Wild Asparagus, Wild Strawberries by Barbara Santich

Author:Barbara Santich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book, BM, BIO029000
ISBN: 9781743055625
Publisher: Wakefield Press
Published: 2018-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

29 Claret

It’s an odd sort of village, I say to John as we take an evening stroll through the Claret on our first day. Not eerie, not sinister, neither bizarre nor mysterious, but different, discordant, puzzling, not like the other villages we know.

It’s the first place we’ve rented sight unseen. Our upstairs apartment consists of two large rooms, one behind the other. On the other side of the stairs is a similar apartment and between the two a shared bathroom—shower and basin. At the other end of the hallway is the shared toilet. We have a proper stove and fridge, but only cold water over the sink. Because it’s now summer, the rent is almost four times as much as at Nizas in winter. At any other time I would reject such accommodation but it’s July, and half of France is looking for a place in the sun.

Our new landlady is Madame Commeiras. Madame Commeiras and her husband live above the Unico general store belonging to her nephew, Jean-Pierre. Its prime corner position—at the bottom of the main street, opposite the place—gives her an ideal vantage point to watch over all the comings and goings in the village, and I suspect she makes it her business to know what everyone is doing. Her daughter also has a shop, she tells us with pride, a kind of mixed business—household goods, haberdashery, gifts—run from her front parlour. The daughter’s house is one of the newer ones at the edge of the village and has a proper yard and clothes line. Magnanimously, Madame Commeiras offers us the use of the line to hang our washing. To me, her welcome rings false, but perhaps it’s because I resent paying so much for such inferior accommodation.

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