2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (31 page)

There was a ripple of excitement amongst the dozen or so of the congregation when the Pope finally appeared on our screen.

“God, he looks ill,” said Brad.

“Yes. But is he ill enough?” I replied.

“I don’t think so.”

Brad was good. He could spot a man who wasn’t about to die when he saw one. Despite his frailty and his need to be operated by aides who at times resembled puppeteers, John Paul soldiered on courageously and completed his discourse without collapsing.

“He put in a good effort, I felt,” said Brad, as we filed out of the church.

“I think he could have done better,” I replied. “That whole failing-to-keel-over thing was a disappointment.”

“Where are we going now?” asked Brad.

“
La mairie
”

“Why?”

“Free aperitifs followed by the annual village photo.”

This was another tradition of which these people had every reason to be proud. Each year, primarily by using the bribe of free aperitifs to ensure a big attendance, a photograph was taken of the village populace on the steps of
la mairie
. As we were cajoled into position by the photographer (who turned out to be Christine, the deputy mayor’s daughter), I wondered how many villages in England could manage to pull such a stunt.

I was wedged between Roger and Andre, smiling rather too enthusiastically as Christine clicked away with relish. It seemed to me to be a great shame that she herself wouldn’t be in the picture and I called out something to this effect. She dismissed me with a giggle and a wave. Presumably she was one of the many women who don’t like being in photos. Before long, though, the rest of us would be in a framed photo behind the bar in the village hall—a splendid record of a tiny moment in history.

“So, you owe Fabrice one euro,” said Brad.

We were getting out of breath as we climbed the steep hill that took us back to our side of the village.

“Yes, well, I guess I can live with that. I didn’t really need to win a euro that much.”

I felt relieved that my rather morbid hopes had not been fulfilled. The Pope may not have been my hero but certainly a lot of other people seemed quite keen on him. A vast crowd had turned up to see him, and they’d given him a tremendous ovation even though he’d done no singing or dancing, and probably hadn’t even turned up for the sound check.

“And if he had pegged it,” said Brad, “just think of all those puppeteers who would have been made unemployed.”

“You’re right. And it wouldn’t have been fair on the Pope either. You wouldn’t want to die with that many people watching.”

“No. How many people watching you die would be about right, then?”

“Ooh, five or six would be about right, I reckon.”

Our absurd conversation about death continued all the way home. Quite why we lingered on the subject for so long, I do not know. Perhaps it was because at some subconscious level we sensed that we needed to cover this subject in order to prepare ourselves for a bereavement that was about to take place further away than Lourdes. Further away from Lourdes, and yet much closer to home.

§

I didn’t get up until 11 o’clock the following morning. The excesses of the ‘Concrete Day’ and the village fete had obviously caught up with me. I pulled on my shorts and wandered downstairs, ready to apologise to Ron and Brad for whom I’d promised to provide some extremely unskilled labour.

The two men were seated at the dining table. I knew instantly that something was wrong. The mood was sombre. No one said a word. No jibes about my tardy arrival, no banter about the day ahead. Instead, silence.

I looked at Ron. As ever, his face revealed little. He did grimace a little and nod in the direction of Brad. I looked over to see my friend pale, drained and with bloodshot eyes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Brad tried to say something, but he just couldn’t seem to make a sound. It was as if his wringing hands were willing him to speak and yet the words were caught in his throat. I looked to Ron for elucidation, but he just waited, allowing Brad the time he needed to squeeze the words out.

“My mum died last night,” said Brad, eventually.

I’m not sure if my jaw physically dropped, but it certainly felt like it did. It was my turn now to be lost for words. What do you say in a situation like this? How do you comfort someone at a time when they are patently uncomfortable? Every sentence that formed in my head seemed wrong. What had Ron said, I wondered? How had he handled this when he’d been told the news?

“That’s terrible,” I said, rather pathetically. “What happened? She hadn’t been ill or anything, had she?”

“No. She died peacefully in her sleep.”

There was another long silence which Ron and I seemed to know instinctively not to fill.

