C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  ‘How did you do that?’ says Simon, with a slight edge in his voice.

  ‘Hop in,’ I shout, revving the engine till it screams like a jet. ‘We can still make the ferry.’

  No, we can’t. Every time we slow down, the engine judders to a halt, the orange death lamp glows, and the rumbling swish of tyres on tarmac returns.

  ‘What are you going to have for breakfast on the ferry?’ I ask, in one of these silences. ‘The ferry ticket includes a twenty-five-pound food voucher.’

  Simon smiles and nods.

  ‘I’m having the works,’ he says, narrowing his eyes to peer into the far distance, as if he can see his breakfast hovering like a mirage above the horizon. ‘Egg, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomato, baked beans, black pudding, fried bread, ketchup and a jolly good cup of builder’s tea on the side.’

  Against the odds, we manage to squeeze on to a ferry that puts us only an hour behind schedule. But the restaurant is full, so we end up in the bar, where we spend our voucher on a limp sandwich each and twenty quid’s worth of crisps and fizzy drinks.

  ‘Good sandwiches,’ observes Simon. ‘And at least I got my cup of tea.’

  Greasy and burping, we stand at the back of the ferry, watching the propellers churn up the green-brown waters of the English Channel, and our wake stretching behind us like a chalk road. ‘Goodbye, England,’ I whisper to myself, as the white cliffs of Dover recede into a grey smudge on the horizon.

  It is a long, sweaty trip beneath the baking French sun. Every journey’s length is magnified by the heat inside the vehicle multiplied by the level of uncertainty of reaching one’s destination. And this one feels very uncertain indeed. With the van as our patient, Simon and I are a pair of trainee paramedics, attempting to keep a heart-attack victim alive. By the end of it all, I feel as drained as the water bottles we have heaped behind our seats.

  We have arrived, though not quite at La Folie. Our night-stop is a quaint chambres d’hôte a couple of miles up the road from my future, where I picture Monsieur Zumbach pacing the empty rooms, stroking the walls, bidding farewell to his past. The place I’ve booked is an ivy-clad farmhouse, whose gnarled antiques are garishly offset by the lurid orange wallpaper. Dinner is a communal affair at a long oak table with four other Brits who are passing through. All of them are house-hunting.

  ‘Gosh, you are brave,’ says one of the wives, peering at me as if I were an object in a glass case when I describe my plan.

  ‘And so lucky, too,’ replies the woman opposite her, a gaudy parakeet with dangly earrings and enormous breasts. ‘Fancy finding your house just like that. Malcolm and I have been looking for months, but there are so few swimming-pools in the region. Isn’t that right, Malcolm?’

  ‘Yes, Maureen,’ says Malcolm, dressed entirely in grey, not looking up from the duck leg he is attacking.

  ‘I imagine that struggling French farmers don’t have much time for practising the breast-stroke,’ says Simon. ‘But you could always buy a farm with a big sheep-dip, and convert that into an excellent pool.’

  ‘Oh, no. We couldn’t do that,’ responds Maureen, shaking her head. ‘Could we, Malcolm?’

  ‘No, Maureen,’ says Malcolm, staring at his plate.

  ‘What’s the betting that you end up with Malcolm and the lovely Maureen as your new neighbours?’ asks Simon next morning, as we haul his motorbike out of the back of the van for the ride into Jolibois. Neither of us wants to climb back into that van ever again.

  ‘Fortunately La Folie doesn’t have any neighbours,’ I reply. ‘Would you mind doing this for me?’ I point to my chin-strap.

  ‘Told you the bike would come in useful.’

  Émilie is seated at her desk, smartly dressed in a black suit, when we arrive for our meeting with the notaire.

  ‘Ah, you must be the lovely Émilie. How very charming …’ says Simon, who has a habit of turning into Terry-Thomas at the first sight of a pretty woman.

  ‘Yes, yes, we’ll see you later,’ I reply, pushing him out of the door and ignoring his protestations about how he just wants to look at the property details on the wall.

