C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  Too late. Within a couple of minutes, two huge moustaches emerge from a police car just down the hill. They must have been hiding round the corner, waiting for me to crash. My heart thumps as the moustaches – preceded at some distance by two impressive bellies – approach.

  I needn’t have worried. Gentlemanly and solicitous, the police are mostly interested in getting the traffic moving. So one of them parks his manly bulk slap-bang in the middle of the road and forces everyone to drive around him. A few minutes later, we are all shaking hands and promising to keep in touch, before the recovery man takes me and what’s left of my car to the Peugeot garage in town.

  ‘Elle est morte,’ says the grey-haired garage-owner sadly when I ask what he thinks. At first I don’t want to believe him, because he is wearing a brown anorak. But secretly I know he’s right.

  And so I sit in my broken little car, gathering up my belongings – a few dusty cassettes, a foot-pump from Halford’s and a lacerated baguette – as I take in the familiar reek of diesel fuel and boiled sweets for one last time. ‘Au revoir,’ I murmur, giving the dashboard a final pat.

  A few days afterwards, the blue-and-yellow Jolibois road commandos re-route la route in the wake of my stupidity. So I can now claim to have made such an impact in France that I have changed the very direction of society.

  26

  ICARUS

  Weather shocking. Horizontal rain; heavy branches ripped and smashed on the drive. Everything brown and dank and muddied; every footstep a squelch.

  In London, I once worked in an air-conditioned office where there were no windows at all. We relied on phone calls from the outside world to discover whether the sun was shining, or whether the onset of a new Ice Age had followed the morning rush-hour. Here at La Folie, I have the opposite problem. Right now, the great outdoors is very much indoors.

  Even the chickens are struggling. They look confused and bedraggled, unable to understand what’s happening as they stand out in the rain, getting soaked. The Rastafarians lean under the eaves behind the house, looking equally morose, and applying rather more intelligence to the problem.

  At the bottom of the drive, the river has burst its banks, flooding the road. The celebrated gothic bridge that features in all the postcard views of Jolibois looks as if it’s paddling. The way the waters are rushing and gushing, a sheep could easily get swept away down there. I still can’t quite believe that – if Gilles is right – I am going to have my own lambs before long. He says that Doris, Daphne and Ella look thoroughly pregnant. If so, their lambs had better be born with webbed feet.

  By lighting the stove this morning, I have broken my own rule about minimum temperatures. But just as humidity makes a hot day seem hotter, so dankness chills the bones. And at least I am in the cat’s good books for a change. She has been looking at me askance ever since I put her on the diet food, because she’s become such a heffalump since the colder weather began and her mouse supply dried up.

  For my six o’clock think, I am confined to the dark kitchen. I sit at the little wooden table where I first sat with Zumbach and Émilie, all those months ago. This weather is shrinking my world. If I could just escape for a while in my aeroplane, if I could just roar skywards, and turn and swoop and dive and climb in the empty air, I could perhaps release myself from some of the avoirdupois that is chained to my shoulders, weighing me down. Viewed from the glittering freedom of three thousand feet, problems become insignificant, unless your cockpit has begun to fill with smoke.

  Water people love to dive deep into the ocean, or skim across its surface in a yacht. Earth people are drawn to mountains and caves. Fire people want nothing more than the heat of the sun on their skin. I am learning to work with the earth. But the sky is where I want to be. If I must come back in another life, let me be a bird or a thundercloud.

  27

  JUDAS ISCARIOT

  Next morning at La Folie, quite without warning, a dirty white lorry splashes up the drive in the darkness. I peer down out of my bedroom window, and see that the back of the lorry is groaning with gleaming scaffolding.

  Mon Dieu. I have grown so used to living in my small submarine that I almost forgot that I was planning to renovate La Folie.

  But now, if I’m not much mistaken, the masons have arrived.

  Three dusty handshakes, and then they are marching their scaffolding bars into the yawning cavity of the summer sitting-room, their hobnail boots crunching on the concrete floor. I fumble for the lights – naked bulbs dangling from a spaghetti of exposed wires – and watch, fascinated, as the shadows of medieval yeomen carrying lances dance up the walls. And then I am rushing around, too, hauling boxes of books and dusty sheet music out of their way, apologizing for the state of my building-site.

