Chapter 11: Anne and Mal’s Barn

Henri Rosin, Chef de Cuisine of the Vermillion Coast Hotel, rarely left the environs of the hotel; his only forays into the outside world were to choose the meat and fish for his kitchen from local producers. It was the proud boast of the hotel that all the food and wine consumed at the hotel came from within a 40 km radius of the hotel. There might have been some leeway in the distance some of the produce travelled from farm/vineyard to the hotel’s kitchen but by and large it was true. It was certainly true of the fish served in the hotel. The small towns/villages hugging the Vermillion Coast were first and foremost fishing villages that for generations had supplied Perpignan and the other larger settlements inland with fresh fish. The advent of tourism in the area in the mid 1960s allowed the fishermen to sell their catches direct to the hotels. It was a win win situation for the fisher folk. No travel costs and with a monopoly in the market they could charge higher prices for their produce.

One of Henri’s specialities was Lobster Thermidor and he always purchased the lobsters from a local fisherman who lived a few kilometres past Redoute de Mailly, an old fortification built to protect the harbour.of Port Vendres It was some distance from the centre of Port Vendres and Henri wanted me to drive him there and act as bodyguard and porter. “The fisherman is a rascally Catalan who will try to intimidate me in paying more for the lobsters than I need to,” Henri explained. “With you alongside me he will be less aggressive.”

I shrugged; I had better things to do than baby-sit Henri but it would be a part of Port Vendres I had not visited and I hadn’t left the hotel for several days and was getting slightly stir crazy.

The drive along the Rue de la Jette was uneventful if somewhat nervy as the Mediterranean was lapping only a few metres away from the road side; and not a particularly wide or well surfaced road. Eventually I pulled up alongside a stone built barnlike building that probably predated the ruined fornications of Redoute de Mailly we had just passed. About 500 metres awayto the east I could see a sturdy stone built causeway curving away into the sea with some sort of light house structure on the end of the stone jetty.

The fisherman was waiting by the side of what was once a barn but had been repurposed and altered to become both a dwelling and a bar/bistro. I supposed the fisherman was the proprietor and eked out a living selling his fish and running the rather insalubrious looking, definitely down market, bar/bistro. A tall slender female stood in the doorway of the building wearing a wide brimmed hat that shielded her face from the sun but allowed tresses of her long auburn hair to tumble to her shoulders. Her dress was ankle length and long sleeved so I guessed she was allergic to sunshine. The Vermillion Coast was a strange place for someone with that allergy to live; the average monthly sun hours between May and August was a 100, during the rest of the year the average per month was 70. Whatever, she was a striking looking woman who I assumed was wife or partner of the fisherman, He, as Henri had described, was a large, burly and bearded man not unlike Bear in size and hirsuteness.

He approached us with a belligerent look on his face. “Who the devil are you?” he said, glowering at me.

“I’m Henri’s bum boy,” I replied, seeking to take the wind from his sails, which I certainly did. He was thunderstruck and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me but then he roared with laughter, almost doubling up in his mirth. I also heard laughter from the female.

“Rather you than me,” he said and then stuck out a hand. “I’m Malachi Vivas.”

I clasped his extended hand in mine. “Philippe Soissons.”

We exerted pressure on each other’s hands until we had taken the measure of each other and liked what we found.

“Well, Philippe, what do you do when you’re not being buggered by Henri?”

“I’m the Night Porter at the Vermillion Coast hotel, among other things.”

He pointed toward the female. “That’s my woman, Anne Brennan. She’s Irish and has to keep out of the sun less she comes out in a rash.” I nodded at Anne Brennan who gave me a brief smile in return. “Okay, Henri, let’s see the colour of your money.” Malachi said, and taking Henri by the arm walked him down to the shore where a fishing boat, rocking on slight waves, was tied up alongside a small wooden jetty.

I could see several lobster pots on the jetty and Henri peered into them, sometimes sticking in his hand and withdrawing a lobster. There was a deal of haggling. As Henri inspected each lobster Malachi would name a price that was met by the shaking head of Henri. At times Malachi’s voice was raised and I looked to see if he was intimidating Henri but soon saw it was all bluster. I realised Malachi Vivas was a show man and someone who liked to pretend to be a bully but was really as soft as butter.

