“Are you sure?”
“Yes” is my reply. The truth is I am not the least bit sure, but the fact is we have no choice.
I am not ready to return to the theater and still have another fifty minutes of lunch break, so I decide, insteading of sitting hunched up in a dressing room learning lines—which is what I would normally do—to browse the suburban shopping street. Coincidentally, I spent many years of my youth, my salad days, in this town of Bromley, so its homogenized modernizations hold a certain fascination for me. I range around, trying to remember how it was and which formative experiences took place where, until, passing one of the pubs, I catch sight of our supporting actor sitting alone on a stool. His head is bent over a glass, and he looks desperately glum. Although we barely know each other, having met only eight days earlier at the read-through, I decide to intrude on his mood.
“Hey,” I say as both greeting and to alert him to my presence. I notice that his drink is a tonic and something… gin, vodka? He turns to face me, and I realize immediately that he has downed more than one. His bloodshot eyes glare out from a face that looks bemused, hurt and despairing.
“How are you doing?” I ask. The question is redundant. The bartender saunters my way, and I order coffee. “Would you like one?”
My colleague shakes a mute head.
“I can’t work with him, he’s a f—er.” I can see this actor’s point, but I won’t say so. After all, we are three and have five months of work ahead of us in a piece that is demanding and intimate.
“I guess he’s nervous. Probably pinning a lot on it. Big role…” My coffee arrives, for which I am grateful because I do not believe a word of what I am saying. My fellow thesp takes the bartender’s presence as an opportunity to order another double. I look at him quizzically. He says, “Listen, why don’t you do a spot of shopping. I’ll catch you back there.”
I nod, leaving coffee and coins on the bar and my poor workmate to his angst and alcohol.
When I return, our leading player is sitting with the director in the rehearsal hall where they are sharing anecdotes, firing off one after the other. I find this a common practice among actors in rehearsal, and I have never quite understood why it happens: a performance within a performance. I concentrate on my script. The next time I look up, it is fifteen minutes beyond the allotted lunch hour, and my friend from the pub has not returned. The leading actor has begun to pace. His face reddens; his blood pressure must be mounting. He is growing manic. The director is chain-smoking. A few moments later, the company manager, a caring young woman in her mid-twenties, enters with a note which she hands to the director. He reads it, frowns furiously, screws it up into a ball and tosses it onto the floor.
“Tony has gone home. He’s not feeling too good.”
The leading actor explodes. We are all knocked backward by the sheer vehemence of his response and the foulness of his language. I turn to the company manager, who returns my duplicitous look. The director rises and announces that probably the best plan is to spend the rest of the day with the wardrobe mistress, who will take measurements for our costumes.
When Michel calls in the evening, I say nothing of the problems I am facing and only assure him that all is well and that I will be in France to sign the documents. I sleep fitfully.
My call for the next morning is slightly later than the others’. When I arrive, I discover the three I left behind the evening before, all wearing long, murderous faces. Before I have the opportunity to say good morning, I am informed that Tony has left the show. A treacherously unprofessional thought then creeps into my mind: we are two left in the cast, only one week to go before we begin technical rehearsals and production days, there is too little time, the management will be obliged to cancel or at least postpone the first night, and I will be free go to France! Obviously, I keep such rising delight well in check.
The morning is spent calling agents, casting directors and chums to find a replacement for Tony. I offer no suggestions because I cannot in all conscience recommend any of my pals to what I am beginning to perceive as a sentence rather than a job. Our star is fulminating and cursing, then suddenly rounds on me. “I suppose it’ll be you next!” he hisses poisonously out of earshot of the others.
“To do what?” I reply, a little shakily.
“You’ll be walking out on me, too.”
I refrain from pointing out that the play is not about him but a team effort. “No, I won’t,” I answer.
I have never walked out on a job, but at this very moment there is nothing I desire more. However, for many reasons, high on the list being the cost of house renovations and land-maintenance equipment, it would be an irrational act. I stay put and go on with the business of learning my lines and worrying about how I am now going to persuade the management to give me the Monday off, less than two weeks hence, to fly to France.
