Deep France

by Celia Brayfield

  November

  Orriule – Maison Bergez is behind the trees at the top of the hill

  The First Week

  I’ve been here almost seven complete days. I’m so tired I can hardly type. Yesterday I almost fell asleep at the wheel of the car. My bum aches, my quadriceps are screaming and at the end of the day a gin and tonic goes down really easily. I’m too tired to feel lonely, which is just as well, since I have met only several cheeky dogs, who run in and out of the open gateway as if they own the place.

  It is possible that Orriule is actually run by the dogs. They are all outrageous mongrels, from a tiny genetic absurdity with a shaggy coat, a curled tail and legs two inches long to things that look almost, but not quite, like pointers. They meet every morning on the corner of the lane opposite Maison Bergez, have a lively discussion about their affairs then disperse in self-important groups to patrol different parts of the village.

  The few humans I pass on the roads around the village stare at me with open curiosity, but nobody says hello, although they must know who I am. There are very few British here. The Béarn is a wild frontier for ex-pats; previously, I’ve met two kinds of foreigners in this region: those who have settled here for the love of it, and the rest – which includes the broke, the crazy and the people who got in their car in Sheffield and drove blindly south until they ran out of money. I called a couple whose names I had been given, and got the husband on the phone. ‘Come over any time, we’re pissed as newts here,’ he slurred. Was I going to turn into a sodden ex-pat? It seems to be a real danger.

  Will I miss friendly old London? Or will I only miss the filthy streets, the dismal shopping mall and my mad neighbours? Every metropolis has a high quota of roaming maniacs. On our street we have our share of crazies, including a character, who calls the blossom from his neighbour’s apple tree ‘filth’.

  I have set up the computer, bought a French modem cable and connected up the technology. The day is starting to get a rhythm. Writing needs a rhythm. There are days when rhythm doesn’t happen and everything slides into a pleasant sequence of pottering, which you rationalize by explaining to yourself that it is more creative to dawdle back from Rymans via the junk shop on the corner, or that you really really need to tidy up that box of handy old nails and screws right now.

  The days which slide are pleasant but they weigh heavy on my conscience. Worse, much worse, are the days when the rhythm gets choppy then breaks into something agonizingly and disgustingly chaotic, which is like that moment when you know you’re going to throw up, but extended for an entire morning. This is not a good feeling. My theory — get a rhythm and keep it. The day starts with the sound of the dogs barking and my neighbour’s tractor roaring past. When the school bus, actually a luxury coach, comes by I know I should be through with the coffee and heading for my desk.

  It snowed this morning, big fluffy flakes whirling in from the north. At first I thought they were falling leaves. They didn’t settle. This afternoon the sky cleared – mean­ing huge grey and white clouds came surging over the intense heavenly blue above them – and when I went into Sauveterre to get my Times the landscape was bathed in rich golden sunlight. The trees are redder and browner every day, burnished by the sinking sun. The mountains are clear in the distance, snow-capped now. I arrange the room which is to be my office so that I can see the Pyrenees from the desk. My neighbours, I notice, have all their shutters firmly closed.

  Sauveterre is my nearest town. It is a jewel. The name means ‘safe ground’, describing it in the lawless early Middle Ages, when its huge grey-stone fortress was impregnable and guarded the road south to Spain. What’s left of the fortress is a grey-stone battlement, sweeping along the top of a cliff that overlooks the river, and a mighty, half-ruined tower. Huge magnolia trees grow wild along the bottom of the cliff, and half a medieval bridge spans the water. Behind the tower of the Romanesque church the main square opens out, in front of a gracious seventeenth-century Hotel de Ville.

  Sauveterre’s fate has always been to under-achieve its own magnificence. There are two beautiful hotels overlooking the river; one, the Hostellerie du Chateau, was shut because the original owner has died and so many cousins have inherited the business that they can’t decide what to do with it. The other is also shut.

