Excited as I am finally to be fulfilling my destiny, sixty years on, I am simply unprepared for how difficult learning to fly turns out to be; for how it leaves my brain feeling like warm scrambled egg. I am not a natural Spitfire pilot after all. Flying is a lot more technical, and a lot less romantic, than I imagined.
Nevertheless, by now I have managed to criticize enough Macbeths to buy my own vintage aeroplane: a bright-yellow Luscombe Silvaire built in 1946. Two seats, side by side, squeezed into a tiny leather-lined cockpit, held aloft by a pair of fabric-covered wings and hauled along by a 65-horsepower Continental engine that looks as if it has been recovered from a peat bog. The Luscombe is no Spitfire, but it smells of the 1940s and I think it is perfect. I begin to discover the romance of flight, after all.
In London, the garden goes to seed, and then to weed.
Marisa and I split up. There is no fighting; no flying crockery. Just a sense that the parallel tracks of our lives are ready to diverge. So we hug each other, and wave our handkerchiefs, and steam off on our separate lines.
And then, one blustery January day, I am sent to interview an actor who is about to star in Macbeth. I leave black footprints on the sleeted pavement as I trudge to the rehearsal room, a one-time nursery school at the end of an East London street that looks as if it still hasn’t recovered from the Blitz. I sit on a child’s plastic chair, watching my tenth Macbeth, without rapture. And instead of thinking up ways of making yet another insecure actor sound fascinating and important, I decide that I am going to go and live in France with a cat and a piano and an aeroplane.
‘So what did you think?’ asks the director afterwards, pulling at the neck of his black polo-neck as if to let the steam escape.
‘Um … interesting,’ I mumble.
‘It’s such a great play.’
I nod, desperate to escape his labrador enthusiasm. ‘It’s made me see my whole life differently,’ I add.
‘God, really? That’s fantastic.’
I am not running away. I happen to think that England is a very good place to live, if one happens to like Marmite and hard cheese. But my London life is uncomfortably comfortable, and I need to create some proper problems for myself. I have had enough of living in a hamster’s sawdust-lined cage. I want a true adventure, instead of endlessly trying to gallop somewhere – anywhere – on my little plastic wheel.
I want to have sheep and chickens and manly power-tools, and to make friends in a foreign language.
I want to watch the seasons passing, and to learn about things that matter, by looking and watching and digging my hands into the dirt.
I want to become the man I always hoped to be, before life got in the way. Abroad. Alone.
In France, perhaps I shall find myself a dishy French girlfriend. And perhaps I shall at last be able to sit down and write The Labours of Jack Larry. I’ve read enough, absorbed enough, endured enough of the buzzing cacophony of London. In my heart, I am a country person who has lived all his life in towns. And I am tired of being this soft, fearful townie, watching nonsense on the telly, sitting through mediocre plays at the theatre, talking trash with my friends to distract myself from the fact that the meter is ticking and I still have done nothing with my life of which I can feel proud. One day, I would love to be a wise old man. I have been extremely successful at the getting-older part. The getting-wiser part is proving tougher to achieve.
More than anything, I want to be able to look my eighteen-year-old self in the eye when I tell him what I’ve been up to. I’m tired of his finger-wagging.
‘Do you mean to tell me that’s all you’ve done in the last twenty years, after the start I gave you?’ he says, as he stands beside my bed with his fresh skin and his blond hair. His face is half in shadow, so I cannot read his expression. But I’d say he isn’t angry; just bemused.
3
MARCH: INITIAL VIRILITY TEST
So here I am, driving through rain-tossed rural France, hunting for aerodromes in the dark. Dawn broke an hour ago, and never recovered. The deluge is vicious. It makes me hunch my shoulders and long for hot buttered toast and Horlicks. And I don’t even like Horlicks.
My equipment for the heroic quest is slight. My steed, a Korean rental car the colour of a broad bean. My sword, a smattering of rusty A-level French. For guide, all I have is a soggy 1:500,000-scale aeronautical chart to lead me through the murk.
