2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees Read online

  I lay the metal jigsaw pieces out on the floor and tried to ignore the fact that the number under the egg timer was 45.1 had never attempted anything of this magnitude before and it felt better not to focus on the size of the task in hand. Yes, I knew this was going to be harder, but if I went slowly and methodically there was no reason why this couldn’t be as magnificent a success as the two terrific mirrors I had heroically liberated from their packaging, enabling them to stand majestic and free in the bedrooms.

  Things began well enough, but as I progressed I found that I wasn’t going slowly and methodically, just slowly. One key drawback on the ‘methodical’ side had been that I’d failed to notice something quite fundamental in the instructions. It was only much later that Brad pointed out that there were two men in dungarees sketched on the top of these instructions, and that trying to do the job alone, not to mention without dungarees, lacked wisdom.

  After an hour and fifteen minutes of ‘slowly’, the clothes rail was in a precarious state of’two-thirds finishedness’. The final third was the crucial bit. The bit that needed the other ‘dungareed’ man. I ploughed on alone, trying to balance metal poles whilst attempting to screw in bolts at the same time. Inevitably everything collapsed at the last possible moment, just when I thought I was about to be successful. After the fifth failed attempt at one particularly tricky part of the assembly, I allowed myself to slump onto the wooden floor (I didn’t have far to go as I was already in a prostrate position with feet, arse and hands all performing pivotal roles in a highly intricate manoeuvre). I began to beat the floorboards with my fists, letting out a gentle wail as I did so.

  “You all right in there?” called Brad from the next bedroom, no doubt well onto his second clothes rail in the time that I’d managed to construct something that resembled debris from a motorcycle accident.

  “I’m fine,” I called back, as cheerily as I could. “Nearly finished. How are you getting on?”

  “Done one. Halfway through number two.”

  I beat the floor once more.

  “You sure you’re all right?” came a concerned voice.

  “Fine. Just fine.”

  §

  “Shall we go out tonight?” asked Brad, as we tucked into the delicious home-cooked ratatouille.

  I’d volunteered to cook, largely as a means of getting out of finishing my apology for a clothes rail. Quite how Brad had managed to succeed in erecting all three rails without a dungareed assistant I didn’t know, and I wasn’t about to ask.

  “What do you mean, go out?” I replied. “The bars round here aren’t exactly barrel loads of fun.”

  I’d noted, with some chagrin, that the French aren’t drawn to bars in the same way that the British are attracted to a pub.

  “I was wondering if there are any discos around here,” said Brad. “Maybe we should check out the local talent.”

  Hmm. Local talent. How best to put Brad in the picture?

  “It’s not heavily populated in these parts,” I explained. “And a lot of the young people go off to the big cities to study—and they don’t necessarily come back. And the ones that do, tend to get married.”

  “Yeah, but it’s Friday night. There must be some local talent,” insisted Brad.

  No doubt there were talented musicians, even farmers who showed a great aptitude for handling tractors, but not necessarily talent of the sort to which Brad was alluding. I’d spent a little more time here than Brad and I knew that it being ‘Friday night’ wasn’t necessarily enough.

  “What about that disco we saw on the way to Conforama?” persisted Brad.

  “We could give it a go, I suppose,” I said with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm, hoping that he might spot this and go off the idea.

  “Great!” he said eagerly. “I’ve always liked French girls. They’re really sexy.”

  “And you really think you might find one tonight?”

  “Of course. Anything is possible. Only a fool thinks otherwise.”

  “Yes. Yes, you’re right.”

  For all Brad’s noble positive thinking, I couldn’t help but believe that he had a night of disappointment ahead of him.

  8

  Pool Hell

  It would be quite cool, we thought, to wander nonchalantly into the disco when the party was in full flow and head straight onto the dance floor. We believed we’d got our timing just about right as we arrived at precisely 11.30pm.

  “Try and look as young as you can,” I said to Brad as we approached the drab converted warehouse that now housed the club. “We’ll probably be the oldest ones here, barring the owner.”

  Brad’s eagerness to ‘get down and boogie’ meant he reached the nightspots big red door several paces ahead of me.

  “That’s odd,” he said. “There’s a note here saying something.”

  A beat later I caught up with my friend, and I read the sign that had halted his progress.

  “That’s weird,” I said. “It says it doesn’t open until midnight.”

  “Midnight?” queried Brad.

  “That’s what’s written here.”

  To us this seemed most odd. We weren’t in Paris now. We were in a distinctly rural part of France where the entertainment options appeared to be minimal. Where the hell were all the disco’s potential clientele right now? They weren’t in the local bar because we’d driven past it on the way here and noted that it was almost empty.

  “What shall we do?” I asked, hoping for a two-word answer—‘go home’.

  “Find another bar,” said a determined Brad. “We could have a drink there and then come back.”

  And so we decided to look for another bar in Tarbes, the home of Conforama, which was a twenty-minute drive away.

  “Perhaps we’ll bump into Emmanuelle,” said Brad optimistically.

  “Yes, she’d like that,” I replied in sardonic tone.

