C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  So begins a chase scene that lasts considerably longer than Titus’s entire time in captivity at La Folie. Unimpressed by the lure of my chicken feed, the escapee is soon three fields away and heading for St Tropez.

  I chase Titus over hill and dale; I gallop after him through hedges and bramble bushes. He flops across a stream; I fall into the stream. Wellies squishing, ripped pyjamas dripping and dropping – the elastic seems to have gone west somewhere in those brambles – I stagger onward, feeling a bit like the Terminator after he’s been through the car-crusher.

  A good thirty-five minutes later, I am so fed up that I head back to the house and resort to an underhand tactic. Delving into the mildewed cupboards in the kitchen, amid the pea-like husks of dead wood-lice and the sticky white globs of spider spawn, I draw out a fearsome weapon: the domestic equivalent of the European nuclear deterrent. It’s not much, but it’s the biggest cooking pot I can find.

  Returning to the fray, I wave the pot meaningfully at Titus. Panicked, he makes a dash for a distant hedgerow. I sprint after him, brandishing my saucepan in one hand, whilst doing my best to hold up my jim-jams with the other.

  This is when the postman’s van comes round the corner of the drive.

  ‘Bon … jour … Mon … sieur,’ he murmurs, winding down the window of his yellow van just halfway.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I pant, holding out my saucepan to receive a pile of leaflets about pork bargains from Netto. ‘Er … j’essaie d’attraper un poulet …’

  ‘Oui?’ He eyes my pyjamas suspiciously. ‘Eh bien, bonne chance … et bon appétit,’ he says, leaving me choking on his exhaust as he zooms off in a cloud of diesel smoke.

  It’s now that Titus makes his big mistake. He attempts to dive through a hole in a fence that is about the size of a ten-euro note. And gets stuck. I narrow my eyes and wish I had a pair of spurs jingling on my boots and a cheroot to chew between my teeth as I advance upon my quarry. Yet Titus still has some fight left in him. The poor chap almost shakes himself to pieces in a froth of red-and-green feathers when I grab him and do my best to contain his thick beating wings.

  By the following morning, and after a night with my gorgeous girls, Titus has come to his senses. He struts out of the chicken house behind them, proud as you like, before leaping up on to a gate and bellowing his lungs out. Cocorico! Cocorico!

  This sound gives me a ridiculous thrill every time I hear it, and the girls seem happy enough, too. They have even stopped bullying each other, now that they have a bloke who makes them feel wanted on an hourly basis. Titus has made his mark. At the start, and in a manner that absolutely does not make me think of the femme fatale in the tourist office, I take it they were just playing hard to get.

  15

  SPACE INVADERS

  One morning, the cat and I are woken from our beauty sleep at the crack of dawn, and not by Titus. Outside my bedroom window, I can hear a jeering mob. Mon Dieu. It’s those women again. And more of them than ever before.

  I know why they’re here. The fat trollops want what’s left of the shrubs at the front of the house. I rub my eyes, and there they are, smugly gazing up at me from below the window, chewing away like bored teenagers. So this is how Potiphar felt. But all he got were seven fat cows, whereas I’ve got twenty-seven fat sheep. And this is not a dream.

  A pair of these buxom Marys – escapees, no doubt, from Old Boulesteix’s place over the hill – turned up yesterday morning. By the afternoon, they were back with a couple of friends. And now the gossip has spread: tasty foliage on offer up at La Folie. Coach parties welcome. Foxgloves and chips all round, please, Mavis.

  As one who had a knack of killing every house-plant I touched in London, I feel strangely protective of these French fronds that are still stretching towards the sky in spite of me and the encroaching russet of autumn. I’ve noticed that Nature manages very much better when I resist the urge to intervene. But I’m not prepared to apply this rule to marauding moutons.

  Hurrying downstairs in my dressing-gown, I dodge the mouse entrails lined up for my approval on the bottom step, and confront the bleating throng. This is considerably more exciting than rushing down to switch off a car alarm in East Dulwich.

  ‘Va-t’en! Va-t’en!’ I yell, scampering around the back of the invaders and clapping wildly at them. The result is instant. The cat rockets up a tree. And the sheep tuck into their breakfast more hungrily than ever. I suppose I just have a way with animals.

