Deep France (18 page)

At Iraty, Fiona’s dog, a wire-haired terrier called Scruff, was whirled up in a tornado and dropped from a great height – fortunately into a snow-drift.

Lunch with Marie and Robert

Marie, of course, had invited me to lunch immediately I arrived in Orriule, but on a day when Annabel was away and I had already invited Gerald over for pot luck. Like most of
my neighbours, she and Robert have enough to do with keeping up with their family, but at last we found a date that worked for both of us. ‘Come and eat some
confit!
’ she
chortled down the phone.

If you want to do justice to lunch with Marie and Robert, it’s a good idea to fast for a couple of days first. Robert and their son, Christian, are capable of sitting at the table and
watching her bring a procession of home-prepared delicacies out of the kitchen, then graciously selecting a few morsels and passing the loaded plates onwards, but my admiration for the cook
won’t let me do that.

Indirectly – and not very indirectly at that – it is thanks to Robert and Marie that I am here at all. Some years ago, Willow and Tony, having decided to settle in the region, began
house-hunting. Willow’s method of doing this is
simple. She goes to every estate agent in the chosen area and asks to see their cheapest property.

In this case, it was a small farm cottage with no main services, surrounded by maize fields, near Ossages. Robert and Christian Lafargue were the nearest builders, and got the job of converting
the cottage into an elegant home, complete with a galleried double-height reception room and a wide balcony overlooking the valley.

Ossages was then almost a ghost village. The last auberge was shut and the
dépôt-de pain
, less than a shop but still a place you could buy bread, closed at the same time
Willow and Tony moved into a caravan in what was supposed to be their garden. Some of the finest houses in the village were either standing empty or seriously dilapidated. Robert and Marie’s
children were still in the area. Their two daughters were married to local businessmen and Christian was living at home, running the building firm with his father and still, in theory, looking for
a wife. However, their grandchildren, like the rest of the young people in the village, had moved away, first to study and then to build careers in Bordeaux or Bilbao.

Slowly, Robert and Marie looked over these foreigners who had bought into their community, who wanted walls built lumpy, beams left exposed, window sills shaped freehand and a bathroom with a
power shower to every bedroom, who ate dinner instead of lunch, had friends instead of relatives and were content to rattle around in a vintage Mercedes instead of trading in a brand-new Peugeot
every couple of years.

It must have been a steep learning curve on both sides. Willow and Tony, used to houses with foundations, didn’t appreciate that their cottage, like many old buildings in the Chalosse, had
been chucked up on a sandy slope with no foundations at all. Only the stone mass of the chimney
breast stopped the whole structure sliding down the valley. Willow wanted to
move the fireplace. Christian mentioned underpinning. Willow said they couldn’t afford it. I was talking to her on the phone when the walls did their house-of-cards trick and I can still
remember the scream.

Week by week, mutual trust developed. It was over a year before Robert mentioned that his great-grandfather had built the house. When the first part of the job was done, Marie invited the
clients to lunch. It was noted with enthusiasm by all the female Lafargue relatives that Tony bore a striking resemblance to Julio Iglesias.

In time, some friends of Willow and Tony came to visit and decided to buy a substantial
maison de maître
in a nearby village. Instructions were faxed to the Lafargue office, and
translated by Tony, who speaks fluent English, French and Spanish. After three years of this, the friends reappeared and moved in with Willow and Tony for the final six months of snagging and
general agony. The wife then picked a fight with her old friend and never spoke to her again. Time passed, and the foreign community developed the notion that the wife was an English
aristocrat.

Marie and Robert sided firmly with Willow and Tony. ‘
Un pen bourgeoise
,’ Marie says of the wife, making clear that this is a courteous understatement of her real views. The
house at Berenx was going to need ongoing work, but Lafargue et Fils had enough work for the next two years and blood was thicker than water – because by now, Willow and Tony were part of the
family.

Robert is a man of immense respect, which he has earned in a lifetime of fair dealing and wise advice. When people pass him on the street, they say, ‘
Bonjour, Maître
Lafargue
.’ He encouraged my friends to buy their present home, a handsome village house facing the church. It needed saving
from the decades of neglect; the ageing
owner would soon need residential care and her family needed the money.

Under the wing of their adoptive parents, my friends were inducted into village life. The mayor smiled upon them. They sold their first house to another English family. Now there are six houses
in and around the village belonging to non-French owners. Ossages is almost fashionable. The village has a shop and cafe. Somebody has just opened a
brocante
but the prices are ambitious.
All these matters were discussed over the
confit
. By half-past two, everyone had finished their coffee and went back to work.

A Literary Evening at the Hôtel du Golf

The Hôtel du Golf was built mostly of concrete in the 1970s, and beside the glory that is the rest of Saliés it looks rather plain. Nevertheless, the Club
International Salisien had determined that it was the ideal venue for my
conférence.

