I could tell that this sentence had been too long. They wouldn’t have time before retirement to think through that much logic.
‘Do you know Pierre Ribout?’ Florence demanded.
This had a lot more effect than my logic.
‘Pierre, oui, bien sûr!’ The mayor’s name seemed to evoke happy memories of many an apéro gone by.
‘Because he is a very good friend of our family,’ Florence said.
Which gave me an idea.
‘Come and have a drink,’ I said. ‘It is much too hot to talk in the sun.’
There didn’t seem to be any rules about not drinking on duty, because these two settled in at the apéro table and saw off almost a whole bottle of wine while Florence and Brigitte lied to them about how Monsieur Ribout had seen our car and noted the particular redness of the dent.
I could sense the gendarmes’ resistance weakening as the wine settled into their ample bellies, and I broached the subject of going to the garage to look at our car for themselves.
‘Will you promise to go?’ I asked, my glass raised as if for a toast. I wasn’t used to drinking at nine in the morning, so I was tipsy to say the least. ‘Vous mettez votre main sur votre cœur et vous promettez?’ Will you put your hand on your heart and promise?
At this the two gendarmes exchanged an anxious glance, emptied their glasses and stood up. Florence was staring at me open-mouthed. Brigitte was hyperventilating. I wondered whether it might be treasonable to make gendarmes swear an oath.
‘Mesdames, Monsieur.’ The small one nodded, backed out of the garden and squeezed himself into the car. The tall one followed him, holding his képi in place with one hand and his crotch in place with the other. Weird.
‘Are you mad?’ Florence asked me when they’d driven off.
‘What do you mean? All I said was . . .’ and I repeated it, in French, putting my hand over my heart this time, to stress my meaning.
‘Oh, Paul.’
Well it wasn’t my fault, was it? It’s the way we Brits say things. We call a car a cah, a bar a bah. We don’t pronounce our r’s. So it’s not my fault if when we say ‘cœur’ it sounds as if we’re saying ‘queue’. And you can’t blame me if ‘queue’ is a rude word for penis.
Surely the gendarmes ought to have known that I’d never tell them to ‘put your hands on your dicks and swear’. Did they think I was some English Mafioso who’d castrate them if they didn’t go and look at the red paint marks on our car?
Well, yes, they obviously did.
Then it struck me. Why has no one ever mentioned it before? All those English tourists asking directions in Paris: ‘Excusez-moi, Madame, where is the cathedral of the sacred dick?’
Brigitte had to go and lie down to get this second helping of male genitalia out of her nervous system, and there ensued a short row between Florence and myself about whether I’d permanently screwed up our chances of getting the bad driver to pay damages, during which I learned a new word. Not a swearword, exactly, though Florence was using a few of those. I discovered that French drivers are so bad that there is a special word for them. The normal word for driver is ‘chauffeur’. A bad driver is a ‘chauffard’. Bad driving is such an institution that it’s made it into the dictionary.
I ended this row with some simple retaliation. If I was screwing up some things, maybe Florence was screwing up others.
‘Did you call Nicolas?’ I asked.
Florence blushed and her whole body swerved away from me as if to avoid the question.
‘Oui.’
‘Well, is he at the tea room? Has work started?’
She suddenly seemed excessively interested in a small lizard crawling up the wall of the house.
‘Pas tout à fait,’ she finally admitted.
‘Not completely? They haven’t completely started? What does that mean? It’s like saying the baby’s not completely born. I mean, has it popped out of mummy’s tummy or hasn’t it?’
There ensued yet another short row. This one was about the possible motivations for choosing an architect. Top of my list: he or she is a good architect. Down there at number fifty (in my view at least): I used to shag him.
This time it was Florence who got in with a killer question.
‘But didn’t you tell me that your motivation for coming to work in France was to see women’s lingerie?’
‘Well, yes, but I haven’t been seeing much of that in the past two or three days,’ I huffed.
