2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (2 page)

“I think we should head for La Mongie,” said Kevin, consulting the guidebook as I made my first tentative manoeuvres in the hire car. “It says here that it’s the biggest skiable domain in the French Pyrenees.”

“Sounds good to me,” I replied. “We’ll find a nice hotel, treat ourselves to a slap-up meal, and then get up early to take advantage of a full day’s skiing.”

“It’s a top plan.”

And like a lot of top plans, it all went horribly wrong.

§

“What’s the matter?” I called as I looked back up at Kevin, who was halfway down the slope, reaching down to his ski boot and grimacing.

We’d been skiing for less than half an hour. The conditions were excellent—a smattering of fresh snow the previous night, and although it wasn’t a clear day, visibility was good.

“It’s my ankle,” he called back. “I thought it was going to be OK.”

Tentatively, and clearly in some pain, he skied down to join me.

“What do you mean—your ankle?” I said accusingly the moment he drew level. “Since when did you have an ankle problem?”

“Since Thursday evening.”

“And what happened Thursday evening?”

“We played five-a-side football.”

“Oh no. You bloody idiot! Does this mean…?”

“Yes, I think it does.”

And that was it. Our long weekend of skiing ended there. Kevin was clearly in too much pain to carry on and I didn’t fancy skiing on my own, despite my mate’s reassurances that he’d be ‘fine’ if I did so. He wouldn’t be ‘fine’ and I knew it. Besides, skiing alone has never been my thing. It’s a sport that I’ve only really enjoyed if I can push myself to the very limits of my ability, and that means I need someone with me who can regularly pick me up and dust me down after each spectacular fall.

So we adjourned for a drink in a bar at the foot of the slopes, in a case of ridiculously premature apres-ski.

“What are we going to do with our weekend?” I said, as brightly as I could.

I was trying not to reveal just how miffed I was. Why hadn’t Kevin, like me, had the wisdom to hang up his football boots?

“We could go sightseeing,” he replied with an apologetic shrug.

“Kev, it’s February. The only sights to see are covered in snow. Snow is going to make us want to ski, and we can’t ski because you’ve got a bad ankle.” I scratched my head, enabling an idea to strike me, just as it does in cartoons. “I know! There’s nothing else for it! We’ll just have to go to the nearest town and visit the estate agent instead.”

“What?”

“Look for a house. For me to buy. I think your ankle might be fate’s way of telling me to become a French home-owner.”

“Fine by me. But don’t these things need more research? I mean, you don’t just come on a skiing weekend somewhere and then buy a house because your mate injures his ankle,”

“Of course not, but you’ve got to start looking some time, and what else are we going to do?”

“Fair point.”

I reached for the map.

“The nearest big town to here is Tarbes,” I said. “Let’s head there straight away. You have to admit, Mr Ankle, that anything is better than watching other people ski.”

Kevin agreed.

§

Tarbes is not an exciting place. For me, anyway, the distant promise of the mountains left it feeling like a town where you might stop for refreshments before continuing to where you really wanted to be. However, it was pleasant enough and it had what we wanted—an estate agent—just off the pretty main square.

“I’ll let you do all that stuff,” said Kevin, as I prepared to go inside.

I could see that he was eyeing a Prisunic store, a kind of French Woolworths, with an obvious yearning.

“You’re just going to buy lots of pants, aren’t you?”

Kevin always did this. He likes buying his pants abroad. I’m not sure if it’s a fetish or not, but if it is I don’t know the name of it.

“I might do,” he said innocently. “I’ll see you back here in half an hour.”

“What exactly is it that you are seeking?” asked the smug-looking thirty-something agent.

I toyed with saying that I was seeking ‘enlightenment and spiritual fulfilment’ but then I remembered that estate agents generally aren’t good at that sort of stuff.

Monsieur L’Agent was smartly dressed in a dapper suit, with a trendy hairstyle that looked neat enough to make the photo in the window at a unisex salon. But for his dark complexion he was not unlike most of the British estate agents I’d encountered—well groomed, polite and adept at a sycophantic charm, undoubtedly nurtured to maximise profit.

