2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (37 page)

“Ouch!” she said, appropriately enough.

“Sorry.”

“Can you get off me, please? This isn’t the time or the place.”

“You’re right. I’ll just haul myself back into position.”

By this stage the burly chairlift attendant had seen the mess we had made and had hit the button that stopped the chairlift so we could sort ourselves out. He had obviously taken an executive decision that it wasn’t safe to send the chair to the top of the mountain with a man dangling precariously from it, holding onto his girlfriend for dear life. By the time he’d halted the lift we were already thirty feet in the air, though, so I was finding it very hard to manoeuvre myself off Fi, not having the ground to use for leverage.

“The problem is that your left foot seems to be stuck under mine,” said Fi. “Pull.”

“I am pulling.”

Boy was I pulling. But nothing was happening. Meanwhile the chairlift attendant had decided that the best thing to do was to shout at us in French. Good, that would help. Just what I needed right now.

I pulled some more but to no avail.

“I don’t believe it!” said Fi, who had managed to lean forward into a position that meant she could see what had caused me to become trapped. “Your ski seems to be caught underneath mine. If you spin yourself round to the left you should be able to see for yourself.”

I contorted myself in mid-air, ignoring the unintelligible instructions that were being bellowed to me from the burly man below. And then I saw what the problem was.

“God. It’s even worse. I don’t believe what’s happened. It doesn’t seem possible,” I said to the woman lying beneath me.

“What’s happened?”

“We appear to be joined at the feet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, there’s a gap between the bottom of your ski boot and the top of your ski.”

“And?”

“Unbelievably, the tip of my ski seems to have found its way between that gap and it’s wedged in there.”

“No!”

“Yes. Honest.”

“So you can’t pull it free just by moving?”

“No. You’ll have to take my ski off or I’m stuck like this.”

“But I can’t take your ski off- you’re in the way.”

“Yes. This seems to be the root of the problem.”

It was a problem that had now been identified by the chairlift man below.

“YOU MUST TAKE OFF ZE SKI!” he shouted in English, having realised that I’d not been overly responsive to his French.

“I KNOW!” I shouted back. “BUT IT’S NOT THAT EASY!”

The worst thing about this situation was that our entanglement had brought the entire chairlift to a grinding halt. People who were anxious to get out there on the slopes were being held up by the daft English couple. Time was of the essence or we might be close to causing an international incident.

“You must be able to get it off,” said Fi.

“I’m trying. Honest. The problem is that I can’t get myself into the right position. I’m too tangled up with you.”

“I thought you liked being tangled up with me.”

“I do. But I’d prefer it if there were less people inconvenienced by it.”

Others further up the chairlift had begun to shout at us. Great. That really made the process of releasing my ski from the binding that much easier. And more help was at hand below.

“YOU MUST TAKE OFF ZE SKI!” repeated the burly one.

One thing was certain. If we ever got out of this mess, we wouldn’t be using this chairlift again today. I couldn’t face seeing the burly man again for quite some time. To be fair, he probably wouldn’t be overly anxious to see me either.

I exerted all my efforts into one big shove against the binding, nearly falling from the lift to guaranteed hospitalisation as I did so. I grunted and I strained and finally I got the result. The ski binding released and I was able to pull my leg free. An ironic cheer went up from those who were looking on anxiously from above us on the chairlift. I managed to hold onto my ski, slide myself sideways and, with a helping hand from Fi, hoist myself back up into the conventional position for chairlift transportation.

“That was all quite embarrassing,” giggled Fi. “Do you reckon we can get through the day without further incident?”

“I’m not confident,” I replied, as the chairlift started up again. “The trouble is that it’s quite a fast lift, this one. I could have a problem if the lift guy at the top doesn’t see that I’m carrying one of my skis and slow the thing down when it’s time for me to get off.”

Needless to say he didn’t. He was too engrossed in reading OK magazine to notice that I was anything but OK. We undid the bar of the chairlift and I attempted to ski off on one ski. As a matter of routine I fell over, taking a bash on the head from Fi’s ski pole as I did so.