  ‘C’est pas grave,’ they growl, tipping their caps. ‘Pas de problème.’

  Probably they want me to leave them to it, for they have the air of well-briefed commandos carrying out a raid. But I can’t help wishing I could join in. In addition to wanting to be Queen Victoria’s train-driver, a Spitfire pilot and a cinema organist, I’ve decided I want to be a stonemason, too.

  There is an honesty written in these men’s faces, and a brutal strength about the way they attack their labour, that makes me stand and gawp in wonder. I didn’t know that men still worked like this any more. They don’t even have a cement-mixer to mix the wagon-loads of mortar that they will soon be pressing into the joints. It’s all done with shovels in a flat trough.

  So begins a period in which the masons’ lorry sends the chickens flying just before eight each morning, and the sound of hammers clattering on stone begins to echo through the house. Outside, winter may have La Folie firmly in its watery grip, but inside the house, things are at last beginning to grow and develop in a kind of indoor version of spring. And as the house begins to flower, I feel myself expanding, too.

  Action inspires action. Ideas beget ideas. I’m glad to have company; to have noise in the house, over and above the scuttling of rodents and the creaking of rotting beams. It gives me the feeling that I’m doing something, even when I’m doing nothing. I can’t help feeling personally responsible for all that crashing and banging next door. So when the masons head off for their two-hour lunch-break, I have a similar break myself, to reward myself for all our hard work.

  I take new pleasure, too, in donning my grubby jacket and filling the feed-bucket for the sheep in the morning, smashing the ice on the water troughs, or hauling out another armload of fence-posts, now that the workmen – Serge and his silent son, along with the burly Gérard (who has no teeth, but a toddler’s gummy smile) – are here to set an example. I’m so much less lazy when someone is watching me, witnessing my idleness. So, for once in my life, I find myself able to look workmen in the eye. The secret, I’ve discovered, is to be shouldering a sledgehammer at the time.

  The men take no English tea-breaks; never stop for a fag. The bashing and clanging stops at noon, restarts some time before two and continues until just before six. When I wander into the war-zone at the end of the day, it has always been immaculately swept, with my motley belongings piled beneath a dust-sheet. I am ashamed to say that this is the tidiest room in the house.

  Along with Gilles, Serge is my new hero. He has the rugged features of some ancient warrior, and walks with a slight limp following a fall, years ago, from a high ladder. Probably during the siege of Poitiers, is my guess. After he has done a tough day’s work at La Folie, Serge labours elsewhere, he says, until eight o’clock at night, to feed his three children. Yet etched into his handsome, dust-veneered face, he has the smile-lines of a man who is unfailingly cheerful, and responds to every unforeseen snag – such as me changing my mind about the style and colour of the pointing for the umpteenth time – with a shrug and that most blessed phrase in the ouvrier’s vocabulary: ‘Pas de problème.’

  Serge is an inspiration. His is the gentleness of a man who is truly strong.

  ‘I’m just taking some of my s
heep to market,’ I tell him one morning, as nonchalantly as possible. I feel myself joining a grand tradition of young chaps – from Jack and his Beanstalk downwards – who have set out on just such a sunny morning as this, taking their sheep to market. Admittedly, Jack was taking Lucy the Cow, whereas I’m taking Charlie and the sweet-faced thugs.

  I shall be sorry to say goodbye to these three strapping brothers. But poor old Gaston has his work cut out, defending his wenches from them. I can’t believe the ewes are still on heat, when Gilles is convinced that they are already pregnant – but nobody has told that to my trio of priapic lads. There is a serious risk of in-breeding. So it’s urgent that I find them a new home, today.

  Gilles has told me that I should find several Ouessant-buyers at the market in les Hérolles. I picture a well-heeled Dutch couple buying them, as lawn-mowers for the grass behind their signal box. (It’s not only les Anglais who are buying up rural France, although the Dutch appear to be unusually specific in their tastes. All the local Dutch people I’ve come across live beside the railway line, presumably because it’s the closest thing they can find to a canal.)

