It was market day at Villeneuve, and Miranda and Jonathan left Abie with friends and came to see Mike. He smiled at Miranda looking so beautiful in her long orange dress. We saw another doctor, newly returned from holiday. He was pleased with Mike’s progress but worried about signs of atrial fibulation. I explained that this was an old problem, which he had developed many years before when he was trying to combine occasional commuting to teach in an American university with working on BBC children’s television, while also teaching at Goldsmiths.
‘We would like to give him an anticoagulant,’ said the doctor. ‘But it could make the bruise in his brain spread, so we can’t risk it.’ He sighed. ‘Courage, Madame.’
Hugh and Sally arrived at lunchtime and banished us from the sickroom to go and eat. The pavement cafés were crowded. The waiter, recognising us, squeezed us in, but when Jonathan ordered cheese with his omelette aux cèpes his eyebrows almost disappeared. ‘Sacrilège!’ he declared.
It rained hard in the night but the temperature did not fall. With the air so moist it felt more like the Caribbean. Raymond and Claudette came in to see Mike, with Jean-Michel and Véronique. They also had another patient in the hospital to visit as the young man who usually drives the combine had slipped while vaulting over an electric fence. Unwisely he had grabbed the live piquet, which gave him a shock and caused him to fall so awkwardly that he had broken his femur. Mike seemed very sleepy and it was difficult to rouse him. ‘Ouvrez les yeux, Michel!’ yelled the nurses each time they came along. He would make an effort but not for long. We drove home hoping that the grandchildren would get a better result the next day.
Jean had taken the day off to cook a huge lasagne and she brought it up just before they arrived. The boys tumbled out of the car, which I was surprised to see was chauffeur driven. The TGV had arrived on time in Agen but the office for the already booked and paid for hire car was shut. Adam learnt, next day, that the car keys had been left with the man who runs the station buffet. As there was no way he could possibly have known of this cavalier arrangement and as the taxi had cost eighty pounds he was not best pleased. The hire car arrived in Villeneuve the next morning and he did, eventually, get his taxi fare refunded.
Now we were a complete family and Matthew was able to take the odd morning off. He had been such a strong support but the constant anxiety was beginning to take its toll. He and Thomas swam. Elliot too, swallowing a lot of water as he chirped away with an endless recital of interesting information. The whole world fascinates him. Long may it last. Claudette appeared with melons, and an egg loaf. She had obviously got the idea from the pain poisson we had eaten at the tenth wedding anniversary. This one was made with ten eggs mixed with small pieces of courgette, carrot, onion and lardons and cooked for forty-five minutes in a very slow oven. ‘In a bain-marie?’ I asked. ‘Non,’ she replied, simply. It was delicious.
We established a visiting rota, which gave all of us a little time off. On August the 27th Caz and I did the late shift and Mike was more animated. As I adjusted his pillow he looked at me with his eyes wide open.
‘It’s a big stroke,’ he said, refuting what I had told him at the beginning. The physiotherapist had been again and was pleased with the improvement in his movement on the paralysed side. ‘He is really trying hard,’ he said. Only his chest was still causing concern. I sat listening hour after hour to the hiss of the oxygen and wondering how soon we could get him home. Adam had been in touch with our GP who promised to do her best with the stroke unit at St George’s. As I drove back later to Bel-Air with my daughter-in-law on another beautiful evening, I compared the drive with that from Clapham to Tooting and tried to count my blessings. When we got home we found a barbecue prepared for Matthew’s birthday. We ate the last of the pain aux oeufs for a starter. It was even better after three days.
The next day, after a long session with the hospital administrator, we began to make plans to fly Mike home as soon as the doctor would release him. Clearly his recovery was going to be a slow and lengthy process and we had already run up a sizeable bill, only part of which would be covered by the E111. We had already established that our travel insurance would cover neither this, nor an air ambulance. The insurance company had contacted our GP and it was clear that Mike had forgotten to add to his form the latest medication for the angina. I sat, for my twenty minutes off duty, by the fountain in the garden of the hospital, great cedar trees bordering the shady lawns. I thought how unimportant the money was. We were fortunate to have some savings. What else were savings for?
