C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  ‘Il fait chaud, oui?’ I gasp, stopping to catch my breath.

  ‘Hot? You can say that again,’ he says, beginning to whistle while I work. A tiny man with wisps of grey hair clinging to his shiny brown head, he looks as if he would be more at home in a coconut shy than a timber-yard. ‘You should ask the mairie to give you a sign for this place,’ he says. ‘It’s impossible to find.’

  ‘But I like the fact that it’s a little hidden,’ I pant from behind a stack of oak.

  ‘Hidden? You can say that again. It’s the end of the world. And look at the state of the drive!’

  ‘Ah, yes. I need to have that cut back.’

  ‘Cut back? You can say that again.’ The whistling resumes. ‘Incidentally, if you don’t mind my asking, how are you going to lay the floor with all that scaffolding there?’

  I give him my best French shrug, adding the regulation boff for emphasis. That scaffolding gives me confidence, because it makes me think that one day the masons will return. They couldn’t just have dumped it here, could they?

  A chance meeting with Jou-Jou, at the Café de Mortemart, reveals that the search for a suitable produit for the walls of the summer sitting-room is turning into a grail quest of Arthurian proportions.

  How weary he looks today. His shock of hair, which I suspect may not have been combed since the Stone Age, is greyer than I remembered, and there are new lines and wrinkles etched into his square face. His wrist is supported in a makeshift sling, and he rubs it constantly with his other hand.

  ‘I fell off a ladder,’ he tells me, grimacing at the injured wrist. I can see that his hand is swollen and bruised; yellow, green and purple.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  He nods. ‘This hot weather helps. But when it’s cold and wet, it’s terrible.’

  It makes me feel guilty that he is still having to worry about my walls. As he sips his coffee and tells me his tale of all the advice and counter-advice, the suggestions and counter-suggestions that he has received on the subject of a produit for the summer sitting-room, he makes me think of the Ancient Mariner with an albatross strapped around his neck, compelled to tell his tale to every third person who will listen. All Jou-Jou needs is a long straggly beard and a glint in his eye, and the illusion would be complete.

  An idea occurs to me. I wouldn’t dream of mentioning it to Jou-Jou, were we standing in the summer sitting-room, gazing up at the work in progress. But here we are on neutral territory, and I find myself thinking the unthinkable; saying the unsayable. I wonder, aloud, how Jou-Jou would feel about my finding someone else – someone English and unusually large, perhaps – to do the work of rendering the walls?

  Jou-Jou’s tired eyes flash and he seems to grow two inches taller. For a moment I think he’s going to hit me, or hug me, or both. He puts down his coffee cup with a clatter, reaches behind him, and – as the other people in the café sit open-mouthed – unstraps the albatross dangling from his neck in one triumphant movement.

  Jou-Jou beams. ‘I’ll even let you keep the scaffolding for a few more weeks,’ he says. It’s lucky he doesn’t know how heavy Douglas the giant is, or he might have second thoughts.

  On the radio in the café, I can hear a slushy French love song being played, heavy with sentimentality and schmaltz. But to me, right now, it might as well be a Chopin nocturne. For the piano – my piano – has just come another semitone closer to France.

  I would be quite happy with the shameful lack of progress I’ve made in renovating La Folie, if Marisa and I – in our East Dulwich days – hadn’t watched so many inspiring documentaries about young couples turning piles of rubble in the Ardèche into gleaming palaces, in roughly the time it has taken me to persuade Monsieur Laveille the joiner to give me a quote.

  While these televised paragons convert disused pumping stations into stately homes with their bare hands, what have I done? I have converted a small stone pigsty into a chicken house. It’s not much, but I’m proud of it.

  Having Douglas the giant as my near-neighbour hasn’t helped. An ex-rugby international with a black-belt in DIY, Douglas has single-handedly restored an entire farmhouse while I was down at Monsieur Bricolage trying to decide what colour to paint my shutters. I realize that if I, too, could only learn to be as rugged and skilful at plumbing and plastering as Douglas, then my life would be simpler, if sweatier.

