On the Friday before I finally depart for my new adventure, we are playing poker at his house, an event which always leaves me socially richer and economically poorer.
‘We’re worried about you, Michael,’ says the eminent psychiatrist, laying three aces on the table and casually using his forearm to sweep another stack of my dwindling resources into his vast pile of chips. ‘Are you sure you’ll be able to cope?’
‘With the next hand?’
‘No, in France.’ He shuffles the cards with the languor of someone who has won far too much already.
‘To be quite honest, I have no idea,’ I reply. ‘It’s an adventure. An experiment. A test.’
‘What sort of test?’
‘I don’t know. A test of character. A chance to expl—’ I can see his brain whirring. He must be wondering why I think I need a test of character. ‘What?’ I laugh. ‘What is it?’
‘We’ll miss you on poker nights,’ he says with an innocent shrug, beginning to sort his chips into phallic piles.
‘You’re very kind,’ I say. ‘But I really think you’re earning enough money as it is without needing to fleece me every Friday night. And I promise to phone if I think I’m going batty.’
‘But that’s just it,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You’re likely to be the last to know.’ For some reason the eminent psychiatrist appears to find this tremendously funny.
The cat doesn’t know it yet, but she’s coming to La Folie, too. Don Quixote must have his Sancho Panza, however furry. Especially since I have discovered that I am sharing the house with a large number of skittering rodents –which would explain why Zumbach looked so joyful when I told him I’d be bringing a mouser.
Worrying about the cat’s transport is a good thing, because it takes my mind off my own last-minute jitters. Am I making a horrible mistake? In East Dulwich, I’m just packing the last few bags into the car when Simon’s girlfriend, Helen, emerges from number five, opposite, and dumps two shiny black objects that look strangely familiar into the dustbin.
‘I do think you’re terribly brave, Michael,’ she says, making chip-chop-good-riddance gestures with her hands.
‘Taking a poor, defenceless cat to France?’
‘No, going to live there on your own.’
The truth is that I don’t feel very brave at all, nor do Helen’s words swell my chest with pride. Many people over the past few weeks have told me that what I’m doing is scary and admirable and courageous and they wish they were brave enough to do the same thing. And it makes me wonder. My adventure may have seemed brave as an idea in prospect, but now that it is something that I – the non-brave, non-hero – am actually doing, it seems no more brave than waltzing across a dance-floor or going to the launderette. Indeed, it makes me nervous when people say what I’m doing is brave, because perhaps they know something I don’t.
Brave is Ellen MacArthur setting off to sail around the world on her own, or Lance Armstrong lining up at the start of another Tour de France, knowing the pain that lies ahead. Brave is Émilie’s husband Fred, who is not a builder, yet who is renovating a house at the very zenith of the estate agents’ virility test, a house with no drains or water or electricity or anything. And he’s doing it with his bare hands. Brave cannot be what I am doing, for I have always known that I am not.
I can see, however, that there is a difference between my adventure and the one that lies in prospect for the cat. I have made a choice, choosing action in favour of inaction, movement in place of stasis. She will be drugged and trapped in a box driven by someone else, en route to a place she wouldn’t naturally choose for herself. Like all those people commuting to jobs they hate, who tell me I’m being brave.
Officially, Marisa and I share joint responsibility for the cat, following our parting of the ways. But by dint of the fact that I am moving to a mouseful house in the midst of a jungle wilderness, and she now lives in a first-floor flat on one of the scariest streets in South London, she has awarded me custody. Fortunately, Marisa retains a sense of quasi-parental responsibility towards the creature we chose together so many years ago.
‘I’ll hold her and you give her the pill,’ she tells me, at the allotted hour of the appointed day, as we struggle to anaesthetize our unwilling traveller. Ryanair won’t take pets, so we are to drive from London to La Folie in le Pug Rouge. This means nine hours in the car with a muzzy moggy. Thank goodness Marisa has agreed to come too.
The two of us still get on well; we rarely stoop to pushing each other’s buttons, though we know exactly where they are located. No, Marisa feels like a comrade from a campaign fought long ago, or the other half of a double-act in which we both performed several seasons of the same end-of-pier show. I think the world of her.
