2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (4 page)

Soon, though, when the
notaire
read out the price Jean-Claude was getting for the property, I became very interested, although the fun level dipped to an all-time low. It seemed that Jean-Claude was receiving considerably less than I was paying for the property. How could this be? I questioned it, and Monsieur L’Agent, who up until this point had been motionless, shuffled awkwardly in his seat. After much discussion, the agent explained that the discrepancy was created by his commission on the sale. It was 10 per cent. An awful lot of money, given that I’d walked into his office and bought the first property he’d shown me.

“What’s this?” I protested to the agent. “You can’t charge this much, surely? That’s 10 per cent—in Britain the agent takes no more than 2 or 3 per cent, and anyway the vendor pays that—not the purchaser,”

“But you signed the papers agreeing to this,” he replied.

“Did I?”

“Yes. Look.”

He produced the document I’d signed when I first went into his office. Oh dear. Immediately I knew that my fbrmophobia hadn’t done me any favours. If I’d read the form properly I would have seen that I was agreeing to pay a fat 10 per cent commission to a fat agent who did sweet FA. (He wasn’t fat actually, but he bloody well ought to have been.)

I felt a knot of anger materialise in my stomach.

“I’ve been well and truly stitched up here,” I said, dispensing with the polite and simple English with which I’d addressed him thus far.

“Not so,” he said.

“Yes so,” I said indignantly. “I am not happy about this level of commission. I’m not sure that I’m prepared to sign the papers now.”

Monsieur L’Agent looked suddenly concerned and he leant forward towards me to exclude the others.

“Do not worry about this,” he said, conspiratorially. “This fee is negotiable. We will discuss it later. Also, you should know that under French law, the purchaser is entitled to a seven-day cooling-off period after signing the contract.”

I felt hugely relieved. If, in few days’ time, I still felt that I’d been utterly shafted, I could back out and not lose my deposit.

So, when the
notaire
eased the large piece of paper towards me with both his and Jean-Claude’s signatures on it…I signed.

I felt a bit sick, but I signed. The commission was negotiable after all. It was time to get tough.

I’m not very good at getting tough. It’s so much less preferable to ‘mucking about’. It was at times like these that I had to concede that I was an adult living in the ‘big world’. To some extent I’d been cosseted from these kinds of situations, swanning around as I had done in a world of entertainment, happy in the knowledge that if things got a little bit tricky, then my agent would sort it. The irony of this situation was that this particular agent was well and truly sorting it. Sorting it so that a good chunk of my money ended up in his pocket.

After saying goodbye to Jean-Claude and the
notaire
, I stood in the rain outside the office with my newfound foe.

“OK, let’s negotiate,” I said, trying to sound like a hard man from a Hollywood blockbuster. “Maybe 5 per cent is a fairer figure for me to pay. And anyway—you didn’t explain that the form I signed would give you 10 per cent and my French isn’t that good.”

Monsieur L’Agent got shifty.

“I have to call my boss.”

He made the call on his mobile and I waited patiently for the outcome. After a few minutes of hushed exchanges, he folded up his phone and turned to me, rather sheepishly. The rain was falling hard around us on the dark backstreet, making me feel like a shady character in a film involved in some illicit underworld transaction.

“My boss says that the fee is not negotiable,” he said, displaying something not far from a hangdog expression.

“What rubbish,” I said. “Of course it’s negotiable. Call him straight back and give me the phone.”

“He does not speak English.”

“Never mind,” I said crossly. “I can speak enough French to make my point.”

This statement turned out to be untrue. Arguing in French, I was soon to realise, requires a more comprehensive vocabulary than the one on which I could draw. As soon as I had taken the phone and stumbled to my first point, Monsieur le Boss, who was evidently a quick-tempered man, raised his voice and launched into a tirade that suggested he wasn’t embracing my rationale.

It was such a shame that I’d signed a document agreeing to the very thing that I was now contesting. That didn’t really strengthen my position. My only argument was that the document had not been properly explained to me and that I had almost been bullied into signing it. However, when it came to it, all the French words that would have helped convey this completely eluded me. I attempted to make my case, but my sentence stuttered and stumbled before it eventually ground to a halt.

