Agnèse Dorléac’s butcher

Frail lemon sunshine slips through a gap in the morning grey; steals a chance to rehearse its shine after the storm of dirty February rain.  And Agnès Dorléac in the sitting room above the butcher’s shop – the one with the margarine-coloured wall tiles She often calls the room shabby; forgets how Agnès Briard had hoped it could be, and had seen it for one night. But with kind thoughts and a shoebox of dear photographs, Mme Dorléac remembers the magic, the post-war, cellophane shimmer that wrapped the little room in scarlet, gold and emerald shades of hope; she remembers excited hands as they smoothed the shiny toffee paper layers, covering the old year with the expectation of someone new.

And she recalls tall, dark-haired Agnès Briard in a not quite long enough dress the colour of almost-ripe limes waiting for something to happen under the grey-green and creamy bobbing, bouncing mistletoe ball.

Then the sound of 60 seconds as they rushed into a new year. And the sombre suits and sparkling bodies in a swaying, grasping nest of extended arms holding others, then one another’s for a moment… and then a moment longer. Greetings, wishes, good tidings; kisses and whispers brushed away then lost against the velvet crush of soft, wine-flushed cheeks.

And, finally, for Agnès Briard her last first kiss: dry, small and quick with no passion and given with an apology, but, as she remembered, received very gratefully, from the butcher’s apprentice; younger, shorter than her with clean pink skin (like ham, she thought).

But he was kind and she liked his eyes.

Then they stood against the wall, holding aubergine-coloured glasses of warmer then flatter sparkling wine.

He felt for her hand. “And will we all be here next year,” he asked.

A gentle engagement, then a short veil and a wedding dress as stiff as cartridge paper. Her sister in puff-sleeved man-made powder blue tinged with a curious rust.

White gloves and a book of prayers. Lily of the valley tied with thin sky-coloured ribbon. And Agnès Briard standing before the mayor with her kind-eyed, clean and shiny-pink butcher. And as she looked down at Rémi Dorléac, and as he looked up, she smiled.

Then they kissed. And the swaying nest clapped, her mother cried and her father sighed with relief.

Birthdays and anniversaries; spring green stems of butter-yellow cup-headed tulips dropped into a bottle-blue vase and left for Agnès in the sitting room every St Valentine’s Day.

Then three sons: one a butcher, like his father – and grandfather; one a teacher and one who went his own way, putting a suitcase and then the box of his great grandfather’s books on the back seat of his friend’s cherry red car and taking the main road out of town.

And they often come to stay.

And Mme Dorléac and her butcher husband (now retired) will celebrate 60 years of uneventful, contented married life this year.

And for that, for the tulips on St Valentine’s Day and for the colour Rémi brought into her life, Agnès is happy.