by Mary Byrne
She turned to the wannabes again. ‘It’s a wonder any self-respecting foreigner would want hand, act or part of such a country.’
We all grinned. This was the truth. But it was all the anal-hoarding sadist needed.
‘You’re suspended,’ he said. ‘Out. Now.’
Chantal’s lower lip was trembling as she grabbed her stuff and left.
She was pre-retired with less pension than she would’ve got, but she was delighted not to have to look at him ever again.
She decided to leave the city altogether. ‘I’m baling out. They say you’re only free when the kids have finished university, and the dog is dead,’ she smiled. ‘You could say that’s about where I am, now.’
She headed for Normandy and had a look at various heaps, eventually settling on one. She came back to Paris and sold her small studio for a modest sum— ‘It’s a helluva lot more than I put into it,’ she said.
I helped her load the hired van and we drove out to Normandy during the full fury of the sixtieth commemoration of the Allied landings.
It was not a good idea. Roads were blocked and deviated and security was at its most tense, as heads of state from far and wide made their way to Omaha Beach and the rest of it.
‘Did you time this deliberately?’ I asked her.
‘Was so busy packing boxes I never even noticed.’
We got closer to her chosen place, and deeper and deeper into a forgotten country of little stone villages and small fields and wild hedgerows and farmyards of hens and geese and ponds of ducks. It all looked as if it hadn’t changed for several centuries.
When we finally juddered up the last narrow little path—you could hardly call it a road—I was shocked.
The place was in ruins. It was a collection of stone buildings arranged in a U around a yard. The side she planned to restore first consisted of a little house attached to a barn. Both had a very deep roof, covered in artistically rusting corrugated sheets. The rest had no roof at all. Oh, it was picturesque, all right. But it was a disaster.
She showed me round, knowledgeably. Off to one side was an old mill, and a reed-ridden field that even I knew in winter would be water-sodden.
We unloaded and dispersed her stuff in places we thought waterproof. She set up tent hastily, before nightfall.
I almost felt guilty, leaving her there in the middle of nowhere, on her own.
‘Go on. I’m a country girl at heart,’ she said.
And I drove the van back to Paris and my job with the wannabes.
With one thing and another I didn’t get out there again for months. I hired a car and drove out in boiling heat one August day, the car loaded with city goodies for Chantal. In the left lane, look-at-me sports vehicles sped past, headed for Deauville.
When I left the traffic behind and got to her place, I had time to take in the whole place again. It hadn’t changed a whit. The tent was still under a lean-to. However, I glimpsed two caravans.
An elderly lady in waist-length grey hair came out of a barn towards me, walking on crutches.
When she started to speak the voice was the falsetto of Chantal. You’d have heard her three fields away. ‘Oh, là-là!’ she said. ‘Have I been having a time of it!’
She was gabbling so much I stopped listening and just looked. Gone the French pleat. The hair was only yellow at the bottom now. She was wearing stained tracksuit bottoms and a tank top. Her face was brown, her face wrinkled without its smoothing make-up. But she looked more youthful, even happy.
She’d been collecting plums for the visiting architect and fallen from the tree breaking several ribs.
‘Without the neighbors I’d have been jiggered,’ she said.
She showed me around. She’d bought a beat up old white van. There was a caravan under a hayloft and another in the house itself. One served as kitchen and the other as bedroom. There were umpteen cats, two dusty appaloosa ponies, and a donkey. The appaloosas whinnied whenever we were in earshot. ‘I can’t resist giving them treats,’ she admitted. In another meadow two huge drays raised their heads and lumbered towards us, curiously.
‘Guy couldn’t feed them, nobody wanted to buy them. He was contemplating selling them to the factory for meat. So I couldn’t resist.’
‘And the donkey?’
‘My favorite. Everyone has a donkey here,’ she said. ‘They keep the grass down.’ She had a number of hectares, some of them rented.
Her hands were still black from picking blackberries the day before. Blackberries weren’t good this year, she said, because of the drought. She had invited some people around for dinner to meet me, and was planning a barbecue. ‘Although I don’t usually eat meat,’ she added.
