‘You lay one finger on me …’ she mouths.
I scoop out a big glob of Vaseline from the jar and clench my teeth.
‘Not a word of this to anyone,’ blinks Mildred, with the slightly brittle self-confidence of a public-school headmistress who has mislaid her spectacles and doesn’t want you to know it.
Holding my breath, I feel my way through the fluffy down around her back end, and – gulp – smear the Vaseline on what I hope is the right place. Mildred, unflinching, gazes back at me with suppressed outrage. Then the moment comes for me to squirt the paraffin into her beak. But the patient is having none of it, like a baby faced with a spoonful of purée it is determined not to swallow.
This stage of the treatment has to work. Because if it doesn’t, the book tells me that I must hold Mildred over a cauldron of boiling water, to relax her bum in the steam. I don’t like the idea of this any more than I like the sound of stage four, which involves attempting to puncture the egg inside her and hoik it out with my fingers. Delia doesn’t say anything about this in her recipe for foolproof scrambled eggs.
Fortunately I now have a moment of inspiration. I cluck very loudly at Mildred. This she considers for a moment. And clucks back. Squisssssshh goes the paraffin into the open beak. And poor Mildred becomes very still and pensive, as if I had just told her a terrible secret.
A few hours later, with much excited clucking from Mildred, the long-awaited egg pops out.
But Mildred has her revenge. For later that week, I am alarmed to find that I’m suffering a rather similar and uncomfortable condition, no doubt caused by a surfeit of scrambled eggs for breakfast. So there I am, down at Chabrier’s pharmacy once again, requesting substances that may provide a little light relief.
‘Don’t tell me,’ says Monsieur Chabrier beadily, as I show him my prescription. ‘It’s for a chicken, right?’
Today is my big day: I am to accompany the Mass for the first time. Alone in the tribune, I open the fuse-box and click the five interrupteurs to ‘on’. The leather bellows creak and fill like an old man’s lungs. Half an hour before the Mass, the church is still deserted. There’s just a lady lighting the candles on the altar, who waved at me when I came in.
I play a couple of nervy Bach preludes as the church fills up. And then the Angelus tinkles from the sacristy, and the Mass is hurtling by in a flurry of mounting panic, ecclesiastical French and excruciating silences.
All at sea in a morass of meaningless photocopies, I am fumbling to find the right music in time for the next bit, and mostly find it about ten seconds late, when an uneasy rustling has already started down below and, out of the corner of my eye, I am dimly aware of upturned white faces looking to see what’s wrong.
Somehow I manage to mix up the Kyrie and the Gloria, sink the Sanctus, and then – dripping with sweat, my pulse racing – launch boldly into the Prière Universelle when Raphaël announces the Notre Père. Well, I thought the Lord’s Prayer was the Universal Prayer. Apparently not, from the way the light glinting on the priestly spectacles suddenly flashes like an Aldis lamp. Non, non, non.
Standing at a microphone in front of the congregation, a lovely old fellow called Henri does his best to lead the singing. Now Henri has the voice of a rugby player calling for the ball, and beats time as if he were guiding a helicopter in to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier in a force-eight gale. Yet the heroic gusto of his presence, and the rubicund cheer with which he belts out every note, somehow carries me through the storm. Though he is not required to sing the Anamnèse, Henri still comes trundling out from behind a pillar to give me one of his radiant nods as my signal to start playing. He reminds me of a retired cherubim in tweeds. If ever I am chained to a radiator by terrorists for several months, I should like someone like Henri to be there with me.
From time to time in the service, he and I even manage to arrive at the same note at the same time, and his rapturous smile illuminates the church.
Even so: I know I’m going to be found out. They’re going to burn me at the stake in the square outside the church, pour encourager les autres. I think I might sleep in the chicken house tonight.
The Mass thus massacred, I play a skittery postlude before staggering down the stairs, wondering if I’m about to be excommunié by a church I don’t even belong to. Sure enough, there’s quite a mob waiting to lynch me outside.
‘Bien joué, Michael,’ announces Henri, the retired cherubim, amid a gentle ripple of applause. As our eyes meet for a second, I can see that he knows what I’ve just been through.
