A Year in the Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  "Tell him I never eat animals that I have to peel myself."

  "We must not refuse. We will be his new neighbours."

  I felt a little jolt of happiness. This was the first time I could remember Alexa referring to anything between us as "we". It was "my house" we were trying out, and if we went round to any of her friends it was always that they wanted to meet me, not that they'd invited us over.

  "OK, I guess we can always bury the rabbits once it gets dark."

  "No, I will cook them."

  Alexa thanked Monsieur Augème for the offer, and he went off up the field after the hunters, who'd almost reached the tree line, and were fanning out into hunting formation again, their fluorescent jackets bobbing about like floats on a sea of ploughed mud. The sheep in the next field instinctively moved away en masse from the men with the guns. Who said sheep were stupid?

  Monsieur Lassay came over an hour or so later and we conducted our negotiations around the kitchen table. Today he was looking even more English than last time, with a waxed jacket and shiny elastic-sided brown boots.

  He'd brought the promesse de vente with him, a multi-paged booklet with large blanks for the description of the house, the land, the present and future owners. He'd filled in some of the answers in tidy blue ink, and talked me through the various stages of buying. I had to sign the form, deposit a cheque for ten per cent of the price, and would then have a seven-day cooling-off period during which I could retract my offer without losing my deposit. If I pulled out after that, though, the seller got the ten per cent. Meanwhile, the seller couldn't sell to anyone else, even if they made a better offer. The form gave a date, two months away, on which we would sign the final sale agreement, the acte de vente. It all seemed clear, except for one thing.

  "You are lawyer or man who sells?" I asked.

  He nodded - fair question. "In small towns, we are often both the lawyer and the agent. People ask us to sell their houses because they know we can do the legal work for them." He fluttered the termite, lead, and asbestos ("amiante") certificates at me, and a stapled wad of papers that listed the exact surface area of the property - each room, the barn, the garden, the orchard, the fields, everything measured down to the last square millimetre by a certified surveyor.

  "I find lawyer also, me?"

  "If you want. Or I can do the administration for you, too. There are not many lawyers here, and a Parisian will not do it for you." He snorted a laugh at the ridiculousness of this idea.

  "What you must do for me, legal things?"

  "Oh, I make sure that the commune, the local mayor's office, does not want to buy the house for municipal housing,. But he won't -" He placed a reassuring hand on my arm. "I make sure that the railway company does not want to send a new railway line through this valley - which they won't. There is already the TGV line south of here. I prepare the final acte de vente."

  "How much I pay you for this?"

  He didn't look at all offended by the question. "Me personally, not very much. The state, a lot. You must pay five per cent of the price in tax."

  "Five per cent?"

  "Yes, and it was ten until recently."

  Even with the extra five per cent on top, the price was still irresistible. Monsieur Lassay unscrewed his chic black Mont Blanc fountain pen, and I signed two copies of the forms, one for the seller, one for myself. I wrote out a cheque and wafted it around my warm new kitchen to dry the ink. Alexa was smiling encouragingly at me. Monsieur Lassay was looking as content as a man who is about to receive a cheque usually does.

  "Can we come here also next weekend?" I asked.

  "Yes, I think that is no problem. After all, the house is almost yours. You will let Monsieur Augème continue to use the fields?"

  "Why not?" I shrugged.

  "Good. I will go to see him and reassure him. He wants to begin planting."

  "What plant?"

  "I don't know. But do not worry, these old farmers are all practically biological."

  "Biological?"

  "Organic," Alexa translated.

  We all wished each other "bon dimanche" and Monsieur Lassay dug his car keys out of his jacket pocket. "You are so lucky here with your generator," he said. "In the town we have no electricity. It is like medieval times. We cannot read after six in the evening."

  Oh, how smug I felt.

  The following weekend could have been programmed by a software company making an interactive film called A Hundred Reasons Why You'd Be Stupid Not to Own a Slice of Rural France.