Andrew and Geoff, my new friends from Castagnède, came. Sandy-and-Annie came, and bought champagne because the Irish were indeed going ahead and buying their house. Willow and Tony, newly
returned from exterminating the cockroaches in their Spanish villas, came. Annabel,
la vice-prèsidente
, came with Gerald and her handsome thirtysomething godson. Fiona and Gordon
came with Cam and Margot, and Cam crawled over the floor in front of the front row like a commando. Dominique came, and had the new experience of trying to follow a conversation in a foreign
language for an hour. Roger was in England and sent his regrets. The Mayor of Orriule was also invited, but couldn’t come; she was a birdlike young woman who dropped in on me one morning at
Maison Bergez, apologizing
for not calling before and inviting me to the Mother’s Day fete.

The translator, more than ever like a bright-eyed robin, introduced me to the young owner of the excellent local bookshop. I’d seen the French edition of
Heartswap
in his window
the previous year, but he had no recollection of stocking it.

The rest of the audience were club members and seemed, on average, to be British and confused. My party piece contains one splendid joke, at which they laughed uproariously, and it did seem that
they were taking in the good stuff about narrative, mythology, the collective unconscious, Joseph Campbell and the legend of the hot springs.

But then it was time for questions. The first was in English, from the lady with the wistful voice. ‘All these bestsellers are written to a formula,’ she said. ‘What is
it?’

About half an hour earlier, I’d explained that there was no formula and it was this irritating misconception that had led me to get interested in plot structure in the first place.
‘Er – as I said at the beginning,’ I said, trying not to sound insulting, ‘there is no formula. There is only classical narrative structure, which is capable of infinite
interpretation.’ She looked disappointed.

The next question was in French, from the Club President herself, Gracienne, who had turned up in stilettos and a black power suit with a peplum. ‘Why aren’t there any pictures in
your books?’ she demanded.

The translator waded in to try to help. We went for something on the lines of words being the medium in which I preferred to express myself. Gracienne looked disappointed.

Annabel’s godson asked: ‘Why was your first novel a bestseller?’ Well, what could I say? Because it was brilli­antly written, exquisitely constructed and, most crucially,
it was exactly the right book at the right time. ‘Well, why
don’t you do it again?’ Because I grew up, along with my readership. Because it’s not in my
nature to churn out a blockbuster every two years. Because I’m an artist and we have to move on. He looked disappointed.

Afterwards, we attempted to enjoy a dinner of excruciat­ing slowness, thereby blighting the romance of the hotel’s only guests, two lone salespeople, a man and a woman, who sat sadly
at their separate tables. Gerald, I noticed, talked animatedly in French to Gracienne until way past midnight without a hint of tiredness.

Confit de Canard

This, the great signature dish of all Gascony, is hideously abused in Britain. I was once silly enough to order a salad with duck
confit
in the restaurant at a West
End fashion emporium. A minute inspection of the limp leaves that arrived some twenty minutes later revealed no meat of any kind. I suppose the chef decided to try it on because most of his
clientele ‘eat’ a salad by flicking the leaves about for a while, then mashing a few of them with a fork before pouting resentfully and shoving the plate aside. The tiny minority who
actually swallow then rush off to the lavatory to make themselves sick. Easy to put invisible
confit
on the menu with that kind of customer.

If you are ever actually served duck
confit
in Britain, it’s usually slimy, pallid, greasy and revolting. To be strictly fair, you can have the same experience in a downmarket
auberge
anywhere in Gascony, too. In Britain, trying to make your own
confit
at home is almost as unrewarding – I’ve read recipes by otherwise reputable cookery
writers who suggest that the cook in a hurry can just mock up a decent duck leg
en confit
by tossing it into the deep fryer. Trust me, you can’t.

You can’t make duck, or anything else,
en confit
in a hurry. It’s a dish that was originally cooked over embers in the corner of an open fire, while the cook and her family
got on with their lives nearby. The essence of its deliciousness is
that the meat is briefly cured in salt, then its fat is rendered very slowly, then the meat is cooked in the
fat so slowly that it practically melts. Pierre Koffmann remembers that his grandmother didn’t consider that the first part of the cooking had been completed successfully until she could
pierce the meat with a piece of straw.

This slow cooking, followed by slow cooling and a process of preservation in fat, gives the meat a velvety texture and a deep, mellow flavour. Without giving each phase of the process its due
time, the chemical changes that create the texture and flavour will not take place. A piece of duck
confit
should also be golden and gorgeously crispy on the outside – it’s a
close cousin to the classic air-dried duck dishes from China, another great duck-eating nation.

Prepared properly,
confit
should not be greasy, and should offer the maximum of crispiness for the minimum of calories, because the cooking is finished by again heating the pieces of
preserved duck slowly in the oven until all the fat has run off. Most modern hobs and ovens can cook
confit
perfectly well on their lowest settings.

If you’ve bought your duck from a proper butcher, you can ask him to cut it into pieces for you, leaving you with two breast portions, or
magrets
, two legs, two
wings (minus the tips) and the carcass with its skin and fat. Leave the skin on the pieces to be preserved.

Like the peasant’s pig, every bit of the duck was con­sidered eatable, and so a traditional
confit
operation would preserve the heart, the gizzard, the feet and the head, as
well as the skin of the neck stuffed with sausage meat.