by Jamie Ivey
In the villages the majority of businesses are boarded up with vague promises of a return pinned to flaking shutters. Anyone with sense disappears to the Alps. The remainder huddle next to wood-burning stoves, unplug the telephone, eat preserved food and do their best to deny the existence of the outside world. It's a miserly, frugal, grudging existence that quickly makes the feasting of Christmas appear like a dream. People who once spent €900 a kilo on a truffle will now hesitate at the indulgence of fresh vegetables. Occasional tourists, cameras slung redundantly over their shoulders, pace the streets, scanning guidebooks in frustration as they search for whatever induced them to book their holiday at this time of year.
As new parents we were immune to the January blues that inevitably beset everyone around us. The local paper, La Provence, proclaimed doom and gloom: flooding in Cavaillon, rioting in the slums of Avignon and the inexorable rise of the cost of living. A survey found that the Provençaux were the most depressed people in France. Nobody disputed it. Yet our bonhomie endured.
When a simple standard format letter arrived from the mairie of Pertuis congratulating us on the birth of our daughter, we quickly had it framed.
'Where else in the world would the mayor take the time to write?'
'Where indeed,' I agreed.
We both stood back and admired the embossed letter, hanging from the newly painted pale pink wall of our daughter's bedroom. To us, drunk on the joy of our firstborn, it represented incontrovertible proof of the superiority of French society. The rest of Europe was going down the drain, consumed by capitalism, but here in France, the mayor still cherished every birth. Visits to the paediatrician induced similar gushing praise. Appointments were readily available, there was no waiting and each week the doctor spent forty minutes with Elodie, charting her minute progress and prescribing a seemingly endless list of preventive medicines which the state was all too happy to subsidise.
'What a marvellous country, what a marvellous way of life,' we agreed.
Even the avalanche of new year tax bills, the receipts from which helped pay for such administrative niceties as the mayor's letter and the inexhaustible supply of medicines, failed to shake me from my good mood. Two weeks with my mother-in-law passed without incident. A local vigneron offered to bottle a jeroboam of wine to celebrate Elodie's birth. An artist cast her feet in clay and we hung the result in the bathroom. Cards and presents arrived on a daily basis and well-wishers deposited more casseroles and confits, assuring us that we were too busy to cook. Momentarily this was true. My power drill was on permanent charge as I assembled the cot, rebuilt the mobile, took down a bed and put together a replacement futon. Nightly sleeps were almost always interrupted and catnaps during the day became a necessity.
When the squeaking new wheels of Elodie's buggy bumped along the cobbled streets of the village, heavy wooden doors swung open letting plumes of precious heat escape into the icy street. The excuse for such inexplicable largesse was not just a baby but a blue-eyed baby. Women would knock on neighbours' doors, imploring their voisins to come outside with a sense of pious urgency more usually reserved for a minor religious miracle.
'Regardez les yeux.'
'Ils sont magnifiques.'
'Oh là là, ils sont beaux.'
Gradually we came to appreciate that any eye colour other than nut brown was as rare as a comet here. Even field-hardened labourers would press their hands to their hearts and swoon at such alien blueness. As a consequence each trip out ended like a procession, with a line of admirers waiting for their turn to peel back Elodie's blankets.
A more disturbing habit was an obsession with Tanya's body. Hands were pressed to her tummy to check the speed with which it was returning to normal. A hello kiss became an intimate experience as arms were wrapped around her waist searching for the remaining signs of her pregnancy – was she carrying weight on her bottom, or water on her thighs?
This all too intrusive interest perplexed me until I overheard a conversation standing in the boulangerie queue.
'Attention, c'est chaud!' The baguettes were still fresh from the oven and the homely aroma of soft dough pervaded the small shop. Condensation traced its way down the windows and beads of my breath coalesced on the furry inside of my jacket. It was the most popular time of the morning and at least ten people were pressed into the room. Turning around was difficult so instead the customers, most of them wearing fur coats, shuffled forwards with their arms clamped to their sides, rather like a queue of penguins preparing to launch into the sea.
The different breads waited in a sentinel line. The fridges to the right held a collection of sumptuous tarts: raspberry, strawberry and fig, together with the speciality of the house – layered caramel on a crunchy biscuit base. Customers with less voracious appetites needed to turn left where there were rows of individual pastries, fruit tarts and chocolate concoctions. This early in the morning every minute spent in the shop was a temptation; sugar levels were low and the oven was constantly churning out new delights.
'Sunflower bread and a multi-cereal.' The features of the next customer were shrouded by the hood of her coat.
'Sliced?' asked Madame Parmentier, the baker's wife.
'No thanks. It's such a cold rain.' The conversation opener was always the weather.
The boulangerie was widely recognised as the centre of all gossip. Its effectiveness was multiplied by the French willingness to travel to buy different types of bread. The common consensus was that it was impossible for any baker to perfect all elements of his art. Thus, some bakeries were renowned for their speciality breads, others for their croissants, and some for their skill with the humble baguette. People therefore frequented not one but all the local boulangeries, depending on their requirements for that day, spreading news as they went.
