2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (9 page)

I continued to stare at the doorway, but no one appeared. Suddenly I was startled by a voice coming from my right.

“You are Tony?”

I knew that voice. I’d heard it twice before over the telephone. I spun round to see her standing before me, holding my leather jacket in her left hand. An attractive, sophisticated lady in her mid-thirties? Not at all. This was the same sixty-something woman I had seen moments before. She must have gone to get my jacket from her car before coming to say hello. Terrible news.

“You are Tony?” she repeated.

“Yes,” I replied, trying to conceal my spectacular and foolish disappointment.

“
Votre blouson
,” she said, handing me the jacket.

That voice. So young-sounding. How did she do that? Why did she do that? So unfair. No doubt she had been a fine-looking woman in her day. Unfortunately for me, that day had been February 5
th
, 1966.

“
Merci
,” I said, shaking her hand and making a mental note to scold Tim for having built up my hopes so high.

Suddenly I became aware of the bouquet of flowers that I was clutching close by my side, and I held them out in front of me.

“
Pour vous
,” I said.

“
Ah merci
,” said the lady with the faintest of smiles, taking the flowers with her free hand. “
Au revoir!
”

And that was it. Immediately she turned and walked back towards the same doorway from which she had materialised minutes before in all her grandmotherly splendour. No invitation to her apartment for tea. No cordial small talk. With the brisk and calculating efficiency of Cold War spies, we’d exchanged items and parted company. The job done, there was no reason to hang around.

I walked back to my car, opened the door and slumped into the seat. Love, it seemed, would have to wait. At least until after lunch.

§

Lunch found me once again at Malcolm and Anne’s. When they’d heard I was coming back to the village, they’d been quick with the invitation. I was grateful to them for their hospitality, and it felt good to have some company to take my mind off the morning’s disappointment.

“What are you doing tomorrow?” asked Anne, as she chomped on some charcuterie.

“In the morning we have the last signing session at the
notaires
office, which will finally make the house mine.”

“Oh that’s a shame—you won’t get to do the
transhumance
.”

“
Transhumance?
”

Anne explained that this was an annual event in the pastoral calendar, during which the cattle are moved from the hilly fields that surround the village up to mountainous grazing. This is done so that the lowland pastures can be used for producing hay through the summer months, which can then be fed to the cattle through the winter. I was told that anyone could tag along, and they did so in quite large numbers.

“And what would I do, if I were able to join in?” I enquired. “I have very little experience with cows.”

Up until this point in my life, all contact with these creatures had been limited to frosty staring matches on country walks (which I always lost), or, back in the days before I’d given up eating meat, surveying small bits of them arriving on my dinner plate. These latter encounters had somehow made up for all the unsatisfactory staring matches, as they acted as comforting proof that I had been the one who’d finally prevailed.

“All we do is follow the cows,” said Anne. “It’s easy.”

“Sounds fun. If I didn’t have the other appointment, I definitely would have been up for it.”

This wasn’t entirely true. The truth was that to me it seemed like an event that lacked pizzazz. Walking behind cows? It didn’t quite do it for me.

“Where are you going to stay tonight?” asked Malcolm.

“At a hotel in the town,” I replied.

“Why don’t you stay here?” he continued. “The loft apartment is empty. It’s yours if you want it.”

“Really?”

“Of course, now go and get your stuff.”

Wow. The locals appeared to be taking me to their bosom. Well, the Anglo-Saxon ones, at any rate.

§

The afternoon saw the first of the many managerial chores that face any overseas home-purchaser. I needed to open a bank account. We forget just how laden our adult lives have become with administrative and bureaucratic baggage. Because we have taken a number of years to acquire our bank accounts, credit cards, insurance policies, driver’s licences, national insurance numbers and the rest, we have forgotten just how uninspiring and tedious each individual acquisition happened to be. Now that I had chosen to establish my bureaucratic presence in a new nation state, a veritable plethora of dreary, pompous and largely incomprehensible French paperwork lay in wait for me.