  As anyone who has ever attempted to renovate a house will know, the root of the problem is contingency. The oak floor cannot be laid until the Velux windows have been installed. The windows cannot be fitted until the scaffolding has been moved, and that won’t be until after the walls are painted, which can only happen once the rendering has been done.

  But now that I have stopped judging myself against Douglas, and decided to employ him instead, my life has improved considerably. Today is a good day, for today we are mixing cement. Well, I am mixing the cement as if I were a proper builder, and Douglas is using it to render the walls of the summer sitting-room.

  Douglas, fortunately, is a proper plasterer. He’s also that rare thing: an English tradesman who has managed to get all the legal stuff sorted at the chambre des métiers. So he’s actually legit (which is more than can be said for me, in my new role as a plasterer’s mate). This is my justification for breaking my own rule of only employing French ouvriers. Too many other tasks hang on this one being completed.

  So here I am, shovelling great globs of gritty Angel Delight into a bucket and hauling it thirty feet up the ladder to Douglas, who says he feels a bit like Michelangelo, working amid the soaring roof-timbers.

  ‘Muck up!’ he yells at me, every quarter of an hour.

  ‘Here you go, boss,’ I pant, as I heave the leaden bucket of cement sludge up to him.

  ‘What do you call that, then?’ he sneers, peering at my handiwork.

  ‘That’s muck, that is, boss.’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s soup.’

  ‘Right. Sorry, boss.’

  So I pour the soup back in the mixer and start adding more cement. And I am just thinking that this is the strangest relationship with a paid tradesman I have ever had, when suddenly there is a grinding of gears behind me, and – like a deus ex machina – Monsieur Étang, the plumber, turns up.

  My first thought is that I have been overdoing the Pastis. I have been ringing Étang for several weeks, to ask him when he is thinking of doing the work for which we agreed a quote way back in December. So to come face-to-face with a vision of the man, right here on my doorstep, is an unsettling experience.

  ‘What did his parents feed him as a baby?’ asks Étang, gazing up in awe at Douglas atop the scaffolding. I see what he means. It is a vision that conjures images of King Kong clinging to the Empire State Building.

  But Étang has rattled up the drive, bless him, just to tell me that it will be some time next year before he has time to install my new bathroom. Despite the heat, he is sporting a yellow anorak/sou’wester combo which strikes me as not the best possible advert for his working practices.

  ‘Mais Monsieur Étang, you gave me the quote last December,’ I say.

  ‘Ah oui, je sais,’ he groans, close to tears. ‘But I’ve got customers who have been waiting since 2002.’ The poor chap glances nervously over his yellow shoulder, as if half expecting to see a phalanx of Jolibois women waving their bath taps at him. It must be terrifying to be in such demand. And if ever I have children, I shall be sure to put them down for Étang at birth.

  38

  ARIADNE

  Six o’clock, and the cat and I are sitting on the terrace, gazing at the shrinking view. The trees seem to grow taller and greener every day.

  As I sip my Pastis, it occurs to me that I really wasn’t prepared, when I first moved to France, for how much there would be to do. I assumed life would be magically less stressful than in London. I feared I might be bored. I thought I would spend most of my time sitting on a hill top, meditating on how to be a hero. But it’s difficult to be a hero when
life keeps getting in the way. It’s not just the renovations, the wood-cutting, the trips to the bank for yet more wads of euros, and the trips to the supermarché for yet more restorative doses of Pastis. Add a bunch of sheep and chickens into the equation, an encroaching jungle, the pressures of an overgrown vegetable patch, the need to earn an honest crust and somehow to heat the place, and I have enough fun activities to distract me from ever noticing that I don’t have a telly to distract me. I’ve barely even had time to go flying since I ferried the Luscombe down here.

  The phone rings, and it’s Simon, in East Dulwich.

  ‘We were just talking about you, and wondering how you’re getting on,’ he says. ‘Found a sexy copine yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I reply. ‘And any woman who sets foot in this place is sure to run away as soon as she sees the state of it.’

  ‘You should get a dishy Portuguese cleaning lady, like Colin Firth does in Love Actually,’ he says, chortling to himself.

