A Market Tale Read online

  There is a special companionship among sportsmen, and so in the course of that afternoon, Marcel was introduced by his friend to the importers and distributors of the finest products that the planet, and not just the fertile fields of France, had to offer. The trucks that left Rungis market at dawn each day for deliveries to Bordeaux and Périgueux henceforth kept a special corner for Marcel of St. Denis. So Marcel built his restaurant trade, made a good living and had the satisfaction of pride in his work and the food that he sold, along with the respect of his market colleagues and his friends like Bruno for the way he had rebuilt his shattered life.

  And now, Bruno reflected, his friend was showing interest in a woman again. And the young woman in question seemed wise enough to have looked beyond Marcel’s limp to the qualities of the man beneath. Bruno’s one concern was Marcel’s family, or at least one crucial member of it, Marcel’s big sister, Nadette. It was short for “Bernadette,” but since her days as a schoolroom bully nobody had ever thought she deserved the name of the saint.

  The very name Nadette, a sound that was hard, blunt and to the point, seemed to sum her up. She was big, bigger than Marcel, and as tall as Bruno and probably weighed a few kilos more than he did. Had there been a rugby club for girls when Nadette was at school, she would doubtless have been its star. She had been married, briefly, to an older man, a truck driver who had moved to the region from Paris after his first wife died. He left after two years, saying he only stayed that long for her cooking, leaving her with an infant son who had since grown up and joined the navy. Rumor said he couldn’t wait to leave home.

  Nadette was not much liked in St. Denis. She worked at the Trésor Public, the town’s tax collection office, and was said to take a special pleasure in tracking down late payers and making surreptitious visits to observe those who were not paying the TV tax, to see if they were watching illegally. In a wine-growing region where most people enjoyed a drink but few took it to excess, the startling number of empty bottles that Nadette took to the glass recycling point had earned her the reputation of a drinker. And since she had so few friends, Bruno reflected sadly, she must be a solitary drinker.

  Nadette also had a reputation as a malicious gossip, and while Bruno did not reveal this to others, he knew her to be the source of many anonymous letters to the authorities. She specialized in accusing unemployed neighbors of performing black-market work without paying taxes and social-insurance charges. These accusations might have been justified, but they took little account of the economic realities of the recession and the lack of jobs in the region. It was Bruno’s unpleasant duty to investigate such cases, so he thought Nadette both tiresome and damaging to the town’s social fabric. He usually managed to resolve matters with a friendly warning and a pamphlet on the useful system of chèques emploi service, under which an employer of temporary workers made the proper deductions. This protected both employer and employee in case of accidents. To Bruno it seemed a very sensible French compromise, to civilize the underground economy without stifling it.

  Marcel had been the baby of the family, an unexpected child when his mother was past forty and his big sister was already a teenager. Perhaps because she had helped raise him, Marcel was unusually patient with Nadette. When their parents had died, he had allowed her to take the family house, a handsome old stone building on the outskirts of St. Denis with three stories, a large garden and a barn that she rented to a local farmer. The house was worth considerably more than what Marcel had taken as his share of their parents’ estate, the land on which the family kept the market garden that provided some of the fruit and vegetables for the market stall. When he married, Marcel had built a small, cheap house on a corner of his land, and after his wife’s death, Nadette had campaigned tirelessly for this to be sold and for Marcel to move in with her.

  “She says we’d both save money, and families should stick together,” Marcel had explained to Bruno over a beer at the rugby club bar. “But I need to keep an eye on the garden and I want my own space. It’s hard to make her understand when she’s trying to be so kind.”

  Nadette had a key to get into Marcel’s house and clean it on Sunday mornings when he was at the market in St. Cyprien. She’d empty his laundry basket and wash and iron his clothes. She left meals for the week in his freezer and insisted that he join her for a family supper on Sunday evenings.

  “It’s not really my business, but doesn’t she understand you need a life of your own?” Bruno asked. Marcel had just shrugged. “What happens if you meet a new woman, if you want to marry again?”