  The market at les Hérolles happens only once a month, so I am determined not to miss this opportunity. After weeks of rain, there’s not a cloud in the sky as I head off in the Espace, taking my sheep to market, their three brown heads and six perky ears just visible in the rear-view mirror.

  I tell myself that I will not – must not – take my chaps back to Jolibois, come what may. I even have the thought that I could stop and quietly lift them into someone else’s field, in the first known case of sheep rustling in reverse.

  And then I arrive at les Hérolles, a tiny village that hosts its huge market on the twenty-ninth of every month. There are people selling cheap raincoats, and honey in plastic pots, and chickens packed into crates as tightly as oranges. But I can’t see any sheep. My three are still standing patiently in the boot of the Espace, watching the world go by.

  At last I find the animal market with its fifty-odd steel pens spread over an area the size of a football pitch. They’re all empty.

  ‘C’est fini, Monsieur,’ explains a stooped old man, with a slow blink and a shrug. It’s ten a.m. And the livestock market ended an hour ago. ‘But look – there’s a marchandeur, Monsieur. Perhaps he will buy your three little sheep.’

  I follow his bony, trembling finger to where a stocky man in wellies is standing. He reminds me of Peter Lorre after a rough night on a trawler.

  ‘Des Ouessants?’ Peter Lorre raises his bushy eyebrows, and his eyes light up like the bumpers on a pinball table. Yet his voice only makes me think of vinegar gurgling down a sink. ‘Where are they?’

  I jab my thumb at the Espace, and attempt to look like I’ve done this before. All I need is a different face, different accent, twenty years’ experience and a beard, and the illusion would be complete. But the fact that he knows about Ouessants is encouraging: he must have someone in mind – a Dutch couple with an overgrown garden beside a railway, perhaps – to whom he can sell them on. He wouldn’t care about the breed if he just wanted to eat them, because Ouessants are too small and valuable for that.

  ‘How much do you want for them?’ he rasps, as he squeezes the flesh on their backs with a hand like a claw. Why should he care how fat they are, when their value lies in their sweet natures, scarcity and aesthetic appeal?

  ‘Cent euros pour les trois,’ I say: a hundred for the lot.

  Lorre spits on the ground.

  ‘I’ll give you thirty,’ he croaks, his face setting like quick-drying cement. With the market ended, he knows he’s got me over a barrel.

  ‘I can’t do it for thirty. Each is worth at least eighty euros.’

  ‘Not any more, they’re not. It’s not like the old days, you know.’

  ‘Donc, pour soixante-dix …’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Cinquante?’ I murmur, embarrassed. A small crowd has gathered to watch the market’s final transaction.

  ‘I’ll give you thirty,’ he snarls, ‘et c’est tout.’

  On my way down here, I would happily have given my three rams away. All I really wanted was a good home for them. But I can’t sell them like this for ten euros each. It’s an insult to Charlie and the boys.

  ‘Tant pis.’ He shrugs, turning to go. ‘We’ll not fall out over it.’ And then he delivers a low blow. ‘They’re not tagged,’ he hisses. ‘You’d better watch out for the gendarmes over there … because they’ll have you, just like that.’ He grabs his bicep and jerks his forearm upwards, glancing at the policemen. For a moment, I think he’s about to shop me.

  I gaze at my young charges. They stare back at me doubtfully. In this noisy, alien environment, I’m the closest thing to a friend they’ve got.

  I grit my teeth. ‘All right, I’ll take thirty,’ I murmur, wishing I could grab the words back as soon as I have said them, and feeling his rough palm shaking mine. Something in me doesn’t want to sell my sheep to this man. But the deal is sealed.

  ‘Then put them in the lorry,’ he says.

  The tail-gate of the lorry is raised, and my heart sinks. Pressed against the far end are a dozen grey sheep – each at least three times the size of Charlie – collapsed like bloated junkies in the fetid straw. Compared with my bright-eyed Ouessants, they have the blank stares of the condemned.

  I set my first ram down on the floor of the lorry, and am relieved to see him trot instinctively into the ovine melee. Something doesn’t feel right, but I can’t put my finger on it.

