Marrying Off Mother: And Other Stories, Page 2

  ‘Monsieur?’ she questioned, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand to clear them of the shimmering tears.

  ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ I said. ‘Could I see Monsieur Clot if you please?’

  ‘Monsieur Clot will see no one,’ she said, gulping, and the tears renewed their flow. ‘Monsieur Clot is indisposed. He can see no one.’

  At that moment, a very large, paunchy gendarme appeared from the back room, where the uproar had now renewed itself. His eyes were as dark as blackcurrants, his nose resplendent, a rich wine red, covered with a patchwork of blue veins, and over his pouting mouth lay an enormous black moustache like the skin of a dead mole. He gave me an all-embracing glance in which suspicion and malevolence were nicely blended. Then he turned to the beautiful lady.

  ‘Madame Clot,’ he said, in a rich syrupy voice, ‘I must leave now, but rest assured, madame, that I will make the utmost endeavours to unmask the fiends who have perpetrated this outrage, the ghastly assassins who have dared to bring a tear to your beautiful eyes. I will move heaven and earth to bring these brigands to justice.’

  He gazed at her like a starving schoolboy regarding a cream-filled doughnut.

  ‘You are too kind, inspector,’ she said, flushing.

  ‘For you, nothing is too much trouble — nothing,’ he said and, seizing her hand, he pressed her fingertips into his moustache, rather as, in times gone by, a man would help a lady on with her muff. He brushed past me, hurled his bulk into his car and, with an excruciating tangle of gears, drove off in a cloud of dust, a St George in search of a dragon.

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘I see that you are upset, but I feel that it is possible I may be able to help.’

  ‘No one can help — it is hopeless,’ she cried, and the tears started to flow again.

  ‘Madame, if I were to mention the name Esmeralda, would this mean anything to you?’

  She fell back against the wall, her wonderful eyes staring.

  ‘Esmeralda?’ she said, hoarsely.

  ‘Esmeralda,’ I said.

  ‘Esmeralda?’ she repeated.

  ‘Esmeralda,’ I nodded.

  ‘You mean Esmeralda,’ she said faintly.

  ‘Esmeralda, the pig,’ I said, to make the point clear.

  ‘So you are the fiend in human form — you are the thief who has spirited away our Esmeralda,’ she screamed.

  ‘Madame, if you’ll just let me explain . . .’ I began.

  ‘Thief, robber, bandit,’ she wailed, and ran down the passageway screaming, ‘Henri, Henri, Henri, the thief is here demanding a ransom for your Esmeralda.’

  Wishing all pigs in Purgatory, I followed her down to the room at the end of the hall. A riveting sight met my gaze. A powerful, handsome young man and a portly, grizzled gentleman with a stethoscope round his neck were endeavouring to restrain someone — this I took to be Monsieur Clot — who was desperately trying to rise from a recumbent position on a purple chaise-longue.

  He was a tall man, slender as a minnow, wearing a black corduroy suit and a huge black beret. But his most striking attribute was his beard. Carefully nurtured, carefully cosseted and trimmed, it cascaded down as far as his navel and was a piebald mixture of black and iron grey hairs.

  ‘Let me get at him, the misbegotten son of Satan,’ Monsieur Clot was yelling, struggling to rise from the chaise-longue.

  ‘Your heart, your heart, remember your heart,’ shouted the doctor.

  ‘Yes, yes, remember your heart,’ shrieked Madame Clot.

  ‘I will deal with him, Monsieur Clot,’ said the handsome young man, glaring at me from ferocious gentian-blue eyes. He looked the sort of muscular young man who could bend horseshoes out of alignment with his little fingers.

  ‘Let me get at him, let me tear out his jugular vein,’ shouted Monsieur Clot, ‘the illegitimate thief.’

  ‘Your heart, your heart,’ the doctor shouted.

  ‘Henri, Henri, keep calm,’ shrilled Madame Clot.

  ‘I will disembowel him,’ said the muscular young man.

  The trouble with the French is that they love to talk but not to listen. One sometimes gets the very strong impression that they don’t even listen to themselves. When you get embroiled in a turmoil of French citizens like this, there is only one thing to be done. You must out-shout them. Filling my lungs to the utmost capacity, I roared ‘Silence’ and silence fell as though I had waved a magic wand.

