The countryside en route to Sarlat makes me shake my head in wonder. Fields and lakes stretch themselves out before me as if someone had printed a life-size map of France on to khaki velvet. Gazing down from four thousand feet, I have an inkling of how northern Europe must have looked before human beings came along and began to spoil it.
And then I tap the altimeter, and check that I have it set for the correct sea-level pressure. For the ground rises over the Dordogne, making everything look closer than I’d expect. The houses are different, too. The walls appear sandier than in the Limousin; the stone redder, as though the sun had burned the skin of a grey old man. And then the land falls away, and my four thousand feet above sea level suddenly feels high after all, as if I had snorkled over the edge of a reef and into deep water.
A few minutes later, and the earth’s surface rises again. I can see Sarlat aerodrome, perched on its plateau like a cake on the edge of a table.
‘Sarlat, Golf-Zulu-Alpha est un Luscombe en provenance de St Juste, à destination de vos installations. Je suis à cinq minutes au nord; je rappellerai vertical du terrain à mille-cinq-cents pieds fox-echo, Sarlat.’
I land – whoopsadaisy, let’s hope nobody saw that one – and head hungrily for the restaurant. A deep-fried hippo would go down a treat. But the place is deserted.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur,’ chirrups a voice behind me.
‘Have you already stopped serving lunch?’ I ask, turning to face a fiftysomething man with round specs and a smile that makes his whole face crinkle like a cobweb.
‘About two years ago,’ he sighs. ‘The restaurant is gone.’
My lower lip must have started to tremble, because the man adds quietly, ‘But you’re welcome to share our lunch, Monsieur, if you would like.’
‘Well, I … I …’
‘It’s not much,’ he adds, extending an arm towards a chart-table where two children have begun laying out cutlery, ‘but there should be enough.’
I’m so busy feeling touched and blessed and unworthy that I almost forget to say yes. I can’t remember the last time I spontaneously invited a foreign stranger to lunch, because I know I never have.
I start stammering about wanting to pay, but my host – Daniel – saves me from my own ungraciousness.
‘What make is that joli petit avion, Monsieur?’ he asks, pointing at the little aeroplane glinting in the winter sun.
‘Luscombe Silvaire. From the USA. 1946.’
‘So will you give us your beautiful plane, if we give you lunch?’
‘It’s a deal,’ I laugh.
And the airport staff share their lunch with me. A home-made quiche, served by the children. A few tomatoes. Some hastily divided steaks and a grilled magret de canard, cooked by the lantern-jawed Chief Flying Instructor. A floppy lettuce. A ripe Camembert. Tarte aux pommes. Coffee prepared by the white-haired airport manager. It is so perfect, I feel like I’ve just wandered into one of those black-and-white films you long for on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I must learn to be more spontaneous.
Over coffee, I ask them about the town down in the valley.
‘We hardly ever go there,’ says Daniel sadly, ‘because it’s too expensive for us now. A Coke in town will cost you four euros.’ I know why this is – it’s the curse of les Anglais – though they are too polite to say so.
After lunch, I want to offer Daniel a flight in the Luscombe. But that won’t leave me enough fuel to get back to St Juste. And if I refuel, I risk being late to play the organ for Mass.
I refuel. And up we roar, into the clear blue sky. At five hundred feet, I ask Daniel if he’d like to take control. That cobweb again. And he gives me a panoramic tour of his valley.
‘What’s the agriculture here?’ I ask him, gazing down at the fields beneath us.
‘There’s nothing here now except tourism,’ he replies, glancing at the instruments. ‘Everything is English.’ He doesn’t sound bitter; merely wistful.
We land, and I keep the engine running while Daniel climbs out, thanking me profusely, his grey hair flying in the prop-blast.
‘It is I who must thank you,’ I yell, ‘for giving my aeroplane back to me.’
He grins. ‘Think of it as an extended loan,’ he shouts. ‘That way, you must come back.’
As I take off into the sunset once more, the deep voice of the airport manager crackles over the r/t: ‘Merci pour la visite, Zulu-Alpha. Hope we see you again.’