The woman, Anne, came and stood next to me. Up closer I could now see she had a pale, almost alabaster, complexion. It was erotically stimulating to imagine she was the same shade all over her body, which although slender had protuberance and curves in all the right places. Her eyes were hazel rather than the green I imagined she would have, given her hair colour, although there were flecks of green in the irises. Her thin, aquiline nose was the type of proboscis the aristocracy sneer down at lower class people although she didn’t appear to have the accompanying arrogance. Her mouth was generous, with a prominent Cupid’s bow and full lower lip – extremely kissable in fact. Anne Brennan obviously smiled a lot judging by the laughter lines around her mouth and eyes but the lines did not detract from her attractiveness.

She gazed at Malachi fondly, a smile on her face. “Mal pretends to be a Grizzly bear but really he is just a big cuddly Teddy bear. His bark is worse than his bite and he never bites, at least he doesn’t bite men!” She gave me a sensual look and I had a lewd mental image of Malachi sinking his teeth into her lily white body. I blushed a scarlet red.

Anne must have read my mind. “Better a blush on the cheek than a stain on the heart,” she said in reasonable Spanish. Her French was good although her accent was distracting.

“What part of Ireland are you from? I said in English. I needed to move away from my erotic thoughts and this was the best I could come up with.

She looked at me in surprise. “Your English is excellent.”

I gave a self-deprecating shrug. “I had a good teacher.”

“Obviously from London!” She observed; it appeared some of Alfie Hinds’ Cockney accent had rubbed off on me. “I’m from Sligo, in the west of Ireland,” she continued, “but I’ve lived in France for twenty years, fifteen of them with Mal.”

“You must have been very young when you first came to France?” I estimated her age to be no more than thirty five.

She laughed, a rippling tinkling outpouring of mirth. “Either you are a flatterer or, as most men, hopeless at judging a woman’s age?”

“I don’t like to ask a direct question when it comes to the age of a female. I’ve always thought it rather rude and intrusive.”

“Well, I shall ask you your age, if that isn’t rude and intrusive?”

“Not to a man.”

“Are you a sexist pig?”

I think she was joking with me. “No, but I try to be courteous.”

“Courteous! That’s an old fashioned word.”

“I’m an old fashioned man of forty.”

“Well, in that case I’m a modern female who is three years older than you are, Philippe.”

My surprise must have shown and she laughed again. “I will say one thing about you, Philippe Soissons; you certainly know how to raise a female’s spirit.”

“Were you in low spirits?”

“Yes I was, but now I’m fine thanks to you.” She moved close to me, gazed in my eyes for a moment and then kissed me firmly on my mouth, the tip of her tongue feathering across my lips for a sensuous second before she pulled her mouth away from mine. “Welcome to The Barn, Philippe Soissons. I know we are going to be the very best of friends.” After delivering that provocative statement she went back into the building.

I was sailing into dangerous waters. Anne Brennan was in a long term relationship with Malachi Vivas but she seemed to be coming on to me. There was certainly a strong sexual attraction between us but did I need the trouble a dalliance with her would bring? Thankfully Malachi Vivas, being fully engaged with Henri, was oblivious to the attraction between Anne and me. He and Henri eventually finished the haggling and had arrived at an amicable agreement. Henri paid over the money and Malachi shouted for me to come and carry three cases of lobsters to the van.

“Stay and have a drink, Philippe.” Malachi said as he and Henri walked up from the boat.

“I need to get these beauties back to my kitchen as soon as possible,” said Henri, a hint of petulance in his voice.

“Maybe another time, Malachi,” I said, loading the three crates of crustaceans into the back of the van.

Mal was persistent. “How about tonight?”

A germ of an idea had come to me when I first saw the barn cum bisto cum bar, and I agreed to call in later that evening.

“Your first drink will be on the house!” Mal added.

I grinned. “It’s a deal.”

