I have no television, and my radio appears to have a filter on it that excludes all stations except religious ones. The phone does have a dial tone, but since the line remains as dead as the local nightlife, this is a bit like having a purr with no cat attached. And Zumbach swears that he told France Telecom I was moving in. I should have sorted the thing out sooner, but it didn’t seem terribly important at the start. Who wants a telephone on a desert island?
For ‘security reasons’, every new home-owner in France is assigned a new number. Unfortunately, security is so tight that France Telecom can’t tell me what mine is. When I try to make a call, I am at first encouraged to hear a recorded female on the other end of the line. I listen to her message several times, partly because it’s a voice – any voice – and partly because it takes me a few goes to work out what she’s saying. I think she’s telling me very firmly that I have no right to take such liberties, and that she’ll come round and personally chop off my fingers if I don’t hang up right now. Or words to that effect.
‘We are pleased to inform you that today you spoke to one of our advisers,’ says one of the many letters that arrive. ‘We are pleased to inform you that you have a new number,’ says another, before continuing: ‘We are pleased to inform you that we will write to you soon and tell you what this number is.’ I’m half expecting them to reveal the number digit by digit in bi-monthly instalments.
But after a few more letters, the phone rings and I almost jump out of my skin. It’s my mother. ‘Oh, you’re there,’ she says.
Yes, we are pleased to inform you that I’m here. And I’m happy to learn that she and my father are already planning their first visit. This is good because it might just inspire me to clean the bathroom. Good, too, because I want them to be able to stop worrying about me. I’m trusting that when they see La Folie for themselves, they’ll finally understand why I’m here.
‘Should we bring Marmite?’ asks my mum.
‘No. Just survival gear and a torch.’ She clearly doesn’t realize how French I’ve become.
‘And PG Tips?’
‘Well, OK. A box of 160 wouldn’t go amiss.’
Next day, I am lying in bed, staring at the mysterious knot-hole in the ceiling above my bed, while the early-morning sun comes blazing in through the window as if someone were making a film out there. Mornings are my secondary thinking time, at least until the cat stirs and starts yowling about the emptiness of the abyss that is her stomach. And this morning I am thinking about chickens.
There comes a time in every man’s life when he must buy some chickens, and mine has come. Never mind that the sum total of my chicken knowledge comes from watching Chicken Run on video. I once knew a lady who kept budgerigars, and they can’t be all that different.
Chickens will, I have no doubt, teach me something about life. And they will provide a gentle introduction to animal care, in preparation for the day – far into the future – when I may feel man enough to buy some sheep. Curiously, every shop in Jolibois sells great sacks of chicken-feed, with the exception of the paper shop and the pompes funèbres, which is currently advertising a sale of funerary monuments. Yet I have never seen a hen for sale.
More pressingly, the days are getting shorter, the evenings cooler, and still I have no firewood for the wood-burning stove. This is a worry, particularly with my parents’ visit on the horizon. Apart from my thermals and a couple of blow-heaters that wouldn’t heat a sausage, that stove will be my only weapon against the winter cold.
Trouble is, I cannot see how I am ever going to persuade anyone to reverse their tractor-plus-heavily-laden-trailer up the assault course of the drive. La Folie has stood on its foundations for nearly five hundred years. The place was designed for horses. So there’s nowhere to turn around. My ideal visitor would arrive on a donkey.
I lie in bed, wondering where I am to find chickens, while the sunlight streams over me. Curled up against my chest, the cat lies purring like an unusually fluffy dial-tone. It’s Sunday, and the day of my French social debut. But my mind keeps going back to chickens.
Down in the valley I hear the jangle of a distant electric bell, and then the approaching artillery of a train. That will be the 07.15 to Limoges. I must potter down to the railway line one morning, to take a proper look.
Later, at five minutes to midday, I climb into the Espace, tell myself that I shall one day get used to the smell, and rattle down the drive to Valette’s raggle-taggle farmhouse. It’s the first time I’ve been here, and I look both ways before bouncing across the tiny level-crossing – the one whose bell I must have heard this morning, and every morning – casually scrutinized by four cows in the field on my left. Even though it’s only for a snifter before lunch, I have washed my face and put on a clean shirt.
