A Place in Normandy (23 page)

She paused.

“He claims there's a better future raising fish in Normandy than there is in computers,” Julia pushed on, relentless as the rain.

She paused again.

“At least he'd be allowed to eat his clients,” I pointed out.

“Speaking of eating clients, let me talk to Margaret,” Julia said. “You found them sheets and everything? Are they having a good time?”

The rain poured down.

Ben pulled out his deck of cards and started dealing bridge hands. With Margaret on the phone, we were only four; Ruth was my partner. Despite the fire, the room was well ventilated, the draft under the dining-room door keeping the room's air from becoming what a person might call close. Since I was trying to overhear Margaret's side of the conversation in order to infer Julia's, I played an indifferent hand. The scraps I overheard from Margaret were not completely promising.

“Why don't you just think of it as his mistress? … I know, well, yes, that's a good point, a mistress he'd try to keep secret from you, which would be an advantage to you, and she'd cost less to keep up.… No, no, the airplane trip was awful, worst ever—bumpy? at least a dozen times I thought we were going to ditch.… Yes, he put flowers in the rooms, he's really putting on the dog. Flowers in the rooms, and we're making sure he eats.… Fish farm! A fish farm? Of course … exactly!… exactly!… It's what I've always said: if there's anything harder on a marriage than children, it's men … exactly!”

I realized that my partner had become the dummy, which made me the responsible hand in a five-heart bid I did not recall initiating. Adjusting my snooping to spring to full alert only if the word
bathroom
should be mentioned, I turned my concentration to the game.

TWENTY-SIX

I was wakened at four in the morning by the furious, shocking beauty of a nightingale's song under my window, and the answer of another nightingale not far off. I could hear, under the birds' sliding chuckle (which had always seemed sinister to me), the rain still falling out there. The singing of the nightingales (whose principal
nourriture
was spiders) brought back a buried memory (unless I made it up, or unless she did, but maybe it was true) of my mother's saying that her tutor, M. Letellier, had told her seventy years before that in his youth, “There were always nightingales in your woods. Often I used to stop my horse so I could listen to them, driving to my home from the station at Fierville.”

After sleeping and waking again, I found the experience in my more recent memory both so real and so unusual—I had not heard a nightingale for fifteen years—that it seemed the kind of thing that must in prudence be dismissed as mythological or, as the dictionary would put it, merely
poetical
and
obsolete.

As much a glad surprise as any nightingale, M. Joffroy knocked at the dining-room door early in the morning as I was pouring coffee for Ruth and waiting for M. Le Planquay's
gars
and his assistant, a first-year apprentice. They had at least another full day's work, maybe two.

Frances with M. Letellier, the schoolmaster of Mesnil, ca. 1923.

M. Joffroy did not come inside but stood out in the rain, smiling and pointing at the side of the house, so that I had to step into the garden to see what was pleasing him. He was a tall man. He wore a soft cloth cap but otherwise defied the rain, sporting a white shirt and a blue sweater that shed water. His gesture tricked me into the yard, where we shook hands and he pointed at the sight that had caused his delight. On the telephone wire drooping from the cracked and yellowing stucco of the wall, two large snails were making what must for them be passionate love.

M. Joffroy kissed the pursed fingers of his right hand and flicked a blessing from them into the universe. His eyes danced. “
Escargots de Bourgogne.
Very rare in these parts,” he exclaimed. “People have eaten them all.”

“They're all over the property,” I told him. Only the day before, we had remarked on the exuberant population of salamanders, snails, and slugs—the fat orange ones that bask out in the open when it rains, taking in the moisture like topless bathers at Deauville absorbing sun.

“And soon there will be more of them,” M. Joffroy said, his voice filled with approval at the couple's endeavor. “You will have all the snails you want.”

Preparing snails gathered in the wild, I happened to know from reading up on them once in the strangely titled (at least if one thought about it from the point of view of the snails)
Joy of Cooking,
required starving them for ten days in a covered basket in a cool place like my
cave
and then feeding them new lettuce leaves each day for two weeks—a process designed to detoxify them in case they had been in pasture on such poisons as the leaves of the foxglove (digitalis) that now blasted color into my dining room. Then they must be boiled for an extended period of time—days, maybe—and forked out of their shells, to have their innards cut out and then matched with their weight in minced garlic and three times their weight in butter before their emptied and enhanced black bodies were packed back into their shells to bake.

“It's one advantage of keeping the place so run down,” M. Joffroy admitted. “The
escargots de Bourgogne
have almost disappeared elsewhere. I suppose we could think of this, what you're doing here”—his gesture included much of which I was ashamed—“as ecology.”

We'll suggest a snail farm to Julia,
I thought.
Since she doesn't like the sound of fish. Christopher might go for it; he likes process—and snails, too,
I remembered. The ancient Romans used to grow them on ranches, feeding them sweet bay leaves and wine. Christopher, who would eat anything that crawled, especially in the shallow parts of the sea, always called them “land snails” to distinguish them from the periwinkles he brought home in quantities from the mudflats of Deauville.

As was the custom in the country, everyone at the table rose and shook hands before M. Joffroy and I settled down to business. Alerted both by me and by M. Le Planquay, M. Joffroy had come to survey the damage in the upstairs bathroom. I followed him up the grand staircase. The son of a farmer, born in a village six miles away, M. Joffroy was skilled at reconciling the habits of the countryside to the expectations of foreigners. His sense of humor triumphed over my indifferent French, and therefore we communicated rather well; he served as an invaluable aide whenever I needed to confer with craftsmen.

