But Mary has not been right for a long time. She waddles around with her stomach dragging on the ground, as if her crop were full of lead shot. She smells funny, too. I believe I once read about an ailment called Sour Crop, and treating it with Epsom Salts. Yet I can’t be sure. I ask around, and none of the local farmers is quite sure either. As a last resort, I take Mary to the vet.
Gilles hates it when I take any of my sheep to the vet, because he says it’s too expensive, and the vet only really knows about poodles and guinea-pigs. But the vet saved old Gaston when he had pneumonia last year, so I have faith in him. Obviously, if I tell Gilles I’m taking a chicken to the vet, he’ll never speak to me again.
The vet examines Mary. ‘Nope, definitely not a poodle,’ I can see him thinking. ‘And probably not a guinea-pig, either.’ He ascribes her problem to an ‘untreatable internal lesion’ which, he says, doesn’t seem too serious. Thus reassured, I ignore the problem and assume it will just go away. But the freezing weather continues, and – as far as I can tell – the problem doesn’t go away.
‘Brrr … Ça caille,’ says Céline from the boulangerie, as she and I arrive at the church for the Saturday-evening Mass, she wearing seventeen overcoats, I weighed down with a foot-high stack of organ music and a spare pair of shoes.
‘You can say that again,’ I reply, taking a wild guess at her drift as we peck each other on both cheeks.
‘You’re not planning to play all that music, are you?’ she asks nervously.
‘No, but I can never make up my mind beforehand.’
‘Is that why you have two pairs of shoes, too?’
‘Ah, the shoes are for the organ. These …’ (I gaze down at my clumpy Timberlands, each encased in a thick Cornish pasty of mud) ‘… are not much good for the pedals.’
Raphaël le Prêtre arrives, and we all shake hands.
‘Brrr, ça caille,’ I tell him.
Raphaël bursts out laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’ I ask, feeling like Eliza Doolittle. ‘Did I get it wrong?’
‘Non, non,’ he says. ‘It just sounds funny, coming from un Anglais.’ As I stomp up the stairs to the organ, I make a mental note to use my new phrase as often as possible.
At least the plummeting temperatures make me feel better about having installed such expensive roof insulation in the maison des amis. Serge the mason has covered the bare tiles between the gnarled oak beams with a combination of thick Rockwool and high-tech foil-cum-foam, which I’m sure will do a splendid job of conserving the warmth that I have not yet worked out how to create. Indeed, in a masterpiece of energy efficiency, my current scheme for this part of the house doesn’t involve any heating at all.
‘Have you noticed that it’s warmer outside than it is in here?’ asks Claude, the tennis-playing electrician, blowing on his hands. I take this as a generous compliment to my insulation. It’s so cold that I have even considered buying a second-hand tennis umpire’s chair, so that I can sit closer to the ceiling.
My heating problem extends to the other end of the house, too; the one that is technically habitable. It’s only a small glitch, but both the kitchen and winter sitting-room generally fill with smoke within an hour of my lighting the wood-burning stove. I even consider driving to St Juste to borrow the carbon-monoxide detector from my plane, since I never look at it in mid-air. After all, I’d hate to poison the cat. And so – tired of sitting at my desk with tears streaming down my face – I decide that reparations are in order.
After giving the chimney a jolly good sweep with a set of old poles and un hérisson that I’ve found at the back of the barn, I make one of my regular trips to Le Grand Mermoz’s hardware shop. Snow falls lightly from a pewter sky as I drive down to Jolibois. What’s required today is some expensive glass-fibre jointing-cord to replace all the manky old rope on which sit the stove’s heavy iron plates.
Once I’ve laboriously glued the new cord into place, I glue my fingers together, and then glue myself to the kitchen taps.
Some time later, I am free to fire up the stove.
The result of my fix is immediate and impressive. The beast now blows out twice as much smoke as before. After a day of this, the cat’s nostrils have gone black and, when I catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, I look like Yosemite Sam after he’s just been blown up by Bugs Bunny.
