C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  ‘No? A steam train, coming down the line here?’

  ‘In a couple of weeks’ time, from Limoges. It’s a one-off.’

  ‘I shan’t miss it.’

  Back at La Folie, I wander outside to take a last look at my own little flock. I need to practise this counting lark.

  ‘Deux … quatre … six …’ Strange. I could swear I had eight this morning. And now there are nine.

  ‘Oh, well done, Doris,’ I whisper into the gathering dusk.

  Next morning, I am quietly admiring Doris’s new lamb suckling from its mother when, behind me, I hear a lawn-mower straining up the drive. Of course; I almost forgot the couple with the navy-blue Renault 4. And now they have returned with their lady-friend, who used to live here in the 1930s.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ says the bushy-eyebrowed frown at the wheel. This time he is smiling. ‘Do you remember us?’

  ‘Of course,’ I reply. ‘And you’re welcome.’ I open the back door of the car for the elegant woman who is sitting behind the driver and his blonde companion. ‘Madame …’

  Antoinette turns out to be a wonderful lady: a trim octogenarian in a floral-print dress, with clear blue eyes and neatly coiffed auburn hair, who unfolds herself from the back of the little Renault with the aplomb of a duchess. Then she shakes my hand, and looks about her, turning a full circle like a ballerina on a musical box. Monsieur Bushy Eyebrows stands edgily behind her with his hands outstretched, as if he might have to catch her at any moment.

  ‘I remember,’ she whispers, pressing both hands to her mouth as she glimpses the view across the valley. ‘But the trees are so big now, aren’t they?’ Then she turns and looks up at the house; slowly shakes her head. ‘Oh, thank you, Monsieur, thank you for letting me come and see it all again.’

  I shrug, embarrassed. And we all stand in silence for a while.

  ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur,’ says the man. ‘We should not have presumed …’

  ‘May I ask you, Madame … ?’ I interrupt, turning to Antoinette. ‘What was your life here like?’

  ‘Our life was very hard,’ she replies simply, staring at the field behind the house, as if she has spotted her father there, still ploughing behind a pair of cows. ‘But I was so happy.’ She wrings her hands, and I don’t know what to say. The man looks as if he wants her to climb back into the Renault 4.

  ‘Don’t you want to see inside the house?’ I ask.

  ‘Are you sure?’ She looks terrified and excited as I lead her up the steps into the winter sitting-room. The others follow.

  ‘The fireplace hasn’t changed,’ she gasps, pointing a trembling finger at the hearth. ‘But there are so many windows. I can’t believe it.’

  ‘These weren’t here before?’

  ‘Oh no, we only had one window in these two rooms. When you are working outside all day, you don’t need to look out of the window when you come home.’

  ‘It must have been very dark,’ I observe clumsily.

  ‘That was where my sister and I slept,’ she continues, pointing at the kitchen. ‘And this was the room where we all lived and ate.’ She gazes, open-mouthed, at the walls of the winter sitting-room, hardly able to believe that this was the place, the very place, where her six-year-old self once dreamed about the future, in 1933.

  ‘I suppose the only water was from the tap behind the house, that runs off the well at the top of the hill?’

  ‘No, there was no tap.’ She looks confused. ‘My sister and I were sent up the hill every day, to fetch the water in buckets. And it’s not a well. It’s a spring.’

  ‘Une source?’ I ask, incredulous. Zumbach assured me, when I bought the house, that the rubble at the top of the hill marked an old well, and not to drink the water, which might be polluted by the sheep. I’ve only ever used it for watering the potager. But to have a fresh-water spring: that would be something else.

  Together, we walk through into the soaring space of the summer sitting-room, with its polished oak floor and grand piano.

  ‘This is where the cows lived,’ she giggles, covering her mouth with both hands in a mixture of shock and amusement. ‘I can’t believe it. They were right here.’ She waves her arms at the piano, as if hoping to transform it into a heifer. ‘And they were happy, too.’

  ‘Come along now,’ says the man with bushy eyebrows gently, his eyelashes glistening. ‘It’s time we took you home, Maman.’

  The vet said Silent Mary’s problem was not serious. But it still hasn’t gone away. The poor girl is close to collapse, and she hasn’t done her Charleston for months. After re-reading all my chicken books for the umpteenth time, I bring her into the kitchen, feed her on parsley and Weetabix, and drive down to the pharmacy.