The couple coming up in the chair behind ours arrived and landed in a heap on top of me. Only then had we created enough chaos to distract the lift operator from his reading, and he duly stopped the lift so that the pile-up wouldn’t become bigger, giving us time to disentangle ourselves. I apologised profusely to the couple, who had already spent more of their morning than they would have liked watching me contorted on the chair in front of them. They mumbled something that was almost certainly derogatory and then they skied off.

Fi was laughing hysterically.

“So this is ‘pretty good actually’ is it?” she managed to say between convulsions.

“It gets better.”

“I do hope not. This is much more fun. Are you always this funny?”

“Tragically, no,” I said, remembering some of the tougher gigs I’d done to late-night crowds in comedy clubs. “Now let’s get out of here. I can’t handle any more dirty looks.”

And finally we skied off—thankfully into a day without any further incidents that would have made Lord Roberts of Kandahar turn in his grave.

§

The next three days were made up of a blissful combination of amusing tumbles in the snow, warm hugs by the open fire and evenings whiled away by the piano. The summer’s practice schedule, ill disciplined though it may have been, was finally paying me dividends. I indulged in shameless showing-off. A bit of boogie-woogie and some blues, interspersed with the occasional self-penned composition, left Fi suitably impressed.

“How do you do it all without any music?” she asked.

“Well, when I was sixteen I used to spend hours just messing around on the piano and experimenting with chords—and I’ve done it ever since.”

“Will you teach me?”

“Of course.”

The piano, it seemed, was going to perform a new and unexpected role.

Our guests arrived on the morning of New Year’s Eve. Fi and I were being joined by two couples—Nic and Kevin, and Ron and Brad. Not that the latter were an item as such, but they’d developed an affectionate banter that may well have been misinterpreted by anyone meeting them for the first time.

“What’s on the agenda for tonight, the big night?” asked Kevin, as I drove the eager new arrivals from airport to mountain retreat.

“There’s a dinner at the village hall.”

“But of course!” said Kevin’s fiancée Nic. “As if they’d let an occasion go by without a dinner at the village hall.”

“I’ve bought us tickets,” I explained. “And Fabrice and Marie-Laure are driving up to join us. It should be a good night.”

“Are you coming along with us, Ron?” asked Brad, tentatively.

“Nope. You lot go. I’m happy enough back at the house.”

“Really? That’s a shame,” I said, disguising the fact that I’d been so sure that he wouldn’t come that I hadn’t bothered to buy him a ticket. Ron’s improved state of mind didn’t yet mean that he was ready to cope with more than two or three humans at a time.

“Fi is back at the house, I take it?” asked Nic.

“Yup. And there’s an outside chance she might have a salad ready for us when we get there.”

“Will this be the first time everyone in the village gets to meet Fi?” asked Brad.

“Yes. I hope they like her.”

“Of course they will,” said Kevin. “And you’ll be well on the way to losing that
cèlibataire
label.”

About time too.

§

As usual we turned up too early for aperitifs at the village hall. Fabrice and Marie-Laure, predictably enough, were running late and had told us that they’d join us later. Only the old guard were there—Odette and Andre. Fi began speaking to them in her rusty school French, and I looked on proudly as I watched her charm them with each laboured and disjointed sentence. Like many a rusty French speaker, Fi claimed that she could ‘understand much better than speak’. Later in the evening, however, I was to discover that her powers of comprehension left something to be desired when she returned from a brief chat with a lady from a neighbouring village. “That’s amazing,” she said. “That lady’s husband used to be a nightclub singer in Paris.”

It wasn’t until half an hour after when I began chatting with the lady in question I learned her husband had in fact worked for the French railways in a ticket office. The mind boggles as to how great a misapprehension could have occurred, but the reality was that this was just an exaggerated example of the kind of thing that had happened to me on a daily basis. The number of times I had ended conversations with only the faintest grasp of what had been said must have run into the hundreds. The levels of concentration involved made it all so tiring, too. Sometimes an evening of French speaking left my brain feeling like it had undergone a frontal lobotomy. I knew that this linguistic barrier would prove a huge obstacle if I ever decided to live in the Pyrenees permanently. Being a student in the language means that you miss out on the witty asides, the plays on words, the cultural references and the subtle nuances in the repartee. All this passes you by, leaving you feeling like a child at an adults’ party.