  They'd got the weather exactly right - crisp air that dried the mud and made you want to bound out along the winding country tracks. They'd zapped the hunters (who, Monsieur Augème said, weren't trying to kill rabbits after all - they only came to this part of the valley because a wild pig had been causing damage to some new tree plantations). The programmers had given Alexa an enhanced libido and a newfound desire to make huge meals out of all the local produce we bought at the market (which in turn had been recreated using picturesque rural images provided by the French Ministry of Food Clichés). And the software writers even managed to get mains electricity restored, by keying in some agreement from Électricité de France to reinstate its plans to sell nuclear-power technology to Third-World countries and thereby guarantee jobs for life for its French workers.

  I'd have been crazy to pull out of the deal. I was drinking white Loire Valley wine and wondering which part of Alexa to kiss next as my seven-day deadline tiptoed discreetly past the bedroom window on its way to Lassay's office.

  Buying my own bit of France seemed to cause a subtle change in my mentality. I found that I understood a lot more about Parisians' attitude to work. Workdays became a mild irritant inserted between weekends. Friday afternoons were little more than a short period after lunch during which you checked the internet for traffic jams on the routes out of town.

  My tea room project hibernated through January, but I didn't fret. I was much more interested in Monsieur Lassay's progress through the legal morass. Whenever I called up for news, he always took the basic Alexa line on housebuying - everything seems OK.

  One Saturday afternoon when Alexa and I were down at the maison, which I was renting every weekend, Jean-Marie popped his nose in the kitchen door while we were having coffee. He was in the region "to kiss the caïd again", he said.

  "The caïd?" Alexa asked.

  Jean-Marie was much too interested in Alexa's physical attributes to bother answering. He asked who the "beautiful young lady" was, and held her hand for so long I thought he was trying to engrave her fingerprints on his palm. He was standing over her like a heron waiting for the right moment to skewer a poor, innocent carp.

  And the worst thing was, Alexa was smiling into his eyes and loving every second of it.

  "Do you want to look around the place?" I asked Jean-Marie. As far as I was concerned he could start at the top end of the orchard and keep going till he got stuck in the mud.

  "Or have some coffee?" Alexa offered.

  "Oh no, I would love to, but I must go," he said, tearing himself away from Alexa with an almost audible ripping of flesh. "Le caïd a un caillou a la place du coeur."

  She simpered admiringly at his bit of poetry, and he was gone, leaving a cloud of hot testosterone in his wake.

  "What did that mean?" I asked.

  "I don't know. The caïd has a heart of stone," Alexa said, gazing fondly at the door. "He is very friendly, your boss."

  "Friendly? No, that was him in a bad mood. When he's feeling friendly, he bends straight down and gives you oral sex."

  "Oh, you are jealous!" she said, as if it was somehow perverse to object to his lusting after her.

  "Yes, I am jealous. Who wouldn't be?"

  I thought Alexa would be flattered to hear this, and I was right.

  I was lying, though. I wasn't jealous, I was mad. What a bastard coming on to my girlfriend like that, right in front of me. If I'd been out weeding the potatoes he'd have invited her for a
ride in his company shagmobile. Or at the very least charmed a phone number out of her.

  A rapper would have called up his homies to organize a little drive-by. But I was a gentleman farmer (well, almost), so I decided to take less violent action.

  I was pleased to find that Stéphanie hadn't changed her password, and still had her cute habit of deleting messages but not emptying her trash. What's more, she didn't seem to realize that the "messages sent" folder was storing all her correspondence for snoopers to read. People like that really shouldn't be allowed to send emails about illegal food imports.

  I stayed on late one evening to click back through her recent mail. It was a Wednesday, when the offices were emptier than normal because lots of mums took Wednesdays off when their kids didn't have school.

  So there was a deathly silence on my floor as I whistled my way out of my office and into Stéphanie's.

  The first signs of what I took to be the "caïd's" presence came about a month earlier, with an email from Jean-Marie saying, "je m'en occupe" - "I'll deal with it" - in reply to Stéphanie saying "il faut absolument calmer le jeu avec fn". Calm the game with FN?

