C'est La Folie

by Michael Wright

  Fast jets roar low overhead in Jolibois, just as they do in Castle Cary. The difference here is that the cafés are still populated with the time-worn tricolore of wrinkled paysans in blue overalls, swigging their red wine before rumbling off in their white Citroën vans. There in the south-west of England, I see young men in the pubs, the collars of their pink polo shirts turned up, their silver Freelanders waiting outside as they sip their pints of IPA. Cattle farmers have diversified into buffalo, wild boar, bison and ostrich. The local pig farm has been converted into a candle factory.

  Here in the Limousin, it’s still sheep and cattle all the way, and let’s tighten our belts another notch, chérie, to mark each passing year.

  I think about all this as one of Ariane’s beautiful daughters passes me the wand of the narghile, and I take another puff.

  ‘You’re right, Ariane,’ I tell her. ‘This could be rural England. But it would be an England of fifty years ago. Living here makes me feel nostalgic for an England I never knew.’

  ‘That’s so sad,’ she says. And we all sit in silence, gazing at the wisps of smoke drifting from the top of the narghile.

  ‘Marie-Claude,’ whispers Yves-Pascal beside me, giving me a hearty nudge in the ribs.

  Next morning, I am woken by an unusual sound. Something is wrong. Titus is singing his heart out on top of the rubble dump. Cocorico! Cocorico! Why isn’t he in the chicken house, clamouring to be let out? I couldn’t have left the door open all night, could I?

  Yes, I could.

  I start counting my chickens: look, there’s Martha, there’s Margot, Melissa’s in her usual place on the window-sill with Titus, and there are Mary and Meg under the Espace. Mildred must be in her nesting box, squeezing out an egg.

  But Mildred’s not there.

  Nor is she in the barn, the workshop or under the pine trees by the fosse septique. Unlike Martha, she hasn’t worked out how to use the cat-flap, so she’s not hiding under the kitchen table, either.

  It’s too soon to be alarmed. Mildred will turn up. I know she will.

  After lunch, there’s still no sign of her. I fire up the brushcutter, and start cutting a swathe through my jungle in search of the runaway. I’ve just refuelled for another session when my heart leaps. For there, in the long grass, is a white feather.

  Two paces further on, and there’s another feather. Then another. And another. The regular spacing is odd. Was Mildred dropping them as she journeyed to find her way home, like Theseus with Ariadne’s ball of wool? Or to help me to rescue her? What’s unusual, too, is that these are the soft, downy feathers that sit close to her skin, not the stiff quills of her wings and back. In a game of strip poker, a lady doesn’t surrender her underwear first.

  Holding my breath, I follow the innocent trail. Feather follows feather until, turning a corner, I breathe a heavy sigh.

  There is no blood. But there, amid the green bracken, lies a tell-tale avalanche of white. Someone has burst open a feather pillow beneath the trees.

  I can’t help wishing it were one of the others. Mildred was such a chatty soul, with a frank opinion on every subject, and a forceful cluck that always felt as if she were thwacking me with her handbag. The poor dear started life at La Folie at the very top of the chicken pecking order, but what with all her hang-ups and neuroses, gradually found herself demoted. Two parts Margaret Thatcher to one part Joyce Grenfell, Mildred was the sort of girl you notice before anyone else, and hope she doesn’t notice you.

  And now she’s gone, and the place feels empty without her. It’s stupid, I know, but every chicken counts when you live alone. I still think she’s going to come waddling round the corner, clucking about how Titus never does the washing-up. And I expect her to come rushing to greet me when I rattle up the drive in the Espace, playing her suicidally literal game of Chicken.

  The other birds seem confused, and have made me understand the word ‘crestfallen’ in a whole new light. Titus, bless him, has bravely taken to perching on Mildred’s spot nearest the door of the chicken house. So if the fox returns, he will now have to reckon with Titus first. Titus may be very stupid, but I find his bravery deeply moving. And wish I had a little more of the same quality myself.

  First Emil, and now Mildred. Creatures I barely knew, and yet whose deaths have hit me harder than I would have believed. I’ve come to France to learn to be tough, and what I’m discovering is that I’m less tough than I ever imagined.

