Deep France (40 page)

Make the pastry by mixing the dry ingredients, heaping them on a work surface and making a well in the centre, into which put the eggs and butter. Draw the
flour mixture into the wet ingredients and gradually mix to a soft dough (or chuck the lot into a food processor and blend briefly). Move the dough to a floured board and knead briefly with the
heel of your hand. Roll into a ball, wrap in clingfilm or a cloth and leave to rest in the fridge for an hour before rolling out and using to line a well-buttered 22 cm (9in) flan tin.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas 5.

Warm the butter and the honey. Gently mix all the filling ingredients together in a bowl, pour into the flan case and bake for 40 minutes. Leave to cool, sprinkle with icing sugar and serve.

Ahetze –
brocanteurs
at lunch

It was time to get going. I picked a date, 2 November. I called the moving firm; they were a bit startled to be asked to move
somebody back. People didn’t come back from France, as a rule. The human traffic was definitely one-way. I could have my pick of collection dates, and chose one just a couple of days before I
planned to leave.

I began to pack Chloe’s room first; the summer clothes, the old school books, the even older cuddly toys, the bag of baby shoes. After that, my own souvenirs: the Ossie Clark mini-dress
from the sixties, the sequinned bustier from the seventies, the striped blazer from the eighties that I’m wearing in Glynn’s portrait. Did I need these things? No. Did I want them? Yes.
I had examined my past lives and chosen my memories. Some unswept corner of my character had been aired and accepted.

The boxes which had contained my books were still in the
abri
, the lean-to with a tiled roof which was originally designed to store firewood – those I hadn’t given to Fiona
to take back to New Zealand or to Sandy-and-Annie to help them with their move. Thus there were ninety-eight coming out, and there were going to be seventy-nine going back. Fortunately the last
vide grenier
of the season was looming, and it was going to be right on my doorstep, in the
salle multiactivités
in Orriule, sponsored by the Club International de
Saliès-de-Béarn.

With so many British people involved, this event
inevitably took on the feel of an English village fete, an institution that endures even in the London suburbs, like
Chiswick, which are famous for their ‘village atmosphere’ and take care to replicate a few events of a rural community calendar. Annabel, who had accepted responsibility for the
catering, had dutifully researched the lower links of the antiques food chain and visited several
vides greniers
over the summer. Nothing, however, could persuade her that it was necessary
to offer alcohol and bacon sandwiches. She had issued an appeal for home-made cakes, and I, still enjoying a barrage of walnuts, dutifully cooked Margaret’s wonderful walnut sponge and took
it over in the glass croissant-keeper which I’d bought at a sale earlier in the season.

It was a roasting hot day, especially out on the
fronton
, where there was no shade. Inside the hall I found Annabel installed at the serving counter behind a tea urn, already drawing
startled glances from the handful of villagers who had ventured into the hall to witness their new amenity being colonized by foreigners for a Sunday. There is no tradition of
noblesse
oblige
in France. The lady of the
manoir
is not required to go slumming for the good of the community. Aristocrats are expected to stay in their chateaux – or, more often, in
Paris – and get on with their lives of unearned luxury, not descend from their great height of privilege to rub shoulders with ordinary people and perform ritual acts of humility, like an
archbishop washing the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday.

Gracienne, the prime mover in the event, was perhaps as much of a foreigner as any of us. She tripped about with her metropolitan poise, collecting the exhibitors’ fees of €6 per
metre of stall frontage, and then retiring to preside over her own stall, where she was selling off the least desirable stock from her antique shop.

Roger arrived in his Mini Moke, loyally accompanied by Reine, who helped him set out an enticing array of items he has scavenged from the town dump over the years. Having a
surprisingly fine eye for bric-a-brac, he saw his stall picked bare by the dealers in an hour. However, right opposite his pitch was a young man from a strange religious community in the valley,
who did his bit to support himself there by buying up army-surplus goods and selling them in the markets. He also sold old electrical fitments. Roger’s eye was irresistibly drawn to the flak
jackets, the camouflage nets and the spools of brightly coloured electrical wire. It seemed likely he would go home with more stuff than he’d brought.

Reine seemed to have relaxed about me. I noticed her circling my stall with a discreet expression of amazement in her eyes while I was selling half a rack of size-sixteen clothes to a well-built
young woman from Orthez; perhaps that was what finally reassured her that I had no designs on her
petit ami
.

Apart from the Club’s members, the event was not well attended. The Mayor looked in, stood about awkwardly for ten minutes, then made her excuses and fluttered back to her own house. The
jolly farmer with the fish pond planted himself in front of the tea urn and was resolutely gallant about the non-availability of aperitifs. Most of the rest of Orriule stayed away. All the same, I
managed to sell all my surplus English books and magazines, and all my out-of-style clothes.

The dealer next to me, a woman about my own age who was selling antique textiles from some old trunks, struck a bargain with me to watch her stall while she went outside to chat. She had not
bothered to unpack most of her goods. At the bottom of one of the trunks, under a pile of old lace curtains and ragged tablecloths, was a huge and perfect
wolf-skin rug, the
sort of accessory which might be seen in a picture in
Elle Decoration
for a price tag of about £600. I sold it to Annie for the price the dealer had marked on it –
€60.

