A Place in Normandy Read Online Free Page B

A Place in Normandy
Book: A Place in Normandy Read Online Free
Author: Nicholas Kilmer
Pages:
Go to
near Pont l’Evêque, at the end of 1918, after the end of the First World War. Not far away, in Mesnil, the Friesekes, following his lead, purchased a dilapidated farm in 1919 and began to make it theirs, gradually adding such modern frivolities as plumbing and a kitchen. Later, after the stock-market crash, and when they had reached a certain age, they would give up their Paris apartment, and the place in Normandy would become their sole residence. Frieseke had started to enjoy some critical success in the world before the war, and his pictures had begun to sell. In 1919, he was forty-five, and his only daughter five years old; the family of three was apparently in an expanding mode that must have been enhanced by the euphoria of the war’s end. It was not that they were going back to the land, exactly, since they had every intention of keeping the Paris apartment on the Rue du Cherche Midi for the months from November through March. And besides, the actual farming of the property would continue to be done by a local family that rented the acreage and lived nearby.

FOUR
    I parked in the deep, wet grass in the shade of the house, which the sun had not yet crossed. (It took it a long time to get over the hill, and longer still to get over the slate roof.) I reminded myself that I was here on business and must consider the property carefully, in the businesslike way suited to any prospective investor in real estate, instead of gaping like a thirteen-year-old freshman boy finding himself alone with a fabled senior girl, a cheerleader, who happens to be sprawled, somewhat disheveled and tiddly, and whispers to him …
    It was not just fifty acres and one big house that I had to think about, but three buildings; not only the pastures, orchards, stream, and crown of woodland, but the ruins, and the potential ruins. Before climbing out of the car, I checked the cottages on either side of the main house. The one we sometimes called the guesthouse, which I had first known as M. Braye’s house and where Great-aunt Janet had lived during her first recovery from marriage, should be empty now, and it actually did seem to be empty this time. A squatter ensconced there once had taken us two years to remove. From the other cottage, Mme. Vera’s, a narrow plume of smoke reached into the warm blue sky, where a few high clouds ambled. This cottage was occupied year-round by Mme. Vera Tonnelier, who had been living on the farm since the thirties, when she came from Poland intending to earn enough to take home as a dowry by working as housemaid for my grandparents, as her elder sister had done before her. Instead, the war intervened, and she married a local farmer and remained in Normandy (a widow now, accompanied by an embarrassment of goats, chickens, ducks, and so on), the property’s most predictable resident. She and her late husband, both ferociously loyal to the Friesekes, had supervised as best they could the protection of the latter’s possessions during the occupation. I did not see Mme. Vera anywhere about at the moment, so I would wait to say hello.
    I got out of the car and was greeted by the tribe of wood doves that made a continual activity of Grecian tragic-choral moaning from their nests in the eaves thirty feet above the driveway. I stretched, looked out over the land, and smelled the grass, and Mme. Vera’s smoke, before I addressed the house that the wood doves were warning me about. I noted the ragged string of goats crossing below the ruin of the cider press fifty feet down the hill, in a sweep of pasture where a few trees bloomed late, their cover of white blossom perhaps indicating that they were about to die. Some of the older apple trees were rotund with a waxy green that was in fact illusory, being mistletoe rather than leaves and set fruit. A pair of hawks wheeled overhead, calling to startle the songbirds sheltering below them in the hawthorn thickets and make them, in panic, break
Go to

Readers choose

Brett Battles

Peter Tremayne

Lana Krumwiede

Lisa Gee

Mia Dymond

Don Calame

David Thompson