  I did a search for messages containing "FN", whoever he or she was. I found her warning Jean-Marie that together, FN and "chasse et pêche" could cause "graves ennuis" in Jean-Marie's "circonscription", as well as for the company. Could it be right that "hunt and peach" would cause "serious boredoms" concerning Jean-Marie's foreskin removal? I would have to ask Alexa to translate for me.

  I printed the message off and went further back in time, to an email sent just before the demos outside our office building. That was when I'd found out that Jean-Marie was importing British beef.

  The message was long and carefully typed, with all the accents included, and seemed to be some kind of circular. Stéphanie had forwarded it to Jean-Marie, then "deleted" it. It was from a representative of the Front National, a name that even I recognized. FN, of course. This was the extreme-right political party that had got to the last round of the presidential elections in 2002. The email seemed to be written entirely in euphemisms, but I thought I got the message. This was a time for patriotism, not internationalism. Globalization was a cancer eating away at the French way of life. The FN would be reminding the people of this at the municipal elections in May, in partnership with its associates in Chasse et Pêche. All French companies, especially those with interests in the rural economy, should remember this.

  This could have been a simple "buy French" message, if Stéphanie hadn't added a little note when she forwarded it to Jean-Marie - if I understood right, she was asking him if he intended to stand for re-election in May. Re-election? So Jean-Marie was a politician as well as a seller of minced beef and a future cafe owner?

  I printed off the other emails that I wanted to reread and got out of there.

  * * *

  I was careful about how I tackled Alexa for the translations I couldn't find in my dictionary. I wasn't sure how long the effects of Jean-Marie's seduction-by-hypnosis technique would last.

  We were sitting in the cinema, waiting for the start of a Franco-German documentary about the working conditions of the Chinese girls who made a certain well-known brand of girls' dolls.

  We'd just bought our overpriced ice creams from an underpaid usherette when I casually asked, à propos of nothing, who Chasse et Pêche were. It turned out that they were a rural political party, formed by hunters and fishermen to defend their right to ignore EU laws against the massacre of any endangered species unwise enough to migrate across France. And they seemed to put human migrants in the same bag as feathered ones - they were all fair game.

  I'd heard, I mentioned to Alexa as we watched an ad for a massive diesel-powered 4WD, that the Chasse et Pêche might form an alliance with the FN for the municipal elections in May.

  This didn't surprise Alexa, who bit unconcernedly into her chocolate Cornetto.

  Who exactly got elected in municipal elections? I asked.

  "My horse," she said.

  "Uh?"

  "My horse of towns and villages and arrondissements." She was irritated that I didn't understand, although the music for this never-ending ad for the gas-guzzling monsters was making conversation, even for people who spoke the same language, almost impossible. "Les maires!" she yelled in my ear, just after the music had stopped.

  "Oh, mayors," I said, rubbing my numbed ear, and wondering why I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  I sat back and prepared to be convinced that I shouldn't buy myself any more Chinese-manufactured dolls.

  As soon as I got home - alone, because Alexa didn't feel sexy after such a depressing film (why go and watch the damn thing with me, then?, I didn't ask) - I went on to the French government website and found the proof I wanted.

  The mayor of Trou was a certain Jean-Marie Martin, "local entrepreneur and landowner". He'd been elected as an independent candidate, but, clicking around on other election results in the region, I saw that he'd benefited from surprisingly low percentages for the FN and Chasse et Pêche, who usually got high scores in nearby rural constituencies.

  Call me suspicious, but this set me wondering about "friendly" Jean-Marie. It was about one in the morning. Madame Hippo was upstairs dreaming of stomping through reed-beds in Central Africa. There were only a few isolated shouts and laughs from passing revellers outside, and the distant thud of music from the gay bar on the corner of the street. The relative silence helped me piece together fragments of doubt that had been blowing around in my mind like scraps of torn-up newspaper.

