C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  ‘Music helps,’ I reply, looking at Fabrice. I decide not to try to explain that I am still sitting out my six-month trial period with the locals. ‘And then there’s the tennis club. And even the Mushroom Society.’

  This produces much mirth, as none of them have ever heard of the Mushroom Society. To be fair, my membership of it has not been an unmitigated success. I joined after I went on one of their mushrooming walks, and was carried away by the saprophytic enthusiasms of the ladies who ran it. I thought I might make friends with fellow foodies whilst learning how to sniff out a trompette de la mort at fifty paces. But it turns out that wild mushrooms only do their thing in France for a few weeks in the autumn. How is a fellow supposed to know that?

  For the rest of the year, the Société Mycologique busies itself with the production of a thick bi-monthly newsletter which, in attempting to put the fun into fungi, only manages to put the non into champignons. It seriously makes me want to hide from the postman. I am now wondering if the Snail Society might be more my tasse de thé.

  ‘How long are you going to stay in France, Michael?’ asks Céline. ‘Don’t you miss England?’

  ‘Maybe he misses the food,’ giggles Luc, nudging Fabrice in the ribs.

  ‘I miss certain people,’ I reply, ‘and I miss not having a piano.’

  ‘Ah, mais oui,’ nods Fabrice, trilling with his fingers on the dining table.

  ‘Is it true that you have an aeroplane?’ continues Céline.

  ‘Er, yes. A very little old aeroplane,’ I tell her hesitantly. ‘Nothing special. And yes, I miss that, too. So I’m going back to England soon, to go flying. Just for a weekend. But in answer to your question about how long I plan to stay in France: I simply don’t know. I suppose it depends on whether I meet someone. A woman to live with, I mean.’

  Everyone considers this in silence, as I remove their cheese plates, still heavy with fish slush.

  ‘So do you think French food is better than English food?’ asks Fabrice finally, as Luc begins to slice up the flaky, syrupy tarte aux poires that he has baked that afternoon. The other three have never been abroad, but Fabrice is a man of the world, having once spent a fortnight in Stoke-on-Trent when he was training to be an engineer. He says the best things about English food were toffees and Newcastle Brown Ale.

  ‘Right now, Fabrice,’ I reply, tucking into the warm, sweet tarte that reminds me of sinking into a comfy bed at the end of a long hard day, ‘I think it’s the best in the world.’

  Next morning, the washing-up piled beside the sink looks so daunting that I almost think I might set about writing the opening chapter of The Labours of Jack Larry. And this reminds me that now would be a perfect time to start work on the potager. Before Josette’s accident, Gilles told me that he’d come and plough the would-be vegetable patch for me, once I’d removed the old fence and nuked the mauvaises herbes with something he called Rrrrrondop. He also told me to buy some spuds to plant. Very soon, too, I will have to build a new fence, as Frère Sébastien advised, or else Titus and the Egg Squad will make short work of all the prize tomatoes and beans and basil that I am planning to grow.

  My confidence is hard to justify, for by nature I am a serial plant-killer, incapable of keeping anything green alive, if we discount the furry bits on the cheese at the back of the fridge. At Windlesham, I was the one child who failed to make his mustard seeds sprout on the damp blotting paper. At Sherborne, I snuffed out numerous spider plants (parched) and cacti (drowned). Later, in East Dulwich, I planted many splendid shrubs, to no avail. All dead, dead, dead.

  Undaunted, I remove the decayed old fence from around what must once have been a very splendid potager. I buy a hundred metres of green chain-link grillage from the lovely ladies at Alliance Pastorale (‘Another fence, Monsieur?’), forty stout wooden fence-posts and a small book called Potager: Cultiver de Beaux Légumes au Naturel. Then I napalm the mauvaises herbes with Rrrrrondop, just like Gilles said. And I wait. The thistles and nettles and brambles and Triffids first wilt and then slowly brown, like leeks in a pan. I should have done this with the brambles on my archaeological dig; the one where I found the Massey-Ferguson and the rotting cart.

