2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees
Page 30
Satisfied though I was to see everyone getting on so well, I was still slightly on edge. Someone very important had failed to show up thus far.
He rolled in at ten past ten.
“Bonsoir, Roger!” I said, confronting him after he’d barely made it though the door. “Je veux te presenter a la petite Anglaise!”
His eyes lit up, and I quickly called Fi over. When she arrived I popped my arm around her and forced her into some kind of unnatural pose in front of Roger, a little like we were entering a ‘Couple of the Year’ competition.
“Aha! Yes!” said Roger, with a broad smile on his face. “Magnifique. You have done well!”
He then slapped me on the back and moved off to greet his fellow villagers.
It had been a short exchange, but it had meant a lot. Quite why I needed the approval of my choice of woman from a part-time mechanic in a Pyrenean village I’m not entirely sure, but require it I did.
Moments later further approval was forthcoming from Fabrice when he took me aside and gave me a pat on the back.
“I did not know that there were girls this beautiful in England,” he said.
“Otherwise you would have gone there by now, right?”
“Exactement ,” he said laughing, before quickly adopting his more serious face. “Tonny, I am sorry to tell you that we will not finish your pool as quickly as we said.”
“Oh?”
“No. Philippe and I were talking and we think that it makes no sense to put the water in at this time of year. It will freeze at night and this will damage the liner. Can you wait a few more months?”
“I suppose so,” I said, wondering slightly why they hadn’t told me this weeks ago. “I guess if I’ve waited this long, then I can hold out a little longer.”
“It is better like this,” he said. “It will be ready soon.”
“OK. I understand.”
And I did understand. This wasn’t the place to be if you wanted things done quickly. Had Bigorre been a sovereign state then its national anthem would have been called ‘Ready Soon’. (Either that, or the composer would have been still working on it.)
After what seemed like an age, Rene the Mayor invited us all to be seated, and the meal began. As ever, it was a long-drawn-out affair—oysters, foie gras and scallops were all served as starters. Needless to say, we were nowhere near having the main course by the time midnight came around. In fact, had it not been for the deputy mayor’s son Mikael, we might have missed it. He happened to glance at his watch and notice that the magical moment was only a few minutes away, and then immediately alerted the group. We were all ushered to our feet whilst Guy, the village technical bod, tuned the PA into the radio. Soon we were counting down to the hour of midnight, along with some fatuous French DJ. (All of us except Brad, that is, who possibly thought we were praying—perhaps for the arrival of our main course.)
The kissing and the shaking of hands then began in earnest. Bizarrely we’d already done this to each other when we’d all arrived, the only difference this time being that we got to kiss and embrace the people we’d arrived with. That meant hugs for Nic, Kevin and Brad. Oh yes, and one other.
God, she looked lovely.
“God, you look lovely, Fi,” I said.
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, whatever. This is no time for an argument. Give me a kiss.”
And she obliged. I found myself swept into a place where things felt different. For a moment, the village hall and its revellers seemed to be a long way away. I felt pleasantly disorientated, lost in a momentary sense that this embrace was everything. Warm, sensuous, secure—spiritual even. I longed for it to last forever. One thing was certain. I never could have found a moment like this in Ron’s arms.
Van Halen brought me back to the real world. Rather rudely, I thought. A deafening burst of wailing guitar made everyone in the hall nearly jump out of their boots. Guy had pressed the wrong button on the music system and subjected us to several seconds of heavy metal. Fi was whisked away from me by a grinning Roger, and I continued on the salutatory circuit of the room, suddenly reunited with who I was, what I was up to and where it was that I was doing it. It may not have been as extraordinary a world as the one from which I’d just been untimely plucked, but as worlds go, it wasn’t too bad. I was soon engulfed in a three-way hug with Fabrice and Marie-Laure, before everyone in the room was swept into a huge circular dance that seemed to involve a lot of whooping and a certain amount of lateral movement, but little else. The perfect dance for slightly drunk English folk, of whom there were now more than one or two.
§
We all walked back from the village hall at four in the morning. It had been one of the best New Year’s Eves I’d had for ages. Never mind that we hadn’t eaten our main course until after one in the morning. It didn’t matter that the latter part of the evening had been dominated by the traditional introduction of pea shooters, and that the wanton firing of pellets around the room had led to a couple of stinging blows to the back of my neck. I didn’t even mind that the radiators had packed up working at 2am and that for much of the remaining festivities guests had seen fit to don their winter coats. None of this had bothered me in the least. I was amongst friends—both new and old—and simple though it was, this meant more than it ever had before.
