‘Ouch,’ I cluck.
‘I’ve just hoovered up a mouse,’ she says, when I return from apologizing to the chickens on her behalf.
I begin to apologize for the mouse. It’s true that I do quite often come across the desiccated bodies of the cat’s cast-offs, several weeks after even the flies have lost interest in them.
‘Mais, non!’ declares Marie-Claude, her eyes shining with triumph. ‘This one was alive.’
‘And now it’s in there?’ I ask, aghast, pointing at the vacuum cleaner.
She nods, brandishing her feather duster as proudly as if she were a big-game hunter leaning on an elephant gun. I can just see her in a pith-helmet and baggy shorts.
I grab the vacuum cleaner and take it outside. I have become inured to the cat’s kills, and will happily continue eating my supper when she is throwing a half-dead mouse around the kitchen. But I still don’t like the idea of hoovering a mouse to death.
The bag is clogged with dust and hair. I give it a shake, and listen. Nothing twitches within. But at last, as I peer in through the hole with the help of a torch, I spy a shape like a grey truffle, and hook it out with my fingers. The poor creature is entirely enbalmed in dust – even its eyeballs are caked with the stuff – and I can see its lungs fluttering as it fights for breath. I picture it inhaling the howling, poisonous gale, and shudder at the thought. Then I dunk it fast, once, in a bucket of water. Now at least I hope it can see. I lay it in the undergrowth and wish it bon courage.
‘Was it still alive?’ asks Marie-Claude.
‘Yes, it survived.’
‘Ah,’ she murmurs, raising her pencilled-in eyebrows and wiping her unadorned hands on her tunic. I can’t tell if she’s disappointed. But I shall be sure not to leave her alone with the cat when next Tuesday comes around.
A few days later, I’m hurling empties into the bottle bank beside the river when a shiny silver car draws up.
‘Excusez-moi, Monsieur?’ says the attractive woman passenger, fluttering her eyelashes at me with a desperation that is distinctly un-French. ‘Er, Chapterie?’
I glance across at the driver, a shiny-faced Toby-jug of a man in dark glasses. He shrugs and mangles a smile. English, too, no doubt.
The woman holds out a scrap of paper with an address on it. And then, in her bravest schoolgirl French, she asks me if I know where it is.
‘I don’t know that house,’ I reply in French, touched by her willingness to make an effort, and not wanting to snub her like a Paris waiter. ‘Mais pour Chapterie, vous prenez le deuxième pont, et puis continuez tout droit.’
She looks blank. He looks even blanker.
‘Le deuxième pont,’ I repeat, searching their faces for a glimmer of comprehension. And then, in English: ‘For Chapterie, take the second bridge, and then it’s straight on till morning.’
‘Oh, you’re English!’ she says, breathless with happiness, as if I were clad in full Zulu garb with a spear to her throat and she had just noticed an ‘I love Marmite’ tattoo on my ankle.
I smile and tug my forelock.
‘We’re house-hunting!’ she adds, as if I hadn’t guessed. Although, to be fair, they are a little on the young side.
‘That’s a good restaurant, by the way,’ I say, pointing at another name she has scrawled on her piece of paper.
‘Oh, it’s the hotel where we’re staying. Is it far?’
I fish a map of Haute-Vienne out of the Espace. ‘You should get one of these,’ I say.
‘Yes, we’ve realized that,’ she laughs. ‘But it’s Sunday, and everything’s shut. Isn’t it funny?’
Ah, the English abroad. In some ways we’re so charming in our enthusiasm for adventure, and our willingness to explore other cultures. And yet we’re flooding so inexorably into rural France that it’s hard not to feel for the locals, stranded on the beach as the Anglo-Saxon tide comes in. I know I’m part of the problem, and wish I could be part of the solution.
Later, I drop in at the aeroclub. For some while, I have been planning to take my aeroplane higher than I have ever flown it before. Partly this is just for the hell of it, and partly because I want to fly the Luscombe over the Pyrenees to Spain. Before I do, I need to know how the fifty-year-old engine is likely to perform at altitude, rather than have it spoil my day by spluttering to a halt just when I’m overflying a jagged Pyrenee. But today the puffy clouds studding the sky turn into a steely overcast, so I restrict myself to practising some touch-and-goes.
