by Tony Hawks
Amidst much childish tittering I made the call, immediately struggling to form the correct sentence. I wanted to say that I thought that I might have dropped my jacket somewhere on his driveway—but I couldn’t think of the word for jacket and I didn’t know the word for driveway. And so Matt got his way. He saw me squirm. Momentarily lifted by the fact that the word for jacket’ magically popped into my head, I launched into a long sentence in which I attempted to get my meaning across. I’m not sure if I was entirely successful because on its completion there was silence at the end of the line, followed by a slightly pained ‘Comment?’ (The polite way in French of saying, ‘What in God’s name was all that about?’) I had another go, but, again, with little apparent success because Jean-Claude countered with a long and speedily delivered sentence, the intonation of which suggested that it might be a question. Shortly afterwards I said my goodbyes and hung up.
“Well?” enquired Tim, whilst Matt, who had recently descended into fits of giggles, looked on. “Is it there or not?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied. “But I don’t think so.”
“You bloody idiot,” said Matt, once he regained a modicum of composure. “You screwed up big time.”
“How?”
“Instead of using the word blouson, which means ‘jacket’, you used the word bouchon, which means ‘cork’. You just asked him if he could look and see if you dropped your cork somewhere outside his house.”
Tim now joined Matt in raucous laughter, causing the van to swerve rather dangerously towards the hard shoulder.
“Then,” continued Matt, “you asked him if he would call you on your mobile as a matter of urgency if he found your cork lying anywhere around the place—so that we could then turn the van round and go back for it.”
Oh dear. My credibility with the vendor would be in tatters. All future negotiations would be tarnished by his belief that I was a strange and celibate bachelor with an unreasonable and obsessive attachment to corks.
§
We were just outside Paris when I got the explanation of what had happened to the jacket. I received a call to my mobile from a French woman who explained that she had found the jacket, picked it up, and then found my mobile number in the front of my diary.
“Fancy turning round and going back?” I enquired of Tim, Matt having been released from the van several hours back.
“Don’t want to sound selfish,” he replied dryly, “but I think you’ll have to go back for it another time.”
“Fair enough, I suppose. Anyway—I’ll be back in a month to sign the papers and formally take over the house.”
“Perhaps this jacket lady will turn out to be the woman for you,” said Tim with a cheeky grin. “What did she sound like?”
“Well, she had a nice voice,” I said, “but there didn’t seem to be any major reason to suggest a blossoming romance.”
“That’ll come,” said Tim. “I mean, talk about fate drawing you two together. She’s all the things you could want in a woman—resourceful, kind, public-spirited, and has a car.”
“Yes,” I said, sceptically. “I’ll let you know.”
5
Cows, Cows and More Cows
“Blimey, how far were you hoping to get in this thing?” asked the man who’d come to tow the van away.
To say that he was eyeing the abandoned white van disparagingly doesn’t do justice to the extent to which he’d managed to contort his face.
“The French Pyrenees,” I said, not without shame, whilst furtively looking around me hoping that no one else in the road would overhear.
“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed. “In that thing you’d have been lucky to get to the end of this road.”
Then he thought for a moment and added, “Well, you didn’t, obviously.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Then I gave him a cheque for £70 and he hooked up the front of the disgraced van to some kind of hoist and towed the bloody thing away.
Final bill then: £585.00. A bargain.
§
A few weeks later I was back in France to sign the papers that would make the house mine, all mine. As I sped along the motorway in the hire car, I was fully prepared for the many administrative chores that lay in store for me. I was also ready for potential romance. I knew that I was probably being a ridiculous dreamer, but I couldn’t help wondering if there might be something special about to happen between me and ‘Jacket Lady’.
Tim was responsible for this. His words had refused to leave me. And I was rather fascinated by the way in which this woman and I had made contact. The romantic in me wanted to be sitting at a dinner table in years to come answering the question about how we’d met. It would probably trigger a round of applause from all present—the finest example of a relationship that was simply meant to be.
We had spoken on the phone a week previously, but a combination of her lack of English and my incompetence in telephone French had made it impossible to fathom whether we had anything in common. All I knew was that she had quite a nice voice. I felt a tingle of nerves as I drove the car into Tarbes and began to follow the muddled directions to her apartment that I’d taken down. On the passenger seat next to me there was a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Well, I’d thought, even if there wasn’t a hint of a spark between us, she deserved a big thank-you anyway. She’d ‘saved’ my leather jacket, after all. And if she was gorgeous? Well, the flowers weren’t going to do me any harm.
Jacket Lady lived in a block of flats that looked just like those I remembered from a photograph in my first French textbook at school. They’d probably been ‘state of the art’ when they’d been built in the 1970s, but they hadn’t aged well. I pulled over in the car and tooted my horn, as I had been instructed to do. I picked up the flowers, got out of the car and stood there, watching the exit to the flats in anticipation. Then my heart sank. An elderly lady appeared, grey-haired, perhaps in her late sixties. Surely this couldn’t be Jacket Lady? The voice I’d heard on the phone had almost certainly been that of a younger woman than this. Surely I couldn’t have got it so wrong.
