C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  Thank goodness Gilles suggested, all those weeks ago, that I buy Ouessant sheep. Some of the fat beasts I’ve witnessed in the fields around La Folie would need a tractor to lift them if they were to collapse into deadweight in a distant pasture.

  Gaston eyes me in the rear-view mirrror as I fire up the engine.

  ‘No sex for you today, mate,’ I tell him. He doesn’t chortle. But I hope he can at least smell something of the comforting whiff of his ewes, left behind in the back of the car.

  The vet presses his stethoscope to Gaston’s chest and thumps him here and there, one hand on the back of the other. Then he shoves a digital thermometer up Gaston’s rectum and the old boy grunts in surprise. I wince for his dignity.

  In silence, the vet examines the thermometer. I can see the numbers, but they mean nothing to me.

  ‘Il est chaud?’ I ask.

  ‘Très chaud,’ he nods, drawing down the corners of his mouth like a child practising a frown. ‘C’est très grave. Il a la pneumonie.’

  ‘Will he live?’

  The vet pauses. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What are his chances?’

  ‘Maybe fifty per cent Maybe it is already too late.’ He squints as he fills a syringe, before asking me to hold Gaston as he gives him a jab. ‘Will you be able to inject him each day if I give you a syringe?’

  ‘Yes,’ I reply, looking away, shrinking at the thought. I am terrified of injections, of needles, of inflicting pain on a defenceless animal. But if it is what Gaston needs …

  ‘Here.’ He passes me two bottles and a pair of syringes, then hunts for needles, handing me three crackling cellophane packets. ‘The injection is intra-muscular, so the needle goes here.’ With his third finger he parts the black wool and presses the papery skin that covers Gaston’s shoulder. ‘You have to push harder than you’d think.’

  ‘Urgghhh.’

  The vet smiles. ‘It is your first time?’

  I nod.

  ‘Then bon courage.’

  So Gaston and I head back to La Folie, and I wonder if I am about to lose my favourite ram so soon after he has arrived. Not only Gaston, either. The vet has warned me that I must also separate those worst affected from the other sheep. So that means Doris, my most sociable ewe, a plump, gap-toothed madam who faintly reminds me of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. And it means Ramekin, my back-up ram: Gaston’s son and heir, whose crescent horns are still no bigger than the handlebars of a toddler’s tricycle.

  I clear the barn for Gaston as best I can, organize a small trough of feed and a bucket of water, and then trudge up to the field. The rain is blowing into my eyes, stinging my cheeks, as I climb over the fence. I’ve brought a bag of stale bread in an attempt to bribe my chosen hostages. Dear old Doris falls for this immediately, bless her, so I grab her and carry her to the barn where Gaston is waiting in the shadows, like a shrunken minotaur in his labyrinth. And then I return for Ramekin, who is much jumpier than the other sheep.

  ‘I’m doing this for your own good,’ I tell him, as I make an ineffectual swipe for his legs. And then he makes a mistake, attempting to scamper past me, and I just manage to grab a handful of the wool on one of his haunches. Ramekin is so small that it feels like I’ve just rounded up a teddy bear. But teddy bears don’t bleed. As I pick him up, I notice a trickle of bright blood in the grass. Is he dying, too?

  In the kitchen, I pick at my supper – a plate of pasta, a glass of red wine – and feel unusually alone. I wish I’d lit the stove today, even though it’s at least fourteen degrees indoors. I would never make a real farmer. I don’t feel much of a trainee hero, either. Even the white noise of a television – the townie’s umbilical cord – would be nice, just to fill some of the gaps that are beginning to appear in my life, gaps that friends used to fill.

  If I had my piano here, I’d have some way of keeping myself company. But I can’t send for the piano until I have a floor to stand it upon. And I can’t lay a floor until the roof has been insulated and covered, the stone walls have been plastered, the breeze-blocks have been rendered, and so on.

  So I sit in silence, and tell myself that this – this feeling – is what I came to France to find and face. If, one day, I am to have a wonderful relationship with a woman, I first need to learn to be happy within myself, even when things are tough. And if I am to be a wise old man, I need to live through some difficulties first.

