Dinner is served in silence, in the flickering light of a dozen candles and three naked wall-lamps. Eyebrows are raised. Nods are exchanged. An ambulance is not required.
‘C’est formidable,’ murmurs the Proustian Madeleine, after trying my chicken korma.
‘Super bon,’ concurs Claude the electrician, looking shocked. I have done my bit, for now, for Blighty. Mind you, despite the mildness of the sauce, its un-French spiciness does take some people by surprise.
‘I can see why you need these things,’ says the smiley (and habitually ice-cool) Maxim, fanning himself with a poppadom.
‘Where’s the bread basket?’ asks Kiki, scanning the table.
‘I’m so sorry. I don’t have one,’ I confess.
‘No matter,’ says Jeanne kindly. ‘A board is just as good. Oh, this is nice.’ She looks more closely at my cheeseboard, with its green floral tile, circa 1979, embossed in two flat slabs of linseeded plywood.
‘Actually that’s the cheeseboard,’ I explain.
‘Is it old?’
‘It’s something I made at school, a long time ago,’ I call, over my shoulder, hurrying to fetch the breadboard.
‘You see, Kiki,’ laughs Mermoz, in a stage-whisper loud enough for me to hear from next door. ‘He’s a craftsman, too.’
‘It’s a lovely thing,’ says his wife, swapping me the green cheeseboard for the breadboard. ‘You must keep it for your children.’
‘Actually I gave it to my parents, years ago. And they gave it back to me.’
But Jeanne isn’t listening. She gasps when she sees the two baguettes, upside-down, on the board. Hurriedly she turns them over.
‘You must never do that,’ she warns. ‘It’s very bad luck.’ And, in case I think she’s being superstitious, she adds that her mother would never serve bread without scratching a cross on the bottom first.
‘Tonight you really should be riding a horse and wearing one of those big feather hats, Michael,’ declares Mermoz.
‘Chéri,’ sighs his wife, ‘I think you’re thinking of the wrong kind of Indians.’
After dinner, I cannot resist heading to the piano and singing the one French song I know: ‘Clopin Clopant’, about a lovesick man with a limp, which is especially for the hobbling Kiki. The performance is greeted with such generous rapture that I know I should stop. But of course the skiers beg for another – they want to sing, too – so I dig out my trusty Abba songbook, because they say they know Abba. But ‘knowing’ a foreign language song is not the same as being able to sing along to it. So I just sing, horribly loud, on my own – which would be fine if I could actually sing. Instead, I am an ace practitioner of the art of tuneless yelling. I yell until the rafters are creaking, my voice is hoarse and the lightning is flashing in the sky outside. It’s a relief when Claude the electrician comes to join me for the high bits in ‘Money, Money, Money’.
‘It’s lucky that you don’t have any neighbours,’ says Kiki in the stunned silence that ensues.
‘You certainly are … unusual, Michael,’ adds the Proustian Madeleine.
‘I think there’s a storm coming,’ says Maxim, gazing out through the French windows.
‘Didn’t we just hear it?’ asks Mermoz.
Shortly after one a.m. we all kiss and shake hands, and they head off down the drive, into the night. Exhausted, I slide into bed, where the cat is curled up in a lifeless ball. She loves people, too, so it was tough on her to be deprived of so much company tonight.
Two hours later, the cat and I awake with a start; we both sit bolt upright in bed.
The rain is smashing on the roof tiles and thunder crackles overhead. But it is another sound that has woken us. Outside in the darkness, one of the sheep is emitting a throaty wail, like someone retching into a basin. The Rastafarians never bleat at night. And they never bleat like that.
I pull a coat over my pyjamas and head out into the storm with a searchlight, feeling the rain pummel my shoulders as I stagger up the hill. It may rain half as often in France as in England, but every raindrop is twice as wet.
I can see the sheep sheltering under the gutter at the back of the house, their eyes glowing green amid the glitter of the raindrops. And then I pick out the lone creature bawling her heart out: Claudette.
For a split second, a lightning flash illuminates the whole field, and I feel like I’ve wandered into a B-movie version of Far from the Madding Crowd. I pace across the hillside, raking the wet grass with the beam of my searchlight, conscious that Claudette is thundering close behind. Perhaps Nemo, her firstborn, is caught in a fence. Perhaps he’s alone; shivering, disoriented by the storm.
And then, in the sea of brilliant green, the torch’s beam lights upon something very black and still. Something I’ve been searching for, and did not wish to find.
Nemo lies curled, eyes closed, soaking up the rain. Around his neck, a scarlet necklace. Beside him, his assailant has laid out his guts in the grass. Habeas corpus.
