‘We’re so sorry, Monsieur,’ she says, wringing her hands. ‘C’est la sécheresse. All the grass is scorched. They’ve nothing to eat. That’s why they keep running away.’
‘I’ve given them hay,’ adds her son. ‘But that doesn’t seem to be helping. And we’ll run out of hay, too, before the end of winter.’
I know they really need to be giving the sheep a granulated feed, to fatten the young lambs and strengthen the expectant mums. But this is an expensive business. Gilles says he’s been getting through almost a tonne of feed a week.
I walk back up to La Folie, feeling helpless. A few minutes later I hear Boulesteix shouting at his sheep. Only he’s not shouting. He’s screaming at them, with an edge of despair in his voice that frightens me.
Let it rain, and soon.
47
NOVEMBER: GATHERING DARKNESS
The colours grow warmer as the days at last grow cooler. Autumn blows over the hill behind La Folie. The last remaining splashes of green become golden; the yellows darken to red. The traffic lights are changing once more.
As a child, autumn was my favourite season. Now that I am a grown-up, thirty-eight years closer to the end of my life, it is spring that calls out to me.
Back then, I cherished the rich Victorian hues of the leaves as they turned, warming my retinas, spreading their crackling carpet upon the pavement. The sharp outlines of the trees and the houses; of the Surrey church-tower where I rang the bells with the only local people I ever knew, and felt I was touching history as we hauled on our ropes and rang changes from another world.
There is still beauty in these colours. But, like the butterflies flitting out their last hours, it will all be over so soon.
The rains come at last.
It is not a deluge. It is not enough.
But it’s a start. I can’t remember when I was last so pleased to see mud.
I never saw the coming of winter like this before. I never saw winter as death. In London, I was merely aware of the weather turning cold and wet, the trees shedding their leaves, the long nights drawing in. It didn’t occur to me that in the shortening of the days lay the falling of the leaves.
I know that every day further from my birth brings me a day closer to my own death. I wonder if I will notice it creeping up upon me, in slow motion. Or will I be spinning in a car across a dual carriageway, thinking about the approaching juggernaut, or spinning in a Tiger Moth towards the earth, with a windscreen full of trees?
Nature withers slowly on the bough. And we humans, we animals, can be so swiftly snuffed out.
Last night, I went to put three of my four young cockerels into the concrete rabbit hutches behind the chicken house. I have asked around locally, and no one can offer them a good home, except Douglas, who confirms that he is prepared to take one to squire his four bald-necked hens.
In the darkness, I pulled the lads from their perches alongside their brothers and sisters, father, mothers and aunts. I know it is foolish to anthropomorphize a creature with a brain the size of a broad bean, but chickens are special creatures, with a curiosity that always touches my heart. They just can’t resist something new; an open car door, an upturned rock. And they like to chat, too.
Separated from the rest, incarcerated in the rabbit hutches left behind by a previous owner of La Folie, their shrieks of outrage echoed out across the moonlit fields as I ate a late supper. So I turned up my CD of Ashkenazy playing Chopin just a little louder, and tried not to think of death camps. And I felt sick in my stomach, knowing what I knew. To each of them I gave a final meal of a little grain and some water.
‘Not too much grain,’ Gilles warned me, ‘or you have a frightful mess – and a bad smell – when you gut them.’
Harry is my favourite, but there is another – The Blue Max – who is the biggest and strongest and most impressive. If Douglas wants to breed from his future cockerel, then I owe it to him to give him the best I have.
48
DECEMBER: THE BLUE TREES
My search for a dishy French copine has come to nothing. My ill-judged attempts to chat up the vampish coquine in the tourist office are behind me. The white-wellied Botticelli who used to work behind the fish counter at Carrefour has moved on. And I never did go dancing with the lovely Marianne from the bank, after she turned out to be happily married.
Zumbach was right: I have about as much chance of finding the woman of my dreams while I am living here in Jolibois, as little Gaston has of finding one of Young Boulesteix’s fat ewes – the ones he has been ogling from afar for days – munching hay in his field.