  ‘Sel d’Epsom?’ I ask, having looked up Epsom Salts in my French dictionary. The pharmacist looks at me blankly, as if I’d just asked him for Eccles cake or Dorset knob. ‘I think it’s magnesium sulphate,’ I add.

  His face flickers and he opens his mouth to speak. Then he disappears into a back-room. When he reappears, he is clutching a dusty, leatherbound volume which looks like a manual for turning base metals into gold. I certainly hope it’s not the Epsom telephone directory. He runs his finger down the pages as if he were searching for a dead person: Monsieur Sel, I presume.

  Then he whistles and jabs his finger at the page. SEL D’EPSOM = SULFATE DE MAGNÉSIUM. ‘It is a good day when one learns something new,’ he declares, beaming at me.

  So I put Epsom Salts in the girls’ drinking water, and in three days Mary has made a wonderful recovery. The change is so marked that I wonder if I shouldn’t retrain as a vet. I feel so relieved that I make myself an omelette to celebrate, and then head down to the church to practise the organ.

  I have just finished blasting out Karg-Elert’s Nun Danket chorale prelude on the farty reeds when I hear footsteps stomping up the oak staircase to the tribune. Funny. I could have sworn the dark church, lit only by a few votive candles, was empty. Probably Fabrice, or perhaps Raphaël le Prêtre. But a face I half recognize – a bald head, like a snowman, with currants for eyes – pokes itself round the corner and squints at me for a moment, dazzled by the bright lights of the console, before breaking into a mournful smile. The man’s cheeks are wet.

  ‘So beautifool …’ he rasps in a hoarse whisper, reaching out a trembling hand to shake mine. ‘Making me sad.’

  ‘I hope I didn’t disturb …’

  ‘No, no, your music is beautifool, thank you very much.’ He wipes his eyes, nods an apology, before turning to stomp back into the shadows. ‘Desert rats. Am thanking you, Mister. God save the kings.’

  ‘God save the kings, Édouard,’ I reply softly.

  By the end of the week, Silent Mary begins to slide again. I put her back on the Sel d’Epsom, but the signs are not good.

  She lies in the barn, eyes closed, neck outstretched, panting for breath. Her food and water sit beside her, untouched. I spend much of Saturday in the barn with her, hoping for some flicker of improvement.

  At last, there comes a kind of miracle. As I watch, Mary suddenly rears up, spreads her wings wide and high as a heraldic crest, and begins to beat them. Blow me down if the old girl isn’t trying to fly. I feel like cheering.

  Next, a violent shudder passes through her body, as if she were being electrocuted. Then she collapses like a burst balloon in the straw. A clear soup trickles out of her beak. Ladies and gentlemen, Mary has left the building. All that remains is a rumpled costume left behind after a fancy-dress ball.

  So I blow my nose and bury Mary beside Emil, beneath the trees beside the potager. And there, I give myself the fright of my life. For as I lay the body in its tiny grave, it emits a faint squawk.

  I jump back in alarm, and emit my own squawk, beginning with ‘f.’.

  Still alive? No, very dead. But the gas squeezed from Mary’s frail carcass has made her cluck. It is a shock that I shall not forget in a hurry, any more than I shall ever forget Mary, the gentlest, stea
diest chicken a chap could wish for, who did have a voice after all.

  55

  A CELEBRATION

  Silent Mary’s death has quite knocked the wind out of me and, right now, I can’t think of anything I feel less like doing than socializing. Nevertheless, tonight I have to cook the dreaded repas anglais for my friends from the tennis club. Claude the electrician has been to La Folie before. But for Mermoz and Jeanne, Blaise and the Proustian Madeleine, for Kiki the femme fatale, Maxim the welterweight economist and the rest, it will be their first visit to outer darkness. Though these hardy souls somehow survived my snoring and my sleep-talking when we went skiing together, Mermoz is convinced that my cooking is going to finish them off.

  Hard on the heels of Mary’s death comes the most joyous consolation. Claudette, one of my two Ouessant lambs born last year, produces a gorgeous lamb of her own. This is my first ‘second generation’ birth at La Folie; the first time an animal born under my care has itself given birth. So we are a grandfather at last.

