Summer school at labasti.., p.3
Summer School at Labastide, page 3
Above, the whole first floor had been cleared of partitions and turned into a vast studio with windows on three sides and an ancient uneven tiled floor. On the fourth side was another cavernous fireplace with its Norwegian stove and a number of sinks and cupboards on either side. The attic above was mainly used as dormitories for art students from schools in both France and England and could accommodate up to sixteen. Greg had not accepted any students for the midsummer sessions because of the heat under the tiles, so at this point they were empty, except for the McAllisters’ cat, Simpkin, who regarded the attics as his particular domain and was not above presenting startled students with mice caught in the cellar or, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, a large rat which he had not quite killed. Lucie adored him. Greg suspected him of possessing a sense of humour.
Jane lugged her case into Steven’s sparsely furnished room. There was an extra-long bed to accommodate Steven’s two metres with a woven African bedcover in glowing primary colours, an oak chest, a rickety basket-chair and a rail for clothes, jingling with wire hangers, hung from two chains screwed into a ceiling beam. The deep window embrasure which looked out on to the square had been boarded over to make a sort of dressing table and a mirror hung on one side, too high for Jane to use easily. Against the wall was a set of open shelves made of cheap rough wood and beside that a long, scarred trestle table stained with paint.
Jane unpacked and made a rueful face at how little space her belongings occupied. She had not been able to bring much with her. She decided she would have to buy a few extras at Campmontfort market. For one thing, she had not taken the heat into account; the shorts and shirt she was wearing were damp with sweat and the idea of wearing them again, unwashed, was not agreeable, as Lucie might say. Tomorrow it would have to be the cotton trousers and they would be too hot. She hung up both her dresses with a wry look for she was very unlikely to be able to wear either of them. She sat down on the bed when everything was tidied away and counted out her money. It had been every last penny in her account and had seemed like a lot at the time but if she had to buy clothes it would not last long. The arrangement with Greg and Lucie was for bed, board and tuition in exchange for help where Lucie needed it. No money. She was not to know that Greg, offered her services by her employer, had looked a gift horse very closely in the mouth and decided that until she proved her worth to Lucie, bed, board and tuition was quite enough.
Lucie came in while she was frowning at the little pile of notes. Typically, Lucie at once demanded to know what was the matter. Equally typically, Jane told her the truth, saying she had brought too few clothes with her and some of those not what she needed and was wondering how much she could afford to buy. She was at once overwhelmed with spare clothes, the use of the washing machine and the iron. Amused and touched, Jane accepted a shabby pair of denim shorts and a smarter pair in a flamboyant jungle print.
“This summer,” Lucie shrugged, “maybe I will need wider waists. Who knows?”
There was also a bundle of crop-tops and some T-shirts adorned with slogans, pictures and the names of obscure pop-groups.
“All left behind,” Lucie told her. “Always they are leaving things behind.”
Jane, cheered, showered, clean and cool, went down to the cellar in the jungle print and a T-shirt blazoning her adherence to Smear, whoever they might be, to wash what she had been wearing in the ancient stone sink which emptied directly into the mediaeval kennel of the Rue des Deux Tours and hang them on the rack outside the door which complicated the motorist’s life almost as much as the tourelle.
“For, so hot as it is today, they will be dry in an hour,” Lucie assured her.
Shortly after four o’clock there was a cheerful hooting from La Porte Vieille and Lucie who had been preparing raspberries for the deep-freeze stripped off her apron and started for the car-park outside the gate to welcome her husband and those students he had gone to fetch from Toulouse airport. She had just broken into her usual jog-trot when she heard Jane’s voice from the door, mimicking Claudine.
“Slowly, slowly, girl. To breed one must be tranquil. Move gently, don’t jog everywhere like a donkey!”
She slowed, turned and waved a cheerful fist in Jane’s direction and then went on her way, at a walk. The mini-bus was parked just outside the gate. Armand Mauriès, the driver and also the owner of the garage at the junction of the village road with the main road, was disinterring bags from the luggage compartment. Greg was standing by the sliding door, offering a hand to the people disembarking and at the sight of his wife strolling round through the gate he raised an incredulous eyebrow and grinned. She joined him and was held hard against him for a moment.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced with mock pomposity, “let me present my wife, Lucie. She is not, in fact, the Maire but I can assure you that the Mairie does not move far without consulting her.”
She dug him painfully in the ribs, smiling at the first to alight.
“Lucie, this is Calli’s friend, Madame Martin.”