I have therefore decided to stop looking. I’m happy, after all. And I take it that the universe will, in its wisdom, provide. Eventually. Trouble is, it’s tricky to explain this to the locals. In East Dulwich, I grew used to my female friends attempting to match-make for me, but the men in Jolibois are far, far worse.
‘You need to get married, Michael,’ says Luc the pâtissier, over dinner at his house. Luc is not being funny or clever. He is just attempting to set me right, as he might straighten a picture on the wall. Something must be done, if social symmetry is to be maintained.
‘But Luc, it’s better to remain single than to spend a lifetime with the wrong woman,’ I protest. I’m looking for a soul-mate, not a cell-mate. He glances at Céline, his wife of thirty-seven years, and smiles sympathetically at me, as if I had just told him my plan for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.
Then there is Hubert, the gravel-voiced Jack-Daniels-gargler who taught me the gamut of French profanities on a tennis court last year. Despite my protestations that I’m not desperate to conjugate, Hubert tells me that I really should check out Véronique, one of the check-out girls at Champion.
‘Ah, Michael, she is very available,’ he whispered. From the way Véronique has begun to tousle her hair and smile coquettishly at me as she passes my bananas through her laser beam, I have an uncomfortable feeling that Hubert has told her the very same thing about me.
Isabelle, up at the big house, is doing her best to help, too. Over the past few weeks she has twice invited me to dinner, ostensibly because her children want to see me, but I think more because she rather hopes I may rescue her beautiful niece, Éliane, from her singledom. This may sound arrogant, but the way Éliane and I have twice been left by ourselves in the vast salon, while the others whisper and titter in the kitchen, cannot simply be so that we can admire the etchings.
I feel a bit like one of those giant pandas that used to get ferried into London Zoo every few years, in the hope that Sing-Sing might finally mate. Éliane and I chat away about London and Paris, and – lovely though she is –there is little enough chemistry between us that the prospects of our getting down to any physics or biology together remain entirely outside the curriculum.
Jérôme, down from Paris, invites me to lunch, and I explain my predicament.
‘You do know the French look with suspicion on men who live alone, don’t you?’ he warns, chuckling to himself as he pours me a glass of wine. ‘I should know.’
‘But I have chickens and sheep, too,’ I protest.
From the glance he throws back at me, I fear that this will not be enough. And then – too late – I remember the nine horses and the nine bicycles.
‘And you, Jérôme,’ I continue, changing the subject. ‘What is your news?’
‘Some wonderful news,’ he says, his eyes sparkling. ‘The grandchildren are coming.’
‘Ah, Jérôme, c’est formidable,’ I reply, thrilled for my friend. ‘And how many of them will come?’
‘All of them. All nine,’ he says, leaning back in his chair and basking in pleasure at the thought.
And so we talk and talk, and I am struck by how lucky Jérôme’s children and grandchildren are, to have this wonderful man devoted to creating a haven for them; a haven where, I sense, he is already dreaming of how their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will be able to come and play. It fe
els a relief to be able to share his happiness, and not to dwell on my own wistful solitude.
Later, back at La Folie, the cat comes and rubs herself against my legs, wanting her supper. Martha and Margot tap angrily on the cat-flap with their beaks, demanding the same service. But as I wander out to feed the sheep, only six of the Rastafarians come charging down the field to greet me. For blow me down if old Gaston isn’t nuzzling up to the haunches of a beautiful white ewe almost twice the size of him, who has somehow snuck over the fence to join the adoring Othello. I’ve no idea how they managed this. But I can’t help laughing. And feeling strangely encouraged, too.
‘Don’t you get scared,’ asks Marie-Claude, my scary cleaning lady, when Tuesday comes around again, ‘living up here on your own?’
‘No,’ I laugh, and wonder if I’m lying. ‘There aren’t too many drug-crazed robbers armed with bazookas here in Jolibois.’
‘Ooh, I’m not sure about that,’ she says reassuringly.
‘Ah.’
‘I suppose it makes a difference that you’re a man,’ she huffs. I puff out my chest and resist the urge to grunt, ‘Moi, Tarzan. Vous, Marie-Claude.’