Afterwards, I take the Espace to the garage at Carrefour, just across the way from the Toquenelle café, where Peter Viola and I drank those first coffees together, all those months ago. The kiosk is shut, but you can still buy fuel if you have the right kind of card. The smartly dressed English couple in front of me don’t. They peer at the screen, puzzling over which button to press to valider their transaction, while the queue lengthens behind them.
‘C’est là,’ I explain, gently pointing out the green button embossed with a ‘V’. This has been worn to a shine by tens of thousands of French digits, like the toe of the Virgin in the church just up the road.
Hubby presses it and I lead him, in French, through the next few stages: pump number, type of fuel, and so on. After a few seconds’ delay, a rejection message flashes up and the card pops out. He’s about to reinsert it when I explain – still in French – that it is the wrong type of card and will not work.
‘Ah, oui, oui,’ he nods, pretending to understand, and pointlessly shoving the card back into the machine. So I tell him again, in English this time.
‘Look, it’s the wrong kind of card. You need one with a pin number.’
‘Oh, you’re English, thank God!’ he exclaims, as if I’d just relieved him at Mafeking. And I remember something Marie-Claude told me this week, when we were cleaning the windows of the summer sitting-room together.
‘You can immediately spot English people in a shop,’ she said, ‘because they’ll be the only ones who are talking very loudly. Is that because they want everyone to know they’re English?’
It’s true: I’ve never heard a French person speaking noisily in a shop, except for that time when I got sprayed with blood in the cat-fight at Champion. But I don’t believe the English yell to draw attention to ourselves. No, it simply hasn’t occurred to some people that they do not live in a private, sound-proofed bubble.
‘So what the hell are we are going to do?’ snorts the man at the petrol station, glaring at the wicked French machine.
‘You’ll have to find a manned petrol station, which isn’t easy on a Sunday.’
Now he starts swearing – not at me, but at his wife, his car and France in general.
‘Look,’ I tell him hastily, ‘I’ll put it on my card, and you can pay me the cash.’
‘Would you really do that?’ he asks, open-mouthed. ‘That’s incredibly kind. Are you sure?’
But it’s not incredibly kind. ‘C’est normal,’ as they say in France, where the kindness of strangers no longer takes me by surprise.
41
HIGH FLIGHT
The following afternoon is so dazzling that I return to the aeroclub. I can’t resist it. I want to see how high I can fly.
On the radio, I tell the nice lady at Limoges air-traffic control that I want to begin a climb to eight or nine thousand feet. France itself may be staunchly metric, but the sky above it is still measured in imperial plates of meat.
‘Huit mille ou neuf mille pieds?’ she exclaims. ‘Et pourquoi?’
Even though most private pilots rarely fly above 3,500 feet, I wasn’t expecting an inquisition. I feel as if the princess in the boulangerie has demanded that I justify my choice of baguette.
‘To test le moteur. Et pour l’expérience.’
There’s a silence, while Madame has a word with her boss.
‘All right, Golf-Zulu-Alpha,’ she grumbles. ‘But call me when you pass 6,500 feet. I’ll need to transfer you to Bordeaux Control.’
And so I
start climbing in big circles over St Juste; up, up into the blue serene. I can feel myself pressing forward in my straps to urge the Luscombe onwards and upwards. This is going to take a while. Ten minutes later, Madame is on the blower again.
‘Golf-Zulu-Alpha, vous êtes à 6,500 pieds?’
‘Négatif,’ I reply, conscious that she is casting aspersions upon my manhood. ‘Je suis à 5,900 pieds. Golf-Zulu-Alpha.’ I feel like Scotty in the engine room of the Enterprise, with Captain Kirk demanding more power. ‘Och, I’m giving it all I’ve got, Captain, but …’
Madame sighs and reminds me to call her back at 6,500 feet.
Finally I reach the required altitude, am transferred to the controller at Bordeaux, and tell him that I wish to climb as high as possible. He takes a deep breath.
