C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  11

  THE GIRDLE OF HIPPOLYTA

  Never mind the jungle. My search for a dishy copine has got off to a very bad start. Despite Zumbach’s warning, I somehow expected Jolibois to be a town full of peachy French maidens in diaphanous summer dresses, just waiting for an invitation to come up and see my hypothetical chickens. Instead, I find a population of elegant walnuts; of mothers and matrons, unfailing in their kindness and – largely because they’re all married – unthinkable in their birthday suits.

  This is what makes my failure with the beaming temptress behind the fish counter at Carrefour in St Juste – my Botticelli in white wellies – all the more galling. I know she had me down as a two-kilos-of-monkfish type of fellow. But earlier this week I unwisely changed my mind about a single salmon fillet she’d wrapped for me. And she now has a special scowl reserved for the English cheapskate. Angleterre, nul point.

  Worse, much worse, is to come with the girl in the tourist office. I’ve just popped in to ask for the number of the tennis-club president when I catch sight of this tousle-haired coquette with an irresistibly sulky expression and all sorts of tempting curves squeezed into a lacy top. I want to turn and flee; to catch my breath, plan what I’m going to say. But it’s too late. She’s already seen me.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ she says, fixing me with two very bored green eyes. I’ve seen the cat gaze at cornered mice like this.

  ‘Vous avez le numéro du club de tennis?’ I stammer. Why didn’t they teach us chat-up lines as part of French A-level? And why am I speaking in such a high voice?

  The concept of supplying a single telephone number contravenes the French law of paperwork generation, so Mademoiselle fishes out a thick wad of A4 listing all the club presidents in Jolibois: voluntary gymnastics, former POWs, pigeon-fanciers, the works. Les Français love their clubs, because clubs mean committees. And committees, naturally, mean lots more lovely paperwork.

  ‘Voilà,’ she says, pointing at a name on the list. ‘Jean-Michel Faure, le président du club de tennis.’

  ‘Ah, oui,’ I reply without enthusiasm. ‘Merci.’ The truth is that, without quite knowing why, I want to stay longer in this glamorous woman’s orbit; want to ask her more questions. Unfortunately, Mademoiselle’s list blows clean out of the water all the other spurious enquiries about clubs and associations and societies that have suddenly occurred to me in the face of such a thrilling cleavage.

  ‘C’est tout?’ she huffs, the cat prodding its half-dead prey with a clawed paw. ‘Is that all?’

  The silence between us opens up like an abyss. And in the very depths of the abyss, a lightbulb illuminates.

  ‘Erm … evening classes.’

  ‘Quoi?’

  ‘That’s right. I’m interested in doing some … some … pottery.’

  ‘There are no evening classes in Jolibois.’ She shrugs.

  ‘Well, can you suggest … a decent go-karting track?’ And so it goes on, I making ever-more-desperate enquiries, she responding with pamphlets and irritation.

  We’re getting on like a house on fire. I’m the house, and she’s les pompiers, grimly pumping gallons of French pond-water into the blaze. I’ve got to do something; something brave. Man or mouse, Wrighty? ‘Mouse,’ squeaks a familiar voice in my head, just as I become aware of another man in the tourist office, saying something to the girl in an accent I vaguely recognize.

  Oh my God. It’s me.

  ‘I don’t suppose … perhaps … if you had the time … you would consider joining me for a drink … one evening?’

  The eyes of the cat widen, as if the dying mouse between its paws had just begun a striptease to the tune of ‘La Vie en Rose’. For a nasty moment, I think she’s going to be sick. And then she replies with the magical three-letter word:

  ‘Non.’

  ‘Très bien,’ I say cheerfully, the butt-naked mouse attempting to cover itself with a few shreds of dignity before racing for the door. ‘Et merci pour tous ces papiers.’

  But the cat isn’t listening. She adopts a look of regal disgust, huffs and stalks away in search of fresher game.

  Back in the sanctuary of La Folie, I have a blinding epiphany: so this is why all les Anglais buying houses in France are already hitched. I’m still turning the thought over in my mind when the cat – my cat – comes crashing through the cat-flap at 120 mph, wild-eyed, electric-furred, as though it has seen a ghost. Rural France is going to take a lot of getting used to. For both of us.