‘Et ce n’est pas monotone,’ she asks, ‘with nobody to talk to?’
‘I talk to the chickens.’
Marie-Claude laughs nervously. I think she thinks the funny Englishman is joking.
At La Folie, despite the departure of Georges la fouine from my bedroom ceiling, I sometimes have such vivid dreams of an old couple living at the other end of the house – which, in my nightmares, they are dismantling stone by stone – that I begin to wonder if the renovations haven’t disturbed a few ghosts.
‘It’s quite obvious what this is about,’ says the Eminent Psychiatrist, when I make the mistake of sharing my dream on the phone. ‘You’re lonely, Michael. So your unconscious is inventing imaginary companions.’
‘But it’s not as if we’re sitting down to dinner or playing poker together,’ I protest.
‘Even so …’
The truth is that I have now made more friends among the locals than I ever expected, mostly thanks to the tennis club. People such as Le Grand Mermoz, the beery-cheery force of nature who runs the local hardware store and plays tennis as if he were fighting the Crusades. Blaise, the gruffly gentle PE teacher who roars around Jolibois on his Harley-Davidson, and his wife, the Proustian Madeleine, a sparkling firework of a woman, whose beaming face always seems to be illuminated from within. Seurel, ostensibly a guard on the trains to Paris and Lyon and beyond, but a thoughtful philosopher, too, who always picks up what I am trying to say long before anyone else catches on. Maxim the welterweight boxer, who is really an economics teacher, and whose twanging Toulouse accent is as much of a challenge to me as his sliced backhand. Claude the electrician, who sometimes stays for lunch after working on the wiring in the summer sitting-room.
Yet I do retain a niggling sense of separateness, as I struggle to forge those intimate connections that go beyond words. And I am still not dreaming in French. So I’m thrilled when Claude invites me to dinner at his house, with several of the others from the tennis club. Here I also meet Katya, Claude’s husky-voiced wife; Jeanne, the spirited consort of Le Grand Mermoz; and Kiki, a twice-divorced heavy smoker who strikes me as falling into the ‘dangerously attractive’ category. Especially since one of her ex-husbands, I am told, is a gendarme.
‘I used to be such a nice person,’ laments Jeanne, to much laughter, ‘until I met my husband.’ And then the laughter dies, because we realize that she is being serious.
‘What do you say to that, Mermoz?’ asks Blaise, elbowing his friend in the ribs.
Undaunted, and smiling bravely, Mermoz looks around the table, his piercing blue eyes travelling from face to face.
‘What I say is this,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we all go skiing together for the weekend in February?’
‘Formidable! Impeccable! Nickel!’ comes the response from every side except Jeanne’s, who smiles wearily at her husband’s latest inspiration.
‘And if you play your cards right with Kiki, Michael,’ continues Mermoz, in a mischievous stage-whisper, ‘your luck could be in.’
I blush, and cravenly do my best to avoid eye contact with Kiki for the rest of the evening.
Jolibois is fluffing up its feathers for Christmas once more. In the manner of a sweet old lady who always wears the same string of pearls to Midnight Mass, the familiar ropes of naked bulbs have been strung across the Rue du Coq. I’ll bet people gazed up at those very lights in 1955. The trees outside the church are slung with twinkling lamps, too, much like the ones outside the Dorchester on Park Lane.
Well, almost. There’s a naivety about the Jolibois version that I find irresistible, especially when combined with the clumsy Christmas-tree offcuts that have been tied to the railings up and down the road. It looks as if Pike and Godfrey have attempted to camouflage them, under the supervision of Corporal Jones. (‘You can’t be too careful, Captain Mainwaring.’)
Inside the church, Fabrice the organist has once again decorated the crib. This is always a treat, because Fabrice is trained in both plumbing and electrics, so we have green and orange lights to illuminate the baby Jesus, and real water gushing over a mill wheel beside the three kings. I like to think this is where the shepherds wash their socks by night. And if people sing loud enough, they might even drown out the buzzing of the Bethlehem waterworks.
