‘Rrrrright. By speaking firmly to them?’
‘By giving them a good slap across the chops.’
‘Ah. Perhaps Steven will be free next weekend?’ Steven is my other brother, but he is an Artist, and probably allergic to sheep, as Nicholas well knows. I can tell that he likes the idea of being a shepherd for a day, but wants to make me suffer a little. He prides himself, with complete justification, on being the one practical member of the family.
‘There may be a little bit of fence-building, too,’ I add, just to seal his enthusiasm.
‘All right, I’ll be there at the end of the week,’ he sighs, his enthusiasm still expertly hidden.
‘Thanks, Nick. What are you eating, incidentally?’
‘Chicken Caesar sandwich from Prêt. Why?’
‘Oh, you know. Just curious.’
Next day, the midday sky is black and it pours with rain as I set to work on setting the last three corner-posts. This is what I came to France for, I tell myself, as I struggle to push the wheelbarrow full of concrete up the soggy hillside, while Mildred and the girls shelter in the barn, clucking at the rain thundering on to the roof above them, before it tick-tick-ticks on to my precious wood-store in the places where it has found a way through the lichen-encrusted tiles.
I can see the cat gazing at me from the window-sill inside the house, idly licking a paw as I stagger past with one of the concrete posts across my shoulders as if I were a peasant in a pillory.
I’ve already painted evil black tar on to the tips of all my wooden posts. On the phone, my father tells me I need a post-hole borer (his favourite Useful Gadget) to make the holes for these, before adding – as he always does – that ‘Your mother cooked something really first-class last night,’ as if he were letting me in on a secret. But both Gilles and Frère Sébastien have told me I must use a heavy iron bar to make the holes. And when I find just such a weapon in the barn, apparently left behind after the Hundred Years War, I take another step further from Surrey; another step deeper into darkest France.
Wham, wham, clang goes the iron spear into the earth, juddering my spine every time it hits a chalk-seam, forcing a readjustment to right or left. My hands are soon numb. Sweat and rainwater are running into my eyes. And I’m enjoying this. The rain eases off, and a gentle mist that appears to be falling sideways keeps me cool, as I roughly set post after post in place. I think back to my conversation with Fred, when we were mixing concrete. Somewhere along the way through my comfortable existence, I lost touch with just how satisfying hard physical work can be. Especially when the only person making me do it is myself.
And then I’m whacking in the fence-posts with my sledgehammer, and watching the tops split after the first ten or fifteen hits.
‘You need a different kind of masse,’ sighs Gilles, dropping by to check on my progress and pulling a disgusted look as he examines my narrow sledgehammer. Then he leans forward to squint down my latest row of fence-posts, to see if it’s straight.
‘Not bad?’ I say, panting like a happy spaniel.
‘Not good,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘These should soon be fully set,’ he adds, kicking one of the concrete posts. ‘Let me know when you’re ready to stretch the grillage. I’ll come and show you how it’s done.’
So it’s back to the nice ladies at Alliance Pastorale for a new sledgehammer, one with a plastic shaft and a huge flat head. This is much massier than the first one, and does the job in half the time.
A day later, I’m so stiff from heaving all those atoms, I can hardly move. And time is running out. It’s Thursday already. Nicholas arrives tomorrow afternoon, and we’re to collect the sheep on Saturday.
Another ten wooden posts done. Gilles and Josette appear again, this time bringing with them the fence-stretcher: a couple of stout pieces of wood to grip the fence, two rusty iron chains, and a lever. I bring out the roll of grillage and we unfurl it, inquisitive chickens watching in awe as it rolls down the hill like a playful child.
With a haste that makes me think he must have left his best trousers just in front of the fire, Gilles now begins to lever the grillage into a state of tension. This is amazing. After a few pulls, the fence begins to rise off the ground and stand all by itself. And then – as the wire tightens – it begins to look like a real fence.
