Merde Actually

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Can’t you cut the legs off these chairs?’ I mimed amputation. ‘Or add a few centimetres to the table legs?’

  ‘Oh no, Maman would not like that.’

  Little Simon was suddenly clinging to Florence again.

  ‘He wants to cut our chairs?’ he asked, aghast.

  ‘No, no,’ Florence assured him. ‘It’s OK, Paul, you will quickly learn to eat your dinner facing to one side.’

  ‘Ma chérie!’

  A woman swept into the kitchen. She was wearing a brown kaftan-style dress that made it impossible to tell whether she was as thin as a parasol or as bulky as her dinner table. She bounded up to Florence and gave her a loud smacking kiss on each cheek. As they pressed together I saw that Madame Flo senior was very shapely in that comfy, fifty-year-old kind of way.

  ‘Maman, je te présente Paul.’

  Maman turned to look at me. I stood up and smiled with all the gratitude that a boy should show to the woman whose loins had produced his lover.

  She smiled back warmly and tugged on my shoulder until I was small enough for her to kiss. I tried not to let my brain register the fact that my mother-in-law’s large breasts were bouncing against my ribs.

  ‘Enchanté, Madame. Vous allez bien?’

  ‘You can call me Brigitte,’ she said, promoting me instantly to a tu. ‘Qu’il est mignon!’ she laughed, and kissed me again on the cheek. Mignon, I knew, meant cute. Though it can also be used to describe a cute guinea pig.

  Brigitte was small and graceful, like her daughter, but not at all Indian. Her hair was dark red – the colour black-haired women dye their hair to cover up greyness. It was cut in a thick bob, and her skin was very fair. She had Florence’s joyful smile and laughing eyes, and emanated a kind of universal love for humankind.

  And I don’t think it was all down to Prozac.

  We exchanged potted CVs. She was a primary-school teacher, an institutrice, in a town near Tours. I was a soon-to-be English-tea-room owner.

  ‘Ah oui, Maman,’ Florence interrupted. ‘I’m leaving my job and going to work in the salon de thé.’

  ‘What?’

  Suddenly I looked less mignon. I could tell that I’d mutated from the harmlessly exotic boyfriend to the corrupting influence that had persuaded Madame’s poor offspring to give up a job for life. The universal love had evaporated and been replaced by raw disapproval.

  ‘Oui, Maman, mon boulot me faisait chier.’ Florence’s work was ‘making her shit’, as if constipation in the office was some kind of ideal state.

  She explained that her company was instigating a ‘plan social’, offering staff a full year’s salary or early retirement to leave. Even when the French economy slows down, people are rarely thrown on the rubbish heap. So she had taken the offer and was coming in with me to set up the tea room.

  ‘And in this salon de thé, what will you do? Be a waitress? Is that why you qualified as an accountant?’ Brigitte smiled wanly over at me as if to say that she wasn’t implying that her daughter was too good for the likes of me. Even though she was.

  ‘It’s a small business, Maman, we’ll do everything. You know, Paul was the head of marketing for a big company before giving it up for his salon de thé.’

  Brigitte leaned back against the polished slate mantelpiece and examined me, this T-shirted, unshaven foreigner with the faded Union Jack flip-flops who didn’t look like the head of anything except maybe some international association of beach bums.

  ‘A French company?’

  ‘Yes, and before that an English company,’ Florence said.

  ‘Hmm.’ For some reason, Brigitte was slightly reassured by this. ‘In London?’

  ‘Yes, Maman, in London.’

  ‘They say it’s the most expensive city in the world.’

  ‘It is, but luckily the salaries are in proportion,’ I said, drawing myself up to my full height and cracking my skull on the low ceiling beams.

  Maman went to the fridge in the corner of the kitchen and took out a large glass jug full of pink foam.

  ‘You will have some strawberry juice?’ she asked me.

  ‘Strawberry juice?’

  ‘Yes, we have so many, we don’t know what to do with them. I mix them up, add some water and a little sugar and lemon juice, and voilà.’

  ‘Mmm, it must be délicieux,’ I said, thinking the liquid looked like mashed sheep’s brain.