The Future of Henri Cat

Would a Béarnais wild cat enjoy chasing sewer rats around Hammersmith? I didn’t think so. Not for all the Whiskas in Tesco. Besides, the pet-passport regulations
required any animal being imported into Britain to have been micro chipped and vaccinated six months before passing through customs. Six months ago, Henri Cat was so wild he wouldn’t come
within two metres of a human.

Now, however, he was a sleek, well-covered, affectionate young cat. The nights were getting nippy, and he was getting used to curling up on the sofa after I’d gone to bed, and strolling
into the kitchen in time to have his breakfast biscuits on the window sill. Piglet, having been thoroughly bribed by me with duck scraps and extra cuddles, had decided to tolerate him. The Duchess,
on Planet Pedigree as usual, was barely aware that he’d become part of the household.

Henri Cat was on my conscience. True, he still vanished for two or three days at a time, but he never went far. I could usually find him lying comfortably on a patch of dead oak leaves by the
washing line, surrounded now by a sprinkling of wild cyclamen flowers and purple autumn crocuses. Gerald was issuing daily sermons about the unfairness of getting an animal used to love, food and
comfort and then letting it down. There was such an emotional edge to his lectures that I began to wonder what had occurred in his
own life to make him empathize so
passionately with a seduced and abandoned house pet.

However, when he was a kitten, Gerald had tried to catch Henri Cat, who scratched him and, in his frail state of health at the time, caused a nasty wound. So Annabel had set her face against
Henri, and wouldn’t consider adopting him. Instead, they had a new kitten of their own, an adorable young Birman who was doing a fine job of being a surrogate grandchild.

I confessed my guilt to Andrew, who immediately offered to adopt Henri. He was now a born-again cat lover, having been converted by the two ginger kittens he acquired shortly after moving into
Maysounabe. They were called Patsy and Edina, and they made short work of their owners’ intentions that they should sleep in the kitchen and be seen and not heard. However, the Béarn
wasn’t going to be enough for Andrew and Geoff for twelve months of the year. They planned all sorts of migrations – to Spain, to Florida, to anywhere there isn’t snow in the
winter. Earlier in the year, when they took off to Bordeaux for the weekend, Sandy-and-Annie were left in charge of the livestock; Edina immediately left home and set herself up in the woods above
the house. I doubted not that if Henri went to Maysounabe, he would join her there almost immediately. Better he should stay on his own turf.

One morning, Henri let me off the hook. He was snoozing on the car bonnet at usual, and as usual I went to talk to him before I shooed him off and started the engine. He was tame enough to pick
up by now, but as I took him into my arms I caught a strong whiff of scent. It was not my scent. It was Guerlain’s Shalimar, a great classic fragrance which I can’t wear. Henri Cat had
found himself another admirer. I felt I could leave him in Orriule with a clean conscience.

La Vie en Mince

Zoe had announced her engagement to Matthieu. La Maysou was in a state of exalted rapture and high anxiety. The date! The invitations! The ceremony! The reception! The cousins!
The caterers! The dress! The photographs! Oh my God, the photographs!

Annabel decided that, as the mother of the bride to be, whose image would be immortalized in the photographs for generations to come, it was time for her to lose weight. I had come to the same
conclusion on my own behalf, since spending six weeks in a wheelchair testing recipes had done nothing for my figure. Furthermore, it is a sad truth of a writer’s life that a new novel will
put anything between ten and twenty pounds on the writer’s frame, unless he or she is a chain-smoker. And even then, the combination of anxiety and inactivity can obliterate a waistline in
fifty thousand words.
Wild Weekend
was up to that size already. I’d gained weight in proportion, and I had been quite big enough before I even left England. In London, I had been
steadily shedding the stubborn deposits left by unhappiness, HRT, literature and the love of cooking with the help of Weight Watchers.

I started with Weight Watchers after Chloe was born, and dropped thirty-six pounds in six months. I also learned more about self-motivation than I learned in the whole of the rest of my life;
back then, the basic diet, which is totally flexible unless you want to flex it in the direction of a cream-cheese Danish every morning, was supported by a motivational programme devised by a
genius. Nowadays, the psycho-dynamic element disappeared, and a dreary emphasis on selling diet products replaced it. It’s a shame. I still use some of the tricks to get me through writing a
book, since
a curious, butterfly-brain such as mine isn’t naturally inclined to sit still and concentrate for months on end.

Surely this excellent organization would have a branch in France? A quick search on the Internet confirmed the fact. We could choose between a class in Saliès, a class in Orthez and
several classes in Pau. Amandine, I had discovered, went to the meeting in Orthez, and we didn’t want to embarrass her by pitching up at the same weighing machine. Saliès, we guessed,
would be a bitchy little gathering and not our style. So, although it meant a forty-minute drive through the autumns mists once a week, we decided to go to Pau. The most highly recommended
wedding-dress couturier in the department had her salon in Pau, so Annabel hoped to kill several birds with one stone.

The meeting took place in the Kyriad Hotel, an exquisitely vulgar edifice of pink concrete which, in proper Béarnais style, was almost empty of staff despite the fact that several hundred
women would be ready for a
cappucino-lite
by the time the day was over. We wandered about the corridors and eventually found the low-ceilinged room in the basement where the familiar
set-up had been installed. With a few French embellishments.