So here I am, flying in circles above rural France, waiting for a man on the ground a hundred miles away to tell me what I am allowed to do next. Finally he tells me that he can clear me to 10,500 feet, but no higher. This suits me just fine, for I am not carrying oxygen, and it’s getting pretty nippy, too. Icarus would have succumbed to hypothermia long before his wings melted.
Up we go, higher and higher. Two miles above the earth is not high compared with a migrating eagle or a passenger jet. But, alone in my little yellow plane, it still feels like the most remote place I have ever been. At La Folie, marooned on my distant hillside, I always know that Gilles and Josette are less than a mile away. Here, shivering through the glittering blue of this boundless welkin, gazing down on the ice cliffs of the clouds, I sense an awesome new solitude, as the grey lakes and ointment-pink villages shrink beneath me, and the unfiltered light becomes ever more brilliant.
Problems become distant, too: the health of animals, renovation of houses, absence of pianos and my ongoing struggle to integrate myself into Jolibois life. All are far away from this ice kingdom, where everything is so clean and bright and serene that it makes me wish I never had to come back down.
‘Did you go far?’ mutters old Marcel, his cigarillo beating time on his bottom lip as I climb out of the Luscombe. Marcel has walked away from more plane crashes than anyone else I know, but he cannot fly any more, for his lungs are shot. And he is angry all the time.
‘Only about three kilometres,’ I reply.
‘Only three kilometres?’ he growls. ‘But you were gone for almost an hour. Where were you?’
I point straight up above my head. ‘Up there. It felt like I was in another world.’ And then I brace myself for the sneer and the sarcasm.
But Marcel does not sneer. And from the way his eyes seem to mist over as he rolls his cigarillo between his grey lips and does his best to smile, I know that he has been there, too.
With animals, it’s the comings and goings that get you. The births, the copulations, the deaths. Once they’re grown up and healthy and comfortably installed in their pré or poulailler, they mostly just do their sheepish, henful thing, until a surfeit of males leads to yobbish behaviour and unplanned pregnancies. After that, it’s the new arrivals that create the headaches, while the departures – planned or unplanned – do something similar to the heart. Melissa, bless her, has been so knocked sideways by her sister Mildred’s death that she has begun sitting broodily on a clutch of eggs. Unconscious as this may be, I cannot help rejoicing to see her labouring to bring new life to La Folie. Among my friends from school, it was often the ones whose parents had died the youngest who most looked forward to having children of their own.
But Melissa’s chick-generation project is playing havoc with egg production. No sooner has she spread herself in one of the nesting boxes, like a battleship in a dry dock, than the lovely Martha decides that she has maternal longings, too. With both nesting boxes occupied, everyone else is having to lay their eggs wherever they can find a hiding place. Unfortunately they’re rather good at this. I haven’t found a single egg for days.
The two broodies only leave their nests for one sniff of freedom daily. Martha is a marathon runner in a comedy chicken suit, snatching a few gulps of water before waving to the crowd and settling back into her rhythm on the nest. Melissa is more like a house-bound mum nipping out for a guilty fag and a cream cake while the children are at school.
Out she totters on her stiff pins, feathers fluffed out in her best don’t-you-know-who-I-am fashion. She looks like a fat snowball. The idea seems to be to go mental for five minutes, whilst eating and drinking as much as chickenly possible, taking a frenetic dust bath, and shrieking at the other girls about her sore bum and how motherhood isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. This is accomplished with much charging back and forth, and giddy bows to all four compass points, like a tiddly dowager duchess who’s lost a contact lens at a hen party.
My chicken book tells me to check which eggs are fertile by candling them – holding them in front of a light source and peering at what’s inside. A special lamp is recommended, rather than relying on old-fashioned candle power. But when I rattle down to Gamm Vert to buy my chick gear, forty-two euros seems an awful lot to pay for a flimsy 1950s ray-gun made out of rubber and aluminium, even for a self-confessed Useful Gadget junkie like me. So I settle for a big bag of chick crumbs and a mini-feeder, lining them up at the till as proudly as an expectant mum buying romper-suits at Mothercare. The cashier beams at me. I think she’s impressed.
