Page 3 of Vianne

Marseille is a city of extremes. Church and cobbles; gold and stone; food and famine; charity and the everyday cruelty of folk in a rush. It is the oldest city in France, dating back six hundred years before Christ, with all the human contradictions that entails.

Wealth comes from tourism, history, trade – and, of course, the Catholic Church, dominating the city in all its gold and gilding.

Poverty lives in the bidonvilles , those shanty towns of corrugated iron and plastic containers, and plastic sheeting, and discarded doors.

People here are both gaudily rude and unexpectedly warm and kind, much like the people we used to know when we lived in Naples.

Poor people are like that sometimes; cold outside, warm inside.

Maybe it’s because the poor have to look after each other.

After leaving Notre-Dame de la Garde, I found an old-fashioned bistrot unsurprisingly called La Bonne Mère and ordered the set menu – bouillabaisse , with lots of bread, and a carafe of tap water.

I realized I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast on the plane – a piece of fruit, a dry croissant, a cup of tepid coffee.

The owner saw the way I ate and refilled my bowl without asking: the stew was rich with saffron and oil, and green anise, and orange.

It’s a cheap dish to make in Marseille: rockfish costs almost nothing.

Mussels, too, are cheap, and squid, and the rock crabs that cost so much in elegant Paris restaurants are vermin here, good for nothing but stew.

Food has a strange way of leaving home as a beggar and coming back a rich man, so the things we used to forage for free – wild greens, razor clams, wild garlic, herbs, shellfish, rock crabs, even snails – have been made into elegant dishes by chefs attempting to pique the jaded palates of those who lack nothing.

I still remember seeing the price of a dozen escargots on a menu in New York.

How we laughed, my mother and I. Those snails must have gold shells , she said.

Who knew we were so fancy? Grief hits me again.

She’s gone. No more laughing at menus. No more of her extravagant plans; no more of her fanciful stories.

‘Un p’tit pastis?’

‘No thanks, monsieur . I’m pregnant.’ How strange, that I should need to tell my secret to this stranger. But secrets, too, are burdensome. Suddenly, I felt lighter. The bistrot owner, a stocky, stern-looking, grey-haired man in his fifties, gave me a smile.

‘Congratulations. Here for a while? Maybe you’re on holiday?’

I shook my head. ‘Just passing through.’

I saw him look at my hands and note the absence of a wedding ring. ‘Heading where?’

‘I might follow the coast. I haven’t lived by the sea for years. Or maybe I’ll follow a river until I find a place to settle down.’

He frowned. His eyebrows were thick and forbidding, but underneath, his eyes were kind. ‘You’re very young to be alone. Do you have a place to stay?’

I thought of my five hundred francs, now reduced to three hundred and eighty-five. ‘Do you know a good place? Clean? Not too expensive?’

He shrugged. ‘Here in the centre, everything’s twice as expensive as anywhere else. But out there, beyond the 14ème arrondissement , the sleep-sellers will eat you alive.’

I know those sleep-sellers. I’ve met them before.

Men in baseball caps and flares, with faces like the edge of a knife, and low, insinuating voices.

Their hands are greasy from handling cash.

Their eyes are like beads of frantic sweat.

Room for the night, miss? Room for the night?

And they lead you to a vertical slum, with cardboard homes on the landings, and shanty-buildings clinging to the roofs and balconies, where you will share a room with two other families, and where it stinks of urine and smoke, and where perhaps that night, or maybe the next, another man will drag you from your thin cocoon of sleep and throw you out into the rain because someone else paid a higher price for the space you occupied.

The bistrot owner brought me a cup of coffee with navettes , those little boat-shaped biscuits flavoured with orange blossom. ‘I have a room above the bistrot that I sometimes let out to guests. A hundred and ninety. With breakfast. It’s clean, and there’s a lock on the door. I’m Louis Martin.’

‘Vianne Rochas.’ The name – not quite a lie – was out before I had time to think where it had come from.

‘Unusual name. Is that short for something?’

‘No.’

‘Finish your coffee. I’ll show you the room.’

It was a small and narrow room, high in the eaves of the building.

From the south-facing window, I could see across the bay.

A single bed with a yellow candlewick bedspread; a wardrobe.

A basin. A porcelain jug. A pair of faded curtains with a floral pattern.

It was good. It was perfect. I was aware that Louis had offered it to me because I was young, and pretty, and because I had said I was pregnant.

But he was right: a woman alone is vulnerable in a place like this.

Of course I had resources: skills I’d picked up on the road.

But at some point in the next eight months, I would need to put down roots.

I would need a home; a job. Somewhere permanent to stay.

