‘Right, yes, well, you must be ready for a drink,’ I declare, rubbing my hands as I walk backwards towards the house. ‘And then I’ll show you round.’
‘After we’ve unpacked the car,’ says Mum, in such a way that the grass around her blackens and begins to smoke gently in the breeze.
‘Can’t it wait, Anne?’ pleads my father.
‘There are things that need to go into the fridge,’ she says, glaring at him.
‘What things, precisely, Mum?’ I ask, knowing full well that I shall be expected to find space in the fridge for all the bits of their half-eaten picnic that must not be thrown away until after they have left.
Never mind that the fridge is already full. Out come the screwed-up freezer bags, the creased tin-foil, from the depths of the car.
‘But I already have plenty of cheese,’ I protest, as my mother proffers the remnants of a cross-Channel Camembert from Waitrose. ‘And France does have bakers.’ My mother is threatening me with the end of an English baguette she defrosted yesterday morning.
‘Well, what about this milk?’ she asks, waving a Unigate carton that has just spent several hours in a Volvo climatically controlled to evoke the tropical Palm House at Kew Gardens.
My mother relaxes considerably once all her manky leftovers are safely stored in the fridge and their suitcases are upstairs.
‘Right, six o’clock,’ I announce, not even looking at my watch. ‘Now it’s definitely time for a drink.’
I uncork a chilled bottle of Saumur, extracted from behind my mother’s Unigate carton like a prize in one of those fairground crane games, and pour her a glass of wine.
‘Would you like me to measure yours, Dad?’ I ask.
‘Ha ha. Very funny,’ he says. ‘No, thank you.’
It feels strange to be a grown-up, looking after my parents in my own house in a foreign country.
‘So here you are, in France, again …’ I say.
‘Yes, and very nice it is, too,’ responds Mum quickly.
‘We like your house very much,’ adds Dad, making me wonder how they can already have had time to discuss it. ‘But I do admire your courage, because the state of it is … rather more daunting that we’d realized.’
I frown, to stop myself smiling. For this is just what I wanted to hear. ‘It’s simply a question of finishing the work that’s already been started,’ I reply. And I might just as easily be talking of all they have done for me.
The following morning is a fine and frosty one as I rattle down to Jolibois in the Espace. The Espace is no chick-magnet, even now that I have removed some of the rear seats which make me feel like an absent father. But it only cost me nine hundred euros, and I do like having a French number-plate with an 87 for Haute-Vienne at the end of it. I can now wave gaily at everyone I pass, making them turn and peer after me. C’est qui?
On the pretext of a bread-run, I’m going to recce the market for chicken sightings, before returning to La Folie for breakfast with my parents. Then we’ll all ride back down to Jolibois together, for the epochal moment when I purchase the first chickens to have been in my family for two generations. It turns out that Dad’s mother – a closet alcoholic I never met – kept chickens in Southampton during the war. When she died, he says they found bottles hidden all over the house. No one knows what happened to the chickens.
Jolibois is all a-bustle with its monthly market. Groups of beaming women kiss and wag their fingers at each other on every corner, while men in berets lean on their sticks to watch the traffic. An excitable policeman in white gloves stands in the middle of the road, waving the cars ahead whenever the lights go green, and stopping them with a flat palm when the lights go red. Presumably this is helpful, if you’re colour-blind.
The monthly market is smaller than I was expecting, and there appear to be more people selling mattresses and cheap anoraks than goat’s cheese or artichokes. But Gilles was right about the chickens.
Two lorries have already set up just outside the estate agency where Émilie works, with chickens, ducks and geese packed so tightly into cages that their down squeezes out between the bars like fat thighs in fishnets.
Bingo. Chickens ahoy, skipper. I barely stop to look. My sortie accomplished, my heart fluttering, I gun the Espace’s tired old engine and head back to La Folie.
It must have rained in the night, for the fallen leaves have turned into a wet porridge on the side of the road. I take the steep first hairpin on the drive carefully. I don’t want to skid.
Then comes the shallower uphill stretch, and I’m going just fast enough to change up to second, before I let the Espace cruise gently down the other side. Oops: not too fast. I can hear the tyres hissing through the leaf-porridge.