‘No, because I haven’t been wearing any’ She hooked a long finger in the top of my shorts. ‘And I won’t be wearing any tonight. And little Simon is going to stay with my uncle in Brive.’
Florence certainly knew how to end a row in style.
As the sun climbed higher and began to bite into my arms and legs, I shaved off half the barn’s moss moustache, scraping away with the knife until every last molecule of green was gone from the smooth grey surface of the slate. Some of the tiles had been replaced with asbestos, I noticed. I didn’t scrape those, and prepared a little French speech in my head in case Brigitte complained. I’m sorry, Brigitte, but your ancestors have already destroyed my knees and my spine – I’m not giving them my lungs as well.
Michel woke up just before midday apéro time. He scraped his increasingly unshaven cheeks against my face and gave me a hand clearing away the clumps of moss littering the lawn at the foot of the barn wall. I knew the word for asbestos – ‘amiante’ – from when I’d tried to buy a country cottage the previous winter, so I explained about the toxic roof.
‘Boh,’ he puffed, as if I was scared of pricking my fingers on a courgette plant. He climbed the ladder and started hacking away at the soft grey tiles. The knife sent mossy pellets and asbestos flakes raining down into his face, but it didn’t seem to bother him.
Had no one told the French about this stuff? I wondered. But then the tiles were stamped with the name of a French manufacturer, so I guessed not. It’d be bad for the economy to slag off a local poison.
Apéro time went surprisingly well. Brigitte was bubbly and talkative, as if the wet-flasher incident had never happened. Monsieur Ribout came over, dog in tow, for a quick drink and announced that there was going to be a party at the Salle des Fêtes that evening, and we were invited. Especially me.
‘Pourquoi moi?’ I asked.
‘Ah!’ Big surprise, it seemed. I just hoped I wasn’t going to be asked to judge the courgette-of-the-year competition.
After a lunch of neighbour’s pig and unfreezable vegetables, I offered to make coffee for everyone.
‘We’ll have it outside,’ Florence said, and went into the garden with Michel and Simon.
‘No coffee for me,’ Brigitte said. ‘I’ll have tisane.’ Herbal tea. ‘I’m going to lie down. Can you bring it to my room?’
Oh no, I thought. Will this be her chance for revenge? The naked siesta?
The French love their herbal tea. Not strawberry tea or cranberry or any of those sweet concoctions that we Brits go in for. The French drink infusions made out of different sorts of shrubbery. Some of it’s not bad, if you like boiled twig. Personally, though, I’d rather endure a bout of gastro-enteritis than have to drink camomile.
At first I couldn’t find any herbal stuff amongst the packets of tea and coffee, then I remembered. They’d gone to buy some more from the hypermarket. It was probably a test, I thought. Will Paul have to come and ask for help? No, he won’t.
I found the big cupboard where Brigitte stored her recent shopping and there, right at the front, was a transparent glass jar with a flowery label saying ‘Verveine’. Verveine is verbena, though I have no idea what verbena is. A type of shrub, that’s for sure. Inside the jar were some extraordinarily complicated muslin sachets, like frilly little testicles. Must be very high-quality shrub, I thought.
I made the coffee and carried it outside while the verveine brewed. When the tisane was a sickly green colour, I poured some out into a thin china cup (why couldn’t they use t
hese at breakfast? I wondered) and psyched myself up for a lightning delivery mission. Into Brigitte’s bedroom, cup on bedside table, out of there. Don’t even look at the bed.
And it went perfectly to plan. I saw out of the corner of my eye that Brigitte was lying on her bed in her kaftan du jour, reading. Phew, no nude nap. She didn’t even have time to look up before I was out through the doorway and back in the lounge.
I joined Florence and the others in the garden and had just enjoyed my first sip of coffee when the scream erupted from the house.
We all stopped in mid-sip or stir and looked at each other. Had we heard correctly?
The second scream confirmed that we had. Florence and Simon leaped indoors. Michel and I followed on cautiously, in case it was strictly a women’s problem.