“
Il faut expliquer que
…er…um, er…er…er…er…
il ya un probleme
…er…
je
…er…er…er…
est-ce que
…”

My adversary would hardly have felt that he was up against a heavyweight debater. Oh how I longed for the vocabulary that the situation demanded: “Look here, matey, if this commission isn’t negotiable, which seems to be the main thrust of your recent ill-mannered and unprofessional diatribe, then how come your employee assured me in the
notaire
’s office that it was? Eh? Answer me that!”

But it was no good. The required words wouldn’t come. Some were secreting themselves in the dark recesses of my memory bank, and some had simply never been there in the first place. The only half-baked sentences I did manage were shouted down by the manic ramblings of my foe. Realising that the argument was lost, I resorted to English, because, though I say so myself, I’m rather good at that.

“You are a greedy little man,” I said, puffing out my chest and handing the phone back to Monsieur L’Agent.

Not big. Not particularly clever. But it made me feel a bit better.

I’d calmed down considerably by the time I made it back to the village, but I was still cross. I felt cheated, and I was no longer sure that I was prepared to go through with the transaction. Also, the dispute at the
notaires
meant that I was now running twenty minutes late for lunch at Malcolm and Anne’s. Surely they wouldn’t mind? They’d probably been living in the south of France long enough to have developed a healthy regard for those who shun meticulous punctuality.

Jean-Claude had suggested I meet them. He’d announced rather excitedly over coffee that there was an English couple in the village who were ‘tres gentils’ and who often came round to his place to watch big rugby matches on his TV. I had telephoned them to say hello and they’d immediately invited me round for lunch.

As I made the scenic ten-minute walk from Jean-Claude’s to Malcolm and Anne’s house, I decided that the village wasn’t really a village at all. Kevin and I had driven round it after the first visit to the house and we’d discovered that it was more of a hamlet—a group of houses dotted around on the two sides of a pretty valley. There was no main street with shop, bar or post office. Rather ludicrously, however, for something of its size, it did have a small church and a
mairie
, or town hall. This meant that it was given the administrative status of ‘
une village
’, complete with the trappings of a mayor and a deputy mayor, plus planning and social committees. All for a population of 130.

Having walked up the gentle incline past several of my potential neighbours-to-be, I reached a small fork in the road. I was immediately greeted by a boisterous gaggle of chickens geese and ducks. It was almost as if they were questioning my very presence. “What are you doing here? We’re not sure if we approve of your sort—I mean, you’re not from round here, are you, mate?” Foul fowl.

I left the noisy birds behind and turned left down the narrow lane that led down one side of the valley. Soon it would rise steeply again, leading the walker to the other ‘half of the village, but I didn’t need to go that far. My destination was on my right, marked with a sign saying ‘Gites de France’. For a moment I amused myself with the idea that Malcolm and Anne were advertising themselves as ‘French gits’, but I knew that it far more likely meant that they had converted a part of their house into self-contained accommodation that could be rented out in keeping with the regulations of the French Tourist Board. That must have been a fun process to go through, I thought, as I walked up the steep gravel path.

Soon I could see a couple in their mid- to late forties standing on the terrace in front of a house that bore a strong resemblance to the one I’d spent the morning endeavouring to buy. As I drew closer, the couple (who were now smiling and waving) became more clearly defined. They were both light-framed, and they sported deep suntans, shorts and stress-free expressions.

“Welcome to the village,” said Malcolm.

“Thanks,” I said, resisting an initial urge to point out that it wasn’t really a village.

“Come and eat,” said Anne, directing me to a table on the terrace.

I sat down and basked in the spring sun, looking out across a view that included a different mountain to the one visible from my place, owing to the more westerly aspect of the house. As we tucked into charcuterie accompanied by tomato salad, it soon became clear that I was with two very kind people who shared my sense of humour and relaxed outlook. I felt confident that we would become friends.