On balance, I think I may have overdone the glue. So it’s back to Mermoz’s shop for some thicker jointing-cord. ‘Re-bonjour!’ says the sit-com lady on the till, who must think I’m stalking her.
Back at La Folie, the snow is now falling thick and fast. The phone rings, and it’s Ralph the artist on the line, calling from his centrally heated townhouse in Jolibois.
‘Are you all right up there, darling?’ he asks. ‘We’ve been worried about you.’
‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ I yell. ‘All’s well here at Ice Station La Folie.’
‘You’re not getting too cold, are you?’ he says. ‘I mean, you know, just phone us. You can come and stay if you want.’
This is a tempting offer (‘Say yes! Say yes!’ implores the cat, wild-eyed, clawing at my trousers), because Olga the spy is a wonderful cook, and I like the idea of sharing house-room with Ralph’s paintings. But I haven’t forgotten that I’ve come to France to toughen myself up. So I’m not about to start complaining about being stuck out here on my tod in a little bit of a blizzard. Especially since Nicholas gave me a splendid furry hat for Christmas, with ear-flaps that may be worn in either the up or down position.
No matter that the temperature in my bedroom barely climbs above freezing, nor that the house is about as draught-free as an international draughts convention. I get an atavistic thrill from staggering back from the barn with another armful of logs, thinking of all the French paysans over the centuries who have done this before me, all muttering the same expletive as they have slipped in the same mud. The only really painful aspect of the cold is watching the misery of the chickens outside, and Mary in particular, who has timed her annual moult for the worst possible time of year.
The cat opens one green eye as I barge through the door with my logs, my face glistening with sleet. ‘About time, too,’ she gestures with an imperious blink, as cats over the centuries must have done, in this very room, before her.
Whatever the cat may think, I know that facing up to the cold is part of the pleasure of living in my ramshackle old house. If many have lived this life before me, others, I fervently hope, will follow. For I feel as if I am in touch with some secret source of goodness here, and I have no wish to keep it all to myself.
As I stand at the back door, I lay my cheek on the cold glass, and gaze out at the snow. It’s so beautiful that my first emotion is a kind of wistful longing, a craving to share this scene, these next fifteen seconds, with someone else. And then I look again, look a little longer, trying not to label what I see as beautiful.
I look out at the gnarled old trees, and the pile of discarded stones I know so well, and the snow blowing in all directions. These are my familiars now, these trees, these stones, these snowflakes. We have been through something together, though we have never spoken, and never will.
I trudge out to the sheep with another armful of frozen hay, my fingers throbbing as I pluck fat chunks of ice out of their water trough. The stove finally fixed, I shove another log on to the fire, and think about how lucky I am. Winter is here, and we’re keeping the home fires burning at Ice Station La Folie. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
50
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
After the snow comes the rain. It has been lashing down for a night and a day, and – once again – most of it appears to have flowed under the back door into the kitchen. The good news is that the kitchen has a stone floor. The bad news is that so much water has entered via this route that it has flowed right on through the kitchen, politely turned ninety degrees to negotiate the steps into the winter sitting-room, and trickled on out under the front door.
<
br /> I am not exaggerating. I have never seen the film A River Runs Through It, and now I don’t want to. La Folie is the first house I’ve ever lived in where you can play Pooh Sticks while reading the newspaper.
The cat clatters in through the cat-flap, skips a few paces through our new water feature, and freezes. She glares at me with unfeigned disgust before shaking her dripping paws, one by one, into a blur. I can see why dancers call this move an entrechat.
By early evening, the rain has cleared and the temperature plummets. The sky is glitter spilled on to black velvet as I trudge out to put the chickens to bed. I don’t remember the nights ever being this dark in East Dulwich, where the stars were never more than a handful of dim pinpricks in the sodium gloom.
The Egg Squad are still jockeying for position on their perches when I enter the chicken house with my oil lamp. Everyone wants to be in the middle of the top row, where it’s warmest. Except Titus, bless him, who is still on sentry duty by the door. I collect four eggs from the nesting boxes, murmur my congratulations and gently close the door of the chicken house behind me.
