Madame had brought the new heater a couple of years ago. At the time he had scolded her for spending such an outrageous sum on a piece of electrical equipment. The truth was he actually did not know how much this kind of thing cost these days. Or anything else for that matter. He sighed pulling a hand watch out of his checked gilet. Everything was changing so fast, it must be so scary to be a young person nowadays. At least, being old gave you the advantage of not having to know how to deal with new things anymore.
It was twenty to one, Madame would be upstairs deftly peeling the potatoes for the roast with her knobbly little hands. He looked down at his own artisans’ hands. Toughened to the point of leather on the edges of his thumbs, yellowish fingernails and big fat veins crisscrossing on the back.
He used to be an accountant, a solid job as his father would say. He would be sitting in front of rows and rows of numbers that would fall into patterns. Like snow flakes falling on grass, he had said once on a fling of enthusiastic poetry at the corner cafe during an after-work drink with colleagues. He couldn’t remember if that was the evening he had first spotted Jeannine or if it was at someone’s ‘pot de depart’ party. She was always dressed smartly and there was something vibrant about her. A dash of lipstick or a daring purple stocking under her tweed office skirt.
He took out a cloth hankie and passed it over his rheumy eyes. The cold was really getting at his bones this winter. Making umbrellas always calmed his spirit. He would have a go at it this afternoon, he decided. Maybe shut the shop for an hour or two. He had a new bolt of lime green fabric and couldn’t wait to see how it looked with a cherry trimming.
He had started looking at pretty things for her. He wanted to show her that he was not only interested in numbers as other colleagues teased him.
He remembered sitting around the tight little round table at the same cafe on the corner with Quentin and Jules. They were having a smoke outside with a glass of white wine. Not really statutory for a lunch break, but they were feeling reckless. The cafe was just out of sight of the company entrance. They were discussing politics and the usual strike that followed any political decision in France. Jules was adamant about the strike, his black hair flopping over his eyes as he shook his head vigorously at what Quentin, the most conservative of the three, was saying.
It was then that he saw her. She was winding her way between the crowded terrace tables towards them, a knowing smile playing on her lips. A few men on the terrace turned to make her pass and to stare at the fortunate trio. He couldn’t remember much else of that day, only the purple circles that her lipstick left on the filter of the cigarettes that she smoldered in the glass ashtray and the rustling sound of her tweed skirt when she crossed and uncrossed her legs. He could hear the other two accountants joking, laughing, offering her their lighters and sipping their rebellious white wine eagerly.
As he stared at the circle on the filter in a daze she blew out smoke in his direction and with her head at an angle asked ‘Jean, so do you think it is true that men are color blind?’
Somehow, incredibly she had remembered his name. He had no idea how the discussion among the other three had evolved this way. He pointed at the neat circle on the white filter and said slowly ‘magenta’, then picked up one of her gloves from the table delicately, like a little bird fallen from the nest. It was still warm. He looked at her and murmured ‘dove gray’.
In time he discovered that she was as good as him with numbers, or even better. As the months rolled by into spring they kept meeting at the cafe on the corner or strolling in the Luxembourg gardens during lunch break. The boys would initially come with them, then they started finding excuses to leave them alone.
That spring was the most magical moment of Jean’s life. He remembered laughing at her witty jokes, mostly at the expense of other colleagues. Pointing out a particularly beautiful flower composition to her in the park or just sitting on the green wooden benches with his hands sticky from a chocolate crepe feeling contented to just look at her talking.
She had a great deal to say. She was the secretary for the sales director but only because she couldn’t find a proper accountant job.
As spring melted into a suffocating summer she started being always tired. There were no colorful lipstick circles on the filters piling up in the glass ashtray anymore.
The day Jean decided he had to save her, he found her crying in the photocopies room. Her purple stockings had a run in them and she looked as if she hadn’t slept much, the roundness of her face looked sagging. He tried to tease her a bit but her face just crumpled even more.
Jean blew loudly in his handkerchief and turned around startled. Lost in his memories, he hadn’t heard the shop’s bell tinkle. A young Asian girl was looking at the umbrellas.
His window composition was actually quite something. Dark blue and black umbrellas with heavy wooden shafts and silver pommels shaped in the form of dogs or cats heads were hanging from above wide open. Held up by invisible strings a flurry of silk handkerchiefs in emerald green, rusty brown and chocolate looked as if they were falling to the ground like leaves. On the window sill reaching up, a composition of foldable floral pinks, icy blue snowflakes or geometrical greens were standing on their backs, their black and white pommels like the pistil of a flower.
The girl was looking at the practical cheap things that Madame had convinced him to buy last year. ‘Jean, we are going to be out of business if you only sell your own creations!’
He despised these ‘Chinese inventions’ as he called them. Badly built, you just needed a gust of wind to flip the umbrella inside out and tear the nylon. On principle he decided that these monstrosities would be set next to the cash desk, like chewing gum at the supermarket. They were not to be confused with his craftsmanship and he had gone as far as putting up a cardboard sign with “THESE ARE NOT HAND MADE” on top of the rack. But Madame had protested and made him take it down.