Just to be on the safe side, I dab the brakes. The front of the car dips and skids right, towards the curtain of trees that pins the lane to the hillside, stopping it from sliding down the steep bank and crashing on to the sheep below.
The car’s not slowing down. Steer left, left. Brake harder. No, pump the brakes. It’s all happening so fast, but in slow motion. And then comes the crunch of fibreglass on young oak, the sickening tinkle of breaking glass, and I so wish I hadn’t done that.
I switch off the engine, and open my door in the silence. This means lifting it almost vertically towards the canopy of trees, as the Espace has come to rest at a steep angle, like an aeroplane crashed nose-first in the jungle. I jump down with a splash and let the door slam shut behind me.
The damage isn’t as bad as I feared: one smashed headlamp and some crunching distortion to the front-bumper. For a while, I attempt to push the thing out, standing in the mulch of leaves and heaving with all my strength. Stacking all those logs in the barn has given me Atlas-type delusions. But there’s no way to keep a foothold, and the car is going nowhere. Perhaps I can persuade Gilles to come and drag me out with his tractor. First I have to face my parents. I feel like a child again as I stomp up to make my confession. I hope they didn’t hear the smash.
‘Morning, Mum,’ I say, as I march into the kitchen. I lay the bread on the table and head straight for the fridge. I have a surprising need to eat some strawberry yoghurt, fast.
‘Oh, hello,’ she replies. ‘Are you back already? I didn’t hear the car.’
‘Hm, yes.’ I select a teaspoon from the draining-board and begin to shovel the creamy sweetness into my mouth.
‘Would you like coffee? And were there any chickens?’
‘Yes, please. And yes, absolutely. There were chickens.’
The coffee tastes so good that I burn my mouth and have to eat a second yoghurt. I didn’t even like yoghurt before I came to France.
‘Are you all right?’ asks my mother.
‘I’m fine. Where’s Dad?’
I’d rather start by fixing the problem, and deal with the sarcastic comments afterwards. I already know exactly what Mum’s going to say, and the amused tone in which she will say it.
I find Dad in the barn, where he is rearranging objects in the boot of his car so that they will occupy a smaller space than the volume of the objects themselves. Packing cars is one of Dad’s gifts, like finding brilliant-yet-flawed shortcuts, and it is another thing that I have not inherited from him.
‘Dad, I’m proud to say that I have just crashed the Espace.’
He turns and looks at me, to see if I’m joking or bleeding.
‘Ah. Bad luck. I take it you haven’t told your mother.’
I shake my head.
‘Where is it now?’
I point towards the trees in the distance. ‘Can you see that green shape, nosing down sharply into the trees? The engine still runs, but it’s stuck. I could get my neighbour, Gilles, to tow me out,’ I say, with bogus nonchalance, ‘but I was wondering if with the Volvo … you might be willing?’
‘Have you got a tow rope?’ he asks, smiling at being able to be a proper dad again.
Mum comes to the kitchen door as Dad reverses; wants to know where we’re g
oing.
‘I’ve had a little skid in the Espace, and Dad’s just coming to help pull it out of the mud,’ I say, not wanting to open a discussion about how it’s lucky Dad’s here.
Mum smiles. ‘Do be careful,’ she says. ‘What would you have done if your father weren’t here?’
To give my parents credit, they do not even mention the smell in the Espace, let alone the smashed headlamp. In town, I beg them to keep a low profile while I make my chicken purchase. Sticking out my belly and adopting a swagger I consider to be authentically Jolibois, I do my best to look expert as I approach one of the big moustaches who is busy stacking cages. I hope Émilie isn’t watching through the window of the estate agency, too.
‘Elles pondent bien?’ I murmur, kicking an imaginary stone. Do they lay well? I’m not sure what I’m expecting the man to say, but from the way he waves his arms around and mimes an excited squatting action, I take it that either his chickens are indeed splendid layers, or else he’s been overdoing the stewed apricots.