  A la Maison

  The house is sorted now, and ready for my books, plus clothes and the household stuff I couldn’t live without, which will come in a container next month. The workshop is stuffed to its beams with macrame plant-pot holders and fringed lampshades. The French beds are against the wall as they were intended to be, the floorboards gleaming, the walls bare. I can see our friends in the place. I have a little white bedroom with a dressing table and my clothes folded on shelves. This feels like my home now.

  I’ve put our family photographs on the wall, together with a couple of fine paintings by Glynn, and the framed cover of Variety, the American show-business newspaper, on which my name appears. I am very, very proud of having been on the front page of Variety. The story refers to Tom Cruise, whose production company bought an option on my last novel last year. They bought it to turn into a film star­ring Nicole Kidman. Then Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman got divorced. The option is still current, but I suspect that all I will have to show for it is my name in Variety and the memory of being briefly brushed by stardust from Tinsel­town.

  On Sunday, somebody spoke to me at last. There had been a hard frost, overnight temperatures down to –3°, followed by a glorious sunny morning. I set off to walk around the village with my camera. My neighbour over the road smiled at me as he passed in his car.

  All the countryside is white with frost, every bramble leaf dusted with diamonds. Everywhere the noise of falling leaves, pattering on the branches on their way down. The hedges are foaming with yellow-green mistletoe.

  I met a woman on the road, a farmer walking down with her dog to move her cows to another field. We chatted for a few minutes about the weather. She’d found an icicle as long as that (three centimetres) on her tap and was glad she’d taken her flowers in or they would have been dead this morning. I’m amazed that I can remember enough French to get through this conversation. The dog’s fur was hanging in dun-coloured dreadlocks.

  Orriule

  The village is scattered over two small hills, and divides into the realms of body and spirit, or church and state. Maison Bergez is near the top of the temporal zone. There are two houses above it, one just over the brow of the hill, which I can hardly see, and my immediate neighbour at the end of the field above the garden, a large, handsome farmhouse with palm trees and oleanders outside.

  Downhill from Maison Bergez is a pottery, with a showroom full of blue-and-white plates decorated with a cherry pattern and stoneware bowls glazed in a brilliant metallic turquoise, the signature style of the potter. Behind the pottery is another business that is dependent on the natural deposit of clay in the hillside, a factory whose speciality is medieval-style roof tiles. About twenty people seem to work here, judging by the cars, but it is well hidden by pines and cypress trees, so when you look back at Orriule from the next hill, you can hardly see the factory and the warehouse at all.

  Opposite the pottery is the mairie, a new building, clean-walled and grey-shuttered, plus the post box, the phone box, and the new village hall, the salle multiactivités, essential in every small village because the national budget for rural regeneration has to be spent on something. The hall is one storey, connecting at right angles to the village school, with the fronton, the court on which pelota is played, filling the open space between them.

  The noise of a ball being knocked about the pelota court by an idle boy was to become one of the most evocative sounds of Orriule in the months to come. The slow, echoing ka-pok, ka-pok is to the Béarn what the smack of leather on willow is to an English village. Pelota is a Basque game which exists in many different variations, most of which are like squash played with wicker scoops instead of racquets. Orriule is not
a Basque village, of course, but pelota, like many other Basque institutions, seems to offer an enhanced sense of identity to the entire region, so when the hall was built the pelota court was considered an absolute necessity.

  Beyond these buildings are the farms, their barns spilling down the hillsides in attitudes of dilapidation. Every old building is crowned with a Bearnais roof, ending in fantastic pointed eaves: Gothic, fanciful, the roofs of the tumbledown cottages of the poor woodcutters in the stories of Europe’s childhood. The house walls are of the local white limestone, rendered with crépi which, after several centuries of weather, mud and cow shit, takes on a pale beige hue, the colour which people in Notting Hill pay fortunes to paint mixers to achieve.