  Another old friend is waiting when Émilie and I reach the notaire’s office: Monsieur Zumbach, breathless with nerves, all buttoned up in a shirt so well-pressed that someone else must have done it for him. A lady whom I take to be his ex-wife is there, too: a slim, birdlike woman with sculptor’s hands. It was she, I suppose, who carved the worry lines into his medieval misericord. I’m happy to see them leaning their heads together to murmur between themselves; that their connection has not been entirely sundered. I knew that the sale of La Folie was the result of a broken marriage. I was hoping that all the fragments would not have been lost.

  To my surprise, the birdlike woman tiptoes over to me and presents me with a huge bundle of keys. ‘These are for you, Monsieur,’ she says.

  ‘Merci.’

  I lay the bunch of keys carefully under my chair when we all tramp into the wood-panelled office of the notaire, and the woman gives me a quizzical look. But we haven’t signed the papers yet. It feels too soon to take possession.

  The notaire we were expecting – Yves-Pascal Pascaux – is on holiday. This one is a bald, studious man with a cold smile, glinting like flint. I follow everyone else’s lead in treating him with exaggerated respect, which does not appear to dismay him. And then we are all shaking hands and emerge from the stuffy office like relieved cinemagoers at the end of a long and worthy documentary, blinking in the daylight and taking lungfuls of fresh air. Zumbach signals to me that he wants a private word.

  ‘Er, Monsieur Wright,’ he begins, with a nervousness that I find contagious. ‘May I ask you a favour?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s the goldfish. Will you look after them?’

  ‘Bien sûr.’ I laugh, relieved. ‘Is it difficult?’

  ‘Just a little food, and some local gossip every now and then.’

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  He makes a little bow, presses his hands together in thanks, and avoids my gaze. Then he marches away with his head held high, as only a man who has lost everything he once held dear, and yet has held on to his pride, his compassion and his sense of humour, can.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asks Émilie, who has been standing just apart.

  I nod, shaking myself out of my thoughts. ‘He’s quite something, isn’t he?’

  ‘The notaire?’ Émilie wrinkles her nose.

  ‘No, Monsieur Zumbach. He’s become a bit of a hero of mine.’

  ‘So what did he want?’

  ‘He’s left me the goldfish. And I’ve promised to feed them, even though I’m not going to be properly moving in for a couple of months.’

  ‘Fred will look after them.’

  ‘Are you sure your husband is going to want to drive all the way out to La Folie, day after day, just to feed three goldfish?’

  ‘Fred is good with fish,’ she says firmly. And already I feel as if I am entering a different world.

  6

  PA’S OMELETTE

  My heart is thumping as I venture out of the furnace-heat of the afternoon, and into the dairy coolness of the dilapidated French house that I have just bought. Excitement mingles with dread as I tiptoe into each room. Simon strides behind, providing an excited commentary.

  ‘Look at this!’ he says. ‘And look at that! It’s incredible.’

  I’m having the same thoughts. La Folie is such a higgledy-piggledy place that I can’t even remember how many bedrooms there are, and I’m half afraid that a dead body is going to fall out of one of the cupboards.

  ‘In fact, I wish I hadn’t seen it,’ declares Simon. ‘Helen and I are never going to find anywhere as good as this. It’s the perfect place.’

  The French have a reputation for taking all the lightbulbs with them when they move house. Actually, that’s unfair. They don’t just take the lightbulbs. They also take the door handles, radiators, kitchen sink, the works. But it�
��s not the things Zumbach has taken with him that make my mouth gape. It’s the things he has left behind.

  A ping-pong table encrusted with cement. One bent set of chimney-sweep’s brushes and poles. An ornamental MDF throne, six feet high. A sugar bowl in the shape of a golf ball. Two dead bicycles, and one still fighting for breath. More than 150 Kilner preserving jars with perished rubber seals. Four pairs of Empire-building shorts (extra-large). A huge black-and-white television. Enough broken saucepans to cook pot-au-feu for a batallion. A quantity of gherkins. And so on.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ continues Simon. ‘Are you sure he’s already moved out?’

  ‘His wife gave me the keys.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘This stuff was someone’s life,’ I say, ignoring him. ‘It feels like it should be in the Louvre or the Smithsonian or something.’

  To be fair, Zumbach did ask me on the phone if he could leave behind ‘un ou deux trucs’.