‘What do you think of the blue trees, Michael?’ asks Le Grand Mermoz’s wife, Jeanne, over dinner at their house. With her jaunty yellow jumper and bobbed hair, she looks younger and somehow less weary than she did at Claude’s the other night.
‘Les arbres sont bleus?’ I ask, glancing out of the window into the darkness.
‘Not those trees. The ones at the top of the Rue du Coq.’
Now I come to think about it, I did notice two glowing blue cones there yesterday. In place of last year’s noble firs, these illuminated spikes looked sleek and threatening, and it never occurred to me that they were trees. You certainly wouldn’t expect an elf in a jingly hat to step out from behind them. You’d expect Anne Robinson.
‘Ils sont pas mal,’ I offer.
‘Ils sont moches!’ snorts Jeanne with an amused sneer. ‘And what do they lead to? A deserted old street with a few branches stapled to the railings. C’est fou!’
To be honest, I just like the fact that someone has gone to so much trouble to decorate the town. But Jeanne is right. One of the reassuring things about living deep in the countryside is that what you see tends to be what you get. Metaphor is a city construction; nature plays it straight. Trees are made of wood, not fibreglass. Cows are made of beef, not concrete. This is what I love about the story of Letellier, a grizzled Normandy farmer who, at Christmas each year, leads several of his cows into troubled urban estates, so that children can touch them. ‘The cow represents the earth,’ says Letellier in an article in Le Populaire. ‘I want to restore hope in people who feel they have no roots.’
In one Paris suburb, an old woman from Algeria came out to stroke Letellier’s cows, because they reminded her of the ones she had reared in her own country. She said she had been living in France for seven years. And this was the first time she had ever set foot outside her apartment.
Back at La Folie, I sit at the kitchen table, not quite ready for bed. Trees and farm animals are time-machines: at once quiveringly real, yet timeless and universal, too. And as human beings, we appear to have a weakness for those rare and beautiful moments of simplicity when we feel ourselves connected to the past, sharing precisely the same experience – or witnessing the very same view – that someone else must have seen or felt, decades or even centuries ago.
I have felt it when flying a Tiger Moth high over the fields of Kent, or playing the pipe organ in Strasbourg that Mozart once played. Here at La Folie, I feel it when I watch the sleet soaking into the feathers of my chickens, as they peck for grain in the doorway of the ancient bar
n. The sheep trotting after me as I bring them another bundle of hay. The shadows rustling as I trudge down the old footpath through the woods at night, swinging my oil lamp and telling myself that I am not afraid.
At the weekend, when I fly to England to join my parents and brothers for Christmas, I will feel it when we find hidden in the Christmas pudding, yet again, the very same old sixpences and silver threepenny bits that my great-great-grandmother used to hide. And I feel it now, as I sit at Zumbach’s old kitchen table and gaze out at the dark shapes of my flock silhouetted against the frosty hillside, just as they might have been, on such a night as this, two thousand years ago.
49
JANUARY: COLD COMFORT FARM
Christmas has come and gone, and still the weather grows colder, dashing my hopes that my second winter alone at La Folie will be easier than the first. This is good; I wouldn’t have it any other way. But when the Rastafarians gallop down the hill to greet me each morning, I notice with a pang that they have turned from black to white overnight. The winter sitting-room is heading in the opposite direction, as the stove-belched soot blackens the whitewashed walls. The summer sitting-room, meanwhile, reminds me of a giant fridge with a dusty, cement floor. Even when it is finished, it will be uninhabitable when there’s an ‘r’ in the month.
Outside the back door, Titus and the girls rage at me, as if I am personally responsible for making the ground so chilly underclaw. It wasn’t half as cold as this last year. I feel for Silent Mary in particular, who currently looks a bit like a pheasant that has just been sucked through a jet engine.
Mary is the gentlest, steadiest chicken a chap could wish for. She is one of those shrinking souls you don’t even notice when you walk into a room, and who – while everyone else is partying – quietly goes and does all the washing-up. I think she must have been born without a voice, because she never, ever clucks. Instead, she suffers in silence, whether it’s children trying to pick her up or Titus flattening her with his ardour. She is also the only chicken I’ve ever seen who can do the Charleston.
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