in the 1930s. He wrote, The traveller who, from the terraces of Cordes, looks at the summer night sky, knows that he needs to travel no further, because the beauty here, day after day, will remove any loneliness. I’m not too hot on my French existentialists, but I’d say I was more on Sartre’s wavelength, agreeing with his assessment that ‘Hell is other people’.
My palms nicely warmed by the croissants, I empty the greasy paper bag onto a plate and fill a cafetiere with coffee. The smell of creamy butter fills the room. Damn that Sabrina Rousseau. Her baking has become an essential part of my morning routine. Dropping Ari off to school, walking home, making coffee, eating a pastry. Thirty minutes in which I don’t have to worry about rising damp or what new mess Dad has got himself into or whether or not I made the right call moving here. And it strikes me as sad that she doesn’t know, as she gets up at a.m. to twist sticky dough into a crescent shape, that what she’s offering isn’t simply an exchange of goods for money. It’s a lifeline.
‘Do I smell Sabrina Rousseau’s handiwork?’ Leonard is standing in the doorway, wiping his hands on an old tea towel. ‘That’s a fresh coat of paint on all the downstairs shutters.’
I smile. ‘You legend. Pull up a chair.’
I ended up hiring Leonard for a job the week after we met. I hadn’t been prepared for the amount of work involved in getting La Maison Bleue into shape. Besides, we kept bumping into Leonard everywhere we went. When he was buying rolling papers in the tabac and chickpeas in the supermarket. As he was walking down Rue Saint-Michel with his guitar case strapped to his back. Each time, he’d greet us like he’d just reconnected with a long-lost cousin. (He might well think we’re related given the Irish connection.) Ari was an instant fan, and I’m a fan of Ari, so I asked Leonard if he’d sand down the dining table on the terrace. He’s been turning up ever since.
‘What’s her deal anyway?’ I say, putting the cafetiere, a couple of mugs and the plate of croissants on the table.
‘Sabrina? She’s not so bad once you get to know her,’ says Leonard, lifting a pastry.
‘She has no interest in letting me get to know her,’ I say. ‘The other day, trying to make conversation, I told her I was thinking of visiting Albi as I’d heard the cathedral there is worth a look. She stared at me blankly like she didn’t understand a word of what I was saying, so I repeated myself. Eventually, she goes, ‘I have never heard of Al- bi, only Al- bi , emphasising the last syllable instead of the first. Honestly, she’s a first-class pain in the hole.’
Leonard laughs. ‘Hang in there. She’ll come round. How’s the little guy doing at school?’
I flop into the chair opposite Leonard and sigh.
‘Still not settling in?’ he says.
‘The teacher had to drag him off me again. He kept screaming, “Stop! My body is my own!”’
‘Where did he get that from?’
‘I’ve been trying to teach him about bodily autonomy and stranger danger. He seems to be getting the message. We were in Carrefour last week when an old woman squeezed his cheeks in the condiments aisle and told him he was mignon . He smacked her hand away and told her to respect his “bodily lobotomy”.’
‘Way to go, Ari!’ Leonard chuckles. ‘He’s setting boundaries. If there’s one thing the French appreciate, it’s directness.’
‘Hmm. I’m not sure his teacher would agree.’
‘Hey, school is a big adjustment, never mind being the only non-French kid in class. Give him time. It’s only been a couple of weeks.’
‘I hope so,’ I say, dunking a croissant into my coffee. ‘Ari’s not your average five-year-old. He was already different and now he’s the pale Irish kid who doesn’t know what caca boudin means.’
‘What’s caca boudin ?’
‘“Poo sausage”. It’s an expletive just for kids, which is the most French thing I’ve ever heard. Irish children’s first swear words are whatever creative obscenity they’ve picked up from the adults around them. I believe Ari’s was, “Fuck me Jesus”.’
Leonard’s eyes widen.
‘In my defence, I almost set the house on fire making fish fingers.’
‘You said Ari was different. Different how?’
‘Hyper-sensitive, for one thing. Too plugged into everything that’s going on around him.’
‘ Isn ’ t that a good thing in a kid? In anyone? Hell, the world would be a vastly different place if we were all a little more in tune with our environment.’
I chew the inside of my cheek, mulling over Leonard’s words.
‘ Agreed,’ I say. ‘With Ari, though, I don ’ t know … He feels things. Like really feels them. And I ’ m terrified that when he grows up and realises what the world is like and how people are with each other, he won ’ t be able to cope. Honestly, the best thing a parent can do for their child is teach them resilience.’
Leonard studies me for a second, a look of con cern flashing across his habitually serene features. ‘Well, you know what Leonard Cohen said – “When things get really bad, just raise your glass and stamp your feet and do a little jig. That ’ s about all you can do.”’
Leonard is his namesake’s number one fan and I suspect the ever-present trilby on his head is a tribute to the legendary Canadian songwriter. It’s not clear whether Leonard changed his birth name to honour his idol or if it’s a fortunate stroke of fate that he should share a name with the man he would go on to worship. Sometimes, when Leonard-from-Wichita speaks, he affects a low, smoky kind of voice, half-speaking, half-singing his words, like his famous counterpart. At one stage, I wondered whether he might identify as Leonard Cohen. I decided it didn’t matter.
‘Any more bookings?’ he asks.