I sighed with relief when the lady emerged from the doorway and then turned to the left, moving away from me. Good, it wasn’t her. I could now get on with the job of fixing my eyes upon the doorway, hoping to be delighted by the imminent emergence of an attractive, sophisticated woman in her mid-thirties. A minute passed. Jacket Lady was certainly taking her time. Perhaps she was sprucing herself up and making herself look even more lovely. Maybe, like me, she had felt that there was something special in the way that we had been drawn together. Did she also suspect that we might have been supposed to meet?
I continued to stare at the doorway, but no one appeared. Suddenly I was startled by a voice coming from my right.
“You are Tony?”
I knew that voice. I’d heard it twice before over the telephone. I spun round to see her standing before me, holding my leather jacket in her left hand. An attractive, sophisticated lady in her mid-thirties? Not at all. This was the same sixty-something woman I had seen moments before. She must have gone to get my jacket from her car before coming to say hello. Terrible news.
“You are Tony?” she repeated.
“Yes,” I replied, trying to conceal my spectacular and foolish disappointment.
“Votre blouson ,” she said, handing me the jacket.
That voice. So young-sounding. How did she do that? Why did she do that? So unfair. No doubt she had been a fine-looking woman in her day. Unfortunately for me, that day had been February 5th, 1966.
“Merci ,” I said, shaking her hand and making a mental note to scold Tim for having built up my hopes so high.
Suddenly I became aware of the bouquet of flowers that I was clutching close by my side, and I held them out in front of me.
“Pour vous ,” I said.
“Ah merci ,” said the lady with the faintest of smiles, taking the flowers with her free hand. “Au revoir!”
And that
was it. Immediately she turned and walked back towards the same doorway from which she had materialised minutes before in all her grandmotherly splendour. No invitation to her apartment for tea. No cordial small talk. With the brisk and calculating efficiency of Cold War spies, we’d exchanged items and parted company. The job done, there was no reason to hang around.
I walked back to my car, opened the door and slumped into the seat. Love, it seemed, would have to wait. At least until after lunch.
§
Lunch found me once again at Malcolm and Anne’s. When they’d heard I was coming back to the village, they’d been quick with the invitation. I was grateful to them for their hospitality, and it felt good to have some company to take my mind off the morning’s disappointment.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” asked Anne, as she chomped on some charcuterie.
“In the morning we have the last signing session at the notaires office, which will finally make the house mine.”
“Oh that’s a shame—you won’t get to do the transhumance.”
“Transhumance?”
Anne explained that this was an annual event in the pastoral calendar, during which the cattle are moved from the hilly fields that surround the village up to mountainous grazing. This is done so that the lowland pastures can be used for producing hay through the summer months, which can then be fed to the cattle through the winter. I was told that anyone could tag along, and they did so in quite large numbers.
“And what would I do, if I were able to join in?” I enquired. “I have very little experience with cows.”
Up until this point in my life, all contact with these creatures had been limited to frosty staring matches on country walks (which I always lost), or, back in the days before I’d given up eating meat, surveying small bits of them arriving on my dinner plate. These latter encounters had somehow made up for all the unsatisfactory staring matches, as they acted as comforting proof that I had been the one who’d finally prevailed.
“All we do is follow the cows,” said Anne. “It’s easy.”
“Sounds fun. If I didn’t have the other appointment, I definitely would have been up for it.”
This wasn’t entirely true. The truth was that to me it seemed like an event that lacked pizzazz. Walking behind cows? It didn’t quite do it for me.
“Where are you going to stay tonight?” asked Malcolm.
“At a hotel in the town,” I replied.
“Why don’t you stay here?” he continued. “The loft apartment is empty. It’s yours if you want it.”
“Really?”
“Of course, now go and get your stuff.”
Wow. The locals appeared to be taking me to their bosom. Well, the Anglo-Saxon ones, at any rate.
§
The afternoon saw the first of the many managerial chores that face any overseas home-purchaser. I needed to open a bank account. We forget just how laden our adult lives have become with administrative and bureaucratic baggage. Because we have taken a number of years to acquire our bank accounts, credit cards, insurance policies, driver’s licences, national insurance numbers and the rest, we have forgotten just how uninspiring and tedious each individual acquisition happened to be. Now that I had chosen to establish my bureaucratic presence in a new nation state, a veritable plethora of dreary, pompous and largely incomprehensible French paperwork lay in wait for me.
I was blissfully unaware of this as I drove into town and so my mood was still upbeat. Bagneres was big enough to offer a selection of banks, and so it would be important to make the right choice.
Obviously it would be best to find one that could offer favourable interest rates on any lump sums that I may deposit. Furthermore I would require my bank to be understanding, and sympathetic to the different problems faced by the foreigner with a new home. I would need to take care.
I didn’t take care though. Far from it. Instead I proceeded to choose my bank on the basis of which one was nearest to the spot where I’d managed to park.
