2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (18 page)

“Hello, Tony,” he said, shaking my hand. “Welcome back to France. How long are you here for?”

“A long time,” I replied. “I am going to be a part of your village now.”

“This is good, you are most welcome.”

Roger’s face showed that he meant this. It wasn’t just some sycophantic remark that he’d made to pass the time of day. Conversations I’d shared with Anne and Malcolm meant that I knew this man to be genuine. He was one of the stalwarts of village life, working hard behind the scenes for all the village social events, and generally taking neighbourliness to new heights. I was pleased that he seemed to like me.

“I saw from the window in my house,” he said, still beaming broadly, “that you were speaking with my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Yes. Up the road. She lives in that house—where you stopped one minute before.”

Of course. I knew this from the village dinner. Marie was Roger’s mother. And now I knew that Roger had a brother called Serges. And he had a mechanical digger. Serges probably lived with his mother Marie because he was single. Evidently Roger and his wife had built a new house on the family land, so he now lived next door to his mother and brother. In only a matter of minutes I was beginning to unravel the plot of the village’s soap opera.

“Your mother tells me, Roger,” I said, “that you might be able to find me a second-hand car?”

“But of course. What would you like?”

“An estate car would be good. About ten years old? A Peugeot—or a Renault.” I wanted to ingratiate myself by buying French.

“Don’t worry. I will find you one,” he said, not altogether convincingly. “And if you need help—you must knock on my door.”

With those words Roger disappeared back down his driveway, and Ron and I drove on, hoping to make it to the house this time. Our stomachs were calling for lunch.

“Very friendly round here, isn’t it?” said Ron, somewhat amused by all the attention we’d already received even though we’d only been in the village a matter of minutes.

“Certainly is,” I said, smiling broadly.

“Were Roger and that farmer on about volleyball too?”

“No, Ron,” I said. “They’re president and vice-president of the Village Independence Party and they’re arranging a march on Paris tomorrow morning.”

“Right.”

Just as we turned the final bend before my house, Irish Mary, who lived next door but one, waved to us from her terrace.

“Shall I stop and say hello?” I asked Ron.

“No, I’m starving. She’ll have to wait till after lunch,” said Ron, unaware that he was missing out on the one conversation with the locals that he would have understood.

§

“Yeh, I’ll be happy enough in there,” said Ron, with trademark monotone delivery.

We were busy sorting out where Ron would sleep whilst he was at the house.

“Are you sure?” I said. “I mean, there’s plenty of room inside.”

“Nah, this is probably better. It means that when your friends arrive, I’ll be out the way.”

“Only if you’re sure.”

“Yeh, I’ll be all right in there.”

And so it was, with perhaps an oblique nod towards the Nativity, that Ron moved into the woodshed.

It was a good woodshed, mind you. Better than a stable, anyway. It had electricity, it was dry and it had a decent roof. Once we’d put a bit of carpet down and given the walls a lick of paint it was fit for…well, it was fit for Ron. He confirmed that he’d be happy enough in this bolthole, preferring to be out of the way of house guests. Ron liked his own space, but didn’t necessarily need a lot of it. Life on a narrow boat had cured him of that indulgence. For him, the woodshed was relatively spacious, and after we’d finished moving in items of furniture it definitely resembled a hut which hardy young travellers would happily rent on a beach in Thailand or Goa. The only real difference was the lack of adjacent sun-soaked beach populated by scantily clad women. But no matter, Ron’s imagination was as good as the next man’s.

§

In the coming days we were kept very busy. Ron began tiling the downstairs double garage, the first stage of making it a habitable overspill for when the house was brimming with guests. Meanwhile I drove around the region buying materials and calling in on swimming pool shops, all the time wondering for how long I’d be stuck with the hire car. Was Roger seriously going to find me a second-hand estate car? Genuine though he may be, there had been nothing about his demeanour to suggest that this would be a priority for him. And why should it be? He had a full-time job as an engineer in nearby Tarbes, and he tinkered with cars at the weekend. He’d hardly have much spare time.

