Synopsis
Mauressac has a Bar-Tabac, fronting onto its square. It is where Mauressacois come for cigarettes and a drink. Like many such places in the Midi-Pyrenees, it is dilapidated. It was not like that when Jimmy and Helen breakfasted there, on holiday in the early 1980’s. Then, it was clean, well furnished, colourful with flowers. The elegant Patronne so impressed them she became one of the reasons they retired to the village 20 years later. Learning she had been in hospital for weeks, Jimmy visits her on impulse, even though he knows little about her. She and the hospital authorities draw him and Helen into helping her, and as they become more and more involved, they discover that she is not the person they had assumed her to be, and that her life story and the Bar-Tabac’s history are one and the same, both starting in Occupied France.
[Bar-Tabac is one of six novels set in fictitious Mauressac. The others are:- Siffleur (about a retired peasant); Vines (about a vigneron); Baguette (about bakers); Syndicat (about a Tourism Officer); Ex-Pats (about English settlers). In preparation are Mariage and Restaurant.]
Chapter 1
I wondered what I was doing, standing at the window of a side ward in Albi’s General Hospital. This was my second visit to the patient asleep in the bed behind me. The first had been made on impulse, this one too. Perhaps I ought not to have been in the room. I had no right to be there, no duty to fulfil. I did not know the invalid’s name, and there was nothing on the door, nor above her bed, to indicate who she was. There were no medical notes hanging from the bedrail either. I hoped I was not interfering or being inquisitive. I did not think I was morbid. The promise I had made to myself, that I would end my habit of assuming responsibility for other people’s problems, looked as if it might have been broken again.
Four years earlier, in 1998, with my wife, Helen, I had come to live in La Plassarié, a house we had bought on Les Hauts, overlooking the village of Mauressac, in the Département du Tarn of the French Midi. Before that, it is not going too far to say our life had just about fallen apart. The electorate hoofed me off the City Council in the North of England, where, for eighteen years, I had been trying to do some good in local politics. Shortly afterwards, my municipal usefulness ended, the University College, at which I was the Senior Administrative Officer, made me redundant. All this caused Helen to worry, and the worry came on top of the emotional strain she already endured each day, as an Operating Theatre Sister, in the children’s hospital where our own little lad had died years before. Stressed, Helen was advised to resign, and when I insisted, duly did. We both decided, our daughter having married and left home, we needed to start our life together again.
As we had visited Mauressac on holiday every year for fourteen years, the friends and acquaintances we had made amongst the villagers encouraged us to rebuild our future with them. Luckily, with their help, we had been able to buy a traditional property that was all we could want. For the first time ever, I thought of myself as laid-back, which made Helen laugh. I was dismissive of her taunt, “How long’s that going to last?”
In early August, I drove to the village to buy croissants and baguettes from ‘La Ronde Des Pains Boulangerie’, in the side road off the square. Even though the church clock had only just chimed 9 o’clock for the second time, the sun was hot. Nostalgic for former holidays, I decided to have my croissant at a table on the terrace of the Bar-Tabac, with a grand café noir, as Helen and I used to do each summer. I stared at the orange and black umbrellas over the tables advertising 33 Dry, and recalled past times. They were not to be recaptured. The terrace, with its pool into which the water of a tapped natural spring spouted, lacked the colourfulness it once had. There were tubs of wilting pelargonia and verbena beside and between the tables, but they were the only flowers there were. The floral display, that had always been a feature masking the sidewall, was dead or dying brown. Nor was that all. The Bar-Tabac was closed. I had forgotten it no longer opened before 11 o’clock in the morning.
Returning to my car parked on the square, I met Edouard Dantan, Président of the Syndicat d’Initiative and of much else in the village. Dressed in habitual, summer white, his tennis shorts militaristically pressed, his white moustache and hair trimmed with precision, he greeted me with his customary, dark eyed delight. Intensely proud to be French, he always enjoys being reminded that at an Englishman has recognised the superiority of his native land by settling in his native village. His handshake and tap on my upper arm were fervent expressions of a pleasure that was more than just in seeing me.
Laughing, I asked him about the neglected show of flowers.
“Have you not heard, my friend?” Edouard replied, his expressive face frowning into concern. “It was most unfortunate. I regret Madame fell down the stairs to her apartment. She was only found when the people living in the flat below returned after a weekend away. She was taken to the hospital in Albi. Must’ve been some weeks ago. I do not remember exactly how many.”
“She seriously hurt?”
Edouard shrugged. As was typical of him, he was already looking beyond me for someone else to buttonhole and impress. Speaking over his shoulder and sounding unconcerned, he admitted, “The emergency services removed her during the night, so I’ve been told. As to how she is now, I have not heard.”
It was my turn to frown. If Edouard did not know how the former Patronne of the Bar-Tabac was, then no-one in Mauressac did.
I had a lot of respect for the injured woman. When Helen and I first came to the village, she had served us at the bar. There was an unobtrusive professionalism to her, which impressed. After our first day, whenever we sat at a table on the terrace for our pain au chocolat, croissant or whatever, she brought us, without being asked, our routine breakfast coffees and a copy of the morning’s La Dépeche newspaper.
Not only was she efficient, she was always well presented, groomed in fact. We were grateful for her pleasant service, and we admired the magnificent display of potted flowers she maintained against the far wall. It was a cascade of colour. During our third annual holiday in Mauressac, sometime after 1986 I think it must have been, she spoke to us one morning, commenting on the obvious, that we were there once again. We admitted what we could not deny.
Very slightly she shook her head. “Have you nowhere else to go?”
“We like it here,” I confessed, with a broad smile.
She looked at me, and then at Helen - and raising her finely shaped eyebrows, she tilted her head incredulously. Without saying another word, she walked away, our intelligence questioned. We laughed.
In subsequent years, whenever we met her, which was not often, we exchanged pleasantries, nothing more. She became part of the welcome Mauressac always gave us.
A few days after I talked with Edouard Dantan, I was in Albi. Because grey skies were darkening, I put my car in the underground car park in the Place Jean Jaurès. I was near to the hospital when the heavy rain of a storm started to splatter on the pavement. On impulse, I decided to take shelter by visiting the invalid from Mauressac. In retrospect, I suppose, I acted foolishly. Having no knowledge of what I might find, I could have been an embarrassment. At the time, I merely thought the violent change in the weather had prompted me to be polite to someone who had always been polite to me.
Be that as it may, I was welcomed. The fact that I did not know the name of the patient on whom I called proved no problem. Mention of an elderly lady from Mauressac was enough to have me directed at once to a single bedded, side ward on the third floor.
The ensuing conversation, broken across long silences, was formal, conducted at a Monsieur - Madame level, with many banalities, most of them about the lightning and thunder outside. After twenty minutes, as I started to say goodbye, I was still diffident.
“Me, I wish to thank you for coming, Monsieur,” Madame told me.
I looked at her for a moment, without answering. She was weak, her voice cloyed, as though she were drugged. Her left arm and hand had not moved from under the blanket and sheet neatly folded across her. Her frank face was parchment white, greyed with age and ill-health, yet still firm and smooth. I detected an appeal in her cautious words.
“It’s been good to see you once again,” I smiled. “I hope you’re much better next time, Madame.”
“I hope so too, Monsieur.”
I left thinking we had somehow agreed I would call on her again, without either of us having said so.
I did nothing to fulfil the promise I may have made, until the next time I went to Albi
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