The Writer, the ending
The lonely cyclist has offered to buy the writer lunch in exchange for the writer’s story; they are nearing the end of the meal …..
He scraped the last of his custard up onto a spoon and popped it into his mouth. “That is my last taste of real French food. I don’t think I’ll ever persuade my wife to come back to France.”
I raised an eye at that.
“She couldn’t stand it any longer; she went back to England to sort out somewhere for us to live. I had to stay while I dealt with winding up everything down here.”
“What happened? It sounded like you had a pretty good life here.”
“We were ostracised, dropped from society. People stopped inviting us to dinner, to barbecues, even the emails telling us where the next ex-pat lunch was stopped coming. My wife told me she was ignored and even snubbed by our former friends in the supermarket. She is a far more sociable person than me so it was very hard on her.”
Our coffee arrived; he paused while I paid the bill. “This is on me, call it a leaving present. Did you find out what had caused your fall from favour?”
“Yes, my wife eventually trapped one of the other women and forced it out of her.”
“And?” We were both toying with our spoons in the coffee saucers.
“It was the book. My wife had tired of me evading questions about my writing. She had passed a copy of my book onto one of the other women at the lunch club. They had read it a few weeks after that, then passed it on, in anger. My wife, unaware of that grievous error, had introduced a ‘first edition’ copy of my book into circulation. Eventually, they all agreed that what I had written was possibly slanderous, not only about Jerry, but the characters that they imagined were other people in the group. Mind you, I think that it says more about how they see each other than anything I would have put on paper. In the end, the book got to Jerry and the rest is, as they say, history.”
We picked up our cups and toasted each other with the bitter taste of coffee. Then we both got to our feet, I went to buy another bottle of water for my onward journey. The writer headed for the door. By the time I’d paid and stepped out into the solar furnace, he had gone. I strapped the bottle of water to my luggage pannier. A quick check of the tyres and brakes and I was ready to go. I clipped my helmet straps together, then looked up at the road that lay ahead as the Proprietor emerged from the kitchen door carrying a bundle of ready meal cartons to the bin.
“Au revoir, Monsieur,” he called as he stuffed the frozen chip and heat-and-serve Confit de Canard packages into the overflowing trash receptacle.
“C’est triste!” I gestured towards the bin with the bike wheel. I was bitterly disappointed to see another bit of French culture going down the chute.
“Oui, Puis, il raconte la même histoire tous les midis!” With a gallic shrug, he turned back to the kitchen. I point the bike up the road and start to pedal in the blistering heat.
I’d gone about a kilometre up the road when I started to unravel that parting comment from the Proprietor. I’d caught the bit about it being the same story every lunchtime and accepted that. Except ‘Puis, il raconte …’ translates as ‘Then he tells the same story —’
The Legal Bit
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