  ‘Mais oui, bien sûr,’ I replied, all innocence. I suppose I should have guessed from his tone that he was finding it a lot harder to fit the contents of La Folie into a one-bedroom flat in Limoges than he had expected.

  I thought I was just buying a ramshackle house with three goldfish attached. But I have bought much, much more than that. I am now also the proud possessor of two rotting carts, one ox-drawn plough, the carcass of a 1930s threshing machine, a pigsty, six rabbit hutches, a fearsome dog-kennel, four acres of wild scrubland, an overgrown orchard and a ruined well.

  ‘What exactly is a truc, then?’ asks Simon.

  ‘It’s a whatchamacallit. A dooberry. A thingummyjig.’

  At Simon’s insistence, I telephone Zumbach on my mobile to check when he is planning to pick up the rest of his stuff.

  ‘Ah, non, Monsieur Wright. These are little presents, for you.’

  ‘Ah, merci, Monsieur Zumbach. C’est très … gentil.’

  I walk into the kitchen and suddenly feel guilty rather than self-righteous. For there, on the kitchen table where Émilie and I sat sipping coffee four months ago, is a gift from the foul-tempered ogre: the three simple, unglazed earthenware cups that I had told him were just right for this place.

  Simon is by now in clover. Here is a man who makes an artform out of collecting other people’s discarded trucs. He has already expressed an interest in the MDF throne.

  ‘Helen won’t mind,’ he murmurs. ‘And what about this?’ he asks, holding up the golf-ball sugar bowl. ‘May I have it?’

  ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘It feels more like we both just found all these trucs in a skip than that they’re mine.’ But I am ashamed to discover as soon as Simon expresses an interest in a greasy old teapot, or a wicker basket I had planned to discard, that I begin to wonder if I should keep it. I must learn to stop wanting things, just because someone else wants them. Otherwise, even now, I could end up with a stressful job in banking, two screaming children and a blonde wife who knows everything there is to know about daytime television and plastic surgery.

  Poor Simon looks quite pale as we begin to make a pile of trucs for disposal. He really must learn to stop wanting things, just because no one else wants them.

  ‘Are you quite sure you want to get rid of all this?’ he asks, biting his lip. His eyes mist over as he surveys the broken treasure. ‘Even the Kilner jars? Someone might want those for jam-making.’

  ‘Especially the jars,’ I reply.

  The sky has turned golden and the crickets are whirring in the long grass by the time we finish exploring. The blazing intensity of the afternoon has relented, like a cup of coffee finally cool enough to drink without burning yourself. I can feel the salt caking my face when I smile.

  We sit on the low stone wall at the back of the terrace, drink cold beer out of bottles dripping with condensation, and ponder the mysteries of the universe. Beside us, the three goldfish swim silkily in the cool depths of their stone pool. In the distance, I can hear a train chugging through the trees. The lone pine casts its long shadow like a sundial into the field below and, across the valley, the tiny chapel of St Sauveur glows in the last rays of the disappearing sun.

  ‘It’s good here,’ says Simon. ‘You’ve done well.’

  ‘But that’s just it,’ I reply. ‘I don’t feel I’ve done anything at all. It’s too much. I don’t feel worthy of this place.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ Simon nods. ‘And you will.’

  The trip to the tip is a painful one. In the midday sun, we have sweated to load up the jinxed van, Simon wincing every time he glimpses one of Zumbach’s 150 Kilner preserving jars.

  And, once again, the beast conks out every time we apply the brakes. So we do not apply them.

  ‘Have you ever seen the film Speed?’ asks Simon.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, this is worse,’ he pants, wiping his brow with his forearm as we scream across another roundabout.

  Fortunately, the shimmering roads around Jolibois are very straight, and the local drivers don’t seem much interested in braking, either.

  ‘Do you live here, Messieurs?’ asks the man at the tip, when we finally rattle through the gates. Leaning on a spade, he gazes at our English number-plate as if it were wearing stockings and suspenders.

  ‘Oui,’ I reassure him. I’m not some lightweight weekender; I’m here in France for the long haul. ‘I live at Jolibois.’

  ‘Then you can’t leave your stuff here, Monsieur. This is the Magnac-Laval tip. You’ll have to go back to Jolibois.’

