Reflections of Sunflowers

by Ruth Silvestre

  So many times Grandma and I sat together, either up at Bel-Air or down on the farm, shelling white coco beans for bottling or cutting up greengages to make jam. Stick in hand, she would walk slowly up through the wood to Bel-Air in her flowered pinafore and wide straw hat. She would always carry a gift, a small bunch of parsley, a couple of sweet onions, or a bunch of sorrel to make soup. She was a very quiet person but sometimes she would talk about her childhood. Her parents died when she was small. She and her brother, who were very close in age, were brought up by a much older, married sister. The family owned and worked quite a large mill, but by the time Grandma and her brother had grown up, the sister’s husband had squandered all the money. The mill and all the land had to be sold. Grandma’s inheritance is now a flourishing, four-star campsite owned by a Dutch company. We used to make the occasional nostalgic trip on a Sunday after lunch, to see how it had been altered.

  Sometimes Grandma would tell of her courtship, of how Grandpa would call to take her dancing on a Saturday evening. I imagine them setting off proudly in the Citroën, she, without a doubt, the envy of all the local girls. In the late twenties not many young men had a car. She was very pretty, with dark curly hair and very small hands and feet. Grandpa certainly didn’t pick her as a sturdy wife for a farmer. He too was slightly built with a mop of fair hair. They were married in 1931 and she came to live at the farm. I don’t think she got on too well with Grandpa’s difficult and possessive sister, who lived in the next village. But with the war, all petty disputes were put aside as the whole community faced real hardship, especially when, with Claudette still very small, Grandpa, conscripted into the French army, was captured and spent five years as a prisoner of war in Germany.

  ‘Ah oui,’ she would sigh. ‘C’était dur! Très dur!’ And that was all. Grandma always preferred to talk about happier times.

  We were shocked when we arrived that last summer to see her so changed. She was in a wheelchair. A long silk scarf was tied round her waist to hold her safely in. She was confused and incredibly thin and frail, a sad reunion for us. Adam, my elder son, his wife, Caz, and my two grandchildren, had arrived by car on the first of August. Elliot, then two years old, was carried, still sleeping, straight to bed. Six-and-a-half-year-old Thomas demanded food and then raced all round the garden whooping with joy. We finally persuaded him into bed and had just sat down to a very late meal when Jean-Michel appeared. With tears in his eyes he told us that Grandma had died an hour ago.

  Mike and I went down to comfort a sobbing Véronique. Grandpa sat, his head bowed, his sister by his side. Raymond’s brother and his wife stood as if uncertain what they should do. Claudette, dry-eyed, just kept repeating bewilderedly, ‘She was all right when I put her to bed. Elle a même pris un peu de bouillon – a little broth.’

  She shook her head as though she still could not believe it – as though she had not been able to acknowledge her mother’s clearly impending death.

  ‘When I put her to bed, elle était comme toujours,’ she began again as she led us to the bedroom. Grandma, her jaw tied up with a crepe bandage, now lay there in her best dress, the one she had worn for her diamond wedding, six years before. She looked so small. A rosary had been wound around her bony, work-weary, little hands. Our great sadness was mitigated by relief that this gentle old lady no longer had to suffer the indignities of her illness.

  The following evening we were invited down for special family prayers. There were other family members; Philippe and Corinne had come from Toulouse, cousins from La Capelle. In a large rough circle we sat outside in the open-ended hanger, waiting for the Curé. We waited and waited. No one seemed to know what to do. There was such a deep sense of shared loss and sadness. Mike suggested that we hold hands and he said a brief prayer. The family seemed grateful. Still we waited. The absent Curé was not, alas, the sweet old priest who had officiated at both Philippe’s and Véronique’s weddings. This priest was fairly new and not particularly popular. He did nothing to improve his reputation that evening with a grieving family. He did not come.