  Bruno remembered some of the shouting matches between Nadette and Marcel’s wife before her death. On a couple of occasions he’d had to stand between them in the market, convinced the two women were about to hurl themselves onto each other. At the funeral, Nadette had been dry-eyed. Marcel and his wife had no children, so the family property would pass to Nadette and her son. Such matters of land and inheritance had often stoked family feuds in France.

  “Not much chance of a new woman for me,” Marcel had told Bruno when they had talked, tapping his prosthetic leg. Bruno was not so sure. The family genes had played a cruel trick on Nadette and her brother. She had the stolid, almost lumpish shape of a once-athletic man whose muscles had gone to seed, and her skin was pale and blotched easily in the sun. By contrast, Marcel was slim and lithe, with an olive complexion and dark, flashing eyes. He’d have made an attractive woman, Bruno sometimes thought, and his sister would have made a rather imposing man.

  Bruno knew instinctively that Nadette would be shaken by the prospect of her brother again having a woman in his life. At first she appeared unconcerned, believing it was no more than a holiday fling that would end once Kati left town. It was when Kati began working for Dougal’s rental agency that Bruno braced himself for trouble from Nadette’s reaction. He did not have long to wait. An anonymous letter claiming that Dougal was improperly hiring foreigners arrived at the mairie. Bruno checked the regulations and found that the Swiss had the same rights as European Union citizens to live and work in France, just as the French did in Switzerland. He ignored the letter, but next time he was in the Trésor Public he commented to the manager, loud enough for Nadette to hear, on the boost the foreign residents, including the Swiss, brought to the town taxes. Nadette’s next ploy was to claim Kati was not paying tax on the TV in her staff house. Bruno sighed. The TV was in the communal sitting room, and the tax was paid by Dougal. He wondered what Nadette would try next.

  But she seemed to back off. Bruno kept a wary eye on the mairie’s postbox and tipped off Sergeant Jules at the gendarmerie that Nadette could be about to cause trouble. Perhaps because her own brief courtship and marriage had been so unhappy, Nadette seemed to miss the signs that were becoming evident to everyone else in St. Denis. Kati and Marcel were becoming a couple. They giggled together as they tasted the different vintages at the town’s wine fair, shopped together in the rummage sale that raised money for the Red Cross and strolled hand in hand along the riverbank to watch the sunset from the bridge. They even went to the final of the tennis tournament together, although most of their time was spent staring dreamily into each other’s eyes.

  It was impossible to see them and not feel better about life, thought Bruno. Old men and young sportsmen, teenagers and matrons, shopkeepers and tourists in the market—all their faces broke into indulgent and tender smiles when Marcel and Kati passed by. Some were perhaps a little wistful, a little regretful that those days had passed, or were yet to come. But one reason that Bruno on the whole liked the human race was the way that people tend to be inspired into a generosity of spirit by the sight of young people in love.

  However much in love she might be, Kati was a practical young woman. She knew that her job would end with the summer and had been thinking what would be best to do after that. She could have helped Marcel at the market stall, but she wanted a measure of independence. So she looked carefully at the St. Denis market and asked herself what was
missing. She visited other markets in the region, including the big ones at Sarlat and Périgueux, and thought about markets she had seen in Germany and at home in Switzerland. She toyed briefly with the idea of a stall selling Christmas items, but that would be no use after December. Then one day in Eymet, a town with many British residents, she saw a van in the market that was flying a Union Jack and selling hot pies.

  Instantly, Kati was transported back to the Schaffhausen kitchen of her childhood and the scents that came when her mother pulled out the Cornish pasties, the cheese-and-onion tarts, the steak-and-Stilton pies, the sausage rolls and bacon sandwiches of her native land. Kati bought a Cornish pasty, the warm golden pastry with its filling of meat, turnips, potatoes and onions and thick gravy, and the woman in the van handed her a square brown bottle with a blue label that she remembered, HP sauce, with the picture of the Houses of Parliament in London.

  At once, Kati had her solution. The only other people selling hot food in the markets were a Vietnamese couple offering their nems and Jean-Paul with his rotisserie. As winter approached, hot food would be popular, and she would have little competition.

