Due to popular demand (well, seven or eight demands) I am going to continue and, hopefully, finish the story I started in the game of Consequences I participated in recently (see Part One on June 15). I'll try to keep each installment short and just see what happens. There may be some illustrations too but I'm just playing by ear.
Beth has very generously offered to host a cross-posting of six installments at her Cassandra pages when she can fit them in to her own time table.
La Vie en Rosé (tentative title) PART TWO
Marcel Lafitte’s immediate impulse was to pull away from Susan’s urgent grip but he had just been mulling over something he overheard earlier in the day, a couple of old parishioners talking about him.
“He’s so farouche, Père Lafitte. I always have the feeling he has to make a big effort just to say bonjour.”
“Beh! He should have joined the Trappists instead of coming here.”
Père Lafitte hesitated then took Susan’s hand and holding it in both of his, looked steadily into her tear-smudged face.
“Une nunnery!” she repeated, “Une couvent. Tout suite! S’il vous plaît.”
Père Lafitte’s English is slightly better than the French of les Anglais who gradually moved into La Rosière in search of a paradise which does not exist anywhere on earth. Although none of them are church-goers, he knows them all sufficiently to engage in minimal small talk whenever he sees them, thankfully not too often. Of course there is the gossip, dished out by the ladies who clean the church, but he pays no attention to it.
There is something about this Englishwoman’s tipsily desperate determination which moves him. She is middle-aged but seems childlike, bewildered.
“Would you like a cup of coffee pour le moment? We can talk about the nunnerie.”
“ Yes! Oh oui! Please. Thank you.”
“Come along, then. I will make coffee.”
Père Lafitte moved away at his usual brisk pace, Susan stumbling on her high heels several paces behind stopped to remove her shoes. Barefoot on the warm cobblestones she caught up with him.
“Padre,“ she whispered, “I am a bit drunk and I should not be.”
“Bon Dieu!” he thought, “I will have to listen to drunken confessing without the shelter of the confessional!” But when Marcel Lafitte decides to do something he does it, and in the past half hour he decided to be more responsive to people. Père Lafitte does not like people. He likes God who is silent and demands nothing. And he loves his land, the ten wooded acres which his mother left him outside the village of La Rosière.
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