A Place in Normandy (21 page)

I showed my guests the linden alley, which led from woods to woods in a stretch only as long as the long side of the house, itself not visible from this height. The linden alley was a folly, meant merely for decoration since it was too narrow to accommodate a cart and, in any case, had never gone anywhere. It was planted as a place to walk in. From here, when the trees had lost their leaves, one could look down and see the face of the house that the Mesnier-Bréards had done in masonry: white tinted by lichen to a warm yellow, with insets of floral garlands under the upstairs windows. This day we argued about whether or not we could actually see the smoke from our dining room, which would be joined in that chimney by the smoke from the bedroom Ben and Margaret were using. Birds darted through the wet space under the lindens; beyond the alley, the unused quarry was already thick with blackberry brambles flowering in their rambunctious version of the rose. In that area, where we had done extensive clearing, doomed birches and alders sought to take over, but they were soft and temporary and would be shaded out with time, once the serious hardwoods could establish themselves.

The front of the house from the third terrace, 1937. Photo Claude Giraud

Our path through the woods was an old one, the equivalent in French terms of a British footpath. After giving onto the abandoned quarry at the top of the hill in back of the linden alley, it skirted the backsides of a sequence of farms on one side, keeping to woods on the other while never surrendering its quality of always seeming poised to offer insight into the forest primeval.

The front of the house from the top of the hill, 1995. Photo by author

We had brought sticks with us to beat our way through the bracken, and to break the backs of the blackberry canes that sought to take advantage of the path's offered access to the sky by snaking across it at eye or ankle level. Andalouse the city dog kept to the path immediately ahead of us and neither looked nor sniffed to left or right. The haze of brilliant damp that struggled to magnify the secluded sun rendered the colors vivid and vibrant, and I would have thought the same to be true of the smells, which should have provoked desire in any dog. The woods harbored foxes, several varieties of weasel, badgers, deer, and wild boar in addition to smaller fare.

It seemed to me that the songbirds were more plentiful each year; I did not recall having heard about any deer when we first came back, but these, too, had become progressively less timid recently. I suspected that the region was now producing fewer young men with the skill or patience to hunt these enemies of agriculture, and that the more people's livelihoods depended on things they could do in town without getting dirty, the better it was for the deer.

“That sounds just like a cuckoo,” Margaret said.

The first time we traveled through Tuscany, Julia and I had noticed that the shapes of the landscape, and of individual trees or rocks within it, proved something that had never before occurred to us: such artists as the Sienese painters of the fifteenth century had been reporting, not inventing, an organization of landscape that we, foreigners both in time and in geography, had dismissed as the kind of fake for which the faddish term of the day was “magical.”

Likewise, what does the American do about the cuckoo, on arriving in a land in which that bird's voice is such a commonplace as, after a while, not even to be noticed? A person of Margaret's age, if educated in a certain way, would be familiar with the repeated musical descending minor third in a hundred familiar warhorses of European origin, from Respighi back through Beethoven's Fifth to a song by some composer in the Middle Ages whose name has long since fallen off his work. The cuckoo supplied the metaphor for a joke (about husbands' losing the attention of their wives) that was making people yawn generations before Shakespeare. The familiar references in English literature, if piled on the unfamiliar ones, and those in turn on top of references drawn from other European languages, would make a tower higher than the embarrassed cuckoo could ascend attempting to escape them. The cuckoo sings only in May. Overfamiliar as a cultural footnote relentlessly repeated, the song, when it first occurred to her ear for real while we were trudging through the woods, was simply a revelation to Margaret: she exclaimed, surprised with pleasure, “God! It's all true!?”

It was the sort of delight that nothing could be done about afterward, however, because we were strangers in the bird's country and to refer to it in a familiar way would have seemed like dropping, in conversation, the wrong nickname for a famous person we didn't know.

“Must be,” I told Margaret. I hadn't heard it, though I'd been hearing it for days; that made it familiar, if not exactly mine: I could not use it in Cambridge.

So we walked along the muddy path, beating back ferns and breathing in the complex forest odors that Andalouse disdained, and we were accompanied by the nagging of cuckoos and the blackbirds' extraordinarily intelligent musical approximation of spirited if polite conversation between rival women, and only the crows sounded like home—in fact, like taxi drivers, Margaret said. She understood them as easily as if they had been growling in Brooklyn, “Get a move on, lady,” or “You call that a tip?”

I was keeping an eye on Ruth, hoping to see her stoop and pick up a flint on one of whose raggedy faceted sides she would show us evidence of Cro-Magnon human workmanship, perhaps pronouncing it “not of museum quality” before tossing it into the brambles.

The remains of this ancient forest—of which not a single stick was ancient, the woods having been farmed and exploited for a thousand years—occupied the whole crest of the hill, spreading over several hundred acres. This part of Europe had been pretty much forested out, and a good hardwood trunk—such as an oak—was still of such value that after felling a tree, a lumberjack was required to stamp an inventory number into the fresh cut, so that each trunk could be registered and accounted for.