  “Takes you back, does it, love?” the woman in the van asked Kati, in English. She looked older than Kati’s mother. “Lots of people miss their home food.”

  “My mother’s English, but my dad’s Swiss, and I was brought up in Switzerland,” she explained. “Where did you find this van?”

  “On the website auboncoin,” came the reply. “But if you’re interested, this one’s for sale. I’m getting too old for this lark, up at five to start baking every day, then there’s all the cleaning up, both the van and my kitchen at home. It’s no picnic, my girl.”

  The woman, Ethel, who came from Rotherham, not far from Kati’s mother’s birthplace in Leeds, put on the electric kettle and made them both a cup of tea. She showed Kati the extra-heavy battery that powered the kettle, a hot plate and a small grill. Then Kati took over the stall for ten minutes while Ethel did her market shopping. When the market closed, they had lunch together—unsold cheese-and-onion pies and sausage rolls with the bright yellow and peppery English mustard.

  “HP sauce, chutney and Colman’s mustard, dear,” Ethel confided. “If you’ve got those the English will be your faithful customers. For the French, I’ve got different sauces, that Thai sweet chili, and there’s one I make with vin de noix and honey that’s very popular. And there’s always tomato ketchup.”

  Over another cup of tea they agreed that Kati would join Ethel on Saturday mornings, getting up before dawn to help her bake and then learning the ways of the market. Kati was already thinking of Swiss pastries she knew how to make—honey-walnut tarts to apple strudel, Mailaenderli cookies and Spitzbuben—and then there was Zopf bread. The possibilities expanded brightly before her.

  There was, however, one very large obstacle. Kati wondered how to raise the issue and decided to explain her problem honestly. There would be no point in starting to learn the trade with Ethel if the Englishwoman wanted to be paid up front.

  “I don’t have the money to buy your van outright,” Kati said. “Could we arrange a leasing deal, in which I pay you out of my earnings? Or maybe I could rent the stall from you.”

  Ethel put down her teacup and eyed Kati solemnly. “Let’s see how it goes,” she said. “If we keep a good record of your sales, the bank might be prepared to give you a loan.”

  “It sounds as if you need the money,” Kati said, crestfallen.

  “I do, but not right away. Besides, once you see how much work it is, you might change your mind.”

  But Kati did not change her mind, not about selling pastries from the market stall, nor about Marcel, nor about St. Denis. When the season came to an end and Dougal hinted that he’d be renting out the house he used for his employees, Kati moved in with Marcel. Bruno learned of this the day after it happened, when Marcel invited him and some other friends to dinner at his home to celebrate the new arrangement. Kati would cook, he said proudly.

  The weather was still warm enough for them to eat outside on Marcel’s terrace, looking over his carefully tended vegetable garden. Kati’s hair had grown out during the summer, and she had piled it in some fetching female way on top of her head, revealing a shapely neck. Bruno had always thought that the back of a woman’s neck was one of the most beguiling of the endlessly enchanting features of the female anatomy. It was set off by a collarless blouse of white linen, with which she wore a long cotton skirt of a blue he had recently seen on the stall of Leopold, the Senegalese who was in the market. The skirt was well cut and fit perfectly, so he assumed that either Kati had made it herself or she had found her way to Marie-Josette, the town’s dressmaker. Bruno guessed the latter; Kati seemed instinctively to understand that a new merchant in the market would do well to support the established businesses.

  They were nine at a table set for ten, and Bruno realized with a touch of foreboding that Nadette had been invited but had failed to attend. The food quickly improved his mood, but he kept an ear cocked for a telephone call from Nadette pleading some sudden illness or emergency, and he resolved that he would insist on handling the matter rather than Marcel. He was not going to allow Nadette to spoil Kati’s evening.