  We sat at the table, our knees twisted to one side, and drank tumblers of pink frothy goo that got stuck between your teeth. Little Simon was the only one who could sit comfortably. The rest of us were like three Snow Whites squatting chez the dwarves.

  ‘So where is it, this salon de thé?’ Brigitte asked, with only mild aggression.

  ‘Near the Champs-Elysées,’ I said.

  ‘The rent must be very expensive.’

  ‘I negotiated a good price.’

  ‘When do you open?’

  ‘A la rentrée, the first of September,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Maman, Nicolas is doing the plans. You remember Nicolas?’

  ‘Oh, oui, he was so mignon, Nicolas!’ Brigitte sighed fondly.

  I wondered how she was so familiar with the architect who was overseeing the refit at the tea room. Florence had told me he was a young architect who’d give us a good price – a ‘prix d’ami’ – because he was ‘a boy I went to school with’. Parisian women are surrounded by ‘boys I went to school with’ because so few of them leave Paris to study or find a job. The question is, of course, what did they get up to when they were at school together?

  This Nicolas was quite a handsome guy if you liked the tall, pale, artistic type with impeccably casual designer clothes and an overdose of self-confidence.

  It was comforting to know that a friend of Florence’s was dealing with all the stuff I was linguistically incapable of: getting building permission and quotes, buying materials, scheduling in the various workmen. But I couldn’t get the question about his place on Florence’s sexual CV out of my mind. Wasn’t there a difference between hiring an architect you knew and giving work to an ex-boyfriend?

  I made a mental note to call him over the weekend to make damn sure that everything was ready to roll on Monday morning, when the guys with sledgehammers were due to go in and remove all evidence that the premises had recently been a shoe shop.

  ‘Was he very big, Nicolas?’ little Simon asked.

  ‘Shut up, Simon,’ Brigitte snapped, giving me a ‘don’t worry about him, he’s just being stupid’ smile.

  ‘Wel-kum, wel-kum!’

  A grinning man of about my age and size was stooping through the doorway from the lounge. This was Florence’s big brother, Michel.

  Like Florence, he was a perfect cocktail of French and Indian blood, a dark-eyed, long-limbed latte of a man. Unlike her, he had a lot of bodily hair, and a corresponding tendency to baldness that he attempted to hide by pulling his hair back in a short ponytail. He was shirtless, with a slight pot belly, and his shorts were even more rumpled than mine. I guessed he’d slept in them.

  He kissed Florence and gripped my hand, examining with a mixture of curiosity and pity this guy who was shagging his sister.

  Waving away the offer of sheep juice, he went to the fridge, where he found a bottle of fizzy Badoit water and guzzled down half of it, puffing breathlessly as the bubbles fizzed up into his nose.

  ‘Michel, that bottle is for everyone,’ Brigitte told him, and he laughed, the kid who’s never had to listen to what his parents told him.

  Florence and I told the story of our accident, and then Brigitte announced that as we’d be staying for a few days, we could help out with the chores. A holiday at her country house wasn’t a holiday, it seemed. Everything was permanently on the verge of falling down, going rotten or getting eaten by pests. I knew the feeling.

  I was given several choices of how to occupy my first afternoon in Corrèze. Unfortunately, curling up with Florence wasn’t one of them. There was picking lettu
ce, radishes, courgettes or strawberries, demossing the barn roof, or digging.

  ‘You are making a swimming pool?’ I asked. I had noticed a large, fresh hole down the slope a little from the barn.

  ‘No, it is for the fosse septique,’ Brigitte explained.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘You know, the reservoir for the, you know . . .’

  ‘For the caca and pipi,’ Simon giggled.

  ‘You don’t have one?’ I asked, envisaging dawn trips to fertilize the hedges.

  ‘Yes, yes, but it is out of date.’

  ‘Out of date?’ There was a problem with having last season’s septic tank?

  Florence explained, while Brigitte listened tensely. This was obviously a subject that was painfully close to her heart.

  Apparently all the houses in the village had septic tanks, but none of them were ‘aux normes’ – they didn’t conform to modern building laws. It seemed that it was OK to pollute the outskirts of every town in France with hideous billboards and industrial estates, but it was illegal to have an undersized septic tank.