The vet says the feline knock-out pill will take an hour to kick in, and should last three hours. By Dartford, the cat is already woozy. By the time we enter the Channel Tunnel she’s snoring like a whoopee cushion. And shortly after Calais, she is motionless on her back with all four legs in the air, mouth and eyes wide open. Now I’m no vet, but I know a dead cat when I see one.
‘Do you think she’s OK?’ I gulp, peering into the rear-view mirror.
‘Oh my God,’ gasps Marisa. ‘I think we’ve killed her.’
Stricken, I stare at the Autoroute unfolding ahead of us. Thanks to my selfish desire for an adventure in France, I’ve just bumped off a perfectly decent cat. We drive on in silence, chain-sucking Vichy tablets. What’s the French for pet cemetery?
By Paris, there are signs of a feline resurrection. A paw twitches; an eyelid blinks. A cheering aroma of ammonia wafts through the car. Cat pee never smelt so good. And when Marisa leans out of the window to pay the toll at the Autoroute’s final péage, our little Lazarus even makes a woozy bid for escape. One life down. Eight to go.
It’s past six p.m. by the time we bump up the drive to La Folie.
‘Is this land all yours?’ asks Marisa, impressed.
‘No. It starts at these blue gates.’
‘Even so …’
We’re there, at La Folie. Marisa makes all the right ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ noises as I show her round, while the cat – stiff-legged, tail held high as a periscope – displays exaggerated disgust.
I find myself making excuses to Marisa for all the things that aren’t quite perfect yet. ‘It’ll look better without the crumpled zinc on the barn doors … I’m planning to mow that jungle …’
‘I see the spiders have made themselves at home.’ She shivers, gazing up at the grey candyfloss between the smoke-blackened beams in the winter sitting-room.
‘That means there’ll be fewer flies,’ I declare confidently.
‘So what are those?’ Marisa is pointing at the brittle husks of perhaps a hundred bluebottles, laid out on the window-sill like Spartans after Thermopylae.
‘Maybe French spiders are fussy about what they eat.’
‘Let’s sit outside.’
‘That’s where I usually sit,’ I say, but Marisa has already vanished on to the terrace.
The cat looks alarmed. Her ears are going wild –twitching and twisting left and right, directed towards the latest threatening new sound of bird or insect or scuttling critter. She is hearing new noises and smelling new smells for the first time. She can probably hear mice whispering to each other in French.
Her reaction stops me in my tracks.
I imagined I would be wonderfully sensitive to my new surroundings, yet all I have done so far is stand and look at the trees and label them as beautiful. And, once labelled, things become invisible. It’s so easy to label France as a surrogate England, only with better weather and proper tomatoes. But look: the cat is really listening.
And for the first time, as I sit on the terrace with Marisa, immersed in the whirring of the crickets, I am conscious – in a visceral, physical sense – that this is indeed another country; another countryside.
‘I hope you’re both going to be all right here,’ she says,
sounding as if this is exceedingly unlikely. ‘No one will think less of you if it all gets a bit much and you want to come home.’
‘We’ll be all right. And I’ll have the chickens for company.’
‘Chickens?’ She stares at me as if I were three years old and my face were covered in Chocolate Spread.
‘I’ve always wanted chickens.’
‘You never mentioned it.’
‘You never asked,’ I reply, and we both laugh.
Tomorrow I shall drive Marisa to Limoges airport, and she will return to her London life. And I shall come back alone to La Folie, and sit on my terrace with the cat, gazing out across the valley, and wonder what the hell we’re doing here.
Hello. What the hell are they doing here? With Marisa safely dropped off at the airport, I am nudging my way up the drive in le Pug Rouge, when a white Citroën van –thoroughly beaten up and sprayed with orange mud – comes surging down in the opposite direction.
We both brake, with a squish of rubber on wet leaves. The collision avoided, the van-driver and I exchange smiles. I feel more relieved than he looks. Then he gestures at me, and begins to reverse so fast that I barely dare keep pace with him. Tucked into a corner, he waves me past. Two sheepdogs stare at me, bright-eyed, from behind his head.
