‘Quelque chose d'autre, Madame?’
For a moment I stepped outside myself and saw myself as she must see me: foreign, transient, thick tongue stumbling over peculiar sounds, dependent on a map to locate me in a strange landscape and a phrasebook and dictionary to communicate. She made me feel lost the very moment I thought I'd found home.
I looked at the display, desperate to show her I wasn't as ridiculous as I seemed. I pointed at some onion quiches and managed to say, ‘Et un quiche.’ A split second afterwards I knew I'd used the wrong article – quiche was feminine and should be used with une – and groaned inwardly.
She put one in a small bag and laid it on the counter next to the baguette. ‘Quelque chose d'autre, Madame?’ she repeated.
‘Non.’
She rang up the purchases on the cash register. Mutely I handed her the money, then realized when she placed my change on a small tray on the counter that I should have put the money there rather than directly into her hand. I frowned. It was a lesson I ought to have learned already.
‘Merci, Madame,’ she intoned with a blank face and flinty eyes.
‘Merci,’ I mumbled.
‘Au revoir, Madame.’
I turned to go, then stopped, thinking there must be a way to salvage this. I looked at her: she had crossed her arms over her vast bosom.
‘Je – nous – nous habitons près d'ici, là-bas,’ I lied, gesturing wildly behind me, clawing out a territory somewhere in her town.
She nodded once. ‘Oui, Madame. Au revoir, Madame.’
‘Au revoir, Madame,’ I replied, spinning around and out the door.
Oh Ella, I thought as I trudged across the square, what are you doing, lying to save face?
‘So don't lie, then. Live here. Confront Madame every day over the croissants,’ I muttered in reply. I found myself by the fountain and reached over to a lavender bush, pulled off a few leaves and crushed them between my fingers. The sharp woody scent said: Reste.
Rick loved Lisle-sur-Tarn when he saw it, and made me feel better about my choice by kissing me and spinning me around in his arms. ‘Hah!’ he shouted at the old houses.
‘Shh, Rick,’ I said. It was market day in the square and I could feel all eyes on us. ‘Put me down,’ I hissed.
He just smiled and held me more tightly.
‘This is my kind of town,’ he said. ‘Just look at the detail in that brickwork!’
We wandered all over, picking out our favourite houses. Later we stopped at the boulangerie for more onion quiches. I turned red the moment Madame looked at me, but she directed most of her remarks at Rick, who found her hilarious and chuckled at her without appearing to offend her in the slightest. I could see she found him handsome: his blond ponytail in this land of short dark hair was a novelty and his Californian tan hadn't faded yet. To me she was polite, but I detected an underlying hostility that made me tense.
‘It's a shame those quiches are so good,’ I remarked to Rick out on the street. ‘Otherwise I'd never go in there again.’
‘Oh babe, there you go, taking things to heart. Don't go all East-coast paranoid on me, now.’
‘She just makes me feel unwelcome.’
‘Bad customer relations. Tut-tut! Better get a personnel consultant in to sort her out.’
I grinned at him. ‘Yeah, I'd like to see her file.’
‘Positively riddled with complaints. She's on her last legs, it's obvious. Have a little pity on the old thing.’
It was tempting to live in one of the old houses in or near the square, but when we found out none were for rent I was secretly relieved: they were serious houses, for established members of town. Instead we found a place a few minutes' walk from the centre, still old but without the fancy brickwork, with thick walls and tiled floors and a small back patio sheltered by a vine-covered trellis. There was no front yard: the front door opened directly onto the narrow street. The house was dark inside, though Rick reminded me that it would be cool during the summer. All of the houses we'd seen were like that. I fought against the dimness by keeping the shutters open, and caught my neighbours peeking through the windows several times before they learned not to look.
One day I decided to surprise Rick: when he came home from work that night I'd painted over the dull brown of the shutters with a rich burgundy and hung boxes of geraniums from the windows. He stood in front of the house smiling up at me as I leaned over the window sill, framed in pink and white and red blossoms.
‘Welcome to France,’ I said. ‘Welcome home.’
When my father found out Rick and I were going to live in France he encouraged me to write to a cousin several times removed who lived in Moutier, a small town in northwest Switzerland. Dad had visited Moutier once, long ago. ‘You'll love it, I promise,’ he kept saying when he called to give me the address.
‘Dad, France and Switzerland are two different countries! I probably won't get anywhere near Switzerland.’
‘Sure, kid, but it's always good to have family nearby.’
‘Nearby? Moutier must be 400, 500 miles from where we'll be.’
‘You see? Just a day's drive. And that's a lot closer than I'll be to you.’
‘Dad -’
‘Just take the address, Ella. Humour me.’
How could I say no? I wrote down the address and laughed. ‘This is silly. What do I write to him: “Hello, I'm a distant cousin you've never heard of before and I'm on the Continent, so let's meet up”?’
‘Why not? Listen, as an opening you could ask him about the family history, where we come from, what our family did. Use some of that time you'll have on your hands.’
Dad was driven by the Protestant work ethic, and the prospect of me not having a job made him nervous. He kept making suggestions about useful things I could do. His anxiety fuelled my own: I wasn't used to having free time – I'd always been busy either training or working long hours. Having time on my hands took some getting used to; I went through a phase of sleeping late and moping around the house before I devised three projects to keep me occupied.
I started by working on my dormant French, taking lessons twice a week in Toulouse with Madame Sentier, an older woman with bright eyes and a narrow face like a bird. She had a beautiful accent, and the first thing she did was to tackle mine. She hated sloppy pronunciation, and yelled at me when I began saying Oui in that throwaway manner many French have of barely moving their lips and letting the sound come out like a duck quacking. She made me pronounce it precisely, sounding all three letters, whistling the air through my teeth at the end. She was adamant that how I said things was more important than what I said. I tried to argue against her priorities, but I was no match for her.
‘If you do not pronounce the words well, no one will understand what you say,’ she declared. ‘Moreover, they will know that you are foreign and will not listen to you. The French are like that.’
I refrained from pointing out that she was French too. Anyway I liked her, liked her opinions and her firm hand, so I did her mouth exercises, pulling my lips around like they were made of bubblegum.
She encouraged me to talk as much as possible, wherever I was. ‘If you think of something, say it!’ she cried. ‘No matter what it is, however small, say it. Talk to everyone.’ Sometimes she made me talk non-stop for a set period of time, starting with one minute and working up to five minutes. I found it exhausting and impossible.
‘You are thinking a thought in English and then translating it word by word into French,’ Madame Sentier pointed out. ‘Language does not work like that. It has a grand shape. What you must do is to think in French. There should be no English in your head. Think as much as you can in French. If you cannot think in paragraphs, think in sentences, at least in words. Build it up into grand thoughts!’ She gestured, taking in the whole room and all of human intellect.