‘Je suis désolé,’ I exclaim.
‘Non, c’était très bien,’ coos Françoise, Henri’s wife, taking his arm. Her smiling face reminds me of a beautiful wrinkled peach. And to see these two old souls so happy together somehow makes everything OK.
‘But I got it all wrong,’ I say.
‘Not all of it,’ chuckles Henri. ‘And you’ll find it easier next Saturday.’
‘Ah, bien sûr,’ I hear myself say, when what I really mean is, ‘Are you telling me we have to go through that all over again next week?’
Suddenly a wiry old man in a grey suit bowls up. ‘Mes félicitations to the young Anglican organist,’ he chirrups in French, his eyes bulging from their sockets.
I’m about to beg him to keep his voice down when I become aware that I haven’t gone up in a puff of smoke, and that no one seems remotely surprised.
‘Merci, Monsieur,’ I hear myself saying, though inwardly I’m thinking, ‘How the hell did you work that one out?’
The landscape fades from gold to grey, as the trees give up their last shards of shrivelled foliage. I hear the hiss of the distant river more clearly now, and the rattle of the two-coach trains rumbling through the cutting at the bottom of the hill, their diesel engines churning as they begin the climb towards the viaduct that spans the valley behind the church.
My breath fogs in front of me as I trudge out to the barn to fetch another armful of logs for the wood-burning stove. Tonight, I have just fixed myself a Pastis and poured a heap of pistachio nuts into a bowl when Jean-Michel Faure, the president of the tennis club, phones. I left him a message a fortnight ago, in the traumatic aftermath of my debacle with the lady from the tourist office. And now, without preamble and in a voice booming enough to make me hold the receiver away from my ear, he wants to know if I’d like to take part in a game of doubles on Tuesday evening.
‘Bien sûr,’ I reply, feeling the familiar fear grip my insides. ‘But won’t it be dark?’
Jean-Michel laughs so hard that the phone vibrates in my hand. ‘There are lights in the gymnasium. We play indoors at this time of year, unlike les Anglais.’ I wonder how he knows this. At the little tennis club in Dulwich, Simon and I would often play tennis in midwinter, slipping and sliding on the frosty courts.
‘Ah, très bien. But there’s one other thing, Jean-Michel.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m really not very good.’
‘Nonsense,’ he barks. ‘That’s what everyone says about themselves. You’ll be fine. À mardi, bonne soirée,’ he barks, and hangs up.
Another chance to make a fool of myself. I hang up the phone, sip my milky Pastis, and settle down to my six o’clock think. Except that I don’t seem to be able to think, for my mind is racing, cluttered with images from long ago.
Aged seven, my best subject is English, and my worst subject is PE. In my dreams, I fantasize nightly about being given an off-games chit by matron.
Football is the thing I dread most of all, because I am so useless. Yet it is the one thing that all the other boys seem to care about.
I cannot understand why I am so bad at games, because when my father was at school, he was some kind of sports hero. He was captain of everything and – before a vast crowd, silent with excitement – took the decisive kick in the Public School Rugby Sevens of 1953, earning a write-up in The Times as Sherborne celebrated its first and only national victory on the rugby pitch.
Mr Bishop, the PE teacher, raises himself on to his toes, blows his whistle even though nobody is talking, and tells the two biggest boys to pick teams. I hate Mr Bishop, and I know that he hates me. I can see the scorn in his eyes, and the derision flowing in the veins that stand out on his temples.
A train rumbles past the pitch, and I wonder if the passengers have any idea how much it hurts to be here, waiting to be picked, knowing you will be the last, once again.
Aged eleven, my best subject is Latin, and my worst subject is PE. In the first round of the Windlesham tennis tournament – which I have entered in the deluded hope of impressing Clara Delaville – I am drawn against Norman Handley, who is the best player in the school.
There I stand, with my stubby little racquet and regulation itchy-navy shorts, grey Aertex shirt and plimsolls.