  The ones in Brigitte’s village were all basically brick chambers in the garden where waste products had been flowing and fermenting efficiently for centuries. However, with modern washing machines and dishwashers, too many houses were pumping warm water out into the roadside ditches, turning the lanes into subtropical gardens that the council had trouble keeping in check. Now the mayor had got a regional grant to fit large modern septic tanks that would hold all the waste water.

  ‘They do not make the hole for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, but . . .’ Brigitte shuddered.

  ‘Maman is afraid they’ll break the water pipes or cut through the roots of the walnut tree,’ Florence explained.

  ‘Huh,’ Michel grunted. ‘She just doesn’t want strange men digging around in her—’

  ‘Michel!’ Brigitte blushed as pink as her strawberry juice.

  ‘Anyway,’ Florence went on, ‘Maman wants us to dig the hole ourselves.’

  ‘I think I prefer to pick courgettes,’ I volunteered.

  ‘OK, you can do some digging tomorrow,’ Brigitte said. ‘You’ll just have to be careful, because we’re quite close to breaking through to the old tank.’

  In short, my French vacances were in danger of getting off to a very shitty start.

  3

  I HAD SEEN the three or four rows of courgettes round the back of the house, and figured it would take me no more than five minutes to strip them bare, after which Florence would be able to give me a guided tour of the house, with the finale in a secluded bedroom.

  The two of us were still at that early stage in our relationship where you need to touch each other all the time. Where as soon as your fingers so much as brush against each other’s skin, the other parts of your body start saying they’d like to join in with this skin-brushing business. It’s probably not the best time to go and stay with your mother-in-law.

  And now the combination of glorious sun, thrusting vegetation and Florence’s exposed limbs (she’d found a bikini in the wardrobe) was making my whole lower body ache.

  So I was gutted to learn that the courgettes I was supposed to pick weren’t in the little veg patch behind the house. They were a ten-minute walk away across the lane and through the woods. Worse, Florence wasn’t allowed to come with me because she had to help turn the morning’s crop of cherries into a clafoutis, a sort of mammoth fruit flan.

  I was given an old straw hat that a donkey would have refused for being too battered and a pair of gigantic wellies, and told not to come back till I’d filled a laundry basket with courgettes.

  Just to be sure I knew what I was supposed to be doing, Brigitte came out of the kitchen and gave me a specimen.

  ‘Voilà, this is what I want,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, courgettes,’ I agreed, pointing intelligently at the courgette-shaped, courgette-coloured courgette.

  ‘Some city people mistake them for cucumbers.’

  ‘Not me, I am working five years in the food industry already.’

  ‘Ah, but I don’t think you make tea out of courgettes,’ she said and, having put me firmly in my place, pirouetted back to her kitchen.

  At this point, I must admit that a little matricide did spring to mind.

  In fact it was fun playing the peasant for a couple of hours.

  No matter where you are in the south of England, the city can always catch up with you in the shape of an off-road vehicle or a gang of mountain-biking yuppies. Not here. The vegetable garden was a hundred-yard-long, ten-yard-wide strip of cultivation in the middle of a medieval wilderness. On a gently sloping hillside, it was a sunlit clearing amidst huge, swaying chestnut trees. Even the rusting shell of an abandoned van looked hundreds of years old. It was one of those vintage French vans made out of corrugated iron, and now it was quietly biodegrading back into iron ore, with a sapling growing out of its back window and rotting wooden vegetable trays in place of its windscreen.

  When I took a swig of water from the bottle I’d brought, my glugging was the only human sound in the world around me. The insects were humming, the birds were screeching, the treetops were swishing, and absolutely no one was driving cars at me. It wasn’t as enjoyable as diving into the Med or on top of Florence, but spending an afternoon alone in the middle of France wasn’t so bad after all.

  Even though I was out here on my own, filling my basket with courgettes made me feel part of the family. Everyone had their task to do, and I was providing the vegetables. I hadn’t felt this much at home in France in the whole ten months I’d been here, not even when I’d moved into Florence’s apartment near the Père Lachaise cemetery, or when I’d first learned how to barge in front of someone to nab a Parisian café table. Now I was just like countless thousands of Parisians, enjoying a mild summer dose of peasant life at the family maison de campagne. It felt deeply satisfying.