  It was probably her idea of a splendid Friday night—meeting two ageing foreigners whose only faltering conversation would be based around the earlier purchase of some free-standing mirrors and clothes rails. Yes, you could see how, quite quickly, it could get her’all steamed up’.

  Quite what Brad, as someone who spoke no French, was hoping for from tonight I wasn’t entirely sure. To score, he would have to rely on looks and animal attraction. Or perhaps enormous amounts of alcohol could ease the path to communication. Either way, I reckoned that the odds were heavily against either of us having any company back at the house that night. Brad, however, remained upbeat.

  “I love French women,” he kept saying, almost as if this desire alone would be enough to provide him with one.

  A brief drive around Tarbes town centre didn’t reveal any inviting hostelries and so we settled for the least gloomy bar from three of the dingiest in south-west France. Alas, drinking in bars just isn’t a part of French popular culture, and Brad and I were paying the price for this right now. That was why we got in the mood for partying the night away by downing a couple of beers in the company of a very small number of young people who looked like they’d been tagged by the police, or who would have to report to probation officers first thing in the morning.

  We were back at the disco at 12.45am, with considerably diminished expectations. The momentum had gone out of the evening. We had to face it, we were hardly on a roll, and were at an age where we couldn’t kick-start the enthusiasm as easily as we’d done twenty years before.

  “You still up for this?” I said to Brad, as I pulled in to park.

  “Yup. You?”

  “Yeah. I guess so.”

  I needed to find some enthusiasm from somewhere. Things are more fun if you ‘go for it’. I knew that. Yes, it was unlikely that the two of us would find the women of our dreams on this particular night out—but hadn’t I always been told that it would happen when I least expected it? Perhaps this was the night for that prophecy to be fulfilled.

  “Right, let’s go for it!” I said with as much gusto as I could muster
.

  We pushed open the big red door and walked into the club.

  “Oh dear,” said Brad, looking around him.

  Instead of being greeted by a throng of young revellers, we were faced by the closest thing to one man and his dog that a nightclub can produce. There were only three other customers—a hippy-looking guy and two girlfriends, who peered up at us as if we’d taken a wrong turning somewhere and believed this to be the Holiday Inn, Toulouse. We sat down on an ugly velvet banquette, trying not to slump. I glanced across at the two girls, just in case something could still happen when I least expected. Neither girl took my fancy, and judging by the way my look was returned, the feeling was emphatically mutual.

  “Well, Brad, what do you think?” I said, hoping that he’d be ready to throw in the towel.

  “Let’s have a drink and see if the place fills up,” he replied doggedly.

  “OK, I’ll get a round in.”

  A drink each and twenty euros later we looked out across the empty dance floor as it paraded itself before us like a cheap temptress. Lights flashed all around it, and the euro-pop blasting from the speakers ensured that at least two-fifths of the clientele weren’t remotely tempted to make use of it.

  “The barmaid said that the club doesn’t really start to get busy until about 3am,” I part-bellowed above the echoey boom, boom, boom of the sound system’s bass.

  Brad looked at his watch: 1.15am.

  “You know what,” Brad called back. “I reckon that this is the wrong thing for us to be doing out here. If you want nightlife, it’s available in London.”

  “Precisely. We can see the Pyrenees from my house. It should be a spiritual haven, a veritable antidote to nightspots like this—a place for meditation, reflection, early nights and bright new dawns.”

  “I’ll drink to that!” said Brad, holding his almost empty whisky and coke aloft.

  We downed our drinks, got up and left, safe in the knowledge that in future, as we slept soundly in our beds, we wouldn’t be missing out on anything.

  God we were getting old.

  §

  “So are you any closer to knowing what you want to do about this swimming pool?” asked Brad, as I hung up the phone.

  We’d already spent the morning driving around the half dozen swimming pool centres that dotted the surrounding area. It had been a much more difficult business than I’d expected, mainly because I hadn’t realised how little I knew about swimming pools. They’re more than just holes in the ground with water in them. Oh yes. They come in all different shapes and sizes; they can be made in fibreglass, steel, plastic, polystyrene blocks or concrete; they require pumps, skimmers, filtration systems and floating surface cleaners; some of them need liners, others special paint; and then there’s the question of how you get in and out of them—do you build steps or have an old-fashioned swimming ladder? And don’t forget that you also have to decide what kind of cover you are going to put over it in the winter. All these questions and more were fired at me by each retailer we visited. I would have struggled in English, but in French I was left feeling utterly flummoxed.

  “It’s so tough to make a decision,” I said. “That was Malcolm on the phone just now, and he was suggesting that I go and talk to Paul and Berry for advice.”

  “Who are Paul and Berry?”

  “They’re another English couple, who live the other side of the village.”

  “There are more English here? I thought it was just you and Malcolm and Anne.”

  “I’m afraid not. Apparently they were away for the weekend of the village lunch so I didn’t get to meet them then. Malcolm says they’ve got a pool and that they should be able to offer some advice I can actually understand.”

  “God, more English people!” said Brad, still amazed by the news.

  “Yes, I know. I’ve got mixed feelings about it.”

  This spot in the Pyrenees was supposed to have been my discovery, my little part of rustic France. I’d come to terms with the fact that Malcolm and Anne had beaten me to it, but another couple as well? I wasn’t Pioneer Tony after all.