One morning as I drove towards his house I decided to drop by and make further enquiries. As I negotiated the steep driveway and neared his garage, I could hear the gentle tinkering of spanner on carburettor. Or screwdriver on alternator. Or similar. Well, you get the gist.

“
Roger? Tu es la?
” I asked, eager to announce a new presence.

An oil-covered man slowly revealed himself on a little trolley from beneath the big Peugeot estate before me. He could have been a diver emerging from the depths of the sea for all the knowledge I had of the world whence he had just come. The World of the Mechanic. An alien, scary world and not one where you’d choose to spend your holidays. Roger proffered his arm, since his hand, as he ably demonstrated with a brief flourish, was too oil-caked for the conventional grasp and shake. I smiled, shook his elbow and enquired as to how he was getting on in the ‘finding me a nice ten-year-old estate car’ stakes. He threw his head back, rolled his eyes and bent his bottom lip. A possible sign that he hadn’t lined up a choice of six for my inspection.

“
Ah, c’est difficile
,” he said, adding a shrug to his vast range of gestures. “The estate cars are hard to find—but do not worry. I am trying.”

Somehow I doubted that he’d done much vigorous phoning around or scouring of the local ads—or that he was about to do so. He just looked too laid back. Almost unhealthily so. I strongly suspected that his ‘finding’ an estate car would have had to involve someone driving one round to his place and handing him the keys.

It had been the shrug that Roger had given me when we’d said goodbye that led me to take such drastic action later that same day. It had been a gesture that I took to mean that although he wanted to help, he just wouldn’t be able to find the time. That’s why I pulled the car over when I spotted a nice little red Peugeot 106 for sale, parked outside a car spares shop. Ron and I had just liberated ourselves from another particularly confusing session with a pool retailer in which we’d endured a long and baffling speech on the differences between sand and chlorine filtration systems. Now I was going to invest time in something else that I knew nothing about.

“I think we should take a look at this car,” I said to Ron. “It looks in good nick.”

“But I thought you wanted an estate.”

“I do, but Roger assures me that they’re difficult to find, and I can’t hire forever so maybe I’ll have to compromise.”

Soon Ron and I were giving it the once over and Ron bestowed upon it his seal of approval.

“Sounds all right to me,” he said, as the owner jammed down the accelerator pedal. “I think you’ve got a nice little runner there.”

The owner of the car appeared to be the proprietor of the shop as well, and I took this to be a very good sign. Provided that he wasn’t a crook (and he didn’t look like one—no stripy top, mask or sack over the shoulder marked ‘swag’) then the vehicle surely would have had spare parts showered upon it whenever it had needed them. Indeed, the owner reeled off a list of recently fitted new parts, all of which sounded impressively expensive.

“Sod it,” I said to Ron. “I’m fed up of driving a hire car. It’s a waste of money. If he’ll accept a cheque, shall I buy it straight away?”

“Yeh,” said Ron. “I think it’s a good bet.”

I circled the car once more, trying to erase from my mind the fact that it had been Ron who had sanctioned the purchase of the White Van. To be fair, though, he hadn’t given it an enthusiastic final appraisal. A ‘piece of shit’ had been his eloquent judgement upon it, and one that time had all too speedily borne out.

France is an excellent place to keep a pied-a-terre, have tete-a-tetes, use double entendres, arrange a menage a trois or discover one’s joie de vivre and raison d’etre. It is also a smashing place to experience deja vu. And that is precisely what I felt as I drove the red Peugeot away with Ron following behind in the hire car. The road ahead of me could easily have been in a suburb of Croydon and the wheel between my fingers that of a Luton van. Bereft of confidence, I drove on with a growing feeling of trepidation and impending doom. However, the kilometres rolled by and the car motored on, eventually delivering me home—accident and breakdown-free, and in fine style. Quite extraordinary.

“There,” I said from the balcony, as I viewed my recent purchase glistening in the midday sun. “Now I have a house and a car.”

“All you need now is a bird and you’ve got the set,” said Ron, succinctly evincing his uncomplicated view of the world.

“Yes, I suppose so,” I said. “But cars and houses are so much easier to find.”

“And cheaper to run.”