She even had a garden. She was soaking nettles in water to use against unwelcome insects. Tall bluegreen absinthe plants leaned against the wind, and were intended for the same purpose.
The evening was pleasant, bucolic. The sun sank red behind Chantal’s ruins as we drank cidre bouché and gnawed on bones. There was talk of the price of firewood (hot on the heels of gas and oil), the profitability of growing cereals (fifty hectares didn’t produce sufficient revenue for a family). Maize needed prodigious amounts of water just to produce one kilo. Things like that.
This gave me time to study Chantal’s guests. Most were wily-eyed peasants with rough hands and plump wives. The older ones talked of the war, as if this were expected of them. One old lady had thrown a broom at a German soldier who came looking for milk and butter. ‘Nichts lait, nichts beurre,’ she had told him.
When at one point the question of our work came up, we both sighed and told them a little about our boss. We said he was a connard. The old lady with no fear of Germans said he sounded like a right peau de hareng: a right old herring-skin. We got a great laugh out of that.
One member of the company was different. For one thing, he wasn’t a local at all, but where he came from was a bit vague. I never got his name right, either. There was a double name and then a nickname like Mimi or something. He sat across from me. He had dark lumpy skin and wore a leather tie with a turquoise stone in it. His greasy hair was held in a ponytail by another leather tie and turquoise stone. He smoked rollups. He appeared to be on the dole. He did odd-jobs. He sculpted with stuff he found on rubbish tips. Had I seen the horse he’d made for Chantal? I recalled a rusted effort inside one of the barns. I’d seen guys like this all over the Mediterranean.
When it was all over, people helpfully washed dishes and left them to dry on one of the various oilcloth-covered tables Chantal had laid out over the yard. I was surprised to see Ponytail stay behind when the others left. He didn’t have a car either, apparently.
Chantal showed me to my quarters in the bedroom caravan, told me where best to pee and how to block the door against cats, grass-snakes, foxes—
‘Stop! I said. ‘I’ll be wanting back to my seventeen square meters, if you tell me any more!’
Then she and Ponytail retired to the tent on the sheltered side of the house.
I lay awake for a long time thinking about all that.
In the morning, Ponytail had to have hot chocolate, while we had coffee from big heavy bowls. He wasn’t after the calcium for his teeth, I reckoned, because one or two were already missing. Others looked ready to follow.
It was hot. Chantal had no electricity yet, and flies came and went and laid eggs in any dead meat left lying. The cats deposited dead mice or else came with live ones and consumed them whole before our eyes—tails, teeth, and all. We walked lots. Around the locality, Parisians repaired their roofs, clipped their hedges and generally prepared to batten down the hatches for winter. ‘You’d wonder,’ said Chantal, ‘what amusement they get out of their holidays at all.’
Ponytail said he drank pastis in the evenings. I discovered he drank it at any time of day, forcing it on anyone who dropped in to see Chanta
l. Sometimes he even bought a bottle from the travelling grocer, in case he’d run short.
One evening, he took us to a bar he liked to frequent—what he called a ‘decent drinkers’ bar’—in a nearby village. ‘Le Novelty’ it was called. There was a giant union jack on the back wall. It was a favorite haunt for tourist Brits.
Luckily for us the Brits weren’t there that day. But Ponytail could talk of little else, and the bartender was equally enthusiastic. He looked at Chantal, and said, ‘I hear the table groans with food over in your place.’ He gave the impression that his bar specialized in English-speakers. ‘There’s X from Scotland,’ he said, ‘and Y from Wales, and—’
Suddenly a local man at one of the tables spoke up:
‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,’ he announced. ‘I’m sitting here and no one to even ask if I have a drought on me.’