  Ten days later, Gilles comes and ploughs and harrows with his mighty engine-of-war. Josette is still in pain, but mobile, he tells me. I dig and rake. And how proud I feel of my freshly made vegetable bed, which really looks good enough to lie down and go to sleep in. It’s not yet time for planting. But if I were a potato, I should be extremely happy to do my sprouting there.

  30

  THE AUGEAN STABLES

  Just as each country has its own terrifying delicacies, so they have their own fearsome mythological beasts, too. The Irish have their Bogles. The Scots have their Kelpies. The Danes have their trolls. And the French have their fosses septiques.

  Zumbach told me it would be all right to leave emptying mine until the autumn, but somehow it slipped my mind. Now, however, I am beginning to catch a whiff of ancient Rome on still evenings, and I know that it is time for me to make my heroic venture into the underworld. Especially as I am off to Blighty to fly my plane next week, and do not wish to return to find La Folie inundated beneath several years’ worth of liquid ordure.

  I have no idea what it looks like, but I do know where the fosse septique is located. The beast is surrounded by a ring of pine trees in a small depression several yards away from the house, like an altar in the centre of a druidic circle. I have scratched at the grass there, and come upon smooth concrete: I have touched the very surface of the gates of hell.

  Straight after breakfast, I stride out to it with a rusty old scythe I have found at the back of the barn. Martha comes to spectate as, gritting my teeth, I hack away at the earth and scrub that covers one of the monster’s lids. There are three of these: one large and two small, arranged like the eye and nostrils of Polyphemus. Kneeling beside the eye, I reach across to the far side of the concrete disc, and attempt to lift it.

  Nothing. So I jam my fingers under the lip closest to me, shut my eyes, grit my teeth, clench everything, and heave.

  The earth moves. I am half expecting to be enveloped in a pestilent mist; to hear the distant groaning of a thousand penitents. There is none of that. But I do catch a glimpse of something dark, gleaming and evil. I breathe the stench of darkness. And as I gingerly lower the hell-hole cover, I can already feel the hoofs of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse clattering up the road from Limoges. Every time I flush the loo now, I say a little prayer.

  So today a brave man is coming to empty the beast. I have chosen a company called le Petit Vidangeur, after spotting one of their pocket-sized lorries in town and deciding that there’s a sporting chance it might be able to squeeze its way up the drive.

  Le patron sends his biggest lorry. I hear it labour and then judder to a halt, stuck on the drive’s final hairpin.

  A few minutes later, there comes a knock at the door.

  ‘Monsieur,’ says a harassed-looking man in blue overalls. ‘May I use your phone?’

  From the shouting on the other end of the line, I can tell that reinforcements are not on the way. The man in blue overalls puts down the receiver, shakes both fists at the ceiling and strides out of the front door, muttering under his breath as he disappears back down the drive.

  Watching him go, I ponder the mysteries of French sanitation. I started to have my doubts when Céline and her family came to dinner. They all stayed until almost midnight, yet no one showed the slightest inclination to use the facilities. They simply held on. And Marie seemed positively shocked when I asked her if she wanted to visit la salle d’eau. I’m not sure, but I think she may have thought I was asking if she’d like to take a shower.

  Ten minutes after his vanishing act, the man in blue overalls is back. He knocks at the front door, with a haunted look about him.

  ‘Do you have a spade, Monsieur?’ he says, wringing his hands.

  After we have dug out his lorry and are nicely covered in
mud, there is another phone call to le patron. This time, when the man in blue overalls stomps out, he looks on the verge of tears.

  Sweating and swearing around the distant lorry, he begins to bolt section after section of additional piping on to its unwound hose, thick as one of Serge’s forearms. Blue sections, brown sections, sections that look as if they were unearthed at Pompeii. Each section is ten feet long, and must be about as heavy as one of my sheep.

  At last the Heath-Robinson hose reaches the Pit of Hell. And with a hissing of pistons, and a squelching noise like the sound of a fat child being dragged from a swamp, the vidange begins.

  I can breathe again. It has taken this heroic fellow two hours to do a job that should have taken twenty minutes. Le patron has told him to charge extra, because of the time it took. But that’s le patron’s problem. I write out a cheque for the amount I was originally quoted. And then I pay the difference, in cash, to the man in blue overalls. God knows, he’s earned it.