Right now, I had enough money for another night at the bistrot, and maybe another meal or two.

After that, there was nothing left. Only the wind, the wall, and me.

‘You can leave your things in there,’ said Louis. ‘They will be perfectly safe.’

I didn’t have many possessions. My mother’s box, with her Tarot cards.

My toothbrush by the basin. My jacket in the wardrobe.

I’ve always been good at making a place mine, for just a night or two.

A handful of flowers in a vase. The pillows arranged how I like them.

It’s all just an illusion, I know – and yet, it makes it all seem less impersonal.

As if there’s a chance that I might one day find a place where I can say, yes, this is home .

I looked around the little room. Opened the tiny window to let in the scent of the ocean.

I locked the door and put the key in the pocket of my canvas bag with my wallet and my mother’s ring.

The ring was gold; fourteen carats. A wedding ring, even though she was unmarried, because a woman alone, with a child, can sometimes attract attention.

She’d bought it when I was a child, saying: It’s easier when people think you’re married .

Was it easier? I thought. Should I keep it – wear it – so that people wouldn’t judge me?

But it wasn’t judgement she feared. She was afraid to lose me.

Perhaps someone had said something – suggested she was unfit to be a mother.

Maybe even suggested that she was not my mother at all.

I have a distant memory of a man in black – a priest – saying: It’s a sin, Jeanne.

For the sake of the child, confess. And afterwards, that night, she’d cried, and held me very close, and then, in the morning, we moved on, and she bought the ring from a pawnshop in Nantes, for the price of six nights at a hostel, and when I asked why, she told me: This is how we go unseen.

How we fool the Man in Black. Because he wants to take you, ’Viane. Because he’s always hungry.

I sold the ring. I found a place that offered cash for jewellery.

A thin man with a jeweller’s glass weighed the ring and gave me a price.

Eight hundred and fifty francs, a little more than I’d hoped, but still not much.

Enough to buy a few more nights, a few more meals.

Enough for now. Of course, I thought, when my child is born, people will know that she has no father.

But why should I care? Her father is gone.

He was no one, nothing to me. Just a kind face and a bed when I was lost and grieving.

I don’t even remember his name – just the warmth of his brown skin and the scent of him, like smoke and sweat and cinnamon, and the way he slept with his arms around me for the rest of the night, and the way I fitted into his arms like a stone inside a peach.

I moved on after that one night. I’ve never needed longer. But for one night, I made him my own, just like those empty hotel rooms, and moved on into the world again as light as thistledown on the breeze.

Baggage only slows you down. Baggage, people, feelings.

That was my mother’s mantra, and it served us all these years, but now I needed to slow down.

The space inside me told me that: the space that was the shape of a child, growing into the heart of me.

I used some of my money to buy a pair of crocheted bootees from an old woman selling her work on the corner of Rue du Panier.

They are shell-pink, and beautifully made, as intricate as antique lace.

I shall carry them in the pocket of the canvas bag that has been my constant companion for all these years, so that by the time my daughter is born they will smell of the sea, and the lavender that I picked by the roadside in Puglia, and all the roads we trod, and the times the two of us laughed until we cried.

By the time she is born, she will know. She will know her . She will know me .

‘When’s she due?’ said the woman with the basket of crocheted things.

She was old, eighty at least, brown-skinned, with bright little silvery flecks in her eyes and white hair under a shady straw hat.

Her hands were like olive-roots, twisted and brown.

In one she held a half-finished piece of work, a little white cap so intricate that fairies could have made it.

I told her. I noticed she did not question how I knew my child would be a daughter.

The old woman smiled. ‘A summer child.’ Her voice was curiously accented, not with the harshness of Marseille, but with a bright, North African lilt.

‘Summer children are filled with light. Here, take this.’ She handed me a sachet, filled with scented herbs.

‘Hang this in your wardrobe,’ she said. ‘In winter, your clothes will remember.’

I smiled and thanked her. With some of the rest of my cash, I bought underwear and some sandals.

Then, in a tiny second-hand shop. I bought a white embroidered blouse, a silk scarf, a skirt with bells on the hem.

An indulgence, I suppose, but the old woman of Rue du Panier had given me a sudden desire for my own things, in my own space.

In winter, your clothes will remember. I like that.

I like even more the idea that perhaps I might still be here then.

But I do not want Marseille for my child.

My child will be born in a quiet place; a place in which she can thrive and grow.

Perhaps even that little bastide , by the side of the river.

Still, that’s for later, I told myself as I headed back to La Bonne Mère, where I slept without dreams and in comfort, and awoke to the sound of bells ringing from the summit of the Butte.