Malcolm and Anne had done what many British people dreamt of doing—they’d left the rat race behind. Malcolm had been an accountant and Anne a teacher, and whilst neither had been unhappy in their work, they’d felt sure that they somehow wanted more. That ‘more’ had turned out to be a Pyrenean home and a relaxed lifestyle, financed by organising walking tours and renting out the apartment they’d created on the second floor of their tranquil home.

“Another glass?” enquired Malcolm, bottle of red wine poised in his left hand.

“Oh, why not?” I said, demonstrating a will of aluminium.

“So, how is the purchase going?” asked Anne.

I explained about the morning’s fracas with the estate agents.

“You’ve got a two-week cooling-off period,”Malcolm reminded me.

“Yes, that’s an excellent idea, that is,” I said. “I need to reflect a little back in England. I’m still not certain that this is the right thing to do.”

“Well, if you do go through with it,” said Anne, “you can rest assured that you’ve picked a terrific part of the Pyrenees. When Malcolm and I decided that we wanted to come out here, we spent nine months searching for the decent-sized town that we wanted to be near. After extensive research, we decided that it was Bagneres. Then we rented accommodation there and began the hunt for the right house in the right village.”

“And you’re happy here?”

“It’s wonderful,” said Malcolm.

“You couldn’t have found a village made up of a nicer bunch of people,” said Anne.

This is exactly what you want to hear when you’ve just bought the first house you’ve seen, having done no research and made no comparisons with any other houses whatsoever. It was nice to know that my wild, irresponsible and reckless leap into the French housing market could receive such comprehensive endorsement. I appeared to have landed on my feet, even though I’d broken every rule in the book when it comes to buying property abroad. I hadn’t even had the house surveyed. Well, I thought, why bother? I decided some time ago that I wasn’t a ‘make sure you have a survey done’ kind of person. I like to think that I could see if a house was falling down. I had an eye for that sort of thing. If there happened to be any hidden dangers such as subsidence or rising damp, then I would rely on my guts to instil me with a healthy feeling of unease about the place. I was something of a hippy in this regard. I went for it because it felt right.

“It feels right here,” I said, as Malcolm and Anne cleared away the plates. “But do you think I’ll fit in here OK? I mean, an Englishman buying a house on his own—aren’t they going to think I’m a bit weird?”

“I think you’ll be fine,” said Malcolm. “As long as you speak a bit of the language and turn up to some of the social events, they’ll take you to their hearts.”

“Great,” I said, raising my glass, taking the final sip of red wine and staring off into the soothing horizon.

Momentarily it felt like I could peer into the future, and I could picture it all vividly—me seated at my piano, gazing into the mountains, poised and ready to compose my masterpiece.

“You look happy,” said Anne.

And she was right. I was.

White Van Man

Back in London I began to wonder what piano I was going to play in my new mountain retreat. It seemed that either I had to look around and buy one when I got there, or I could take my own piano out with me—the iron-framed upright with the tone and action that I loved; the piano that had provided me with hours of pleasure; the piano that felt as much like a friend as a hefty mass of wood, iron and ivory could possibly be.

Upon reflection I decided that I couldn’t be unfaithful and get a new one. Besides, I would have enough on my plate when I got to my new home without having to drive to Toulouse to look at pianos, purchase one and then wait for delivery. That would lose me valuable practising time, and I wanted to start my new and strict training regime just as soon as possible.

Of course, the question remained as to how I was going to get the instrument out to France. There was the easy option of instructing a removal company, but this would be expensive and it seemed somehow soulless. I preferred the alternative of hiring a van and driving it down there myself. That way, I figured, would allow for some emotional attachment to the whole experience and it would somehow mean more when I sat at the piano and played it. I have often felt that in the course of making our lives easier (and by that I mean by hiring people to do the donkey work or unpleasant tasks for us), we miss out on experiences that can enrich our lives and enable us both to learn and to acquire wisdom. We live in a culture where people avoid strenuous tasks and hard manual labour but pay vast monthly sums to join gyms where they work their nuts off trying to get fit and lovely-looking. (I, by the way, have always managed to remain lovely-looking without recourse to such cold and heartless places.)