From the level-crossing, the house looks as if it must once have been an old mill, powered by the same river that I am just beginning to hear splashing at the bottom of the hill on still days, now that the leaves have begun to fall. Rather like La Folie, most of the building is taken up with a pair of barns, while the small living quarters are bolted on at one end, like the engine of a two-carriage steam train on a rural branch line.
Smoke slants from the chimney as I roar into the farmyard, my approach sending chickens flying in all directions. A pair of sheepdogs runs alongside the Espace, splashing through the mud, baying for my blood. But it’s the smoke that holds my attention. Perhaps Monsieur Valette will be able to sell me some firewood.
Unfortunately, from the expression on his face when he comes out to see what the commotion’s all about, it doesn’t even look as if he’s expecting me.
I wish he’d call off his dogs. His hounds leap up at my chest in a blatant attempt to amputate my nose. I flinch, turning my face away from the slavering jaws, though it turns out that the dogs want no more than to imprint my nice clean shirt with their gloopy paws.
‘’Scusez les chiens,’ mutters Valette, shaking my hand, and giving one of the dogs a hearty kick. Again, that weird handshake, the knuckle in my palm. I don’t know how to tell him that I’m not a member of the Rotary Club.
‘Pas de problème,’ I reply. ‘It’s kind of you to invite me.’ I watch his face carefully, to see if he remembers.
‘Ahh-ouf,’ he says, with an unsmiling shrug, motioning me inside. Outside, the dogs cringe and cower as he barks something at them.
The kitchen is darker than I was expecting. I can see a woman in the shadows by the stove, which is throwing out the heat of a blast-furnace. A tall, dark-haired young man is sitting like a thundercloud at the table. He rises to shake my hand, murmurs something, frowns, and sits down again. The woman now shuffles over, and I recognize her as Josette, the other face in the white van. I shake her hand, too.
Perhaps they don’t have any electricity, is my first, excited thought. Perhaps that ancient pump in the yard outside is all they have for running water. Perhaps the whole family sleeps in one bed, with the dogs, for warmth. We are as far from London as I could ever have dreamed. But when my eyes become accustomed to the gloom, my rapture at having stumbled upon some atavistic peasant hovel soon evaporates. An enormous wide-screen television dominates one end of the room, with twin video and DVD players beneath it. On the wall, proud young men pose in army uniforms, and Michael Schumacher raises his arms in a Ferrari. I am disappointed to note that the floor is of linoleum, not peat or straw or stone.
The strip-light above our heads flashes once, twice, on, and we all squint at each other, dazzled by the glare. Valette points to a chair, and I sit.
There is a selection of bottles on the table, most of whose labels I do not recognize. After the disappointment of the electrics, this is good. I feel very Abroad. I gaze expectantly at the bottles, then at my host, and then down at the paw-prints on my shirt. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks.
Unfortunately, given a silence, I always feel a strong urge to dive into it.
‘And how are the sheep?’ I ask Valette.
�
��Ça va,’ he growls.
‘Is it a lot of work?’
‘Sometimes.’ The silence deepens. I stare at the bottles, hoping that they will begin to pour themselves. The others exchange glances, the woman in the shadows looking accusingly at her husband, as if he’d tramped in with something evil on the sole of his shoe.
‘Et vous, Monsieur,’ I say, turning to the young thundercloud beside me. ‘Vous habitez ici, aussi?’
‘No, I live elsewhere,’ he replies, raising his eyebrows at the thought.
‘And that would be where, exactly?’
‘Châteaudun.’
‘Oh, really? And what’s that like?’
He shrugs and looks at Valette. ‘Ça va.’
I bite my lip and decide to go with the silence after all.
This turns out to be the right thing to do, because now Valette asks me what I’d like to drink. Eeny-meeny-miny-mo. I point at the bottle of Pastis – it’s time I learned to like the stuff – and feel a twitch of relief as the taciturn young man follows suit. Valette pours a shot of something red and radioactive for Josette, while he himself settles for a bright-yellow liquid that looks like something you might use for cleaning the floor of an abattoir.