Suddenly Josette shrieks, ‘Arrête! Arrête!’ The concrete end-post has started to shift in its foundations. The concrete is solid enough. It’s the hillside that appears to be moving. Gilles must be stronger than I thought. He stops tightening the grillage and the post holds. But the damage is done, for it now leans down the slope at a Pisa-type angle, almost perpendicular to the hill.
‘It’s not good,’ says Gilles ruefully, looking at my botched fence.
‘No, but it’s another good lesson for me,’ I reply. ‘I’ll do better with the next one.’
Nicholas is sitting on his luggage in front of the 1960s-style terminal building when I arrive at Limoges airport in le Pug Rouge.
‘Am I late?’ I ask, looking at my watch.
‘The flight was half an hour early,’ he shrugs. ‘Jolly little airport, isn’t it?’
‘They’re about to knock it down and put up a bigger one. This one was designed long before les Anglais discovered the Limousin.’
‘There were so many English voices on the plane, it’s hard to believe I’m in France.’
‘Just wait till we collect the sheep,’ I tell him. ‘You will.’
The next morning dawns bright and clear, and Nicholas and I wander out to the barn to examine the vehicle I have selected for our mission.
‘You can’t be serious,’ he says, gazing in awe at the Espace.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Michael, it’s a car.’
‘Yes, I know it’s a car. But there’s plenty of room in the back.’
‘For eight sheep?’
‘Well, they’re very small sheep. And my neighbour Gilles says it’s better if they’re packed in tightly, because they won’t charge around so much.’
‘They won’t what?’ Nicholas’s sheep experience is strictly confined to grilling and basting. He’s not accustomed to being attacked by his own pot-roast.
As we rumble down the drive, I click a Blues Brothers tape into the stereo and Nicholas dons his shades.
‘Right,’ he says, perking up. ‘It’s a hundred kilometres to Aubusson. We’ve got a full tank of gas, no cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses. Hit it!’
En route, I declare that it’s important we keep the sheep as calm as possible. ‘And you’ll need to give them a good slap, Nick, if they try to climb into the front.’
‘Oh great,’ he mutters.
Two hours later, and we are contemplating eight little dreadlocked thunderclouds – five rams and three ewes – as they rage and tear around inside their sheep house.
‘I’m afraid they’re a bit over-excited, Monsieur,’ whispers the peroxide Madame. The drainpipe man attempts to tie up the hooves of the chief ram and then thinks better of it, as the panicked creature flails wildly to escape.
‘We’ll just have to put them in as they are,’ he says through gritted teeth. ‘But I’m worried about them smashing a window with their horns. If one jumps out, they’ll all follow.’
‘What did he say?’ asks Nicholas.
‘He said French sheep love car journeys.’
One by one we bundle the struggling animals into the back of the car, and then I’m writing a cheque for 280 euros and reassuring Madame that I won’t turn her precious darlings into cutlets.
‘One last thing, Monsieur,’ she calls, as we drive off. ‘The ewes are on heat.’
I’m not listening. I’m too busy concentrating on every bump in the road ahead, my pulse racing with concern for the creatures now in my care.
‘What are they doing, Nick?’ I bark every five seconds.
‘They’re still fighting. Does it matter that one of them’s got a runny nose? O
h, hello …’
‘What?’
Alarmed, I peer into the rear-view mirror. And there, peering back at me with an embarrassed grin, is the face of a small black ram, visibly jiggling. I raise myself higher in my seat to investigate, only to spy that the rest of the woolly scrum are all equally bent on doing what comes naturally. Ah, the joys of driving through rural France, while a flock of randy sheep stages a mass orgy in the back of your car.
As our travelling sex-show rumbles through sleepy villages, I gaily wave and smile at the walnut-faced matrons who stare at us in gap-toothed disbelief. The one blessing is that Ouessant sheep are so very small. So it’s only when the lusty dwarves are actually up and at it on their hind legs that passers-by can see them participating in the sordid scene.
‘Down, down,’ hisses Nick, and I instinctively duck. But it’s the sheep he’s addressing. Just up ahead are a couple of gendarmes on motorbikes. I clench everything, concentrate very hard on the road ahead, and start chanting the thirteen-times table in French for the benefit of the lads in the back.