  Eventually Philippe decided that we would have to say our farewells without him. We crowded solemnly back into the bedroom where Grandma lay. Philippe stood at the end of the bed. He said a few loving words and then a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria. Grandpa’s sister, ever acerbic, declared that it was ten Ave Marias that must be said. Claudette began, the others joined in and all the endless and, to me, pointless repetition of the prayers of my Roman Catholic childhood came flooding back. The confessions, when I scratched around for a sin or two to tell the priest. My bewilderment as to why four Our Fathers and six Hail Marys would make it all better, and the difficulty of getting any of my questions answered. Then I felt ashamed of the rebellious anger that had momentarily welled up in me. Dealing with death needs every comforting ritual. ‘Holy Mary, pray for us sinners, now, and in the hour of our death,’ indeed. We all lined up to kiss her. Grandpa stood back until last, and in Occitan, the old language that they often spoke to one another, he shouted at her, in the way the very deaf do. Then he embraced her and howled ‘Addio’ and then I did cry.

  It was a scorching day for the funeral, which was held the next day at 5.30 in the village church. We went early to help prepare and found that Mme Barrou, who keeps the keys, had decorated everywhere with a variety of vases filled with delicate pink cosmos, no doubt from her own garden. Mlle Bruet, was also there, plugging in her portable organ. She looked alarmed when she saw me as we had met some years before at a rehearsal for Véronique’s wedding when I had expected her to play my accompaniment for an Ave Maria I was to sing. It was then that I discovered that she could only read the melody line, which she played with one hand. Fortunately, at that time, my friend Christina, an expert accompanist and stalwart improviser on even the most dire instrument was staying with us for a few days, and she kindly managed to record my accompaniment onto tape before she went back to England.

  Now Claudette had asked me if I would sing the same Ave Maria for the funeral, as Grandma had so enjoyed it. Grandma herself had a sweet voice and had taught me to sing Le Temps des Cerises, Cherry Time, a great favourite with the older generation. I quickly reassured Mlle Bruet that I was happy to sing unaccompanied and left her to rehearse the small choir of elderly ladies in hymns all set, alas, as always, too high for them. The choir were very undecided about my solo. They shook their heads and fretted that perhaps it would be necessary to ask the Curé. It was quite likely that an Ave Maria would not be considered at all suitable for a funeral. I was determined to sing it anyway but when the Curé eventually arrived he shrugged and said loftily, ‘Je ne vois aucun empêchement, I see no obstacle.’ I forbore to point out that I was singing it not for him but for Grandma. Sung in a lower key and much slower than for the wedding, the Ave Maria ended the simple service and felt right.

  I was proud of Philippe who spoke movingly about his grandmother. He looked so tall and handsome and I remembered the slim, brown-legged boy who had come out, eager to greet us the very first time we had driven up to the farm. When the service was over we all wound our way through the village and up to the small cemetery where, after a long and hard life, this loving and much loved grandmother was laid to rest.

  We walked slowly back home from the vineyard, the dying sun slanting through the poplar trees at the edge of the track before it disappeared, and we drank a toast to the two old people who had, over so many years, shown us such kindness.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Guy and his friend from university turned up as they had promised and dealt with our piles of garden rubbish, the speed and ease with which they worked making us feel very old. I had known Guy since he was a baby. In the following summers we had all been enchanted by this blonde toddler who loved to ride on Raymond’s tractor and was fearless in our neighbour’s pool. When he was about five years old I had watched his face change from excited apprehension to delight as he swallowed his first oyster. I did not imagine then that one day he woul
d be over six feet tall and would take on those tasks which we could no longer manage.

  They made short work of trimming our straggling hedge, restoring our view up to the vineyard and, as they pulled up the splendid growth of weeds behind the hedge, we discovered something else that we had forgotten; a neat stack of about two hundred, very old Roman roof tiles. That reminded us that we had still not found a solution to the roofing over the small terrace outside our fourth bedroom, which we had made in the chai. As long as the weather was fine, guests who stayed in that room were happy to walk outside to the shower. When it rained hard, however, they got a shower of a different kind and too often had also to negotiate a small lake. We left an umbrella just inside the bedroom door but year after year we puzzled about what to do.

  The difficulty lay in the joining together of two roof edges, which sloped in different directions. ‘There must be a solution,’ said Mike after a particularly spectacular downfall, which threatened to reach the step of the chai and flood the room. He made a paper model, we began to see a possibility and felt at least one step nearer to getting the problem solved. Who would actually do the job was yet another problem. Then the previous summer we had had the chance to acquire some really old tiles. They had come from reroofed outbuildings at the local chateau, which we learnt had just been sold, and restoration work had begun.