Brigitte’s bed was empty. The only signs that she’d been there recently were her discarded book and the upturned china cup. From the bathroom we could hear gagging sounds and choked half-sentences of female conversation. A tap was running.
Florence came out of the bathroom frowning. She picked up the cup from the bed and sniffed it.
‘What did you give Maman to drink?’
‘Verveine.’
‘Show me.’
I did.
‘Imbécile,’ she moaned when she saw the packet.
‘What?’
‘These are for the bath.’
‘What?’
‘They’ve got soap in them. They’re bath crystals parfumés à la verveine. Didn’t you read the ingredients?’
‘Read the ingredients? Of course not. I don’t read the ingredients on tea and coffee packets. It said verveine on the label. How was I supposed to know you bathe in the same stuff you drink? We Brits don’t drink soap.’
‘Oh, Paul! Maman drank almost the whole cup in one go. She thinks you tried to poison her.’
‘Oh merde.’
Michel, Florence and Simon all looked at me solemnly, trying to work out whether I was a bad tisane-maker or a particularly inefficient killer.
Luckily for me, it was Michel who laughed first. Poor Florence had to go back to the bathroom and help her mum to puke up the soapy water. We three boys were able to go outside and roll about on the lawn, howling up at the pure blue sky.
9
I APOLOGIZED, OF course, and took it like a man when a distinctly pale Brigitte asked whether the customers in my tea room were going to get similar treatment.
As penitence, I spent the afternoon with Michel taking it in turns to scrape the toxic and non-toxic roof tiles. (Yes, who was trying to poison whom round here?)
Brigitte didn’t emerge for the apéro or dinner (for which I subversively cooked pasta with a zero-fresh-vegetable sauce), and Florence said she oughtn’t to be left alone.
‘I can’t come to the Salle des Fêtes with you. I have to stay with Maman.’
‘You’ll come with me, won’t you, Michel?’ I begged.
‘Ah non, ça m’emmerde.’ This kind of thing bores him, literally ‘shits him up’. It’s like ‘faire chier’. The French seem to have real psychological hangovers from their toilet training.
All this meant that I was alone as I wandered up the hill in the purple dusk. Huge mosquitoes tried to headbutt me to the ground and siphon off my blood, but I swatted them out of the way and plodded doggedly onwards and upwards, heading for the pool of halogen light around the Salle des Fêtes in the centre of the village.
The Salle looked as if it had been a gift from Soviet Russia in about 1970. It was modernist and proud of it, with glass walls jutting out of the ground at various angles, like the trajectory of plutonium particles in the first milliseconds after a nuclear explosion.
The main hall covered an area about the size of three or four tennis courts, but because of the angular design there seemed to be only about ten square feet in the centre where you could actually organize a fete. Through the windows I could see that this area was taken up with a long plywood trestle table covered in bottles.
I recognized all the faces I could see – they were the people Monsieur Ribout had taken me to visit. The only names I could remember were Henri and Ginette.
As soon as I walked through the double doors I was greeted with another of their ‘aah’s. This one started out with one voice and grew as other people saw what the aahing was about and joined in.
How come they’re all so pleased to see me? I wondered. Surely it wasn’t because they’d heard about my murder attempt on Brigitte?
‘Pol!’ Ribout got up and took me by the arm. His dog was snapping at his heels. The two of them shepherded me over to the table and I went all round shaking hands. The women shook my hands, too, presumably because I was too young and foreign to kiss. I was the youngest by at least thirty years.
It was swelteringly hot in this abstract goldfish bowl – the sun had been heating the air since early May, and now at least ten people were replacing the oxygen with smoke. No one else seemed to be sweating, though. The men looked very comfortable in their Sunday-best shirtsleeves, and a couple of the women were even wearing light cardigans. I was in T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops, but feeling that everything except the flip-flops was extraneous.
We raised glasses of warm red wine and toasted the Queen and the memory of Princess Diana (or ‘Leddy Dee’ as they called her).