  39

  WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

  A week later, I am sitting at the kitchen table, sipping scalding coffee from one of Zumbach’s earthenware cups, enjoying the silence of the early afternoon. I am meant to be editing a CV for Gilles’s son, the silent thundercloud from Châteaudun, but mostly I am thinking about poor Mildred. Suddenly I hear a commotion upstairs. Clitterclat go the mighty claws across the bedroom floor, just above my head. The cat must be taunting its latest victim.

  But no: the cat is sitting on my lap. And she has heard it too. Ears flattened (her), heart pounding (me), we leap up to investigate.

  Nothing. The air is so still that I can hear the sheep tearing at the grass outside. The cat stares up at the roof beams, clearly thinking in terms of vampire bats. With a child’s foreboding, I check under the bed. Still nothing.

  Recently, I decided that I should learn to co-exist with the invisible scuttlers in my roof-space. They were here first, and if I were to regard them as benign sitting-tenants, I might sleep better at night. Why can’t we all just get along?

  But in the mornings, when I trudge out to feed the sheep, I have started to find clumps of yellow laine de verre – glass-wool insulation – in the scrub around the house. The critters – whoever and whatever they are – are renovating my roof, sans planning permission. This means war.

  My bedroom is a small box with an open space above its ceiling, enclosed by a low parapet. This space is the place, I have no doubt, Where the Wild Things Are.

  I toy with the idea of donning my wolf suit and climbing up there to investigate but, after considering this for a split second, opt to volunteer the cat instead. Something about that shadowy space unnerves me, as if there might be some sleeping evil up there. If so, I have no wish to wake it from its slumber.

  Standing on tiptoe, I can push the wide-eyed volunteer just far enough up the wall for her to scramble over the parapet and on to the ceiling. I hear her padding like a cat-burglar across the tongue and groove, as I wait for the wild rumpus to start.

  Above me, the cat has stopped to sniff something. My skin prickles and my heart leaps as a stray image jumps inside my brain: a rusty man-trap on a heavy iron chain.

  ‘Eva, don’t move a muscle,’ I hiss. The cat peers down at me, spooked by my tone, pupils dilated with the excitement of this real-live game of Murder in the Dark. ‘Don’t you dare move,’ I repeat over my shoulder, as I race to fetch the ladder.

  Up I climb, and close my eyes with relief as I register that the rusty trap is not set, after all. To be certain, I lob the end of its chain towards the jagged jaws.

  The thing snaps shut with a force that could shatter a man’s arm as if it were a stale baguette. Unperturbed, the cat slinks into the shadows, while I wonder if it’s too early for a Pastis.

  Wars, unfortunately, have a habit of escalating. That very night, as I lie in bed, the critters unleash their elite storm-trooper brigade just above my head.

  Buh-dumm. Buh-dumm. Buh-dumm. Oh golly. What the hell is that thing? It sounds about the size of a small grizzly. And it’s only got two legs. My mind races through the obvious possibilities: King Kong? Rumpelstiltzkin? Mrs Rochester?

  Buh-dumm. Buh-dumm. Buh-dumm. It’s stopped. I hold my breath, listening. And not four feet from where I am lying in bed, staring up into the inky darkness, there comes an eerie sound. Someone is drumming on the floor. It sounds almost as if he’s peeing through the ceiling at me.

  Nom de Dieu! He is peeing through the ceiling at me.

  ‘Right, that’s
it, Georges,’ I say out loud. ‘This time you’ve gone too far.’

  I name him Georges on the spur of the moment, because I’d hate to think of someone I don’t know peeing through my bedroom ceiling.

  Next day, I drop in on Gilles for un apéro and ask him what he reckons.

  ‘I think it’s a fouine,’ he says, stroking his beard. ‘And you must do something about it, or it’ll have the tiles off your roof. You should call in la chasse.’

  ‘But won’t the horses have trouble getting up the stairs?’

  Gilles pulls a business card from a board criss-crossed with faded ribbons. ‘Phone this man.’

  I put the card in my shirt pocket as I rise to go.

  When I get home, I look up fouine in my French dictionary: a stone marten.

  Then I look up stone marten in my English dictionary: ‘Hunts rats and mice.’