Claudette is making a furious din behind me, so I stand aside to let her look, shining my torch on her dead lamb. I need her to understand that he is gone. Last year, when I took the dying Emil from Doris, she screamed and hollered for two weeks, calling for her vanished lamb. I felt it was my fault. But the sight of this broken black puppet makes no more sense to Claudette than it does to me.
And so we just stand there, the two of us, as the torch-beam slowly dims. I, silent; she, screaming into the night. And in the end the light goes out, and we are both left alone in the dark.
Claudette now falls silent for three days, while Nemo’s body lies in a box in the barn. I can’t face dealing with it yet, not with the rain still bucketing down. From time to time I go in there to look at the perfection of him, fluffy as a black teddy bear, attempting to accept a reality that, even now, I somehow do not wish to believe. One of the things I wanted to learn from living alone, close to nature, was about birth and creation. It never occurred to me that mostly I would learn about death.
Gilles strokes his beard when I tell him about the lamb.
‘I think it was a badger,’ he says. ‘A fox would have taken the whole thing, instead of just eating the entrails like that.’
Finally, next to Silent Mary’s grave beneath the lone pine, I dig a deep hole. The chickens peck around me, searching for worms. With my boot, I begin to press down the earth on top of Nemo’s body. And then I freeze. For at this precise moment, after days of silence, comes a new and eerie sound. From out of sight behind the house, it is Claudette, sending one last, desperate wail into the sky.
Slowly, I trudge back up to La Folie. Seeking comfort, the cat jumps on to my lap, and I stroke her cold fur until the purring starts. I can’t help smiling as Martha appears on the window-sill in front of us, pecking at the glass. She reminds me that it’s time I fed the sheep. So I wander up to their field, feel them nuzzling against my legs in search of an extra mouthful. Across the valley, the chapel of St Sauveur glows in the late-afternoon sun.
And here, now, at last, I have an idea for the first sentence of the book I have for so long lacked the courage and inspiration to begin.
It’s not much of an opening, but it’s a start:
I am three years old, and I want to be Queen Victoria’s
train-driver.
And then I lay down my pen, for in the distance I have heard the jubilant shriek of a steam-whistle. It is time.
I charge off down the drive like a six-year-old, almost blinded by the sunlight as I whip up clouds of dust with my clumpy shoes, racing to beat the train to the level-crossing. Allez, allez! Turn right up the road out of Jolibois, then sprint left down the track to Gilles’s farm, where the railway line curves around his land like silver leaf on the rim of a plate.
Already I can see a plume of steam rising out of the trees in the distance. I can hear the kiffa-kiffa-kiff-kiffa-kiff of the pistons. And I can almost smell the coal-smoke belching from the funnel as I catch a glimpse of sunlight glinting on pol
ished paintwork in the trees, and the great beast emerges from the shadows like a dragon from its cave.
Excitement electrifies my skin as I take in the iron monster’s gleaming green beauty, feel the great clanking weight of it thumping into the soles of my feet. First comes the coolness as its daunting mass blots out the sun, and then the blast of damp heat as the steam belching between its wheels wraps me in sooty tendrils of pure bliss. Oiled pistons pump and hiss. Steel thunders on steel. Earth and air, fire and water, whammed into an elemental hymn.
And then I am cheering and waving like a child, and the passengers, hanging out of the windows like returning soldiers, are waving and laughing back at me.
Kiffa-kiffa-kiff, kiffa-kiff goes the train, and even though it’s clanking as slowly as a steam tractor around the edge of Gilles’s field, it’s going far too fast for me.
If only it would stop.
For as the train begins to clank away from me, I’m sure I see a figure standing apart from the rest, on a wrought-iron observation platform at the very back of the final carriage.
A tiny woman in a black silk dress.
In one hand, she carries a lace handkerchief. In the other, she holds the hand of the small boy at her side: a bespectacled urchin in a flying-helmet, who gawps at me as if I were someone from another universe. Breaking into a grin, he gives me a shy wave, and proudly holds up the little brown hen under his arm.
I want to believe that they are saying hello. But I know, in my innermost heart, that we are finally saying goodbye.
In memory of
Mildred
Emil
and Silent Mary
About the Author
Michael Wright was born in Surrey in 1966. Following an unfashionably happy education at Windlesham House and Sherborne, he graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in English Literature, and spent several years working as a theatre critic, arts columnist and literary diarist in London whilst wondering what to do when he grew up. The answer turned out to lie in rural France, where he now lives with eleven very small sheep, three cockerels, three hens, two goldfish, one vintage plane, one labrador with a Baltimore accent and one disgruntled cat.
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First published in Great Britain by Bantam Press
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Copyright © Michael Wright 2006
Michael Wright has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. In some [limited] cases names of people, places, dates, sequences or the detail of events have been changed to protect the privacy of others. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such minor respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true.
Lines from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot are reproduced with the kind permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446422052
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