2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (17 page)

“Shall we take a short break here? I’m knackered,” I said to Brad.

“OK,” said Brad, without a hint of hesitation.

We were looking out across a stunning vista. Rolling hills, meadows, pastures with grazing sheep and cows, a busy stream and a smattering of barns and farmhouses. The town of Bagneres was visible in the distance, as was the whole region of the Bigorre, in all its bucolic simplicity. We scrambled up to a large rock where we could be ‘
bonjour
-free’ for a while. Here, contented and calm, we sat and marvelled at the peace of it all.

“You see those sheep over there?” said Brad.

“Yes.”

“Well, why do you think there’s one lot all sticking together and pointing the same way, and another lot over there, doing exactly the same, but having nothing to do with the first lot?”

It was a good question. Were sheep tribal creatures? There were definitely two distinct gangs on this mountainside.

“I wonder if they ever switch from one group to another?” I mused.

“And do they like each other—or is there an undercurrent of tension between them?” added Brad.

Neither of us had any answers.

We were fast discovering that this is what it’s like when ‘townies’ go for a country walk. For the rest of our outing we found that every ten minutes a question was asked to which neither of us had any answer.

“How long can that buzzard hover there before he gets tired?”

“What kind of animal leaves droppings like that?”

“What altitude do you have to be at for grass not to grow?”

And all the time, the question to ourselves: why didn’t we pay more attention in geography at school?

Finally Brad went for a sudden change of subject and delivered the killer question.

“So, did anything Paul and Berry said make you any closer to making a decision about the swimming pool?”

“Well, it’s a shame,” I replied. “But it does look like I’m going to have to be patient and wait until next August.”

“What? You can’t wait that long!”

“Well, there’s no alternative. What else can I do?”

“Do it yourself. They sell kits.”

“That’s what Paul said, but he hadn’t seen what a mess I made of the clothes rail. Do we want a swimming pool or a hole with a swamp around it?”

“You could hire in some local builder to do it.”

“There aren’t any available. Paul and Berry say that there’s a shortage and that they’ve all got more than enough work already.”

Brad scratched his head. He had a determined look on his face. I’d seen him like this before—in problem-solving mode.

“Maybe the answer,” he said, eventually, “is for you to fly Ron out to join you. You could do the pool together.”

“Ron?”

“Yes, Ron.”

I looked askance at Brad, but I could see he was serious.

“The same Ron who recommended the white van which made it 500 yards on the epic journey to the south of France?”

“Yes.”

“The same Ron who has been holed up on his boat for the past few months saying he’s feeling depressed?”

“Yes. But a trip to France will probably snap him out of it. He’s a great builder. He’d be able to mastermind the pool—and do some of the other jobs you need doing.”

“I don’t know. I think it might be better just to be patient and wait a year till we can get the pool professionals to do it.”

“Well, you know best.”

I hate that expression, mainly because people only use it when they mean exactly the opposite.

“We’ll talk about it on the plane home tomorrow,” I said, closing what was fast becoming a difficult subject.

Brad’s enthusiasm for the pool project was colouring his judgement. I’d have him brought back to his senses by the time we landed back in London.

Common sense would prevail.

Something in the Woodshed

The next time the plane touched down in Pau airport I knew that I wouldn’t be seeing Britain again for months. The to-ing and fro-ing was over. This was it: I was moving to France for the summer. I was saying goodbye to driving on the left, traffic jams and the loud thwack of leather on willow on the cricket greens of our fair villages. It was ‘cheerio’ to TV soaps and the lurid sensationalism of the tabloid newspapers. I was bidding farewell to Britain and going to live with what some might describe as the beret-clad, garlic-chomping, onion-selling enemy. However, like the big man that I am, I was prepared to set our differences aside. So what if we’d once fought with each other for a hundred years? So what if de Gaulle and Britain hadn’t always seen eye to eye? And never mind that some of the French saw us Brits as a nation of shopkeepers who boil everything until the flavour has gone. I didn’t mind all that, I was happy to be going to live in France and it felt wonderful. It felt romantic. And it felt a little odd.

