Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

found Claude sprinkling hard-boiled egg on a butter-lettuce salad and Chef Quartey plating a portion of langue de boeuf à la moutarde. Jeremy wordlessly pulled on his whites and his apron, washed his hands and, following Chef Quartey’s nod, went over to help on grill. Much later, after everybody had gone and the broken tail lights of the farm trucks had disappeared up and over the hill, they all sat together out front for a snack and a nightcap. He returned Patrice’s encouraging smile from earlier. He smiled at her Roman nose, brown eyes and black hair, and she smiled back. Chef Quartey poured them all more wine.
    “Santé,” he said, and tore off a piece of bread to dip into his own glass. “On the seventh day, Ger-ah-mee,” Chef Quartey continued, pausing with something like respect and waving a paw around the empty room, “we serve the people with the rubber boots.”
    The words stayed with Jeremy as he walked home with Patrice, his arm around her shoulder, hers along his waist. The Rubber-Boot People, the people from here. Their simple words.
    He woke up with the very earliest light, his hand on the strong curve of her hip. The light broke into the valley, through his window, across Patrice’s brown shoulder, and there was, for a moment, utter simplicity and coherence.
    He cooked seven nights a week from that point onward, eager for the seventh day when the stiff cardboard menu wasput aside in favour of a chalkboard where Chef Quartey or Claude, or even Jeremy eventually, would write down their ideas. And during his few morning off-hours, Patrice began to show him the secrets of the surrounding countryside. In the Fôret de Gens above town, there were hollow trees in which the women of the village had once hidden pots of soup for resistance fighters. They never saw the men, Patrice told him, but they would return in the still-dark morning to retrieve their cold tureens.
    Sometime later she took him to the source de la Seine. It was on the far side of the ridge above the town, the side of the ridge that faced away from the quiet of rural Burgundy and down towards the tumult of Paris. Here, in a little park of Parisian symmetry, a statue of the goddess Sequana guarded the famous source. She lay in a grotto built by Napoleon III, vacant eyes cast upwards as if imagining the City of Light, where this bubbling water would eventually flow under the Pont Neuf and around l’Île de la Cité and on to the sea.
    In her direct manner Patrice only explained: “Here from the ridge flows the water that will wet the grass that the cows will eat to make the cream for your coffee when you leave me and go to Paris.”
    He climbed across the low iron railing that separated Sequana from her visitors.
    “Ger-ah-mee,” Patrice scolded.
    He took a long step across the pool that surrounded the goddess, stood next to her, then climbed into her lap. She held him securely. He lay his head in the hard valley between her stone breasts and gazed out of the grotto at Patrice.
    She was laughing. “Wait,” she said. “Do not move now.” And she produced a Polaroid camera from her handbag and took a crooked shot.
    He remembered that after taking the photo, they heard the diesel snort of an arriving bus, trucking in the touristsfrom Paris to visit Sequana, to understand something of how Paris came to be.
    “You must come out,” Patrice said, holding the developing Polaroid.
    “Tourists,” Jeremy said, affecting a weary, spoilt tone. “I cannot bear them.”
    “I think the goddess likes the tourists better than you,” Patrice said after he had climbed out. “They are maybe not so familiar.” But they stood there for a few minutes longer and watched the picture become clear. It had turned out nicely.
    Of course, he knew he had to return home eventually. Work visas aside, there came a month during which thoughts of leaving came up once a week, in each case riding sidecar on a sweeping memory of his mother’s death. Of how she had