  A few minutes later, having found my inner sheepdog, I manage to hurry all the sheep down the drive and they hustle back through their hole in the fence. Afterwards, I feel strangely deflated. It was good having sheep at La Folie, if only for a moment.

  A few days later, Gilles and Josette come to lunch. I’ve invited Old Boulesteix and his wife, too, but Gilles tells me that he’ll be very surprised if Monsieur Boulesteix ever sets foot in La Folie.

  ‘Boulesteix can’t stand les Anglais,’ he coughs.

  ‘Mais pourquoi?’ I ask, opening the oven of the wood-burning stove and taking out the shepherd’s pie that I have cooked. I’ve never met Boulesteix, but his wife always say a friendly Bonjour when I see her in the fields above the house.

  ‘Because he used to rent a farm not far from here, until an Englishman bought it for an amazing price.’

  ‘A bargain?’

  ‘No, a rip-off. That’s why many people around here have lost respect for the English. They pay too much. Il faut marchander. You have to haggle.’

  Like the colours at La Folie, France is changing, too, as the English invaders rush in.

  ‘We do like you, Michael,’ says Gilles. ‘But thanks to the English, the young here can’t afford to buy houses any more.’

  I don’t know what to say to this. I put the shepherd’s pie on the table, and fetch three plates from the wood-burning stove.

  ‘It’s the same for me,’ continues Gilles. ‘When I retire in two years’ time, I’ll have to stop renting the farm. We were going to buy a house with a little piece of land. But now there’s nothing we can afford.’

  I’m thinking about all this when Gilles jumps up and starts waving his hand in the air. Is this what French haggling looks like, I wonder?

  ‘Ah, merde …’ he yells. I notice that the top half of one of his fingers is missing. Mon Dieu. I leap up, too, glancing around for a cat with a French finger in its mouth. But there doesn’t appear to be any blood.

  ‘Those plates are hot!’ he says, glaring at me.

  ‘Er, yes. I’ve heated them.’

  ‘Is that an English thing?’

  I’m not sure how to answer this. I am too busy staring at Gilles’s hand, and the gap where the middle finger should be. Has he burnt it off?

  ‘An accident with a chainsaw,’ he explains. ‘Years ago. It hurt like hell; still does, on cold wet days.’ He doesn’t have much control, he says, over the nerveless severed stump.

  We all think about this for a moment.

  ‘So in France, you never heat the plates?’ I ask.

  Gilles and Josette stare at each other as if I’d just proposed a game of Twister.

  ‘No, we don’t,’ he says slowly. ‘But it’s an interesting idea.’

  And again we sit in silence, basking in simple wonder at our differences as I serve up the shepherd’s pie. Like sodium in a swimming-pool, it fizzes and splutters when it hits the white-hot plates.

  ‘What do you think about me buying some sheep, Gilles?’ I ask, as we stand and survey my jungle pasture after lunch.

  ‘You? Sheep?’ Gilles whistles. I can see him rifling through the first ten things that spring to mind, until he comes up with an acceptably polite way of deflecting my folly. ‘But you haven’t any grass.’

  ‘So what’s that?’ I ask, pointing at the shrubby chaos before us.

  ‘C’est pas joli,’ says Gilles, shaking his head.

  Not pretty? Not pretty! I am stunned. I like my jungle. It looks wild and rustic. Clearly there is a gulf betwee
n French and English notions of what a proper field should look like.

  ‘Suppose I come and mow just one strip with my tractor,’ suggests Gilles, ‘and you see what you think.’

  ‘But won’t that spoil it? And what about all the little creatures who must be living in there?’

  ‘Ah, bof,’ he replies, wagging his finger at me. ‘I won’t cut it too short.’

  ‘Let me think about it,’ I beg. It’s hard to deny that mowing just one strip of jungle would really do no great harm to La Folie’s savage ecosystem, but I’m terrified that Zumbach may turn up for a surprise visit, and see how I’ve violated his wilderness. Months after the sale, it still feels as if La Folie is more his than mine.