  It’s amazing to see this tiny creature bouncing around the field after only twenty-four hours on the planet; an arched body on four splayed limbs, like something you might have knocked up in carpentry at school. A lamb so black that he looks like his own silhouette. I shan’t name him, for I learned my lesson after Emil’s death last year.

  So let this be Nemo. I can easily stand and let the hours go by, just watching this fragile thundercloud taking his first steps in the world. But I mustn’t, for I have to cook.

  ‘If we eat your English food, there will be no one left to represent Jolibois in the leagues this summer,’ Mermoz warned me last week, making me wonder if word of my green egg hash with black shrapnel has somehow got out. Since Mermoz also has acute cat-phobia, he is being very brave in coming to La Folie at all.

  For starters, we’re having Delia’s salmon fishcakes, followed by chicken korma (I know, I know) with rice, nan, poppadoms, mango chutney, etc. Then cheddar and un-French biscuits, ferried hither by a charming Portuguese anaesthetist from the little tennis club by the railway line in Dulwich, on one of his trips to the Algarve. For the skiers’ dinner, I was going to do ice cream with Mars Bar sauce, too, but the Proustian Madeleine has offered to bring dessert (pronounced with a hissed ‘s’, not a ‘z’, she corrects me, or else people might think I was serving a few buckets of sand and a cactus).

  Frankly I’m grateful for all the help I can get, because whenever a recipe says ‘Preparation time: twenty minutes’, that’s how long it takes me just to mentally prepare myself to roll up my sleeves. I can add another nought for the time it will actually take me to chop and mash and incinerate the thing. I bet it doesn’t take Delia seven hours to make fishcakes.

  Tonight is special to me, for the strands of my French life are coming together, and it is a baptism of sorts. For the very first time, we are going to eat in the newly finished summer sitting-room – and I may even have the chance to play the piano for everyone afterwards. I can’t quite believe this. I’m still so used to thinking of the echoing void as a building-site that whenever I go in there now, it feels like I’m entering Narnia.

  ‘On va pendre la crémaillère,’ Mermoz’s wife, Jeanne, tells me on the phone.

  ‘Oui, bien sûr,’ I reply, without a clue as to what she means. It’s only when I look up the phrase in my dictionary that I realize she’s describing a house-warming: we’re going to suspend the fireplace hook.

  It may be a house-warming, but it’s a dress rehearsal, too. For next Saturday I am undertaking a more daunting soirée, in the shape of a dinner-cum-concert for the workers who did the renovation work in the summer sitting-room, with Gilles and Josette for moral support. Zumbach, the reclusive former owner of La Folie, has even promised to drive over from Limoges as the guest of honour. Since it was he who conceived and started work on the summer sitting-room, years ago, I want him to be here to see it finished.

  Twenty minutes before the skiers arrive, I’m still trying to light the wood-burning stove, whip up a sauce to go with the fishcakes and muck out the chicken house when a silver car pulls up and a bearded ogre with a familiar smile climbs out. Oh-là-là. Please tell me that isn’t who I think it is.

  ‘Bonsoir, Michael,’ growls Zumbach, shaking my hand as if he were ringing a firebell. ‘I’m not too early, am I?’

  ‘Er … about a week, Ludo,’ I gulp, peeking at him from between my fingers.

  His face changes colour. My cheeks are burning, too. I invite him to join the skiers for dinner anyway, but he won’t hear of it. And he’s not free for next week’s dinner, either.

  ‘There’s only one thing I ask, Monsieur Wright.’

  ‘Of course, Ludo. Anything.’

  ‘May I walk around, just for a few minutes? I shan’t get in your way. I’d just like to see the old place, see the wonders you have worked.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure they’re wonders …’

  But Ludo has already walked into the summer sitting-room. I hear him gasp, and emit a little groan. When I follow him in there, he has slapped both hands to his mouth, and is turning a slow circle, gazing up at the roof.

  I don’t know what to say. But I want to give him a gift, and I want to mark this moment in some way. And so I slide on to the piano stool, and I launch into the Fantaisie-Impromptu of another Polish artist who made France his home.