  What kind of man, I wondered, arranges for someone to get a bonus of a few hundred euros that are to be paid back to him as rent for his absent daughter's apartment? It ought to have been pigeon feed to a businessman as rich as Jean-Marie. Unless, of course, his whole life revolved around never losing out.

  So, my thoughts ran on, what was I to think about the fact that it was Jean-Marie who had so kindly introduced me to Monsieur Lassay? And lent me a car - free of charge - to go and visit the place?

  It was a thought that kept me awake for the rest of the night.

  Next morning, I called Lassay "to see how things were progressing". As usual "everything was in hand", "what was there to worry about?" etc etc. What indeed. I made an appointment to meet him tor a more detailed progress report on the following Sunday hinchtime.

  I then took Nicole out to lunch to a restaurant that just opened up near our office, where the service bordered on the slavish. It made a refreshing change to be treated with so much respect.

  I hadn’t seen much of Nicole recently, because she didn't come to many of our "committees". I'd assumed this was for two reasons - one, we weren't at a stage where we were spending the budgets she'd set aside for us, and two, she had real work to get on with.

  As a slightly chubby young waiter handed us the menus, hand-chalked on small blackboards, Nicole explained that I was wrong on the first count. My Tea Is Rich was spending quite a lot. Creating our logo (which looked to me like "My Tea Is Rich" written in beige Times Roman italics) had cost a small fortune. And the mortgages on our future premises were expensive, given the neighbourhoods they were in. Though this didn't matter too much, Nicole said, because the premises had been let out to a chain of discount shoe stores on short-term leases.

  Premises? Mortgages? Short-term discount shoes? Jean-Marie had been much busier than I thought.

  But I wasn't really shocked to learn all this. If she'd told me that Jean-Marie had bought up the state of Darjeeling and had every other tea plantation in Asia napalmed, I don't think I'd have done more than raise an eyebrow.

  I ate oysters, which I could now slurp down without thinking of bronchitis, and an inch-thick fillet of smoked haddock in a mustard sauce, served with a "tian" - a sort of courgette flan. This, washed down with a light white Sancerre, cost about the price of a bad pub sandwich in London.

  Nicole talked me through the promesse de vente that had been lying
, almost forgotten, on the desk in my bedroom for the past few weeks.

  Everything standard, she said, the two-month deadline for final completion was shorter than usual, but this was presumably because I didn't have to sell a house to finance the transaction, so things were less complicated.

  Was there any way of pulling out of the deal if I wanted to, I asked.

  Nicole finished swallowing a mouthful of her seared cod and considered this.

  Frowning, concentrating hard on a problem, she was, I decided, attractive in a dowdy sort of way. She fiddled with a slender gold necklace, put a clear-varnished nail to lips that still bore traces of her faint pink lipstick even halfway through lunch. She was a woman who looked after herself, and a tactile person, even though you had to watch her closely to notice it.

  A flicker of humour creased the laugh (or care) lines at the corner of her subtly made-up eyes.

  "You want to buy a country chateau, no?" she asked.

  "I'm not sure any more."

  "In that case," she said, leaning closer as if the businesswoman at the next table might eavesdrop above the voice in her mobile phone, "the classic way to stop a transaction for a ouse is with your bank. If hit refuses to give you the credit."

  "The loan?"

  "Yes, the loan. If hit refuses to give you the loan, you can recuperate your ten per cent."

  "Ah."

  Even a swill of the fruity wine did nothing to raise my spirits. There was no chance of the bank turning me down. When the bank manager had seen my salary, my rent and the price of the house, he not only gave me a mortgage, he'd also tried to sell me a car loan, asked why I didn't also buy myself a small apartment in Paris, and suggested I avail myself of the bank's instant "thousand euros cash for small emergencies" facility.

  "Is that the only way I can pull out?" I pleaded with Nicole, as the waiter refilled our glasses.

  "Yes, if the ouse does not fall down." She giggled, looking shyly around the restaurant to make sure that her delicate laughter was not bothering the other customers.