2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (13 page)

I finished the night at a table wedged between Alain and Serges, the latter of whom congratulated me on my drinking performance.

“
Tony, tu bois bien
,” he pointed out graciously. Then Alain slapped me on the back. I liked this place.

§

I had a headache in the morning, and the only thing that made it better was that I wasn’t suffering alone. Malcolm and Anne had bad heads too.

We were attempting to expunge our hangovers by engaging in the public-spirited activity of cleaning up the village hall. Just as volunteers from the village had prepared and presented the whole meal, it fell upon good souls like us to dispense with the debris. There were quite a few of us on duty, including the mayor and deputy mayor. It seemed that in this part of the world positions in high places did not excuse you from the menial tasks. Everyone mucked in together. Seemingly the only perk of being mayor was that you got to use the big ‘sprayey thing’. I expect there’s a technical term for such a contraption, but I don’t know what it is. Basically the ‘sprayey thing’ was a little machine attached to a hosepipe from which a big spray gun emanated. It was with this spray gun that the mayor prowled the village hall, spraying the tanned floor as he went. It fell to us lesser mortals to follow behind with big ‘scrapers’, pushing the soapy water away. Rene the Mayor conducted the operation with great pride and authority. There almost seemed to be a swagger about him as he waved his spray gun about the place. For a moment I wondered whether, if he was completely honest with himself, this was the thing he enjoyed best about being mayor.

Of course, there was the small point that the floor had never really been dirty enough to warrant the use of the ‘sprayey thing’ in the first place. A cursory wipe with a couple of mops would have sufficed. But no one had thought it wise to point this out. I mean, why deny your mayor his fun?

“
Voila!
” he said as he looked down proudly at the fruits of our labour.

A floor that looked pretty identical to how it had before.

“
Très bien
,” I said, a bit like the school creep. Rene nodded proudly and smiled back at me. Shortly afterwards we adjourned for a big lunch. About time too.

No point in overdoing it.

§

Later that day I found myself clambering into my hire car (which hadn’t exactly been overused) and heading off to the airport. My stomach seemed to be considerably nearer the steering wheel than it had been a few days earlier, such had been the spirit with which I’d embraced French hospitality. Yes, I had given a good account of myself, and I swelled with both food and pride as I watched the mountains disappear from view in my rear-view mirror. For someone who didn’t yet have the keys to his new house, I’d surely made good progress. In fact, it felt like I was already beginning to settle in.

The steady monotony of the motorway reminded me that this was ‘back to England’ time. Already the last couple of days felt like a dream. How would I get on, I wondered, when I returned as the legal owner of the property?

What would happen to the dream when it became a reality?

SOS DIY

Back home in England I began to think that Alain was right. He’d stated quite clearly that I was English, and that this fact alone made it beholden upon me to get a swimming pool. In his own erudite words, it was ‘
une bonne idee
’, and I was aware that arguing with him on this matter was only going to lead to back trouble in the future. So, I started drawing little plans for where a pool might fit on the available land, and I even wrote to my chum Rene the Mayor to discover what was needed in the way of permission.

I was quite delighted with the form I promptly received back from him. It was called a ‘
Declaration de travaux exemptes de permis de construire
’. This effectively meant that it was a form you filled out which, if approved, gave you permission not to need permission. If this was an indication of what French bureaucracy had in store for me, then installing myself in this house was going to be an arduous task. Filling out the form made me feel like Corporal Jones from
Dad’s Army
, who always asked Captain Mainwaring’s consent for everything he did.

“Permission not to need permission,” he would have requested.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jones,” would have come the reply.

But Captain Mainwaring wasn’t in charge of the French bureaucratic system. The post-war de Gaulle had been most diligent in ensuring that hadn’t happened. No, he’d got French bureaucrats to do it, and the ‘Permission not to need permission form’ may well have been one of their finest achievements.