  12

  NOVEMBER: THE APPLES OF THE HESPERIDES

  A puff of wind rustles through the acacias in front of the barn, and a single leaf falls. Then another, and another. When I first came to La Folie, I swore I would watch the passing of the seasons; that I would notice every detail of the cycle from birth to death and back again. Yet autumn has already started, and I never noticed it begin. In the straw-coloured frazzle of late summer, I never saw the first fox-mark of brown on the season’s endpaper, the first tinge of gold smudging the brilliant green of the leaves all around.

  With each shortened day, the house grows a shade cooler, as autumn begins to leach summer’s warmth from its thick stone walls. I like being cold – I’d rather suffer in the frozen wastes of the Arctic than be scorched in the Sahara – but a warm blast now greets me when I open the back door, as if I were a cat shut in a fridge. And with only a week to go before Mum and Dad’s visit, I still have no logs for the wood-burning stove.

  Peter Viola, my new friend from the aeroclub, phones to ask if I want to go flying with him.

  ‘Bit too nippy for the French, but I don’t see why that should keep us on the ground,’ he says, as casually as if he were leaning against a Sopwith Camel with a Woodbine between his teeth.

  I know I should really be going through the local papers, phoning up farmers who have bois de chauffage for sale. But the chance to climb into that clear blue sky is irresistible. And I’ve never flown in a tiny microlight such as Peter’s Thruster, which looks as if it has been bolted together from a Meccano set, and then given a set of wings that fell out of a Rice Krispies packet. I tell Peter I’ll be there in half an hour.

  ‘Bit of wind in your hair will do you a power of good, old boy,’ he says.

  On the way to the aerodrome at St Juste, I stop to buy bread at a village bakery. The door is open, though the shop is deserted. Lunchtime.

  ‘Je viens,’ calls a man’s voice from next door, in the middle of a mouthful.

  While I wait, I glance at the cards on the noticeboard: adverts for broken-down Renault 4s and chest freezers, for straw by the bale, and twin-bladed girobroyeurs to bolt to the back of your tractor for cutting the grass. At the bottom, beneath the neatly written cards, is a scrap of paper from a child’s squared exercise book, scribbled with the words Bois de chauffage and a telephone number.

  The baker emerges through a bead curtain, wiping his mouth with a napkin. ‘Excusez-moi, Monsieur,’ he says, apologetically. ‘Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?’

  I pay for one of his chestnut-coloured baguettes, and then point at the scrap of paper. Does he know the man who’s selling the firewood?

  He wanders over. ‘Ah, oui, Jean-Louis.’ He nods. ‘Il est super-sympa.’

  I jot down the number, fold up the paper and place it carefully in my wallet. Then I head on down to the aerodrome.

  ‘Hop in, old boy,’ says Peter, strands of his white hair blowing in the wind as he stands beside the Thruster. ‘I’ll just finish the pre-flight, and then we’ll fire her up.’

  So I strap myself into the leather bucket seat, and watch while Peter meticulously does his checks, pulls a small Argyll sock off the pitot tube, and bundles himself into the seat on my left. I watch as he scans the instruments, pointing his finger at each gauge and dial in turn. Then he points at the chart on his lap, its surface covered in an idiosyncratic array of coloured pins, and turns to me.

  ‘My own patent navigation system,’ he tells me with a wink. ‘Never fails, even
in thick fog.’ Then he flicks two switches, presses the button on a yellow stopwatch attached to the corner of the chart, and turns the key in the ignition. The engine just above our heads kicks straight into life, and I reach for my headset to silence the din. I wish my Luscombe were that easy to start.

  ‘Saint Juste, Golf-Kilo-Oscar, je roule pour le point d’arrêt.’ That same English accent, the one I heard over the airport tannoy the very first time I came to St Juste and saw the yellow insect falling from the sky. And now here we are together, in that flimsy flying-machine of tubular steel and stretched nylon, about to commit aviation.

  My low-slung seat feels so close to the ground that I could be in a rowing boat. If I were to reach out of the open doorway beside me, I could touch the tarmac with my fingertips. And then Peter opens the throttle, there is a furious roar, and we hurtle sideways down the runway.

  ‘Blimey,’ I announce, grabbing the strut beside me and clinging on.