  Oh, great. So I’ve got a whole food chain up there. Yet something stops me phoning the number on the card. I feel I should give diplomacy – and Georges – one last chance. One day, I will learn to stop giving my animals names.

  It soon emerges, however, that Georges’s dirty protest through the ceiling was not an escalation of violence, but a parting shot. The smell of the cat must have been enough for him to decide to move out. And I only wish I could explain to the cat what a heroic victory she has won.

  40

  LES ANGLAIS

  Raphaël le Prêtre has invited me for supper after the Saturday-evening Mass. I’m expecting him to ask if I’d mind playing the organ a little more quietly during the chants. Instead, as we tuck into our steaming bowlfuls of beetroot soup, the conversation turns to Jolibois and its future. And Raphaël says something that makes me stop, spoon suspended in mid-air, and wonder if I’ve misheard him.

  ‘This place is dying, and you’re our last hope,’ he declares, with a dramatic wag of his finger.

  Now I like to think that my contributions to the Jolibois men’s over-35s 2nd tennis team will one day include the occasional victory amongst my defeats. But isn’t Raphaël going just a bit far? I mean, it’s all very well to cast me as the Clint of Jolibois, but I still have a lot of work to do on my backhand, and I don’t have a poncho.

  ‘Je ne suis pas sûr …’ I begin.

  ‘You have wealth and education,’ he says, waving his hand.

  ‘Er, tu crois …’

  ‘You have youth,’ he continues.

  ‘C’est gentil.’

  ‘You have children.’

  ‘Non, je n’ai …’ I’m about to explain that I don’t have any children, and then – as the centime drops – I blush the colour of the soup we’re slurping. Raphaël is not talking about me at all. He’s talking about les Anglais en général.

  It’s surprising – and encouraging – to find a Frenchman casting the arrival of les Anglais here in Jolibois in such a positive light: as a force for good, rather than for ill. When I trundled down from the organ loft after Mass last week, the cherubic Henri’s wife, seraphic Françoise, was saying that she thinks les Anglais are beneficial for the region, too, because we tend to renovate so beautifully all the old houses that the French never wanted to buy in the first place. And, as the man in the paper-shop tells me, at least we’re not Parisians.

  Well, allez les Rosbifs!

  Next day, a squirrel flashes into a tree as I bump back up the drive to La Folie, and I stop to take a closer look.

  I know, I know. It’s only a squirrel.

  But that isn’t a grey squirrel. It’s a red one, and the first one I’ve seen at La Folie, its eyes glittering, its auburn coat shining in the dappled sunlight as it sits on a branch and twitches its whiskers at me. I’m struck by how much smaller it looks than its grey cousins, and how it appears more like a creature complete in itself; less like a rat with a bushy tail.

  I haven’t seen a red squirrel since I was a child. And I’m surprised to find myself suddenly longing for flapjacks in front of jackanory; for Spangles and Jammy Dodgers, and for kicking through fallen leaves with my Clarks Commandos on the way to school. I feel like I’ve just spotted someone who died long ago, like my first English teacher, Mr Gould, who would read us Tennyson on a Saturday morning with tears trickling down his cheeks.

  I think I must have been spending too much time alone.

  ‘C’est normal,’ shrugs Gilles, when I tell him about the squirrel. For red squirrels are indeed still common in France. How can a man know that something is special, until it is lost?

  I find myself hoping that I and my fellow Brits here are not like the grey squirrels introduced into Britain from America in the nineteenth century, forcing the indigenous red squirrel into retreat. I don’t want to discover that I have unwittingly become part of some eco-cultural catastrope.

  The French have always been much bigger on this sort of thing than we are in Britain. They have their Académie Française to safeguard the lingo. Radio stations are expected to include a fixed proportion of French music in their Anglo-dominated playlists. Each little town, Jolibois included, has its jours du patrimoine, when significant events in local history are celebrated. Not for the tourists, but the locals.

  All this makes me wonder if there is a way of living here, for those of us who have bought property in France, that will not stamp out the local culture in the way that it has already been all but crushed by the Brits in the Dordogne. Far better if France were to rub off on us than we on it.