The hens cost a few euros each, with some smart white poules de Bresse for a tad more. These look huge and heraldic: more like albino vultures than hens. I gesture that I’d like a couple, on the expert basis that if they cost more, they must be good. Then I point to a couple of medium-sized black ones, and a couple of little brown ones.
‘Is it all right to mix them?’ I ask, in French.
‘Ah oui, bien sûr, Monsieur.’ The two little brown hens, eyeing the white vultures, don’t look quite so sure. I wince as the man grabs all six birds by the feet and stuffs them into two tiny cardboard boxes like dirty laundry. I have never seen chickens looking so alive.
‘I’ll need some feed, too, if you have any.’
‘Pas de problème,’ he says, dumping a large white sack at my feet.
But now I have a problem. Sudden lack of cash. And the man won’t take a cheque. I turn to the lady behind me, who has been pretending to admire the partridges. ‘Er, Mum … any chance you could lend me forty euros?’
Mum chuckles, and examines – with excrutiating slowness – the contents of her wallet.
As I hand over the forty euros to the chicken man, I can see Émilie waving excitedly at me from inside her office. I nod and hold up my two boxes in shy triumph.
I drive us back to La Folie so slowly that we are hooted from behind by a tractor. But it’s only Gilles, waving at our stately progress. In the back, my mother gasps with exaggerated horror every time I dab the accelerator. Finally we are at the top of the hill, and – while Mum and Dad watch from a safe distance – I lay my boxes on the ground in the enclosed yard outside the pigsty, open them, and hastily retreat, as if I’d just lit two mighty rockets.
A head pokes up. Then another. And another. I’d expected the chickens all to leap out and rush off to start laying eggs, but they look too shocked and dishevelled for that. So I attempt to lift them out. I’ve all but grabbed the first one – one of the two big white poules de Bresse –when she manages to break away in a terrifying explosion of shrieking and flapping and flying feathers, making a sound like someone shaking an empty paper bag right beside your ear.
Now all hell breaks loose. There are chickens everywhere, running, hopping, squawking, panicking, in a fearsome chain reaction. One of the white bruisers ends up on top of the wall, glaring down at me with undisguised hatred, like something out of Du Maurier via Hitchcock. The two little brown hens huddle in the corner of the yard, visibly shaking. The other three stand, heads to the wall, feathers ruffled, as if they have all volunteered themselves for detention.
‘I think I’ve changed my mind about having chickens,’ says my mum, watching from the safety of the other side of the wall.
‘Thank God,’ mutters Dad.
‘They’re just settling in,’ I say authoritatively, channelling my inner farmer. At this, the white bird that was on top of the wall hops down the other side and starts running away, heading for the trees and freedom.
‘Is it meant to be going over there?’ giggles my mother, with a snort.
Early evening, and we are out on the terrace, sipping our wine. It’s chilly, but the low sun offers a last vestige of late summer. And we are English, after all. I ask my father about his parents, whom I never met, and his grandparents, whom he hardly knew. Questions I’ve never asked before. God knows why I had to come to France before I could ask my dad where he came from.
‘My grandfather was a plate-layer on the railways,’ he says. ‘I believe that’s something to do with building steam trains.’
‘He built steam trains?’ I splutter. ‘I can’t believe you never told me that.’
‘I suppose it never seemed important. It was all in the past.’
‘But you know how I felt about steam trains.’
‘How could we forget about the Royal Queen?’ says my mother, gazing dreamily at the cat, which is stretched out in a Superman pose across her lap.
‘And the past does matter,’ I continue, my voice coming out louder than intended. I hate hearing other people lecture their parents. ‘It’s what makes the present happen. It’s the foundations of the house.’
‘You’re probably right,’ says my dad gently. ‘But your mother and I grew up in the war, and perhaps that—’
‘And that just makes it all the more fascinating,’ I interrupt. We are all silent for a moment.
‘Sometimes you really can be rather aggressive, Michael,’ says my mum.
‘Sorry. You’re right. Sorry.’ And we all sip our wine in silence.
‘Did your father have any brothers and sisters, Dad?’ I ask, trying another tack.
‘I had an uncle … I believe he used to make Spitfires, in the Supermarine factory near Southampton.’
‘Spitfires? You’re joking. Spitfires! And you never told me.’