The room began to fill with guests. Aperitifs continued to be poured and there was not the remotest sign of any intention by anyone to sit down and eat, even when the clock passed ten. There was too much chatting to be done. I looked around me and saw Nic and Kevin babbling away in French to Fabrice and Marie-Laure, flanked by a furiously nodding Brad, who had developed the admirable skill of being able to have a good time even though he was totally oblivious to what was going on around him.

Satisfied though I was to see everyone getting on so well, I was still slightly on edge. Someone very important had failed to show up thus far.

He rolled in at ten past ten.

“
Bonsoir, Roger!
” I said, confronting him after he’d barely made it though the door. “
Je veux te presenter a la petite Anglaise!
”

His eyes lit up, and I quickly called Fi over. When she arrived I popped my arm around her and forced her into some kind of unnatural pose in front of Roger, a little like we were entering a ‘Couple of the Year’ competition.

“Aha! Yes!” said Roger, with a broad smile on his face. “
Magnifique
. You have done well!”

He then slapped me on the back and moved off to greet his fellow villagers.

It had been a short exchange, but it had meant a lot. Quite why I needed the approval of my choice of woman from a part-time mechanic in a Pyrenean village I’m not entirely sure, but require it I did.

Moments later further approval was forthcoming from Fabrice when he took me aside and gave me a pat on the back.

“I did not know that there were girls this beautiful in England,” he said.

“Otherwise you would have gone there by now, right?”

“
Exactement
,” he said laughing, before quickly adopting his more serious face. “Tonny, I am sorry to tell you that we will not finish your pool as quickly as we said.”

“Oh?”

“No. Philippe and I were talking and we think that it makes no sense to put the water in at this time of year. It will freeze at night and this will damage the liner. Can you wait a few more months?”

“I suppose so,” I said, wondering slightly why they hadn’t told me this weeks ago. “I guess if I’ve waited this long, then I can hold out a little longer.”

“It is better like this,” he said. “It will be ready soon.”

“OK. I understand.”

And I did understand. This wasn’t the place to be if you wanted things done quickly. Had Bigorre been a sovereign state then its national anthem would have been called ‘Ready Soon’. (Either that, or the composer would have been still working on it.)

After what seemed like an age, Rene the Mayor invited us all to be seated, and the meal began. As ever, it was a long-drawn-out affair—oysters, foie gras and scallops were all served as starters. Needless to say, we were nowhere near having the main course by the time midnight came around. In fact, had it not been for the deputy mayor’s son Mikael, we might have missed it. He happened to glance at his watch and notice that the magical moment was only a few minutes away, and then immediately alerted the group. We were all ushered to our feet whilst Guy, the village technical bod, tuned the PA into the radio. Soon we were counting down to the hour of midnight, along with some fatuous French DJ. (All of us except Brad, that is, who possibly thought we were praying—perhaps for the arrival of our main course.)

The kissing and the shaking of hands then began in earnest. Bizarrely we’d already done this to each other when we’d all arrived, the only difference this time being that we got to kiss and embrace the people we’d arrived with. That meant hugs for Nic, Kevin and Brad. Oh yes, and one other.

God, she looked lovely.

“God, you look lovely, Fi,” I said.

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, whatever. This is no time for an argument. Give me a kiss.”

And she obliged. I found myself swept into a place where things felt different. For a moment, the village hall and its revellers seemed to be a long way away. I felt pleasantly disorientated, lost in a momentary sense that this embrace was everything. Warm, sensuous, secure—spiritual even. I longed for it to last forever. One thing was certain. I never could have found a moment like this in Ron’s arms.

Van Halen brought me back to the real world. Rather rudely, I thought. A deafening burst of wailing guitar made everyone in the hall nearly jump out of their boots. Guy had pressed the wrong button on the music system and subjected us to several seconds of heavy metal. Fi was whisked away from me by a grinning Roger, and I continued on the salutatory circuit of the room, suddenly reunited with who I was, what I was up to and where it was that I was doing it. It may not have been as extraordinary a world as the one from which I’d just been untimely plucked, but as worlds go, it wasn’t too bad. I was soon engulfed in a three-way hug with Fabrice and Marie-Laure, before everyone in the room was swept into a huge circular dance that seemed to involve a lot of whooping and a certain amount of lateral movement, but little else. The perfect dance for slightly drunk English folk, of whom there were now more than one or two.