The French socialist must have burst her bladder getting a litre of percolator coffee down her to stop the Dutch couple getting any, but she managed it. She was more than a socialist, actually. I think she was one of those continental communists.
‘Why can’t we all just ’ave what we need an’ live in peace, uh?’ she asked me at one point, with the obvious answer, ‘Because you hate everyone and pilfer everything,’ but I couldn’t say that and I didn’t want an argument with her because she was pretty feisty.
Pretending to be Irish for two weeks was wearing me out but I kept it up because I feared she would boil over if she found out I was Crème anglaise. She pronounced on arrival that she detested the English for their appalling manners, so I made the strategic decision to let her assume we were locals as I dutifully trooped down to the village to get her and her husband croissants every morning, which no Irish woman running a B&B in West Cork would have done. Madame La Gauche railed about the English being uncouth while I waited on her hand and foot and she did all sorts of things herself that amounted to appalling manners.
Halfway through her stay, for example, a young Dutch couple arrived for the weekend and she became territorial about the breakfast buffet. She had drained that entire percolator of coffee by the time they came down for breakfast, and I didn’t notice until they had finished their bagels.
‘Oh no, let me make you some more,’ I said, entering the breakfast room to find them sipping mint tea. The lad smiled and said not to worry.
The builder boyfriend swaggered into the breakfast room with far less tact and, with the French having gone upstairs to get ready for whatever joyless, famine-based, English-hating day trip she had planned, he began a conversation with the Dutch about what they thought of her.
‘Eh?’ he said, nodding to the empty table. The Dutch kids smiled nervously. ‘You like madame?’ The Dutch boy oiled out of answering, so the BB gave up and went to pull ragwort from the fields. When the French came back down, the Dutch were peeling themselves an orange, enjoying the peace of the sun-drenched breakfast room. But she marched into the adjoining drawing room to play the piano.
Bang bang bang went the half-wrong jazz chords and I did consider telling her to stop. But that would have provoked ten minutes of ‘Ne pas jouer? Jouer? Ah! Jouer! Do not play-yuh!’
She was, of course, being impossibly awkward about every single word that I was not pronouncing precisely to her liking.
So I might have said ‘Voulez-vous des fruits?’ 57 times every morning and unless I hit the word ‘fwee’ exactly as she wanted it, she would look at me and emit ‘Ugh?’ until, dying inside with the futility of it all, I just shouted: ‘FRUIT! You want fruit?’
And she would say: ‘Ah fwee! Bah yes-urr. I will ’ave some fru-it sank-yuu!’ And I would be expected to ignore her ‘fru-it’ and ‘sank’ while grovelling about my ‘fwee’.
How hard is it to learn that the word for merci isn’t ‘sank’ it’s ‘thank’ – th th th thank! God help a Crème anglaise if they got merci wrong, eh? We’d have to hear all about Joan of Arc.
Later that day, she declared she wanted to show me how to bake bread, the inference being that what I was putting out every morning wasn’t good enough. She went to an organic shop to get ‘good farine – ’ow you say? Flow-urrr?’ and she made me perform as directed, then put this dough in the oven and when it came out not quite risen declared it très bon.
I agreed and stuffed a piece down my throat. ‘Mmmmm! Très bon,’ which made her frown because I hadn’t said bon to her liking.
On their last evening, she said they would like to eat with us and when I said that would be lovely she didn’t say anything else. ‘Right, I’ll get something in then,’ and I trooped down to the village.
The lamb chops disappeared in one go down the husband, who looked as if he hadn’t seen meat for decades. She produced two bottles of wine they guarded between them and a salad of nuts and berries. This was your classic socialist fodder, like a plate of screws and bolts, and the BB and I had to surreptitiously douse it in balsamic vinegar and oil to get it down us.
For her part, she doused her chops in cheap barbecue sauce, for she was horribly desirous of sugar, as those who try to be vegan often are.
The next morning, I set out a new jar of blackcurrant Bonne Maman and when I cleared the table after they’d left I found the jar empty. Whether eaten in a frenzy or spooned into Tupperware for the onward journey, I have no idea. Either way, her final act was a redistribution of jam.
To book the B&B, visit www.melissakite.org
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