by Peter Mayle
I’m a quick study when there’s some advantage in it for me, and so it wasn’t long before I mastered the routine of everyday domestic life and could turn my attentions to learning about the outside world. Here, of course, I had to rely more on the management, and it is probably appropriate at this point to give you a brief character sketch.
They are not like other couples, I’ve discovered, in that both of them stay at home. In normal circumstances, so I hear, people leave the house in a bad temper shortly after breakfast and go to work. They have offices where important and serious activities take place, meetings and paperwork and what have you. This is not the case chez nous. Honest employment is avoided, and I sometimes wonder why. Madame seems perfectly capable, particularly in the kitchen, and I would have thought that a steady job in a canteen would not be beyond her.
The other half, alas, is not visibly gifted. I have observed his attempts at gardening and minor domestic tasks over the years, and they usually end in pain or bloodshed: Wounds from screwdrivers, shovels, and pruning shears; scalded fingers from kitchen utensils; broken toes caused by clumsiness with heavy objects; and temporary blindness from a poorly aimed salvo with the rose spray are only some of his disasters. Thank heaven he doesn’t hunt. He is not dexterous, except for a certain facility with the corkscrew. Even this small skill could be put to commercial use—bars need bartenders, after all—but he shows no signs of ambition, preferring to shut himself in a room for extended periods, sharpen pencils, and gaze at the wall. Odd, if you ask me.
Nevertheless, they appear to be contented enough, and the arrangement suits me very well. It’s not often, as I’m sure you’ve found out, that you like both members of a couple, and here I consider myself fortunate—happy with either, happier with both. They’re punctual with the food, great believers in the benefits of fresh air and exercise, and solicitous over my ailments. They place rather too much emphasis on hygiene for my liking, but nobody’s perfect, and in terms of general care and attention, I don’t have any serious complaints. If I’m allowed one criticism—and as this is my book, I think I am—it is simply that they are unable to come to terms with their own social habits, which can be a little exasperating from time to time.
They claim, loudly and often, to be lovers of the quiet life, content to vegetate, admire the beauties of the countryside, and tuck themselves up with the bedtime cocoa shortly after the sun’s golden orb sinks slowly in the west (their words, not mine). This is self-deluding nonsense. For two people who like to believe they’re one step removed from the hermit of the woods, they’re dismal failures. I can’t remember the last time we had a day when the house was empty. If it’s not neighbors or the men who seem to be on permanent duty with a cement mixer, it’s a deputation of refugees from overseas—a boisterous, disreputable collection, by and large, addicted to drink, late hours, loud music, and gossip.
Not that I mind. It’s rarely dull, and if, like me, you have a healthy curiosity about the ways of the world, there’s no place quite as illuminating as my spot under the dining table, learning by eavesdropping.
This has been going on for years now and has provided me with what you might call a wide-ranging, eclectic education. I know, for instance, that 1985 was a particularly good vintage in Châteauneuf; that one of the local mayors likes dressing up in a nurse’s uniform and playing the trumpet; that all politicians and lawyers are rogues; that writers are saintly and hard-done-by artists, exploited by brutal publishers; that the Channel Tunnel will be the end of England as we know it; that a baker in the next village has eloped with an exotic dancer from Marseille; that a diet of foie gras and red wine prolongs life expectancy; that the European Economic Community is run by venal buffoons; that the British royal family is moving to Hollywood; and so it goes on. All human life is there, and it’s fascinating stuff if you can stay awake.
What is sometimes even more interesting is the critical assessment that is delivered in the kitchen once the revelers have left, and here we return to the management.
I try never to miss these gentle exchanges as the empty bottles are counted and the dishes are being dropped, and there’s a comforting familiarity about the course the conversation takes. It starts with a brisk difference of opinion about the quality of the food, with madame expressing disappointment with her cooking, and the other half pointing to the evidence of bare plates and bones picked clean.
