There were no humans, though. We saw their farms – little clusters of buildings like Brigitte’s place, with a few outbuildings and the occasional chicken pen or duckpond. But no people. All asleep, I guessed. Or watching the Tour de France.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘To town. I have to say two words to the curé.’
We passed a concrete-walled cemetery, then pulled into the square next to a squat stone church and a school bus stop.
‘You wait over there,’ Monsieur Ribout told me. On the other side of the square was the Mairie, like a tiny two-roomed classical château, and in front of it a simple war memorial with a stone First World War soldier standing at ease as if waiting his turn to go and get shot. Apparently there’s only one village in the whole of France that lost nobody in the trenches.
But Monsieur Ribout wasn’t telling me to go and pay my respects to the dead. Well, not exactly. He was pointing at the nondescript glass-fronted building in one corner of the square, marked Café de la Mairie.
Back then, I didn’t understand something very important about sitting in a café in a non-touristy part of rural France. The people aren’t necessarily unfriendly. It’s just that they’re so unused to strangers that they don’t notice you. Or if they do see you, they don’t know what to do with you. The barman knows what every one of his customers drinks at any time of the day, so the arrival of a non-regular doesn’t compute. Why is someone sitting in Marcel’s seat when Marcel’s been dead for three years?
The customers were all men, their ages ranging between thirty and death. There were about ten of them, and at least half had moustaches. The air was full of smoke, beer and Tour de France commentary, an ambience that was being wafted lazily about by a ceiling fan.
I wished everyone a friendly ‘bonjour’ and made eye contact with all the men who looked my way. Several of the men replied to my greeting, but the only one I really wanted to talk to didn’t react. The barman was taking a slug from a glass of beer and listening to the twangy patois of an old guy sitting at the bar.
Oh well, I thought, they’ll know Monsieur Ribout. He’ll get us served.
The local paper was lying on the table, and I deciphered the front-page report about all the accidents on the region’s roads. No mention of my crash, but then it wasn’t in the same league as a Vel Satis clocked at two hundred kph on the autoroute, and a wine lorry that had skidded out of control and caused sixty kilometres of jams as people stopped to help themselves to free bottles of Côtes du Rhône. The perfect wine for the thirsty drink-driver, it seemed.
‘Salut, Pierre!’
There was a chorus of hellos as Monsieur Ribout strode into the café carrying a plastic bag full of cucumbers.
‘What? You haven’t served my English friend yet?’ he said, dumping the cucumbers on my table and going to shake everyone’s hand. He harangued them all for being unsociable, and the younger men came over to shake hands and say bonjour. The older ones seemed to be stitched in place on their bar stools.
‘Viens, viens,’ Ribout called, and I went to stand at the bar like a real man. He explained who I was, which elicited a lot of nods and aahs.
‘Didn’t you use to be taller?’ one of the men asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘before the operation.’
‘No, but didn’t Brigitte’s girl have—’ the questioner went on.
‘And your wife, doesn’t she have a lover who’s two metres tall?’ Ribout interrupted.
Laughs, backslaps and insinuations killed off any more talk about Florence’s ex.
Minutes before, I’d been sitting alone and ignored, and now we were getting offers from all the men to go and have a drink at their place.
‘No, not now,’ Ribout said, downing his coffee.
‘We’ve got some visits to make back at the village.’ We shook hands all round and left, with Monsieur Ribout promising to go for an apéro at everyone’s house within the next week. One sure way of making a fortune out here, I thought – set up a liver-transplant clinic.
For the next two hours, Ribout drove me around to say hello to practically every farmer within three miles of Brigitte’s place. There were oldies whose kids had gone to work in the city – meaning Limoges, Tulle or Brive. There were younger couples whose kids were planning to work in the city. It was rural depopulation before my very eyes.
I sat at tables in a dozen kitchens and ate strawberry tart, strawberry cake, strawberry mousse, strawberries in red wine or just plain strawberries. The downside to eating seasonal food is that you eat nothing else for the whole damn season.
I drank wine and cherry eau de vie. I was welcomed everywhere with smiling curiosity and presents of strawberries and courgettes. The bag of cucumbers was for me, too, a gift from the curé.
I was shown around fascinating barns and enticing septic tanks. I was offered the chance to shoot at rabbits – ‘they won’t run away’, dig up moles – ‘you only need a hundred skins to make a waistcoat’, and watch TV – ‘we can get three channels here, really clearly, too’.
By five o’clock I was drunk, overflowing with strawberries and dizzy from such a concentrated dose of country life.
‘We’d best go home for the apéro,’ the mayor announced.
We were standing at the top of a hill, in a gaggle of houses near the centre of the village, and somehow I managed to scrape together enough energy to have a constructive thought. Up here, my phone might actually work, whereas Brigitte’s place was down in a basin, hidden from every phone mast in France. Trust her great-grandad not to foresee the coming of the mobile phone.
‘Can I just see if I’ve got any messages?’ I asked the mayor.
‘Boot off course,’ he said in his fake English, and went to sit in his car.
I hooked up to the outside world. It was almost a surprise to discover that there still was one. I had three messages, including a text from my ex-girlfriend Alexa.
