Standing on the steps outside La Folie, it doesn’t occur to me until after my parents have driven away that they must have been as lump-in-throat sad to leave as I was to see them go. I suppose we try to be brave for each other, because it’s what the English do. Stiff upper lip and all that.
13
THE HYDRA
Alone again, and without method or masterplan, I am doing my best to m’intégrer avec les Français. I have now conquered my fear of entering the smoky, all-male cafés in town, where leather-faced farmers stand hunched over their ten a.m. beers at the bar. The secret, I discover after a series of botched visits and bottomless silences, is to stride in with a cheery ‘Bonjour, Messieurs,’ and to shake hands with anything that moves.
This is the French way, and appears to be disarming when practised by un Anglais. As the weeks pass, I am even beginning to recognize some of the late-bottled Oliver Reed lookalikes whose chalky paws I am shaking. We don’t exactly then start singing ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ together, but we don’t get into a sword-fight, either. Echoing the man in the paper shop, Gilles has told me that any newcomer must expect to wait six months before local people begin to accept them. So that leaves me another three and a half months until the beginning of March, to sit out my time in Coventry, or one of its friendlier suburbs.
After driving into town to deliver some eggs to Émilie at the estate agency – the production line is now in full swing, and I already have far too many for personal consumption – I stop off for a coffee at the Café Colibri, shake hands with each moustache in turn, and then wander down to the church.
The mystery of the church in Jolibois is that it is always deserted: dark and sombre as a tomb. And yet, each time I visit, there are always two or three votive candles burning which appear to have only just been lit.
Today, however, the door is open, and a chatter of ladies is arranging flowers in gaudy vases. Light creeps through the stained-glass windows, casting green, red and golden ghosts on to the pale stonework. I’ve come to ask about playing the organ.
I have practised my organ-playing little since school, after the poetry of Chopin and Schubert led me away from Bach’s meticulous prose. But I’m hoping that here, finally, may be my chance to brush up my massacring of Widor’s Toccata, and make some small contribution to Jolibois life.
‘You play the organ, Monsieur?’ asks a trembling bunch of carnations, before calling out to the vast display of lilies beside it: ‘Céline, there’s un Anglais here. (That’s right, isn’t it, Monsieur?) Wants to play the organ.’
‘You’re in luck,’ giggle the lilies. ‘Fabrice the organist is my son-in-law.’ A lady I recognize from the boulangerie emerges from behind the froth of petals. I am beginning to think that everyone in Jolibois is, in the nicest possible way, related.
I’m also fully prepared to wait until the beginning of March before I hear from Fabrice, but he telephones me the following morning, and we arrange to meet at the church.
I can already hear the organ bucketing off the twelfth-century stonework as I climb out of the Espace. That’s quite a beast he’s got in there. I don’t recognize the piece, but it sounds like the baddies are winning.
As I clump up the steep wooden stairs to the tribune, the racket stops. A small boy with chocolate smeared around his mouth comes racing round the corner, and reaches out to shake my hand. Good Lord. Fabrice is younger than I imagined.
‘Bonjour,’ I say. The boy makes no reply, but turns and scuttles back around the corner of the tribune, his fingers leaving two dark trails on the dusty panelling. I follow, and almost bump into the figure who has climbed off the organ stool to greet me.
‘Fabrice?’ I mumble.
‘Bonjour,’ he mumbles back. Organists are not a talkative bunch.
Fabrice cuts a pale and otherworldly figure; an overgrown schoolboy in corduroy trousers and a baggy black sweatshirt, who looks as if he may not have seen daylight in the last thirty years. He regards me with a liquid stare for a few seconds, before digging out a dusty book of chants and motioning for me to play one.
‘I see that you have already met my son,’ he says, while the little boy peers out at me from behind his legs. Fabrice’s voice is high and soft, and he sings very beautifully, leaning out from the balcony like a flying buttress, as I sight-read the chant.