  I begin to understand why, on the roadside in France, one will frequently see a chap proudly pointing his petit zizi at the hedge, in a happy display of liberté. There’s little égalité, so far as I can tell, since women are deprived of this small pleasure. But there’s often fraternité, in the sense that the Frenchman likes nothing more than to line up alongside his comrades in looking upon the hedge, gazing out across the sunlit fields as he joins in a communal tinkle. Safer by half to use the great outdoors than to risk the wrath of the dreaded fosse septique.

  31

  URBAN PASTORAL

  My trip to London is only for a long weekend. I am not running away, but I do want to remind myself what it is that I have left behind. I need to shake out the cobwebs from my flying, so that the Luscombe and I are not still feeling rusty when we are on short final for Le Touquet or Chartres. And I am more than usually desperate to climb back into the cockpit of a Tiger Moth, too.

  Once again, I am late getting away from La Folie. I’ve never been one of life’s early birds, but today’s close shave looks as if it will be more exciting than most. When I should be on the road to Limoges airport, I’m still feeding stale bread to the Rastafarians and counselling the cat on how to deal with an obsessive-compulsive rooster. Gilles has offered to take charge of everyone while I’m away. He doesn’t think any lambs will be born for a few weeks yet. I’m still finding it hard to believe that the toothless Gaston can have impregnated Doris, Daphne and Ella. But Gilles is convinced that something will happen in the end.

  At the airport at last, I’m trying to find a space in a car-park jam-packed with Brit-registered Fiestas and Cavaliers. Parking is free, so cars are abandoned here for months on end while their owners sit in Chingford and dream of being able to snatch another weekend at their little place in Chateauponsac. Today there’s not a single space left, so I have to invent one. If I cannot be Queen Victoria’s train-driver or a Spitfire pilot or a cinema organist or a stonemason, I might come back as a cowboy car-clamper in my next life. One could make a jolly good living out of all the Brits at Limoges.

  I race for the airport building, my suitcase bumping behind me as I rush for the big white marquee that is the temporary terminal. Back in the 1970s, they never dreamed of all les Anglais who would one day be flocking to the Limousin.

  The Ryanair check-in closes thirty-five minutes before departure, and the flight from Stansted has already arrived. A contraflow of happy English passengers is squinting out into the frosty sunlight, looking for their friends. I can see why the locals talk of an invasion.

  ‘Golly, you said it would be rustic, Jill,’ trills a lady beside me, ‘but I didn’t expect the airport to be just a tent!’ Well, yes. We’re temporarily under canvas because the old terminal is having to be extended to cope with the new influx. Now if you don’t mind moving your trolley, Madam …

  And then I’m at the check-in with three minutes to spare. Ahead of me, an English couple is being stung for their overweight baggage.

  ‘’Kin ’ell, Shaz, the luggage is going to cost us more than the ticket,’ wails a shaven-headed walrus in a scarlet tracksuit with three lurid white stripes that run from neck to ankle.

  Shaz, no stranger to the tea-trolley, looks blank. ‘I’m not leaving the jam, Del,’ she says, widening her stance like a Sumo preparing to engage.

  Del sighs, and opens his wallet to pay for the most expensive jam in the world.

  I can’t talk. My own hand luggage is stuffed with Oeufs Frais des Poules Contentes de La Folie, which I’m worried may be fried by the X-ray machine.

  ‘Hey, Michael, you’re cutting it fine, aren’t you?’ chuckles the young man behind the check-in desk. At first I can’t place him, but he reminds me: I was practising the organ in the church before Christmas, while he and Fabrice were setting up the gaudy illuminations around the crib.

  ‘Deux minutes? Pas de problème,’ I reply, as the last-call-for-boarding announcement comes over the tannoy.

  I know this announcement is a fib, because I can see all the passengers squeezed into the airless, chairless holding-pen on the other side of passport control. So I ask the glamorous blonde lady behind the bar for a café allongé and wait for the latecomers to hit the check-in.

  Watching them is a grim sport, and I do it not out of schadenfreude but because it gives me an obscure sense of catharsis: pity at their plight, fear that it will be me next time round. Thirty-four minutes before the plane is due to take off, the latecomers arrive at the desk, puffing with relief when they see the queue for the X-ray machine, and then gasping when they’re told that they’re too late to check in.