As it turned out, not getting permission was quite a complicated business. I had to make a sketch of where the pool was going to be on the land, including its dimensions and a cross-section drawing revealing its depth. My mind boggled as to what would have been required had I actually needed their permission. Presumably they would have demanded further information, like birth certificate, blood type and special dietary requirements.

One of the consequences of completing the form and sending it back to the mayor was that I became aware that the swimming pool was now more than just a ‘maybe’ in answer to friends’ questions about whether I was going to get one or not. If my application for not needing permission were successful then it would become a major project for the new home, alongside plonking on the piano keys. But many questions remained unanswered. How much would it cost? Would I use it enough? Would there be a sporty type on a ladder blowing a whistle if I ever got the opportunity to do some petting?

Then there was the guilt factor. I’d already been through it once with regard to buying the house in the first place. How could I justify having so much, when so many people in the world have so little? Bloody conscience—why couldn’t it just mind its own business for once? It was assuaged a little after some surfing on the net revealed that the pool would cost me less than half what I’d pay for a fancy four-wheel drive. Now I didn’t feel so bad. Self-serving and hedonistic, yes, but not bad.

Not long after this period of form-filling and soul-searching, I received a letter from the
notaire
’s office informing me that the signing had all gone smoothly in my absence and that the house was now mine, all mine. Yes, I thought, but I’ll believe that when the keys are in my hand, and not before. Experience was teaching me that in these matters it was prudent to be a sceptic.

§

Spring had turned to summer by the time I set off to claim my treasure. I hadn’t wanted to go alone and I was travelling with Brad, who months before had done such a sterling job in devising a way for us to get my piano into the original white van. The original white van that regrettably was still not fully out of my life. I hadn’t realised that it had been my responsibility to let the Department of Transport know that I’d had the van towed away and crushed. An official letter had recently informed me that my failure to do so now made me liable to a hefty fine. Surely, I mused as I wrote out the cheque, this would finally be an end to the saga? Could there be any other ways that this van, deceased as it was, could drain my resources still further? Was I soon to discover that it had gambling debts for which I was responsible?

Brad and I loitered in the aisle of the plane, waiting for our turn to file down the steps and onto the French tarmac of Pau airport. A wave of hot humid air hit us as we stepped out from the plane’s pressurised cabin. The mountains, no longer snow-capped, swallowed up the horizon.

“Yes! We’re in heaven!” said Brad, pausing on top of the steps that would soon take him down to earth.

“Good, isn’t it?” I replied, slightly less euphorically.

I hoped that this trip would make a good break for Brad. He was waiting on a divorce, and although the process thus far had been amicable and he was well set to become good friends with his wife, I still felt he was carrying a burden of sadness and disappointment around with him. It felt great that I could provide succour by offering him the break of a few days’ relentlessly lugging furniture and unpacking boxes. It seemed the least I could do.

The drive was hot and humid, but then it was summer in the south of France, so it wasn’t unexpected. We wound down the windows and let the hot air circulate in the car until gradually it cooled as we began to climb and gain altitude. It wasn’t long before we were driving through the centre of Bagneres, almost in awe of the towering grey peaks that seemed to have sprung up all around us.

“What’s the first job we have to do?” asked Brad, displaying a splendid understanding of the fundamental nature of his trip.

“We have to collect the keys from the
notaire
’s office,” I replied. “It’s just up here on the left.”

Brad waited in the car whilst I climbed the stairs to the
notaire
’s office. I was nervous. I felt sure there’d be some last-minute bureaucratic hitch. But no, five minutes later I emerged from the offices waving the keys triumphantly above my head.

“No problems?” asked Brad, as I got back in the car.

“None at all. The
notaire
’s secretary handed over the keys. I didn’t even have to sign for them.”

A cynic might have believed that now all of my money had been successfully divided up amongst all the interested parties, there were no further hitches because nobody really gave a toss any more. But I was far too excited for such a cynical thought to have crossed my mind. I had the keys! The house was mine at long last.

