On market days in Monsègur, and on fine, early summer mornings before the canicule arrives and burns everything under an African sun, the locals mingle with English, French, German, American, and Dutch tourists, and those who own second homes. Then there are those, like Lala and Teddy, more firmly expatriated. Each tribe is identifiable with a little practice: the locals, farming stock, short and square and, for the men, badly dressed in nylon pullovers and royal blue work trousers, with flat caps and the occasional Basque beret covering their heads like yarmulkes or taqiyahs. Their faces, sometimes wall-eyed with glasses, all shapes of round, or sallow melting splodges like Dali paintings. The gummy, tooth few grins and scowls, reveal the plaque devouring hanging remnants of incisors, thin or thick lips clamped tightly on cigarette butts aplenty. The women make more effort with their appearance, but still clearly belong to a tribe once residing in the 70s, with burgundy hairdos and bangled ears fixed to heavily made up pobble like faces. The notion of ‘chic’ is rarely to be found among these kinds, though, despite that, some of them are quite handsome.
The Parisians more than make up for that. Striding confidently among the thronged square of the covered market a good head taller than their southern cousins, the sharp, tailored, expensive looking jackets and trousers in fashionable hues, the razor creases, the highly polished shoes, the year-round tans, the look of money, identified these tourists in their own country as readily as the lack thereof identified the locals.
As for the English (the Dutch are as the Parisians save for the lugubriousness of their demeanour and added height) they too have camps within camps of their tribe. The local builders: Jack-the-Lads with Geordie, Yorkshire and Estuary accents sit at bars mingling quite contentedly with their French and Portuguese counterparts, downing vast quantities of beer and wine; why work on a Friday market-day?
And then there is the permanent three-way divide of lower, middle, and upper middle classes. The lower-middle classes are, in truth, only a stone's throw from their working-class cousins. The younger men wear the same polo shirts (the larger the crocodile or polo player on his horse the better), Bermuda shorts and sockless deck shoes or socks with sandals. They are mostly on holiday and are red faced with wine and warmth. The middle-aged sprout comfy tummies over the waistline of their pleated creaseless trousers. Women, if still lithe, wear similar Bermuda shorts, in navy blue or khaki, and sometimes in white if they think that their posteriors can get away with it. Or, nice floral, patterned summer dresses and a hat and sunglasses, successfully and consciously hiding their true origins. Most of the women, unlike the men, who are recognisable from a considerable distance, only give the game away when they open their mouths. Regional twangs and drawls and pronunciations are the badges, the branding on the tongue, and they seem to bear them well. After all, in the land of Libertie, Fraternitie, Egalitie, they believe they can cast off all that Non-U British nonsense.
But the English game never really allows for true classlessness, and to be both U and rich like Teddy and Lala, one might as well be the Queen. The obliging English, unlike their French brothers and sisters, seem content to believe that some are better than others solely on account of to whom they were born, and an ostentatious, asinine pompousness is an admired social flourish.
When each is confronted with their social lesser or superior, in the shops and bars, or at the market stall, they then go to pieces. As soon as the whinny of a voice revealing a higher social class, or the vernacular and accent of a lower is discerned, then a gathering about of the skirts, a hoisting of the waistband, a stiffening of the spine occurs, and the metaphorical drawbridge is drawn.
They do their best. Some fumble over their words, trying to interject vocabulary they are unsure of, and eventually trip over, as sure as those who attempt what they do not really know always will. Or, their muscles contract, clam like, and through gritted teeth, offer a damn not given. A pose that their might is right and can and will conquer all. Not that that can ever hope to heal the vicious wound a patronised heart receives. It is left to fester, seep, and infect the once sturdy body and mind of the hitherto reasonably happy.
Still, they jollied along as best they could, and Teddy was liked by good and all on account that, a) he was a mildly spoken gentleman, and b) he was generous to a fault. Teddy could always be counted on for a drink, if not several rounds, and on occasions entire expeditions to Bordeaux. There, back in those days when he could still be bothered to, he would drag French peasants who could hardly believe their luck, around the fine restaurants and nightclubs, revelling in the astounded and sometimes despising looks of the well-heeled Bordelaise who observed them, and then paid hundreds of euros for taxis to take them back home in the most solid of solidarity. He was popular with the regulars at the Bar du Cabaret.