So follows a series of Sunday mornings in the organ loft with Fabrice, attempting to learn how to accompany the Mass. Like most of France, Jolibois is Catholic. I, for my sins, am a lapsed Anglican in mufti. My entire Catholic experience amounts to a few Masses dutifully attended with Marisa, and watching The Thorn Birds on ITV with my mum. So I really don’t know my Anamnesis from my Agnus Dei. I could be found out at any moment.
To make matters worse, Fabrice plays everything from memory, with not a scrap of music in sight. So I’m lost in a jungle without a map. There’s no hymn book, and no ‘We shall now sing hymn 385: “Let Us Winkle Out Impostors”.’ No, the organist is expected to divine what comes next by instinct alone, like a pig snuffling for truffles.
‘C’est maintenant?’ I rasp at Fabrice in a panic, one Sunday, when he invites me to take over for the Gloria. ‘Je commence?’ I can see the lights glinting off the specs of Raphaël, our young priest, as he glares up at the organ loft, wondering what the diable is the delay. I like Raphaël. Tall and solid, he used to farm cattle and strawberries before he found his priestly vocation, yet he has a veneer of city sophistication, too, that seems at once out of place and strangely familiar to me.
Even worse than not knowing what to play when is the improvising; a central pillar of the French organ tradition. Fabrice’s resonant extemporizations for the offertoire or the communion sound like Handel meets César Franck. My glib noodlings sound like Pinky and Perky meet a sticky end.
‘How long have you been the organist here, Fabrice?’ I ask him despondently, as we stand by the church door.
‘Thirty years.’
‘But if … how old are you?’
‘I’m thirty-eight,’ he shrugs.
Overhearing our conversation, an elderly lady, bright-eyed, grabs my arm as she passes.
‘They called him le petit Mozart,’ she whispers.
Characters abound in Jolibois, and many of them have been bundling up the drive to La Folie in their white vans to give me quotes for my renovations. The first of these, simply for pointing the walls of the summer sitting-room, is for fourteen thousand euros, which would swallow more than half of my entire budget. I can see that finding the right mason is going to be a challenge in itself.
Today, Monsieur Étang – a handsome caveman in a yellow anorak, hopping around on tiptoes – arrives to quote for plumbing a new bathroom in the maison des amis. Now anyone I’ve asked about plumbing tells me that Étang is the best plumber for miles around, and one of the cheapest, too. The trouble is that everyone knows this, and poor Monsieur Étang cannot be very good at saying no. His shining reputation is clearly taking its toll. He runs upstairs with his tape-measure, runs from wall to wall, measuring and panting, runs down to examine the water-heater, scratches his head, asks me about the fosse septique, and then runs away again. All on tiptoe. The frenzied stress of the man is alarming. I want to sit him down, make him a fortifying cup of PG Tips, and tell him to think of cool, wet grass. But there is no time for this when the water-pipes of Jolibois have need of him.
‘I’m so sorry, Monsieur,’ he says, looking pained as he jumps into his car. ‘I will write to you next year. There are so many people to please.’
Various fine moustaches have already driven up the hill to La Folie to consider the question of insulating the two hundred square metres of exposed roofing in the summer sitting-room and maison des amis. Several more will appear over the next few weeks. After Monsieur Étang, the running plumber, comes an electrician the size of Blackpool, to examine the wiring.
‘C’est Charlot,’ he says, opening yet another junction box and shaking his head. I recognize this a
s a reference to Charlie Chaplin, who was not, I think, a world-renowned electrician. ‘You need to find out who did this crazy installation, so he can explain where all the wires go.’
I telephone Zumbach, who sounds nervous.
‘Tout va … bien à la Folie?’ he asks.
‘Yes, absolutely. I don’t suppose you happen to have a number for the man who did the wiring in the maison des amis, do you?’
‘Er, I think it was someone from … Lille,’ he says. Lille is about the furthest, largest, most anonymous town in France. I do not press the question.
In between waiting for other ouvriers to come and examine the various renovation works to be done, I make frequent trips to Limoges, mostly to the grands espaces of Monsieur Bricolage and Castorama, where I buy wall-lamps and draught-excluders and various lengths of timber for ambitious projects that I am much better at starting than finishing. Mostly I like gawping at the manly power-tools, and wondering if I could justify a router or a band-saw or un raboteur.