Ten minutes later, after a drive that had seen Brad exude repeated gasps of approval prompted by the surrounding vistas, I was standing at my new front door and poised to turn the key in the lock. This was it! The moment that all the hours of paperwork, meetings, musing, worry, reverie and stress had been leading towards. The moment when for the first time the house well and truly became mine. Brad stood just behind me, poised with his camera, ready to capture the moment on film.

I turned the key but got no response from the lock. I turned it again. Still nothing. Three consecutive attempts produced little more than heavy sighs.

“Here, let me have a go,” said Brad, fully aware that he was better at this kind of thing than me.

I watched in despair as he turned the lock one way, then the other, only to find that the damn thing wouldn’t work.

“It’s no good,” said Brad. “The key just won’t open the door.”

“Don’t call it a key. It’s only a key if it has the good grace to open a lock. At the moment it’s just an annoying piece of metal.”

“Maybe it’s the wrong one. Let’s try it in the back door.”

And we did. And we had no luck there either, however many different key-turning techniques or swear words we used.

“Are you sure they’ve given you the right ones?” said Brad.

“I think so. They’re all labelled up as being for this house—and all the keys seem to fit the locks. They just don’t open them.”

“I think we might have to break in then,” said Brad.

“Oh I don’t like the sound of that,” I complained. “I haven’t gone through all the rigmarole of the French legal system just so that at the end of it all I can do what a squatter could have done in the first place.”

“All right, let’s try the garage door,” said Brad, who was clearly feeling far less despondent than I was.

The garage ran the length of the house beneath, like a giant cellar. However, I didn’t follow Brad as he set off down the drive because I was in a sulk. I knew what was going to happen. There was obviously a knack to these French locks, and soon we would have to summon the help of a Frenchman, shortly afterwards suffering the indignity of watching as he turned the key and opened the door with a nonchalant ease. I was extremely fed up that I was going to have to suffer this kind of humiliation in only the first few seconds of ownership. It would have been nicer to have let at least half an hour go by.

“Done it!” shouted Brad from below. “I’m in!” I ran down to join him. It was true. Genius that he was, he’d managed to get his head round a French lock, and we were in.

“Well done, mate,” I said, trying to pretend that I’d not spent the last few minutes in a childish sulk. “We can make our way up into the house using the internal staircase that leads up from here.”

Seconds later we emerged in the ground-floor hallway to be met by a dank smell of emptiness. Vacant houses always have this aroma, which lingers until the furniture of the new tenants arrives and magically exorcises it.

We opened the shutters and windows and a flood of light burst into the long open-plan living room where I’d had a drink with Jean-Claude and his family a few months before. It looked very bare now. Bare except for one very important piece of furniture that was already in situ. The piano. Upon moving out Jean-Claude had kindly got his brothers to help him move it up from the garage and into the living room. A gesture that had probably saved me and Brad from a premature acquaintance with the French health system.

“Go and play something,” said Brad. “A welcoming ditty.”

I lifted the lid and banged out the first tune that came into my head—which happened to be the
Pink Panther
theme. Quite why this melody emerged through my fingertips I do not know, perhaps it was some kind of subconscious homage to the Clouseau-like way we had entered the house. However, through the recently opened windows it also announced to the neighbourhood that someone new had arrived. Someone who knew the
Pink Panther
theme.

“I think a cup of tea is in order,” I declared as the final chord began to fade. “I’ll unpack the kettle.”

As new English settlers, it was important to mark our territory with a good old-fashioned cup of tea. Not to have done so would have been a betrayal of our heritage. It was certainly true that now I was here in France I wanted to absorb the local culture, but two things were non-negotiable. Tea and Marmite. I was not giving either of these up, and the fact that weeks before I’d made sure that the kettle was the most accessible object amongst the pile of stuff now waiting in the garage to be unpacked went some way to prove it.