The queue stalled as Madame Parmentier revealed the details of a botched perm and my mind ranged over the options for breakfast: buttery croissant, rich enough to work with a strong black coffee; pain au chocolat, one of the finest in the region, laced with two thick seams and presumably, like the baguette, still warm; croissant aux amandes, simply sublime but too indulgent for a weekday; and finally my daily temptation, the feuilleté saucisse, the closest the French got to a cooked English breakfast. A tray of pizza emerged from the oven, filling the shop with the smell of thyme and overripe tomatoes. I couldn't… a pizza for breakfast?
'Just a month and her tummy is already tight.' The two women in front of me had found the space to wait side by side. From the quality of the fur coat and the tiny wet canine nose poking inquisitively from its folds, one of them could only be Delphine. I hesitated before saying hello, waiting for her to buy her bread.
'I was always too terrified to have babies; the thought of what it might do to these.' Delphine somehow delved into her coat and hoisted her no doubt surgically enhanced cleavage skywards, revealing a lacy bra in the process. 'Maybe I was wrong, I mean, her décolletage is still firm, lucky girl.'
Filling in the gaps, I suspected the décolletage they were discussing was Tanya's. Nice as it was to have one's wife's breasts complimented in public, I didn't think Tanya would be happy. Yet it seemed too late to intervene. The conversation had achieved a critical momentum and I was powerless to stop it. Instead I shrank into my coat and pretended not to listen.
'Legs are in good shape.'
I thought of Tanya, busy at home sterilising bottles for expressed milk, and folding baby clothes. The immediate manic aftermath of the birth had passed – the hapless clothes-wrecking first nappy changes and baby-dropping baths, as the physical impossibility of holding child and soap at the same time became apparent – and life had settled down into an enjoyable semi-peaceful rhythm. And yet inexplicably we were the news on the bakery semaphore.
To the French female mind Tanya's struggle to regain her pre-pregnancy shape was, I realised, a race against time. Men were feckless wandering souls to whom monogamy was anathema. From politicians to pool boys we were all the sam
e and so when Delphine looked at me, rather than seeing a doting father she must have seen a philanderer. From her perspective, the only way Tanya could ensnare me into a life of loving servitude was a tight butt and flat stomach.
'Look at what happened to Claudine,' continued Delphine. 'Husband insisted on night harvesting, said it was to stop fermentation in the field, but every morning he came home as clean as a whistle, and the resulting wine tasted worse than ever.'
'How dare he?'
'If that was me, I'd hire a hitman.'
The rééducation that Delphine had so strongly advocated was, I now understood, core to the French woman's sexual psyche. The sooner after giving birth she could get her man back into bed the less likely he was to start 'night harvesting'. Temptation was all around. The swinging sixties had never left our corner of remote Provence. At a local road-restaurant-cum-nightclub, two villages away, couples checked in and the ladies picked a set of car keys at random as they left, and only this summer, according to gossip, a hotelier had tried to persuade a couple in the honeymoon suite to order some extra entertainment.
We were now near enough the front of the queue for Madame Parmentier to spot me. Quickly picking up the topic of the ongoing conversation, she raised her eyebrows at Delphine in warning.
'Charming couple, though, sure they will be fine.' Delphine turned and greeted me with the warmest of grins. Not a moment's surprise registered on the old pro's face.
'Bonjour, ça va?'
'Ça va, merci.'
'Et Tanya, et Elodie?'
'Tout va bien.'
We exchanged farewell kisses and I shuffled forwards, trying to comprehend the consequences of such a heightened sense of insecurity. Society was promiscuous. Like loving food and wine, having affairs had become an intrinsic part of being French. However, far from living in a permanent state of euphoric ardour, French women, theoretically the world's greatest lovers, appeared to exist in a state of terror, ever fearful that they would lose their man. This daily agitation seemed to explain another until now unsolved enigma of life in France – the abundance of lingerie shops.
There was scarcely a street in a town where the plastic nipples of a mannequin didn't protrude through a lacy embrace. Until this moment I'd assumed that Provençal men had insatiable appetites and that after a hard morning picking pumpkins or pruning vines, they rushed to spend their hard-earned wages on the very latest edible thong, crashing through the door to their home in a fit of raging passion, wolfing down a daube and spending the remaining hour of their lunch licking an île flottante from their wife's heaving breasts.
Instead, I now appreciated lingerie was a defensive female purchase. It might never be worn, but it was there in a drawer, ready and waiting, a threat and a temptation. And the beauty of it all for the lingerie shop owners was that a woman could never have enough. These shops fed an insatiable arms race between wives and mistresses, each faction desperate for the reassurance of another pair of suspenders, just in case they were ever needed.
Madame Parmentier slipped the pizza into the bag and the warm topping immediately clung to the paper.
'Merci beaucoup, bonne journée.'
We parted company. For once Madame Parmentier sheepishly averted her eyes.
Back at home Tanya was busy trying to reassemble a breast pump and Elodie was lying on her back in her cot, wailing with hunger. My mind was still turning over the eavesdropped conversation as I placed breakfast on the table. The photos at Pertuis hospital with the mums in their finest underwear now also made sense. They were a timely reminder to the husband of what he'd been missing and a warning not to stray. Imagine the hassle, though; you've just given birth, you're tired and exhausted, all you want to do is sleep and yet instead you commission a photographer and put on your finest bra, posing artfully to reveal a heavy post-pregnancy cleavage. Such dedication took a special kind of distrust of one's husband.