  16

  DECEMBER: THE OXEN OF GERYON

  Titus and the Egg Squad are still confined to the small yard outside the pigsty. This seems hard on them, when there is so much other land that they might explore: the grassy haven of what must once have been a beautiful orchard, rough scrub, the depths of the jungle; primordial chicken heaven. Melissa and Mildred, my big white poules de Bresse, appear to have had the same idea, for – just as on that very first day – they have begun to make repeated flapping forays on to the wall of the yard and out into the field beyond, where the abandoned rabbit-hutches and the broken-down old ploughs and harrows lurk in the returning brambles like silted ships on the sea-bed.

  So I build a fence around the field.

  Quite possibly this fence will one day be listed as the worst-constructed fence in the Limousin, except that it is unlikely to last long enough for that. It looks about as taut as a set of curtains held up with half a dozen drawing pins. But at least it is, recognizably, a fence.

  With due pomp and circumstance, I open the gate of the pig-yard and let the girls into their lavish new enclosure. Out they potter, tottering on their high heels, handbags swinging, heads perked on the qui vive. There is some low-grade pecking at my shoelaces, and then Melissa’s off, like the brassiest ladette on a vodka-fuelled hen night. She’s not interested in staying put. No, with the blood of Napoleon coursing through her veins, she is ready for fresh conquests. Up on to the gate that encloses the new field, cluck, cluck, cluck, come on girls, veni, vidi, vici, je ne regrette rien, and all that.

  ‘Oh, blimey …’ I begin to exclaim. In a flurry of feathers, they all follow Melissa: up on to the gate, then over and out.

  At last, only poor Mary is left behind in the new enclosure. Flapping and fluttering, she is unable to make the jump to freedom. She doesn’t even seem to be able to cluck, bless her. I feel so bad for her, I lift her up, too. On the top of the gate she turns her head and gives me an apologetic blink before jumping down on the other side and charging after her sisters. Together, the six of them waddle into the distance like the Magnificent Seven with one missing. Ah, there he is: Titus, on the starboard wing, galloping to stay abreast of Melissa.

  I think we can call that a success, I say to myself, peering after them.

  Later the same day, I am in the queue for the check-out at Champion, and the old Frenchman in front of me is struggling with his shopping. I can tell from the way he is eyeing the long queue behind him, and doing his best to hurry – fumbling in his purse, struggling to find the opening in the carrier bag, dropping his courgettes – that he’s not local. I shuffle forward and start to help him.

  ‘There’s no hurry, Monsieur,’ I tell him in French. ‘And these carrier bags are tricky.’

  ‘Ah, merci bien, Monsieur. C’est très gentil.’ He sighs. ‘I’m not as young as I used to be.’

  When I walk out of the supermarket, the old man is waiting for me.

  ‘Vous êtes anglais, Monsieur?’ he asks, with an amused smile.

  ‘Ah, you guessed.’ I laugh.

  ‘Et vous habitez ici, à Jolibois?’

  ‘I’m doing my best.’

  The old man hesitates. ‘It’s just that I am having some local people for drinks tonight. Some of the more cultured local farmers. And I thought you might like to join us. Are you free?’

  ‘You Frenchmen are very spontaneous,’ I reply, chuckling.

  ‘That’s settled, then. Here, I’ll draw you a map.’

  And so I meet Jérôme, seventy-three, a former banker from Paris who has nine grandchildren, nine horses, nine bicycles, several donkeys, four hundred acres of beautiful wooded hillside, and a mind as quick as an escaped cockerel.

  Inviting a complete stranger to your house for drinks with the locals is – I think – more a Jérôme thing than a Limousin thing, where the official social-quarantine period for interlopers is, as I am only too well aware, six months.

  But when dusk falls, I drive up to a grand farmhouse with a big square tower that looks like it ought to have bells in it, and Jérôme ushers me in as if I were an old friend. Which is almost how I feel, when I recognize one of the cheery faces glowing in front of the fire. It’s Jean-Louis, the great oak of a man who delivered my logs back in October, whose WG Grace beard and yo-ho-ho geniality lend him the air of a young Father Christmas. Beside him stands his wife, the willowy Chantal, whom I have to stand on tiptoe to kiss, and who seems unusually poised and elegant compared with the more earthily pragmatic women I tend to see in Jolibois.