  ‘Mm. Yes. Maybe.’ The truth is that cleaning ladies are so hard to find here in Jolibois that I would happily settle for someone who won’t kick the cat. I can’t be fussing about youth and beauty, too.

  Well, all right, I have replied to one ad in the window of the tabac, placed by a lady who was looking for cleaning work. But it was pure chance that she turned out to be a breathy-voiced nineteen-year-old called Marie-Sophie. And our chat turned out to be one of the shortest phone conversations ever.

  ‘Would the work be declared or undeclared, Monsieur?’ she asked.

  ‘Undeclared,’ I assured her, thinking that she would obviously want to be paid in cash. I could hear her having a heated discussion with someone else in the background.

  ‘And is it for a family with children, Monsieur?’

  ‘Just me,’ I replied cheerfully. ‘I live alone.’

  There was more growling in the background, and her father came on the line to grill me about my intentions. Too late, I discovered that cleaning ladies in rural France prefer to be paid with social-security cheques, all fully declared, rather than with ready cash. And that men who live alone in Jolibois are a cause for considerable suspicion and alarm. Papa hung up on me.

  The subject of cleaning ladies comes up the next evening, at the home of Yves-Pascal and Ariane, the well-pressed notaire and his wife. They have invited me over for dinner, and usher me into a beautiful salon that seems to belong to a different universe to La Folie, or Gilles’s old mill house, or the other rustic houses into which I have been welcomed for a glass of red wine or a simple supper, their interiors heavy with brown oak furniture and faded floral wallpaper.

  Chez Yves-Pascal, diaphanous white curtains hang like clouds between floor-to-ceiling windows that flood the room with a fragrant light, scented and filtered by the flowers and shrubs in the garden outside. There are velvet sofas and armchairs which seem to sigh with contentment as you sink into them – a luxury I have not permitted myself at La Folie, but which I appreciate now, unaware that what I am appreciating is really an English touch, not a French one.

  The whole room envelops me in its civilized elegance, turning me into a boorish simpleton in my clompy shoes and mud-stained shirt. Especially when two poised young women – the daughters, I assume, both petite and charmante and somewhere in their early twenties – appear carrying trays of canapés. I know I’m staring, but I don’t seem to be able to help myself.

  Grey-eyed Yolande has an airy, bohemian air about her, coupled with a stillness that makes me think that she is noticing things – a glance, a remark, a tiny hiatus – in alarming detail. Her skin, stretched tight over her cheekbones, reminds me of unglazed porcelain, while the speed of her chatter betrays years spent in Paris. I am struck all the more by the sparkle of Sandrine, her younger sister; warmer and less mysterious than her sister, yet with something of the quicksilver evasiveness of a bead of mercury in a puzzle. Her dark eyes fix upon me for a second and then wander elsewhere, in search of a more interesting subject.

  Ariane comes sweeping into the room from the kitchen.

  ‘Donc, vous habitez à La Folie?’ she says, picking up the conversation we had at Ralph and Olga’s, and frowning at the two trays of canapés on the glass-topped table in front of the fireplace.

  ‘What’s wrong, Maman?’ asks Sandrine quickly. The two sisters glance at each other.

  ‘Rien,’ says Ariane, turning both trays through ninety degrees, so that they sit sideways rather than lengthways on the table.

  ‘Oui,’ I say, shifting to perch on the edge of my seat. ‘C’est La Folie. Et je l’aime bien.’

  ‘Quoi? Ah, La Folie. Yes, it’s a wild, old place, isn’t it? Yves-Pascal said there was an ecologist there before you. Romanian, I think?’

  ‘Polish, actually. And he did have a singular attitude to nature, which was simply to leave it to its own devices.’

  ‘Quelle horreur,’ drawls Ariane with a shudder. Behind her, Yves-Pascal has appeared, cradling a bottle with unusual care. ‘And now you live there all by yourself? How do you manage?’

  ‘The winter was tough at times,’ I reply, watching as Yves-Pascal pours vintage pineau into five crystal glasses, the golden liquid making blup-blup-blup sounds as it gurgles from the bottle. ‘And I’m fighting a losing battle against the spiders and the flies and the rising piles of paper. I don’t suppose you can recommend a good cleaning lady, can you?’