I was blissfully unaware of this as I drove into town and so my mood was still upbeat. Bagneres was big enough to offer a selection of banks, and so it would be important to make the right choice.

Obviously it would be best to find one that could offer favourable interest rates on any lump sums that I may deposit. Furthermore I would require my bank to be understanding, and sympathetic to the different problems faced by the foreigner with a new home. I would need to take care.

I didn’t take care though. Far from it. Instead I proceeded to choose my bank on the basis of which one was nearest to the spot where I’d managed to park.

I guess this was a conscious rebellion against the increasingly large section of our media that continually instructs us to be careful with our money. TV and radio ‘money’ programmes and thousands of column inches in our newspapers and magazines advise us how to invest, avoid tax or move our money about, seemingly unconcerned that our lives are being frittered away beneath the heavy duvet of pecuniary prudence. They constantly tell us to shop around in the financial marketplace, overlooking all the much nicer things we could be doing with our time. Would we prefer to talk to a spotty bloke in glasses from Lloyds TSB about an investment account, or go for a nice stroll in the country? Not that difficult a choice for me. Besides, financial planning is actually so much easier than they make out. Here’s all you need to do: earn a bit, spend a bit and stash a bit under the bed. It needn’t be any more complicated than that—and that’s why the pleasingly adjacent Banque Populaire was good enough for me. It was a bank, it was popular, and it was just over the road.

Having negotiated a series of high-security doors and buzzers, I found myself in an environment more like an office than a bank. French banks have chosen to put their security at the street end of things, so once inside one encounters no bullet-proof screens or grilles through which to address the teller. No, it’s nice and familiar—and dead easy to hold the place up, provided that you manage to sneak a gun in under your coat and don’t mind the fact that there’s no escape. (How irritating to have all that money, and then only be able to open a deposit account with it.)

After a brief chat with the agreeable and very pretty young lady who greeted new arrivals from behind a pristine and shiny desk, I was ushered upstairs where I had a pleasing meeting with the charming, healthily bronzed Monsieur Daressy. He assured me (from behind another shiny and pristine desk) that I’d made the right choice in picking their bank. It felt extremely good to have my rigorous selection process so promptly endorsed. Monsieur Daressy was extremely helpful and filled out all the forms for me, occasionally throwing in the odd word in English, after which he looked up and beamed at me for approval.

Twenty minutes later I emerged from the bank’s security system and onto the street, now in possession of a newly opened bank account, numerous pieces of paper that meant little or nothing to me, and a not altogether wholesome attraction to the girl on the front desk.

Emboldened by this success, I decided to call in at the
notaire
’s office, just to check that everything was OK for the following day’s meeting.

The
notaire
—the man who had sniggered at Tony the
cèlibataire
at that preliminary meeting months ago—was not there. His assistant, a lady lacking in the charms of the bank teller, was unable to find anything about the meeting in the
notaries
diary. A flurry of phone calls and asking around the office produced no tangible results. No one had any knowledge of an impending meeting and signing.

“
Mais c’est extraordinaire
”, I complained, before being handed the phone to sort it all out for myself.

The first call I made was to my dear friend, the estate agent Monsieur L’Agent, who quickly established that he was totally in the dark about any meeting. So then, rather nervously, I called the vendor Jean-Claude on his work number. The nerves were because I feared that as soon as he heard my voice he would almost certainly be expecting me to launch into a further barrage of enquiries regarding the whereabouts of my cork.

“
Ah, bonjour, Tony
,” he said as he answered the phone, almost with a tremor in his voice.

No doubt to his great relief, I proceeded to ask about what was happening with regard to this signing session. Confused though he may have been as to why I had suddenly dropped all concerns for my cork, he was forthright in his confirmation that everybody knew about the imminent meeting and that he was fully expecting it to go ahead in the morning. All very odd. Very odd indeed.