“It’s just such a shock,” continued Brad. “Seventy-six seems so young. Her mother lived to ninety-two and her grandmother to ninety-three. I never saw it coming this early.”

I looked at my friend. He had an emptiness about him. But then what did I expect? If this news felt like a body blow to me, then how did it feel to Brad? I got to my feet, trying to muster some positive energy.

“I’ll organise some flights home,” I said.

With those words I left the room. Perhaps I should have stayed longer, but I felt that Brad needed to be silent, and yet not completely alone. Somehow I knew that Ron was going to be a better man for the job than I was. And for once, he looked up for it.

§

One of the frustrations of life is that however much time we spend planning our futures, we are always potentially just a moment away from a piece of news that can shatter everything. We have but a brittle hold on our own lives, let alone those of others.

“Jeez, I might be dead tomorrow.”

It had been a phrase I’d often heard uttered during my travels in Ireland some years before. It was true that very often the provider of these words was about to order a twelfth successive alcoholic beverage, and that the consumption of this next drink might indeed make ‘being dead tomorrow’ a distinct probability. However, there was a profound wisdom behind it. Is it not the case that we live our lives largely in denial of our own mortality? We may indeed ‘be dead tomorrow’ or perhaps halfway through next week, but we don’t like to consider the prospect. We just don’t know when we are going to pass away. Even the greatest minds on the planet are ignorant of when their moment of extinction might come. It’s a mystery. However, when the moment of truth does arrive and we are able to look back over our lives, there’s one thing we can be sure that we won’t be saying:

“You know, my biggest regret is that I didn’t worry a bit more. I had so many opportunities to be more uptight about things and I just didn’t take them. Oh, how I wish I had.”

This was the general theme of the conversation as Brad and I waited in the airport terminal. After hearing the sad news I’d booked us both on the first available flight back to London. Ron was going to stay on and try to complete the work that we’d started, although I suspected that without company, and without Brad particularly, his work rate would decline considerably.

“How do you feel?” I asked Brad, as he sipped his coffee.

“It changes every few minutes,” he replied. “Sometimes I feel strong and then suddenly I feel so alone. Irish Mary summed it up when she popped over to say goodbye. “The world changes when your mum dies,” she said. And she was right.”

We boarded the plane with a solemnity that belied the nature of the summer that had just passed. But the summer was over. With each passing day it had begun to feel like autumn was looming, and this bereavement somehow made the onset of winter seem more imminent.

“Ron was amazing,” said Brad, looking down on tiny buildings and miniature vehicles, evidence of people below going about their daily business.

“What do you mean?”

“I told Ron what had happened a good couple of hours before you got up. We sat there, drinking tea and smoking his fags. He seemed to know when to ask questions and when to be quiet. At one point he sat in silence opposite me for twenty minutes, while my mind came to terms with the fact that I’d just joined the ‘loss of a parent club’.”

I still longed to know how Ron had handled things when he’d first come upon the traumatised Brad. Had he coped much better than me?

“What did Ron do when you told him?” I asked.

“It was weird. When I struggled to get the words out, he laughed at first. Then, when he saw that something was wrong, he sat down and waited till I was ready. And when I finally spat it out—“My mum died last night”—he found five words that somehow seemed to do the trick.”

“And they were?”

“‘Best put the kettle on.’”

§

Ron himself flew back a week later. By his own admission he’d done virtually nothing during that time.

“You only need to sort me out for a couple of half-days,” he said when we met up and I settled up what I owed him.

My project in France seemed to have ground to a halt. For a while the house felt further south than ever. The family that had once happily occupied it had broken up, and the piano rested untouched beneath a thin layer of concrete dust.

Home Alone

It was late October before I set foot back in the house. I’d had to spend some time in England securing some income, since my life in France only offered an expensive outlet for it. I made damn sure I visited my mother, too.

“Does the house feel like it’s yours yet?” she’d asked, as we’d chatted over tea and biscuits.

“Yes. It’s really beginning to feel like I belong.”

“Well, don’t belong too much. Or I won’t get to see you any more.”