Back at La Folie, I am relieved to find that the door is still locked. I have nothing of any value here, but still I run my eyes over the things that matter: my pilot’s logbook; my lacquered fountain pen; the cat. It’s all still here. So the man in the van wasn’t a burglar. Besides, he didn’t look like a burglar. Bright-eyed, like his dogs, and with a twinkly grin. Considering his familiarity with my drive, I can’t help thinking that we shall meet again.
I have never been a fan of routines. Routines send the brain to sleep. But in the face of my daunting freedom and unbounded new life, I am surprised to find myself creating one or two of them after all. Each morning, for example, I swing my leg over the rusty old bicycle I found in the barn, and wish that I’d accepted Simon’s offer of one of his whizzy reclaimed bikes. Then I freewheel down the drive, gazing at the jungle on my left and attempting to picture it as a vegetable patch full of spuds and tomatoes and aubergines, swelling in the sun. I must find a friendly gardener to advise me, I tell myself, as I prepare for the assault on the south face of the town. It’s a steep hill, and my thighs burn as I push towards the summit and the boulangerie.
Yet the ride itself is not nearly such a challenge as trying to raise a smile from the sulky princess who works behind the counter. I suspect she is no more than eighteen, for she regards me with exaggerated disdain.
‘Ah, bonjour!’ I exclaim each day, louder than is strictly necessary. ‘Et comment va la journée?’
She regards me as blankly as if I were a croissant that hasn’t quite risen.
‘Il fait beau, oui?’ I persist, wheeling out yet another of the brightest gems in my dazzling French repartee.
The princess frowns and shrugs. Beautiful eyelashes shading flashing dark eyes. Delicate lips curved into a tiny cupid’s bow, which – day after day – fires arrows marked ‘Non!’ in my direction. For the princess has her routine, too. And so, with a sigh in my heart, and a crusty baguette de campagne poking out of the top of my rucksack, I haul myself back on to my rusty charger, ready for the headlong hurtle back to La Folie.
Today, on my way down the Rue du Coq, I stop to look at the cards in the window of the tabac. A Franciscan monk called Frère Sébastien is looking for gardening work. This is almost too good to be true, I tell myself, as I stand on the pedals for the final, bumpy climb up the drive to the house. I have been wondering how to find someone to come and examine my jungle; someone not too expensively professional, to help me create a vegetable patch and teach me how to tend the many unidentified fruit trees. I am a stranger in this strange land, and my own ignorance scares me. But a monk: that’s not scary at all.
Frère Sébastien is not wearing a cassock when he bundles up to La Folie in his white Citroën van. I’m disappointed about the cassocklessness – how can I be sure he’s a real monk? – but clerical robes are presumably not practical for digging up spuds.
Nor does Frère Sébastien have a tonsure, nor Caesar sandals. Instead, he wears a yellow lifeboatman’s anorak, sports a brillantined fifties quiff, and has a lined face that makes him look as if he probably did some hard-living before he found Jesus. I wonder if I should ask to see his monkish ID, and think better of it. From the way he greets me – pressing my palm between both of his – and the hushed tones in which he tells me how much he loves the savagery of my jungle and how Jesus loves us all, I think it’s safe to say that he’s a monk.
‘Quel beau terrain!’ he exclaims, with such rapture that I’m half wondering if he’s going to kneel down and kiss the earth. Or, from the way he appears to have connected so immediately and intimately with the landscape of La Folie, if he will ask if he can come and live with me, in a willow cabin at my gate.
‘Yes, I’m very lucky,’ I reply. ‘But I don’t know much –in fact, je ne sais rien – about plants. I’m hoping you might be able to help me.’
‘Ah, bien sûr,’ he says, striding down to the broken fence – a confusion of rotting posts and mangled chicken-wire – that surrounds the old potager. ‘We must get rid of this, and build a new one. The posts will be chestnut, their tips painted with tar so they do not rot in the earth. And there will be paths, here, and here. He maps out the shape of a cross. And over here …’ – he strides off again –‘… this will be the orchard.’