This is followed by a prolonged discussion of the highlights of the evening’s entertainment and personal remarks, which we needn’t go into here, about the various guests. Act three is a unanimous vote to avoid all social contact for the next six months. But then we have the encore, which is the realization that invitations have been accepted for a replay. And so to bed. You see what I mean? They say one thing (“Never again”), then do precisely the opposite (“See you next Tuesday”).
But the constant flow of guests has been instructive, as I hope you’ll see from the pages that follow, and by keeping eyes and ears open, I gradually learned much of what I know today. You could say that observation and eavesdropping have provided me with a sound intellectual base. For practical knowledge, however, there is no substitute for experience in the school of hard knocks. I give you the incident of the plumber under the sink.
Henri is his name, and he appears frequently at the house toward the end of the morning to arrange his tools on the kitchen floor. This is an apparently vital part of the plumbing process, a kind of limbering up before the mysteries of valve, spigot, and overflow are investigated. And so he lays out his rows of hammers, adjustable wrenches, drills, blowtorches, and his special hat with the lamp on the front for peering into dark corners, looks at his watch, and goes off to lunch. The master plumber, so he says, cannot plumb on an empty stomach. Madame is left to pick her way through the equipment and mutter, in her usual way, about giving it all up and going to live in a tent, and the other half, in his usual way, finds something pressing to do as far from the kitchen as possible.
Normally, I don’t pay too much attention to plumbing, but on this occasion I was intrigued. For some days, there had been an interesting and increasingly strong aroma coming from the closet under the sink. I couldn’t place it myself, but I overheard Henri saying that, in his professional opinion, there was a small, dead creature, or maybe even a nest of them, lodged somewhere in the pipes. I’m never averse to a corpse, as long as it’s not mine, and so I decided to supervise activities and see for myself exactly who was hiding in the kitchen’s intestinal tract.
Henri returned from lunch and the management went into hiding, a habit of theirs in the face of potential catastrophe. Ever since the unfortunate business with the upstairs ball cock, I think they fear the worst whenever Henri pits himself against the plumbing, and I must admit he has a patchy record: played thirty-two, won ten, and lost the rest, and that was just since I’d been keeping score. Anyway, with the management well out of harm’s way, there were just the two of us in the kitchen.
Henri adjusted his hat and switched it on, crawled on all fours under the sink, and started the process of diagnosis, which was to hit everything in sight with a hammer. He talks to himself while he’s working, and so I was more or less able to keep track of progress, although there wasn’t much in the way of excitement, unless you have an interest in corroded joints and deformed waste pipes.
And then he must have found what he was looking for, because there was a sudden intake of breath, and voilà! was mentioned a couple of times in a satisfied way before he reversed out of the closet to rummage through his collection of instruments on the floor. I took his place under the sink, and it was immediately obvious to me where the foreign body was, halfway up the U-bend. I was amazed he couldn’t smell it himself, but that’s plumbers for you, I suppose—all brute force and wrenches, and very little talent in the nostrils.
It was a vole in there, I was fairly certain, and I was thinking of somewhere suitable to bury it when there was a tap on my back, and I turned around
to see Henri and his illuminated hat. He was anxious for me to leave, I think, because he dragged me out by my back legs, called me something insulting, although technically accurate, and shoved me aside on his way into the closet.
Something in the genes took over then, a wild, primitive desire to be in at the kill. Also, it was as much my closet as his. I squeezed back in so that I could look over his shoulder and witness the extraction of the vole at close quarters. Henri elbowed me out. I pushed my way in again. And so it went on for several minutes. It was a battle of wills, but eventually my determination prevailed, as it usually does. Dogs are more single-minded than people, you see, as you’ll know if you’ve ever watched anyone trying to coax a Jack Russell out of a rabbit hole.
I think Henri would have shrugged if there had been room, but he nodded at me instead, beckoned me to come closer, and went to work with an adjustable wrench. Simple, trusting soul that I was, I thought our territorial differences had been resolved, so I put my chin on his shoulder, the better to see what happened next. A mistake. He performed one last turn with the wrench, ducked aside, and let me have the full benefit of the dead vole and several gallons of pent-up water right between the eyes. He blamed me for the subsequent flooding, too. Moral: Never trust a plumber in a confined space.