Next morning, I am planning to head down the autoroute to Limoges, to buy a heater. The radio thermometer says it’s minus-five degrees outside. Yet as I gaze out of the window, I can see that it is raining. Not hail, not sleet, not snow, but rain.
I now do something very foolish, as anyone who has ever experienced freezing rain will immediately recognize. I step out of the front door to investigate. A second later – whumpf whumpf whumpf – both feet have slid out from under me and I am bum-skating down the three ice-slicked steps like a canoeist shooting rapids.
The cat, hearing the fall of man, rockets out of the barn and gallops up the steps to the cat-flap. Big mistake, as anyone who has ever experienced freezing rain – me, for instance – will immediately recognize. Clawing for traction like Scooby Doo, she skids backwards off the second step and ends up in the flower bed. This just makes me roar with laughter. Not sharing the joke, the cat casts me a look of such bitter hatred that I fall silent and curse my puerile sense of humour.
At the second attempt, the cat slithers up the steps on her belly, commando-style, and inveigles herself through the cat-flap, leaving me wishing I could do the same. But every ice-slicked surface is so slippery that the simple process of re-entering my own home has turned into something out of Jeux Sans Frontières. I can already hear the commentator crying with annoying laughter. I think it’s safe to say that Great Britain will not be playing their joker on this one.
Next day, the local paper reports that 114 people broke their wrists in Haute-Vienne following the freezing rain, and that the autoroute to Limoges became such a skating rink that it had to be shut for several hours. So the cat and I got off lightly. And I now understand what all those Brits mean when they say they have come to France for the weather.
I am also beginning to understand that my renovations will not be finished before Doomsday. I can take my time about painting the doors in the summer sitting-room, because Laveille, the joiner, won’t be here to lay the oak floor until 2008. Then there’s Monsieur Duruflé, the tiler, who complains that he’s already completely débordé, and as for poor Monsieur Étang, the yellow-anoraked plumber – always in demand, despite being named after a lake – I can’t bring myself to spook him by phoning him again.
Accepting such delays takes no Zen mastery on my part. I like living in my small submarine and I wouldn’t know what to do with all this space if the rest of La Folie were ever finished.
And then the phone rings, and it’s Monsieur Laveille. Now I’ve always had a good feeling about Laveille, because he is the only man in Jolibois whom I’ve seen wearing shorts in December. Either his charges are so reasonable that he cannot afford a proper pair of trousers, or else he is a fiendishly hard worker whose legs often overheat.
Contrast this with Duruflé, the tiler, whose picture-book lawn is crowded with tiny windmills and superior-looking gnomes. You wouldn’t think gnomes could make a chap look flush, but these ones do.
‘I’ll be there in a fortnight,’ says Laveille.
‘Impeccable,’ I reply, steadying myself.
After months of waiting, I am caught with les culottes en bas. Before the floor can be laid, there are all those doors and the huge French windows to paint in the summer sitting-room. Another coat of emulsion required on the west wall, thirty feet up. Myriad fiddly timbers to varnish. A scaffolding tower to dismantle. And the staircase next door can’t be built until the floor it stands on has been tiled.
I phone Gnome Central.
‘Is there any chance, Madame,’ I ask, ‘that your husband could tile the floor before the seventh? It’s rather important.’
‘Ah, would that be when Monsieur Laveille is coming?’ asks Madame, who is linked to the Jolibois grapevine via broadband. ‘Pas de problème. We’ll do the tiling next week.’ It’s amazing what a specific date and a little urgency will do. I should learn from my animals: the order in which I feed them is in direct proportion to the anguish they express.
Making a mental note to be more of a cat and less of a sheep in my next life, I phone Serge to ask if he’d be willing to remove the scaffolding before the seventh.
‘Pas de problème,’ he says. ‘I’ll be there on Wednesday.’