‘Thanks, Sarlat,’ I reply, almost with a lump in my throat. For I feel as if I am leaving an old friend.
My route home takes me over Lascaux, with its celebrated cave-paintings. I peer down at that unspectacular hill, and try to imagine a hairy little man creating beauty beneath it, by the light of an animal-grease lamp, seventeen thousand years ago.
The cave is locked up now. Too many people wanted to see it, and their breath was poisoning the paintings. So the French have buried a concrete facsimile two hundred yards away, to give visitors a similar experience without destroying the real thing. Sometimes I wish they could find a way of doing the same thing for the whole country, before it is too late.
45
SEPTEMBER: THE STYMPHALIAN BIRDS
For months, ever since Gilles told me I must mow the field behind the house, I have been on the hunt for une tondeuse autoportée d’occasion – a second-hand ride-on mower – powerful enough to cope with the wonky terrain at La Folie. But tracking down the right gadget is easier said than done. Much as I love browsing collections of manly power-tools, I soon lose count of the number of times I have stood in the chatty melee that passes for a queue chez Roland, purveyor of chainsaws, brushcutters and other weapons of mass destruction to the paysans of Jolibois.
Roland is a lovely man, who looks more like a toymaker, twinkling behind wire-rimmed specs, than a chainsaw-mender. Like almost every man over fifty in the region, he sports an impressive moustache, which he carefully strokes when he wants to emphasize a point.
‘You say your land is on a slope,’ he says on one of my visits, clenching his fist and offering it to me in what looks like an impromptu game of scissors-paper-stone. The first time the man in the Renault garage did this to me, I got all confused and tried to bump knuckles with him. But now I know that I’m simply required to shake Roland’s wrist, because his hands are oily. ‘So just how steep is it?’
I stretch out my fingers and indicate the gradient with my forearm. ‘Nee-hai-yaaaa!’ is what I don’t say to Roland, though I am tempted. He doesn’t look like a Bruce Lee fan.
‘That’s steep all right,’ he murmurs, stroking his moustache. ‘All I have is a machine that isn’t powerful enough. But it may help until something suitable comes in.’
‘You mean I can hire it?’
‘No. I’ll lend it to you.’
‘But I feel I should pay you something.’
Roland waves away my objections. ‘I’ll get someone to deliver it,’ he says. ‘You live at La Folie? Is tomorrow OK?’
He doesn’t ask me for a deposit, or even my phone number. We simply shake wrists and smile, and know that all will be well. I suppose that people must – once upon a time – have known that all would be well in England, too, in the days when we used to trust one another.
Next morning, a man who faintly reminds me of Buddy Holly in a green boiler-suit comes and mows several strips of my jungle for me whilst demonstrating how to use Roland’s machine. ‘As long as you stay in first gear, it should do the job,’ says Buddy, pushing his glasses up his nose and shaking his quiff at me.
And so I begin. It’s a long afternoon beneath the baking sun, and frankly, it’s all a bit much for Roland’s machine.
I’m on the penultimate strip when the beast begins to emit a series of haunting groans. After a final death-rattle, I am left sitting on a horrible silence.
Gilles is waiting for me and an apéritif as, dripping with sweat, I haul the dead machine back to the barn.
‘Salut, Gilles,’ I pant, wiping my gri
my hand on my shorts before shaking his. Gilles and I don’t do wrists.
‘What have you done?’ he asks.
‘I think I’ve broken Roland’s appareil.’
‘Not that. Ça!’ Gilles is gesticulating at the field I’ve just mown.
‘I mowed the field, just like you told me to.’
‘But it’s too hot for that now. The short grass will dry out and die. We’ve had no rain for weeks; none is forecast for a while to come. You should have left it well alone, so that the sheep could graze at the base of the long stems.’
I think about this for a moment. I consider setting fire to the mower. I even consider setting fire to Gilles. But in the end I say the only thing that makes any sense to me right now.
‘Come on, Gilles. It’s six o’clock. Let’s have a drink.’
Next day, cap in hand, I go and tell Roland that I think I’ve broken his autoportée.
‘Ah, c’est pas grave,’ he says. ‘Not to worry.’