I had a few conversations along the lines of ‘I expect it’s not as hot as this in England’ and ‘so you live in Paris, do you?’ while Monsieur Ribout looked on benevolently, as if I was a stray puppy that was putting on a good display of tail-wagging and was about to find itself a new home, just like his Retriever had done.
When he finally joined in the conversation, everyone stopped talking and listened.
‘Do you see that house across the road? That used to be the café,’ he said. ‘And the commune’ (the village) ‘has just bought it. We’re going to open it as a café again. We’ve got the licence.’
There were nods of approval, and someone reminisced about the last owner, who, if I understood correctly, had hanged himself in the back garden.
‘And we have a little shop that’s open in the mornings. But we have the tabac licence so we’re going to find someone who’ll open it all day.’
‘And Sunday mornings,’ a woman at the end of the table chipped in.
‘And Sunday mornings,’ Ribout confirmed.
I drank a sip of congratulations, and felt it instantly shoot out of my pores as sweat.
‘We have a Dutchman living in the village, but he doesn’t try to integrate. He comes in summer, and at Easter, sometimes at Christmas, but he drives here in his camping car and he brings everything with him. We see him unload his cans of beer, his packets of cheese.’
‘And his PQ,’ someone added, and got a big laugh. PQ was toilet roll, I knew. Short for papier cul, arse paper.
‘But the English aren’t like that,’ Ribout went on. ‘There are some English families over in Tulle, and they live in their houses most of the year. And they buy local cheese and wine.’
‘And PQ,’ the same man added, and got a bigger laugh.
‘They integrate,’ Ribout said. ‘This is why the Dordogne still has its markets. The English even send their children to the local school.’
A circle of smiling faces seemed to suggest that the healthy state of the Dordogne’s economy was all thanks to me.
‘So we are happy that you have decided to come here. You are the first, but as soon as there is one English person in the village, others will come. We know this.’
The faces were still smiling at me, but my expression of goodwill to all men had faded ever so slightly. What was Ribout saying here?
‘We are sure that you will find what you are looking for in one of the houses you have visited.’
‘Or fields,’ Henri said, raising his glass to me.
‘Yes,’ Ribout said, ‘if you prefer to construct, I can guarantee that you will have no problem with the building permission, if you see what I m
ean . . .’ Chuckles all round. ‘The same goes if you wish to renovate to your taste in the English style, it will be no problem. And of course it is so much cheaper here than in the Dordogne.’
They were all looking expectantly at me. I’m sure my half-smile was stuck to my face like a pickled anchovy, just hanging there waiting to fall off and reveal the grimace of horror beneath.
Strangely, my first thought was not, How could they think I’d want to spend the rest of my life in this place? Because I could see the upside of living in a village where the biggest sources of stress were Who shall I have the apéro with today? and What the hell am I going to do with five tons of unfreezeable fruit and vegetables?
No, my first thought was, I’ll kill that Brigitte. She set me up, inviting her neighbours round to sell me their field and then getting the mayor to take me on an estate agent’s tour of the region.
But immediately afterwards – and this is where the horror kicked in – came the thought, Florence. That first evening, Henri and Ginette must have thought, bingo, un Anglais, and improvised from there. Otherwise they’d have taken me down to the field in the daytime, wouldn’t they? You don’t sell a house or (I supposed) a field when all you can see is its current population of moths and mosquitoes.
Florence must have known what was going on when she walked me down that lane. And when I went off for the afternoon to be force-fed strawberries by every farmer who ever voted for Ribout. And she must have known what was going to happen tonight. I doubted very much whether every boyfriend she’d brought chez Maman had got a civic reception like this one.
She also knew that I’d tried – and failed spectacularly – to buy a house in the country the previous year.
This was the biggest case I’d ever known, and I have known a few, of dropping your boyfriend in the merde.
‘Merci, merci,’ I mumbled, clinging desperately on to that anchovy of a smile. I took a big gulp of wine, and let Ribout refill my glass. ‘I am very . . . touched. Your words . . .’ I couldn’t think of a verb to finish the sentence. ‘Your words really . . . correspond.’
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