‘Well, I think it was Spitfires,’ replies my father hastily. ‘It was hard to be sure, because he was always very hush-hush about it. He used to tell us that he was making the wooden pips to go into wartime strawberries.’
‘I love it.’ Because I do love it, when everything fits together. When the past and the present make sense of each other, and history isn’t just something that happens to other people.
My dad smiles, takes a sip of wine, and gazes out across the valley at the huge oaks, and the leaves that are continuing to fall.
By nightfall, things have calmed down on the poultry front. But there’s still a problem. Not one of the girls has shown the slightest inclination to lay any eggs. Instead, they are now all squeezed into the corners of the poulailler, wretchedly trembling. Nor do they show any interest in occupying the fine perches I have provided for them. They simply hunch themselves at the edges of the cold cement floor, looking glum as teenagers at an icy disco. Strange. An hour later, and it’s the same story: still pas d’oeufs.
Next morning, I march out to the nesting boxes, armed with a large basket to collect all my farmhouse produce. In the nesting boxes: nothing. Not a saucisson. But –ignoring the feed I’ve poured out for them from the big white sack – the girls do at least come scuttling out of the chicken house to scratch and peck at the weeds in their yard. And it’s hilarious.
Quite clearly at the top of the pecking order are my two white poules de Bresse. That means yesterday’s clucking escapee – caught after a marathon pursuit employing the tactics of the Schlieffen Plan by me and my father – and her even more vocal sister, whose scarlet comb is so big that it flops at a rakish angle reminiscent of a Rembrandt self-portrait. Of the two, the latter shall be Mildred, self-styled trumpet queen of the roost, with Melissa the Fugitive as her regal consort. Then come the two black-and-gold birds, Margot – a Spanish galleon, complete with foredeck and poop-deck – and Martha, my instant friend.
Martha appears to have decided that I am her kin, and comes hurrying to greet me whenever I set foot in the yard, tugging at my shoelaces with her beak and flapping her wings in look-at-me-Papa fashion.
Bringing up the rea
r are Mary and Meg, already the hen-pecked squaddies of the troop. These two are both so brown and small and plain that I cannot easily tell the difference between them. Meg makes the occasional cluck. Mary breathes not a sound.
Day three: Eureka. My heart swells with pride when I spy a tiny brown egg lying in the straw. Granted, this egg is some distance from my luxury nesting boxes, but greater accuracy will, I assume, come with time. And it’s an egg. A proper, egg-shaped egg. It even has a shell and everything. Since all the chickens make defiant clucking noises when I remove the precious artefact, I assume it must have been a joint effort. I can’t wait to show Mum and Dad how clever I am.
Never mind the fact that, when ceremonially boiled, this first egg tastes about as interesting as polenta and yields a yolk approximately the size and colour of a sherbet lemon. It is an egg. And even though I didn’t lay it myself, I almost feel that I did.
Saying goodbye to Mum and Dad is difficult. We’ve never been very demonstrative – Surrey people aren’t – but that doesn’t mean we’re any less attached to each other than those who go in for more histrionic farewells. I hug my dad and kiss my mum, and almost conquer my embarrassment enough to tell them that I love them. I manage to say this to them about once every five years, at which moments they generally blush and fumble for words and swiftly reassure me that such things don’t need to be said, before wondering aloud if it is going to rain this afternoon.
Our goodbye makes me understand now how hard it must have been for them to send my brothers and sister and me away to boarding school in England, when they were living in Colombia, five thousand miles away. It is a sacrifice for which I shall always feel grateful. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for them, waving us off at the airport with our teddies and our sunburn, as we headed off across the Atlantic for a new term.
Years later, when I returned to Windlesham to teach for a while, one of the most disturbing scenes I witnessed was a mother saying goodbye to her eight-year-old son on his first day at my old school. The little chap stood there on the front steps, lip trembling as he attempted to comfort his mother, who was clinging to him, weeping and wailing like an amateur thesp in a bad production of you-know-what. What does Mummy know about this place that I don’t, the brave child must have been thinking, as he waited for the blubbering to cease.
C'est La Folie Page 10