‘But I must pay for the repairs.’
‘No, it’s not your fault. The thing wasn’t powerful enough. Hopefully something else will come in soon.’
Lovely man, Roland.
After lunch, there is an unexpected eclipse of the sun. Douglas the giant has come to call. Like me, he keeps a few chickens. But he has no cockerel. And he must have heard through the grapevine – from Fred the Viking, I presume – about my surfeit of roosters.
While we’re standing there, admiring my quartet of young varmints – each still no bigger than a pigeon, and all doing their best to stay out of Titus’s way – I tell Douglas about the mower, and my high estimation of Roland.
‘Ah, now, well, you say that,’ says Douglas. ‘But I went in there to look for a mower with Jill. And it was …’ Douglas removes his prayer-cap and scratches his head. ‘… it was, cor, dear.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Well, we were interested in this mower, right?’
‘Right.’
‘And I suppose I must have just touched it with my foot.’ Douglas peers down into the far distance at his feet, each of which is roughly the size of Luxembourg. ‘I mean, it wasn’t as if I kicked it, or anything. I used my toe to point something out to Jill. And I dunno, maybe I …’ He purses his lips.
‘Anyway, suddenly the old boy’s rushing over, isn’t he?’ continues Douglas, ‘and pointing at his machine, and wagging his finger at how I’ve made this tiny little crack in the plastic.’
Remembering the scene, Douglas raises his hands and recalls what he attempted to say in his Estuary French.
‘I said “Non, mate, non, non, non je ne sais pas. Je n’ai pas kické ton lawnmoweur. Vous avez le wrong idée.” But this bloke, Roland, was having none of it. Because then his wife comes racing over, too, doesn’t she?’ Douglas’s face reddens at the memory. ‘And she’s backing him up. They’re both having a right go at me. But I can’t seem to get it through to them that it wasn’t me. I mean, I know I’ve got big Bronskis and everything, right, but I couldn’t have broken it just like that.
‘So anyway, I’m about to walk out, because they’re trying it on, and Jill grabs my arm, and then she starts having a go at me, too. “Douglas,” she says. “Douglas, just listen for a second. They’re not blaming you. They’re saying they know about the crack, and they’re sorry. And the machine therefore has seventy euros off. So what do you think?”
‘I think I feel a right twerp.’
*
It’s still light when I return to La Folie from this week’s French class, and the chickens are pecking at the last few grains of corn in their feed-tray before turning in. Weary with subjunctives and conditionals, I pour myself a glass of cold Muscat from the fridge, and wander out on to the terrace. The cat comes and rubs herself against my legs, tail held high as a Rajah’s parasol, and then jumps on to the table as she waits for me to sit and make a place for her on my lap. Today is the first birthday of my new life in France.
As the two of us gaze out over the trees in the valley, I try to remember how this view looked to me, exactly a year ago.
Did I see it more clearly then, when it was new to me? Or do I see it better now; now that the misty glow of romanticism has been wiped away like the condensation from a steamed-up bathroom mirror?
The inside of the house was once an organic whole to me, but now I am newly aware of it as a tangle of constituent parts. The pointed stonework. The insulated roof. The rendered walls. There is no piano to transform the summer sitting-room into a music room, for the floor remains stacked up, in bundles of broad oak, in one corner. And the scaffolding, gathering dust even now, lends the room the air of a building site, or the stage set for a post-industrial production of Macbeth.
A gaggle of young cockerels squawks past the terrace, running for their lives, pursued by Titus: four Stukas chased by a Blenheim. I don’t like to think about it, but their days are numbered; all except whichever one I spare for Douglas. Behind me, the Rastafarians start up their evening bleating, hungry for their granulated luzerne. The grass has still not recovered from the incinerating blasts of summer, and my ill-timed mowing has only made things worse. Their desperate foghorns always make me feel a pang, especially Doris’s. But yet more heart-rending is the fragile piping of the lambs, Camillo and Claudette, who still sound like children even though they are almost as big as their mums.
Smiling to myself, I gaze across at the trees, and at the shining whiteness of the clouds that decorate the beckoning sky. Perfect flying weather. If anything, I think this sky looks more beautiful to me now than it did a year ago.
