The Virgin Blue. Tracy Chevalier

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СКАЧАТЬ the River Tarn. At the end of it a church and a café marked the town’s edge. I parked next to the café and began to walk; by the time I reached the centre of town I knew we would live there. It was a bastide, a fortified town preserved from the Middle Ages; when there were invasions in medieval times the villagers would gather in the market square and close off its four entrances. I stood in the middle of the square next to a fountain with lavender bushes planted around it and felt contained and content.

      The square was surrounded on all four sides by an arched, covered walkway, with shops on the ground level and shuttered houses above. The arches were built of long narrow bricks; the same bricks made up the top two levels of the houses, laid horizontally or diagonally in decorative patterns between brown timbers, held together with dull pink mortar.

      This is what I need, I thought. Seeing this every day will make me happy.

      Immediately I began having doubts. It seemed absurd to decide on a town because of one beautiful square. I began to walk again, looking for that deciding factor, the sign that would make me stay or go.

      It didn’t take long. After exploring the surrounding streets I entered a boulangerie on the square. The woman behind the counter was short and wore a navy blue and white housecoat I’d seen for sale at every market I had visited. When she finished with another customer she turned to me, black eyes scrutinizing me from a lined face, hair pulled back in a loose bun.

      ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ she said in the singsong intonation French women use in shops.

      ‘Bonjour,’ I replied, glancing at the bread on the shelves behind her and thinking: This will be my boulangerie now. But when I looked back at her, expecting a warm welcome, my confidence fell away. She stood solidly behind the counter, her face like armour.

      I opened my mouth: nothing came out. I swallowed. She stared at me and said, ‘Oui, Madame?’ in exactly the same tone she’d first used, as if the last few awkward seconds hadn’t occurred.

      I hesitated, then pointed at a baguette. ‘Un,’ I managed to say, though it sounded more like a grunt. The woman’s face modulated into the stiffness of disapproval. She reached behind her without looking, eyes still fixed on me.

       ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