by Tony White
Ironically, the pipelines serving Villeneuve-Loubet, Tourrettes, Saint-Paul and Vence itself were sabotaged in 1792 by Sardinian counter-revolutionaries and royalist ‘Feuillants’ funded and emboldened by support from the Spanish royal family and the Knights of Malta. By laying siege and cutting the water supply, these royalist militia were seeking to starve out the ‘patriots’ and revolutionists in those two towns, but in fact they achieved the reverse. By inadvertently cutting the supply of poison to the polis, the counter-revolutionaries unwittingly did much to improve – with almost immediate effect – the long-term health and vigour of these communes. However, what was good for les Vençois may not have suited those living closer to the source, for the supply of contaminated water to both Fontaines (-en-Forêt, and -lès-Vence) remained unaffected by these skirmishes. Thus was created an isolated pocket of backwardness, a place that superstitious travellers – little understanding the symptoms of lead poisoning – might hurry through, nosegays clamped to their faces, fearful of the region’s ominous reputation and what might happen to the traveller who tarried too long.
Élise told how nineteenth-and twentieth-century developments such as the cutting of the railways or the building of the modern Route de Grasse had more or less passed La Fontaine-en-Forêt by. The surveyors responsible for the latter had in fact compounded the village’s isolation by blasting a steep cutting right across the old donkey track that remained the only means of access to the village. Hence the steep climb, she said, from the road to the track proper. Similarly, the Nice-to-Draguignan railway, which climbed from the coast to Vence, would bring no benefits to La Fontaine-en-Forêt, instead passing several hundred metres lower and to the south of Tourrettes-sur-Loup and La Fontaine-lès-Vence, on its way to Grasse and beyond that to Draguignan, some fifty kilometres to the west.
‘There is more,’ Élise said with a smile. ‘Always more! But maybe I tell you tomorrow.’
On his way to bed, JJ took an empty wine bottle to the fountain and rinsed it out in the running water a few times, before filling it from the spout and stoppering it to take to his room in case he needed a drink of water in the night. As he did this, he realised that he could hear a bird singing somewhere above him. He couldn’t see it, but it was close. Perhaps it was on the roof of the large house. It sounded a bit like a blackbird, which had a song that he recognised. Blackbirds often used to perch on the television aerial on their chimney back at home in the evenings, where they would sing for what seemed like hours.
Hearing the rasp of a cigarette lighter, JJ realised that he wasn’t the only one enjoying this avian soloist. He looked up to see that at least one set of blue shutters on the front of the large house were now open. A woman was leaning out of the darkened first-floor window, smoking a cigarette. Perhaps she had also been attracted by the bird’s song. He wondered if this was the Sylvie that he had heard about from Milo. He couldn’t really see her very clearly, as there was hardly any moon, and no street lighting apart from what spilled out from Nos Resto.
‘Hello,’ JJ said, pointing up at the bird on the roof. ‘C’est joli, oui?’ he asked, before – unable to form any more meaningful sentence in French – reverting to English. ‘Is it a blackbird?’ he asked. ‘Do you know?’ He was suddenly aware of the collective sound of thousands of frogs croaking in the gorge far below the village. He couldn’t understand how he had not noticed this before. When, he wondered, had the more ethereal cries of the darting swifts been replaced by this amphibian babble? He could barely hear himself think. Suddenly he felt a bit like a frog himself, rather than the handsome, prince-like figure he had hoped to strike.
‘C’est un ousel,’ she said. ‘Ah, okay, in English. Yes, he is maybe like the blackbird, son cousin, but with the white … sais pas … collar? They spend the winter ’ere.’
‘I don’t blame them,’ said JJ. ‘It’s beautiful.’ He suddenly felt a bit shy and struggled to remember some, any, French. ‘D’accord,’ he said, finally. Then a flash of inspiration: ‘Bonne nuit, Juliet.’
It took a moment or two for the joke to sink in. Then, ‘Bonne nuit, Roméo,’ Sylvie said, before laughing and closing the shutter.