  ‘Ah!’ interrupts Yves-Pascal, the lines on his face dancing with a smile that is somewhere between a beatific grin and a grimace.

  ‘Marie-Claude!’ shrieks Sandrine, giggling. ‘Oh, Maman, you can’t.’

  ‘Yes, she can,’ mutters her sister.

  ‘Ah, Marie-Claude,’ echoes her father, clasping his hands and letting out the kind of sigh that would not disgrace a dying Romantic poet.

  ‘I might be able to,’ says Ariane, glaring at them both and inviting me to help myself from one of the trays of canapés: a smart-casual arrangement of pink radishes, each neatly trimmed to leave just a tiny flash of green stalk attached, with a bowl of buttery dip beside them, several folded napkins, a fork and a silver teaspoon. I hesitate, my hand paralysed in mid-air.

  ‘Um …’

  ‘It’s all right, just use your fingers,’ says Ariane kindly.

  ‘I dread doing something in an English way, and finding that it is deeply offensive to the French.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ chuckles Ariane. ‘I’m Belgian myself.’

  ‘Santé,’ says Yves-Pascal, with sing-song cheeriness, and we all clink glasses. ‘Marie-Claude!’ he whispers, winking at me.

  Dinner passes in a happy blur, not because I have drunk too much, but because I am dizzied by all this care and sparkle after months of mud and rain and sheep and soot.

  We have moved from the dinner table back to the pillowed chairs that sigh when you sit on them, and are now indulging in the very un-Jolibois practice of inhaling some sort of molasses-infused vapour from a smouldering narghile; a bong, in other words, that Yves-Pascal has brought back from one of his trips to Turkey.

  The ornate ceramic urn sits gently smouldering, while we pass its silver mouthpiece, attached via a length of embroidered hose, between us. I was expecting the taste to be acrid and alarming. But the sensation turns out to be more like inhaling a warm cloud of peppermint tea.

  ‘So why did you choose to live here of all places, Michael?’ asks Ariane, puffing on the bong. ‘Why Jolibois?’

  I wander back in time, through the smoke, to attempt to recall why it was. I know I wanted to be far enough south to have better weather, but close enough to England to see my parents. I remember scouting out aerodromes in the pouring rain, and being immediately drawn to this place that combined medieval higgledy-piggledy with supermarkets and a cinema. I recall that I saw the gleaming pipes of the church organ as a good omen, along with the neatly brushed clay courts at the tennis club and the ten-euro lunch I wolfed down at le Cheval Blanc, when I was still in shock at the fact tha
t I really was going to buy my very own house in France.

  This is all Ariane wants to know, but I’m just getting into my stride, and I need to tell her all the other good things about living here: about the way everyone shakes hands at the slightest provocation; that there are squawking chickens for sale outside the smart coiffeur; that people murmur ‘Messieurs, Dames’ when they join the queue at the bank; that other drivers don’t hoot me if I’m a nanosecond slow to notice that the traffic lights have changed, and the only time they flash me is to warn that there’s un flic with a speed-gun just around the next corner.

  It feels as if people trust each other here. Outside the clothes shop, closed for lunch, a rack of ladies’ blouses is left to bake in the sunshine. Jou-Jou the mason doesn’t expect to be paid a centime until the job is done. Children, when introduced, still present their faces to adults to be kissed.

  There are surreal pleasures, too, such as the night when an old couple who have pulled in at le Moulin Vaugelade, just down the road from Gilles’s house, insist upon giving me forty bananas after I help jump-start their car. What are they doing with all those bananas, by moonlight? Where are they taking them?

  ‘But all this,’ says Ariane, sounding as if she wishes she never asked, ‘it’s just because we’re in the countryside. It would be the same in rural England.’

  I wonder. My parents now live in Somerset, and I went to school in Dorset. I have some picture of rural English life. And it is not the same: not worse, not better, but different. There, in Somerset, my father was upset to have his tractor-mower stolen by skilful thieves. Here, Douglas the giant left his front door open, just over the hill from La Folie, and returned to find that someone had half-inched his daughter’s cello. Life is not perfect. Et in Arcadia ego.