“They are bringing tents and will sleep in the garden, and before you say another word, they want to. It will be an adventure.”
Tents arrive and, with them, a quartet of teenagers. How is it possible that only last year two prepubescent girls spent a summer with us and this year two stunning young creatures appear? The French have the perfect word to describe that awakening flush: pulpeuse. I love it. Pulpy, ripe. Their bodies and senses have woken up to the world. Of course, with such awareness come hazards. Julia, with her nubile figure, bewitching blue eyes and swaths of long, flowing blonde hair, is two years their senior and a sleek and enticing temptress she is. Hajo, her younger brother, is a few months their junior and, as so frequently happens with boys, seems to be five years younger. He is a Boy Scout of a boy. He helps Michel and Anni in the garden, collects wood, treats his grandparents with extraordinary love and respect and, when evening falls, happily accompanies the trio of girls to town but remains completely, innocently oblivious to their real interests: Les mecs. Boys!
DAYS SPIN OUT. Contented guests laze, doing nothing in particular or find themselves chores to help us out while I write like a driven fury. My scripts are ready to first-draft. Michel is reading them, and I have set to work on my novel. And then, a delicious diversion—Klaxon! Klaxon!—as a truck coughs up the drive, stripping sprawling fig branches and denuding ripening fruit as it ascends. We have all been awaiting this delivery, I more feverishly than the rest. Finally, I am to have my ancient wooden table the size of a railway sleeper. At last. At last. We bought it in sorry condition months back from a fabulously eccentric secondhand furniture store on the Left Bank in Paris, near St. Sulpice, where the shop owner arranged to have it restored for us by an artisan carpenter in Mougins. But when he delivers it, he takes one look at the exterior stairs, the terraces, the length of the arched walkway and pronounces his work done. He and his two associates, with the aid of a pulley system within the van, unload our precious teak table, deposit it in the driveway and depart.
It requires six men to carry it and deliver it to its place. Quashia’s Arab colleagues rally to the call, shouting to one another in a language that none of us understand, with their dark faces and their assortment of hats. Polite men with decaying teeth, shabby clothes and shy expressions on tobacco-ravaged faces, always willing to lend a helping hand if there are francs in it for smokes. A makeshift team, troops up the hill, shaking hands with one another, shaking hands with us, then they go to work, moving as one, like our train of caterpillars, at the yell of an order—nasal high-pitched cries—until the table has been hoisted up the steps and positioned beneath the towering, majestic magnolia grandiflora, with its shiny bottle-green leaves and perfume from heaven, and there it will stay, we hope, for a hundred years. Sweating, resolutely keeping their gaze away from the three tender beauties sunbathing in itsy bits of string by the pool, the men refuse refreshment.
Each lines up solemnly for his fifty-franc billet dished out by Michel, nods his thanks, then wanders off contentedly down the drive, slapping his fellow countrymen on the back and Quashia, too, who has found them this rare moment of employment.
Pamela is the first to settle beneath the table. She waddles over and takes up residence like a rotund queen bee, then drops like a log and begins instantly to snore.
By and by, the puppies begin to appear. They creep forward inquisitively, one by one or in twos or threes, unkempt fluffy curiosity converging from everywhere. One cocks its little leg against a great wooden beam of table leg. I run, screaming, to chase it away, and they all scatter like a swarm of frightened rabbits, tumbling over one another in a mix of confusion and uncertainty only to sneak back again as soon as they sniff my absence.
They are still so gauche, so unsteady on their limbs, making nuisances of themselves at every turn, chewing feet, climbing bronzed legs, uprooting flowers and covering everything in earth. One little culprit steals one of Anni’s new sandals, which makes her laugh, but when she settles back into her book he drags it to the murky fishpond, where it is lost until a carp surfaces with a sandal strap trailing from its torso—do fish have torsos? At feeding time the pups are easy to locate, nine hungry mouths packed greedily beneath No Name with splayed legs, sucking at her tired chewed teats. Still, she is a model, patient mother.
