But now there’s change coming to the charming village — of course it has kept its character through many changes, longer than the legendary longevity of a parrot. The revolution that sent the monks fleeing from their monastery whose cloisters are now the garden bar of its avatar as a five-star hotel; the German occupation in the 1940s in which young men of village families still extant (look at those baby carriages) were killed in the Resistance — there’s a street where one was born, named after him. There has been the restoration of rotting beams in old houses by Scandinavians, Germans and the English, who in the boom years of Europe discovered a delightful unspoilt place to acquire a historic maison secondaire.
This latest change has a finality about it — as no doubt they all have had for whoever lived in or visited the village ‘as it used to be’. Before. For each individual another ‘before’. But one of the finalities, now, is the announced closing of the restaurant of the parrot. After thirty years! Madame Delancy knows she owes an explanation to the habitués, whether the survivors of the lesbian community from the Twenties, the regular summer visitors, or the youngsters who take their right as a species of collateral grandchildren to sit smoking, jeering and chattering for more than an hour over a single coffee or a shared icecream. The chef, her dear husband who (everyone has heard related many times) learned his skills in the kitchens of Maxim’s in Paris, has been cooking for more than forty years. For some while they have had a small apartment with a view of the sea, ready in preparation for this time that has come. So the tables with their white napery and flowers, the chairs on which everyone is at ease, raising glasses, all will be folded away, the ice buckets where bottles of Provençal Rosé are powdered with chill, and the chef’s incomparable Tarte Tatin that is displayed among desserts — all will disappear. No. No? A German gentleman has bought the restaurant. As if one can ‘buy’ a restaurant whose character has been formed over thirty years. A German. Sauerkraut and sausages. Or worse, something imagined as international French cuisine by those who are not French.
An imperious scream from under a bower. — Bon jour! Bon soir! Hullo! Ça va? — reminds: and Auguste, what will happen to the parrot? Can he be bought along with the premises?
The parrot will move to the apartment. What a question.
But there is a question: what life will it be for him, alone with an old couple gazing at the sea. Oh the family, the children and grandchildren will visit. Sometimes. Everyone has found other work.
The final week of the restaurant’s life it is more fully patronised than ever. One must eat there just one time again, it’s going to be the last time. For some people: of many phases, stages, stations of lifetime. The parrot has witnessed these; those that people remember, have forgotten, or want to forget. He is particularly talkative during his last chance of recollection declared, it seems that if the creature is long-lived, it also has a relentless memory. It is all there in whatever strange faculty is hidden in that feathered throat and blunt grey tongue behind the probing beak. He laughs the crescendo laugh of a coquettish woman who may or may not hear herself in it as she comes stooping on an invalid’s walker to sit for one last lunch at her usual table. Now he’s tittering nonsensically from the adolescence of girls who have disappeared into the cities; the parents, eating their ultimate Daube Provençale, haven’t had news for months. The tittering sweeps away to a drunken blast (that poor devil, relic of former habitués, begs now outside the market). The murmur of lovers across a table (the hostile couple who don’t exchange a word while they eat), the insinuating laugh of gossips whose predictions of mismatch and betrayal have come to pass, there — and someone smiling a farewell, cajoling, Auguste, Auguste, turns away from the cage at lack of response, the creature has gone silent. He fidgets about the cage as if to find a bribe of sugar he has missed. But it’s more than that. He yells anguish, PAPA PAPA PA — PAA! Where is that child from whom this cry came, and is stored, maybe for the rest of a hundred years? PA — PAA! Where is the father who was called for in desperate appeal, and did he ever come. HULLO HULLO PA — PAAA PA — PAAA! BON JOUR BON SOIR WHAT? WHAT? ÇA VA? ÇA VA? The parroting that isn’t only that of parrots repeats how we hide from one another’s hurts. ÇA VA?
How goes it.
And from the depths of whatever he has that mocks vocal chords, low and angry, there is what was overheard, what he shouldn’t have overheard. Ça ne va pas du tout.
Doesn’t go at all.
a beneficiary
CACHES of old papers are graves, you shouldn’t open them.
Her mother had been cremated. There is no marble page incised Laila de Morne, born, died, actress.
She always lied about her age; it wasn’t her natal name, that was too ethnically limiting, inherited generations back, to suggest her uniqueness in a programme cast list. It wasn’t her married name, either. She had baptised herself; professionally. She was long divorced although only in her late fifties when a taxi hit her car and (as she would have delivered her last line) brought down the curtain on her career. Her daughter Charlotte has her father’s surname and has been close to him as a child can be subject to an ex-husband’s conditions of access while the ex-wife, customarily, has custody. As Charlotte has grown up she’s felt more compatible with him than with her, fondly though she feels towards her mother’s — somehow — childishness. Perhaps acting is really continuing the make-believe games of childhood — fascinating, in a way. But. But what? Not a way she had wanted to follow. Although named after the character in which her mother had an early success (Charlotte Corday, Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade) and despite the encouragement of drama and dance classes. Not a way she could follow because of lack of talent: her mother’s unspoken interpretation of disappointment, if not expressed in reproach. Laila de Morne had not committed herself to any lover so far as marrying again. There was no stepfather to confuse relations, loyalties; Charlie (as he called her) could remark to her father, ‘Why should she expect me to take after her?’