Later, when the sky clears, I may find that the Limousin is a bosky mélange of trees and lakes and rolling hills and gap-toothed old men bent double beneath bundles of sticks. But for now, black rain smashes itself upon the windscreen, making a March morning feel like a January dusk. It looks as if someone has blown the entire special-effects budget of a cheap thriller on this one scene.
I have no idea where in France I want to live. I only know that it must be near an aerodrome. If we’re drawing Venn diagrams, it should also be far enough south of East Dulwich for the cat to feel an improvement in the weather, yet still close enough to Blighty for me to sally back and forth from time to time.
As a child, my biggest fear was that my parents might die. As an adult, my biggest fear is that my parents will die. So I want to spend as much time with them as possible, while we’re all still breathing.
No one really close to me has ever died, except my grandparents. And even they died at a distance: Pa in hospital, covered in tubes; Nanny in an old people’s home, frightened and alone. I wish I had gone to see her, but I was frightened, too. I think I am more frightened of the people close to me dying than I am of dying myself.
So I don’t want to be too far away. I’d love to pretend that I could simply hop into my Luscombe, yell ‘Chocks away, Taffy’ and fly myself back across the Channel if I should run short of Marmite or PG Tips. But the Luscombe is a doddery old girl, restricted to fair-weather flying, and will only rattle away for about three hundred miles before the fuel runs out and the engine falls annoyingly silent. So that’s another reason for not living too far south. But first I must find a likely aerodrome. For I cannot bring an old aeroplane to France until I have found room at the inn to hangar it.
The barman’s moustache twitches as he slides a smoking coffee towards me.
‘Il n’y a pas d’aérodrome ici, Monsieur.’ He rolls his eyes at the other men in the bar as I struggle to unfold my damp chart, repeating a scenario I have played out in countless bars and tabacs all over France, where aerodrome denial is rife.
‘But what’s this?’ I ask, pointing to the little star beside the name Jolibois on my aeronautical chart. He pulls a smile like the twitch of a suburban net curtain. I stare at the floor, feeling as if I have just asked Mr Bumble for a second bowl of gruel, and wishing that I hadn’t.
At last, one of the early-morning drinkers clears his throat and murmurs something to the barman. The net curtain falls limp.
‘Ah, you mean the landing-strip that the pilots use?’ he huffs, sulkily polishing a glass.
I nod.
‘Well, why didn’t you say so, Monsieur?’ he says. ‘It’s up the road, on the left-hand side.’
So I knock back my coffee, and head off in search of the landing-strip-that-the-pilots-use.
The caffeine is already drumming in my temples as I step outside. The rain has stopped and a trickle of sunlight seeps from a curdled-milk sky. I regard this as a good omen, and immediately set off on the wrong side of the road, straight into the path of a juggernaut with his lights on full beam and his horn blaring.
I swerve, buttocks clenched, as we pass each other, lances raised, like knights at a joust. Except that his horse is rather bigger than mine.
The landing-strip-that-the-pilots-use turns out to be a sloping grass track with a dank bog and a small green hangar at one end of it. Through a crack in the hangar doors, I can just make out the ghostly shapes of several microlights, packed together as tightly as crisps in a bag. No space there for a Luscombe. But at least these planes look as if they fly every once in a while, unlike the
dusty spam-cans I have glimpsed through the cracks in hangar doors all over France.
I trudge past the frayed windsock – faded from orange to potato brown – and out on to the runway, trying to picture a bright yellow Luscombe Silvaire landing here.
Then I trek back into Jolibois, in search of the local estate agent. Today is Monday. I’ve given myself a week to find a house near an aerodrome.
Jolibois is a drab medieval sprawl – more purposeful than quaint – wrapped in some grey outskirts that must have looked grim even when they were first built. I’m encouraged by the gleaming pipe-organ in the church, because I’ve been meaning to dust off my preludes and fugues. Besides that, there are several shops flogging health insurance; a hearing-aid centre; an evil 1960s fountain; a small yellow box called the Cinéma Lux; a tennis club beside a petite football stadium; and a swanky-looking theatre with posters for last year’s plays curling on the notice-board outside.