Odd, because when I checked in at the airport, my travelling companion was not the beautiful woman of my dreams—my soulmate, friend and lover all rolled into one. No, it was a fifty-six-year-old bearded bloke with a healthy gut and a cigarette hanging from his lips. It was Ron.

Common sense had not prevailed, and as a result Ron and I were going to be living together for the summer. Brad had put together a pretty persuasive argument on the flight back to Britain. How could I pass up the chance to lounge by a pool after my hours of piano practice were complete? Hadn’t Ron always done a good job for me? Who else would be free and willing to do a job like this at short notice, and away from family and friends?

Under duress, I’d weakened and called Ron to see if he’d be interested in a daily rate to come and convert the garage into a living space, and start work on constructing a swimming pool.

“What do you think, Ron?” I’d asked. “Would you be up for it?”

“Yeh, I s’pose so,” he’d said, somehow managing to keep his excitement under control.

I hadn’t been as nervous as I might have been about inviting Ron to live with me. Technically he may have been my ‘builder’ but we’d never really had a relationship like that. Ron had overseen all the knocked-through walls, extensions, lofts and patios of my life, and I’d never had to suffer the torment that seems to engulf others at the moment they let ‘the men with hammers’ through the front door. “Bloody builders,” they usually exclaim with a combination of frustration, contempt, resignation and self-pity. “What a nightmare we’re having!”

Not me though. It had always been fun with Ron. He’d turn up with whoever he’d mustered together to help him on the job, and the weeks that followed were invariably filled with cheerful banter. It didn’t matter that I was the one who ultimately wrote the cheques, I’d be the butt for as many jokes as anyone else, perhaps more. The job always got done—perhaps not precisely on time or exactly as I’d envisaged, but it was a pain-free experience and that was good enough for me.

Nevertheless, however well you get on with your builder, it’s still not normal to get him to move in with you. Certainly not if you’re a heterosexual man who is not instantly drawn to beards and bellies. However, because we both have a decent sense of humour, we like our own space, and we were both Piscean men living without a woman in our daily lives, I thought we could make this work.

I must admit, though, that recently I’d noticed a deterioration in Ron’s general condition. He’d not had much work lately, mainly because he hadn’t picked up the phone and chased it, and he’d spent too much time alone on his boat, slowly letting his self-confidence ebb away. By his own admission, his appetite for building had disappeared and of late he’d tended to perform the role of foreman, preferring to point at work and direct others rather than actually knuckle down and do any hard graft himself. Secretly I hoped that removing him from his boat and dumping him in the Pyrenees might lift his spirits and herald the era of a ‘New Ron’—vibrant, cheery and eager to get on with things.

The day of our departure arrived. The airport was packed, and it felt different somehow to my previous trips. At first I was confused as to why, but then I realised. The school holidays had begun and most of those around us were families going on their annual fortnights away. At check-in, instead of being surrounded by the relative calm of the business traveller, Ron and I were subjected to the constant whine of children’s questions: ‘
MUM, WHY DO WE GIVE OUR SUITCASES TO THE LADY?
’, ‘
DAD, WHY DID HE WANT TO KNOW WHO PACKED OUR BAGS?
’ And then there were the weary appeals of exhausted mothers: ‘
DAMIAN, PLEASE STOP PULLING YOUR SISTER’S HAIR
,’ topped by the occasional raucous bellow from a short-tempered father: ‘
DEAN, GET OFF IT RIGHT NOW! IT’S A LUGGAGE TROLLEY NOT A BLOODY DODGEM CAR!
’

These people looked dog-tired and it was a pretty good bet that they were all going to return from their two weeks away desperately in need of a holiday. Occasionally a father would look at me with an envious glint in his eye. I’m afraid I had little sympathy. It had been precisely the weary expression that this poor fellow was wearing that had always put me off the idea of starting a family. Why put yourself through the grief?

If Ron and I weren’t the original ‘odd couple’, then we made a splendid second best. From time to time people looked at us with an expression of curiosity, no doubt trying to work out who we were to each other. Just why were we travelling together? Were we relatives? Or work colleagues? Or did they think we were lovers? I quickly encouraged my mind to move on. This last image was one that I wasn’t keen to have linger.