  Peter laughs as we soar skywards, still pointing sideways.

  ‘Er … aren’t you going to straighten up?’ I gulp, still holding my strut.

  ‘This is straight,’ says Peter, his voice crackling in my headset. He taps the turn coordinator, and indicates the balance-ball perfectly centred in its spirit-filled tube.

  ‘Righty-ho.’

  ‘The struts do create some strange optical illusions,’ he adds. ‘For weeks I thought I’d never be able to land the thing.’

  ‘I was the same with my Luscombe.’

  ‘Yes, but at least you can land it now. Whereas I …’ Peter’s voice breaks off. ‘I don’t know why you’re laughing,’ he says, with a frown that finally breaks into a grin as bright as the sunlit clouds.

  It feels so good to be in the sky again. Here, amid the scudding cumulus, I feel like I’ve come home.

  That evening, I phone Jean-Louis, the man with the firewood, who is indeed super-sympa. I like the way he insists that I survey his logs first, so that I can be sure what I’m buying, before agreeing to purchase a stack of them. I am about to tell him about the problem of getting the wood up the drive, and then think better of it. I can always make a couple of trips in the Espace, if he won’t deliver.

  Next day, we are standing side by side in torrential rain, next to a pile of logs about the size of a railway carriage.

  ‘Oui,’ I say expertly. ‘That’s wood, all right.’

  Jean-Louis laughs. He turns out to be a big, genial sheep-farmer, with an iron-age haircut and a beard so vast that I almost feel I’m talking to him through a hole in the hedge.

  ‘I’ve had it with logs,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, really?’ I haven’t brought a coat, and the rain is already beginning to drip down my neck. I’ve had it with logs, too.

  ‘It’s too much work. Maintaining the trees until they mature. Felling them. Shifting the trunks and branches. Sawing to length. Splitting into logs. Stacking them like this. Seasoning them for two or three years, because no one wants new wood.’

  ‘But this looks like good wood. Is it all oak?’

  ‘It’s excellent wood. About ninety-five per cent oak, with a little chestnut and cherrywood thrown in. How much do you want?’

  ‘Erm, enough for one winter, for one person.’ Somehow we agree on three cordes, or nine stères, which is the same as nine cubic metres. Except that in some villages locally, there are four stères to a corde. All I know is that it is a colossal amount of wood. Many fine trees have given up their lives for this. Several of the logs look too good for burning, and should really be carved into the statues of obscure saints.

  ‘And how are you going to collect it?’ asks Jean-Louis. I nod ruefully at the Espace. ‘Well, I was wondering …’ I tell him about the vertiginous and labyrinthine drive to La Folie, about the way entire mule-trains have slipped and fallen to their deaths up there, and how it takes a Sherpa with crampons and an oxygen-mask just to deliver the post.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he says, smiling. ‘I can deliver it for you.’

  I toy with the idea of falling to the ground and kissing his wellies, but in the end simply croak ‘Impeccable, merci,’ and decide that Jean-Louis is the best person in the world.

  ‘You’ll need to clear those branches to get a trailer of logs through,’ says Monsieur Valette – or Gilles, as I must now call him – when I drop in at his house to tell him my news. ‘I’ll bring the tractor,’ he says.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course. You get in the front-loader with your chainsaw, and I’ll lift you up to cut the branches.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Non, non, it’s the best way,’ he says, shaking his finger at me.

  So there we are, the pair of us, looking like the driver and gunner of a secret weapon on Dad’s Army, as our fearsome attack vehicle rumbles up the drive to La Folie. I’m Pike – fifteen-foot up in the air and wanting to come down – and Gilles is Captain Mainwaring, furiously gesturing at branches for me to massacre, and muttering whatever is the French for ‘stupid boy’. My chainsaw is only my second manly power-tool, and I’m still rather scared of it. I’m sure it doesn’t say anything in the safety notes about kneeling in the raised scoop of a tractor and swinging the razor-toothed roarer above your head. Afterwards, I make a big show of counting all my fingers. Gilles glares at me, but I don’t know what he means.

  A day before the arrival of my parents, the sun is blazing out of a clear autumn sky as another tractor labours up the drive, in a storm-cloud of groaning cogs and grinding gears.