Lucie smiled and shook hands with a pretty woman in her forties, dressed expensively for the heat in floating cottons with a shoulder bag that whispered Hermés. Her hair was sleekly brown and skilfully cut but Lucie wondered whether her hairdresser had a sense of mischief for the style emphasized her feline air, her slanted eyes of that hazel which some call green, small neat ears with almost non-existent lobes and that facility all cats possess of never being less than graceful, or other than self-regarding. ‘Don’t much care for this year’s choice,’ Lucie thought and concealed it behind a wide smile of welcome. Aloud she said in her customary mixture of French and English that she was enchanted, Calli was so much a friend and any friend of Calli’s had to be twice welcome. Callisto jumped down, intervened, hugged Lucie in a heartfelt way and said in her fast, fluent, but still unmistakeably American French,
“Don’t spread the butter too thick, my darling, she won’t understand. Her main claim to fame is that after four years of marriage to a Frenchman, a rich Frenchman, be it said, she speaks no more French than her poodle and understands less. How are you, my pet? Any promising signs yet?”
Callisto might be lesbian but she was a sensitive and loving friend and was well aware of Lucie’s hunger for a child.
“Let us say,” Greg intervened in his own highland brand of French, “that hopes are beginning to be cherished.”
Callisto grinned and hugged him as well.
“I’ll put cigars on my shopping list,” she promised.
“Oh, not yet,” he begged, “Lucie won’t buy as much as a packet of nappies until everything is confirmed.”
Callisto chuckled. She too was in her forties and had been born Christina Petersen in New York State but left as soon as she could for Europe. She was very tall and thin with variably coloured, close-cropped hair and she dressed in the glowing colours of her own outrageous styles. She was a dress-designer and, as she put it, a street-hold name, not a household name. She had said once in an interview that she was a second-rank designer, probably more inspired than most of the first-rank but not prepared to pay for the hype. Her designs were pirated world-wide, a practice she refused to counter, regarding it as a compliment and excellent free publicity. She came to Labastide every year, to touch reality for a few days, she said, and brought with her the current amour; these were usually street-wise gamine-types who found the country boring. The elegant Madame Martin was a new departure.
“You’re in the White House as usual, Calli, and Madame Martin also.”
“How unexpectedly presidential,” drawled Madame Martin. “And I answer more readily to Cilla.”
“Just as you wish,” agreed Lucie. “Such an unusual name.”
“My parents called me Celandine, would you believe? All crisp and cool and spring-like, not my ambience at all. Cella was too reminiscent of mould and cobwebs, so Cilla it had to be.”
Clearly Calli had heard this explanation too often before for she interrupted it.
“Come on, I’ll show you your room. Armand will trundle our cases round, won’t you, you villain?”
Armand, whose head was within the bowels of the luggage compartment gave muffled assent, Calli grabbed Cilla by the hand and the two women disappeared under the black shadow of the gate-arch, Calli striding out almost a-tiptoe as if bristling with nervous energy and Cilla keeping pace with her in a graceful unhurried lope.
Waiting quietly in the shade of the bus during this exchange was a tall, very thin man of about fifty. He had the withered leathery look of someone who had worked for a long time in a hot climate. After an incredulous look, Lucie came forward with both hands held out.
“Bax!” she exclaimed, “I’d no idea you were coming. Such a wonderful surprise!”
“I should have telephoned,” he confessed, “but it was a sudden decision. I found myself with,” he hesitated a moment, “with an unexpected holiday so I.....”
“So he packed up his pastels, got a standby ticket and was there at Blagnac, waiting for me,” Greg patted him on the shoulder, clearly delighted, “and of course we have a vacancy which is great good luck though we’d have found you a bed somewhere, Bax.”
Bax smiled at them both but said nothing.
“It is a thing quite splendid,” rejoiced Lucie. “There is a bed at the Priests’ House for you and I will make it up right....”
“Jane will make it up,” said Greg firmly. “Are you able to stay for the whole course?”
Baxendale seemed a little taken aback by this question.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It depends.”
There was, had anyone been watching him closely, a wry twist to his mouth as he answered. He had a deep slow quiet voice with the relics of an Australian accent and was dressed in shabby bush-shorts, a khaki shirt and a rather comic cotton sun-hat, which he wore with complete unselfconsciousness. His luggage consisted of a much-travelled back-pack and a small red plastic tool-box.
“You know your way,” Lucie said.
“I do.”
“You will have the room with the window over the valley,” Greg explained. “It’s small but the light is good. Mostly north. Just right for you.”
Baxendale looked from one to the other and then smiled. Picking up his gear he strode into the shadow of the gate and disappeared from sight. Lucie looked after him with a slight frown on her face. Meanwhile, Greg and a man in his sixties were helping a woman off the bus.
“Mr. and Mrs. Ellerman,” Greg announced. “My wife, Lucie.”
“Oh, please,” protested the man, “make it Graham and Suzie.”
“Just as you wish,” Greg smiled. “Suzie means to do the course, Lucie, but not Graham.”
“She’s the artist,” Graham, said. “Not me. Can’t draw a straight line. But don’t worry. I can entertain m’self. Bird-watchin’. Bit of a twitcher, y’know. Scramble around. Brought the old spy-glass.”