§

There was a light rain gently cascading down as I pulled the car into the drive and got out to admire the view.

“Mmm, that’s good,” I said to myself.

I drew in a deep breath. London was only a matter of hours behind me and yet it seemed a pleasingly long way away. I approached the front door, aware that something felt different about the place. It wasn’t just the cooler air, the silence that replaced the constant sound of jabbering crickets, or the autumnal reds and yellows of the leaves on the trees. Something else appeared not as I’d left it back in August, and I stood looking about me trying to fathom what it was. Then I saw it. The big green dumper bin. The big green dumper bin with my name on it. It was printed in big capital letters across its breadth.

TONY HAWKS

Now I felt like I belonged more than I ever had before. What better confirmation could one wish for? I had a green dumper bin inscribed with my name. Surely a sign that I had arrived in this society. I may not have been on the village committee, but clearly now it was only a question of time. My ‘bin status’ meant that I was finally more than just the Englishman who had bought the house in between Pierre and Bruno. I really belonged now, and I had a bespoke green dumper bin to prove it.

When I opened the front door, still glowing from the welcome of the bin, I could smell that musty aroma again—the one that descends like a cloud over a property that’s been vacated for more than seven days. This time I was walking into the house alone. The purpose of my trip was twofold. In my bag was a screenplay that I thought I’d finished earlier in the year but which now required a further rewrite, according to the producers. The house seemed like just the spot to do it. This could be more than a place to practise the piano, it could be an ideal location to work.

I wandered onto the balcony and surveyed the rolling hills beyond. They were about to be enveloped by swooping dark clouds. It wasn’t a nice day, and yet the view was fascinating. That was one of the things I liked about this place. You could really see the weather, not just feel it.

I knew that the coming days were to be a real test for what this house meant to me. How would I cope living here alone? Up until now I’d always had the company of friends. Now there was just me and the distant echo of the cowbells. Would it be too quiet? Would I go stir crazy?

The answer was not long in coming. Barely after I’d unpacked my bags I got my first caller. It was Michel saying that he’d seen my car outside and wanting to know if I would come and have dinner with him and his wife Christine in a couple of nights’ time. Half an hour after that Malcolm and Anne dropped in, followed shortly afterwards by Irish Mary. Rene the Mayor waved jovially from his car, and Pierre and I chatted over the fence. It all felt pretty uplifting. It was just a shame I didn’t have anybody to share it with. This time, not even Ron.

I still had a long night ahead of me. I had no television for company, just the endless babble of French radio. No problem—there was the piano. Here was a perfect opportunity to practise. I sat down. I put my hands over the keys. But nope. I just wasn’t in the mood to play.

Never mind. I could do some work. I got out my laptop and laid it on the table in front of me. I looked at my screenplay. Nope. I was in the wrong frame of mind for that, too. It was no good. There was nothing for it but to go out. I paced the balcony considering my options. Since a trip to the theatre, cinema multiplex or jazz club wasn’t really on, I opted for what has been the solace of the solitary male for centuries. A beer in a bar. And I knew exactly what bar it was going to be.

I’d driven past the Bar des Sports on numerous occasions, and each time I had been impressed by the number of authentic-looking Frenchmen contained therein. At least 50 per cent wore berets, and the rest looked like extras from a film by Marcel Pagnol. This seemed to me to be where Bagnere’s bachelors hung out to discuss the day’s events and, perhaps towards the end of the evening, allow themselves the odd maudlin reflection on how love had passed them by. I hoped that I wouldn’t fit in too readily.

I parked the car and approached the entrance to the busy bar with some apprehension. Tonight was going to be the first time I would enter it instead of just peering inside inquisitively. As I pushed open the bar’s glass door it felt like everyone present was dying to see who it was that was coming in. There seemed to be a strange enquiring twinkle in their eyes. They were looking at me in the same way that dogs look at people, with an odd mixture of hope and bewilderment. Heads weren’t turning as such, but I was conscious that at every table, eyes were straining in their sockets, anxious to see the stranger but without making any noticeable head movement. The noise level quickly dipped from raucous to hushed.