But how my father indulges them! Whenever I mention the inevitable, finding homes for them, he offers to take all nine of them back to England until my mother shrieks and quite sensibly reminds him that there is a quarantine into the United Kingdom. Vanessa has volunteered to take one, a golden-russet chap she has christened Whisky. The other eight, heavenly as they are, will have to be given away.
MEALS ARE A HULLABALLOO of pleasure. Our long-awaited table is the focus of life, the epicenter of the day. Like a clock striking, a yellow or cobalt blue ceramic and terra-cotta plate clatters lightly onto its surface. The salad contained within it is a masterpiece of Michel’s cuisinary art: variegated leaves, striated, mottled, speckled reds and greens seasoned with herbs, olive oil, lemon or lime and garlic. A cork is drawn, liquid shot through with sunlight tumbles into glasses, a rainbow of fruit appears and each one of us, no matter what we are about, recognizes the signal. A meal is waiting to be devoured. Hajo returns from the village, laden with warm bread that divides at the touch. The epitome of the perfect house guest, Hajo also roams the inclines searching out kindling to bolster Michel’s collection of sacks of pine and magnolia cones stored and dried during the winter for the specific purpose of fueling our summer kitchen: the barbecue, which is working overtime.
We eat and drink and talk and go silent at the pleasure of the delicacies being passed from one length of our table to the other. As the days progress, we eat and drink in greater quantity, and the meals grow longer and more cheerfully abandoned. We have three languages here: French, English and German. At night, candles flicker and the warm light glows and dances across our faces, animated by conversation and flushed with wine. The bats swoop low and spin off, flying “after summer merrily.” Jazz reaches across the terrace from a makeshift system Michel has rigged up in the cool storeroom.
When Michel’s parents first arrived, my mother came looking for me to ask what language they were speaking.
“German,” I replied absentmindedly, busy with my work.
“For God’s sake, don’t tell your father!”
I glanced up, not really paying attention.
“Why?”
“We fought them in the war.”
Here at this table, we pass bottles and lift empty glasses to accept yet another refill, and such frontiers don’t exist. Michel is the conductor, for he is the only one of us who speaks all three languages fluently. With a turn of his head, he switches tongues. A glance to the left and he is with us in English; to the right and words unknown to me flow from his lips. His French daughters and their German cousins, Julia and Hajo, are able to converse workmanlike in whichever language is currently being spoken, but we Anglo-Saxons and Irish are a sorry lot. A lack of language is a poverty, and I resolve to add German classes to my list of chores and brush up on my Italian and Spanish, both as rusty as the plumbing. The odd German word is growing familiar. Essen is a meal or to eat; schnecken is being repeated frequently and debated on a great deal this evening, but I have not heard it before. “What is Anni saying?” I ask Michel.
“She is talking about the snails.”
“Ah, schnecken means snails, does it?” I sigh. Yes, the plants are infested with snails. I have passed several hours on different dewy mornings picking them off the stalks of various shrubs only to find that, by evening, they are back in greater numbers. Crustaceans crowded on top of one another, like bracelets of hippie jewelery.
“She is telling us that she has a solution for them and that I must take her shopping in the morning.”
I look at Anni, and she nods wisely.
“What is it?”
“You’ll see.” She laughs, and her merriment rings loudly ac
ross the valley, absorbed within the mauve hills.
THE NEXT DAY IS A brittle, dry day. Baking. Eerily still, deep heat which often precedes a mistral. My father and I are returning from the vet, where we have delivered a cardboard box full of restless puppies to be inspected. All are in good order, and as far as Dr. Marschang can say at this stage, these little ones are also purebreds. No Name must have been days, even minutes, pregnant when I discovered her. He has agreed to put up a notice in his surgery requesting homes for them. No Name is hovering, concerned by the disappearance of her brood, when Michel comes rattling up the drive with Anni. They have been shopping. As well as the usual provisions and the daily mountains of fresh food being consumed by our party, they have bought black pepper. Not one container, but twenty! This is Anni’s answer to the schnecken.
“They can’t abide pepper,” she explains to me.