And then Raphaël the priest telephones.
‘We wondered if you’d be willing to accompany the Mass this Saturday evening,’ he asks, without preamble.
‘Mais oui … bien sûr,’ I reply. ‘But Fabrice … ?’
‘Fabrice only plays for the Sunday-morning Mass,’ says Raphaël firmly.
‘But I don’t want …’ I falter, for I have no idea how to say ‘I really don’t want to tread on his toes’ in French.
‘Fear not,’ says Raphaël, several steps ahead of me. ‘It was Fabrice who suggested it.’
My first reaction is to feel thrilled, for here – at last – is my chance to make a local contribution. And then I feel terrified, because I’m not ready. I wonder if I ought to come clean to Raphaël about not even being a proper Catholic. But it’s too late to worry about that now. I’ve already said yes.
I have never been good at saying no. The day I first fell in love with the organ was the day I discovered what it is to be thoroughly and rottenly drunk. I was five years old. My parents had been invited to a christening at Eton College, where one of their friends was a housemaster. I don’t recall hearing any music. But in the soaring chapel, the faded beauty of the huge organ pipes – etched with green and red and gold – gave me an unusual thrill. They reminded me of the steam trains I loved, their boilers gleaming in the rich Victorian liveries of the regional networks.
All too vividly, I remember how, after the christening, we children in our awful shorts had tea in a different room from the grown-ups. Here, I discovered that Babycham was a most unusual fizzy drink. It wasn’t like Coke or Fanta, because it came in tiny bottles and it gave you a strange whooshing sensation in your head. I don’t remember much after that, except that it was a baking hot day and I was sick all over the fountain in the middle of Eton’s quad.
Seven years later – aged twelve – I attempted to persuade Mr Lorraine-White, Windlesham’s director of music, to teach me how to play the organ. I had a hunch that this might just impress Clara Delaville. I told Mr Lorraine-White that my favourite record in the world was The World of the Organ, and that I badly needed to learn Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the chorale prelude Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns die Stimme, and Widor’s Toccata. He rolled his eyes, lit a cigarette, examined my legs to see if they were long enough to reach the pedals, and let me loose on the school organ. I was in heaven, even if the music he fed me – the easiest of Bach’s Eight Short Preludes and Fugues and some childlike snippets from the Anna Magdalena Notebook – exuded not quite the coruscating brilliance that I had in mind.
Clara Delaville was not visibly impressed. But one half-term, when Pa and Nanny gave in to my pleas to take me to the music shop in Weybridge, I finally laid hands on the coveted sheet-music for Widor’s Fifth Organ Symphony, with the ten triple-staved pages of its final Toccata black with notes. Buying this artefact took all my pocket-money, and I couldn’t play a single bar of its hurtling splendour with my clumsy child’s hands. Nevertheless, this huge score, with its mottled green paper cover and crude French printing – all the words in heavy-serifed capitals, all the notes looking almost too big for the stave – became one of my special treasures. I still remember how much it hurt when an American boy at Sherborne, a few years later, crept into my study and – in a calculated act of cultural vandalism – carefully poured the contents of a bottle of Ribena from my mother all over the cover.
Twenty-five years on, that mottled green cover is still stained with purple. But I can play all the notes now, with my creased adult hands. And I find a strange delight in playing the same short preludes and fugues, those same childlike snippets that Mr Lorraine-White taught me at Windlesham, in an empty church in rural France, while the dusty sunlight streams through the stained-glass windows on to the lilies and carnations arranged beside the altar by Céline and her friends.
Since school, I’ve lost count of the number of pipe-organs I have played. You can usually find where the churchwarden has hidden the key, if you look hard enough. The most beautiful was an instrument in Strasbourg, on which Mozart had played. The biggest was at Guildford Cathedral, where the organist said I could spend an hour practising as long as I didn’t play too loud. So I didn’t play too loud, for at least the first ten minutes, when my purple-stained Widor began to call to me. And the most fun was the vast 1930s cinema organ of my uncle’s cinema, the Regal in Eastleigh, complete with fire-bells and police whistles, silver paintwork, art deco lighting and a pneumatic hoist. This organ had been installed by my dad’s dad, who – I finally learned, while my parents were at La Folie – started out as a cellist accompanying silent films, and ended up as the owner of multiple cinemas, became mayor of Eastleigh, and, as British bowls champion, won gold medals for England in the Empire Games of 1930 and 1934.