“So you’re going to stick it out then, are you?”
“Please,” I say, “let’s just drop it.”
A replacement is found. A jolly chap, resilient and good-humored. I try hard not to feel disappointed that the production has not been canceled. I need this job, and the actor is someone I have worked with before and like. He makes me laugh. He is exactly what we need and, astoundingly, learns the piece in two days. As far as everyone else is concerned, we are back on track. The other poor victim has been written off as unprofessional. Interestingly, our lead has met his match, for every time he grows even vaguely nasty or malevolent, the newcomer bats back with a quip or joke and the star has no brunt for his sadism. Or has he? As the days creep toward the out-of-town opening and he grows jumpier, he settles his attention on me. After one of the early runs of the piece, he accuses me in front of cast, technicians, management and crew of being entirely without talent and timing. Alone in my dressing room, I shed a few tears. Then, like every actress in desperate straits, I call my agent, who cheers me with “Oh darling, he’s famous for it. When so-and-so finished working with him, she went to bed for a week.” Now he tells me!
The sole high point of my week arrives with the blissful and unexpected news that we will not be rehearsing on the Monday after we open. It has been deemed a much-needed rest day. Our call will be the performance. In the light of this news and all that is going on, I make a precarious and highly unprofessional decision which is to go to France and not mention it. Such a move could lose me my job, but by this stage, I would be almost grateful. Still, it goes against the grain for me to behave with such dishonor, so I decide, for form’s sake and to offload a little of my guilt, to confide my plan in the company manager, who, when she hears, stares at me in sheet-white horror. “You have no understudy until we reach London,” she yelps. “I’d have to cancel the show.”
“I’ll be back, don’t worry,” I reassure her. “The signing is at nine-thirty. It will be over, latest, by eleven. There are two British Airways flights leaving Nice after that. Either would land me at Heathrow in plenty of time, and with a taxi to bring me to the theater, there’s no way I’ll miss the show.” She relents. What choice have I given the poor woman? Her sole request is that, should worse come to worst, I am never, never to mention that she had cognizance of my plan, or her career will be in ruins alongside mine. It seems a fair bargain. I agree.
ON SUNDAY, MICHEL, WHOSE plane from Paris landed earlier than mine, is waiting to greet me at the Nice airport. It is a glorious spring morning. In spite of a tense week and a dawn departure from London, the prospect of the following day’s trip up into the hills exhilarates me. Added to which, after an interminable wait, we are finally taking legal possession of our home, our farm. When we arrive at the house sitting atop its hill of dusky olive trees, which we have not visited for almost three months, it is unrecognizable. Amar has cut back the entire expanse of land. We are gazing upon new geography.
The bosky acres, the brush and brambles, the jungle have been trimmed, laid bare and raked into hummocks ready for burning. However, this fleecing has left Appas
sionata looking naked and vulnerable, a deserted, crumbling shell, yet newborn, with much to discover. We count sixty-four overgrown olive trees (ten I had not seen before) as well as space on the upper terraces for dozens more, terraces cut back in their entirety for the first time in many a year. The trees are now free to breathe, to grow anew and produce.
“I thought you had agreed with Amar to wait until after—”
“So did I,” says Michel.
It is both a lovely and troubling greeting, for we have no gates, no fencing, no boundary partitions of any kind. This will have to be addressed next. So much will have to be addressed next!
But aside from all future cares, there is a revelation too exquisite for words. The cutting back of the land has exposed a fabulous stone staircase. Unbeknownst to us, it has lain buried beneath the layers of brambles, forgotten and unused. Now, its secret unfolded, it rises like a bird taking flight from the foot of the hillside to the house itself. Michel suggests that it must have been the original entrance to the house before the tarmac drive was put in, before a route for cars was deemed necessary, before the lane between our entrance and the caretaker’s cottage was ever thought of. Judging by a series of small rectangular holes cut into the stones, it looks as though a rose bower covered pretty much the entire ascent, a distance of approximately three hundred meters. In full flower, it must have been an impressive sight, and what a perfumed entry!