It’s the kind of experience that leaves an emotional mark, and I’m sorry to say that there have been others. Take the postman, for instance, who objects to my running out for a harmless frolic with his van and keeps a handful of gravel at the ready to throw at me. Or the cyclist who tried to part my hair with his pump; he lost his balance and fell off, as it happened, and retired hurt, with torn shorts and blood pouring down his leg. That was a just and satisfactory ending, but there have been times when things haven’t worked out quite the way they should have—the chicken-training episode, for one. I’ll deal with that later, but I think you take my point. Pitfalls abound, and people are unpredictable. The world can be a perilous place.
The Art of Communication
I am, so I’ve been told, an ornament to any household, an amiable companion, a patient listener, a sage, a source of continuous entertainment, and a mobile burglar alarm. But I have discovered over the years that these virtues are not enough for some people. They are almost always female, in my experience, and they share several characteristics, all resulting, I suspect, from being exposed to too many fairy stories when young. There is no better example of the breed than one of our local landmarks, Madame Bilboquet, a large lady of a certain age who is devoted to good works and vintage port, which she considers to be tres anglais.
She wears billowy clothing in pastel colors and smells of dried flowers that have been kept a little too long in a drawer. Her handbag tastes of talcum powder. She collects porcelain figurines of stout pigs and ruminant cows. She writes letters on paper that has bunny rabbits skipping along the bottom. You know the sort. Her heart’s in the right place, no doubt, but she has this unfortunate tendency to gush.
I can tell what’s coming when she fixes me with a moist and sentimental eye and smiles. If I don’t take evasive action, she will pat the top of my head in that dainty, hesitant way people adopt when they pick up a dead sparrow. Then she sighs. And it starts. “Isn’t he sweet?” she says, in the voice she usually reserves for her wretched rabbits. “I wonder what he’s thinking.”
Most of the time, it’s about sex, or where the next meal’s coming from, but of course she’s not to know that. I’m tempted to put an end to the matter by plunging into a noisy investigation of my undercarriage. But I don’t. I humor her. One never knows with Madame Bilboquet. She has been known to keep biscuits in what she calls her reticule. So I adopt my most soulful expression and brace myself for the inevitable.
Sure enough, after another gusty sigh, out it comes, the missing ingredient. “Don’t you wish he could talk?”
I ask you. There she is, a grown woman, spouting drivel that would embarrass a poodle, and we all know what little toadies they are. The fact is, I have no need to talk. I can make my feelings and wishes perfectly clear to anyone who has the most rudimentary powers of observation. The management understands me. The neighbors understand me. We had one of the local tax inspectors around here the other day. He’s no Einstein, but even he seemed to understand me. He left in a hurry, actually, with one leg of his trousers slightly damp, but that’s another story.
Anyway, I may not talk, but I like to think that I am one of the great communicators. I have a manly and distinctive bark, an eloquent sniff, a squeal of horror that serves to discourage any attempts at grooming. I have, so I’m told, a most expressive snore. And my growl is a model of menace, a profundo rumble that strikes terror into the hearts of small birds and hesitant salesmen. Unfortunately, it gives me a sore throat, so I use it sparingly.
You will have noticed that these abilities, while impressive in their octave range and variety, are all based on sound. And, let’s be honest, most dogs can make a noise when it suits them, although perhaps not always with perfect timing and sense of pitch. Noise, in any case, is not always the way to get what you want. Ask any politician. He’ll tell you that well-directed flattery and, if you have a strong stomach, the occasional bout of baby kissing will produce more satisfactory results than shouting. So it is with dogs and people. Charm succeeds where yapping fails. Take it from me.
The key to it all, in my opinion, is what sociologists call “body language.” The supplicant paw, the vibrating tail, the fixed and loving gaze, the shudders of rapture—these speak louder than words when used by an expert. And I like to think that I’m an expert; heaven knows, I’ve had plenty of practice.
