Deep France (27 page)

Sauveterre-de-Béarn:

le Pont de la Legende

The Blues, Real Bad

Even Gascony was ready for a French victory in the World Cup. A tractor dealership on the road to Oloron put all its blue tractors in a line at the front of its yard, under a
banner reading ‘
Allez les Bleus!
’ All the gas stations and supermarkets were adorned with giant posters of Zinedine Zidane. The Maison de la Presse made a window of its new
stock of football magazines, and the sponsored merchandise ran from the obvious footballs and jerseys to more recherche items such as tins of sardines.

These were small investments compared to the big national players who had decided, in defiance of common sense, basic instincts, expert opinion and recent history, that France was now a great
soccer-playing nation. Hadn’t they won the cup the last time? Hadn’t they defeated Brazil, that race of footballing giants? Well, then, obviously they were going to win again.

To us, the foreigners from a truly great footballing nation, the proper pose was of indulgent non-involvement. ‘They don’t know,’ said Gerald in a kind voice.
‘They’ve never even been in with a chance before, and last time they won. Some of their players aren’t bad. You’ve got to expect them to go over the top a bit.’

‘They’ve got no Gary Lineker,’ said a more recent arrival from Britain who’d just noticed the bias against bad news
that afflicts all the French
media. ‘They never had a Jimmy Hill. They haven’t got any real experts so they haven’t got anyone to tell them how it is out there.’

The madness extended to two particularly confident advertisers, who had actually pre-recorded vastly expensive commercials celebrating a French victory.

The nationwide mood of jubilant anticipation staggered when the French lost their very first match to the little-rated team from Senegal. The commentators jabbered and the newsreaders
floundered. The players gave the traditional ashen-faced interviews but to us, long-term devotees of Ron Knee broadcasting, they showed no sign of appreciating the seriousness of their
country’s situation. Football was no longer a sport to be discussed by people who’d actually played it, but some new kind of reality TV, so the studios were filled with a bizarre parade
of minor celebrities who twittered jaunty banalities at the camera.

When the Blues went down and out to Denmark, the nation plunged into despair. ‘This will teach humility,’ said a French friend, with the satisfaction of a non-fan reprieved from
weeks of soccer mania. Adidas turned on a sixpence and whacked out a new commercial with a slogan borrowed from Kipling, ‘Losing makes you stronger!’

That was on 11 June. On 8 June, the Biarritz-Olympique rugby team had won the national championship. Their colours were red and white. In the Béarn and the Basque Country, the way forward
was clear. The blue banners were pulled down, the blue tractors were driven to the back of the showroom and the blue flowers were uprooted from the municipal displays. In their place appeared red
banners, red tractors and red flowers, not to mention red berets, red jerseys and red sweatbands. The glowering features of Zidane were replaced by the blond head of Christophe
Milheres, on posters adorned with triumphant flashes. ‘
Terre de rugby!’ ‘Allez B-0!
’

‘You can’t expect them to have the same concept of loyalty as we do,’ ruled Gerald. TF1 screened a final analysis of the Brazilian victory, a sedate performance by the
cosmetically perfect ‘experts’ talking in front of an audi­ence of Disneyesque children who were dressed in brightly coloured clothes and waving Brazilian flags. It looked like a
rehearsal for a vintage Michael Jackson video.

Chloe Returns

I collected the limp remains of my daughter from Dax station. She was alone. The plans to arrive with between seven and thirteen inseparable friends and head off to Pamplona in
July for the running of the bulls on the festival of St Ermin had collapsed, because nobody had any money, everybody needed to work through the summer to get some and none of them had yet done the
literature module on Hemingway which would have sold them Pamplona properly.

Between a month of revision and exams, and the week of partying required to celebrate the end of that nightmare, my daughter was speechless and grey in the face, ready to sleep for three days.
By which time, I sincerely hoped that the rain would have stopped.

As day after day had dawned grey and chilly, and squall after squall had blown down from the mountains to soak the already-sodden ground, people were beginning to get anxious. The Gaves were
raging with water. Although it is rated one of the most beautiful regions of France, up there with Brittany and Provence, the Béarn is much less lavish in marketing its charms. While the
Côte Basque resorts lived for the holiday season, very few inland businesses would
suffer badly if the summer turned wet. On the other hand, some tourists came, and
people wanted them to have a good time, especially the children. Up at La Maysou, Gerald was getting the house and garden ready to welcome parties of Zoe’s pupils, lurking indoors cursing
while it rained then dashing out to weed the flower beds and paint the shutters the minute the sky cleared.

Everyone had a prediction. It would stop raining on 15 June, because it always did. It would stop raining on 20 June, because that always happened when you had a cold winter. It would stop
raining on 10 June, because the shape of the clouds over the mountains told you so. ‘It will stop raining on 12 June,’ said Gerald with his usual sublime confidence. And it did, just in
time to greet Chloe when she recovered. I had fixed a hammock between the walnut tree and an ash tree in the garden, and she lay in it contentedly, reading through a new supply of chick-lit from
the English-language department of Amazon.fr and giggling when the golden butterflies settled on her toes.

We then enjoyed a week of perfect weather, with pure white puffs of cloud scudding across the brilliant blue sky. We went up to La Maysou one day and found Gerald taking a break, reclining on a
lounger on the terrace watching the clouds as they drifted past and remembering what fun it was, when he had just got his wings as a Spitfire pilot, to fly in and out of little clouds on glorious
days like these.

The vegetable garden powered into life. The first courgette flowers opened, big orange trumpets just begging to be picked, stuffed with a little fresh goat’s cheese and herbs and eaten.
The peas and broad beans were ready, and were miraculously free of blackfly. Most miraculous of all, the two undamaged artichoke plants were now huge fountains of grey-green foliage, out of which
thrust sturdy stems bearing purple-tipped baby artichoke buds. The one which had been
decapitated was half the size of the other two, but growing energetically.