  As I walked round to Paul and Berry’s house, uplifted as ever by the scenic backdrop, I started to reflect on why rural France had become such a draw for the British. I passed the village hall, tacked onto the side of la mairie like a bureaucratic afterthought, and I wondered if this building summed it all up. This gave the place a sense of community, and it had been here that newcomers were made welcome by the warmth and neighbourliness of the locals. This seemed to be something that has slipped from our limp British grasps in the last quarter of a century. My generation, to its shame, has somehow overseen this loss, and the result is that the Brits are looking overseas to find a replacement for it.

  A tall, fit man in his late fifties greeted me at the door.

  “You must be Tony,” he said. “Good to meet you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m sorry to drop in on you at such short notice. It’s just that I’m getting so confused about pools.”

  “I’m not surprised, pools are bloody confusing. Come and meet Berry.”

  Paul’s wife was lying by the pool, looking in the kind of shape that proved life in the French Pyrenees is good for you.

  “Hey, nice pool,” I said, after completion of the formal introductions.

  I wasn’t just being polite. This had to be one of the most relaxing of locations. The sun was beating down on us as we sipped fresh orange juice by the azure-blue water of the pool, with the Pic du Midi observing our hedonism from a safe distance. Having a swimming pool was making more sense than it ever had before. This was really cool.

  “We’ll give you the benefit of what we know,” said Berry. “But we’re no experts.”

  Paul and Berry didn’t need to be experts. They just needed to know more than I did, and they certainly fulfilled that brief. However, after a long discussion about the various methods and materials available for construction, I still found myself as confused as ever. But the worst news was hearing that whichever company I went with, none of them would be able to start work on installing the pool until the following August, such was the demand.

  “But that means I’ll miss next summer,” I said, almost in the tone of voice of a sulking child.

  “Yes, it’s awful, isn’t it?” said Berry. “There are just too many people having pools built.”

  “Do you reckon I could get some local builders to help me?” I asked.

  “Fat chance,” scoffed Paul. “They’re all snowed under with work too. There just aren’t enough builders in this region to meet the need.”

  “Oh,” I said, realising that my pool project was looking rather dead in the non-existent water.

  “I guess you’ll just have to be patient,” said Berry.

  “Or build it yourself,” said Paul, completely unaware of my recent travails with a clothes rail.

  “Er yes. I’m not sure if that would be playing to my strengths though.”

  From the kitchen an English voice interrupted us. It sounded familiar. I looked up and, dog-like, cocked my head.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “That’s Steve.”

  “Steve?”

  “It’s BBC radio. It’s Steve Wright in the afternoon.”

  “Wow—you can get that here?”

  “The miracle of the internet,” said Paul.

  “I love my English radio and TV,” said Berry. “It keeps me in touch with things. I couldn’t live without Casualty on a Saturday night. I’m hooked.”

  Berry, it seemed, had developed a different approach to living in France. She openly admitted that she missed being close to her family and that the constant effort required with the language was fatiguing. The sound of an English DJ, or time spent with a British soap opera, were things that she’d struggle to do without. For her, technology meant that the country of her roots wasn’t so far away and she was happy to live in a kind of cultural hybrid.

  “Well, thanks for you
r time,” I said as I stood up to go.

  “I’m sure we weren’t much help,” said Paul.

  “You were. If nothing else, you’ve confirmed for me that I have to get a pool.”

  “Bring your trunks next time and have a swim,” said Berry.

  “I will, thanks.”

  The way it was looking, I’d be doing exacdy that for years to come.

  §

  The following day Brad continued with DIY chores around the house and I set off bright and early to purchase an ever-growing list of tools from the quincaillerie. I didn’t know it yet but this hardware store was going to become one of my favourite shops in Bagneres. It didn’t look much from the road, but once inside I was amazed to discover that the shop stretched out into little anterooms, each of which harboured a different specialist area of bolts, nuts or electrical paraphernalia. The man who ran the place was in his late sixties, and he had an assistant who was younger than him, but only just. I watched them serve the two customers before me and I was quickly convinced that the two of them knew everything about their stock, right the way down to the last nut and bolt.

  It occurred to me that these are the kinds of shops that have all but disappeared in England with the onset of the big chains and their knockdown prices. Somehow in France these family-run stores are still able to survive alongside the capitalist giants. For how long, I wonder? I guess they’ll only be there for as long as there’s a generation who feel like they belong in the shop—and who don’t have aspirations for big profits. These retailers tick over—that’s all. They’re never going to have a big money-spinning year that will enable them to sell up and go and live on a yacht in Monte Carlo. Not that the two men in the shop would have necessarily fitted in particularly well to that environment anyway. That world was of no interest. I bet that all they’d ever wanted to do was work in this quincaillerie and do it well, whilst raising a family along the way. This was their lot, and from the expression on their faces, it seemed to be a happy one.

  As I headed home, pleased with my new purchases, I was in relaxed mood. I drove slowly. It’s something I’ve always done. Passengers often look at me like there’s something wrong with me, or make an irritated remark.