A small group of those regulars were there as always, at the Bar du Cabaret when Teddy arrived, drinking coffee, or beer, or an early pastis. Smoking, talking, some ordering patè sandwiches to line their stomachs. Teddy, as he shuffled into the middle of the café tables and chairs like a pigeon looking for crumbs, nodded a greeting to those who caught his eye. He saw Sèdonoudè sitting at a table alone. He was surrounded by round and white forms, his brow furrowed in concentration as he stared at a Euro millions scratch-card with a twenty-centime coin between his index finger and thumb. Teddy relented and remembered that for all the insanity that was their shared lives, he found Sèdonoudè’s obvious guile and lack of pretension somewhat touching.
'Hullo, Don,' Teddy said, as he sat down uninvited beside him, pulling his chair into his backside and under the table. 'Bit of a scene this morning, I know,' he said, almost chastely, 'It was just a bit of a shock, you know.'
'Ah, Mista Teddy, I tell you, we bin' having too many drinking las' night, so sorry for that.'
'What's to be sorry for? What's life for? If not to drink and screw it away. And you know I can only take one of those options. It's just sometimes I want to feel like a man again. I haven't quite forgotten what it's like, I mean in here.' He pointed to his temple with an index finger, as if it were a revolver. 'Not down there.' His eyes glanced downwards as he said it, and Sèdonoudè's watery eyes filled with more of the same as he inhaled deeply the suggestion of Teddy's suffering.
'Lessus drink some beer, Mista Teddy, so we can forgay all about it.' The waitress slummocked across with two half litre glasses of beer, which vanished down their gullets. They burped in unison and immediately felt better. 'Let me tell you, Mista Teddy, bout de time de Tuareg ki'nap me out in de desert, an’ I haffi cross dat hole deset by me'self.'
And so he did, as Teddy's eyes glazed over, in part from the sleepy glow of the beer, for which he raised two fingers in the air to gesture for more, and in part because of all the tall tales Sèdonoudè told, he told this one most frequently, and in greater detail than the others. Maybe, thought Teddy, like all good stories, it was partly true.
Teddy drank his other beer and got up as Sèdonoudè was mid flow - neither Teddy nor Lala had a profound interest in other people - to go and use the bar's toilet. Lately he was increasingly unable to hold his bladder for any length of time. Getting old is not for wimps, he thought. Who was it who said that? By the time he came back, Sèdonoudè had caught someone else's eye, and, eager as ever to make new friends, sure that his luck was forever on the cusp of running out, he was presently latching onto them with the mildly desperate air of a lost puppy.
Teddy wandered round the square, stopping at the Italian lady's stand to buy a few grams of parmesan and a little pancetta, and then a few early, hot housed tomatoes from the vegetable lady. On his way back to the bar, he was side-lined by Angel le Noir de Tournamine, a charismatic art and antique dealer, recently of Paris, but now ensconced in a beautifully renovated barn in the village of Nullepart. His boutique, Le Maison de Angel, sold a mixture of fine art and frippery in one of the shop fronts surrounding the square.
'Hullo, how's business Angel?' Teddy said.
'Oh, hello Teddy, how are you?' Angel's face radiated the pure charm he had cultivated during those years spent pleasing the wealthy art and antique lovers of Paris. He lived by his love of making money through 'the deal'. Air kisses rushed past Teddy’s cheeks with such force that the scarf hanging from his neck wafted off his shoulders.
'Oh, you know, so-so.'
'Yes, I must tell you,' Angel said as he leant in towards him, 'it's a little ‘ard you know. These people, they don't understand furnitures or art!'
'Yes?' said Teddy, quizzically. 'Why's that?'
'Well, you know, many of them are what you call red-necks. They only want to sit in the bar drinking. Tell me, though, why do you call them red-necks?'