It was almost the end of August and, although it was still summer heat, the leaves were turning. Jean, who had been such a wonderful support, had closed her studio and her little house and left for England, and Maggie and Andy had to leave later that day. We know how hard it is to go when the weather is so beautiful. We continued with our daily vigil. We drove into the hospital every morning, past the unusual and somehow curiously reassuring statue of the mother lion and her three cubs at the wide entrance. We now took a short cut up to Mike’s room. There was a door in the corridor which said FUNERARIUM. We had made grim jokes about it when we first passed it. Now one of the nurses had shown us that if we pushed open this door and walked up the back staircase, it opened almost opposite his door. The boys came for a brief visit every other day. Elliot chatted but Thomas found it hard. Every so often we were gently expelled from the room while some procedure was carried out. Doctor Blue Eyes showed me the results of a chest X-ray. They did not look good. The nurses came yet again to aspirate his chest. His breathing was laboured. I sat in his room hour after hour just willing the new and stronger antibiotic to do its work. But he looked so tired and frail, as though he was just too exhausted to battle on. And still I hoped.
On the last day of August, Caz and I stayed for the evening session. His breathing was much better but for the first time for weeks there was a little breeze outside and his hands seemed cold. I closed the door onto the small balcony and lowered the blinds. Before I left I asked the nurse for a blanket, kissed him and gently covered him. Did they know? I’m not sure. Had they hinted, I would have stayed. But they didn’t and I left, as usual. The next morning, before eight o’clock, they rang me to say that my husband had just died peacefully in his sleep.
Matthew, Adam and I walked up the stairs for the last time. Mike lay, so thin, under the snowy sheet, like an effigy. They had propped up his chin with a folded cloth, but too high. It made the corners of his generous mouth turn down as if he thoroughly disapproved of dying. We kissed him and tried to comprehend the incomprehensible. One of the staff came in and asked if I had brought his clothes. It had never occurred to me to do so. His clean pyjamas were in the cupboard, which he had never worn since his stroke.
Would these do? She shrugged. We were asked to leave. He would be moved – downstairs. They were sympathetic but for them it was routine. We should go and see the administrator.
We seemed to spend the next few hours wandering from one office to another, cancelling arrangements for the air ambulance, filling in endless forms and paying bills. The hospital phoned the funeral director. We had an appointment for the following morning. They would need Mike’s parents’ Christian names and his mother’s maiden name. Still in a daze, we called in at the farm on our way home. I couldn’t cry at all but they were both in tears.
‘Oh, pauvre Michel,’ sobbed Claudette. ‘And no more of those wonderful trips we all made together on a Sunday.’ Until then I hadn’t realised just how much they had meant to her.
That evening Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark Cathedral, phoned for news and was very sad. He told me that Edith and Rachel, his wife and daughter, were somewhere in France. The next day, M. Guyou, my neighbour, who in 25 years had never come to my door, came to shake my hand. He made the excuse that one of his cows was out. He told me that a woman aged 61 had dropped dead two days before at the fête in the next village. They had given her bouche-à-bouche, he said, but to no avail. I was
n’t sure if this news was supposed to cheer me in some way, but he shook my hand again, wiped away a tear and left. Half an hour later I had a call from Edith Slee. She and Rachel were some three hours drive away. They would be with us by four o’clock. When I protested she said, ‘Stop arguing, I just want to give you a hug.’
I needed a hug after a session with the undertaker.
The whole process seemed macabre. Getting Mike’s body back to England was not a simple affair. Elaborate coffins are the norm as cremations are uncommon and, as we strove for something simple and less tasteless, the young woman, surrounded by wreaths and urns and pieces of marble, looked disappointed. Did we want a coffin with a window in it? They had many Italian customers who apparently insisted on it. Mafia and substitute bodies came inevitably to mind. The documents would have to be signed by the Préfecture. It would take time. She would have to liaise with a funeral director in London.
We came out into the sunlight in a sort of trance and walked back again to the hospital to settle yet another bill. Did we want to go down the staircase this time and into the Funerarium where Mike’s body lay? I could see that this was going to be very difficult for both my sons and so we decided not to. Raymond and Claudette went that afternoon and now I wish I had gone with them. But we went back to Bel-Air and sat in the garden until Edith and Rachel arrived with a candle. We lit it for Mike.