It’s hard to describe what a joy it is – when you are ten years old, with a pudding-bowl haircut and tortoiseshell National Health specs – to ride on a burnished-silver organ console that is rising from the depths of a 1930s cinema on a pneumatic hoist, while you rattle out a flutey version of ‘A, You’re Adorable’ with your right hand, and wave at an imaginary audience with your left. Add this to royal-train driving and Spitfire flying: another vocation missed.
14
DAVID AND GOLIATH
In the midst of my frequent trips to the church to practise the organ, and my various stilted phone conversations with French carpenters and plumbers, I have been spending a lot of time watching the chickens. I love the way they come rushing to greet me each time I appear with the feed-bucket: six fat madams in feather boas, racing to catch a bus with their hands tied behind their backs.
Their pecking order is now firmly established, so that the perches in the chicken house have as clear a social delineation as the stalls, dress circle and gods of a Victorian theatre. And the order in which the girls emerge through the pop-hole each morning tells its own story of bullies and victims. I see the expression ‘hen-pecked’ in a whole new light as I watch Meg and Silent Mary being remorselessly tormented by Mildred and Melissa, my strapping white poules de Bresse. But Mildred has her own problems. Never mind her exalted social status, I have a nasty suspicion that she is egg-bound.
The poor dear has been jumping in and out of her nesting box, clucking with frustration, to no avail. And my chicken book tells me that I must now smear Vaseline on her bum and squirt pharmaceutical-grade liquid paraffin into her beak to help get things moving. Quel plaisir. When I came to France to learn how to be tough, this wasn’t the kind of tough I had in mind.
I leap into the Espace and head down to Jolibois to see Monsieur Chabrier the pharmacist. Finding his gleaming shop heaving with elderly ladies browsing for suppositories, I lurk behind the homoeopathic display and pray for them to leave before I request my hen lubricants.
‘Il me faut de la Vaseline, et de l’huile de paraffine aussi, s’il vous plaît,’ I say quietly, slamming a toothbrush I don’t want on to the counter.
Chabrier narrows
his eyes and looks at me carefully. I can see he wants to tell me that this is modern France –vous pauvres Anglais! – and that over here these days they have more advanced ways of dealing with my problem.
‘Do you have a prescription?’ he asks.
‘Non, c’est pour … une poule.’
‘Une poule?’ Chabrier pulls his best now-I’ve-heard-everything expression and gazes around the shop, just to make sure that all the old ladies have heard what the drôle Englishman just said. I can see the frown-muscles in his face fighting a losing battle against an appalled leer. ‘Une poule,’ he repeats quietly to himself.
I stare hard at the toothbrush.
Finally, he lays two shiny blue boxes in front of me. ‘C’est tout?’
‘Er … j’ai besoin d’un …’ Here I mime the action of filling a syringe, which I need for administering the paraffin into Mildred’s beak.
‘Une poire?’ asks Chabrier, raising his eyebrows still further.
‘C’est quoi?’
‘An enema?’ he murmurs, switching into heavily accented English.
‘Non, non,’ I exclaim. ‘Quelque chose plus petit que ça …’
Chabrier pulls a thin smile. Was it for this that he spent all those years studying his pharmacology textbooks?
I can’t get out of there fast enough. Scooping up my purchases, I scuttle out into the street. And then realize that I have left the toothbrush behind on the counter.
It’s the middle of the afternoon, and Mildred is crouched like a fat snowball, half in and half out of her nesting box, by the time I return to La Folie. We stare at one another in the half-light of the chicken house. I’m glad none of the other girls is about. This is going to be embarrassing for both of us.
C'est La Folie Page 11
