Englishwoman in France by Wendy Robertson Page A

the town wall, and then in the alleyway behind the Promenade, legs astride, standing upright on the pedals of his mountain bike.
    Now I’m getting ahead of myself. First I must go home to the Maison d’Estella and greet my guests.

EIGHT
Entertaining Mae
    I look up at the old door, a solid and safe haven even after living here only two weeks. As usual Philip struggles with the key. The door is massive – heavy hinged, peeling and weathered with time. I stand for a second out in the narrow alley and reflect how the house has grown on me. I’ve felt safe in this house, roaming the rooms at night, standing on the terrace after Philip has gone to sleep, looking across the shadowy, eternally crimped roofs to the black mass of the cathedral and then – always, always – on up into the sky, dense as blue-black ink. Virgo is so alluring, so seductive that I feel I can put up a hand and very nearly touch the constellation. Some nights I come down from there making my way down the wooden staircases to the courtyard where I lie on the ground and look up through the cupped hand of the old building into the night sky. As I’ve said sometimes I do this in my sleep and end up in the courtyard still unconscious, which rather upsets Philip.
    Today we open the door to the sounds of Norah Jones singing ‘Feelin’ the Same Way’ and to the sight of Mae dancing around the courtyard, a glass in her hand. Her husband Billy is at the wooden garden table, the
Observer
close beside him and a beer beside his hand. The geraniums are nodding in their pots. Surfboards and beach chairs are tumbling from the space under the grand
escalier
which leads to nowhere.
    â€˜Stella!’ Mae puts down her glass and flies across to me. I hold myself stiff as she hugs me to her. Her body feels like a bunch of sticks. She smells of Coco by Chanel, of cigarettes and of that stuff people use to dispel the smell of cigarettes. I must smell of . . . what? The air? Wine? The garlic in the
cassoulet
that Philip made last night? Misery? What does misery smell like? In my experience we all smell of our feelings – right through from desperation to elation, unhappiness to euphoria. This fact used to help me a lot when I used to do personal readings. People would clap their hands at my insight and say ‘How did you know? How did you
know
?’
    Mae strokes my upper arm. ‘Phil was saying you’ve been down the canal on a boat. I don’t know how you could do that, me! Go on a canal in this foreign place, among strangers. You might catch something.’ She hugs me tighter – wanting, I know, to say more than that, to call up our early days, before she was thin and before I was crazy. In my head I can hear Mae say it. ‘Things were so much simpler then, Starr.’
    Her accent has smoothed off through the years, evolving into that middle-England speak that echoes a person’s home region but has rounded itself out, become more distinct, more articulated. It happens to us all, I suppose.
    I stand away, rescuing myself from her close clasp. ‘I’m as you see, Mae. Here and in one piece.’ The words come out more crisply than I intended.
    â€˜Estella!’ Philip says sharply.
    â€˜Great to see you, Mae. Really.’ I make amends. My eye moves across to the table. ‘And you, Billy!’
    Mae’s husband holds up his glass in a toast. ‘Now, Starr.’ Billy always called me by my nickname since the time I told him (having drunk too much) that my mother called me Starr. ‘I fear we’ve brought our northern weather with us.’ Billy always starts his conversations with the weather.
    I smile at him. ‘Perpetual heat here in May is a myth. But Nyrene, the lady who owns this house, tells me she loves this time of year. There might be rain, but because it’s cooler and greener the flowers by the canal are a spring miracle. She’s right. I saw them today from