He tapped a long, well-worn leather tube that was hanging at his back.
“Can’t use binoculars. Never could. Astigmatic. Damn nuisance at times.”
Greg thought they must have strayed out of some Agatha Christie story. They might be met with in any of her English villages. Suzie was fair and plump and had been pretty but her round face was beginning to fall into folds and her mouth drooped. Lucie wondered whether she might have been ill recently. He was a little taller than she, thin and slightly stooped. His hair was white at the temples but still thick and well-barbered like his moustache. His clothes were far from new but had that well-cared-for look which suggested service in one of the armed forces. Incongruously, instead of the polished brogues one might have expected, he was wearing large, rather grubby, trainers.
“Suzie’s the artist,” he said and smiled at her a little anxiously.
“Nonsense, darling,” she murmured, “Mr. McAllister...”
“Oh, Greg, please,” he interrupted.
She acknowledged this with a nod and a vague smile.
“Greg will be expecting something good. Haven’t done much art since I was at school, you know. Not yesterday.”
Like a number of long-married couples they had taken on each other’s speech characteristics. She used her husband’s clipped constructions but had a curiously absent-minded way of speaking, as if her mind was on something else entirely. In this instance it evidently was because Graham nudged her urgently.
“Greg’ll be wondering why you came at all,” he pointed out with a thread of irritation.
“I do so enjoy drawing,” she said unconvincingly and smiled. “Time I learned more.”
Lucie then informed them that they were to go to the Priests’ House.
“So very old,” she told them, “one of the oldest in the village and your room has a view of the forest, so pretty, and there is a door on to the ramparts so that you can watch birds.”
“I’ll show them,” said a voice, unmistakeably Glasgow in origin. “You put me an’ Wayne in there, like I asked?”
The Ellermans looked at him a little doubtfully. Jim Green was short, not squat but well proportioned like a miniature viking. Muscles bulged out of his T-shirt and he wore his abundant red hair long, in a pony-tail. He also had a jutting short red beard. His eyes were a lucent pale blue and seemed vague but in fact he missed very little. He and Greg had a curious relationship. He had been Greg’s pupil for one whole summer and now felt privately that he had outstripped his teacher. Greg, who understood Jim better than he realized, was inclined to agree with him, having as accurate a view of his own abilities as he had of other people’s. Jim was now a teacher himself but, unlike Greg, regarded teaching as a way to eat, not a way of life. His companion was one of his pupils. He was a youth of seventeen, quite astoundingly beautiful. His skin was a smooth ivory, his hair, thick shining blue-black and his eyes, slanting over high mongol cheekbones were unexpectedly blue, a deep Delft blue. He might have been an inch or two taller than Jim but where Jim was sturdy and muscular, Wayne was slim and supple. He clutched a cheap plastic portfolio as if it contained his life-savings.
Suzie considered them with a wide-eyed stare and after a second or two came to a conclusion.
“Takes all sorts, doesn’t it?” she said confidentially to Lucie and drifted over to join her husband sorting out their suitcase from the luggage.
“She thinks you are a couple,” Lucie exclaimed. “Shall I tell her, no such thing?”
“Dinna bother yer heid,” Jim said and chuckled. “Wayne, this is ma wee Luce...”
He gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek.
“An’ she’s right stunner, so she is.”
Wayne came forward, shook Lucie’s hand and smiled. It was the kind of smile which makes even grandmothers pat their hair and sigh. Lucie giggled.
“See?” asked Jim with a resigned sigh. “Females look at him like he was a pudden-supper. He’ll work better if he isnae tom-cattin’ aboot.”
“I’ve put you in the big downstairs room with the twin beds,” Lucy said and giggled again. “Whatever will they think?”
“Just the job,” Jim said and winked. “We’ll just hold hauns a time or two at the caff an’ they folk’ll be thinkin’ it’s real bohemian here, so it is.”
Greg chuckled and helped them sort out their bags. They followed the Ellermans who had found their suitcase and were trundling it up the cobbled entry. The four vanished under the shadow. Armand followed with Calli’s traps on his trolley beside a very expensive set of three matching cases, which were unmistakeably Cilla’s. Lucie watched them disappear.
“I thought there would be two others,” she said. “A married couple, both teachers, wasn’t that right?”
Greg shrugged.
“They didn’t show up,” he said. “No message?”
“Not so far. How thoughtless. Silly too, when they’ve paid all that money. Maybe they’ll come later.”
“Then they can come here by bus. I won’t go in twice,” Greg said firmly.
“Steven’s arrived.”
“How is he?”
“Not very well.”
Greg surveyed the parking place outside the gate where visitors left their cars. The village had two-way traffic in streets barely wide enough for one car and visitors never ventured inside twice.