The next candles which were lit for him were those in the cathedral where his body lay the night before his wonderful funeral two weeks later. Mike joined the army at the age of eighteen and vowed that he would never join anything ever again. He never did. The one exception he made was to become a proud member of the Guild of Stewards at Southwark, the most forward-looking, loving and inclusive cathedral in London.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘Will you go back to Bel-Air?’ people asked me.
‘Of course,’ I replied.
‘Won’t you find it difficult?’
‘I imagine so.’
How would I feel? I knew that many in my situation who had tried, had found it impossible. A second home is such an intensely shared adventure. A madcap decision in the first place but, for Mike and me, it had given us more than 25 years of special summers together and these memories remain to be cherished. Bel-Air is very important to me and I am blessed.
On Easter Monday all the family, except Matthew, who had to work, flew Ryanair to Bergerac. The flight was fine; I cannot recommend the sandwiches. From the modern mammoth which is now Stansted, it is the first time I have ever travelled to Bergerac; back, it seemed, almost to the time of Biggles, with cars parked casually on the grass and a small tent for the swift and efficient baggage-handling. Within fifteen minutes of landing we were on the road in a substantial hired car. Already the right side of Bergerac for us, we soon took a left turn to Issegeac, coasted round the outskirts of Villereal, another thirteen-century bastide with a wonderful covered market square and, in less than an hour, Monflanquin was clearly visible at the end of about the only straight stretch of road in Lot-et-Garonne.
Bel-Air was waiting for us, clean and sparkling, thanks to Susan. On the table outside stood a large pot planted with daffodils bearing a note of welcome from Ursula. Claudette had opened the shutters and laid the fire, and a jug of tulips and forsythia from her garden lit up the living room. I stood in the doorway looking up towards the wood. A breeze blew down across the vineyard. The cows were grazing quietly. I was home.
The boys piled out of the car and rushed into the chilly house. They quickly got warm as they struggled to carry out all the odd pieces of garden furniture, which had been stored in their room during the winter. We filled the hot water bottles, lit a blazing fire, and soon all the sheets and pillows were aired. Fortunately Bel-Air is not a damp house. Unaccustomed to an almost full house this early in the year, I was short of bedding and I had arranged with Jean to borrow duvets for the boys. She would arrive in her snug little village house in two days’ time and her neighbour Rosaleen would have already switched on her central heating. Bel-Air has no such luxury and I had forewarned Elliot and Thomas that they would find it a very different experience from high summer. April can be unpredictable with frosty nights and, once we were no longer subject to school holidays, Mike and I usually left our spring visit until May. Jean’s house is very attractive, with much of her work on the walls. I would be glad to see her. We gathered up the duvets and posted Jean’s key through Rosaleen’s letter box. The beds all made, we put a guard around the fire at Bel-Air, the living room already beginning to warm up, and went down to the farm where Claudette had already invited us for supper. Once again we passed what looked like two newly constructed houses at the bottom of our track. No doubt we would soon find out to whom they belonged.
Raymond and Claudette were waiting to greet us. All too conscious that one of us was missing, we sadly rearranged our traditional seating round the table. But, unused to eating indoors here, the boys were unaware, and this helped. Also, Clement, Raymond’s grandson, was staying that week and came to give the customary kisses all round. The boys eyed each other. It would probably be another year before they would feel confident enough to try out their tentative English and French – at least in front of the adults. As we ladled out the soup, Raymond talked about the new houses. ‘Are they local people?’ I asked. He hesitated. ‘Ils ne sont pas exactement du coin,’ he said.
I imagined folk from Agen perhaps, or even Bergerac. But it transpired that one of the new occupants was a butcher from Monflanquin, the other house owned by a relation of the farmer about two kilometres away. Clearly our coin was, as far as Raymond was concerned, very small indeed. I was pleased to have permanent residents at the bottom of our track as it makes an opportunist burglar less likely. The houses had been built on a piece of land at the end of which stood a complete ruin. There was just one back wall, a heap of stones, and curiously, still standing near the road, a solitary stone gatepost. It had always amused me, for on the top was a neatly cemented pot of flourishing house leeks. This long-abandoned ruin was the reason that building permission for the new houses had been granted, a house having once been there.