Tomorrow will be a flying day. I have invited Sandrine, the younger daughter of Yves-Pascal and Ariane, to come for un petit tour d’avion in the Luscombe. Still in her early twenties, Sandrine is far too young and cool to be interested in a square thirtysomething like me. But it’s fun to be in the orbit of her sparkle. And I can’t help wanting to impress.
‘C’est ça?’ gulps Sandrine, fluttering her long eyelashes in horror at my fifty-nine-year-old two-seater dream machine. We are standing in the opalescent light of hangar three at St Juste, surrounded by dusty flying machines in varying states of airworthiness.
‘Oui, c’est magnifique, non?’ From her silence, I think she was expecting a LearJet.
‘And why is nobody else flying, on such a wonderful day?’ she asks.
Good question. I appear to have joined a flying club where no one actually flies. Among the regulars, there’s Roger, who always wanted to fly, and Roland, who is building a kit-plane that looks as if it will never fly. Then there’s Alain, with his kit-plane he no longer dares fly, Patrice with his plans-built plane that is too expensive to fly, Monsieur Rémy, with his detailed notes about the planes he used to fly, and wily old Marcel, with his tales of the planes he attempted to fly and invariably crashed. These chaps may not fly themselves, but they do like to gather at the aeroclub to lament the fact that no one flies any more.
With my head buried inside the Luscombe’s cowling, I recognize the sound of Marcel’s shuffling gait on the gravel of the hangar floor. Please, let the old fox not be in one of his moods.
‘Salut, Marcel,’ I say as cheerfully as I can manage. ‘May I introduce my friend Sandrine?’
Hands deep in his pockets, grey hair slicked back, Marcel nods. A cigarillo twitches on his bottom lip.
‘What are you looking in there for?’ he growls at me.
‘Ah, you know, checking the hoses are all properly connected, plugs all tight …’
‘Bof!’ Marcel rolls his eyes and pulls a face like a burnt omelette. ‘You don’t know anything about engines.’
‘I know enough to feel confident about this one.’
‘Bof!’ He smirks at Sandrine. ‘With the compressions on those cylinders, it’s amazing that thing ever gets off the ground.’
‘Merci, Marcel.’ I glance at my young passenger, who has never flown in a small plane before. She manages a brave smile.
‘The tyres look a bit flat,’ snorts Marcel. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m topping up the oil.’
‘Have you got a leak?’
I resist the urge to pour several glugs of multigrade into his trouser pocket.
‘Marcel, what’s the problem? Why are you being like this, suddenly, today?’
The old man shrugs, and kicks the gravel. I can’t help thinking about what Gilles told me recently: that rams rarely fight unless there are ewes in the same field, and cockerels will also happily co-exist until you mix them up with some shapely hens.
‘Look, let’s go flying together, one day,’ I say, after a pause.
Marcel shrugs. ‘It’s not a bad aeroplane,’ he mutters to Sandrine, and kicks at a piece of gravel on the hangar floor.
After we have pushed the Luscombe out on to the shimmering apron, I show Sandrine how to climb up into the tiny cockpit’s right-hand seat.
‘Put your right foot on the step, and grab the strut inside the windshield with your right hand. Now swing your left leg into the footwell, watching out for the control column on your side. Et voilà: Bob est ton oncle.’
While Marcel smirks and smokes in the shade of the hangar, I bake on the apron, running through the start-up procedure I have followed so many times before. Brakes on. Wheels chocked. Throttle set. Contact. With rivulets of sweat already dripping down my temples, I stand in front of the plane and give the prop a mighty swing. Nothing. Then another swing, and another, and – having waited until I am properly red in the face, and Marcel is beaming with misanthropic glee – the wheezy old Continental splutters into life.
And then we’re taking off, and Sandrine gives a little squeal when the sun-browned earth falls away, with the engine roaring at full-tilt, and the Luscombe’s nose pointing at outer space. As we surge high into the cold, clear air, the houses shrink beneath us until they’re small enough to use in a game of Monopoly.
C'est La Folie Page 30