  Usually my fingers fumble over some of Chopin’s fiddlier phrases, but today something magical happens. I can only say that the piece begins to play itself. I watch my hands flying over the notes, as what was once tricky and technically challenging seems to be flowing from my fingertips like water from an underground chasm. I feel a sense of vertigo, fearing that if I look down I shall fall. I don’t want to think about it too much. So I simply lose myself in the music, and let it fly up to the rafters. In the lyrical middle section, the trills that I usually fluff glitter like sapphires, and the music ripples to its conclusion with minimal interference from me.

  I turn, expecting to see Ludo’s face illuminated with shared pleasure. But he has gone.

  Alarmed, I slip out of the huge French doors into the chill spring air. No sign of him. I check the barn, the workshop; even the chicken house. Nothing. I wander around to the sheep field, to see if he is there. Not there either.

  And then, at last, I see a grizzled, heavily built figure slumped on the corner of the stone pool where the goldfish live. He is not looking at the fish. Zumbach is gazing out across the valley, to where the last rays of the sun are falling on the little chapel at St Sauveur. There are tears in his eyes.

  ‘Ludo …’ I begin. But Zumbach shakes his head. So I sit down beside him, and we both sit there together for some minutes, gazing out at the same view that we both know so well, just as the six-year-old Antoinette and every former owner of this ramshackle house must have come to know it, too. But I can only guess at what Ludo is seeing, for he has the air of a man who is looking not with his eyes, but with his heart.

  It was self-indulgent of me to play the Chopin. He once told me that Chopin’s music was too sad for him. I should have known it would be too much for him here, today.

  ‘Oui,’ he murmurs at last, gesturing around him, at the house, at me, at himself, the setting sun, a solitary swallow that is carving arcs in the sky above us, and finally reaching out both arms as if he wanted to embrace all of it. The twinkle has returned, though his eyes are still wet with tears. He turns to me and nods, and as I look into his eyes he doesn’t need to explain.

  And then he shakes his head and tries to speak. He clears his throat and tries again, wiping his eyes with the back of one hand. ‘C’est de la folie,’ he croaks, with a hoarse laugh.

  ‘Come on, Ludo,’ I say, hearing the tremor in my own voice. ‘Let’s go inside.’

  But he waves his hand, and pulls away, stumbling down the rocky old drive that he has walked so many times before. I watch him disappear into the dappled shade of the great oaks, like a polar explorer vanishing into a
blizzard, or Hector marching to face Achilles from the gates of Troy.

  And then he marches back again. ‘Forgot my car,’ he growls.

  A few minutes after Ludo’s silver car has vanished in a cloud of dust, the skiers start to arrive.

  ‘Calme, calme!’ coos the Proustian Madeleine, sensing my edginess that everything should be just so. ‘On va passer un bon petit moment, quoi qu’il arrive.’ The wives immediately set to work, washing the salad and polishing champagne glasses, while the men do their bit by wandering outside to view the sheep.

  ‘How much did you pay for this place?’ asks Kiki, still hobbling with a stick after her skiing accident. French directness about money never fails to take me by surprise. Fortunately Mermoz and Jeanne, in matching walking boots and anoraks, appear at this moment, so I can stop squirming. But Mermoz can’t, for the cat – sensing a cat-hater – makes a special point of coming to greet him.

  ‘Putain! Look at the size of that thing,’ yells Mermoz, somewhat hurtfully, as he jumps for cover behind Jeanne. It’s true that the cat is still a little on the starboard side of portly, but she’s been on the diet food for months. ‘Who did he eat for breakfast? You can still see the blood on his jaws.’ Though Mermoz’s joshing is brave enough, I can see the raw panic in his eyes, too. So I grab the cat, and shut it in my bedroom.

  We move through into the summer sitting-room, and I feel suddenly embarrassed, because everyone bursts into applause.

  ‘This is really a chateau,’ declares the Proustian Madeleine, making me feel glad that there are still some exposed lightbulbs dangling from dusty wires, and that I left the ancient cattle stalls in place when Douglas rendered the walls.

  ‘I can take no credit,’ I explain, beginning to tell them about Ludo, and how I have merely been finishing the work he began.

  ‘We’ll be able to play tennis in here next winter, if Kiki will let us,’ chortles Mermoz, giving Kiki a hearty nudge in the ribs.