I shake my head in wonder. How can she possibly know such a thing? Is it black pepper they are allergic to, or all peppers? Are they fine with salt?
I take myself upstairs to my den.
Toward noon, as I stare idly from the window and nurse in thought my work in progress, I notice our various guests at their holiday activities. My father-in-law, Robert, I know, is absent. I can hear the clatter of tins and pans in the upstairs makeshift kitchen, where he is baking yet another round of cakes and creating utter chaos, showering flour and sugar everywhere, transforming our inadequate cooking space into a ski resort. My father is by the pool sleeping, dogs crawling over him like flies on a cow’s rump; the girls are perched in an elegant trio alongside the pool, polished toes dangling in the water to keep cool, sunglasses hiding the mischief in their eyes, whispering hot secrets to one another and laughing skittishly. I discern wind in the trees. It looks as though a weather change is coming in, brought by the wind that blows in from Africa. Hajo and my mother are both alone in private worlds. He is whittling a branch or a piece of tree trunk he has retrieved from somewhere on the land, while she, under the pretext of reading, is frowning at her feet, worrying about something.
Observing folk busy about their leisure is endlessly fascinating to me. But where are Michel and Anni? Leaning closer to the glass, I catch sight of Anni bent low, vigorously shaking pepper over twisting flowers. She moves on to the tender young orange trees, which are shooting up at a remarkable pace and soughing in the wind. Michel trails behind her, shirt flapping, with a tray of pots. Half are empty. He accepts an empty container and hands her another full one, and so they continue. I will be fascinated to learn the outcome. My guess is that the wind will pick up and the pepper will be blown away while the snails will continue to cling fast.
I return to the world of the novel I am writing. In my imagination, I am on a sugar plantation in Fiji and a young arsonist has set fire to the crops. “Fire!”
LATER, I HAVE NO IDEA how much later, minutes or hours, Michel is at my door. “Carol! Chérie!” I look up but barely register his presence, lost as I am again in my invented scenario.
“Mmm?”
“There’s a fire. We should prepare ourselves.”
It sounds too incredible to be true.
“A fire?” I repeat stupidly. Michel has no idea what I am writing, and his news has confused me. “What fire?”
“Chérie, there’s a fire on the other side of the main road. Can’t you hear the planes?”
I have heard nothing. I rise from my trestle table, padding after Michel, then scoot back to save and switch off my work.
“The others are getting dressed.”
It is Saturday, midafternoon. I exit the house after Michel and am hit by a blanket of windy heat and by the roar of engines coming directly toward me. I lift my head and look skyward, and there, probably no more than twenty meters above our heads, a red plane swoops low and shaves the flat roof of our house, sending the gravel stones laid by Di Fazio into rising whorls before they clatter like running feet onto the terraces. Dust is everywhere, leaves are whipped from the trees and swirl about. This feels like an attack.
“I think we should drive to the end of the lane and find out what’s going on.”
Our little lane has been cut off by the fire brigade. No one can enter, and we cannot pass. A barrier erected within the last hour is being watched over by half a dozen hulking young members of the local fire brigade. Clots of people are huddled in groups. There is great activity, much argument. Most look like Parisians, lean and mean, smoking furiously, dressed in chic shorts, bathing suits with silk shirts thrown on hastily, jogging clothes, gold watches, designer purses clutched tight to their well-honed, neat-bosomed bodies. They are probably occupants of summer villas, living behind us or along the multitude of narrow tracks which wind inland toward the heart of Mougins. I ask one of the fireman what the chances are that the fire will leap the bridge over the road. He shrugs. “So long as the wind does not change direction, you are safe.”
“And if it does?”
“If it does, get into the swimming pool and wait for an airlift out.”
We are not to worry, he assures us, they know where and how manywe are. “How many are you?” he asks then as an afterthought.
“Ten, and two dogs and nine puppies.” One very fat dog, I am thinking, who will not be able to run for her life. If worst comes to worst, one of us will be obliged to carry Pamela. And what of all those puppies? I will have to pack them back into the cardboard box and try to keep them calm.