Still attracted by the idea of any other Useful Gadgets I can buy for the chicks, and in need of a product with which to treat the sheep against fly-strike, I head off to Alliance Pastorale, the farmers’ wholesale store.
‘What’s this, Yvette?’ I ask the smiley blonde lady behind the till, as I hold up a board with canvas straps attached. ‘It looks jolly useful.’
‘With only four ewes, Michael, I’m not sure you need it,’ she giggles, explaining that it’s a dye-covered raddle for attaching to a ram’s chest, so that you can tell when all the ewes in a flock have been tupped. ‘Ah, but you English are so funny,’ she adds.
Marie-Claude, my strict cleaning lady, of whom I grow fonder by the week, is not so sure.
‘You can immediately spot an English person in a shop,’ she tells me, in between whacking cobwebs, ‘because they’re the ones who don’t say bonjour.’
‘And because we’re the ones who shout all the time,’ I remind her, remembering our last conversation on the subject.
She smiles. ‘Oui, les Anglais sont sans-gêne.’
‘Sans-gêne?’
‘The English are thoughtless. They’re the ones who barge into you in the supermarché and don’t say sorry. Or walk straight in front of you without so much as an excusez-moi.’
‘But are we really as bad as all that?’ I ask. ‘I know there are too many of us here in France, and that we shake hands too little, and attempt to kiss too much. I know we dress shabbily, and have a reputation as hooligans who drink too much. But there is goodness, too, in the English. You may even find we’re not all that different from the French.’
I must be looking pained, for Marie-Claude relents. ‘Well, at least les Anglais are better than the Germans,’ she says kindly.
‘The Germans?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She nods. ‘They’re even more sans-gêne.’
And so, desperate to be a good ambassador for Blighty, I spend a week saying ‘Bonjour’ to everyone I pass. I also make sure to give my fellow shoppers an especially wide berth in the supermarché, and then surprise them from afar with a ‘Pardon, Monsieur’ or an ‘Excusez-moi, Madame,’ in case they haven’t noticed me behind the frozen escargots.
When Tuesday comes around, I report my progress to Marie-Claude.
‘Non,’ she tuts, wagging her finger. ‘You mustn’t say bonjour to everyone you pass in the street. That’s not correct. You should only say bonjour to the ones you know.’
Rrrrrrrrright. Even though I have lived in France for almost a year, there is still so much to learn; so much, for all my eagerness, that I have yet to grasp. The trouble is that many people in Jolibois by now
look vaguely familiar to me. And I can’t be sure which ones I sort-of know, and which ones I sort-of-don’t. I’ve always been hopeless with faces. At Sainsbury’s in Vauxhall, I once waved at someone I was sure was an old friend, and it was only when she politely waved back, with a bemused smile, that I realized it was Joanna Lumley.
‘Fair enough. But what about when I go into a shop?’ I ask Marie-Claude.
‘Then you must say bonjour to everyone as you enter.’
‘Aha! Even if I don’t know them?’
She nods.
‘Even in the supermarché?’
‘Except in the supermarché,’ snorts Marie-Claude, who thinks this is the silliest suggestion she ever heard.
And then there is the shaking-hands problem. I’m all right when I wander into a café and dutifully shake hands with all the old boys. This is easy enough, because there are only a few of them, and they tend to be heavily sedated. It’s when a lot of people are circulating that my Facial Recognition Deficit Disorder begins to haunt me. Shaking hands with everyone in a room is appreciated. But only once. Attempting to shake hands with the same person twice tends to be greeted, I find, with Mr Bumble-style froideur.
Arriving at the tennis club assemblée générale – when we will have a chance to vote on changing the rules regarding voting – I’m relieved to spot Claude, the electrician with the strong forehand. No problems in recognizing him. But he rejects my outstretched hand.
‘I already saw you earlier,’ he explains.
‘Ah.’ I bite my lip. ‘But that was this morning.’
‘Yes, and one should only shake hands once a day.’
A vast chasm opens up before me, as the implications of this sink in. I shall have to start carrying a digital camera and a telephone directory. Or perhaps I might buy that ram raddle from Alliance Pastorale after all. I can’t wait to ask smiley Yvette if she thinks it would work on humans.
C'est La Folie Page 27