Caravaggio's Angel by Ruth Brandon Read Free Book Online Page B

standard ministry issue: three arched and glazed double doors placed symmetrically in a flat cream façade, neat seats and shelters, planked pedestrian gang-way leading across the rails, stationmaster’s vegetable garden. At my grandmother’s there had been a model town set with a station just like this, and as soon as I saw it I knew exactly what the rest of the place would be like. There’d be a grey-shuttered Hôtel de la Poste, a Café du Commerce with brown plastic tables outside, a gravelled champ de Mars where they played pétanque under the plane trees, a church, a mairie with a tricolour and Liberté Egalité Fraternité over the grand front entrance, a square with a fountain. There they would all be, and there, as I made my way into town, they were, so that this place, which I’d never seen before, felt oddly familiar, as though it was already part of my life.
    My route brought me into the main square, today filled with market stalls. Beneath a plaque marking the spot where twelve meyrignacois had been executed by the Germans in 1944, an ancient man in faded denims and a beret stood beside crates of farmyard fauna, cheeping chicks and ducklings, round brown quails, baby rabbits, fluffy grey goslings, all oddly interspersed with ropes of garlic, possibly a serving suggestion. Further on a row of stalls sold monstrous bras and girdles, violently coloured tops, low-cut dresses in deeply artificial fabrics, and arrays of curiously unfashionable shoes.
    It was hard making headway through the throng. Judging by their faces everyone in Meyrignac was related to everyone else, and market day a big family party devoted primarily to gossip, with buying a poor second. The summer’s invading foreigners stood out like light-houses. Meaty, lobster-pink sweating men and straw-hatted, pastel-bloused women towered blondly above the indigenous gnarled ancients and orange-frizzed house-wives. Dodging a wall of slow-moving baby-pushers, I made for the church tower, which could be glimpsed at the end of a winding street beyond an ancient stone archway flanked by cheese-stalls. Here was another small square, filled today by a farmers’ market. Wandering in a sort of daze, I found myself at a stall announcing its produce as ‘ biologique ’. I was beginning to feel hungry: perhaps this would be the place to buy a picnic. Cherries, for example. Though the cherries here weren’t as big and black as on one or two of the doubtless less wholesome heaps I’d noticed elsewhere. Still, size isn’t everything. At least you could eat this stuff without worrying about washing off the chemicals.
    By the time I reached the tourist office it was almost mid-day, and the girl at the counter, like everyone else in the market, was looking at her watch preparatory to closing up. She nodded when I mentioned La Jaubertie, and marked its position for me on a map: it was just south-west of the town, near a hamlet called St Front. She gave me the map, along with a list of local bed and breakfasts. ‘This one’s near St Front,’ she said, pointing to the list. It was called Les Pruniers – The Plum Trees. ‘Try it, it’s very nice. Madame Peytoureau.’
    By now I was famished, though it was only just past midday. That was only eleven o’clock, London time, but I’d made a ludicrously early start – up at four thirty to get a seven thirty plane. I found a street that ran sharply down-hill to a river between ancient half-timbered houses. To the left, stone steps descended to a low embankment with a pair of benches shaded by a large willow tree. A fisherman sat immobile, cradling his rod, while the fish, ignoring his bait, drifted sideways on the current through glittering green flags of weed. Overhead, leaves twinkled hypnotic-ally in a light breeze. I ate my lunch, lay back, and dozed.
    When I awoke it was nearly two. The fisherman had dis-appeared, and the sun had shifted, leaving me in deep shade. Moving out into the sunshine, I called the bed