  ‘But look, they haven’t even started boarding yet!’ pleads a leather-faced gent in a pink fleece and a Panama hat that’s two sizes too small for him.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Sir. Ze check-in is closed,’ says the young man apologetically. This is cut-and-dried airline policy, and may explain why their punctuality figures are so good.

  I’ve seen men yelling till they’re blue in the face, their wives ululating, their children sobbing into their teddy bears, and it hasn’t made a soupçon of difference. Ze check-in is closed.

  You can head into town to catch the train to Paris, or else you can re-book for tomorrow’s flight. Either way, you’ve had it. I used to think that watching this painful little drama would persuade me to arrive a little earlier if ever I were travelling myself. It clearly hasn’t worked.

  On board the plane, all the safety announcements are made in English alone. I sip a cup of watery tea and, on Peter Viola’s recommendation, read Nous Deux magazine. This is full of tacky photo love-stories which, he assures me, are far better than Flaubert or Balzac for learning the kind of colloquial French that people actually speak.

  And then I’m in a taxi crossing London Bridge, and I can see the cabbie peering at me in the rear-view mirror. I don’t want to chat, I want to look at London. But he wants to talk, especially when I explain that I moved to France to learn to be brave and live closer to nature.

  ‘Blimey, you could do the same thing on a nudist beach,’ he says, roaring with laughter. ‘Especially at this time of year.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ I reply, pretending to take him seriously.

  ‘What do you miss about London then, guv?’ he says. ‘Bet everything’s better in France, innit?’

  I gaze at the soaring buildings, and at the huge advertisements for watches and perfumes and recruitment companies that I’ve never really noticed before. I’m struck by the brilliance of the lighting that blazes into the sky. And everyone looks so young. I’m used to deserted streets, with maybe an old boy on the corner who’ll give me a friendly wave. Here, I see people hugging and kissing in groups. Three Japanese girls snapping each other in their perfect outfits. Skateboarders loafing in baggy beige. An Asian couple in matching specs, pushing a pram. City workers spilling on to pavements, joshing, pint glasses in hand. The ghosts of friends I’ve left behind.

  ‘All this is what I miss,’ I tell him.
‘I just miss all these people.’

  At Rochester airport next morning, I’m glad to find there’s nobody about. Alone in one of the silent hangars which, sixty years ago, housed Stirling bombers, I run my fingers along the Luscombe’s smooth leading edges, picturing the air blasting against them at three thousand feet and a hundred miles an hour.

  With its curves and 1940s elegance, I like to think that the Luscombe carries some hint of a genetic link to the Spitfires and Hurricanes of my childhood dreams. But it is no warbird. With its high wing and fixed undercarriage, it looks more like a proto-Cessna. Mine is a jaunty buttercup yellow, with white wings and tail, and a white stripe down the side. I can’t wait to hear what grouchy Marcel and the old boys at the flying club at St Juste will have to say about it.

  I rock the ailerons, listening to the gentle rasp of the pulleys inside the wings. Unscrewing the fuel cap, I dip my fingers into the tank. I cannot feel any liquid, but the tips glisten when I draw them out. So I did leave the tank full, after all. Good. Less room for condensation and corrosion that way.

  Footsteps crunching behind me break the spell. It’s Nigel, one of the yellow-jacketed ground-staff, watching me from behind the tinted lenses of his spectacles. My heart sinks. Nigel is never happy unless he is thoroughly miserable.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ says Nigel in a nasal sing-song. ‘Here’s trouble.’

  ‘Hello, Nigel. Can we get Zulu-Alpha out, please?’

  ‘Frogs kicked you out, have they?’ he whines.

  ‘Just a few days off for good behaviour.’

  ‘Oh, right. Sunny all the time, is it? Girls, girls, girls?’

  ‘Beautiful girls, Nigel. Girls everywhere. I have to beat them off.’

  ‘Bastard,’ he says. ‘And then he expects us to move his plane for him. Bastard.’ He is silent for a few moments. ‘Is it true they don’t wear any knickers?’