My opponent arrives with three Dunlop Maxply racquets, a smartly ironed Fred Perry ensemble in dazzling white and – most covetable of all – a brand-new pair of Dunlop Green Flash shoes.
Really, Handley is thoroughly decent about the whole thing. He doesn’t hit the ball too hard at me during the knock-up, and he doesn’t complain each time he has to jog on to the football pitches to fetch my latest skyer.
I have decided that I will be satisfied if I win at least one game in the whole match. And then we begin, and I am forced swiftly to revise my ambitions. Now I shall be thankful to win at least one point.
But I can’t. Not a single point. Not a blessed sausage.
Handley, damn him, doesn’t make one error. Not one. I can tell that he doesn’t want me to win a single point. He just hits four out of every five shots to my backhand, and I hit five out of every five of these into the net. He doesn’t even have the common decency to hit one double-fault, to salve my embarrassment. What makes this worse is that he smiles – not at me, but to himself – throughout our encounter. It is a beastly sort of smile; the smile of someone who wants you to know that he knows a secret, but doesn’t want you to know what it is. If he were any less good-natured, it would be a smirk. But what makes my drubbing even more mortifying is that we are playing on one of the courts opposite the girls’ dormitories. So my shame is visible for all the world – and, more particularly, for Clara and her friends – to see.
‘Bad luck, Michael,’ says Handley, glancing up at the dormitories and leaping the net to shake my hand after I have fluffed my last backhand.
But there was no luck involved. I am hopeless, that’s all there is to it. And as I drain my Pastis in a smoky old kitchen in France, twenty-seven years later, I have no reason to revise my opinion. I am, quite possibly, the worst desperately keen tennis player in northern Europe.
Tuesday night, and the gymnasium at Jolibois doesn’t appear to have a door. I can hear tennis being played within, but as I circumnavigate the place, I begin to think that the players must have started playing before the builders walled them up inside. Eventually I stumble in through a fire-exit, and come face to face with three blank stares.
‘Monsieur Wright!’ roars a hawkish man in square glasses and a red tracksuit, as he strides forward to shake my hand. I’d guess he is about sixty. He introduces himself as Jean-Michel, the club president. Though he appears hard, there is an effusive quality about him, too, like water gushing from a rock in midwinter. Two other players amble up to us, and I feel a twinge of surprise because they are both roughly my age. This is a bit of a breakthrough: youngish blokes in Jolibois.
The taller of the two – a toothy grin beneath a spiky outcrop of black hair – beams at me, shakes my hand, and goes back to bouncing a ball on the edge of his racquet, pacing in circles like a welterweight boxer limbering up for a fight. The other looks more intense: stocky and combative as a pit-bull, with a hint of moroseness lurking behind his frown.
The welterweight boxer strikes the ball with a silky smoothness, knees bent, perfect as a demonstration video. The pit-bull is more punchy, racing around the court like a speeded-up cartoon, and making me feel a whole lot better as he hits shot after shot into the net or – with a crash of pressurized felt on metal – at the ceiling.
They are all considerably better than me. I’ve played indoors before, at Queen’s Club with the eminent psychiatrist, but the gentle moon-balling we do there is nothing compared with the hustling smash-and-grab of tennis in the doorless Jolibois gym. The ball seems to ricochet off the shiny floor like the puck in a game of air-hockey, and I miss it completely with my first shot, my racquet arriving at the allotted spot in mid-air about a second after the ball has flown past me.
Yet tonight is one of those rare times when, against all the laws of physics and natural justice, I do not utterly disgrace myself. We play a game of doubles: the boxer and the pit-bull against the rock in midwinter and the funny Englishman. There is a lot more cut-and-thrust, and rather less good-natured joshing, than I am used to from the little club in Dulwich, with its friendly mixed-doubles and barbecued sausages, not necessarily in that order. But the god of double-faults and fluffed smashes smiles upon me and – to my surprise and relief – I even hit one or two good shots. It doesn’t matter to me that Jean-Michel and I lose, although I think from the way he grinds his teeth that it matters to him. No, what counts is that I have passed a kind of test – a sporting test – and that I feel involved and part of something.