I became a regular visitor to Anne and Mal’s Barn, as the bar/bistro was styled. It was mainly locals who patronised the place, pleased to pay normal prices for their food and drink rather than the inflated tourist prices in the centre of Port Vendres. The bar was small and the kitchen miniscule but there was much that could be done to extend and repurpose parts of the original structure and make the Barn a substantial sized bar/restaurant with accommodation for guests on the upper floors. One of the many outbuildings had already been converted into a bakery and the freshly baked bread and croissants served at the Barn was something of a draw for customers.

The staff of The Barn consisted of Malachi Vivas, who spent more time on the customer’s side of the bar than behind it, Anne Brennan, who served behind the bar as well as in the kitchen, and a wrinkled female who could have been any age between 50 and 80 and went by the name of Babette. Her domain was the kitchen. Babette was practically toothless and definitely shapeless but was a chef supreme. Her husband, or it might have been her father or even her son as he was equally wrinkled as her and as difficult to assess his age, was the baker and his croissants were as good as any I’ve ever tasted. He was called ‘Bonno’ short for Boniface but whomever gave him that name was either blind or had that somewhat surreal of humour of the English.

With some alterations and properly managed the Barn could be a goldmine.

I had a standing invite to stay the night after any late night session at the Barn. I always refused as I had duties to attend to back at the hotel. However, one night I over imbibed and stayed overnight in one of the upstairs rooms.

I woke at daybreak alongside a naked Anne.

“Did we...?”

“We certainly did,” she replied.” And now I want an encore.”

“What about Mal?”

“You’d rather shag him than me?” Her ridiculous reply sent her off in a rill of laughter and I feared Mal would hear the noise, break into the room and then break me. Anne calmed my fears. “It was Mal’s idea for me to join you in bed. He isn’t up to giving me more than one shag a week and I’m a woman who, like Oliver Twist, wants more – much more. Anyway Mal is out fishing so we have hours to do what we were doing for hours last night.” She saw the look of surprise on my face. “Don’t tell me you can’t remember last night?”

I did have some highly erotic, pornographic probably being a more accurate description, dreams during the night but thought them due to my over consumption of absinthe but it appears the dreams were not dreams but real. “It’s all a bit hazy but I do recall some things.” I admitted.

“Good, and that’s enough talking,” Anne said, then mounted me and rode me to a cataclysmic climax, twice in fact. Fortunately I had not had sex for several days and even partly hung-over managed to keep my end up to her evident pleasure, which she expressed in quite lurid, unladylike, language.

The idea I had about the Barn germinated during the many times I stayed the night at the Barn where Anne would join me in bed. Between bouts of energetic sex we would talk. She quizzing me about life in the legion and me asking about the Barn; how Malachi Vivas came to be the owner, and what plans he and/or she had for its future. Our talking together was also a period for me to regain my vigour as Anne Brennan was insatiable. Mal was at least twenty five years older than me so it was no wonder he was willing for me to take over the Herculean task of satisfying Anne. He and I got on extremely well together considering I was shagging his common law wife several times a night several times a week, although at times I did have pangs of guilt.

“The Barn has been in Mal’s family for several generations, “Anne told me. “His grandfather had the building converted from a store house to a dwelling. Mal’s father was an indifferent fisherman and was not making enough money from fishing to keep his family, so had a bar built to service the thirst of the more able fishermen who had money to spend on wine and beer. It is still the favoured drinking place for local Catalan fisher folk. Mal had some renovations done and then opened the bistro. I have plans to enlarge the bar and bistro and construct a patio area at the rear of the building. But that will cost a lot of money, money we don’t have at present.”

We were entangled in Anne’s dishevelled bed up in her bedroom; Mal slept in a separate room so he wouldn’t disturb her (or me) when he left to go fishing early in the morning. Anne unlatched herself from me and got from the bed. She walked over to a bureau set against the wall and after rummaging in a drawer of the bureau she removed some documents and then came back to bed. I had watched her naked perambulation to and from the bureau with lascivious eyes. Her alabaster complexioned body was bathed in moonlight giving her an aura that I was eager to turn from ethereal to earthy and set her pale skin glowing with lust. To my surprise Anne wanted to continue to talk business rather than getting down to the business we had been engaged in.

“This is my planned remodelling of the Barn as drawn up by an architect.” She said passing me a document. There was a lot of renovation, rebuilding and new building work but it was not as extensive to what I would plan had I been the Barn’s owner.

