2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (8 page)

“Yes, but you’re not supposed to sleep with them,” said Tim.

“Maybe there were moments with Lianne,” I continued, ignoring Tim’s facetious remark. “And Clare. But the closest to really being in love was probably with Fi. Remember her?”

“Ah yes, Fiona!” said Tim with a smile, no doubt recalling the many fun nights the three of us had spent together over a decade before. “Nothing ever actually happened with that though, did it?”

“Things almost happened—but the trouble was that she was still in love with her ex-boyfriend. In the end she went back to him. He lived in Ibiza.”

“Well, I’m not sure if it counts as being in love if it remains unreciprocated,” said Matt, taking on the role of adjudicator. “So Fiona doesn’t count.”

“I even wrote a song for her,” I mused, surprising myself with the frankness of my confession.

“Really?” said Tim.

“In that case perhaps Fiona should count,” said the adjudicator.

“Yes, I think she should too,” said Tim.

“Right,” I said. “Whatever you boys think.”

“The main thing,” said Tim, “is that you’re ready to get stuck in again.”

“Agreed,” said Matt. “What type of girl would be right for you?”

I shrugged. This was all getting to feel like I was on the psychiatrist’s couch—but for the fact that I was sitting bolt upright and driving a big white van on a French motorway. The questions went on and, despite feeling a little under the diagnostic cosh, I answered each one as honestly as I could, and by the time we’d successfully negotiated Toulouse’s
peripherique
, a conclusion had been drawn by my two amateur psychologists. Basically, I was a man who expected a great deal of a partner in a relationship and perhaps I needed to find a way to be more understanding and tolerant of weaknesses and faults. Secondly, it was agreed that often in the past I had been attracted to personalities who were ambitious and who needed to prove themselves in some way.

“What you need, Tone,” said Tim, elbow out of window, map of France open on his lap, “is someone independent, who likes what she does but doesn’t need to measure her success in terms of achievements.”

“Right,” I said, almost subordinately, as if there was a new hierarchy in the cab and I was now student to Matt and Tim’s university tutor.

“Maybe,” continued Tim, “you need someone simpler—more at peace with themselves, who can support and encourage you, but still with enough enthusiasm for their projects so as to maintain your interest in them.”

“Right,” I said with a nod.

“And with nice tits,” added Matt.

At least one of us had remembered that we were three blokes in the cab of a white Luton van.

“Perhaps you’ll find someone in France,” said Tim.

“Yeah—a nice French girl,” Matt chirped boisterously. “With nice tits.”

“Yes, thanks, Matt,” I interjected. “Well, let’s see what happens, shall we?”

And the van sped on.

§

Half an hour after Toulouse, the Pyrenees rose defiantly and majestically to our left. These snow-capped peaks have formed the natural boundary between France and Spain, the buffer between two cultures, and frequently the escape route for dissidents, freedom fighters and escaped prisoners of war. We were now in the French
departement
of Hautes-Pyrenees, which before the French Revolution had been known as Bigorre. This was where my new home was situated. A home that was looking in fine form by the time we reached it. Tim and Matt approved of the location.

“Wow!” said Matt, whilst Tim offered a whistling sound of admiration.

I swelled with pride and went to knock on the door, an act that reminded me that I wasn’t yet the legal owner. Soon Jean-Claude and family were helping us unload the van with a surprising and most welcome gusto and enthusiasm.

“
Ah, Tony—tu joues du piano!
” Jean-Claude observed on noting the instrument that slowly revealed itself from beneath tables, chairs and an assortment of bedding.

“Owi,” I replied, offering a few playful notes of blues as my accomplices began to shuffle it down the van.

“
Très bon
,” he said with a nod, whilst his wife and son looked on in amazement as if I’d just performed a magic trick.

The addition of French brawn (Jean-Claude’s rugby-playing past now even more acutely evident) meant that the piano was offloaded without further incident, and it was left to relax in its new home—the garage beneath a French house in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Here, I hoped, it would have time to acclimatise itself to its new surroundings so that when I returned it would be ready to ease my fingers across its keys, perhaps towards some inspirational melodies.