We completed the journey quietly, enduring the mayhem of migrating families with good grace and great forbearance. Soon enough we were exposed to the heat and humidity of late July in the south of France, and before long we were driving down the winding narrow road that led to my new home.

“Nice views,” said Ron, who had been in fine spirits for the journey.

“Yes—good, isn’t it,” I replied, proudly.

Ahead I could see a small old lady with grey hair, shooing some chickens into an adjacent dilapidated barn. She immediately looked up at the sound of an approaching vehicle. I could now see that this was Marie, the sweet elderly lady with whom I’d played belote on the day of the village dinner. She beamed and waved to me. Well, it was more than a wave, really; it was an instruction to pull over the car and chat. An instruction that I duly followed. I leant out of the window and kissed Marie gently on each cheek. She looked a little taken aback and then I remembered that the etiquette in France was generally to kiss women younger than you, and shake hands with the older ones. Oh well, maybe it fell to me to change all that.

“
Voici mon ami Ron
”, I said, pointing to my passenger.

Marie tried to reach across and shake his hand, but it was too far. Ron nodded meekly and made eye contact with Marie for only the briefest of moments. It reminded me just how painfully shy the man was.

Perhaps it was the two kisses, but Marie definitely had a twinkle in her eye as she fired questions at me. How was I? What was the weather like in London? How long was I here for? She chatted freely, regardless of the fact that all the chickens she’d diligently shooed into the barn were now slowly making their way back out again. She began to rave about how nice my car was but I quickly explained that this was rented and that I would be looking to buy a second-hand one soon. Ah, she said, then I should talk to her son. He would find me one. He repaired cars and often found good second-hand ones for people in the village. I thanked her and said goodbye.

“What was all that about?” asked Ron, who didn’t speak a word of French.

“Oh, she was just saying how she’s captain of the village volleyball team and that you looked like you’d be a useful addition to the squad. She’s expecting you at training tonight.”

“Oh right,” he said, not really taking in what I’d said. “There was a nice mechanical digger parked round the back of the farmhouse, did you see that? That could be very useful to you if you want to get the hole dug for your pool.”

“Good thinking, Ron.”

I called out to Marie, who was only too pleased to chat further and let more ‘shooed’ chickens leave the barn again. I learned that the digger belonged to her son Serges. I announced that I’d met him at the village lunch, but Marie put me straight. There were two Serges in the village and her Serges never went to social events. I was delighted to learn, however, that her Serges might be up for digging a big hole for me—he was very busy but it could be fine if I caught him at the right time.

“How did that go?” asked Ron as we drove away.

“Pretty well. The digger belongs to her son. He’s captain of the volleyball team. If you play well at training tonight we could be in there.”

“Oh, right.”

We didn’t get much further down the road before we were flagged down again, this time by a thin, middle-aged man in a blue peaked cap, sitting aloft in a beaten-up old tractor. I got out of the car and greeted the man, his hardy face ravaged by the sun, before shaking his hand and asking what he wanted. Somehow he seemed to know that I was the new Englishman who had moved to the village, and he was anxious to learn if I wanted to carry on with the same arrangement as the previous owner, Jean-Claude. The question confused me a little. Seeing my bewilderment, the farmer explained that there was a traditional agreement that during the summer he could bring his cows onto the bottom piece of my land to graze. This effectively meant that I wouldn’t have to worry about mowing this grass, as the cows would munch it all away for me.

Was I all right with this?

Too right I was. Less work for me, and from time to time I got a herd of cows in my garden.

“
Une bonne idee
” I said with a big smile.

The farmer, who I took to be as shy as Ron, nodded uncomfortably before starting up his tractor again and disappearing back into his world.

“I’ve got my own cows!” I announced to Ron, somewhat overstating the case.

“Well done,” said Ron supportively.

Just as the tractor was reaching the brow of the hill behind us, a grey-haired man in blue overalls appeared at the top of the drive to the house that nestled below us. It was ‘bonhomie’ Roger, the cheerful man I had met briefly at the village lunch and dinner. He was sporting his trademark grin and twinkly eyes.