My drink is calling to me, but we are to do some more silent contemplation first, our filled glasses untouched on the plastic tablecloth before us. My mind is whizzing, and these three French people are – it dawns on me at last –dancing to an entirely different rhythm. There’s no hurry, no need to fill every available split-second of time, every ticking moment, with my inane chatter. There will be time.
So I sit, and tell myself to relax my shoulders, and focus on my breathing like I do when the dentist’s drill is squealing inside my mouth, and prepare to wait.
I wait, and absorb a silence broken only by the twittering of a caged canary in the shadows of the next room. I wait, and as I wait, I realize that I have absolutely nothing to say that needs to be said. This has never stopped me from speaking when I am in London. But now that my limited French is acting like a kink in the hose of my splurge to communicate, I am surprised to find that – far from feeling frustrated – I am strangely relieved. It is a silence I shall not forget.
Valette doesn’t have any wood to spare. ‘You don’t buy wood in the autumn, you buy it in the spring,’ he says, wagging his finger at me and heaving a mighty log into the firebox of the stove. ‘That way, it has time to dry out. And it doesn’t cost so much, either. Autumn wood … ouff.’ He shakes his hand as if he’d burnt it, and chuckles for the first time. I explain that my main problem lies in finding someone willing to haul the wood up the drive.
‘Ah-ouff,’ he shrugs. ‘I can help you with that. I’ll hook a trailer to the back of the tractor.’
‘Would you really?’
‘Of course. C’est normal.’
Again, we all stare at our drinks, and wait.
‘You know,’ says Valette, ‘there are other Anglais, just over the hill from you?’
My hand freezes in mid-air. Surely it’s not possible, is it? I was convinced there was no other house within a mile of La Folie. It couldn’t be … not Malcolm and Maureen, the couple from the chambres d’hôte? I ask Valette if he knows the people, or at least what they look like.
‘C’est un grand … an enormous type,’ he says. ‘As big as two people.’
Relieved, I take a swig of Pastis.
‘And hundreds of children,’ continues Valette. Then he stops, and smiles at my expression. ‘You don’t like children?’
‘Ça dépend,’ I laugh.
Another silence. The others exchange glances. For the first time, I notice the pot steaming away on the hob. And register that everyone except me finished their drink some time ago.
Hastily draining my glass and rising from the table, I ask Valette where I might find some chickens. I’m half expecting him to tell me that I should have bought these in the spring, too.
‘The first Saturday of the month,’ he tells me, opening the door and shaking his foot at the dogs. ‘You’ll find them in the square outside the Mairie.’
‘Merci bien, Monsieur.’
‘And you can call me Gilles.’
As soon as I am back at La Folie, fired up with chicken enthusiasm, I pull my heavy-duty brush-cutter out of the barn. This is the first of my manly power-tools, bought for a hundred pounds on eBay. I have also bought a pair of steel-toe-capped boots and a plastic face-shield like a fencing mask, because I love Useful Gadgets, and because I know I’m bound to make a mess of things, like I did with the hedge-trimmer in East Dulwich. As I wobbled at the top of a metal ladder with my new toy in the grey London rain, I told myself that the one thing I must not do was to saw through the power cable. Two minutes later, I sawed through the power cable, in a spectacular shower of sparks.
Happy as I am to have graduated from a puny hedge-trimmer that makes a sound like an electric toothbrush, to a rusty brush-cutter with a two-stroke engine and a harness to help support its studly bulk, I’m ashamed to say that I have reached the age of thirty-seven without ever having started a two-stroke motor. I’m not even quite sure what a two-stroke motor is, although I know I need to add a glop of oil to the fuel, to stop the thing shaking itself to pieces. Standing on the broken flagstones of the workshop beside the barn, I make up the mixture in an empty Evian bottle, gushing unleaded petrol out of the can in heady torrents, before adding a capful of sleek oil from a green plastic container with a picture of a motorcycle on it.