We’d been together for the whole of the previous winter, and I’d been certain that she was The One – great to be with, buzzing with crazy ideas, and pretty damn good to look at, too. But I’d fucked up, and we hadn’t been in touch for months, not since we split up for the second time. The first time had been because I slept with someone else by mistake (it can happen), and the second was after I made a bad joke about a politician (it can’t happen enough). Now it seemed kind of stupid. How can you end a relationship over something so unrelated to your relationship? It seems reasonable to end it because you’ve slept with someone else, because you realize you have nothing to say to someone, or even because your girlfriend makes you dress up in her ex-boyfriend’s clothes, but not because of politics. But then Alexa was a serious girl.
The message she’d left was only half political. It seemed she was lightening up. ‘Well done,’ she wrote in her fluent English, ‘I heard u left ur job when u discovrd ur boss was fascist.’ This wasn’t quite true, but I wasn’t going to deny such a flattering interpretation of my getting fired. ‘Where ru now?’ she asked. ‘Starting salons de tea? In Fr or Eng? I am in Eng.’
Maybe it was because Florence was pissing me off with her exes, but I chose the ‘appeler’ (call) option.
“Allo?’
I made a ‘just one more minute’ gesture to Monsieur Ribout.
‘Alexa, hi, it’s Paul. I just got your message.’
‘Paul? Hi. Where are you?’
‘Standing on a hill in Corrèze.’
‘Corrèze?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you doing in Corrèze?’ As if no one would ever dream of going there.
‘Trying to digest about five tons of strawberries.’
‘Ah, yes, you and your digestion. I remember the effects of your Christmas pudding. A great example of the noisy English digestion.’
‘It wasn’t the pudding, it was the French custard. There weren’t enough lumps. It’s the lumps that help us digest our Christmas pudding.’
‘Remind me not t
o come for Christmas lunch at your salons de thé. Are you starting them?’
I told her about the September opening, she told me her news – she was in England visiting her mum who’d now gone to live over there.
‘You remember, she was in Moscow with the Ukrainian DVD man?’
‘What, and now she’s found an English DVD pirate?’
‘No, he has come to live in England. It is safer. He is buying a football team.’
‘A football team? Which one?’
‘I don’t know. Newcastle something.’
‘Newcastle United? Holy shit, that’s one of the biggest clubs in England. Are you sure he’s not dabbling in second-hand plutonium?’
‘Maybe. I will tell him you want to know.’
A car horn broke the spell. I was enjoying myself after all the Smalltalk with the farmers. Jokes were back on the menu for Alexa and me, it seemed.
‘What’s that? Your girlfriend is getting impatient?’ she asked.
I turned to see old Ribout miming ‘time for a drink’ through the windscreen.
‘No, it’s the mayor of the village. We’re late for his Pernod. I’d better go.’
‘OK, bye.’
‘Bye, Alexa. It was good—’
But she’d gone.
‘Who was that? Un ami anglais?’ Ribout asked.
‘Yes, he’s an old English friend,’ I replied, wondering why I lied. It must be the sexual frustration, I told myself. My genes were trying to cast their net more widely. But they were just being stupid. I wasn’t seriously going to start fantasizing about an ex-girlfriend, was I, any more than I would fantasize about Brigitte.
‘What’s wrong?’ the mayor asked as I clenched my eyes shut and tried to pound the image of Brigitte’s nightdress out of my head with both fists.
When we got back to the house, I was reunited with another old friend – my bag. At last, I could feel almost human again and not like some half-sized apparition from Florence’s past. I changed into some clothes of my own – loose things, so that I’d have room for another gargantuan dinner.
We had terrine of calf’s head, followed by cold pork and the usual landslide of annoyingly abundant green vegetables. I struggled gamely through the meal until it came to the strawberries, when I really could not force another one of the shiny, red bastards down my throat.
While everyone was clearing the table I suggested, at a volume so low that bats would have had problems picking it up, that maybe Florence would like to come for a quick stroll in the dark.
Brigitte must have had her Batgirl costume on under her kaftan because she declared that it was our turn to wash up, after which Florence had to read Simon a story.
I sloshed soapy water about for the required time then went and passed out in bed. At least in my dreams I stood a fair chance of getting laid.
8
THE NEXT DAY, Monday, turned out to be the last full day of our country vacances.
It was yet another gloriously sunny morning, I noticed as soon as I woke up around six. That perfect, pollution-free blue sky was one thing you could never get fed up with.
After breakfast, during which Florence passed on the news that I’d let water get down the back of the sink last night while washing up, which was probably turning the foundations of the house to cold porridge as she spoke, I said that I was off to have a shower. I put a meaningful hand on Florence’s knee (she’d given in to my pleading and sworn never to wear the velvet dressing gown again), and let her know that this was an invitation. The only way to avoid being disturbed, I reasoned, was to lock ourselves in the bathroom. If anyone did knock, I’d just tell them that my poor English digestion was confused by all this fresh food and needed half an hour of uninterrupted concentration.
Florence reached down to rub my hand and it looked as if we were game on.