The night wasn’t over yet, though. When we got back to the house, Brad and I got the guitars out. The noise disturbed Ron, who made his way down to join us, sleep still in his eyes, flies undone and shirt on the wrong way round.
“It’s the first day of the New Year, mate. I hope you have a good one!” said Brad.
“I doubt it,” said Ron, deadpan and laconic as ever.
“What shall we play?” I asked, guitar poised for action.
“Do you know ‘Nature Boy’?” enquired Kevin.
I certainly did. It’s a classic song that has been covered by artists as diverse as Nat King Cole and George Benson.
“Ah yes, that’s fab,” said Fi. “It ends with just the best line ever.”
“And what’s that?” asked Kevin.
“Listen up, they’ll get to it in a minute.”
Kevin, Nic, Fi and Ron all fell silent in anticipation of the great line as Brad and I sang our way towards it. And then the moment arrived:
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
The warm applause that followed the song felt like it was more for that line in particular than for our interpretation of the piece. Immediately all of us began to discuss the meaning of the words and, somewhat inevitably for the time of night, soon we were involved in a discussion about why there was so much suffering in the world.
“It’s difficult to believe in a benign deity when there are so many natural disasters in the world,” said Brad.
“Yes, but most of the world’s suffering is man-made, don’t you think?” suggested Nic.
“I agree,” I said. “And I think it all stems from fear. Man’s fear of not having enough for himself and his family leads him to become greedy, and when greed takes hold, then suffering surely follows. What do you think?”
“You may be right,” mumbled Brad, while Kev, Nic and Fi nodded quietly.
“What about you, Ron? What do you think?” I asked.
“Me? I think that if you’re all going to talk bollocks then I’m off to bed,” he said, immediately acting on his words.
His comment seemed to alert the rest of us to the futility of trying to set the world to rights in the early hours of the morning. Slowly but surely the remaining sages made their way upstairs to bed, until only Fi and I remained.
“It was a wonderful evening, wasn’t it?” said Fi.
“It certainly was.”
“Different to a London night.”
“Very.”
“It’s late, though, and I’m tired. Are you coming to bed?” she asked.
�
�I’ll be up a minute. I just want a little longer looking at the sky.”
“OK.”
I poured myself a nightcap and moved out onto the balcony and peered towards the heavens. The stars were shining. Really shining. The sky was so vibrant—so alive. In stark contrast I looked down at the mess we’d created in my garden. Yes, Serges’s hole was less of an eyesore than it had been, but it was still far from becoming the pool of which I’d dreamt.
The rest of the garden resembled a cross between a building site and an archaeological dig. This job was far from over, and there would surely be plenty that wouldn’t go to plan. I knew that, and I didn’t mind one bit. Why did the place have to be perfect? Whatever went wrong from here on in would be a joyous idiosyncrasy—not a cock-up. Whatever we created, however botched it might appear, would contain within it a happy memory.
Perhaps it was prompted by the warmth of the evening that had just passed, or maybe it was because I was now on my second nightcap after a long night of festivities, but I started to see ‘love’ in every stone, each pile of mud, every abandoned shovel, each mound of sand. I began to think about the year that had just passed. So much seemed to have happened. It was here that I’d struggled so hard to practise the piano, and where Kevin had piled his useless pieces of wood and proposed marriage to Nic. This was where Brad had received the news of his mother’s passing, and where Ron had enjoyed countless siestas, developed a taste for courgettes and found a way to pull himself out of his malaise. This had been the location for me to receive a life-changing phone call when I’d least expected it—the call that had finally enabled me to deliver la petite Anglaise to the expectant Roger.
Right now, Fi was only a climb of the stairs away. That made me feel good. However, I was well aware that we’d only just got things together and that there were still plenty of things that could go wrong. I also knew that I would have felt just as warm and happy at this moment even if she hadn’t yet telephoned her way back into my life. Why? Because I was already lucky in love. I had friends who I loved and who loved me. If that wasn’t enough, then I surely would have been a greedy man.
I sipped the final dregs from my glass, and under my breath, sang the refrain quietly back to myself.
“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.”
That would do for me.
That, and having a bin with my name on it.
§
THE END