Choke closed. Lay the engine of war on the damp grass, and take a firm hold of the metal shaft. A few good yanks on the starter-cord – we men love pulling on starter-cords – and I am in a sun-filled garden in Guildford, watching my father attempting to start his Flymo. The elbow of his maroon jumper jerks into the air with each whirring tug. A muttered euphemism every few pulls – ‘Oh, blow’ – and then a few more pulls – ‘Oh, spit’ – and then him straightening up and staring accusingly at the lifeless machine. My dad is good with machines.
I can feel him here with me now, as I tug away on the brush-cutter’s fraying rope. And then, to my surprise, the thing fires. I don’t quite catch it, and it dies. But with the very next pull it roars into full-blooded action. Blimey. Here we go, chaps.
The riot of brambles and shoulder-high nettles in the yard outside the pigsty – the one that will one day be a chicken house – resembles the kind of overgrown undergrowth that conceals magical kingdoms in children’s stories. And, sure enough, after a couple of hours the whizzing blade begins to bounce and ping off something vast and metallic in the undergrowth.
I am rather hoping that this might be a battle-tank left behind after the occupation, or a discarded Rodin bronze, or perhaps an iron crate filled with 1945 Haut-Brion. I am not counting my chickens, however, partly because I do not yet have any, and partly because I have already found several dusty wine bottles half buried in the outbuildings at La Folie. Tragically, these are all empty. Some thirsty farmer, long ago, didn’t want wifey to find out how he’d been spending the cow money.
Much huffing and puffing later, all is revealed: the Triffidish foliage conceals the iron tyres from a rotted wooden cart; one ox-drawn plough; one agricultural roller on a rusted chariot; and a fine horse-drawn harrow with brambles growing through the holes where the word SEYFER has been stamped out of the seat. And then I hack away a bit more scrub, and see that it doesn’t say SEYFER at all. It says MASSEY FERGUSON.
By mid-afternoon, my hands are a raspberry-ripple of pricks and scratches, and the brambles are still winning. I should have conquered them long ago, but am easily distracted. The children’s swing beyond the goldfish pool looks so bare without a seat on it. I must just pick up some croissants from the princess in the boulangerie. That mouldy garden furniture needs to be carted to the forbidden tip at Magnac-Laval. I think I might just go and buy some more Useful Gadgets from Bricomarché, the local hardware store. I also make an expedition to the top of the hill, over a couple o
f barbed-wire fences, to steal a glimpse of the house where the Giant lives. There it is: a long, foreboding building with no ground-floor windows. Presumably the Giant doesn’t like to bend down.
I walk, too, through the dust and detritus of the un-renovated part of La Folie, attempting to visualize how it will one day look. The granite-and-breezeblock box of the summer sitting-room where, in my dreams, I play Chopin’s 3rd Ballade on a glossy black grand piano, gazing out through the French windows to the valley beyond, sunbeams gleaming on the polished oak floor. The unfinished rooms upstairs, still airless and windowless as in the days when they were no more than the fetid eaves of a cow byre. Here I propose to create a bedroom and a new bathroom too, so that guests do not have to clamber down a ladder and cross a building-site into the underworld when they fancy a tinkle.
Next morning, when the last bramble has finally been mulched into oblivion, I drive down to my new friend Gilles’s farm, to ask what he thinks of my archaeological finds. He promises to come and take a look.
‘Someone might want the cart-tyres,’ he shrugs, as he surveys my rusting bone-yard. ‘A pair of them will hold a hay-bale for sheep. You can drag them behind a tractor, too, to flatten mole hills. As for the rest …’ He wrinkles his nose.
I explain that I had been thinking of keeping the picturesque harrow to hide the manhole covers of the fosse septique in front of the house.
‘Oh, you don’t want that rusty old thing.’ He jabs his finger at my Massey Ferguson. ‘Or if you keep it, you should paint it black. C’est plus joli.’
It’s hard to persuade him that I actually quite like the rusted look, just as I prefer the appearance of crumbling stonework to modern render.
Not everyone wants to feel equally connected to the past. Last week I came across a man cutting down an avenue of two-hundred-year-old oaks with a chainsaw. He must have seen my jaw drop. ‘It’s all right, Monsieur,’ he assured me. ‘These trees are old. I shan’t cut down any young ones.’
C'est La Folie Page 8