I prepare a simple lunch for us both – pâté forestier; pasta with fresh tomato sauce; a few cheeses – and from the way Frère Sébastien wolfs it down, I suspect it may be a while since he last ate. At first he makes me rather glad I never removed the gold papier-mâché Jesus that Zumbach – who is, I think, devoutly pagan – left hanging in the kitchen, and which I have decided somehow suits the place. And then I begin to regret it very much.
Daunted by Frère Sébastien’s charismatic approach to gardening, I dare not contact him again.
The other white van – the one with the sheepdogs –passes me several times over the next fortnight. Our waving becomes more enthusiastic, and I stop resenting the fact that what had felt like my private driveway turns out to be a shared thoroughfare to nowhere. A small grass track snakes off it, just below La Folie, and it is down here that the twinkly smile vanishes, sometimes with a lady in the seat beside him. Perhaps it is a lovers’ lane.
And then, one Saturday morning towards the end of September, the white van turns into the bottom of the drive just as I am rattling down it, en route to the market at St Juste. This time there is room for the two cars to pass. Room for us to stop, too.
I climb out of the Espace, staring at the ground, and wander over to the Citroën, doing my best not to look too threatening. The driver’s door opens.
‘Bonjour,’ I say, reaching out my hand.
‘Bonjour,’ replies the twinkly smile, gazing into the distance. A stocky, sweet-faced man, he wears a ragged grey jumper over a faded tartan shirt that looks as if there must be some pyjama bottoms to go with it, too. The raffish wave in his greying hair, coupled with a roughly trimmed beard, make me think he should really be wearing a cloak and carrying a minstrel’s harp. I’d guess he is in his mid-fifties, and that age agrees with him, like a stiff pair of shoes becoming softer with wear. He shakes my hand with what may be a Masonic grip. It feels odd, as if he’s jamming his knuckle, hard, into my palm.
There’s a silence, so I press on.
‘Er, je suis Michael. J’habite ici, à La Folie.’
‘Ah, enchanté,’ he replies, sounding anything but enchanted.
‘Vous habitez là-haut?’ I ask, pointing up the drive.
‘Oh, non, non,’ he chuckles, with much shrugging, before adding something I don’t catch and doing some pointing of his own in roughly the same direction.
‘Ah, d’accord,’ I reply, hoping that it is ap
propriate to agree with whatever it was he said. ‘And you, Monsieur. You are Monsieur … ?’
‘Valette, Gilles Valette.’
‘And we are neighbours?’
He shrugs. ‘Josette and I live at the moulin just after the next bridge. So yes, I suppose we are neighbours.’
‘Then it’s especially good to meet you.’
‘Would you, ah, would you like to drop round for un apéro at midday on Sunday?’ he says, looking at Josette. At first I don’t even notice that this is a question, let alone that it is aimed at me.
‘Eh, bien sûr! Avec plaisir!’ I reply with an enthusiasm which drives him a step backwards, and I see him gulp as if he were swallowing a pill. ‘Merci bien, Monsieur Valette.’
And then I motor off to St Juste yelling tuneless bits of Die Walküre to myself, for my neighbour has invited me for a drink on Sunday, which means that I am on my way.
10
OCTOBER: CERBERUS
From the speed with which I come dashing out to greet him every morning, my specs still misted up from shaving in the murk of my subterranean bathroom, the postman –a grinning bald head in a yellow van – must think I’m barking mad.
The truth is that I am desperate for any human contact in the lunar landscape of La Folie. I have now notched up my first month of solitude, and feel absurdly grateful that the postman takes the trouble to come bumping up the drive at all. Especially when it’s just to bring me this week’s catalogue of special offers on pork from Netto and Champion, or the latest missive generated by France Telecom’s bureaucracy-maximization department.
I can’t wait for the telephone to be connected. I still use my old UK mobile for emergencies and monks, but a landline will feel like an oxygen link between my lonely eyrie and the outside world. La Folie has no gas, no mains drainage, and only receives electricity thanks to an extension cable attached to the nearest farmhouse half a mile away.
DANGER DE MORT yells a cheery red sign just outside the back door. I’m glad the cat can’t read French, or this would freak her out.
C'est La Folie Page 7