“I guess I want somewhere with views of the mountains,” I replied. “Without too much renovation work to do, reasonably private but not isolated, and within striking distance of a good-sized town where there’s quite a bit going on.”

“I think that we have one just like this. It is brand new—we only took the instruction the day before today.”

Yeah, yeah, I thought. When estate agents say they have something that is ‘just like’ your request, it has usually involved them indulging in liberal interpretation. ‘Striking distance’ can be covered by ‘anything reachable in just under an hour on the day when there happens to be no traffic on the roads’. “Private’ means ‘own front door’, and ‘not requiring much renovation work’ is their way of saying ‘sky not visible through first-floor ceiling’.

“Can we look at it now?” I asked.

“Sure,” he replied. “Just sign this.”

He produced a document and pushed it towards me. It was full of complicated French, but I glanced through it quickly. It seemed odd that I was having to sign something so early on in the proceedings but I guess that the agent needed to be sure that if I wanted to purchase the property we were about to see then I would do so through them and not with any other agent. I didn’t bother reading the contract in detail, partly because I wouldn’t have understood most of it anyway, and also I suffer from Formophobia.↓

≡ Fear of bureaucratic paperwork.

“How far away is the property?” I asked, returning the signed form to the agent’s outstretched hand.

“Twenty minutes,” he replied, smiling. “And we can go right now.”

§

“From the particulars, it does sound like it’s exactly what I’m looking for,” I said to Kevin as our car sped along behind Monsieur L’Agent on the way to the house in question. “Usually they just talk bullshit, but I’ve got a feeling that he won’t be wrong on this one.”

Kevin looked thoughtful for a moment, holding on tight to his big plastic bag full of pants.

“Tony, if you ended up buying this place, what would you do in it?” he said, as the drive into the mountains became ever more picturesque. “I’m playing devil’s advocate here, but isn’t there a good chance that you’ll just end up sitting on your own and admiring the view?”

“I’ll invite friends over,” I replied defensively. “I’ll have parties. We’ll go skiing in the winter and we’ll have mountain walks in the summer.”

“I see,” said Kevin, who was patently aware of my deficiencies as a social secretary. I’d once invited everyone I knew to a party on my birthday, and then failed to attend it myself. (I’d been invited on holiday at short notice and had judged that to be the far better option. I left the keys to my flat with a mate, and the party was alleged to have been a great success, some of the more unkind guests saying that it had gone better than it would if I’d been present.) Kevin looked over at me with a cheeky glint in his eye. “Yes, I’ll look forward to you organising all that.”

“I can do my writing there—and it’ll be a good place to practise the piano, too.”

“What?”

“No neighbours within earshot. I’ve always wanted that—I can bang away on the keys to my heart’s content.”

“You’re going to buy a house in France so you can practise the piano?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I replied. “I haven’t even seen the place yet. I might not like it.”

The omens were good as our car nosed over the brow of a hill, revealing a large sweep of imposing mountains on the horizon. They rose up like white-helmeted granite centurions standing guard over the scores of villages spread out before them like powerless minions in the lush green rolling foothills. Monsieur L’Agent’s car took a left and we followed him down a snaking single-track lane past barns and farmhouses that all seemed to overlook striking landscapes.

“So far, this is doing it for me,” I said, sensing a kind of adrenalin rush building within.

After several twists and turns we started to find that the lane changed in character, private residences taking the place of farm buildings. Most of these were modern but all seemed to be built in the characteristic architecture of the region—two-storey houses with high gabled roofs peppered with small dormer windows. We turned one more corner and then followed Monsieur L’Agent into a steep driveway on our right, where we parked and got out of the car. The view took my breath away. The house was perched on the side of a hill with a 270-degree view of undulating greenery, all against a backdrop of dramatic snow-capped peaks.

“This is it!” I said to Kevin.

“Aren’t you going to look at the house?”

“Ah yes, the house.”

The house wasn’t an old tumbledown farmhouse ready for loving restoration, but a twenty-year-old property that looked ready for immediate habitation. Three things made it special—location, location, location.

“That is the Pic du Midi,” said Monsieur L’Agent, pointing to a mountain in the distance, and possibly sensing from my open mouth that a quick sale was far from out of the question. “You can ski in this place.”