At the top of the stairs, he peered around the corner into the bathroom and shuddered. “That's dangerous,” he told me. “The floor is gone. A thing like that, it always makes me nervous. I think”—and here he acted the part of someone sitting on the toilet and beginning an unexpected long fall into a bottomless septic tank—“I think with your permission I will not go in.”

We stood together at the top of the stairs while he deliberated.

“You want a mason,” M. Joffroy said.

In France, at least in the countryside, the forms of manual labor comprising the building and repair trades are clearly and carefully delineated, even though in my experience most workmen can do a bit of everything. During the great drought of 1976, when the hills turned almost orange, making Normandy look unexpectedly like Cézanne country, we upgraded M. Braye's cottage by putting in water and a toilet (what did Aunt Janet use when she stayed in that house? I wondered), an installation that required the contributions of three separate and independent specialists: a plumber, a mason, and a
terassier,
or digger, whose job it was to make a hole for the
fosse septique
(septic tank) in earth that had hardened to cement. That summer we finally understood the advantage of our thick mud walls, which always kept the inside of the house cool and damp, even when the temperature outside soared over the hundred-degree mark for rainless days on end. The
terassier,
retired from the bureau of Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Roads) hacked away in the blazing sun day after day, relying only on his shovel and quantities of Negrita rum. Each day we saw less of him, until he was at last consumed by the perfect hole he had made in front of M. Braye's yucca.

As we passed through the dining room again, M. Joffroy looked at Ben's and Teddy's bulk with respectful wonder and shook his head. “Having no floor, it makes me very nervous,” he said. “And Madame Julia, your wife, is well?”

Alert and suspicious,
I refrained from saying.

“I will find you a mason,” M. Joffroy said. “The place is rented for August? Then perhaps we should have the mason come right away if he is free, though in the summer…”

He went out by the door into the garden, and I watched through the window as he stood and wished the snails success in their efforts to bring back the glorious population of that fabled era of tranquillity, then went around the house to his car.

*   *   *

“Julia didn't seem at all discouraged by the state of the bathroom,” Margaret said. “In any case, she didn't mention it last night on the phone.”

“Ah, well,” I said. Trying an evasive tactic, I suggested, “It's perfect weather to walk to town.”

“You mean you didn't tell her?” Margaret was not to be distracted.

“I like a
fait accompli,
” I said. “Or if I don't really like one, at least I prefer it to the alternative.”

Teddy had already marched off into the woods carrying a saw. Ben's feet, having risen in protest against the boots he had bought at the Intermarché, elected to keep him at his solitaire, accompanied by the tintinnabulation of the plumbers downstairs, while the rest of us strolled forth.

Ben said to me as we left by way of the garden (where the coupling snails were still as heedless of their audience, Ruth claimed, as actors in some of the live shows in Amsterdam), “The point is not what it
was
but what it
is,
that's my advice; and not what it
is,
but what it's
going to be.
The future. The present is already gone.” He was talking either about gambling at solitaire playing by Vegas rules, or about my concentrating a major part of my life's attention on a farm on the far side of the ocean from home—I wasn't quite sure which.

The effect suggested by the morning's weather was not so much rain as a stingy underwater tour. We had planned to cut across the pastures and through Mme. Vera's courtyard, but as we reached the driveway we heard a shot, a hoarse cry, and then another shot, and Mme. Vera rounded the back of the thatched garage carrying a rifle, with a red shawl thrown over her flowered dress, and a man's hat on her head to keep the wave in her hair from being ruined by the rain.

All three of us had jumped, first at the shots and then at the sight of Mme. Vera, armed and dangerous. She leaned her rifle under the thatch and attacked us with kisses, ignoring the disquiet of my guests.

She told Margaret and Ruth, “
C'est un gros renard
[a big fox]. You heard him barking last night? Coming for my chickens—I missed him.”

That was the cry we had heard after the first shot—Mme. Vera's fury at missing her target. She pointed up the hill to the stooping branches of beech trees marking the edge of woods and pasture. “He's gone now,” Mme. Vera said, acting the part of a successful fox hightailing it into cover. We had to stop so Margaret, who had spent some time with Mme. Vera in the past, could visit with her as she began feeding her chickens. No animal in history had ever been less interested in chickens than was Andalouse, who waded through them as they screamed and stuttered, refusing even to notice them or acknowledge that they were in her way.

“Like Marie Antoinette among the common folk,” Ruth said, gesturing toward her oblivious bitch. “Before her last encounter with them in the Place de la Concorde.”

Wafts and wefts and waifs of mist fled toward and past us through the rain and made everything greener. Mme. Vera began explaining to Margaret and Ruth about the cows' being struck recently by lightning, and about the attendant shortage of sugar.

“And you were here during the war?” Ruth asked. “Right here, on the farm?” Mme. Vera spread her arms, speechless, indicating,
What choice did I have?

“It is so good to see smoke in your chimney,” Mme. Vera said as we turned downhill. She acted the part of smoke rising into rain, looking supple and transient.

We waded across the next pasture, dodging glutinous
bouses de vache
(cow pies) reconstituted by the rain, and climbed a padlocked wooden gate to join the road at the compound, a group of two cottages and a converted
pressoir,
or cider press. One of these, loaned to my family by Tante Margot Lafontaine, was the cottage where we'd first stayed in 1968, when we started working on the house.