I changed the subject. I like to view myself as a ‘New Man’↓ and this conversation was heading in a direction where maintaining that position would have become increasingly difficult.

≡ Male readers might like to test how much of a ‘New Man’ they are. In the street, if there is a woman walking towards you to whom you are greatly attracted, then your ‘New Man-ness’ is measured by the distance you allow her to continue walking past before you turn round to see what she looks like from behind. I’m about a five-yarder. Dock a point if you mumble ‘nice cul’ under your breath.

§

With each passing day my French improved. My vocabulary expanded to include the French words for obscure items within the building trade. And if we needed any more aluminium foil, I was well on top of that task too. I was building superficial but nonetheless agreeable relationships with a coterie of shop assistants. The only frustrating thing about the French shopping experience was the number of times I was caught by the midday closing. Exhausted by the three hours of toil between nine and twelve, staff would down tools and head off for a healthy lunch followed by
une sieste
. For someone who didn’t necessarily get his act together to jump in the car and go shopping till 10.30am, this gave me a tiny window of opportunity to make my required purchases. If, as usually happened, I failed to make all the stores on time, then I was subjected to a couple of dead hours whilst I had to wait for the dozy gastronomes to open back up again.

Another annoying consequence of this tradition was the way in which my builder took to it. Whilst it would be stretching it to describe Ron as a Francophile, culturally he was at one with the concept of having a lie-down after lunch. For me, he embraced it with far too much relish. His working day seemed to take on an extraordinary shape. The combination of breakfast, mid-morning tea and biscuits, lunch, sleep and mid-afternoon tea didn’t seem to leave much time for other things. Like tiling the floor of the garage, for instance.

Work advanced slowly. It seemed that my hope that the mountains would inspire Ron was unfulfilled. Ron would regularly fail to surface following his
sieste
.

“I think I’ll just do a half day today,” he’d call from his reclining position within the woodshed.

I would then produce a frustrated sigh. Knowing that Ron would only ever charge me for the hours that he’d actually worked, I had little grounds for complaint. I just wished I could think of a way to motivate him.

Just after we’d first arrived I’d come close to getting him to agree to exercise a little each morning. I’d purchased a cheap bike from the Geant superstore on which I intended to undertake a daily circuit of the village, notwithstanding the precipitous gradients.

“Ron, why don’t you walk down to the sawmill and back whilst I do the cycling,” I’d suggested. “Very healthy.”

The old sawmill was fifteen minutes’ walk away, nestled at the bottom of the valley in an idyllic location.

“Yeh, I think I might,” he’d said, once again skilfully concealing his excitement.

On the first morning of this new health regime I set off zealously at 7.30am on the dot. It was a beautiful day. The sun was just rising over the distant peaks, backlighting a narrow strip of wispy clouds. The grass glistened with a hint of dew and the cowbells echoed through the valley. Against this picture-postcard backdrop, a forty-something English bloke struggled up some extraordinarily steep hills on a bottom-of-the-range bike. Sweat poured from his brow as he panted and gasped like an octogenarian lover in the throes of potentially fatal lovemaking. Neither bike nor legs could cope with what was required, and willpower notwithstanding, the Englishman ended up dismounting the bike and opting for the pushing option, so rarely favoured in the Tour de France.

I must have cut an unimpressive figure to the drivers of the occasional cars that sped past me as I wheeled my bike up these punishing hills. The problem was that the Tour du Village involved no normal cycling. It was either gruelling, thigh-busting heaves up hills better suited for mountaineering, or legs akimbo freewheeling down the other side of them. Nothing aerobic about this, but exhausting just the same. A bit of a lose⁄lose situation.

At the top of one of the steeper of the five slopes which
le tour
included, I met a little old man coming the other way, stick in hand. As I drew closer I recognised him to be Andre, the delightful elderly gentleman who would have taken me back to his place after the village dinner had it not been for the fact that he hadn’t any milk in. I didn’t recognise him instantly because the top of his head, which previously had dazzled all comers with its ‘Persil whiter-than-whiteness’, was now covered with textbook French beret.

“
B’jour
,” said Andre.

“
Bonjour
,” I replied.