  The door is opened again, and I lay the second ram inside. And now there’s just little Charlie, so much smaller than his two brothers. I gather him into my arms, and feel his poor heart beating wildly with alarm. Then he’s in the lorry, too, and I can’t seem to tear myself away. Charlie peers back at me, confused.

  ‘Je suis un peu triste …’ I explain to the kind-looking man who is holding the door open, waiting for me to move.

  ‘Ah, oui, you are sad.’ He nods with an understanding that takes me by surprise.

  And then Peter Lorre is unfolding his cheque-book, and I tell him that no, the money must be ‘en espèces’. I’m expecting him to refuse, but he makes a big show of putting away the cheque-book and grumpily unfolding three notes from an envelope in his pocket. There’s no going back now. The mob is watching. Yet there’s still something I need to know.

  ‘What are you going to do with my sheep, Monsieur?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m going to look after them,’ he says cheerily. I feel a great weight lift from my shoulders, a boulder that has been weighing there for weeks as I have worried about the future of my sheep. ‘And then,’ he hisses, leering as he slices his hand violently across his throat, ‘I’m going to eat them.’

  I nod, feeling my knees wobble beneath me. I want to change my mind, to find another way. But it’s too late now. The deal is done.

  And then I just want to get away from there, hurtling back to Jolibois with the road blurring ahead of me, and thirty pieces of silver jangling in my pocket.

  28

  FEBRUARY: DREAMING IN FRENCH

  Winter creeps onward at La Folie. Day after day, Serge and the masons appear, and their hammering ransacks the silence. The trees are still bare, but the sheep grow shaggier by the week. I cannot wait for the day when Gilles will come and shear their wool, two years in the tangling.

  On the phone, my mother often asks me if I am dreaming in French yet, in the same tone that she asks me if the bathroom in the maison des amis is ever going to be finished. Mum proudly remembers dreaming in French when she was propping up the suspended-ceiling business in Paris in the 1950s, and this is therefore the family yardstick by which to judge whether or not I am fully Frenchified.

  Though I cannot yet claim such a qualification, my French must be improving, because the locals have stopped making polite comments about it. Indeed, now that my linguistic manglings are no longer a talking point, I begin to suspect that the ph
rase I used to hear – Ah, vous parlez bien le français! – really means ‘Your French is charmingly hopeless, but well done for trying.’ Alarmingly, most of les Anglais don’t.

  I want to hide when I hear people in the paper-shop demanding cigarettes in English, with not so much as a s’il vous plaît to acknowledge that we are in someone else’s country. And then there’s the English woman trying to buy meat in Champion, yelling ‘Mince! MINCE! MINCE!’ at the bemused assistant, in a misguided quest for steak hâché that sounds more like she’s barking instructions at a Butlin’s drag act.

  Though my own vocabulary is patchy – and my accent is heavily influenced by Inspector Clouseau – I am quite strong on useful things such as ovine intestinal conditions, bathroom fittings and Things To Shout Whilst Playing Tennis. Thus Allez, allez! is how one encourages an octogenarian doubles partner to hobble after a lob, Gourmand! means ‘Why did I go for that blasted volley?’ and Bien servi is what you mutter when you’ve just been aced by a twelve-year-old.

  My favourite new word is les perce-neige – snowdrops – because, bless them, these perfect flowers have finally arrived at La Folie, bowing their heads at each van and lorry that rattles up the drive. I have never in my life felt excited about a flower, but I almost gasped at the sight of these, their innocent beauty gathered into dazzling clumps like children at a first communion. Flowers, I begin to see, are not simply pretty things that grow. They are part of some huge clock, too; harbingers of a different season; a promise of better times to come. Spring cannot now be far away.

  ‘Do you really think they can understand you?’ asks Serge the mason, leaning on his shovel. He has just caught me chatting to the chickens. As you do. Indeed, you’d be surprised how much there is to say to a chicken, when you live alone and don’t have a telly. But what Serge clearly finds hilarious is that these are French chickens, yet I’m attempting to parley with them in English.