  This was the most productive kitchen garden I’d ever seen in my life – the courgette plants were hidden away amongst potatoes, tomatoes, green beans, aubergines, radishes, beetroot (I think), carrots, cucumbers, three sorts of lettuce, strawberries, raspberries, blackcurrants, a pear tree, and what looked like almonds. At the end of the vegetable patch there was also a small fig tree, with curled, springy branches, small unripe fruit and the phallic leaves we’ve all seen in paintings. The guy who first chose the fig leaf to camouflage his genitals got it exactly right – the long, central lobe of the leaf looks exactly like a hanging willy. Though he was a bit boastful about the size of his balls.

  What I hadn’t known about a fig tree is that when the sun is on its leaves, it smells delicious. The whole tree was giving off a glorious sweet fig smell that made you want to sit there and wait for a month until the fruit was ripe enough to eat.

  The courgettes were surprisingly prickly, and annoyingly close to the ground. But whenever I got backache I just went and raided the fruit plants.

  This far south there were only a few kilos left on the raspberry bushes in early July, so I polished those off and then wandered down to the next row where there were several million strawberries. One thing was for sure – if I dropped dead from heat exhaustion, within a day my body would be sprouting fruit blossom.

  When I staggered back into the garden with my full basket of courgettes, Florence was setting out glasses on a long teak table by the side of the house.

  ‘The neighbours are coming for the apéritif,’ she explained.

  ‘Think I’ll have a quick shower,’ I said. ‘Can you, you know, show me where it is?’ I accompanied the ‘you know’ with an inquiring lift of the eyebrows, meaning, well, you know.

  ‘I’ll show you how it works,’ Brigitte said, arriving with an armful of alcohol bottles. ‘There is a knack.’

  I looked imploringly at Florence, but like a UN soldier without a mandate to intervene in a humanitarian crisis, she just shrugged and left me to my fate.

  ‘Allez, Paul!’ Brigitt
e had already got as far as the kitchen door. ‘They’ll be here in ten minutes.’

  It was my first day at the kindergarten. Lesson one: this is a courgette. Lesson two: going to the bathroom.

  Is it just me or does every shower unit in the world have a fiendish knack to it? Is this why we Brits preferred baths for so many centuries before we decided we didn’t want to wash our hair in the sink any more?

  With a bath, all you do is fill the damn thing. If the water’s too hot, you add some cold. With someone else’s shower, you need to be a kind of water DJ to get the mix right. And why is it always doubly difficult in a girlfriend’s mum’s bathroom?

  ‘Turn on the water and let it run for two minutes,’ Brigitte explained, bending over the deep shower basin and pointing to the mixer tap. ‘It’s a Butagaz water heater so you have to wait until the warm water arrives from the kitchen. D’accord?’

  ‘D’accord.’ This is French for OK.

  ‘Don’t change the temperature, because otherwise after two minutes you’ll freeze or get burned. D’accord?’

  ‘D’accord.’

  ‘And don’t turn it full on or it’ll push the shower curtain out of the basin and wet the floor.’

  ‘D’accord.’ Very soon my ten-minute shower allocation was going to be used up and I’d have to meet the neighbours wearing a coat of sweaty dust.

  ‘Put the shower curtain right inside the basin before turning on the water.’

  ‘D’accord.’

  ‘And don’t put the plug in or you’ll stain the tub.’

  I now found that my tongue refused to say ‘d’accord’ any more. I nodded.

  ‘And make sure you turn the water right off when you’ve finished.’

  I tried to nod but my head would only move a millimetre. My whole body was going on strike.

  ‘But don’t turn the tap too far or it’ll get stuck.’

  All I could do was move my eyes up and down in agreement.

  ‘And stay on the bathmat to dry yourself off, otherwise you’ll leave wet footprints on the floor.’

  That was it. One more instruction and my head would fall off.

  ‘D’accord?’ she asked.