On the fifteenth of August in the village there was a huge fete to commemorate the war. Film of elderly people recounting their war was followed by folk dancing and storytelling—much of it extremely lewd. Then a sound-and-light show at the old chateau recounted how village and chateau had been torched by the Germans on the eve of their departure. On this very day, sixty years ago. I’d seen various rehearsals in Paris, with jeeps and men in uniform, but somehow all this brought it closer to home. Here, the noise and dust were more real. The show ended with the arrival of a fleet of old American vehicles belching black fumes and teeming with young people, the women in light frocks and ankle socks, the men in army uniforms. All smoked cigarettes and tapped hands and feet to Glen Miller. This was followed by fireworks as good as any in Paris. We oohed and we aahed and made our way home on foot, with cricks in our necks.
I got into the habit of going out to visit Chantal often. I suppose I envied her in a way.
Ponytail was more often absent than present, especially when I came. He was very friendly with the son of a British couple who owned a manor house in the region, an idle young man in his early twenties whom I earmarked straight away for a junkie (‘God silence your viper tongue!’ said Chantal.) Ponytail was helping the Brits with work on their house, he was sculpting for them. The parents were rich early-retired. Their main activity was studying the French. ‘They’re always whining,’ Ponytail informed us. It wasn’t a complaint, he was studying them studying us. ‘When she goes shopping, she complains that the French’re either over-eager to do the hard sell or they just ignore you while they concentrate on stylish layout. It could be tomatoes or designer goods—doesn’t matter.’
It had taken the Brits several years to come up with their big theory about the French: It’s not about the money. The French were sex and food addicts, hedonists if you wanted to be polite about it. They were terribly focused on remaining secular. They were frequently revolting. They were always arrogant. But throughout all of that you had to hand it to them, because while the rest of the world was hell bent on getting rich or being rich, the French still preferred to talk about ‘decent’ wages and quality of life. It wasn’t about the money.
Chantal and I stuck to our more earthly pursuits. Her house had clearly become a sort of halfway house where all dropped in and many stayed to eat. I never saw anyone bring her anything, but imagined there must be some arrangement between them. A man came and pared the donkey’s hooves. Four rounds of dark nail, with a half-moon of paler substance, sat on the flagstones before the house. The locals sat and watched and said nothing. I learned about aphids and compost and that anything you planted on the feast of Sainte Catherine would grow.
When I was there, I wished I was back in Paris, and when I was back in Paris I could think of nothing better than being out in the country again.
We went mushrooming in autumn, as work began on Chantal’s roof. This was a huge affair, and I didn’t dare ask how much it was costing or if she’d have anything left over. Ponytail was spending more and more time with the Brits. That way he avoided getting involved in any of the work on the house. They’d lodged him in an empty wing of the house. But occasionally he graced us with his presence and came smelling of pastis and rollups. He told us about the arguments he’d had with the Brits over William the Conqueror. ‘They think they invaded France!’ he chortled. The young man, his new friend, was called William, which led to further chortling. Ponytail had done his homework: 60 percent of the English language came from either Norman or French—and they weren’t the same thing, he reminded us. Nobody, not even the Allies, had managed to bomb the Conqueror’s chateaux to bits. The Conqueror had built the Tower of London. The Normans had gone on the Crusades. There were people with names of Norman origin in Sicily and the Middle East.
And so on, and so on.
After the roof, Chantal attacked the house itself. She had the walls sanded to bring out the stone, and this is where she got a big surprise. One day the workmen came running to say there was a ‘problem’: they’d have to stop sanding in order to strip a wall that seemed to be covered in tons of plaster. ‘Could be anything under there—maybe the wall’s in trouble,’ they said helpfully. The wall was seriously bulbous.
I wondered why the architect hadn’t gone into the question, but kept my mouth shut.
Chantal wanted everything out in the open and upfront. ‘Let’s strip it and know the worst,’ she said.
So they went through layers of plaster until they came to stone. It took ages. I was there for the start of it, but then I had to leave again.
‘Anyone that hasn’t got a layer of fat on them now, is fucked,’ a customer remarked to the cheese vendor as I hovered in the market one early winter day. I was waiting for Chantal to collect me. I had abandoned cars for the leisurely train.