Somehow, we make it back to La Folie, and I lift the sheep over the newly constructed fence into their field. The place is slowly coming to life. Nick says he’s right off lamb chops. I am an emotional wreck. And the Renault Espace will never be the same again.
18
THE CERYNEIAN HIND
Jérôme – the old man I helped with his shopping in the supermarket – and I have become friends. We seem to understand one another, across the gap in our ages and language and culture. Our solitariness is a bond. And I think to myself how lucky his nine grandchildren are to have him, waiting for them in such a perfect place, with a horse and a bicycle for each of them.
But, as Jérôme explains to me one day, after he has patiently listened to my excited chatter about my newfound role as a shepherd, the mere fact of having horses and bicycles does not guarantee the presence of grandchildren.
‘You have a piano in England that you do not play, and an aeroplane that you do not fly,’ he says. We are chatting in his stableyard, where he has been showing me his donkeys. ‘For me it’s the same.’
‘Not really, because those things are both far away. I’d have them here, if I could,’ I reply. ‘I will do, one day.’
‘Peut-être,’ he says with a gloomy shrug, opening another door in the ancient stone wall of the stables.
And, too late, I begin to understand the truth: that the grandchildren rarely come, and the nine horses wait in vain for their child riders, and the saddles of the nine bicycles are gathering dust, and the four hundred acres of beautiful wooded hillside do not rustle with the sound of children kicking their way through autumn leaves, because – as Jérôme acknowledges, chewing on a soggy cigarette that looks as if he rolled it in about 1934 – today’s children do not always appreciate these things.
‘Perhaps they will come next year, Perce-Neige,’ he whispers, as we stand in the half-light of the stables and he strokes the neck of one of his unridden horses. The horse lowers its head and gazes at him. And to judge from the glances that they exchange, neither of them really believes this is true.
A fortnight after Nicholas’s departure, a few days of late-autumn sunshine have lit up the landscape, so tonight the cat and I are out on the terrace again, having our twilight think. I sip a beer. She licks her paws.
I can’t imagine how empty this place would feel without another living, breathing presence building its life around mine (although the cat would probably say that I am building mine around hers).
Each morning, round about six o’clock, she comes into my bedroom, jumps on to the bed and gently claws at my head until I outstretch one arm so that she can nestle against it. This I can bear. It’s when she tries to clean her mouse-encrusted tongue by rasping it on my unshaven chin that I find myself grimacing and holding my breath.
Hard as it is for me to believe, we have only been here at La Folie for three months, and already she has chalked up at least thirty kills (excluding probables and lizards). Even now, as I stand at the wood-burning stove to sizzle myself a mushroom omelette, she rediscovers – and begins to chew – a forgotten mouse head on the kitchen floor. It’s a sound that makes my shoulder-blades twitch. I remove it from her with a few words about the merits of dining al fresco, and she slinks out through the cat-flap looking (I like to think) guilty and embarrassed. Five minutes later she’s back with another mouse, its two ends dangling from her jaws like one of the outsize moustaches in the Colibri.
I know that being in France hasn’t been all plain sailing for the cat. I knew she might struggle to understand French-speaking mice. But I hadn’t twigged how creepy the whirring of a hundred thousand French crickets might be to a London moggie brought up on traffic noise and police sirens. The spooked creature can spend hours peering out of her cat-flap with flattened ears and, on the rare occasions when she does summon up the courage to venture outside, expects me to keep guard while she performs her little devoirs under the cover of the lone pine.
I begin to share the cat’s disquiet about what might be lurking out there, waiting for us. And tonight my vague foreboding ratchets up into something closer to alarm when – haunted by the scuttlings and scamperings around the knot-hole in the ceiling of my bedroom, directly above my pillow – I climb a ladder to investigate. What I find up there is worse than I feared. Between the roof beams, someone has left a rusty man-trap with jagged metal jaws, big enough to catch a young wildebeest, on a heavy iron chain. What did Zumbach know that I don’t?