Electrified with action, I shin up the tower and start splashing paint on to the west wall, imagining how marvellous it will be when my piano arrives. I crouch where the piano will go, and examine the view. I bellow some tuneless Wagner – the arrival of the Gods in Valhalla – safe in the knowledge that no one can hear me.
And then Titus fires up outside, reminding me that I shall always have not just an audience, but competition, too.
Next thing I know, I’m lying in bed with the cat on my head and a lorry rumbling outside. Egad, it’s Wednesday, I’ve overslept, and that must be Serge. Bleary-eyed, I pull Zumbach’s old flasher-mac over my jim-jams, slide into my chilled clogs, and clump downstairs to unbolt the door.
‘Salut, Serge,’ I croak, shaking his hand and trying to sound as if I’ve been up for hours.
‘Salut, Michael,’ he replies, grinning. ‘What have you been painting?’
‘Myself mostly, but I think a bit went on the wall. Et vous, ça va?’ I ask.
‘Ah, oui. Comme toujours.’ Serge is about as likely to complain as a block of granite. He scratches his head, and looks up at the scaffolding.
‘How long ago did we put this up?’ he asks.
‘Almost exactly a year.’
He laughs. ‘As long as that? And now you see: everything is finished in the end.’
‘But that’s just it, Serge,’ I reply, as I head off towards the chicken house, where the girls – ready to start their day – are squawking to be fed before the sheep. ‘I still feel as if I’ve only just begun.’
51
FEBRUARY: THE ERYMANTHIAN BOAR
This can’t be right. There must be some mistake. The looming stack of oak in the summer sitting-room has been conjured into a flawless floor. Bernard and Benoît, the little-and-large double-act sent by Laveille (now in long trousers, I’m happy to see), have married timber to stone as seamlessly as syrup poured into a flan case.
It’s a minor detail, but they have also imported a load of mud from the quagmire outside, and stencilled it all over the unsealed wood in bootprints little and large.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ says Benoît, waving at the footwork on their handiwork; palimpsests on an ancient manuscript. ‘It’ll soon come off when the floor is sanded.’
‘Ah, d’accord,’ I gulp. While I may not be man enough to do my own plumbing, extract my own teeth or, indeed, lay my own floor, the five-hundred-euro charge for sanding by a third party that Laveille has included in his quote has made me feel unusually tough and resourceful. I know I can rent an appareil from Castorama in Limoges for a tenth of that – one of those self-propelling sanders you walk behind – and do it myself. I might even graduate to a
yellow belt in DIY in the process.
And then I listen to Bernard. Now Bernard is a man who, by his own admission, never sands floors himself. But he suggests an even cheaper solution to my petit problème of how to prepare forty square metres of bootmarked French oak for finition with varnish or wax.
Reader, learn from my folly. If a charming and expert menuisier in green overalls should ever come and lay an oak floor in your house, be sure to have your shipmates stop their ears with wax and chain you to the mast before he can lull you to perdition with his siren song. Bernard murmurs that I could save myself fifty euros and a trip to Limoges by using that little Black and Decker sander he’s spotted in the cellier.
This sander resembles a small household iron. When you plug it in, it is fair to say that the lights of La Folie do not dim. No, the piddling thing simply whirrs and buzzes like a moth in a jar. Its surface area is two thousand times smaller than the floor which I propose to sand with it.
Luckily, I have seen Zulu, and am not afraid.
The prospect of this small exploit gives me a goofy pleasure. I’m looking forward to the task. My warped, dilettantish brain still associates repetitive physical labour – the more tedious and gruelling the better – with heroic self-improvement. And after three hours, I have almost erased the bootprints from a tenth of the floor.
‘It’s not too late to give up and go to Castorama,’ says a voice in my head.
‘Man or mouse, Wrighty?’ comes a familiar reply. So I compromise and, in my English tea-break, visit Mermoz’s store for some Useful Gadgets instead: coarser sanding sheets for the piddle-whirrer, a dust-mask and a pair of knobbly black knee-pads. These are expensive, but might encourage me to weed the potager in the summer.
C'est La Folie Page 33