The shops are all shut – perhaps it’s a bank holiday –but there’s a light on in the estate agency.
‘We only have one old house that might suit you, and it’s this one,’ says the pretty estate agent in breathily accented English, after I’ve explained that I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for, but that it will probably be old and isolated and have a leafy view. Bright-eyed and petite, she reminds me of one of the woodland characters in a Disney cartoon. I’m busy thinking what a pretty town Jolibois is when she shows me a picture of a gloomy-looking farmhouse stuck to the side of a hill.
‘Does it have any windows?’ I ask, studying the picture.
‘I think so,’ she says, pursing her lips. ‘Yes, look, there’s one.’
‘J’ai vu la maison,’ says her colleague, Antoine, peering at me over his half-moons. ‘It’s a good house, but it needs a lot of work and the floors are all on a terrible slope. You’d have to do something about that, or you’d get sea-sick.’
‘Can I go and see it today?’ I ask the lady from the Disney cartoon.
‘Sadly not,’ shrugs Antoine, before she can reply. He waves his spectacles at me. ‘Not until the weekend. And there’s another problem, too. It’s the owner. The man’s an ecologist. Polish, I think. Very gruff and difficult. Doesn’t like visitors. You take your life into your own hands when you go up there.’
‘Ah,’ I say, encouraged.
‘Émilie can take you on Saturday morning.’
The Disney lady and I smile uncertainly at each other. Then she pencils me into her diary for the following Saturday. So the first house will also be the last house, for I am booked to fly home on Sunday. In the meantime, I head off in search of my next aerodrome.
At St Juste, a small market town twenty-five minutes’ drive from Jolibois, I discover a friendly little aeroclub whose members are in the process of building a new hangar. Waving me in out of the pouring rain, the club’s genial president even helps me write a letter, requesting a place on the waiting-list for my Luscombe.
‘To whom should I address it?’ I ask, my pen poised above the paper he has provided, as we listen to the rain drumming on the roof of his office.
‘À moi,’ he guffaws, dictating his name and an appropriately high-flown salutation. ‘And you, when are you moving to France?’
‘Very soon,’ I declare confidently.
‘Then you must meet our other English pilot.’
I must have pulled a face, for the president bursts out laughing again.
‘You English are so funny,’ he says. ‘Why is it that you always want to avoid each other?’
I shrug, embarrassed.
‘Ah, but Peter Viola is just the same,’ he continues. ‘Flies his own microlight in all weathers, and speaks good French. You’ll like him, I assure you.’
*
French estate agents are not like English ones. In Britain, you just walk in, tell the man in the shiny suit how many bedrooms you want, and then you leap into his car and go and look at unsuitable properties. In France, estate agents are rounded professionals with strange things like rigorous training and qualifications. They expect you to make an appointment as if you were going to see the doctor. And, like good doctors, they give you a very thorough examination.
‘In town or in the countryside, Monsieur?’ asks the chain-smoking vamp – Cruella De Vil in a tight purple trouser-suit and with a sultry pout – who interrogates me in St Juste later that day.
‘Well, the edge of a town would be all right, if it was leafy.’
‘How much land, Monsieur?’
‘N’importe.’ I shrug. I really don’t mind, just so long as the neighbours have some nice fields for the cat to depopulate.
‘And water?’
‘Ah, bien sûr. Water and electricity, too, please.’
Cruella eyes me wearily from behind a mascara portcullis. ‘I mean, Monsieur, do you wish to be beside a lake or a river?’
‘Sorry – yes, lovely. And not vital.’
‘Dépendances?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I have no children. Just a cat.’
The sultry pout thins to just two strands of stuck spaghetti. ‘Dépendances, Monsieur … that is, how many outbuildings do you require?’
‘Well, how many would Madame suggest?’
The tip of her cigarette glows as she takes a deep drag.
‘How many square metres of living-space?’