  From the first year that we bought Bel-Air we have known about the local chateau. On brief moments of respite in those early days, as we sat outside in the sunshine, with a hastily concocted sandwich and a glass of wine, the distant cry of peacocks would often drift up across the fields when the wind was from the south. Later, when we had more time and began to explore our region, on our way to our nearest town of Monflanquin, we would catch a glimpse through the trees of a large shuttered house with an elegant but crumbling loggia on one side and a high-turreted belfry. Although we could not see it, we knew that there was also a lake, because Grandpa, as the local gardien de chasse, had permission to fish it for trout and crayfish.

  From various people we heard the sad story of Monsieur, the late owner of the chateau and the last in the line of the once proud family De Becay, who in happier times had been close to the Royal Court. The locals seem to have been fond of the old man, the sole survivor. They understood and respected his decision to remain unmarried and not to have children, fearing that any offspring might inherit the madness of his older brother. However, we learnt that, later in life, Monsieur did eventually marry a middle-aged widow with children of her own. One of the sons, the story said, became involved in Paris in a court case involving fraud, causing his stepfather a great deal of unhappiness. The years passed, Madame died, and Monsieur, now old, alone and frail, and presumably in financial difficulties, made, with the man who normally sold his sheep for him, a perfectly legal arrangement that is quite common here. It would, he hoped, assure him of an income for the remainder of his life, but as it turned out, it also provided a source of local gossip for years to come.

  Raymond had, in fact, acquired Bel-Air in 1961 by a similar arrangement. Rente viagère, as it is called, is a life annuity agreement between an elderly person and a relative, or a trusted friend or neighbour. Simple and very practical, it is designed for people who reach a stage in their lives when they need support but do not wish to leave their home. Each agreement is an act, carefully drawn up by the notaire to suit each particular situation. In the case of our property, Raymond agreed that, after paying the sum of roughly one-and-a-half thousand pounds to Anaïs and her handicapped son at Bel-Air, he would provide them annually with a specified quantity of wheat, wine, potatoes, firewood and feed for the chicken. On the first death, all these amounts were to be halved, except the firewood. On the second death, Bel-Air, and more importantly to him the land, would be his.

  After signing the agreement, Anaïs lived for another two years, and her son, Alois, lived on until 1968. For the last two years of his life he was too ill to live alone and moved to be cared for into the maison de retraite, but Raymond continued to support him in the nursing home and to take him his wine and tobacco. On Sundays he would bring him up to a now unoccupied Bel-Air to sit quietly and look at the view. Of course there are risks in such annuity agreements; the longer the seller lives, the worse the bargain. It is not completely unknown for some old people to actually outlive the potential benefactor.

  Raymond’s small gain, after seven years, of our modest house and a couple of fields was as nothing compared with the legacy of the chateau, which also included in the agreement another large house, the grandest in the village; as well as two more substantial stone-built farmhouses and a great deal of land. What our village has never got over is the fact that after entering into a life annuity agreement with his marchand de moutons, poor old Monsieur at the chateau was dead within a month! There is no serious suggestion of a crime having been committed, although there are shrugs and frowns and taps on the side of the nose, as the story is told and re-told. It is the incredible unfairness of it all that people bemoan and the fact that the now extremely wealthy sheep merchant, whom one might have expected to be the soul of contentment, is, apparently, an extremely difficult man. Monsieur T. had posted ‘Keep Out’ notices all round the chateau, it was said, although he himself had no intention of living there, having a large modern house elsewhere. It was also rumoured that he had installed explosive devices along the tree-lined drive, the entrance to which he had now blocked with a great fallen tree.

  We first met this notorious ‘marchand de moutons’ at the village fête. It was actually an alternative to the normal village fête. For several years the village had been split into two factions. One supported the mayor, who was interested in speaking Occitan and playing the fiddle; the other considered him to be both too radical and too exotic. The opposition included most of the local farmers, Raymond being prominent among them. Not wishing to take sides, for several years we ended up going to both fêtes. It was quite an exhausting business since they tended to be held on consecutive days, and entailed a great deal of eating and drinking. One year, however, they were held on the same day and we had to choose.