He grumbled a ‘good day’ to the girl. She looked actually older than what he had initially thought. Her plaits made her look childish but she was probably in her early twenties. Oh well a student, she would probably settle for one of those spotty horrid plastic things on the cheap rack.
He turned back towards the heater. On a ledge on top of it was a small boiler with a couple of mugs, tea and sugar. It was Madame’s idea of offering clients tea. Initially, she would sit with him in the shop and spring up every time someone came in, teabags in hand. Jean was sure she had scared away more than one customer, but to humor her he had built the shelf. Finally she had got bored with all the activity and human interaction and had gone back to running the financial and administrative aspects of the shop. Haggling over the price of a bolt of fabric, the set of pummels or those new steel shafts was more her cup of tea.
Her desk was in the back room, with numerous filing cabinets hemming it in. Now a brand new computer dominated the center of the desk looking totally out of place, but reassuringly paper files still lay about with her narrow neat writing on them.
The girl had moved from the cheap umbrellas to look at his own creations. She caressed a pommel with a cat’s head and trailed a finger along the shaft of one of the hanging blue ones. He decided to make an effort and offer her tea. She was actually the only customer he had had all day. Maybe she would spread the word of the shop giving out tea to all those hippy Sorbonne students that he could spot lurking around the square. Long hair was in fashion again, Jean had no idea why, but it made him feel even older .
‘Bonjour mad’moiselle’ he sniffed ‘du thé?’ She spun round and covered her mouth with her hand with a nervous laugh. She accepted the warm mug and a smile emerged from behind her hand. In broken French and a lot of pointing she asked how much the hanging umbrellas were.
‘Good choice miss, they are incredibly sturdy, nothing like this… fold-able crap’. But when he mentioned the price her eyes widened and she looked sadly at the cheap rack. ‘I am an exchange student from Japan’, she sipped her tea and looked around the rest of the shop. Spotting the parasols she smiled and pointed.
Those were the rest of a stock Madame had convinced him to buy about 20 years ago. They were strolling along the Seine arm in arm on a summer day. Her dress was flapping in the breeze and she had pointed at a group of people huddled on one of the bridges. They were probably all Chinese and were obviously taking wedding pictures with the Seine in the background. ‘You see we should invest in a parasol collection’. She had started reading about the history of umbrellas. She was intrigued by the oil-paper traditional parasols and insisted that the fate of their little shop was linked to the growing number of Asian tourists in Paris.
They had managed to sell a few but really not enough and he had ended up selling most to actors and eccentrics passing by when he still had the confidence and panache to talk every customer into buying something. After his world filled with columns of numbers this new world full of colors and people had made him exuberant and free. His father and mother looked at him worriedly one Christmas day when he turned up for lunch dressed in mistletoe green and berry red. They mostly looked sternly on the new wife as the culprit for changing their ‘solid minded son’ into such a buffoon. Madame had weathered many a storm for him over the years. He had big moments of doubt on opening the shop. The first week he had a break down. He opened for twenty four hours and then kept it closed for a month. She never stopped believing in him and when he moaned about the loan she battled back at him with reassuring facts and figures. Finally when they opened they had champagne, tea and home made cake for the first customers (they couldn’t quite decide if it was going to be an afternoon or evening thing).
The girl inspected the parasols intently turning around to explain ‘I’m an art student’. Jean let her be and went back to the window cradling his mug in both hands. His back was hurting and he could feel that rain was coming in his hips. Madame always laughed at his ‘meteorologist bones’ when he mentioned it.
The girl had started to look at the umbrellas below the parasols. Old fashioned models that he couldn’t bring himself to refashion or change the colors anymore. Another one of Madam’s ideas to renew the shop and make it more ‘hip’ (a word he had no idea what it meant, but his grandson used it a lot). Refashioning old things had become quite a profitable market and he had brought off the end of a shop that had closed in Gare St Lazare. After a few changing of shafts, adding pommels and strengthening the material the umbrellas were as good as new. But he was obliged to price them down. He wasn’t very sure it was a good idea. Sometimes he spent more time racking his brain on how to make an umbrella more presentable, than doing a new one from scratch.
The girl picked up one of the fortunate ones that had a new aluminum shaft. It was powder pink with a chocolate brown boarder running along the edge. The pommel was covered in dark brown leather held together with a yellowing blanket stitch. Jean smiled ‘that’s half price Mad’moiselle’.
The girl hurriedly set down her tea cup and hunted in her parka pockets for her money. As he tapped in the old till the amount she lightly passed a finger over the pommel. “It is truly a work of art M’sieur”.
She was out of the shop, the bell tinkling behind her, before he could ask her if she wanted it wrapped. Madame had come up with these tubular plastic bag things. She insisted that customers like getting out of a shop with something wrapped up. They also had a selection of Christmas ones that Jean had hidden at the bottom of the pile. The girl waved to him and made a show of putting out a hand as if to test the weather, her black braids flapped in the wind. She then proceeded to open the umbrella with wide flourishing gestures as if entertaining a theater of people. Jean laughed out loud. The gruff sound startled him. “She really did get us, Madame!” he chuckled. The black and white photograph of Jeannine smiled lovingly down at him, her lipstick pristine and a knowing twinkle in her eyes.
Crafty Poulette 