Let me give you an example, which happened only the other day. It had rained all morning, and the management had decided to go out and have a long lunch. This is frequently their reaction to unpleasant weather. Inconsiderate of them, I know, but there it is. And so I was left in the house with the other dogs—dear old souls in many ways, but somewhat lacking in pioneer spirit. Reluctant to join in, if you know what I mean. I think they probably suffered from too much training during their formative years and never recovered.
As I always do when cooped up and left to my own devices, I made a tour of the premises—checking the kitchen for any edible traces of sloppy housekeeping, testing doors and electrical wiring, rearranging rugs, and generally making myself useful. And then, on a whim, I decided to have a look upstairs, where overnight visitors are locked up. For some reason, this has been designated a forbidden zone. Heaven knows what they do up there, but it’s been made clear to me that I’m not welcome.
So up the stairs I went, and what did I find? The door had been left ajar, and the delights of what is grandly referred to as the “guest suite” were available for inspection.
Well, once you’ve seen one bathroom, you’ve seen them all. Stark, uncomfortable places that reek of soap and cleanliness. But the bedroom was a different matter altogether—wall-to-wall carpet, cushions galore, a large bed. And rather a fine bed at that—not too high, with an ample supply of pillows and an inviting expanse of what I later found out was an antique bedspread. It looked like the standard-issue white sheet to me, but antique linen isn’t one of my interests. I incline more to the fur-rug school of interior decoration myself.
Nevertheless, the bed had a definite appeal—as it would to you if you normally spent your nights in a basket on the floor—and so I hopped up.
At first, I was a little disconcerted by the degree of softness underfoot, which reminded me of the times when I’d accidentally trodden on the Labrador. But once I adapted my movements, I found I could explore in short and rather exhilarating bounces, and I made my way up to the head of the bed, where the pillows were kept.
They were poorly organized, in my view, laid out in a neat row, which may suit the reclining human figure but is not a convenient arrangement for a dog. We like to be surrounded when we sleep. I think it may be a subconscious desire to return to the womb, although I personally would
n’t want a second visit. As you may remember, I had to share with twelve others, and I have no pleasant memories of the experience. Even so, the instinct to surround oneself remains, possibly for protection, and I set to work dragging the pillows to the middle of the bed, until they formed a kind of circular nest. And there I settled, in great comfort, and dozed off.
Sometime later, I was wakened by the sound of a car and the barking of the two old bitches downstairs. The management had obviously gorged enough and had decided to return.
You may not know this, but people who live with dogs like a full turnout when they come home after an absence. It makes them feel loved and appreciated. It can also make them feel slightly guilty at having left their faithful companions all alone. This, in turn, can lead to what they call “treats” and what I regard as conscience payments to make up for willful neglect. However you look at it, the fact is that it’s usually worth presenting yourself at the door with bright eye and jaunty tail and generally behaving as if life had been an arid desert without them. As it happens, I could happily have spent the rest of the afternoon on the bed, but I bounded downstairs to do my duty and lined up with the others as the management made their entrance.
All was well until that evening, when madame went up to put some flowers and a decanter of insect repellent in the guest room for visitors who were arriving the next day. She is fastidious about these little touches and has been known to agonize over such details as the choice of water—fizzy or flat—to leave on the bedside tables. She wants guests to be comfortable, you see, which I feel only encourages them to stay. The other half, in contrast, is all for giving them the earliest possible au revoir, which just goes to show that marriage can be a question of give-and-take. Anyway, there was madame upstairs in the honeymoon suite.
I heard distant cries of alarm, put two and two together, and assumed that my adjustments to the bedding were causing some minor distress. Consequently, I was in the basket faster than a rat up a drainpipe and feigning the sleep of the innocent by the time she came down. There were three of us, I reasoned, and so there was a fair chance that one of the bitches would be sentenced to bread and water while the true culprit escaped. Wrongful arrest and imprisonment is very popular these days, so I’ve heard, and I was hoping that this would be another chapter in the annals of injustice.