  ‘But there isn’t a tip at Jolibois.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s too bad.’ He wipes his face with the back of his glove, and looks genuinely sorry. Just not quite sorry enough. And then I tell a bare-faced lie. I know this is wrong. I know I shouldn’t have. But I tell him that my parents live in Magnac-Laval, and this is their stuff. He raises his eyebrows.

  ‘In that case, those must all be dismantled for recycling,’ he says, jerking a thumb at our 150 Kilner jars, each with its thick wire hinge attaching the lid to the body.

  ‘But what if someone wants them?’ asks Simon, aghast.

  ‘I know. It’s too bad,’ he says.

  So Simon and I laboriously set about detaching the wire hinges from each jar. Glass into one dumpster. Metal into another. I can see how painful this is for him. It feels like I’ve asked a vegetarian to help me tear the wings off a flock of sparrows.

  We have been dissecting Kilner jars for half an hour when, with an apocalyptic roar, a beige 2CV squeals to a halt beside us, and a man with a black beret and a face like Armageddon leaps out.

  ‘You’re not throwing those away, are you?’ he barks, shaking his fist at the remaining eighty jars. His magnificent moustache twitches like a ferret. Simon and I stare at each other, mouths open. We’ve barely had time to respond before he is loading the jars into the back of the 2CV.

  ‘You shouldn’t throw such things away,’ he shouts over his shoulder, as the car screams off in a cloud of black smoke.

  ‘I told you we should have kept the jars,’ murmurs Simon, gazing up at the clear French sky.

  If you look up at the weather-beaten facade of La Folie, you can see that the house was built along practical, rather than aesthetic, lines. On the right-hand side are two huge barns for cows and other beasts, with space for hay on an upper level. On the left, tacked on almost as an afterthought, is the original human habitation: a primordial kitchen with a living-room attached, which Zumbach called his winter sitting-room, presumably because the temperature therein makes you think it must be winter, even in high summer.

  This sloping, black-beamed space is dominated by the twin hulks of a huge, soot-blackened fireplace and a venerable Godin wood-burning stove, whose right-angled flue belches its smoke into the main chimney – or should do eventually, just as soon as I find a source of decent firewood.

  At the back of the house, buried in the hillside, is the bathroom, which feels as if it will make a safe, if icy, shelter in th
e event of a nuclear war. This gelid place does have one tiny window, opening on to a narrow mineshaft – une cour anglaise, Zumbach called it – that allows no more than a trickle of milky light to penetrate from the world above.

  Upstairs, now cleared of hay, is a huge open space that would make a good dormitory for monks, with a boxy little room carved out of one end of it, like the cab of a Luton van. This is the room I have chosen as my bedroom, though Zumbach constructed a much larger chamber at the back of the house, where Simon is camping during our stay. I prefer the smaller room, because it faces east, has white walls and no curtains. So as soon as the sun rises, I am dazzled into following suit. I like its compact solidity, and the fact that it looks out over the rocky track up to the house. If brigands come in the night, hoping to steal my trucs, I shall hear them. What I shall do after that, I have no idea.

  Next door to these living-quarters is the first barn, the one that Zumbach had begun to renovate. Most of this has been converted into the shell of the projected salon d’été – the summer sitting-room, rising to the exposed rafters – and the rest, on two floors, forms the empty husk of the future maison des amis. On the far side of this is the second barn, home to my non-existent wood store, a complete food chain of scuttling creatures, and yet more rusty-dusty heaps of Zumbach’s endless trucs – many of which, in fairness, must have been discarded by former inhabitants of La Folie, for the whole wretched gallimaufry has a strong whiff of the eighteenth century about it.

  When Simon emerges from his room, already looking bright and ready to start the day, I make some muddy coffee in the scarlet tin pot that Zumbach has left behind. Simon scrambles eggs.

  ‘You should really cook those more slowly,’ I begin to tell him, and then stop myself as I remember that Simon once worked as a short-order breakfast chef in a greasy-spoon café.

  ‘Have no fear,’ chuckles Simon. ‘They’ll be the best you’ve ever tasted.’

  ‘Did I ever tell you about Pa’s omelette?’ I ask.