Opening the guest-house door and climbing the stairs, JJ reflected that he had only arrived in Cagnes earlier on today, but now, thanks mainly to Pea-tag, he had a bed for the night – or perhaps for as long as he wanted? – in some kind of extraordinary bohemian commune in the mountains. He had eaten and drunk well, and perhaps made some new friends. He’d felt slightly intimidated by Milo, and particularly Victor at first. Béatrice and Élise, less so, but Victor had seemed the most macho and competitive, albeit in a good-natured way. Did they have anything in common, he wondered, apart from the fact that they all lived here together? Certainly, they were all artists or artisans of some sort, and each of them had their own kind of openness – or generosity, perhaps – in both word and deed. He had found this directness incredibly refreshing, and looked forward to getting to know them all a bit better in the coming days. But JJ wasn’t stupid. He also realised that, if he was going to stay, he had better make himself useful. Otherwise he would become a burden pretty quickly. He couldn’t just hang around like a spare part and expect the incredible hospitality he had received tonight to continue indefinitely. He would have to sort something out. In the meantime, a far lesser yet still uncomfortable truth: JJ didn’t know it yet, but this would be the best night’s sleep he would ever have on a futon.
And, despite the dandelion supper, he didn’t piss the bed.
16: CAPILLAIRE (MAIDENHAIR FERN)
Having slept soundly, JJ awoke to the sound of cockerels crowing and beyond that some man-made music, perhaps from a flute or pipe, a series of simple riffs, scales and arpeggios that lifted and fell, repeated and reversed, echoing lightly around the ravine like a musical orison. JJ lifted the rough calico drape and knotted it, then opened the window, but there was no sign of any piper. And because of the way that the sound bounced around the ravine, it was impossible to locate the source.
The village square looked picturesque and quaint from the upstairs room. Apart from the oversized and anachronistic-looking fountain, it reminded JJ of the illustrations in those Jackdaw activity packs that had sometimes been brought out on special occasions for history classes at his primary school. These had been wallets full of stylishly illustrated handouts – in woodcut, perhaps, or pen and ink – together with facsimiles of historical documents relevant to the period, event or person in question. He could just imagine a woodcut of a medieval village like this one, but if so it would be populated by well-dressed peasants with clean faces and 1970s haircuts who seemed happy to live cheek by jowl with their oxen, pigs and geese.
Where La Fontaine-en-Forêt’s main square was set upon the flattish saddle of this odd spur of rock, the western part of the hamlet was built on a lower level, along a broad ledge. It was this that was accessed by La Petite Rue – a narrow street, little more than an alley – which emerged again via some stone steps that brought you back up to a point just inside a plain village gate. The dozen or so houses thus accessed were built amongst, or out of, the rocks along the edge of the ravine, where they formed a kind of habitable fortification. Picturesque on the inside, street-side, but forbidding and inaccessible from the ravine below.
Leaning a little further out on to the windowsill, JJ looked out to the left across a Cubist terrain of terracotta rooftops and stuccoed chimneys; trapezoid planes angled this way and that. These were the rooftops of La Petite Rue. Pea-tag had said that their place – so he and Béatrice were a couple – was down there. Number eighteen, overlooking the ravine. JJ decided that he would have to go and take a look later on. From this vantage point, he couldn’t see the eastern gorge at all, just the misty tops of the wooded hills on its far side. Beyond these treetops the first tinge of dawn was already brightening a vermillion sky that could have been squeezed straight from the tube, and which faded into oranges and yellows as bright as the pigment wash
es on the cover of Sextet by A Certain Ratio.
A few doors along La Petite Rue – Pea-tag had shown him – was an arched gateway that led out, under one of the houses, to some old olive groves on narrow terraces that ran along the ridge behind the village at the foot of the Baou La Fontaine, the immense dolomitic limestone cliff, with its caves and its springs, from which the settlement had grown.
Now that it was starting to get light, JJ decided to go and take a look at this for himself. He pulled on combat trousers and a T-shirt, and was about to get into socks and lace up his DMs, but had a second thought and pulled some flat-soled, black kung fu slippers from the pocket of his rucksack. Moments later he was outside and washing his face in the water of the fountain. He took the cork out of his bottle, to rinse and refill it.