  ‘Monsieur Clot,’ I said, bowing to him, ‘may I make it clear that I am not an assassin or a bandit and that I am not, to the best of my knowledge, illegitimate. Having said that, I feel I can vouchsafe to you the fact that I have in my possession a pig whose name is, I believe, Esmeralda.’

  ‘Ahhhh!’ cried Monsieur Clot, his worst fears confirmed.

  ‘Silence!’ I barked and he fell back on the chaise-longue with a delicate, slender and beautifully manicured hand spread, like a butterfly, over that portion of his anatomy in which he suspected his heart to have its abode.

  ‘I met Esmeralda in the forest,’ I continued. ‘She shared my lunch with me and then, when I had ascertained in the village who her rightful owner was, I brought her back.’

  ‘Esmeralda here? Esmeralda returned? Where? Where?’ cried Monsieur Clot, struggling to rise.

  ‘Slowly, slowly,’ said the doctor. ‘Remember your heart.’

  ‘She is outside in my car,’ I said.

  ‘And . . . and . . . what ransom do you demand?’ asked Monsieur Clot.

  ‘I don’t want a ransom,’ I said.

  Monsieur Clot and the doctor exchanged eloquent glances.

  ‘No ransom?’ said Monsieur Clot. ‘She is an extremely valuable animal.’

  ‘An animal beyond price,’ said the doctor.

  ‘An animal worth five years’ pay,’ said the muscular young man.

  ‘An animal worth more than La Reine Elizabeth’s crown jewels,’ said Madame Clot, bringing in the feminine angle with a touch of exaggeration to gild the lily.

  ‘Nevertheless, I do not want a ransom,’ I said, firmly. ‘I am happy to return her to you.’

  ‘No ransom?’ said Monsieur Clot. He sounded almost insulted.

  ‘No ransom,’ I said.

  Monsieur Clot glanced at the doctor who simply, palms outstretched, shrugged and said, ‘Voilà les Anglais.’ Monsieur Clot shook himself free of both the doctor’s and the muscular young man’s grip and rose to his feet.

  ‘Then, monsieur, I am deeply, deeply in your debt,’ he said and snatched off his beret and placed it over his heart, his head bowed. Then he carefully replaced the beret on his head and ran across the room at me like a badly manipulated puppet and clasped me in his arms. His beard whispered like silk against my cheeks as he kissed me with all the vehemence that only a Frenchman can exhibit when kissing a member of the same sex.

  ‘Mon brave, mon ami,’ he said, clasping my shoulders, looking deeply into my eyes, the tears trickling like transparent tadpoles down his magnificent beard, ‘take me to my beloved.’

  So we went outside, woke Esmeralda and she climbed out of the car to be embraced, patted and kissed by everyone, including the doctor. Then we all — including Esmeralda — went back into the house where Monsieur Clot insisted on opening one of his best bottles of wine (a Chateau Montrose 1952) and we drank a toast to the pig of pigs who was being fed chocolate peppermints by Madame Clot.

  ‘Monsieur Durrell,’ said Monsieur Clot, ‘you may think perhaps that we made a disproportionate amount of brouhaha over the disappearance of Esmeralda.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘it is most upsetting to lose such a fine pet.’

  ‘She is more than just a pet,’ said Monsieur Clot, in a hushed and reverent voice, ‘she is the champion truffle pig of Périgord. Fifteen times she has won the silver cup for the most sensitive nose of any pig in the quartier. A truffle may lurk twenty centimetres beneath the forest floor and fifty metres away from Esmeralda and she will find it unerringly. She is like — she is
like — well, she is like a pig Exocet.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ I said.

  ‘Tomorrow morning at eight, if you will be so kind as to come, we will take Esmeralda into the forest and you shall see for yourself the powers that she possesses. And then if you would do us the honour of staying to lunch we should be delighted. I may say that my wife, Antoinette, is one of the finest cooks in the district.’