  The cat comes and rubs against my legs. I pick her up and hold her on my lap until she settles herself into a circle and begins to purr. Outside, the rain pelts against the windows. And the cat and I stare at each other, and wonder what the hell we are really doing here, marooned in this frozen otherworld.

  21

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  Christmas Eve, and snowflakes are falling silently as I shut the front door behind me and stand on the step for a moment, gazing into the darkness. In the glow from the kitchen lights, I can just make out the lone pine on the edge of the drive, whose tip is a miniature Christmas tree, like the barb on some giant spear. In the distance, to my left, the lamps of Jolibois make a halo in the sky.

  Titus and the girls are all safely tucked up in the poulailler. Gaston, Doris and Ramekin are in the hay-strewn hospital ward of the barn. This has been one of my longest weeks at La Folie. And there are so many injections to go.

  Behind the house lie the ghostly shadows of the other sheep, each curled into a ball like a cat on a duvet, one or two of them still chewing as they ruminate on the day’s events. Slept. Ate hay. Drank water (cold enough for headache).

  With this snow, the sheep will soon be as white as the hillside. The night is silent as a tomb. It is a proper Christmas night.

  In town, an hour before midnight, the church is already buzzing with life.

  ‘Bonsoir, Michael,’ announces Céline as I walk in, and Fabrice the organist comes shuffling up to shake my hand. He looks relieved to see me; glances nervously at his watch. The little boy I first saw scuttling about in the organ-loft, his mouth no longer caked in chocolate, emerges from behind his father’s legs and presents his face to be kissed.

  I gallop up the steps to the organ, unlocking the door halfway up with the bronze key that Raphaël has given me. Fabrice follows me up, and we have a final rehearsal, his high, clear voice floating out into the rapidly filling void.

  ‘Bien,’ he says. ‘Bon courage, Michael.’

  ‘À toi, aussi,’ I reply.

  And then I’m settling into my Bach preludes and fugues, as the waves of happy humanity flood the church, even arriving up in the tribune beside me like water gurgling up a plug-hole from a blocked pipe.

  I can’t remember when I was last in such a crowd. In London, I was the one in eight million who used to love travelling on the underground at rush-hour, and feeling the press of the bodies, especially in the morning, when people are wearing their freshly scrubbed faces and freshly pressed shirts, and are thinking of all the good things they are going to do today. I used to like watching the women touching up their make-up, making that ‘m’ in the tiny mirror with their new-glossed lips, wanting to look their best for the boss, or the young man in accounts, or just for themselves, as a defence against the chaos that might otherwise envelop them, the chaos that is always waiting just around the corner to pounce.

  I have seen that chaos in the frightened eyes of the sheep when I have to catch them to inject them. I have known it when I am lying awake at night, listening to the scrabbling frenzy of the creatures just above my head.

  I know that the chaos is always there, all around me. I used to be able to see it more clearly as a teenager; was aware of it like a shadow at my back. But London life, with its blanket of distractions, must have desensitized me. And it feels a long way away from me now, amid the goodness and simplicity of Jolibois and La Folie.

  Tonight’s service feels like a social event as much as a religious one. Gone are the mouse-coloured overcoats of the regular Saturday-evening Mass; gone the souls shuffling in on li
fe-weary limbs, barely raising their eyes to appreciate the stones they know so well. No, tonight there are bright colours and shining faces, lipsticked and rouged, excited to be amongst friends in such a place, on such a night.

  I feel excited, too. Few churches in rural France have pipe-organs. And Jolibois is blessed with one that works rather well, largely because Fabrice knows his plumbing and his electrics, and does a lot of the bricolage himself. One can often get through an entire Mass without a single note sticking, although the odds are stacked against you for Widor’s Toccata.