I guess I spent about another half hour speaking to all the parties involved. The
notaire
’s secretary informed me that one month previously they had told Monsieur L’Agent that they needed him to request more documents from me, something that he had patently not done. Over the phone Monsieur L’Agent then proceeded to assure me that he knew nothing whatsoever about this. I decided to skip the call to Jean-Claude in which he would have told me that everyone knew everything and that the meeting was still on for the morning. It would have been pointless. Passing the buck, Pyrenean-style, was going on here—and it was a futile exercise trying to pin the blame on any party. Guilt was a movable feast, a cog that turned effortlessly as an integral part of a well-oiled cyclical machine. Why mess with it? Instead, I engaged in an hour of negotiations with the
notaires
secretary and was able to establish a new procedure that I hoped would eventually lead to me becoming the owner of this bloody house. The plan was that I would send out the missing documents by registered post and give power of attorney to the
notaire
so that the deal could be done in my absence.

“
Ça va?
” I finally asked of the secretary, her head still buried in a mountain of paperwork.

“
Oui, ça va
,” she replied.

Slightly exhausted, I walked from the
notaire
’s offices, not altogether confident that we could rely on a problem-free process from here on in. Just how much longer, I mused uneasily, was my house going to remain not my house?

§

That night, I dined once again with my new hosts Malcolm and Anne. Wine flowed and we chatted some more about my prospects for settling into the village.

“You don’t think they’ll resent another Brit buying a property?” I asked.

“God no,” said Malcolm. “They’d sooner have a Brit than a Parisian. And anyway, they’ll like you because you speak the lingo.”

“The best thing to do to really get accepted,” said Anne, “is to throw yourself into village life and participate in every event that takes place.”

“Yes,” said Malcolm. “You must come to the village lunch the day after tomorrow—it’ll give you the chance to meet lots of your new neighbours.”

“That sounds fun,” I said.

“It’s a shame you have the signing in the morning,” said Anne.

“Well, actually that’s postponed now.”

“Aha!” said Anne, as Malcolm seemed to wince ever so slightly. “Then that means you can do the
transhumance
after all!”

Ah yes, now it all fell into place. The obvious upside of having failed to make the house purchase for which the trip had been expressly designed was that I would now have the chance to follow a herd of cows up a load of hills.

“Great,” I said, suspecting that Malcolm was suppressing a snigger. “Is it an early start?”

“No. Seven o’clock,” said Anne with a deadpan delivery that would have made many a comedian proud.

Malcolm charged my glass from a freshly opened bottle of red wine and the three of us got on with the task of becoming more than just neighbours, but friends. It seemed that we shared a comparable predilection for fine French wine, and an equivalent irresponsibility with regard to preparing for long walks up mountains behind cows.

§

The following morning at 6.45am I arose somewhat begrudgingly disappointed to find that I had what the French call
une gueule de bois
(wooden throat), and what we British call a hangover. The atmosphere was noticeably less vibrant as Malcolm drove us to the farm that was to be our starting point.

“I won’t be doing the walk myself,” he said, as his solid diesel car chugged its way up one of the locality’s many available steep hills. “I’m afraid that I’ve got business in town to attend to.”

He didn’t look very afraid. In fact, he looked ever so slightly smug.

“Good luck,” he said as he dropped us off. “You’ll need it—it’s a long way.”

“Yes,” I replied. “Actually, I never asked, but just how far is it?”

“About 37 kilometres,” he said nonchalantly, before driving off sporting a mischievous grin.

I looked across to Anne, who seemed untroubled by this stunning announcement. She was an experienced walker and I guess she could take all this, quite literally, in her stride. But 37 kilometres? Behind cows? With a wooden throat? Not good news.

I was a little anxious as Anne and I began to wander down the muddy lane to the farm that had been delegated
transhumance
starting point. However, if I wasn’t relishing the prospect of the long march ahead, it was made distinctly easier to bear because it was a beautiful, crisp, spring day. My anxiety stemmed from the realisation that I was about to meet many of my new neighbours. Today’s walking companions might well represent a good proportion of the select few upon whom my future happiness depended. Just how charming could I be with a wooden throat? What if they all took an active dislike to me?