So as I showered, I was feeling decidedly happy at the prospect of us soaping each other down and then finding some way of making love in the bathroom – lay some towels out on the floor? I sit on the loo, she sits on me? The possibilities were endless and all equally enticing.
I let the water massage the top of my head while I pictured various scenes from a hardcore porn film entitled Amour dans la Salle de Bains. When Florence finally snuck in, I was, let’s say, fully geared up to play the male lead in the movie.
‘Lock the door and come on in,’ I whispered. I pulled back the curtain to let her see how pleased I was to see her.
And there was Brigitte, a toothbrush in her hand and a strangled squeak in her mouth.
From the look on her face, you’d think she’d never had a man open a shower curtain and point an erect penis at her.
From the time it took for her to look away, you’d think she was afraid it would never happen again.
I found Florence standing by the barn in her bikini. She was holding a broken, rusty knife. Was this it? I wondered. Was I being offered the honourable way out? Hack off the offending member and let’s say no more about it.
She gave me an ‘oo-err’ look and I gathered that words had been said between mother and daughter.
‘What did she tell . . .?’ I began, but Florence silenced me with a frown. Maternal ears were on red alert, it seemed.
‘You’re not picking courgettes today,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘No, you’ve been picking them too small.’
This was the last straw – or courgette. Digging in the wrong place, showering incorrectly, and now this?
‘But surely it’s best to kill the bloody things before they grow too big,’ I said. ‘This place is suffering from a courgette plague. Pretty soon the whole département will be taken over by courgettes. They’ll block all the rivers and smother the apple trees. Courgettes, cucumbers and lettuces. Why is it that you plant the only vegetables in the world that you can’t freeze?’
Florence shrugged. The problem of controlling a courgette population explosion came a poor second to keeping her mum happy, which was fair enough, I suppose.
‘You’re scraping the moss off the roof,’ she said. ‘There’s a ladder in the barn.’
‘Any particular scraping technique I’m supposed to use? Forehand? Backhand? Underarm? Tell me now, because I’m bound to do it wrong otherwise.’
‘Paul . . .’
‘Meanwhile you can call your friend Nicolas and make sure they’re starting work this morning, right?’
‘Hey, a bit less aggression, please,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not my fault you exhibited yourself to my mother. This situation is not easy for me, you know.’
She was looking annoyed but apologetic. Maybe there was a chance of a consolation shag coming my way soon, I thought.
I was just hauling the antique, half-rotten ladder out of the barn when a high-pitched voice started calling ‘Monsieur’ behind me.
I turned to see two gendarmes – one approximately two metres tall, the other half his size – standing by the gate. They were both approaching retirement age, and both were in immediate danger of weight-induced diabetes. There was probably a sweepstake going round the gendarme station as to which would be the first to burst his trousers.
Florence and I arrived at the gate at the same time, with Brigitte looking on from the kitchen door.
The gendarmes saluted.
‘Monsieur Wess?’ the little guy said in his strange high voice, mistaking one of Florence’s breasts for an Englishman to judge by the direction he was looking in.
‘Oui, c’est moi.’
‘Did you make a complaint against a driver for leaving the scene of an accident?’ Now he was under the impression that Florence’s navel was the plaintiff.
‘Yes. Did you find him?’
‘Ah.’ He looked pained, apparently because he’d just noticed Florence’s bare legs. ‘The gendarmes in Montpellier found the person who corresponded to the number you gave, but, ah.’ He stared apologetically at Florence’s crotch. ‘He said he wasn’t at the scene of the accident.’
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‘What?’ I said this so loudly that he finally tore his eyes away from Florence. ‘But we saw him.’
‘He says you are making an error.’
‘Mais c’est ridicule!’ Florence looked as if she was about to thump one of the policemen.
‘Calmez-vous, Madame,’ the tall guy said, though he was obviously hoping she’d need some physical restraint.
‘But did you check that he has a red 4WD? Because if he does, then that proves we are right,’ I said. Pretty devastatingly, I thought. ‘All you have to do is take some paint from our car and see if it . . .’ I couldn’t remember the word for match. ‘Corresponds,’ I said. The French use that word a lot. ‘See if it corresponds with his car. And if it does, then our complaint . . . corresponds.’
‘Mais quel enfoiré!’ Florence wasn’t having any of this reasoned debate. ‘It’s my father’s car. It was brand new. This enfoiré crashed into us on a roundabout and you’re not going to do anything?’
‘Madame, Madame.’ The squat one held his hands out as if to ward off an attack by Florence’s chest.
‘Do you know how many accidents there were this weekend?’ the taller gendarme asked, looking as exhausted as if he’d had to write the report on every one of them.
‘I don’t care how many accidents there were!’ Florence shouted. ‘This enfoiré crashed into us and he’s going to pay for the damage.’
I really must look up that word enfoiré, I thought. It seemed very fashionable. I knew it meant idiot, but I didn’t know what sort.
‘Have you seen our car?’ I asked. The gendarmes shook their heads. ‘Because if you can tell your colleagues in Montpellier, yes, there is red paint on our car, and if you can show that the number of his car . . . corresponds to a red car, we are not making an error. N’est-ce pas?’