'It must be exhausting being a French woman,' I said without thinking.
Tanya's raised eyebrow said it all – gave birth three weeks ago, up every night breastfeeding, the pump which you were supposed to fix doesn't work, I'm still doing all the washing and the cooking and you want to discuss the plight of French women.
Chapter 5
By the beginning of February I was back at work selling wine. In the corner of my cave (wine cellar) I came across a box of rosé from a'Beckett's vineyard in Wiltshire. I'd ordered some out of curiosity following a lunch the previous summer with the wine expert and Decanter columnist Steven Spurrier, and now this English pink gave me an idea.
In 1976 Steven had organised a blind tasting of the best French wines against the best American wines. The premier tasters in the world had lined up, sniffing, swilling, tasting and pontificating over the lingering finish of Cabernet on the tongue. Then, in a result that shocked oenophiles everywhere, the tasters scored the American wines higher than the most famous French clarets. The sporting equivalent of this result would be the Faroe Islands beating Brazil 5–0 at football, in Rio de Janeiro with a Brazilian referee, and with the Faroe goalkeeper having been sent off in the first minute. According to the French mindset, the second coming of Christ was more probable than their best wines being judged inferior to foreign muck. And yet it happened.
The tasting became known as the Judgement of Paris and at the time caused outrage in the wine industry. Steven was temporarily ostracised by major vineyards, who criticised the methodology employed, and such was the legacy of the event that there are now two Hollywood films in production on the subject.
Much of the rest of the lunch with Steven had been spent discussing the nascent English wine industry. Steven's new project was the creation of a vineyard in Dorset. He'd had experts over from Champagne and Chablis to examine the soil and they'd pronounced his prospects to be good. Global warming had led to longer hotter summers and the UK climate was now similar to that of northern France a decade ago. The same band of chalky soil that gave rise to the steely whites of Chablis and lent the finesse to champagnes resurfaced in the UK as the North, South and Dorset Downs. Technically there were no obstacles to the UK beginning to produce fizz, whites and even reds of the highest quality and Steven was determined to be one of the new generation of growers.
These memories returned as I regarded the box of Wiltshire rosé. I needed an event to create a buzz and it would be fun to find out whether Steven was right about English wines. Why not organise a mini Judgement of Paris and see whether in a blind tasting the locals preferred English or French pink? At the very least the tasting would garner some much needed publicity for my business and gain me a few new customers.
As always, it was best to check any new idea with a local.
Born in the house we lived in, Manu, our landlord, was a typical Provençal peasant: dark hair, dark eyes, and arms like anvils. I'd watched him labour for hours unaided by machine, picking olives in the bitter December cold, or harvesting lavender in the heat of July. His body had the durability of an ox and he used his vast bulk to eke money from the land in whatever way possible. Deeply distrustful of strangers, he'd at first refused to allow us to rent the other half of his farmhouse. Our worlds were just too different. To him we were effete intellectuals selling a luxury product (bottled as opposed to pumped wine) to the region's second homeowners. Such people, in Manu's eyes, had the social status of leeches and he would love to have stuck a lighter up their Parisian derrières.
However, once the estate agent had suggested doubling the deposit, Manu's moral stance weakened and finally he relented. Now, after three years living next door to each other, we'd developed a mutual friendship, sharing occasional drinks of the moonshine liquor he produced and talking about politics. Manu was the archetypal French socialist: an ardent advocate of the poor, supporter of strikes, of working shorter hours, retiring early and higher taxes for the rich. In his eyes Tanya and I were the political enemy, capitalists whose belief in profit would bring the world to its knees. A hundred or so y
ears ago he would probably happily have seen us guillotined; these days he had to be content with the occasional dramatic gesture of disgust and some more shared moonshine.
As well as being a reliable barometer of local opinion, Manu was also a vigneron. He'd reclaimed the field of old untended vines outside our kitchen window. The rows now stretched neatly towards the horizon. French winemakers have a saying, 'the wine speaks of the people', implying that the most important element in a wine is the love and care of the person who makes it. By dedicating himself to the land, the winemaker becomes at one with his terroir. I'd never fully understood the concept until I watched Manu work, monotonously, unyieldingly bending his back to the elements harvesting whatever the land offered. If I wanted to know whether the local producers would submit a representative wine to my blind tasting, Manu was the person to ask.
The sound of metal grinding against metal meant that our landlord was at home. Whether it was a hobby or a business I was never quite sure, but Manu spent days dismembering and then reconstructing old cars. They wheezed up the drive or arrived on the back of trailers and a line of vintage Renaults and Citroëns now awaited his attention. Some of the cars had been around for so long that they had become part of the garden. In the summer wild flowers grew out of the windows, in the winter just weeds. I'd persuaded Tanya to view them as art installations, the type of stuff the Tate Modern would pay thousands for – a retrospective on the role of the car in French society.