“Most impressive, but there’s more that could be accomplished.” I said, and then listed what alterations and extensions could be carried out to turn the rather pokey bar/bistro into a place that could serve three course meals and cocktails.

“That’s not for Catalan fisher folk, Phil.”

“But it is what tourists would expect. That is where the money is, Anne. Not cents and francs but US dollars, Swiss francs, and UK pounds.”

“It will take a lot of money to implement a plan like that. Have you got any money?”

“No, but I do have Great Expectations.”

She rolled on top of me. “So do I. Get expectationing!”

Of course my great expectations were having my novel published and it being a best seller ... the novel I had barely started to write. I was spending all my spare time and energy at the Barn and in Anne and all the other things I needed to do were being ignored. I therefore rationed myself to two visits a week to the barn and only one night in flagrante with Anne. She was not best pleased by my absences and I admit it was a struggle for me to keep away from her. She was an experienced, highly sexed woman who knew which of my buttons to press and in return showed me which of her buttons to press. In fact other than Chloe in Castelnaudary I couldn’t recall a female quite as adventurous, agile, vigorous, or vocal.

However there was one disturbing feature of Anne that concerned me. At times she seemed to be in a different place than the rest of the world, not just after experiencing a mind altering orgasm but during a normal conversation. She would abruptly go missing, staring over my shoulder as if seeing someone, and even speaking to this unknown entity as if she was in touch with a higher being somewhere beyond the ken of us ordinary mortals. It was quite unsettling but fortunately these episodes only lasted for seconds before she returned to normality and continued with the conversation as if nothing had happened, and of course to her nothing had.

By the time September arrived and my hotel workload eased I had a rough outline of the novel ready for Raymond Chappell to cast his edificial eye over. I took a day off work and travelled to Toulouse, a two hour train journey from Perpignan. Using the private line to Raymond and mentioning the name ‘Fleur Brossan’ I was swiftly ushered in to the great man’s office by the Dragon Lady gatekeeper, a pert, petite Vietnamese female who was as sweet and gentle as a Samurai warrior.

Raymond Chappell rose from his plush leather chair behind a desk that King Arthur and his knights would have felt at home sat around, and we shook hands. He was in his early thirties, several centimetres shorter than me but several kilos heavier. Light brown curly hair surmounted a round face with brown eyes. He seemed to be a decent enough fellow although his Marseille accent was jarring.

I handed him my opus and he sat back in his chair. I sat in an only slightly less luxurious visitor’s chair across the desk from him.

“Before we start M’sieu Soissons...”

“Please call me Philippe,” I said.

“Certainly, Philippe, and I am Raymond. I was about to say me being presented with the outline of an unknown author’s work is highly irregular. Any work from unknown authors is put in a huge pile that gets sifted through when we have nothing better to do and someone to do it. It is only because Fleur...”

“I know you and she are...”

“Yes, and I wonder at your involve...”

“I know her because I work with her sister. There has been no involvement between us other than her transcribing my audio tapes.” I saw the relief on his face.

“Of course I look at anything recommended by Fleur, not just because she is my girlfriend – in fact we are engaged...”

“Congratulations!”

He smiled his thanks and continued. “Not just because Fleur is my fiancée but I discovered she has a gift for picking winners when it comes to stories and authors. In fact she will soon be an assistant editor and have her own authors to manage. At her job interview I was impressed not just by her personality and beauty but by her acumen when it came to literature, quite amazing given her rather basic education. She saw something in the story she was transcribing from your audio tapes and was sure there was a bestseller somewhere in the mix. I will read the outline and give it my full consideration. Leave your document with me and I’ll get back to you in a few days’ time and let you know if Fleur’s instincts were correct.”

The interview was over and I left his office fuming. It seemed I had wasted a day’s leave as it was obvious Chappell was only going through the motions of looking at my work to keep Fleur happy. I thought he would have given an opinion then and there but it seemed he would deliver his verdict via the telephone thus putting himself out of reach of disappointed/angry authors. My being a former legionnaire might have given him good reason to act in this way as I would certainly take umbrage if my work was dismissed as worthless.