  The first course was a chilled vegetable soup, made from peppers and cucumbers that Kati had picked from the garden that day. Then came a pâté she had made from trout that the fishmonger had smoked for her; she had blended in just the right touch of horseradish. For the main course, she explained shyly, she was serving the same roast lamb that had been the first meal she and Marcel had shared. Bruno’s smile became a little fixed. He liked his lamb pink, but his partner, Pamela, preferred hers well done. When they dined together at her home, she had the outer slices, and he had the inner. But to his relief, Kati’s lamb somehow contrived to suit all tastes. When Pamela came back from the kitchen, having insisted on helping clear away the plates, she whispered to Bruno, “She cooked it very slowly at a low temperature. That’s the secret.”

  Kati had accompanied the lamb with a carrot mousse that Bruno found delightful and a tarte aux tomates, which had somehow preserved the crispness of its pastry. Bruno, whose own pies and quiches tended toward a dismaying sogginess that greatly frustrated him, understood he was in the presence of a cook of rare quality. And that, he suspected, would make Nadette’s animosity all the sharper.

  Nadette did not call that evening. But Bruno suspected it was only a matter of time before she caused more unpleasantness. The day that Ethel’s van, renamed Kati’s Kitchen, appeared at the market in St. Denis, the casse-croûte club loyally gathered to buy their breakfast from her. They feasted with sincere and growing appreciation on cheese-and-onion tarts, bacon butties in whole-wheat buns that Kati had made herself and sausage rolls that she had blended with sage and a little grated ginger.

  “I could get used to this,” said Stéphane, washing down the last bite of a cheese-and-onion tart with a glass of Bergerac red from the town vineyard. “I wonder if she’d like to experiment with some of my cheeses.”

  “She’d be delighted,” said Marcel, who was looking sleeker and more contented than Bruno could remember. “And I don’t think she’s finished with us yet.”

  As he spoke, Kati appeared carrying one of Raoul’s baskets, its contents covered in a tea towel. She put it on the table, whipped off the cloth with a cheerful “Tra-la!” and revealed a heaping pile of Spitzbuben, Swiss butter cookies in different shapes with raspberry jam in the centers and all dusted with superfine sugar. She was dressed in a black blouse and skirt and a freshly starched long white apron. But Bruno realized that there was a regulation she had overlooked. He went quickly into the mairie and grabbed a handful of evidence gloves from the box by his desk and came back to give them to Kati.

  “Just in case we get a surprise inspection,” he said. With Nadette’s malignance in mind, Bruno had already studied the various regulations on serving food in the market, and while no stallholder had
ever in his memory observed the rule about wearing gloves to handle food, he thought it a useful precaution. He had already verified that the oven and refrigerator in Kati’s van were in compliance and that the paper plates and napkins and the plastic utensils she offered were officially approved. He had checked Kati’s insurance, and he thought he had covered every eventuality.

  He was wrong. Nadette’s first strike was unexpected. She had filed her complaint neither to him nor to the gendarmerie in St. Denis but directly to the motards, the gendarmes who enforced the traffic rules. And rather than calling the motards down upon St. Denis, which could have put most of her neighbors and even her brother at risk, she chose Marcel’s day of rest when Kati’s Kitchen was selling pies and pasties in Lalinde.

  Kati was one of three stallholders who had vans equipped to sell their wares, but Kati owned the only van that had not passed its contrôle technique, the road-worthiness and emissions test required for all vehicles every two years. She was fined on the spot and told her van would have to be towed to an inspection station. At least the motards did not stop her from selling food and even bought some of her pasties. But the fine and the towing fee came to 415 euros, a sum she could barely afford; it amounted to her profits for a week. She lost another day of business waiting for the van to pass its inspection.

  Bruno once again reviewed the regulations governing markets, poring over the small print to see what vulnerabilities might remain. He could find nothing, but to be sure, he called on the Vinhs, the Vietnamese couple who sold nems and other Asian delicacies. He asked whether there were any hygiene rules that had to be followed. Not as far as they knew, said the Vinhs. Kati had a sink in which to wash her hands, which was the important thing. When Bruno asked Jean-Paul, the rotisserie man, if he could think of anything, Jean-Paul came up with a list of requirements that Bruno had already covered and added, “As long as she’s done her food-handling course, she’ll be all right.”