'I don't call them that. That's an American expression. I believe it came about because of the scarves that union members in Pennsylvania wore, or something like that, though the modern take is it’s because the folk who toiled in the fields underneath the sun had perpetually sun-burned necks. But I try not to go in for that kind of thing, you know?' Angel laughed.
'Yes, of course, I see, it is like an urban myth. Tell me, how is Lala?'
'Oh, you know, comme si comme ca as ever.'
'Yes, it is difficult for her, no? Well, my friend, I'm going to pack up my shop soon for lunch. Is there anything you'd like from there today?'
'No, not at the minute, Angel, thank you, it's Lala's birthday soon, maybe you can help with finding a gift.’
'Of course, Teddy, bon journee er au revoir mon ami.'
'Et toi meme, Angel.'
Teddy continued to wander around the square and spoke to and bought from the bread ladies, the sausage man, and the cheese lady, with whom he had a long-winded conversation about the truffle infused burrata that he once bought from an epicerie in Bordeaux. While Teddy was minding his own business with the cheese, he caught sight of Lala advancing towards him looking for a fight. He recognised immediately the look in her eyes, the half focus, the anger, the irrationality, the disembodied nature of her under the grip of crisis.
'Tu baise vieux bâtard j'aurais dû tamponné sur toi!' It was Lala's habit, when insulting Teddy in public, to do so in French, knowing that more people would feel the force of her displeasure, and that the normal levels of politeness found in Monsègur were such that the words were doubly shocking. The cry was loud, one of those Lala roars, and it made the whole square fall silent. Poor Teddy turned red and tried to laugh it off, nodding happily at everyone who was looking at him with pity in their eyes. With his little white dog under his arm, there was nothing else he could do.
'Tum te tum te da!' he said, and the crowd rolled its eyes and continued to mumble.
Lala calmed down and went to the bar and ordered a negroni. Whatever it was that had set her off had vanished, and now she appeared nearly as sunny as the day was. She joined the table of three men who could always be found there, smoking, sipping wine. Their faces sand-papered away to reveal red raw sinewy crags of features. Their smoker's coughs rattling with each utterance, waiting for an opportune moment to inflict a phlegm rolling bout upon them.
'Lala! You naughty lady, why did you shout at Teddy?'
'None of your business you old goat.' They broke out laughing. Each of them, in their own way, had looked after Lala in the past. Jean-Paul had worked on her prune orchards, though, like the vineyard, it was really Teddy's baby. Michel had fixed some roof tiles. Francis, her one-time gardener, had allowed Lala to play Lady Chatterly with him once too often, and was finally caught by his wife as he was shagging Lala doggystyle up against one of her giant parasol pines. She had brought him some sandwiches and was repaid for her kindness with a sight she could never really forgive. The marriage survived, but not the gardening job.
The Italian lady had packed up her cart and joined them. She was a good drinking buddy and, like Lala, transplanted from another time and place to this tranquil little corner of the world. Lala forgot her name, because she - apart from the havoc played with her neurons by excessive drinking and being uninterested in people in general - was uninterested in other women in particular. She and Teddy only ever referred to her as the Italian Lady.
The town clock struck twelve and most of them were already quite drunk. Teddy had slunk off, back to his chair now that he knew Lala was not there to upset him. Lala herself opined on all subjects at table, pronouncing this or that a cretinous affair, while she poked a plate of frites with a fork. She ate none. Partly because she rarely ate very much these days except for fruit or chocolate, and partly because as Jean-Paul bit into a medium rare burger, a little blood trickled down his chin. She made no correlation with Teddy's disgust over his own stomach-turning experience that same morning.
A slim thirty-something woman with cropped hair and impish ears came along and sat down next to Lala. She looked at her with slightly stoned eyes, oozing feline mischievousness. Linda Langton, along with the Italian lady, and Arabella Cameron (who was Teddy's school runaway friend's daughter) was one of the few women Lala did have time for.