Because of its scarcity, much that in the States is commonly made of wood (such as popsicle sticks, fence posts, and toothpicks) appears in France in the same shapes but made of plastic or cement. And as for things manufactured from wood pulp, such as paper plates and napkins, when American friends coming over to visit asked us what they should bring (perhaps meaning what outfits?), we used to tell them, “Bring paper plates and napkins.” In France we could not afford them.

Wood was used sparingly in building here on account of expense—another reason I had slowed down when I was building bookshelves. Our friend Suzette, when she came to visit Julia and me in Cambridge, believed herself to be on the American frontier: “All those trees everywhere in the streets and gardens!” she'd exclaimed. “And the dwellings!”—she gestured toward the clapboard houses on our street—“Everyone lives in a log cabin!”

We reached the spot where the path widened to become a cart track and we no longer had to go in single file, far enough apart to avoid being lashed by recoiling branches. I started noticing that the farm buildings we were passing, from which an inquiring dog emerged now and again, were no longer the comfortable, run-down affairs I had been used to. More and more they were being spruced up, leaving our tumbledown wreck looking very much the outsider. Even the cows appeared more prosperous and better educated than those on my side of the hill. (Perhaps they aspired to the
première qualité;
they walked more daintily and lay with more conviction and less abandon, seeming to be vegetarians by choice, unlike the cattle that haunted my fields.)

From the road along the crest of the hill we could look out through orchard and across the valley of the
douet
and see the village of Mesnil, mostly redbrick from this vantage point, and dominated by the church tower. Mist bulged in ragged racing scraps between us and the town, with pods of rain battering it down now and then to allow us a vista.

Ruth hung back to talk to me, her red coat pattering with earnest rain. “I'll tell you what to do,” she said. “And what you should tell Julia. I've given it a lot of thought. That place of yours is perfect for a B and B. Teddy can give you advice since he knows construction; he's done so much with our place in Amsterdam. Of course he says your wiring is all shot, and you don't want to take many chances with that since it's all two-twenty, but after you fix that, and maybe get some real beds—not to imply that what we're in isn't comfortable, Teddy and I, but if you want people to pay real money for a nice experience, it can't just be a mattress on the floor that makes you bump your head on the sink whenever you get up. And that room off the driveway that you call the
cave,
where there's the biggest leak—that's pretty much wasted, right? You could put a bedroom in there, though you'd have to put in a floor first, but it has water already—I know, a sauna!”

“How much will you take to make sure Ruth never runs into Julia?” I asked Margaret. I'd been gently, over the last day, trying to coax Margaret into my camp.

“No, really,” Ruth said. “And about the bathrooms…”

I'd had more or less the same conversation with my friend Madeleine in Paris on my way out here. I had offered Madeleine and her family the use of the house whenever they liked, since it was more convenient for them than for me, but Madeleine knew country houses. By the time you arrived for the weekend and cleaned everything enough to be able to stay there, she said, it was time to start cleaning in preparation for leaving; the men never helped; and you had to take clean sheets from the city and bring them back dirty to wash once you got home (something she always does when they come to visit us in Normandy, I should add; this is standard French etiquette when visiting friends with second houses in the country).

Madeleine's preference, shared by the rest of her family, was to have an efficient apartment in Paris and to travel wherever they could, whenever they could, staying in hotels. What fun would it be, she asked, to visit the house without us? No, if they wanted to see that part of the country, they could find a hotel in Deauville. But thank you.

Madeleine had come back to the apartment from her office to have lunch with me, and I had told her what point Julia and I had reached in our continuing argument. Since she and Tom had known the house in Mesnil for most of the time we had been using it, Madeleine was full of suggestions, not least among which was, “Why are you even
thinking
of doing this? It's so much to keep clean.” Even though she has spent a great deal of her life with Americans, Madeleine has never got the idea that one can both enjoy something and fail to keep it clean.

We sat in her living room looking at her view of the Eiffel Tower as she described a collection of chrome fixtures she had bought, but not used, when she was redecorating her apartment's bathroom in marble. These would be expensive for us to buy again in France, and unwieldy to bring from the U.S.—such things as toilet-paper dispensers. Madeleine reminded me that we had in our two bathrooms nothing but little wooden boxes screwed to the wall, intended for the old French prewar
imperméable
-style folded brown squares. She had been brooding about these boxes, on which our habit was to let the rolls of toilet paper perch on end, like pink attendant birds. She insisted, as she did every year, that the place could never be rented to French people, who looked for cleanliness as well as comfort when in vacation mode, and for whom the charm of rusticity did not encompass an aura of dilapidation. For many of these, she repeated, the concepts of cleanliness and comfort were indistinguishable.

Madeleine, like Julia, had an intimate knowledge of the house's potential charms and horrors, as well as an interest in the overall puzzle: How could we make it work? Especially given that we had little money to invest and must rely instead upon the strength or charm of our personality.

“Why don't you take the money and use it in small amounts to go to India and Croatia and Australia or Morocco?” Madeleine asked. (
Or throw it all in a hole?
Julia did not ask, but she was thinking along those lines.)