We spent a frustratingly short amount of time in what I’d now taken to calling ‘nearly my house’, partly because we’d arrived on a day when the family were anxious to leave for an outing. There was only time to give my two English psychotherapists a short tour, which involved a lot of nodding and smiling at Jean-Claude, who followed us at every turn. All too quickly we were climbing back into the van whilst the family waved us off, completely oblivious to the disasters that had befallen its predecessor and ignorant of the gargantuan effort we had made to get there.

“You’ve done well there,” said Tim, looking back at the house as we pulled away.

“Yeah,” said Matt. “For someone who gave it about half an hour’s thought, this is a bit of a result.”

I hoped they were right.

After drinks with Malcolm and Anne and a meal in town, we were back on the road again. It wasn’t until shortly after we’d rejoined the motorway that I noticed my leather jacket was missing, complete with the diary nestling in its pocket. A quick search of the van confirmed that it was not on board—and I felt pretty confident that on departure I had stashed it in the cab by my feet near the offside door. Irritatingly, I could only conclude that it had fallen out of the cab when I’d opened the door to collect the ticket for entry to the
peage
.

“That makes it your fault, Tim,” I said, trying to remain jovial. “Because if you’d parked nearer to the ticket machine I wouldn’t have had to open the door.”

“All right, Hawks, you win,” said Tim. “We’ll go back for your poxy jacket.”

A fruitless journey though, because on arriving for the second time at the entrance to the
peage
, there was no sign of my jacket.

“Bugger,” I said. “Someone must have made off with it.”

“You’ve had that jacket too long anyway,” said Matt. “You were wearing it fifteen years ago.”

“It’s the diary I’m bothered about. There’s some after-dinner speaking engagements in it that I haven’t got round to copying into my other diary.”

“Never mind,” said Tim. “Let’s just hope whoever finds it turns up and does them for you.”

“It’ll probably be funnier,”joked Matt.

“Maybe it fell out of the van on Jean-Claude’s drive before we left,” said Tim. “Why don’t you give him a quick call and check?”

Tim had correctly identified another possibility and the call had to be made, however much I hated making phone calls in French. I was at a level in the language where I needed to see who was speaking to me so that I could follow the contours of their mouths as they framed the words, and where I could have the option if necessary of drawing pictures on a piece of paper when things went horribly wrong. Phone calls were scary things.

“Can you do it for me?” I said to Matt. “You’re better at French than me.”

“I know, but I want to see you squirm,” he replied.

Amidst much childish tittering I made the call, immediately struggling to form the correct sentence. I wanted to say that I thought that I might have dropped my jacket somewhere on his driveway—but I couldn’t think of the word for jacket and I didn’t know the word for driveway. And so Matt got his way. He saw me squirm. Momentarily lifted by the fact that the word for jacket’ magically popped into my head, I launched into a long sentence in which I attempted to get my meaning across. I’m not sure if I was entirely successful because on its completion there was silence at the end of the line, followed by a slightly pained ‘
Comment?
’ (The polite way in French of saying, ‘What in God’s name was all that about?’) I had another go, but, again, with little apparent success because Jean-Claude countered with a long and speedily delivered sentence, the intonation of which suggested that it might be a question. Shortly afterwards I said my goodbyes and hung up.

“Well?” enquired Tim, whilst Matt, who had recently descended into fits of giggles, looked on. “Is it there or not?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “But I don’t think so.”

“You bloody idiot,” said Matt, once he regained a modicum of composure. “You screwed up big time.”

“How?”

“Instead of using the word
blouson
, which means ‘jacket’, you used the word
bouchon
, which means ‘cork’. You just asked him if he could look and see if you dropped your cork somewhere outside his house.”

Tim now joined Matt in raucous laughter, causing the van to swerve rather dangerously towards the hard shoulder.

“Then,” continued Matt, “you asked him if he would call you on your mobile as a matter of urgency if he found your cork lying anywhere around the place—so that we could then turn the van round and go back for it.”