  ‘Not only the finest cook, but the most beautiful,’ said the doctor, gallantly.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said the muscular young man, fastening upon Madame Clot a look of such burning adoration that I was not surprised to learn that his name was Juan.

  ‘I should be delighted and honoured,’ I said and, finishing my wine, I took my leave.

  The next morning was crisp and sunny, the sky as blue as a forget-me-not, the mist lying in tangled shawls among the trees. When I arrived at the farm, Monsieur Clot, in his disjointed way, was putting the final touches to Esmeralda’s toilet. Her hooves had been rubbed with olive oil (the first pressing), she had been carefully brushed and special eye drops put in her tiny eyes. Then came the final touch. A minute phial of Joy was produced and a few drops were placed behind each of her drooping ears. Finally, a soft muzzle of chamois leather was put on her snout to discourage any inclination she might have to devour the truffles she found.

  ‘Voilà,’ said Monsieur Clot, triumphantly, waving his truffle spade. ‘Now she is ready for the hunt.’

  The next few hours were instructive, for I had never seen a truffle pig at work, least of all one so brilliantly versed in the art as Esmeralda. She walked through the oak forest that abutted Monsieur Clot’s farm with all the slow dignity of an elderly opera singer making yet another farewell performance. As she walked, she crooned to herself in a series of falsetto grunts. Presently she stopped, lifted her head, eyes closed, and inhaled deeply. Then she walked to the base of a venerable oak and started to nose at the earth and leaf litter.

  ‘She has found,’ cried Monsieur Clot and, pushing Esmeralda to one side, he plunged his spade deeply into the forest floor. When the spade emerged it had balanced on it a truffle the size of a plum, black and redolent. Pungent and beautiful though the truffle scent was, I could not understand how Esmeralda, coated as she was in Joy, could detect the fungus’ presence. However, to prove it was no fluke, during the next hour or so she found six more, each as rotund as the first. We carried these back in triumph to the farm and handed them over to Madame Clot who, her face flushed to a delicate pink, was busy in the kitchen. Esmeralda was put in her spotless pen and given her reward, a small baguette of bread split down the middle and stuffed with cheese, and Monsieur Clot and I regaled ourselves with Kir.

  Presently, madame called us to the table. Juan had — I think in my honour — put on a coat and tie and Monsieur Clot took off his beret. The first course, served in lovely earthenware bowls as thin, crisp and brown as autumn leaves, was a delicate chicken broth with fine fronds of onion and golden egg yolk swimming in it. This was followed by a plump trout, deboned and carefully stuffed with a mousseline of finely chopped chestnuts and fennel. Accompanying this were baby peas, sweet as sugar, and minute potatoes in a bath of mint. This had merely been the build-up to the final moment, the course we were all waiting for. Madame Clot cleared the plates away and put fresh ones, warm as newly baked loaves, in front of us. Monsieur Clot, with hushed ceremony, skilfully uncorked a Chateau Brane-Cantenac 1957, smelt the cork, slipped a few drops into a clean glass and savoured it for a moment. He reminded me, irresistibly, of Esmeralda with her cheese. He nodded his approval and then poured the wine, red as dragon’s blood, into our glasses. At that moment, as if on cue, Madame made her entrance from the kitchen bearing a platter on which reposed four rounds of fragile pastry, yellow as ripe corn. One was carefully placed on each of our plates. We were all silent, as if in church. Slowly, Monsieur Clot raised his glass, toasted first his beautiful lady and then me and Juan. We all took a sip of wine and rolled it round our mouths, coating our taste buds in preparation. The knives and forks were lifted, the fragile shell of golden pastry flaked away, like the shell from a nut, and there lay the truffle, black as jet, and from the interior of the pastry came that incredible fragrance, the scent of a million autumnal forests, rich, mouth-watering and totally unlike any other taste or smell in the world. We ate in reverent silence, for even the French cease talking to eat. When the last morsel had melted in my mouth, I raised my glass.

  ‘Madame Clot, Monsieur Clot, Juan, may I give you a toast. To Esmeralda, the finest pig in the world, a paragon of pigs.’

  Thank you, thank you, monsieur,’ said Monsieur Clot, his voice trembling, his eyes filling with tears.