  Jean-Louis the woodsman beams at me through the dense foliage of his beard, and I wave back at him. He mouths the word ‘Ici?’

  ‘Oui.’ I nod. ‘Là.’

  With a hiss and a clunk, the trailer rises. Two tonnes of seasoned oak thunders off the back of it, sending up a cloud of dust that shimmers in the sunlight.

  Six o’clock, and the cat and I are sitting on the terrace, admiring the gold and rust and russet and ochre and chestnut colours of the trees across the valley.

  This is our primary thinking time. Tonight, with the logs all stacked in the barn, I have that pleasant muscular tiredness which comes of having done heavy work, and that blissful mental sense of having deserved a break. It’s not a feeling I remember ever having had as a theatre critic, however late into the night I worked.

  Six o’clock has always been my favourite time of day. Six o’clock in my imagination is drinks before dinner, the whole family gathered in the kitchen as my mother cooks something from Elizabeth David and the evening lies ahead of us like the prospect of summer. Even in Bogotá, when I was ten years old, and slurping Pepsi through a straw rather than sipping pineau or Pastis. A quarter of a century after my parents left Colombia, I can still picture the dusk beginning to silhouette the flowers outside, and the guard slouched in his box by the gate. Probably drunk again. Indoors, the maids bustle around, drawing curtains and lighting lamps.

  Aged ten, I am plump and bespectacled, with a head too big for my bumptious body. My favourite things are Spitfires, pipe organs and Greek irregular verbs. My father, home from the office, looks at his watch and clinks ice into two glasses. With his pewter measure, he pours a tot of Johnny Walker into each. Then a splash of water for him, and rather more soda for Mum.

  ‘Why do you measure it, Dad?’ I ask, watching him from the piano stool.

  ‘Because then I know it’s just the right amount.’

  ‘So why don’t you measure the water?’

  He grins at me. ‘Touché.’ And I know what this means, because we have learned it in fencing at Windlesham. I like fencing, because it is like the sword-fights they do in The Four Musketeers. But one boy – a wild, red-haired lad from Australia – stomped out of our first lesson, because he thought it was going to be about how to build fences, and he couldn’t see how sword-fighting would ever be useful. Now that I am contemplating keeping chickens and even sheep, I think he may have had a point.

  Each night in Bogotá, my father sw
itches on the shortwave radio, and he and my mother listen to the seven o’clock news on the World Service. Except that it isn’t seven o’clock in England. It is midnight, and I shiver as –in another universe – the funereal bong of Big Ben strikes the hours. I suppose Mum and Dad listen to the dark, serious voice of the newsreader because it makes them feel closer to home. But something about it makes me feel hollow inside.

  A few times, I think I hear a car on the drive up to La Folie. And then it’s definitely them. It must be, because the car’s headlights are on full beam, even though it’s a dazzling afternoon.

  In the passenger seat, Mum smiles and waves. I point out a parking spot for my father, under the ancient box tree in front of the house, even though I know he won’t sleep until his Volvo is safely garaged in the barn.

  They climb out of the car, looking tired and happy. Mum and I do our kiss-hug thing, and then I hug my dad, too. Dad and I haven’t been doing this very long, and I suspect he thinks it’s a bit modern, but – standing stiff as a board – he humours me, nonetheless.

  ‘Golly,’ exclaims Mum, knuckles on hips, gazing out across the valley.

  ‘Gosh,’ exclaims Dad, looking up at the house.

  ‘So you found it all right, then?’ I say, not yet ready to face their struggle to find something polite to say about La Folie. Better to allow them to debrief fully about the traffic-jams en route, and the cunning shortcuts that Dad found to avoid them, and the unsporting dead-ends that weren’t marked on their 1973 Michelin road-map. Which is, I presume, why they’re only three-quarters of an hour early.

  ‘It’s certainly remote, isn’t it?’ says Mum.

  ‘That’s what I was looking for,’ I reply, already on the defensive.

  ‘The stonework’s very fine,’ says my dad. ‘And I’m sure that big crack is nothing to worry about.’ He points at a tiny chink in the crumbling render of the facade. My mother is staring at le Pug Rouge, her old car.

  ‘How funny,’ she says. ‘I’d forgotten you had it.’