  It was at this large gathering of recalcitrant farmers that we first met Monsieur T. He was a tall, confident man with a handsome, florid face. There was a great deal of local wine consumed and he was in an unusually mellow mood. The question of the future of the chateau was raised and the new owner told us that he was still looking for a buyer. Perhaps we would know someone in England who might like to buy it? Would we like to visit the chateau? Omitting to tell him that there were very few millionaires among our acquaintances, we naturally said yes. A small party, including Raymond and Claudette, left the fête and were taken on a tour. We parked on the opposite side of the road to the chateau, skirted the obstacle of the fallen tree and walked up the long, overgrown drive.

  The great house was a sad and sombre place. The kitchen was still almost medieval, with massive oak cupboards stretching from the floor up to the smoke-blackened ceiling. In the vast, sooty fireplace remained the spit with the winding gear to turn the roast. A more recent addition was a row of bells to summon the servants, marked Monsieur, Madame, Chambre Rouge, Chambre Verte, Lingerie. The once elegant, marble-floored entrance hall was bare and dingy, and all the way up the wall of the wide staircase, pale silhouettes in the darkened plaster showed where ancient arms and armour had once been displayed. The faded wallpaper in the bedrooms was patterned with intricate oriental designs and each bedroom led into the one next door. The hand basins in the more important bedrooms were large and very much of their period, the bath was in one of the bedrooms, concealed behind tall wooden panelling which was painted a faded blue. In all this great house there seemed to be only one lavatory, tucked away on a small landing. I wandered outside and into the once elegant loggia, with its wooden balustrade, which overlooked the lake, now green and blocked with fallen trees. There were dusty punts drawn up, poles slotted into the roof, and I imagined lazy summer days
of long ago, with laughter and young people in elegant clothes, fingers drifting in the water.

  Over the years, as he sold some of the other properties, Monsieur T. began to spend money on the chateau. From a distance we noted that the loggia was being refurbished. New stonework was evident. The next year as we drove by we saw that the roof had been repaired. There was much discussion about the suitability of red tiles having replaced the original slate, and of the million pounds that Monsieur T. was rumoured to be asking for a sale. Each year speculation grew.

  We had hardly arrived last summer when Véronique, Raymond’s daughter, in her new capacity as deputy mayor, had called to ask if Mike and I would mind acting as interpreters. ‘C’est vendu, le château! The chateau has been bought, by an Englishman,’ she told us excitedly. He had apparently installed two English workmen on site who wished to register for a permis de résidence, and, not surprisingly, neither she nor the mayor could make them understand all the necessary formalities. Apart from being curious, we were happy to help our popular new mayor. Patrick Jayant is a young man with a wide, smiling face, whom I remember as a teenager always ready to lend a hand at the village celebrations, staggering around with great crates of food or drink. The best thing about him as far as the now united village is concerned is that he is a farmer. He understands.

  We drove with Véronique to meet the mayor at the chateau and as we turned off the road saw that the once overgrown and sombre driveway was now trimmed and rutted by traffic. At the top of the drive two large mobile homes were drawn up between the house and the garden, connecting cables for power and water snaking through the grass and across the drive into the house. A pair of sturdy young men, Kevin and Pat, with their wives and children, came out to meet us. Kevin, who was in charge of the whole project, had worked in England for the new owner, a Mr Ensor, who had installed them there for as long as it would take to get the chateau back into shape. They seemed pleased at the challenging prospect, which they reckoned would take at least eighteen months, and now wanted to formally register as resident in France in order to send their children to school in September. Kieran and Kitty, Pat’s children, who were about nine and seven, were clearly enjoying the whole adventure. Kevin’s two little girls, who were much younger, seemed unsure. We translated for the Mayor and his very pretty deputy, as best we could. It seemed that a great many forms would have to be completed and we arranged to go with Kevin and Pat on the following Tuesday afternoon to the Mairie, that being the only time in the week that Odile the secretary is there.