‘I do find it amazing,’ I tell them as we walk back to our cars afterwards, ‘that it is possible for someone like me to come here from Angleterre – from abroad – and none of us have met before, yet we can play a game together, following the same rules, all with the same idea. And it works, just like that.’
The boxer and the pit-bull exchange glances. My epiphany has been a private one. I shouldn’t have attempted to try to explain it. But Jean-Michel, relenting, helps me out.
‘Le sport, c’est international.’ He shrugs, his glasses glinting in the moonlight as he swigs water from a bottle of Evian. ‘Now you just have to learn to win.’
‘Our first international victory,’ laughs the pit-bull, making a fist and shaking it at the boxer. Then he gives me a friendly thump on the shoulder. ‘And Tim Henman will be back next week.’
I wake up at two o’clock in the morning, still in my tennis kit on a rug at the top of the stairs. Last night, my success – or at least my failure to fail – on the tennis court inspired me to a private celebration involving a very cheap bottle of red wine from Netto. Coming on top of the beer and Pastis which preceded it, this has not proved a tremendous panacea for my health.
My head feels as if it is full of boiling marmalade. I wish I could remove my brain and rinse it gently under a cold tap for a few seconds. That might help.
Seven o’clock and things have not improved. Cool hands on my forehead, that’s what I want. These not being available, I fry myself some egg and bacon. And a tomato. And butter some toast. Sometimes an English breakfast is the only thing that will do the job. I’d love a cup of tea, too, but that would sock my temples something rotten.
The two tomato halves are just beginning to sizzle in the pan when I hear the sound of a diesel engine outside the back door. It’s my neighbour, Gilles.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks, peering at me and reaching forward to shake my hand with his masonic grip.
I nod carefully. ‘Just a little too much vin rouge last night.’
He strokes his beard and chuckles. ‘Ah, les Anglais aiment bien boire.’
There is not much I can say to this, so Gilles continues. ‘Do you want a cockerel?’ he asks. As you do.
I blink; glance at his van. ‘Is it in the back? Is it … alive?’
‘No, no, he’s not in the van. But he’s a fine cockerel,’ says Gilles. ‘I have two, and this one’s being bullied. So I wondered �
�’
Well, yes, I do like the idea of being woken by a trumpeted cocorico – French cockerels don’t doodle-do like their English cousins – albeit not in my current state, which makes even Gilles’s soft voice sound like a meat-slicer. But what will my six girls think?
In the end, a visit to view Gilles’s cockerel after breakfast fixes everything. The strutting fellow turns out to be so splendid that I make the decision on the girls’ behalf. This, for reasons I cannot explain, shall be Titus.
Twice the size of my smallest hens, and resplendent in his golden breeches, Titus is a dead ringer for Holbein’s Henry VIII. He arrives that evening, upside-down, legs strapped together with a length of bandage, swinging like a nightwatchman’s lantern from Gilles’s outstretched arm. It’s not the most dignified entrance, but – wincing – I take comfort from the thought of the dishy harem that awaits him. We put him into the chickens’ enclosure, watch for a few moments as he scampers around, vainly attempting to avoid being bullied by his new wives, and then I walk Gilles to his car.
Five minutes later, we are standing there discussing sheep houses when we hear the pit-pat-pit-pat of a scampering biped. Titus. Ankles akimbo, the little blighter is pounding down the drive, throwing up clods of mud in his wake. My girls, it seems, are not good enough for him. Or did the sisterhood freeze him out? Either way, he’s off.
‘Shouldn’t we do something, Gilles?’ I ask.
‘He’s your cockerel now,’ laughs Gilles, with the air of a man who has chased a lot of chickens in his time. ‘Maybe you’ll find him up a tree in the morning, if a fox doesn’t get him.’
Next day, I am woken from a fitful sleep by a joyous sound. It’s Titus, crowing in the far distance. Now I don’t speak fluent cockerel, but the young bugler sounds decidedly anxious as he tootles out the reveille. Donning my wellies over my stripey pyjamas, I grab a bucket of chicken feed and stumble out to coax him home.
C'est La Folie Page 12