The chickens help keep me company, too – especially Mildred, because she always has so much to say, and Martha, because she appears to have decided that I am her best friend in the whole world. While the others are having their dust baths around the lone pine – traumatizing the cat, who would like nothing more than to answer her calls of nature in peace – the dear girl spends hours on the window-sill each day, gazing in at me. I gaze back. I think we must be in love.
Even the goldfish add to my social picture, in their dreamy, silent way, their three bright-orange shapes gliding in the depths of the pool, permanently searching for something they’ve already forgotten they’ve lost.
The sheep are something else. Ouessants, I discover, are not like the big white sheep in the fields all around La Folie, docile beasts bred to fatten as fast as possible. No, Ouessants are wild, ancient creatures, their blood coursing with the salt air of their rocky island home. Chase a flock of meat sheep, and they huddle together, scared and unthinking. Chase a band of Ouessants, and they scarper in all directions, eyes flashing, tails flying, making a nonsense of those ignorant souls who say that sheep are stupid. Mine are jinking, nimble athletes, with a ferocious side-step. So I don’t chase them. I just stand and wonder at them as they lie in the grass, digesting their lunch, learning to accept their new surroundings.
I see now why Madame in her stormtrooper trousers gave me those four extra males as un donné, rather than expecting me to pay for them. Little Ramekin is no trouble, but his three brothers are fighting amongst themselves, and poor old Gaston – my chief ram, he of the satanic horns – has his work cut out defending his ewes from the Oedipal attentions of the youngsters. Madame assured me that Gaston alone would mate with the ewes, but the old boy cannot be everywhere at once. Worse still, the young rams – wonky-horned Charlie and his two thuggish henchmen – are much the greediest when it comes to snuffling up all the granulated feed I put out for the sheep, so the lads grow bigger while Gaston and the girls starve.
I place an advert on the notice-board in Champion, and pray that someone in Jolibois will be interested in providing a good home for two or three wayward Rastafarians (‘jeunes, noirs, en bonne santé’). If not, the time may come when I have to take them to market.
My ambition for both the sheep and the chickens is for them to produce lambs and chicks in the spring, and – if possible – that those lambs and chicks should produce their own young the following year: a generation for w
hich I will have been entirely responsible.
Day after day, I sit at my desk, looking out across the valley, worrying about the sheep, and thinking about starting the novel that I always thought I’d be able to start, just as soon as I was free of the distractions of the city. It never occurred to me that I might find a new and very much more pressing set of distractions in the rhythms of nature in darkest France. I think about Christmas in a few weeks’ time, too, because I have decided to spend it here at La Folie, alone.
This will be my first Christmas away from home, and the thought makes me uncomfortable. In a way, that’s why I’ve decided to do it. But there are also the Rastafarians, the cat and the chickens to think about. And Fabrice has asked me to play the organ for Midnight Mass, which is the Jolibois equivalent of playing Wembley. While I play, he will lead the singing.
Last week, Raphaël convened a meeting to decide which chants to include at Christmas, and I lobbied for ‘Once in Royal’ and ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, albeit with French words. ‘Silent Night’ is in the mix, too. So my French Christmas will have an English soundtrack.
I want to rouse Jolibois with the traditional descants for the carols, the ones we used to sing in the choir at Windlesham, when the trumpets in the gallery would send tingles up my spine with their searing octave leaps in Adeste Fideles. But I can’t remember how the melody goes in the penultimate line. So I phone my friend Jason in Dorset, who went to Charterhouse and writes music for television thrillers. He is sure to know. Jason laughs and performs the descant down the phone.
‘Glo-o-o-o-o-ria, in excelsis deo,’ he growls.
‘If your phone is being tapped, someone at MI6 is going to be very worried,’ I tell him.
‘Ha ha ha. And you’ll have Inspector Clouseau round in the morning.’ He sounds very far away. ‘What the hell are you doing in France?’
‘I’m having an adventure. I’m learning to be brave.’
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