  I like the fact that émail remains – as far as the locals here are concerned – the ancient craft of enamelling, and even the telephone is regarded with suspicion. When I phone Monsieur Laveille about his quote for the oak floor in the summer sitting-room, he insists on driving over to speak to me in person. Presumably his horse-drawn cart is in for a service, or he’d have turned up in that.

  In England, I try not to phone people at meal times. There’s always the danger they might choke on their Pot Noodle at their desk. Here in France, it’s quite the opposite. Everyone goes home for lunch, so meal times are the time to catch people, and the small ads for tractors in the window of the tabac invariably advise ‘H.R.’ (heures repas).

  Even the ouvriers who possess mobile phones never switch them on, claiming that ‘il n’y a pas de signal ici’. Mind you, from what I’ve heard, there may be a selective mobile-phone signal which works fine for arranging amorous liaisons, just not so well for fielding enquiries from clients.

  I have noticed, too, that the local ouvriers have no desire to work slavishly just to amass a fat pile of fric in the bank. They earn what is needful to live, and ça suffit. In England, this might look like laziness. Here, it looks like contentment.

  A few days later, Ariane, the notaire’s wife, phones.

  ‘Are you all right, Michael?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes, why?’ I’m wondering if they’ve all come down with typhus after puffing on whatever was in that narghile a fortnight ago.

  ‘I think I’ve found you a cleaning lady. She should be giving you a call later in the week.’

  And so I come face to face with the famous Marie-Claude: a pocket battleship with sharp eyes and sharper teeth, who can’t be much older than me, yet who exudes a powerful aura of maturity and superiority. Trim, neat and wearing very little make-up, she would be rather attractive if she weren’t so scary. She certainly doesn’t spare my feelings when it comes to describing what she thinks of the state of La Folie. I explain that I feel ashamed about the mess, and am most awfully relieved that she’s come to help sort me out, but she still looks at me as if she’s caught me throwing pebbles at puppies.

  ‘Was this place habitable when you bought it?’ she demands, gazing around her as witheringly as a scout-mistress interrupting a pillow fight. Because even if it was, she intimates, it certainly isn’t now. Remembering an urgent appointment, the cat slinks out of the cat-flap.

  ‘Er, oui, but there was – there is – still a lot of work to do,’ I stammer, wondering if I could squeeze through the cat-flap,
too.

  ‘Dis donc,’ she mutters.

  Ariane warned me on the phone that Marie-Claude was ‘très timide’ and nervous about working for an Englishman. I honestly think the wrong one has turned up. ‘Jolibois Cleaning Lady Kidnapped by Aliens’ will be the headline in tomorrow’s Le Populaire. And I’ll be the next to go.

  Admittedly, La Folie does look a little as if Hurricane Jean-Pierre has just hit. My filing system consists of various piles of paper strewn all over the floor, and I still haven’t found the right sort of cupboard at the dépôt vente for things like clarinets, aircraft batteries and tennis racquets.

  ‘So you haven’t bought une bombe?’ enquires Marie-Claude, becoming even less timide by the minute. I guess she has finally decided the house is so irredeemably dirty, it would be best just to blow it to bits.

  ‘Une bombe? Pourquoi?’

  ‘Pour les araignées,’ she whispers, gesturing at the ceiling. Ah, of course: an aerosol to kill the spiders. And she’s whispering because the spiders may overhear. What if they use their spidery powers on us before we can nuke them with la bombe?

  ‘But I like spiders,’ I explain. ‘They kill flies.’

  ‘In that case,’ asks Marie-Claude flatly, ‘would you like me to leave all of those?’ She indicates the soot-blackened candyfloss of spiderwebs between the beams, which makes the winter sitting-room resemble a cross between Miss Havisham’s mouldering boudoir and a coal bunker.

  ‘Ah, er, non,’ I concede, cringing anew. ‘Vous avez raison. I’ll buy a bomb for the spiders.’

  Marie-Claude and I soon discover that we feel differently about all sorts of animals. I tell her how excited I am about the red squirrel on the drive, and she shrugs and says she hopes the hunters will kill it. Similarly, when Martha and the rest of the Egg Squad wander into the kitchen for a chat, they are soon sent into a clucking retreat with a whack from Marie-Claude’s broom.