‘Just that English family arriving next month. Should I be worried it’s this quiet? I thought things might have started to pick up by now.’
Before he can answer, Myriam appears, wearing rubber gloves and holding a spade.
‘Gráinne is dead,’ she says sombrely. ‘I will bury her by the compost heap.’
Gráinne is one of three hens we inherited with the house. (Another piece of information the owners neglected to pass on.) I named her after the pirate queen, who fought for Irish liberation from the British. Her sisters, Spiderman and Skinny Fries, were christened by Ari.
Leonard leans over and squeezes my hand. ‘It was her time,’ he says.
I nod, watching Myriam as she roots through the cupboard underneath the sink for bin bags, stopping to push her bluntly cut fringe out of her eyes. Myriam has been staying with us for the past five days. She turned up out of the blue, saying she was Nicolas and Sophie’s niece. Apparently, she spends every summer helping them out in the guesthouse in exchange for food and board. She seemed surprised to learn her aunt and uncle weren’t around, and I felt bad sending her away, seeing as she’d just made the five-hour trip from Marseilles. She’s currently sleeping in the converted outhouse, just off the kitchen, and has been giving me a hand around the house.
Myriam’s wardrobe is almost entirely black. The only item of colour I’ve seen on her is a pair of neon-green crocs. This means either, like me, she appreciates maximum comfort when it comes to footwear or she’s doing that ironic fashion thing young people are into right now. I read bucket hats are back. I own both a bucket hat and crocs, which would make me bang on trend if I hadn’t been wearing them for the past twenty years.
She doesn’t say much. All I know about her is that she isn’t on social media. On her first night here, I asked her if she and her mother did dance routines on TikTok. Yiv showed me the video-sharing app when we were out for dinner a few months ago and that seemed to be the gist of it. Myriam said she’s not interested in having her data mined and profited by the Chinese state, and that her mother has patellar tendinitis, so dancing is out of the question. I like that Myriam doesn’t broadcast the minutiae of her life. I’ve never understood why people feel the need to unburden themselves online. Cillian was the sharer in our relationship. After our cat died, he posted a photo of himself crying on LinkedIn, accompanied by a lengthy caption about vulnerability being the root of authentic leadership and meaningful connection.
The volume on the radio increases, heralding the 9 a.m. news. I just about make out the words ‘ pétrole ’ and ‘ meurtre ’.
‘Are they talking about the kidnapped oil executive? Did they find out who did it?’ I ask Leonard.
‘It’s only a matter of time before they do. That guy’s a big fish.’
Two weeks ago, the chief financial officer of a global oil and gas company was taken from his Parisian penthouse apartment in the middle of the night. A few hours later, a breakaway faction of a climate activist group released a video of the executive, his hands bound, flanked by his masked captors. One of them read from a prepared statement, accusing the hostage and the multinational he worked for of lying to the public for years about the impact of fossil fuels on the planet, and covering up their role in the crisis. It was time for oil and gas companies to be held to account, he said. Two days later, the executive was dropped off outside a tower block in Saint-Denis, blindfolded, in the monogrammed silk pyjamas he’d been wearing when he was snatched. Turned out, a member of the group had had a crisis of conscience and released him. Her co-conspirators (he said it was a woman who had bundled him into the boot of the car) were threatening further reprisals.
‘It was bound to come to this,’ Leonard continues. ‘Peaceful protests taking a darker turn. These kids should be at college, getting wasted, sleeping with the wrong people, not going full Apocalypse Now on the oil industry. Someone’s going to get killed soon, you mark my words.’
‘It’s not like they have a wealth of opportunities ahead of them, though, is it?’ I counter. ‘Let’s face it – the future isn’t exactly glittering for your average twenty-something. Most of them will never be able to afford their own home or start a family. That’s if you want to bring a child into a society that’s happy to let half the world drown through global warming.’
I realise that this is a bleak assessment of humanity, even for me, and remember Myriam – not-so-average, yet a twenty-something nonetheless – is in the room.
‘All I know is, violence ain’t the solution,’ says Leonard, shaking his head. ‘Saw enough of it in Iraq to last me a lifetime.’
Leonard does this occasionally. Drops implausible conversational bombshells out of nowhere. I’m an Iraq war veteran. I once played bass for Bruce Springsteen. I was born with six toes on my left foot.
I pick up the last croissant and tear it in half, handing a piece to Leonard as my phone beeps. I jump. I’m still not used to having my notifications on. I changed the settings to make sure I didn’t miss a potential booking, but rarely do I receive anything related to the guesthouse. My most recent emails were Cillian’s latest newsletter (I’ve unsubscribed four times – he keeps re-adding me) and an advert for perimenopause pyjamas. I’m thirty-nine. I thought I had at least another year before the need for ‘cool clothing for hot moments’, but here we are.
‘Oh,’ I exclaim, reading the newest addition to my inbox.
‘Everything okay?’ asks Leonard.
‘We’ve got a booking. They arrive next week.’
‘Fantastic! But why do I get the impression you’re less than enthused by the news? Weren’t you just saying how quiet it was?’
‘I know, I know. It’s just … wow.’
I zoom in to double check the email address. It seems to be legit. I hold the screen up to Leonard, who taps his pocket for his reading glasses.
I move the screen closer to his face. ‘Jack Hamilton is coming to stay.’