  Jérôme turns out to be, like me, a former townie who has come to la France profonde in search of a more authentic existence. In my case, because I am hoping to learn what it takes to be a wise old man. In Jérôme’s case, because he is already a wise old man, and he wants to create a haven for his grandchildren, secluded from the fever and fret of city life.

  ‘I want the family to have a base,’ he says, puffing on a manky cigarette he has rolled for himself, ‘so that the question “Where do you come from?” will mean something again. These days people live everywhere, which is the same as living nowhere.’

  Jean-Louis and Chantal nod.

  I sip the Pastis that Jérôme has poured for me, feeling at once everywhere and nowhere. When people in Jolibois ask me from where I come, I always say ‘Londres’, because they have heard of London, and it seems to reassure them to be able to put me into this neat box. Whereas ‘Surrey’ troubles them, because they learned at school that that’s what you say when you sit on someone’s baguette by mistake.

  Soon after I moved into La Folie and gazed up at its crumbling walls, exposed roofs and dangling cables, I decided that I’d attack the renovation work myself. I came here to learn to be strong and practical and resourceful, after all.

  It wasn’t just that I couldn’t find any French workmen to do it for me before Doomsday. I felt it was important for me to move up from a level-three handyman to the giddy heights of a level-five bricoleur. And I had all my London friends asking ‘Are you planning to do it up yourself?’ as if restoring an ancient farmhouse were as simple as fastening the back of a lady’s dress.

  I think I’ve made a jolly good start. After ten minutes of hacking away with a chisel at the 120 square metres of ancient French stonework that need repointing in the summer sitting-room – the soaring space that will one day house the grand piano – I have already completed an area the size of a table-tennis bat. Only another 119.98 square metres to go, and then I can go out and buy two tons of mortar and a trowel. This seems like an ideal moment to break for lunch. God knows, I’ve earned it.

  La Grange is one of my favourite local restaurants. There is no choosing between poisson or viande; between saignant or à point. Vast dishes of food simply arrive, to be shared between friends. And it’s ten euros for five courses, including a carafe of drinkable rouge. Four workers in blue overalls are already getting stuck in when I arrive.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ they growl, with a quartet of nods. I love this about rural France, the way everyone says bonjour. In the last month alone, I must have shaken hands with more strangers than the Queen.

  Two hours later, as I stagger out into the bar to pay, I feel like Humpty Dumpty before his tumble. But even in my feast-dazed state, I can’t help but
notice the bar’s finely pointed stonework.

  ‘Qui a fait ça, Monsieur?’ I ask le patron, examining the masonry. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’

  He laughs. ‘You should have said so earlier. That’s Jou-Jou. He was sitting right behind you. He does good work, and not expensive, either.’

  In the evenings, I always make an effort to cook myself something – perhaps a lamb chop and some green beans, pasta with chicken and peppers, or a piece of fish. Tonight, hungry again after an afternoon spent sawing logs, I grill myself an entrecôte, and light two candles. Special occasions demand at least one more candle than the number of people dining. And so, night after night, I light two candles. For I have reason to celebrate.

  Mine, after all, is not an enforced loneliness, and I know I am blessed to have the freedom to experience this strange new life. I am healthy in body and – pace Great-Aunt Beryl – in mind. I have no hungry mouths to feed. I am not suffocated with debt. I am simply a bloke at the beginning of the twenty-first century, attempting to learn what it means to be a man.

  Unfortunately, laziness appears to come as part of the package. No doubt I was lazy in London, too, but idleness is more easily hidden there, amid the helpful niggle of deadlines and the buzz of other people’s activity. Here at La Folie, there is no place for my laziness to hide. I can saw logs, build fences, feed chickens and heave rubble out of the summer sitting-room until the cows come home. Yet there is no escaping my failure to address The Labours of Jack Larry, the dazzling first novel I was meaning to write here in France. With plenty of time to write, and a daunting absence of distractions, I have finally run out of excuses. Yet I still don’t know how to begin.

  One day, I am staring at my blank computer screen and sipping my third mug of PG Tips when I hear the sound of a tractor grinding up the drive. Just as I feared: it’s Gilles.

  Despite my misgivings about his mowing my jungle, my neighbour is surging up the drive in a tractor the size of Poitiers, towing a machine that makes me very glad I’m not herbaceous.