  Most of the stops on the organ are either flutey or woofy, and sound like the shy people you find in the kitchen at drinks parties, or else like the noisy ones whose braying in the other room is what has driven you to seek solace elsewhere. But there are also two thrillingly powerful reeds on the organ – a trompette and a clarion – which must operate on a ludicrous wind pressure all of their own. I suspect the organ-builder meant them for a much bigger instrument in a much bigger church. Their presence here is the equivalent of fitting a pair of rocket-launchers to a Sopwith Camel. Nothing else on the Jolibois organ will stand up to their farty blasts, which would probably come in quite useful outside the walls of Jericho.

  The same organ-builder also included a Tremolo system, to produce a wavering vibrato that will come into its own if the church is ever converted into a cinema. This I never use. The sound it makes reminds me of the flesh-pink bathroom suite at La Folie, which I cannot wait to replace.

  The congregation begins to settle, and a hush descends, like when the house-lights go down in a theatre. I put away my Bach and slip into a very slow and quiet improvisation with right hand and pedals, while – with my left hand – I find the music for the first chant. Fabrice appears in the pulpit and gives me a little nod. We’re off.

  I’ve never known anything like this. There I am, sitting at the organ console, with people pressing all around me, so close that I can smell more than two different perfumes and feel their breath on my neck as they sing. Inchoate mystery of the divine? It feels more like a knees-up down the pub, or the kind of dinner party Marisa and I used to have in East Dulwich, with everyone crowding around the piano after midnight to sing raucous selections from Grease and Abba. I may be abroad, a lapsed Anglican in a French Catholic church, but I have rarely felt so at home as I do amongst these smiling people, wrapped up in the drama of the service as if it were a gripping black-and-white film.

  And then it’s the final hymn – the French version of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ – and in the three-second pause before the last verse, I do something I hadn’t planned to do. Pulse racing, I pull out the rocket-launchers – the trompette and clarion – hold my breath, and launch into the descant.

  For a moment, everyone stops singing as the coruscating reeds rend the air, brilliant as war trumpets. Out of the corner of my eye, I am dimly aware of the grey-brown mass of the congregation in the church below turning white, as several hundred faces turn to see what’s gone wrong with the organ.

  Peering round my music stand, I glance apologetically at Fabrice in the pulpit, who stares back at me, openmouthed.

  And then he breaks into a grin and I can see his lips moving as he starts to sing, frantically waving his arms to encourage the congregation into song.

  Organ and congregation are now head to head, two juggernauts racing down both lanes of a deserted highway, bumpers bashing in an all-out competition to see who can make the most awesome din. It feels like I’m winning, but they’re catching up.

  Concentrate. With people singing their hearts out all around me, I find myself wanting to wave with one hand, and it’s tempting to think that the music will just play itself. Oh, for a pneumatic hoist right now. But here we are, at the penultimate line – I can hear Jason growling Gloria in excelsis deo down the phone to me – and then I’m holding the final chord, several seconds longer than necessary, partly because I can’t bear to bring to an end the dazzling blaze of sound from the pipes shining above me, and partly because – like someone telling an anecdote that’s falling flat at a dinner party – I’m fearful of the silence that will follow. But I needn’t have worried. As the notes die away, an excited murmur goes through the church, and I know it is because we have all been part of something that we cannot describe.

  Raphaël gives the final blessing, and there is a rustle like the wind in the trees as everyone makes the sign of the Cross. Then I open a mottled green volume whose cover is stained with twenty-three-year-old Ribena. The book falls open at a page black with notes, and I launch into the music, my left hand stamping out chords, my right hand rippling out semiquavers as if it belonged to an organist far more accomplished than me. I never believed I could do this. And as I stretch my legs two octaves apart for the cataclysmic pedal entry, I can feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. I once thought Widor’s Toccata must demand some kind of heroic virtuosity to play it. And then I woke up one morning, and found that I could play it myself. It’s amazing what the brain gets up to, while our backs are turned.

  Much as I dislike being on the receiving end of an injection – the icy swab; the needle held vertical as a lance; the wasp’s sting of pain; the lingering resentment – I have discovered that I hate being on the giving end even more.