For a few days, we enjoyed the kind of dreamy domestic lifestyle depicted in Conran-inspired photographs of life in France. I couldn’t quite persuade Chloe to wake up in time to see the
sun rise over the mountains, so we breakfasted late and luxuriously on a slice of leftover
pastis landais
with one of my growing collection of home-made jams. (Home-made, that is, by one
of the market vendors.) One of the local dogs, a golden-haired mongrel with a madly affectionate nature, sometimes ran in for some extra petting, wearing half an iron chain instead of a collar.

The mornings slipped away peacefully. We discussed my ambition to keep chickens, by now a well-rounded fantasy featuring a little chicken house out by the compost heap and three birds, to be
named Jeanne, Corisande and Sancie after the queens reckoned to be the good eggs of Béarnais history. Chloe was sceptical, but prepared to indulge me. I had drawings. I had costings. I had a
hilarious book which Andrew had lent me, which advised that a chicken house should be trim and neat, not a ramshackle assemblage of fence posts and bits of rusty old corrugated iron. Clearly the
author had never seen a proper Béarnais chicken house, since this was exactly the vernacular style. Andrew also was determined to keep chickens, but Geoff was against him. He said he
didn’t like to think about eggs coming out of a chicken’s bottom.

After the chicken debate, I could get a morning’s work in while Chloe enjoyed a bath. I had sent Nick Marston, the emperor of Curtis Brown’s media department, an outline and the
first twenty pages of my screenplay about the friend­ship between two great lovers of France, Henry James and Edith Wharton. He had sent me an email containing that kiss-of-death sentence,
‘There is some good writing here.’
Nick was not totally discouraging, and asked me to finish the work, but with this book and my new novel to complete in the coming
year, I would have no time until the follow­ing September. In fact, I urgently needed to crack on with the new novel,
Wild Weekend
, or the schedule would start slipping away from
me.

This was to be the first summer for six years that I had not had a book published. It felt more than a little strange. I had a curious sense that I was fading away and becoming invisible,
particularly when I sensed that I was with one of those big-talking expatriates who was making up a false identity. My French acquaintances, although they politely asked for copies of my books to
read, still seemed overawed by the idea that a real writer was in their midst. I felt hap­piest with Marie, who seemed to accept my explanation that writing was just a job, and so I produced
books just like she produced
confits
.

The only publication coming out with my name on it was a short story in Magic, an anthology published in aid of the charity One Parent Families. For some years, I had been one of the
charity’s trustees. Sarah Brown, wife of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had edited the book and gave a launch party for it at 11 Downing Street. I flew back for this, leaving Chloe in the
custody of Andrew and Geoff.

Unfortunately, there is more to being an author than writing the books. I’ve never been confident of my abilities in that part of the job which is about working the room at literary
parties. I have two problems with this: I feel like a hypocrite even when I’m flattering people I genuinely admire, and I can never get it out of my head that a party is supposed to be
fun.

I watched nervously as other writers jostled to be photo­graphed next to J. K. Rowling and queued up, elbowing aside their competitors, for the privilege of laughing at one
of John O’Farrell’s jokes. A year ago, I realized, the fact that I just can’t behave like this would have sent me home totally depressed. Now it seemed amusing. I
found a kindred spirit in Emma Donoghue, whose story of two rival boatmen in Louisiana was one of my favourites. We formed ourselves into the too-sensitive-to-live tendency and lurked at the side
of the room, where we found an equally shy fugitive from the House of Lords, Baroness (Ruth) Rendell.

He’s a Vegetarian

Michèle Roberts had written a story which summed up Geoff’s predicament perfectly. It was called ‘Please Excuse My Husband – He’s a
Vegetarian’, and concerns a couple who take their holidays in France. The husband, sick of watching his meat-eating wife tuck into one delicious meal after another while he is contemptuously
dismissed with an omelette, says, ‘They’re so intolerant, the French, of anything different.’

‘Oh, darling,’ his wife replies, ‘it’s just not in their culture, that’s all.’ By the end of the story, the wife has acquired some of the timeless skills of
the rural French carnivore, and the husband has come to a sticky end.

Andrew thought this tale was highly amusing, and Geoff did not. He was not finding life easy as a vegetarian and was struggling to master the French language. Often, he gave up on the menu when
we went out to eat. Instead, he gave the waitress a flirtatious smile and hopefully mumbled, ‘
Vegetarian
?’ This strategy produced two choices, a cheese omelette or a mushroom
omelette. Sometimes the chef, feeling embarrassed that he was sending out such a poor dish, would toss in a few
lardons
and ruin the whole thing. The salad makers were inclined to do the
same, adding chicken livers,
gizzards
en confit
, strips of duck breast, slices of ham and chunks of Béarnais black pudding to innocent bowls of lettuce.

Geoff had been a chef himself, cooking first for the patrons of the English National Opera and then for his own clients at the studio, but trawling through the regional cookbooks revealed very
few vegetarian recipes. Most of France is still eating on the values of their peasant days, when meat was the only real status symbol, and the more meat you could eat, the richer you obviously
were. Thus vegetables meant poverty, and serving a guest a vegetable dish was virtually an insult. A couple of women, lunching on their own, might get away with a little
gratin
, but
otherwise the only role for vegetables was to garnish the meat.

To make things worse, vegetables were what the animals ate. The maize, which was now 120 centimetres high and getting visibly taller every day, was intended for export and to fatten the ducks
and the beef cattle. The less delicate vegetables which the British like to eat, marrows, parsnips or swedes, for example, are also considered fit only for animals by the French.