In a panic, I try to guess the size of the little house in East Dulwich. I am about to say a hundred square metres, but that sounds like a football pitch, so I settle on sixty.
‘Soixante?’
Cruella stops writing and begins screwing the lid on to her pen. I can see her mentally cancelling the holiday in the Bahamas she has been planning ever since I walked in. Rattled, I guess again.
‘Seven hundred?’
‘Vous cherchez un château, Monsieur?’
No, no. That’s not right, either. So I split the difference and make a final stab.
‘A hundred and seventy?’
With a smile like an iceberg, Madame writes down ‘200’ in her notebook. And now we come to the virility test.
‘En quel état?’ she asks.
‘Excusez-moi?’ What’s she saying now? Uncle is late?
‘How – much – work – are – you – prepared – to – do – on – the – house?’ she spits, each word shot out in a separate speech bubble.
I will soon learn that there are five levels of manhood in the French estate agent’s virility test:
1. Rénovée: I am a rich cissy.
2. Petits travaux: I’ll wield a paintbrush if you promise not to wobble the ladder.
3. À finir: I watch DIY shows on telly and have my own hammer drill.
4. Habitable: Who needs a bathroom when your tool-belt is as big as mine?
5. À rénover: I am a fearless caveman, skilled in the black arts of the mason, the roofer and the plumber, and only visit the blacksmith when I have a problem with my teeth.
My DIY prowess is strictly level 3 at best, although I do see myself as a testosterone-charged level 4 after half a bottle of wine with someone I’m trying to impress.
The fact is, I’ve always liked the idea of ‘doing up’ a house, heaving spade-loads of cement into a rumbling mixer, and splitting granite with nothing but a Swiss army knife and the sweat of my brow. I’m very keen and all that, for it is undoubtedly vital that the trainee hero chooses gruelling labour over cushy comfort every time. It’s just that I’ve never done anything more complicated than putting up a few lights and painting a shed the wrong colour.
‘If it’s habitable, ça va,’ I declare, puffing out my chest and banging my hand on the desk harder than intended.
‘Oh, really?’ Cruella blows a smoke ring at the ceiling. It looks strangely like a zero. I fear she has twigged that I don’t even possess a tool-belt, let alone a laser gadget for levelling floors.
‘Well, you know,’ I add, attempting a graceful retreat without her noticing. ‘I don’t mind if the place looks a
bit shabby.’
‘Petits travaux,’ she sniffs, making a clinical assessment of my manhood on her pad. ‘In that case, Monsieur, I have nothing for you. Come back in a month, and I’ll see what I can do.’
Bracelets jangle on a bony yellow wrist as she offers me her hand.
‘Bonne journée, Monsieur.’
4
THE OGRE
Saturday morning arrives at last, and I head off to meet Émilie, the Disney lady, in Jolibois. By now, I have been through a dozen Cruella-type interrogations, seen photographs of hundreds of properties, and been taken to view a surfeit of shambling houses built slap-bang in the middle of someone else’s muddy farmyard. Émilie is already standing outside the estate agency when I arrive.
‘Nice car,’ I say as I slide into the passenger seat of her shiny Renault.
‘Yes, my husband bought it for me as a birthday present,’ she says, checking her make-up in the rear-view mirror.
‘Nice husband.’
‘Oh, Fred is good. I’m very lucky.’
‘Unusual name, for a …’
‘He’s English,’ laughs Émilie. ‘You’ll like him.’
The sky looks as blue as Wedgwood china as we follow the directions to the ogre’s lair. The sunlight glitters on the road, still slick with last night’s rain.
‘So why do you want to live in France?’ asks Émilie.
‘For an adventure.’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘Here, this must be it,’ she says, turning off the road on to a track that seems to rise almost vertically into a dense wood.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ I ask, clinging to the handle above my door as the track veers sharply right and left.
‘No,’ she giggles. ‘But you said you wanted an adventure.’
‘If he becomes violent, you’re in charge,’ I tell her. ‘You have to protect the client at all costs.’
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