Their relationship (true friendship being so vague a concept) had deepened since Linda had confided in Lala that she too, was a sex addict, and really could not get enough. The confession sealed if not a pact, then an understanding, as they drank and swapped notes about the legions of horny men that they had had hopping like satyrs fumbling through wool for their privates. As Linda read off the list of men she had slept with, Lala was astonished. She thought that she would have come first in any contest like that. But when Linda included Lucas Dauriac, the half mad shuffler who walked up and down the hill to Monsègur every day, she really was impressed. He never smiled, and smelled appallingly, and only a truly depraved mind would consider the prospect. Boxing George, she could understand, had had herself, for while he was old and brutal looking, he still had a formidable build, one that men many years younger might admire. After that night Lala told anyone who would listen that there was an exclusive club in Monsègur: the non-fuck-Linda-club.
'What's up Linda?’
‘Not much, he’s moaning again.’ He was Linda’s florist husband, an anxious man who, once having taken Linda and her three children into his life, suffered for it as she had affair after affair.
‘Don’t they all? Never mind, I'm having a party at my house later on, do you want to come? Take your mind off it.’'
'Oh yes, Lala,' Linda said, her attractive faraway eyes imagining the debauchery to be had. She had led a terminally dull life until she moved to France and, once there, did what many do after moving abroad with their family in search of a new life, which is to promptly fall in love with someone else. Her builder husband was not the kind to try and win her back, but he did what many men in his position might do and cut his losses. He returned to England and no more was heard from him, which was especially tough on those three children who, as always, were made to suffer most for their parents’ misdeeds.
Linda’s love affair was only that, and, seemed to last only as long as the husband was in the picture. Her lover was not interested in her children. He had left similar trails of tears long before she had turned up in Monsègur. She was a good mum to her kids, but believed, as Lala did, in fucking for solace. Then she had married the nervous yet kindly Frenchman, a man, as mentioned, born to suffer.
Those who fall in love with the wrong person yet spend each married day in an internal debate over the rights and wrongs and truth of the position they have placed themselves in are many. Not stupid, knowing the rumours, choosing not to believe them, when to do so is an exceptional act of mental juggling. They opened a flower shop in the square and Linda slept with the customers on the side. The business did well.
'Alright, see you about eight.'
Lala’s looming personality had a strange effect on the more orthodox young families and retirees. Some simply refused to have anything to do with her, which is not as easy as it might seem in a small town. She loathed small children and did not see the point of them at all. Had even said to one of Arabella Cameron's then infant boys: "If you don't stop making all that noise, I'll stamp on you!" as she had threatened to do to Teddy, loudly in French at the marketplace that morning. Stamping seemed like a good response to displeasing aspects surrounding Lala, though it was not something she would do. The brutality tended to shut people down, as it did Arabella's terrified little boy who rushed to mama (and Arabella was the soppiest of mothers with her darlings) who sheltered him from the 'bad lady'. "Steady on Lala", Arabella had said. Lala had then taken another puff on her spliff and gulp of her vodka and lost the focus of her eyes. Arabella rarely took any of her children when she had to visit Lala, and thankfully, when it could not be avoided for whatever reason, Lala was not always so ill tempered.
Then there were the Uriah Heep like hangers on. They came in all forms: catalogue and telephone alcohol salesmen whose prices always seemed to hit the 50euro per bottle mark. Like all unctuous salesmen they sold the idea of something better or easier than the others. The part time workers, doing odd jobs and drinking more than working. Or the flatterers, the fawners, the greedy couples agitating for favours for their spoilt brats. Utterly uncomprehending the fact that the glow of beauty that they saw in their kinder was only matched in its inverse by Lala’s hostility to them. Each of these in their own way taking advantage of a shambolic situation. Wherever and whenever ordered lives go into meltdown, it is the scum which rises to the surface.
Lala was like a local industry. Teddy may have balked and fumed, but Lala's money was Lala's money. Sèdonoudè was, at the same time, like these, and not like them. He did not hide the fact that he wanted, needed money from her to stay around. But he was also genuinely tender and understanding with her, and with Teddy, in a way that sometimes, only a true outsider can bless those who accept them with a different way of looking at the world.
'I'd better have someone pick up those cases of booze from Duras,' Lala mumbled to herself. She stood up, took leave of the drinking gang without saying another word, and then shuffled back to her car.