Back in Port Vendres that evening I vented my spleen concerning the meeting with Chappell on Anne. She was unperturbed by my juvenile anger and fury. “I’m sure M’sieu Chappell will keep his promise, Phil, and will get in touch with you in a day or two,” she soothingly said while stroking my brow as if I were a fractious child.

“Yeah, he’ll probably tell me not to give up the day job!” was my petulant response.

Anne gave a throaty chuckle. “You had better not give up your night job.” She said, and then drew me into a warm embrace. I soon forgot about writing and publishing books and concentrated solely on venting man juice into the eager, writhing, body beneath me.

Two days later I got a phone call from the gate keeper Dragon Lady inviting me to an audience with the Chief Editor of The Occitanian Publishing Corporation. The fact that I had been summoned to the presence rather than given the bums rush via the telephone gave me reasons to be cheerful. I deputised Oliver from La foule loured (The Heavy Mob) as Acting/Temporary/Unpaid/Night Porter during my absence and caught the noon train from Perpignan to Toulouse.

I was pleased to see Fleur sitting alongside Raymond Chappell when I arrived at his office. She came from behind the desk and kissed me warmly but decorously on the cheek under the benign gaze of her fiancée.

“There is definitely a best-selling novel in the first segment of Grigor Pavel’s story but it needs some additional writing,” Fleur said after returning to her chair alongside Raymond Chappell.

“What sort of writing?”

“Romantic sort of writing,” she replied and grinned when seeing the shocked look on my face. “I don’t expect you to write romance, Philippe, but I know someone who can. The novel will be a collaboration between you and her.”

“And who is this her?” I asked, ungrammatically I admit but I was stung to a quick retort when hearing my story, or rather Grigor’s story, was being high jacked by a female writer of romantic tosh for women.

“Raymond suggested Sadie Luvbyte but I overruled him,” Fleur continued. The engaged couple exchanged loving looks and I wondered how Fleur had accomplished Raymond’s overriding, and then cleared my mind’s eye of the pornographic pictures.

“Sadie has the largest number of readers of all the authors we publish,” Raymond said.

“That’s true, my love; Sadie Luvbyte does have a large and loyal readership but her books are out and out bodice ripping bonk busters and this story needs a more nuanced hand, Monika Morningstar ‘s hand in fact.”

“Where does romance come into Grigor’s story?” I asked.

Fleur swiftly enlightened me. “Grigor referred to his wife as his ‘Siberian Princess’ and believed her to be Anastasia the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas the Second. How romantic is that?”

“She was killed in a traffic accident in Prague...” I began but Fleur interrupted me.

“That he thought was an assassination!”

“Yes he did, but he was distraught. The death of Grigor’s beloved wife unbalanced him for several months. There is no proof Anastasia escaped the massacre of the Imperial Family at Yekaterinburg.”

“But the story to be published is fiction, which means proof and truth can be inferred and implied. What is without doubt are the rumours that Anastasia escaped from the Bolsheviks holding the Imperial Family at Yekaterinburg, and we have audio tapes from a man who was in the region where and when the event happened who also claims his wife was Anastasia. It is a believable story that Monika will spin to the top of the bestselling charts.”

“Grigor doesn’t mention that he was anywhere near Yekaterinburg in any of the audio tapes,” I pointed out.

“He says he was in the Urals, and so is Yekaterinburg,” Fleur said.

“The Urals cover a huge area...”

“Yes, but the readers will note the association and leap to the conclusion Monika is pointing them towards.”

I shrugged my shoulders defeated by her feminine logic. “So what is my role in the collaboration?”

“You are the owner of the audio tapes of Grigor Pavel’s account of his time with the Czechoslovak Legion.”

“I don’t get to write anything?”

“There’s no need, Philippe. Monika will write the fiction of the rescue/romance between a Tsarist officer serving in the Czech Legion and a daughter of the Tsar and will give her own spin to the factual accounts as told by Grigor. No doubt she will contact you if puzzled by any military terminology or suchlike. Monika is a well-regarded writer of historical romances; her latest book, about the siege and subsequent sack of Magdeburg during the Thirty Years War, was a best seller.”