We hurry back down the lane to the house, where the cinders are falling like huge dove-colored snowflakes and are settling on the surface of the pool. All around us, the sky is changing colors. Our loved ones are grouped together clutching bags and various bits of belongings. They are staring skyward, where the reflection of the fire has twisted nature out of recognition. It is impossible to concentrate on anything except the fire. The distant cries of people carry on the wind, the force of which sends a towel left by the pool flying into the water, where it sinks like dead meat.
Michel moves to and fro, making mental notes about the wind’s direction. He is unwinding every hose we own, calling to anyone listening for assistance, and is attaching them at strategic points in the garden. Hajo is dismantling the three tents and taking them into the house for safety. I cannot stop myself from studying the scene, deciding what I might extract from the occasion for my story. The fear, the uncertainty and the threatening sky. Almost every word is shouted or drowned out by the skirring of the brilliant red Canadair planes (the color of the double-decker London buses), purchased from the Canadians and used to fight fires to great effect. Their presence is everywhere. If they are not overhead or passing to the rear of the hill, they are before us, diving into the sea, swooping like dragonflies. Their presence gives an urgency to the fire, which is still out of sight. The roar of their engines, no more than a few feet above our heads, brings real terror to the mood of things.
“I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to begin to soak the vegetation,” Michel suggests, which is what he and I, along with Hajo, are about to do when Quashia appears, damp from exertion, wearing a battered old Panama hat. “I think you need help.”
“How did you get through?” calls Michel.
“I saw the flames from the village and followed the towpath by the stream in the valley. The bridge has been cut off. There are fire engines everywhere.”
I am relieved that our parents cannot understand this, for I fear it would distress them. “The wind’s picking up, too.”
We all look out to sea, where the waves are foamy and white, a sure sign that a gale-force wind is blowing in.
“How much water do we have in the bassin?” Michel shouts to Quashia.
“I switched on the pump on my way up here.”
Michel nods, relieved, and hands out hoses. “We can manage this, chérie, you ought to stay with the family.”
I retreat as the men begin to run the hoses up and down the hill, watering wherever the nozzles will reach. The sussuration of water spraying and fa
lling on a day as relentless as this has a cooling, tranquilizing effect which I am grateful for; whatever posture of artistic detachment I might be laying on the occasion, the truth is I am scared and trembling.
There is nothing more we can do but wait. We sit silently listening to the crackling, even though for the moment the fire is still on the opposite side of the bridge, or we make inane jokes to keep the fear at bay. Eleven of us, plus the terrified animals, staring at an aubergine sky. Those who smoke are smoking too much. The rest of us are trying to remain calm. Quashia, perhaps because he is too restless to sit or does not feel comfortable being a part of the family, has gone to climb the hill. Michel tries to stop him, but he insists that he can better warn us from there.
It is a question of the wind which is building. Trees are bowing and swaying as though attempting to tear themselves from the earth and fly unencumbered with the wind. And then it changes direction, an instant turn about as immediate as switching still-life into animation. Within seconds the flames leap the bridge which crosses the road and are now right behind us, burning fast toward the pinnacle of our hill. We are all on our feet.
“FIRE! FIRE!” It is Quashia.
We run to the rear of the house, and at the very summit, beyond the unfenced limit of our own terrain where the vegetation has not been so rigorously cut back, is a scorching wall of fire which reaches the tips of the tallest pines ascending toward a confused, overwrought heaven. It is the most terrifying sight I have ever witnessed. The flames leaping toward the bruised and moody sky seem to be performing a war dance. I stand gazing up the hill, horrified and petrified.
Beneath us, the first of the fire engines hurtles up the drive. It is shortly followed by a second and then a third.
Michel tells us to collect our passports and keep them at the ready. Clarisse admits to being scared and wraps an arm tight around my waist. I love her for the confidence. Pamela whines like a frightened baby. Robert, munching on one of his cakes, is still covered in flour. Anni, stalwart and unafraid, empties the last remaining pot of pepper onto a rose bush and lights yet another cigarette.
Olive Farm Page 21