I guess this was a conscious rebellion against the increasingly large section of our media that continually instructs us to be careful with our money. TV and radio ‘money’ programmes and thousands of column inches in our newspapers and magazines advise us how to invest, avoid tax or move our money about, seemingly unconcerned that our lives are being frittered away beneath the heavy duvet of pecuniary prudence. They constantly tell us to shop around in the financial marketplace, overlooking all the much nicer things we could be doing with our time. Would we prefer to talk to a spotty bloke in glasses from Lloyds TSB about an investment account, or go for a nice stroll in the country? Not that difficult a choice for me. Besides, financial planning is actually so much easier than they make out. Here’s all you need to do: earn a bit, spend a bit and stash a bit under the bed. It needn’t be any more complicated than that—and that’s why the pleasingly adjacent Banque Populaire was good enough for me. It was a bank, it was popular, and it was just over the road.
Having negotiated a series of high-security doors and buzzers, I found myself in an environment more like an office than a bank. French banks have chosen to put their security at the street end of things, so once inside one encounters no bullet-proof screens or grilles through which to address the teller. No, it’s nice and familiar—and dead easy to hold the place up, provided that you manage to sneak a gun in under your coat and don’t mind the fact that there’s no escape. (How irritating to have all that money, and then only be able to open a deposit account with it.)
After a brief chat with the agreeable and very pretty young lady who greeted new arrivals from behind a pristine and shiny desk, I was ushered upstairs where I had a pleasing meeting with the charming, healthily bronzed Monsieur Daressy. He assured me (from behind another shiny and pristine desk) that I’d made the right choice in picking their bank. It felt extremely good to have my rigorous selection process so promptly endorsed. Monsieur Daressy was extremely helpful and filled out all the forms for me, occasionally throwing in the odd word in English, after which he looked up and beamed at me for approval.
Twenty minutes later I emerged from the bank’s security system and onto the street, now in possession of a newly opened bank account, numerous pieces of paper that meant little or nothing to me, and a not altogether wholesome attraction to the girl on the front desk.
Emboldened by this success, I decided to call in at the notaire’s office, just to check that everything was OK for the following day’s meeting.
The notaire —the man who had sniggered at Tony the cèlibataire at that preliminary meeting months ago—was not there. His assistant, a lady lacking in the charms of the bank teller, was unable to find anything about the meeting in the notaries diary. A flurry of phone calls and asking around the office produced no tangible results. No one had any knowledge of an impending meeting and signing.
“Mais c’est extraordinaire”, I complained, before being handed the phone to sort it all out for myself.
The first call I made was to my dear friend, the estate agent Monsieur L’Agent, who quickly established that he was totally in the dark about any meeting. So then, rather nervously, I called the vendor Jean-Claude on his work number. The nerves were because I feared that as soon as he heard my voice he would almost certainly be expecting me to launch into a further barrage of enquiries regarding the whereabouts of my cork.
“Ah, bonjour, Tony ,” he said as he answered the phone, almost with a tremor in his voice.
No doubt to his great relief, I proceeded to ask about what was happening with regard to this signing session. Confused though he may have been as to why I had suddenly dropped all concerns for my cork, he was forthright in his confirmation that everybody knew about the imminent meeting and that he was fully expecting it to go ahead in the morning. All very odd. Very odd indeed.
I guess I spent about another half hour speaking to all the parties involved. The notaire’s secretary informed me that one month previously they had told Monsieur
L’Agent that they needed him to request more documents from me, something that he had patently not done. Over the phone Monsieur L’Agent then proceeded to assure me that he knew nothing whatsoever about this. I decided to skip the call to Jean-Claude in which he would have told me that everyone knew everything and that the meeting was still on for the morning. It would have been pointless. Passing the buck, Pyrenean-style, was going on here—and it was a futile exercise trying to pin the blame on any party. Guilt was a movable feast, a cog that turned effortlessly as an integral part of a well-oiled cyclical machine. Why mess with it? Instead, I engaged in an hour of negotiations with the notaires secretary and was able to establish a new procedure that I hoped would eventually lead to me becoming the owner of this bloody house. The plan was that I would send out the missing documents by registered post and give power of attorney to the notaire so that the deal could be done in my absence.
“Ça va?” I finally asked of the secretary, her head still buried in a mountain of paperwork.
“Oui, ça va ,” she replied.
Slightly exhausted, I walked from the notaire’s offices, not altogether confident that we could rely on a problem-free process from here on in. Just how much longer, I mused uneasily, was my house going to remain not my house?
§
That night, I dined once again with my new hosts Malcolm and Anne. Wine flowed and we chatted some more about my prospects for settling into the village.
“You don’t think they’ll resent another Brit buying a property?” I asked.
“God no,” said Malcolm. “They’d sooner have a Brit than a Parisian. And anyway, they’ll like you because you speak the lingo.”
“The best thing to do to really get accepted,” said Anne, “is to throw yourself into village life and participate in every event that takes place.”
“Yes,” said Malcolm. “You must come to the village lunch the day after tomorrow—it’ll give you the chance to meet lots of your new neighbours.”
“That sounds fun,” I said.
“It’s a shame you have the signing in the morning,” said Anne.