A bleary-looking Victor was doing t’ai chi on the ridge, and behind him, above the olive trees, JJ could clearly see the inverted ‘V’ of stratified sedimentary limestone. It was as if someone had draped, well, a pile of futon over a sharp ridge. In her potted history of the night before, Élise had said these rocks – the lip of which stretched above the whole Côte d’Azur – were once the seabed, but that pressure from the African plate against the European had caused this great fold belt, which was now exposed by erosion. ‘That little spring, he made these ravine, non?’
She’d told him that the Baou La Fontaine – it was an old Provençal word for ‘boulder’ – dramatic though it was, was dwarfed by the great baous of Vence and Saint-Jeannet to the east. Well, maybe so, but now the baou looked beautiful, brightened by scattered golden smears and reflections of the just-risen sun, which was also throwing shadows across the vast and irregular surface.
JJ hadn’t seen anyone else up and about, so presumably it had been Victor playing the pipes. Perhaps it got him in the right frame of mind to do t’ai chi. He was wearing the same dirty blue overalls as yesterday. JJ watched him for a while, unsure whether he’d be able to pass by without disturbing Victor’s meditation, but he decided that he probably could, and in the event he got a wink in confirmation of this as he walked between the trees towards the foot of the cliff.
Pea-tag had told JJ that Victor had a factory down at Pont-du-Loup, a mile or two further along the Route de Grasse, and that most of the money that it made was used to keep the commune going at La Fontaine-en-Forêt, slowly paying for restorations as and when they were needed or could be afforded. Victor was a trained potter. He had grown up on the Rhine near Strasbourg, and studied ceramics at the famous art school there. He was now in his late thirties, but didn’t look it. He had a small studio, complete with pedal-operated potter’s wheel, here in the village, in an outhouse round the back of Sylvie’s, and he’d built a wood-fired kiln on one of the derelict plots on La Petite Rue. Victor made strong but surprisingly delicate earthenware coffee bowls and rather narrow, straight-sided beakers. There were some seconds put out for general use in the kitchen at Nos Resto. The style that he had developed over the years was for austere-looking salt-glazed vessels in mottled browns, with a slightly flared lip that made them more pleasant to drink from. There would be a little initial ‘V’ stamped into the body near the base, and a simple scratched hoop three quarters of the way up. When Milo had brought out a tray of after-dinner coffees, he told JJ that he was drinking from one of Victor’s beakers. It felt good in JJ’s hand, and he had said so.
‘Merci,’ Victor had said graciously. ‘I ’ad the good teachers. In the sixties and seventies, everyone at l’École Supérieure was the fan of Bernard Leach.’
He’d told JJ that his pots were sold in higher-end arts-and-crafts shops in Nice, Saint-Tropez and Saint-Paul, as well as more locally in Vence and La Fontaine-lès-Vence. ‘Is okay,’ he’d said, gesturing around them, ‘but selling a few pieces every week is not enough to keep all this.’
The way that Victor told the bigger story was that, when they’d discovered La Fontaine-en-Forêt and occupied the place, the first thing that he and an archaeologist friend of his had done was survey the old pipes and cisterns that had been servicing the spring – in some cases – for more than fifteen hundred years. His plan was to replace these with a new system up at the spring and then to reroute the pipeline rather than replace it, using new ceramic pipes, the priority, of course, being to supply the village itself without destroying the archaeology, but also to use natural earthenware pipes instead of shorter-term plastic ones. This was partly because he was a potter and he understood the material, but also because it was ‘more safer, pour l’eau potable, non?’
He’d bought imported pipes from a supplier down in Biot, which were fine for the first batch, to finally get pure and uncontaminated water to La Fontaine-en-Forêt, but he did the maths on what he’d paid for the pipes versus what they’d cost to produce, scaled it up to include potentially supplying several new-builds a year, and then the factory at Pont-du-Loup had come up for sale.
Victor had shrugged. ‘And I thought, why not?’