A bitter wind blew through the cheese vendor’s hair. She checked her clients for offence-caliber, and giggled.
When we got to the house, I was astonished. Inside the main living room was a chimney the size of the entire wall. The stone was beautiful. The corbels were sculpted.
‘Why on earth would anyone want to hide that?’ I asked.
‘Nobody knows anything,’ she said. ‘I’ve checked high and low. You’d be forgiven for feeling paranoid.’
She had other problems too: the new phone number she’d been given turned out to be a former fax, and she kept receiving faxes during the night from advertising computers to which she couldn’t reply.
‘It’s Kafkaesque,’ she said. ‘I have to unplug the phone to sleep. But if I forget, I’m done for.’
Telecom refused to help; all they could do was change her number again.
There was also trouble about a septic tank she’d had installed by a local, without taking account of the new European rules and regulations and permissions and technical considerations.
To cap it all, the next-door farmer was after her land.
‘Sometimes,’ she eyed me carefully as she said it, ‘I think there’s a jinx on me.’
It got so bad that I worried for her, and having little else to do, I went out there for Christmas. We chose pigments, and painted wall after wall. Then we sat before the huge chimney and with giant tongs fiddled with logs a yard long in the great fire. I had to admit Chantal had made a great job of the huge room with its high-beamed ceiling. She hadn’t gone too precious on it, but had left a certain rusticity, all the better to set off the antiques she was collecting all over the region. She’d even got good at beating Parisian dealers to the choicest items. After Christmas we continued ‘the hunt’ as she referred to it. On good days, she’d say, ‘Bagged plenty,’ on bad days, ‘Nothing bagged.’
It even snowed and the electricity blacked out. We spent a whole evening by candlelight, eating food produced on the fire. Chantal was in her element. She had found catechism benches somewhere and cleaned them up for the kitchen table. As we sat there with friends or neighbors, she’d suddenly say, ‘Who made the world?,’ then answer herself, ‘God made the world.’ Then, ‘Wh
o do we call God?’ Even the locals didn’t remember such basics. Some of it contrasted oddly with the antiques and the rest.
It all contrasted utterly with our poor wannabes I’d left behind in the heart of the city.
The following summer, Chantal came to Paris more often. She came for specific events like the Fête de la Musique on the longest day, and later she came again for the fourteenth of July. I wondered what it all meant. I found out that Ponytail was looking after the garden and the animals in her absence. ‘I didn’t leave him a key,’ she added, ‘he has no business inside the house and there’s the insurance to think of. Anyway, I’m paying him for it, he’s strapped at the moment.’
In August we went back to Normandy together and found things a mess. The garden was parched and yellow. More dramatically, even the animals were dry. Nobody had seen Ponytail for days. A neighbor had only noticed the situation hours before, but had done little other than water the animals.
‘I need to have this out with him,’ she said.
Inside the house, there was a dreadful smell. She seemed more worried about Ponytail than the smell.
‘Must be the septic tank,’ she said lightly. ‘I’ll put a dose of ‘Urgent’ in it.
Because we hadn’t found out where Ponytail had gone and because I’d always wanted to see it, I dragged her next morning—protesting—off to a local hunting fete, where horses, dogs and men were blessed from the altar and long polished horns were sounded during Mass. Something else struck me too: here was another, utterly non-peasant side of local life. Pedigree dogs and horses were not only pure-bred but impeccably groomed with shiny backsides and evenly-trimmed tails, unlike the dusty appaloosas in Chantal’s back field. The men and women mounted on them were beefy, well-fed and sleek, in utter contrast to the specimens that frequented Chantal’s place. Their gear was their best, for the festival, green outfits and black outfits and grey and stunning red with matching hats, feathers and sometimes a white fur trim. They walked and talked with the confidence of people who were afraid of nothing and owed nothing to anyone, the kind who could train or whip a horse or a dog and buy or sell a bishop or a gendarme. It was a whole side of local life I knew nothing about, and that Chantal chose to ignore.