  You can work out the organic evolution of a Bearnais farm. First, somebody builds a fine stone farmhouse, usually on the shoulder of a hill where he will have a good view of his cows, and plants a handsome pair of palm trees outside the front door. Then he builds a fine stone barn, usually at right angles, and then a second barn a bit later, usually of a different size and in different materials. Then the next generation inherit the place, ambitions of grandeur trickle away, and they chuck up the add-ons, the pig sties and the poultry house, with maybe another barn, or a smaller house for the younger brother, then perhaps a nice concrete all-purpose building, and a tin-roofed lean-to and wood store. After the first hundred years, the whole complex starts to surrender to gravity, rain, wind and the occasional earthquake, all of which encourage the walls to crumble downhill a few centimetres more each year. The result is chaotic, dilapidated, picturesque and nothing like the super-neat farms of Normandy, with their matching stable blocks and semicircular gravel drives.

  As you keep walking downhill, the next thing you pass is the fish pond and/or reservoir, created by damming a stream in a hollow of the hillside. There is a small pine wood behind it on one side, and the rest of the land around it is marshy and covered with tufts of that spiky grass that’s half a reed and always grows where there is underground water. The stream itself trickles out of a pipe at the foot of the dam, but picks up momentum from ditches feeding into it at the bottom of the valley, and rushes happily away to the south, overhung with alders. It will eventually hit the bottom of the big valley and run into the big river, the Gave d’Oloron.

  Then the road climbs again, up the next hill, which belongs to the church and the spirit. The church looks like not much more than a pile of rocks, a building with vastly thick walls but so tiny that it is dwarfed by the slabs of porphyry marking the family graves in the minute churchyard. It too stands on the hilltop. I paced out the walls to measure them, allowing for the massive stone buttress on the downhill side. Twenty-five metres long, with an immaculate tiled roof.

  The interior is beautifully plain, white walls rising to a dome over the altar, which is an oak chest carved with Maltese crosses. The pine pews are recent. Against the back wall, in the shadow of the wooden balcony, stands a line of prie-dieu chairs, every one different, carved in country style from different woods. The copper cover of the font is highly polished, and by the door a bowl from my neighbour the potter holds the holy water.

  Across the road from the church is a very old and largely dead oak tree, its gnarled roots rising clear of the tarmac. The oak was a sacred tree to the Basques, and to the Celts, and the fact that nobody has tidied up this hulk and turned it into firewood suggests that the tradition has lingered. A half-rotten notice board, with nothing on it, is nailed to the trunk.

  I walked down through the village then turned up the hill to Orion, the next village, on the road that runs along a ridge of hills. We are on the pilgrim route to Compostela, and just outside Orion is a medieval hostel for the faithful who’ve set out to walk over the Pyrenees to the shrine of St James in Compostela, in Spain.

  As I passed through a wood I heard birds calling. The notes were rounded and expressive, but much deeper than the call of the doves. I didn’t recognize the sound and wondered what silly species would advertise itself to predators so noisily. Then a line of birds flew low overhead, about fifty of them, a long ribbon of silhouettes, wing tip to wing tip, rippling across the clear blue sky above the bare tree tops and calling to each other as they went. The cranes were flying south for the winter.

  Not all the wildlife is so majestic, or so far off. Something brown scuttled into the bamboo thicket by the front gate yesterday. Something black shot out of the woodpile into the undergrowth this morning. It was a rat – there are half-gnawed walnut shells in all the gaps between the logs. I’m not a woman to freak over domestic rodents. I think mice are rather sweet, but only outside my own living space. Rats really aren’t my style. I decided it was time to let the cats out for a stroll.

  Tarmac, old and stiff as he was, was still a deadly hunter. He stalked down the front steps and investigated the garden systematically, spending a lot of time sniffing around the kitchen window. He made the other two look like amateurs, and they watched him gratefully.

  Maison Bergez seemed to have a terrifying case of subsidence. There were huge cracks in all the walls, and the floors sloped in all directions. By local standards, none of this was cause for concern. However, I was so unused to uneven floors that the first time I got out of the bath I nearly fell over.