Our approach also reveals soft pink almond blossoms, past their best, fading now, and all around us, bursting from the branches of the deciduous trees—figs, cherries, plums, pears—fresh shiny bamboo-green shoots, as well as literally hundreds of flowering wild irises, white and violet, bordering the terraces, at every level. Pale pink, bamboo-green, white, inky violet: a palette I have never associated with the south of France. We inch forward in the car taking in these sights, these explosions of unexpected color. What release must this nature be experiencing? When did this earth, the soil of these terraces, last feel the beat of sunlight? I consider the millions of creatures and insects who have been rendered homeless, who have lost their bearings, and alongside them, the plants that have been given back the light.
After lunch on the upper terrace, the sky clouds over.
We make the most of our chilly Sunday afternoon working, keeping warm through activity. It is such a pleasure to be outdoors, to be physically busy. Invigorating and reassuring. I weed the flowerbeds; Michel sweeps the steps, which are knee-high in mulchy leaves, then strips and prepares the garden chairs for painting: lilac and ocher. I discover tiny spring-green shoots at the base of the chopped trunks of what we had believed were dead orange trees. Somewhere in the middle distance I hear gunshots, a hunter out after rabbits or small birds. I feel my skin, which is tired and tight from being coated in layers of stage makeup, begin to breathe and glow in the sharp brisk air. As the day draws to its early close, it starts to rain. I jump in the brilliant green pool and swim for my life in the freezing water, circling and paddling like an otter in the drizzle while Michel readies the fire—we have unlimited supplies of firewood now—for our evening. A propitious moment in time: our last evening as official squatters, for tomorrow we will become les propriétaires.
Lounging on cushions in front of the fire, we listen to the rain beating hard and fast against the windowpanes and splashing into our well-used bucket in the makeshift kitchen. And we don’t care. Tomorrow, every leak, every flaking crumb of plaster, will belong to us.
The rain grows tropical in its intensity. All night it beats and slaps against the roof, and when we awake bright and early, ready for our excursion into the hills, our driveway is streaming with water. It runs in rivulets, taking sticks, a dead rabbit and rotting leaves in its wake. Only in the rainy season in Borneo and in the last throes of a hurricane in Fiji have I witnessed such a torrential downpour. As we bolt to the car, it soaks us. The force is so overwhelming that the wipers are barely able to beat back and forth, and in any case, they achieve little. Fortunately, Michel knows the route. We arrive on time but dripping like river rats. Madame B. awaits us, dry as a bone and impeccably turned out. Pierre is not with her. The notaire looks on in operatic horror as we drip and squelch across his pristine beige carpet to our appointed leather chairs.
The panoramic views in this area beyond Grasse, about which I have heard so much, are masked by the sheeting rain. “C’est dommage,” says the notaire, who sports a pince-nez and a well-cut but rather old-fashioned double-breasted navy suit and is as manicured and pointy-faced as a poodle. His elbows are poised on the armrests of his chair and never leave that position. He joins the tips of his fingers together regularly, as though in prayer, and I discover that he has an infuriatingly meticulous attention to detail. Here is a man who puts brackets between verbal brackets and then parenthesizes! Every law, bylaw and clause is thrown open for consideration, then explained at a rattling pace. The history of the estate of Appassionata is not only written into the contract page by page, franc for franc—husband of, wife to, born of—but is now read aloud and commented upon by him.
The villa was constructed in 1904. This was the year the great Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Because the process is ponderous and I have aready lost the thread, I search for a quotation of his I learned by heart recently, but it slips beyond recall when the notaire’s droning drums me back to consciousness.