He had started off by leasing in the extrusion and moulding plant, but investing in three shuttle kilns. When it took seventy hours to actually fire the pipes, he’d told JJ, from cold to cold, kiln capacity was the priority; you couldn’t afford not to have another couple of kilns running on different cycles. Now they produced everything from water and sewerage pipes to high-end salt-glazed kitchen sinks and bathroom ware (‘Toilet, bidet’ – he mimed washing his hands – ‘lavabo. Very nice. Sylvie ’as, in ’er place.’) that were supplied to just a few of the more exclusive retailers. The terracotta shingle business was not worth it, he had decided, so they’d contracted that out. As a result, not only did they now have good drinking water in La Fontaine-en-Forêt and a steady flow of money to support its gradual restoration, they also employed ten local people at the factory, plus they were one of the preferred suppliers of ceramic water pipe to public projects across the whole Alpes-Maritimes region.
‘Wow,’ JJ had said, sincerely impressed. Without quite having the words to express it, he admired Victor’s opportunism, and his agency, his ability to act quickly. JJ could sense that perhaps age had something to do with this, but he had no insight whatsoever into the way that, through your twenties and thirties and onwards, you might work to accumulate sufficient breadth and intensity of skills and experience, knowledge and behaviour, to transform a simple talent into a métier or profession. That success didn’t simply happen by magic or by talent alone.
Victor’s story had also reminded him of one that his sixth-form pottery teacher, Miss Larwood, had once told the class, about a friend of hers from art school days in Leeds, who had a pottery studio in an old warehouse on the River Aire in the city centre. It was a kind of parable about being open to life’s opportunities, or something.
JJ had enjoyed pottery classes. At the end of the first year of sixth form, he had won the art prize – a book token that he had then used to buy the paperback of a science-fiction novel called Nova Express by William S. Burroughs – and Miss Larwood had bought two of the pottery figures that he had liked to make, which were little cartoonish punk rockers with Mohicans and tartan trousers. JJ couldn’t quite remember every word of Miss Larwood’s story now, but it had been to do with her friend, Edward something, who was a good potter but had been trying to find a more commercial product, something that would bring in more money than simply doing children’s pottery lessons on a Saturday morning. Then, one day, while he’d been waiting for his tandoori chicken at the Rajah on Woodhouse Lane, the nice waiter had apologised for the delay and told him that one of their tandoor ovens, the large fired-clay vessels that were used for cooking tandoori dishes and breads, had broken. They were having to ship one over from Pakistan because – and here was the killer – at that time there had been no UK manufacturer.
‘So do you know what my friend did the very next day?’ Miss Larwood had asked.
(And they had all guessed, of course, although the class joker had been quicker off the mark: ‘Did he have fish and chips inste
ad, miss?’ he’d asked.)
‘Exactement,’ Victor had said, when JJ had told him the story about the tandoor ovens. ‘He go into production? C’est un génie; a genius! Is exactly what I would have do.’
At the baou, meanwhile, JJ quickly realised that he must have gone into the wrong cave. Outside he had seen clusters of bright-green fern growing directly out of cracks in the rock here and there, presumably because they liked the moisture from the spring. He had opened an iron gate set into the rock and gone inside, expecting to see some sort of modern waterworks, whatever that might look like: a water filtration unit, perhaps, the hum of motors, shiny stainless steel pipes and cisterns, a ceramic water main? There was nothing like that. Instead there were faded plastic flowers and unlit lanterns stuck to the uneven walls, crates of old bottles stacked up next to a filthy fridge, speaker cabinets and large spools of electric cabling. There was also – for some reason – a canoe, as well as a couple of black plastic dustbins and a tatty wooden bar that might have been the one that had been taken out of the old bar-tabac building at Nos Resto. A couple of rusting barbecues and some ice buckets were stacked up against an old chest of drawers. Everything was covered in a thick layer of something non-specific but nasty-looking, as if no one had been in here for a few years. JJ couldn’t tell if the muck was predominantly bird shit or bat shit, but either way it made him feel a bit sick. There was a large mural on one of the walls, which appeared to have been applied directly on to the stone. Much of the paint had flaked off in the damp atmosphere, but JJ recognised the style and the theme from a school trip to see the Picasso’s Picassos exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. Here, then, was a Picasso parody, an image of an infernal, flaming bullring in which a satyr-like toreador with a huge erection fought not just any bull, but the Minotaur.