  We had sat down to eat on the stroke of twelve for, as is well known in French medical circles, if lunch is delayed beyond midday it can prove instantly fatal to the French citizen. Such bounty had been spread before us by Madame Clot that, as I was finishing the greengage souffle and cream, followed by a delectable Cantal cheese, I was not a bit surprised, on looking at my watch, to find that it was four o’clock. Refusing coffee and brandy, I said that I must go and that it had been the most memorable meal of my life. I asked and received permission to kiss Madame Clot’s damask cheeks three times (once for God, once for the Virgin Mary, once for Jesus Christ, as someone had once told me), had my hand crushed by Juan, and was enveloped in Monsieur Clot’s beard. Before I left he extracted a promise from me that, on my return, I would call in at the village and allow Madame Clot to cook me another meal, which I readily agreed to.

  It was a year later that I was travelling down to the south of France and, as I approached the Périgord region, I remembered, with a guilty feeling, Monsieur Clot and Esmeralda and my promise to visit them. So I turned my car towards Petit Monbazillac-sur-Ruisseau and soon arrived at the Three Pigeons. Jean was overjoyed to see me.

  ‘Monsieur Durrell,’ he cried, ‘we thought you had forgotten us. How wonderful to see you again.’

  ‘Have you got a room for a couple of nights?’ I asked.

  ‘But certainly, monsieur,’ he said, ‘the best in the house.’

  After he had installed me in a tiny but comfortable room and I had changed, I went down to the bar for a pastis.

  ‘Tell me, how have things gone with you and my friends since I was last here?’ I asked. ‘How are Madame and Monsieur Clot and Esmeralda?’

  Jean started and stared at me, his eyes bulging.

  ‘Monsieur has not heard?’ he asked.

  ‘Heard? Heard what?’ I asked. ‘I’ve only just arrived.’

  For all people who live in remote villages, the local news is of prime importance and for you to be ignorant of it is incomprehensible to them.

  ‘It is terrible, terrible,’ he said, with the relish of all who vouchsafe bad news. ‘Monsieur Clot is in prison.’

  ‘In prison!’ I said, startled. ‘Why, what has he done?’

  ‘He fought a duel,’ said Jean.

  ‘Monsieur Clot fought a duel?’ I said in amazement. ‘With whom, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘With Juan,’ said Jean.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because Juan ran away with Madame Clot,’ said Jean.

  ‘How incredible,’ I said, feeling privately that it was not that incredible, since Juan was a handsome lad and Monsieur Clot was approaching seventy.

  ‘Worse was to follow,’ said Jean, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

  ‘Worse?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘What could be worse than running off with another man’s wife?’ I queried.

  ‘A week after they had disappeared, Juan came back and stole Esmeralda.’

  ‘Never!’ I cried.

  ‘Yes, monsieur. Juan is, of course, a Spaniard,’ said Jean, as if that explained everything.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Monsieur Clot, as a man of honour and bravery should, followed them and challenged Juan to a duel. Juan comes fro
m Toledo so naturally he chose rapiers. Little did he know that, in his youth, Monsieur Clot used to be a champion of the foil. So, within seconds, Monsieur Clot had stabbed Juan through his chest, just missing his heart. For days, Juan’s life hung in the balance, but now he is starting to recover.’

  ‘When did all this happen?’

  ‘Last week, and they have Monsieur Clot in the prison at Sainte-Justine awaiting trial.’

  The poor man. I must go and see him,’ I said.

  ‘He will be most enchanted to see you, monsieur,’ said Jean.

  So the following day I went to the prison, bearing the only gift you can give a Frenchman incarcerated in a jail on a charge of attempted murder, a bottle of J & B whisky.

  He was sitting on the edge of the iron bedstead in his cell, reading a book. He was, alas, no longer the immaculate Monsieur Clot I had known. His shirt with no collar was prison issue, as were the thin frayed cotton pants and the slippers. There was no tie or belt with which he might have been tempted to commit suicide, should he have been the sort of man to contemplate such a deed. However, his hair was as immaculate as ever, as was his splendid beard, carefully combed and cosseted. The slender fingers that held the book were spotlessly clean and as carefully manicured as always.