I try again to concentrate but find myself completely, hopelessly lost. Le maître—all notaires in France are addressed as le maître; literally translated, it means the master, an acknowledgment of rank and learning equal, I suppose, to our addressing a judge as Your Honor—swivels his leather chair, as his is the only one not fixed, and talks at great length to Michel. Michel nods and interpolates every now and again, and once in a while, I am fired because I have caught a word or phrase, though I am unclear as to why this notary’s words are directed exclusively at Michel. Madame B. does not appear to be listening. She is crossing and marking the contract spread out on the desk in front of her as though it were a script in need of drastic and immediate rewrites.
When le maître pauses to draw breath, Madame B. interjects, politely but firmly, “Maître, s’il vous plaît…” I haven’t a clue what finer points they are debating, and I cannot possibly ask Michel. I long for the distraction of the view and am struggling not to steal a quick peek at my watch. A tiny worm of concern is wriggling about in my interior monologue: is all this just a teeny bit long-winded, or is it because I am on the outside looking in? Is it going to take all morning? I have to catch that lunchtime flight…
The rain is percussionless: no rolls of thunder, no crashes of electric white lightning, nothing but interminable rain.
Suddenly, when I have drifted far away, the notaire’s chair swivels once more and stops like a roulette wheel to directly face me. “Madame Drinkwater?” All eyes turn to me.
“Oui?” I reply weakly.
“Avez-vous compris?” Have I understood what? I am asking myself. I shoot a glance at Michel, who is gazing at me warmly. He speaks for me, explaining to the notaire that I am not familiar with all of this.
“Aaaah,” sings the man as though it explained my mute inattention, my lack of delight in dissecting these sacred deeds paragraph by paragraph. And then he launches into a history of my life. Where and when I was born, the name of my parents, which banks I patronize in England and France, my annual income (a figure I must have pulled out of thin air, for I have no guaranteed income), my profession, my mother’s maiden name, the sum I have contributed toward the overall price of the estate, the fact that no debts remain unpaid by me. I am stupefied. And then he pauses, throwing his text on the table. “So, you are from Ireland?” I nod, and he removes his glasses and opens up a personal parenthesis about Ireland and the various holidays he has enjoyed there. Green. I understand that word. Yes, I nod, very green. And wet, malheureusement. Yes, Ireland is wet, I counter. Everyone laughs and shrugs and throw
s their hands about the way the southern French do when they are discussing the living habits of those poor unfortunate folk forced to live in climes less blessed than theirs.
“Mais…” He gestures, Shakespearean-fashion, toward the window, which opens onto nothing but the blanket of rain. There is a pause while the rain is considered. I and my history have been forgotten, or so I think. Seconds later, he is back in his role, text in hand, and other details of my private existence are shared with the room. Madame Blancot is taking notes, though heaven knows how anyone could possibly keep pace with this man; silently tucked away in the corner is the estate agent, Monsieur Charpy, who first introduced us to Appassionata.
And so it goes on. And on. I am asked if I have been informed about the existence of Michel’s daughters, his ex-wife. The whole business feels like a preposterous interrogation. Then I am gravely warned about the risks I am taking in signing these documents and in part-purchasing a property with a man who has offspring elsewhere. I fear that were my understanding of legal French any better, I would pick up my bag and make for the door without signing a single page of what turns out to be five copies of a twenty-nine-page document. We are all obliged to initial every page and sign our full names at various strategic points after we have handwritten the words lu et approuvé: read and approved.
The whole process is really quite comical, a merry-go-round of papers and pens, with only one person doing nothing, the estate agent. He, I realize later, is there to receive his settlement from Madame B., which, she begrudgingly gives him in cash. The thick wad of five-hundred-franc notes is quite literally passed from richly bejeweled fingers to grasping hands under the table, but only after every last i has been dotted. I am amused by the notaire, who, while this black-market activity is taking place right beneath his desk, pulls out an enormous white handkerchief and busily blows his nose. The size of the handkerchief, little short of a sheet, manages most conveniently to cover his eyes and most of his face; hence he has seen nothing.
Olive Farm Page 13