  Tonight it is two a.m. by the time I wander out to the barn, with a bottle of antibiotics in one hand and a sheep syringe in the other. The flimsy needles the vet gave me kept bending when I tried to push them in, so I have bought another Useful Gadget from the smiley blonde lady at Alliance Pastorale. The needle of this thing looks as thick as a child’s drinking straw, sliced off at an angle like an italic nib. Ugh. The midnight music has left me on a high, but I am soon brought down to earth as I enter the barn and see three pairs of eyes peering at me from the darkness.

  The sheep run in circles around me as I stand in the middle of the dark barn, for the silent injections clearly hurt. Gaston is very weak, but Doris charges into the old metal manger with a clang that makes me wince, a few seconds before Ramekin knocks over a stack of my surplus fence-posts, ready-tipped with tar for the day when I summon up the energy to enclose another field.

  Once I have caught each animal, I grit my teeth, grip its flanks between my knees, and slide the italic nib as gently as possible into the leathery skin. Doris, bless her, barely flinches. Gaston is the worst because he feels so scrawny; I fumble to find a scrap of flesh to inject on his bony shoulders. Then I am pressing the needle into the charred parchment of his skin, and he staggers as it goes in. Day after day, I gaze at him, and try to decide whether he’s getting better or worse. At least the wheezing has stopped. But it’s hard to tell whether his strength is returning.

  Even in his weakened state, Ramekin is impossible to catch. In the end, I just stick my leg out and he runs straight into it. I inject him as he lies passive at my feet. For a moment I think I’ve killed him, he’s so still. But when I take my hands away, he leaps up and scampers away in a blur of shiny hooves. I sigh, but not with relief. For there is another slick of bright blood in the imprint of his muzzle in the straw.

  22

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  Christmas Day. The sleet is blowing sideways, and I am staggering up a French hillside, trying to catch Doris in the dark. Too soon for dusk, it feels as if someone has turned down the brightness on my life. The blizzard flings itself into my eyes. Lunch with Henri and Françoise, the cherubim and seraphim, amid the cosy bustle of their extended family, already feels like a distant memory, though I only left their house an hour ago.

  I drove back to La Folie feeling guilty about the three sheep imprisoned in the dark barn. But as I rattled up to the house, my headlights picked out six green jewels shining in the gloom. And the jewels blinked. The door of the barn stood open. Gaston and Ramekin, still weak, were soon caught. Doris is another matter.

  Onward I trudge, struggling to keep up with my patient. Doris is just ahead of me now, ears pricked, head held high as she keeps a
watchful eye on her gaoler.

  At home in Surrey, my family will be sipping their coffee and port, still wearing the paper crowns that fell out of their crackers. I can see them chatting in the twinkling glow of the tree-lights, surrounded with crumpled wrapping paper, shiny hardbacks, and strange kitchen utensils that will soon find their way to the very back of the drawer.

  Mum will be saying that she thinks the Queen looked a little older this year. Dad, rosy-cheeked, will be pretending he’s not really having a snooze. And my brothers will be attempting to play with their presents, which is not easy when you’ve just been given yet another set of paintbrushes and an electric wok.

  Later, my mum will phone and tell me that she’s heard from my sister and her children in San Francisco, and I will tell her what a lovely Christmas Day I’ve had.

  ‘Please, Doris,’ I murmur. I can see the sleet turning to mahogany as it soaks into her wool.

  I’m only a yard away now. Just one dive … ‘Yaaaargh!’

  Doris blinks, sidesteps, and I crash into the mud.

  We repeat this procedure many times over the next half-hour.

  Doris trots. I sprint.

  I dive. Doris jinks.

  And I fall flat on my face in the freezing mud. Happy Christmas.

  Each time, Doris stops, turns round and gazes at me as she might gaze at a broken fence-post. You’d think she might have the common decency just to give herself up. God knows, I’m trying to help the girl.

  By now, I am cold and soaked and desperate. I want to be inside. And then I remember that the stove is unlit, and there’s no wood left to burn until I have sawn and split more logs in the barn.

  ‘One option,’ says a voice in my head, ‘might be to stop feeling sorry for yourself and to make a bit more effort.’

  I want Doris to be well. I want to be anywhere but here, alone inside this bleak moment in darkest Abroad.