Oh dear. My credibility with the vendor would be in tatters. All future negotiations would be tarnished by his belief that I was a strange and celibate bachelor with an unreasonable and obsessive attachment to corks.

§

We were just outside Paris when I got the explanation of what had happened to the jacket. I received a call to my mobile from a French woman who explained that she had found the jacket, picked it up, and then found my mobile number in the front of my diary.

“Fancy turning round and going back?” I enquired of Tim, Matt having been released from the van several hours back.

“Don’t want to sound selfish,” he replied dryly, “but I think you’ll have to go back for it another time.”

“Fair enough, I suppose. Anyway—I’ll be back in a month to sign the papers and formally take over the house.”

“Perhaps this jacket lady will turn out to be the woman for you,” said Tim with a cheeky grin. “What did she sound like?”

“Well, she had a nice voice,” I said, “but there didn’t seem to be any major reason to suggest a blossoming romance.”

“That’ll come,” said Tim. “I mean, talk about fate drawing you two together. She’s all the things you could want in a woman—resourceful, kind, public-spirited, and has a car.”

“Yes,” I said, sceptically. “I’ll let you know.”

Cows, Cows and More Cows

“Blimey, how far were you hoping to get in this thing?” asked the man who’d come to tow the van away.

To say that he was eyeing the abandoned white van disparagingly doesn’t do justice to the extent to which he’d managed to contort his face.

“The French Pyrenees,” I said, not without shame, whilst furtively looking around me hoping that no one else in the road would overhear.

“Bloody hell!” he exclaimed. “In that thing you’d have been lucky to get to the end of this road.”

Then he thought for a moment and added, “Well, you didn’t, obviously.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Then I gave him a cheque for £70 and he hooked up the front of the disgraced van to some kind of hoist and towed the bloody thing away.

Final bill then: £585.00. A bargain.

§

A few weeks later I was back in France to sign the papers that would make the house mine, all mine. As I sped along the motorway in the hire car, I was fully prepared for the many administrative chores that lay in store for me. I was also ready for potential romance. I knew that I was probably being a ridiculous dreamer, but I couldn’t help wondering if there might be something special about to happen between me and ‘Jacket Lady’.

Tim was responsible for this. His words had refused to leave me. And I was rather fascinated by the way in which this woman and I had made contact. The romantic in me wanted to be sitting at a dinner table in years to come answering the question about how we’d met. It would probably trigger a round of applause from all present—the finest example of a relationship that was simply meant to be.

We had spoken on the phone a week previously, but a combination of her lack of English and my incompetence in telephone French had made it impossible to fathom whether we had anything in common. All I knew was that she had quite a nice voice. I felt a tingle of nerves as I drove the car into Tarbes and began to follow the muddled directions to her apartment that I’d taken down. On the passenger seat next to me there was a beautiful bouquet of flowers. Well, I’d thought, even if there wasn’t a hint of a spark between us, she deserved a big thank-you anyway. She’d ‘saved’ my leather jacket, after all. And if she was gorgeous? Well, the flowers weren’t going to do me any harm.

Jacket Lady lived in a block of flats that looked just like those I remembered from a photograph in my first French textbook at school. They’d probably been ‘state of the art’ when they’d been built in the 1970
s
, but they hadn’t aged well. I pulled over in the car and tooted my horn, as I had been instructed to do. I picked up the flowers, got out of the car and stood there, watching the exit to the flats in anticipation. Then my heart sank. An elderly lady appeared, grey-haired, perhaps in her late sixties. Surely this couldn’t be Jacket Lady? The voice I’d heard on the phone had almost certainly been that of a younger woman than this. Surely I couldn’t have got it so wrong.

I sighed with relief when the lady emerged from the doorway and then turned to the left, moving away from me. Good, it wasn’t her. I could now get on with the job of fixing my eyes upon the doorway, hoping to be delighted by the imminent emergence of an attractive, sophisticated woman in her mid-thirties. A minute passed. Jacket Lady was certainly taking her time. Perhaps she was sprucing herself up and making herself look even more lovely. Maybe, like me, she had felt that there was something special in the way that we had been drawn together. Did she also suspect that we might have been supposed to meet?