“Over twenty thousand of the twenty five thousand inhabitants of Magdeburg were killed. Not much room for romance in that I would have thought!”

Fleur smiled. “You will have to read the book and decide for yourself. Meantime, if you agree to the collaboration please sign this document. You will be acknowledged as Monika Morningstar’s collaborator on the book’s cover and on the frontispiece. You will also receive a quarter of the book advance made to Monika when she signs her contract.”

“What’s a book advance?” I asked.

“A book advance is a sum of money an author gets when signing a contract with a publisher.It is to provide the writer with the necessary funds to complete the book,” Raymond explained. “With Monika’s track record of sales she will receive somewhere near forty thousand francs of which you will have ten thousand. You will also receive a quarter share of the royalties when the book sales reach the advance money – “ He saw I was about to question him and explained. “Royalties are payments from book sales that you get after publishing the book and meeting the advance. You won’t earn any royalties until the book’s sales equals the forty thousand francs advance.” It occurred to me that Monika Morningstar must be a first class and highly profitable author if she could craft a bestselling romantic novel about the siege of Magdeburg. All I had to do to benefit from her skill was allow her to use Grigor Pavel’s audio tape transcripts. It was a win win situation for me; I agreed to the collaboration and signed the relevant documents.

“That’s the first segment of the Pavel Transcripts dealt with,” Raymond said after I had signed the collaboration agreement. “Now the rest of the transcripts need considering, starting with the Spanish Civil War segment. The benchmark novel for the Spanish Civil War is Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Unfortunately Grigor didn’t include any intimate interludes with females during the conflict and The Occitanian Publishing Corporation doesn’t have any authors with even a smidgen of Hemingway’s ability so I see no point in writing a novel from that segment. Events in Algeria are still too raw to be have a best seller in France from that segment although it would probably be popular in the USA and UK – Schadenfreude – but I think the really saleable segments are those set in Indochina...”

“Surely the events in Indochina are as raw as the events in Algeria?”

Raymond shook his head. “No, there were no pied noirs from Indochina nor was there an attempted coup d’état. Even the mighty USA didn’t succeed in Indochina and unlike them after our failure we extracted ourselves from the mess with some dignity.”

“There are no romantic interludes in the Indochina segments, or do you expect Monika to invent some?”

“Wasn’t there a female mentioned in the tapes, when Grigor was with regimental headquarters of the Fifth Regiment in Tong?” Raymond asked.

“Yes, SNCOs at regimental headquarters were allowed to live off base and had apartments with a live in maid of all work and bed warmer known as Congaï/ cô, aka concubine. Grigor’s Congaï was Nguyen Thi Tam.” I said.

“Good, you can use her for the love interest and build on that. Didn’t he meet her after he was captured at Điện Biên Phủ?”

“He says he glimpsed her when he was being moved from one POW camp to another.”

“Well you can write that they become lovers and she helps him escape.”

“Grigor didn’t escape; he stayed and supported his men.”

“Yeah, well he could do that and also have an affair with the Commissar Lady.”

“She wasn’t a Commissar, merely a translator.”

“Of course, I leave the story telling to you, Philippe, but your readers want romance and adventure interposed with sex and violence. Remember it is the interaction between male and female, i.e. sex, which sells books. I kid you not,” Raymond said. I saw that Fleur was nodding her head in enthusiastic agreement.

Raymond picked up the document I had just signed and placed it in a drawer of his desk. “So here is the deal, Philippe. We, The Occitanian Publishing Corporation, will commission Monika Morningstar to write a novel dealing with the events Grigor described during the Great War and the Revolution in Russia with you as her collaborator. If, when, the story is a success, i.e. we make a profit, we will commission you to write a novel based on Grigor’s time in Indochina during the Second World War and the First Indochina War including his captivity in North Vietnam after being captured at Điện Biên Phủ.” He glanced at the calendar on his desk.” Monika will have a final draft of her novel by the end of the year and it should be ready for publishing in the July of next year. By then we will expect you to have your novel written and ready for editing,” he paused and smiled at Fleur, “by Mam’selle Brousson here who, by the time your novel is edited and ready to be published, will be Madame Chappell!”