  My spiritual friend Adrienne had given me her feng shui guide, from which I diagnosed the house as a major disaster zone. The front door jammed and wouldn’t open, nor would the door to the room that was now my office. Instructed by Adrienne, I had packed away the clutter from the hall and the landing, but feng shui divides a home into areas bringing good luck to various specific aspects of life, and it seemed that the wealth zone of this house contained the loos, the drains and, worst of all, the septic tank, all guaranteed to bring ruin on the occupants. When I worked it out, the bathroom has been in the wealth area of every house I’ve ever owned.

  Adrienne advised a mirror or several to attract the right chi. I moved a mirror into position and the pin holding it fell out of the wall immediately. On the phone, Adrienne cackles with laughter. ‘That’s what happens,’ she says, ‘houses fight back.’

  Where Are You, Exactly?

  People are calling, people are emailing, and this is the question everybody asks. I’m in the Béarn, I say. They’re confused. They ask: Er – where is the Béarn? Between Pau and Biarritz, I say briskly, having worked out that a lot of people have heard of Biarritz, the big seaside resort on the Basque coast, and some have also heard of Pau, which is not only the Béarnais regional capital but also one of those towns to which the English, in the past century or so, have taken a particular fancy. Pau is also the setting for Aspects of Love, the story by David Garnett which inspired the Lloyd-Webber musical. So the Pau–Biarritz formula seems to have the highest recognition factor.

  Not a high recognition factor, however. People say, ‘Is that near the Dordogne? Is that near the Lot? Is that near Beziers / Foix / Cahors / the Aveyron?’ No, no, no, no and no. I’m south of the Dordogne, where the British are so well established that some have even become village mayors. I’m south of the Lot, with its hard-baked fields of sunflowers. I’m even south of the Gers, which the British property finders are pushing as the new Dordogne.

  I’m hundreds of kilometres west of Beziers and the rest. They’re on the Mediterranean side and I’m near the Atlantic coast. Oh, people say, groping for geography, you must be near . . . er . . . Bordeaux? Not really. Two and a half hours south of Bordeaux.

  Then there is silence. People run out of map references. I’m in the south, I say. The deep south. As far south as you can go without getting to the Basque Country. Mystification can be heard. Isn’t the Basque Country in Spain? Not entirely. There are seven Basque provinces. Four in Spain and three in France – Soule, Labourd and Basse-Navarre. The Soule is nearest to us, it starts on the other side of the big river down in the valley here. Then people say, ‘Oh.’ Then they say, ‘And when are you back in London?’

  It doesn’t help that
there are at least four perfectly accurate ways to describe this location. First, the departmental. Orriule is in Département 64, the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. When I want the weather report from the Figaro’s telephone weather service, I key in 64. Simple.

  Second, there is the provincial. On some maps, such as that used by the electricity board, Orriule is in Aquitaine. Everything south of Bordeaux and west of Toulouse gets lumped into Aquitaine at times. British people with a taste for history can usually relate to Aquitaine, because the English used to think they owned it. Maybe we were tempted by the description of a medieval writer called Heriger of Lobbes: ‘Opulent Aquitaine, sweet as nectar thanks to its vineyards, dotted about with forests, overflowing with fruit of every kind and endowed with a superabundance of pasture land.’

  For a while, England had a right to Aquitaine. This came with a queen, a beautiful red-head, in her day the richest heiress in Europe – Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was thirty-one, the ex-wife of the King of France, when she ran off and married a nineteen-year-old, Henri, Duke of Normandy, in Poitiers. By way of a honeymoon, the young power couple travelled through Aquitaine to recruit some troops, and with the help of this army, Henry became King Henry II of England two years later, in 1154.

  Although Henry owed a lot to his French soldiers, forging a kingdom out of England and Aquitaine was straining the logic of geography, at a time when it would take a month to travel the length of the realm, most of which was still a collection of small feudal states with ever-changing borders and ever-shifting alliances. The dynamic Henry and the astute Eleanor kept their dual kingdom together in their lifetimes, but after both were dead much blood was spilled by later English kings trying to pursue their claim to this lush French province. After the Hundred Years War, Crecy, Poitiers, Henry V at Agincourt and finally Joan of Arc, the French reclaimed Bordeaux and everything south of it in 1453.