I didn’t tell him that we’d already done so—for half an hour, earlier that same day.

“The villages you can see dotted on the hills are all in the area called Les Baronnies.”

“Yes. It’s quite a nice view,” I said, trying not to look too enthusiastic and attempting to subdue an ecstatic grin.

“Also, there is enough flat land to put in a pool if you want. Now, let us go inside.”

Oh yes. Inside. I’d forgotten about the inside, so enchanted had I been by the scenery that was stretching out before us.

The inside was pretty damn good too. ‘Ready to move into’ would have been the estate-agent parlance to describe it, but it would have been justified in this case. It had all the features that you’re looking for in a house—windows, doors, ceilings, floors, bedrooms, a bathroom, radiators, a nice wood-burning fire, and all in excellent condition. The kitchen was a little small but that was more than compensated for by the large living room that ran the length of the house and off which was a large balcony that overlooked the view. The fabulous view. Did I mention that at all?

§

“You shouldn’t have put an offer in there and then,” said Kevin as we drove towards Bagneres-de-Bigorre, the nearest town. “It makes you appear too keen.”

“Well, I am keen,” I argued. “What’s the point of not appearing keen if I am?”

“It hinders the negotiating process.”

Kevin was right, of course. I’d had enough experience in the world of courtship to know that an element of duplicity in the ‘negotiating process’ was vital. Only the inexperienced reveal their true hand, and they usually pay the price. I often wondered what kind of God had created the absurd human trait that finds ‘keen’ unattractive. A mischievous one, probably.

“And what happens if they accept your offer?” continued Kevin. “You do realise you’ll be buying a house in France?”

“Will I? By God! That hadn’t occurred to me. I thought we were just outside Portsmouth. I wondered where all those mountains had come from.”

“You know what I mean. I love the house too—but I’m just being a good mate and trying to stop you rushing into something that you might regret. Have you thought it all through?”

“Kev, sometimes in life you’ve just got to go for things. If you think too much, stuff doesn’t happen.”

“Well, houses in France don’t get bought, certainly,” Kevin pointed out.

Bagneres-de-Bigorre had seen better days. It was in an idyllic location, nestled in the valley between giant mountains, but it smacked of faded glory. All around were grand, venerable buildings desperately in need of a lick of paint.

“I like this place,” I said. “Let’s find a hotel and make this our base for the night.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to visit some other estate agents in some other towns?”

“Of course I’m not sure, but life would be pretty boring if we were sure of everything.”

We checked into a hotel with a superficially majestic appearance that masked an interior that was borderline decrepit. This hotel had almost certainly been built when the town was at its most fashionable, back in the nineteenth century. In the early 1800
s
, Bagneres had become established as one of France’s leading thermal resorts, the ‘in place’ for the likes of Rossini and Flaubert. Now, in the early twenty-first century, it was having to make do with a visit from Hawks.

I spent the rest of the day dragging Kevin around the town, reading to him from my guidebook as we went.

“It says here that in the twentieth century,” I announced as we stood before Les Grands Thermes, the elegant healing spa that conjured up images of the town’s halcyon days, “the Pyrenees became a haven for people who were on the run, either from the Republicans at the end of the Spanish Civil War, or from the conservative establishment after the failed ‘67 Paris revolution.”

“Hmm.”

“I mean, how romantic is that?”

Kevin pulled a face that seemed to mean ‘not very’, and I detected a hint of resentment that this cultural tour was preventing him from buying more pants. Ignoring this, I dived back into the guidebook and he braced himself for further trudging.

By dinner, he was exhausted.

“I feel like Britain’s leading expert on this town,” he said, pouring us a second glass of a slightly heavy red wine.

“That’s good. You’ll appear very knowledgeable about the place when you come to visit me.”

“Yes, well, let’s not get carried away. There’s a long way to go yet,” said Kevin, looking rather serious. “The vendors probably won’t accept your offer.”

§

The hotel breakfast was rather disappointing. Coffee, French bread and a dollop of jam are often deemed by our Gallic hosts to be a sufficiently nutritious start to the day. I was mid-mouthful when I got the call that proved Kevin wrong.