‘But why didn’t they demolish the ruin and use the stones?’ I asked, as I had noticed that it was still there, quite close and at a very odd angle to the furthest house.
‘That would have been too expensive,’ explained Raymond as Claudette carried in the first asparagus of the season. ‘Perhaps they’ll use them later to build a wall.’
Thomas enjoyed the whole meal, which continued with cabbage stuffed with minced pork, galantine of chicken, and a copious salad of endive. Claudette grows the endive, which I love, in enamel buckets in the darkest part of the cave. Elliot, who is a difficult eater, enjoyed his customary bread dipped in a bowl of olive oil, but rejoined the menu for a very large sponge cake filled with crème anglaise, with which we drank the first of the season’s white wine which they still make themselves.
I thanked Raymond for having organised someone to cut back my pampas grass. I hadn’t had much of a chance to inspect it but I could see that the normally tall and shaggy, sprawling clumps at the far end of the pool had been reduced to strange, rounded, humped figures. From a distance they looked like great, crouching, bald bears. The work had been done by the mysterious Bernard, of whom I had heard but never met. It was Ken Farrington, our English neighbour, who had discovered Bernard. He was apparently a good all-round handy man who would tackle anything and charged, very reasonably, by the hour. In the summer he lived with a group of friends in a nearby village but during the winter he stayed at Ken’s house and kept an eye on things while carrying out minor repairs. I looked forward to meeting him. We also learnt that M. Carpentier had had a serious accident with a hose of liquid cement which had become blocked and then suddenly spurted out damaging one of his eyes. ‘Il est vraiment demoralisé,’ said Raymond.
Elliot, who had just started piano lessons, was persuaded to play one of his first pieces and
then Clement surprised us all with a short recital. On several occasions he had come shyly to listen when I played. When I showed him how to find the melody of Au Clair de la Lune, he had learnt it in seconds. He had been having lessons for six months now, he told us, and clearly he has inherited the musical gene in Claudette’s side of the family. Elliot was impressed.
As we left, with a dozen eggs and a small electric radiator, we admired the new heavy sliding glass doors enclosing the hangar. Jean-Michel’s plastic screens had finally fallen to pieces, they explained. The room now looked so smart, I thought, there would be no chance of our ever returning the space to ‘non habitable’. The great lemon tree in its tub on wheels was hung with fruit, and together with all the other sun-loving plants huddled along one wall, still awaited warmer weather. The air was chilly, the sky bright with stars. We were all tired. As I lay in bed that first night, wondering if I would sleep, the house put its arms around me and the next thing I knew was the call of Jean-Michel’s hens as daylight filtered through the window. I got up quietly and found the small bellows. The still hot ashes soon glowed and then a small flame licked the kindling and rose through the dry sticks to light the fire for a new day.
Later, while Adam shopped, I went to the bank. The Credit Agricole was completely transformed. Where once we would wait in conversational lines amid the potted plants, wondering if we had picked the slowest queue yet again, where talk was of prunes and maize and cows and Brussels, of celebratory meals and new babies; all was now space and silence. The counter was gone where fresh-faced young men, it was usually men, in smart jackets in deep emerald green or bright blue would smile and chat as they tapped with beautifully manicured fingers into their small computers. Now, around the newly curved, bare wall, four machines apparently coped with everything. At a tiny desk in the centre perched Miss Chewing-Gum. We called her that when, some two years ago, she first joined the young men. With her pale skin, heavy eyelids and full greased lips in perpetual motion we were surprised that no one checked this mesmerising habit which gave her such a, probably false, air of insolence. In her new role as receptionist and the only human being in sight, it seemed that she had been told. She chewed no longer. A slight waft of sympathy came my way as I explained why I wished to change my house insurance into my name. For the first time, Mike’s original death certificate in French did not need translation. I waited while she telephoned, some distance it seemed, for instructions.
Reflections of Sunflowers Page 18