2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees Read online

  Another annoying consequence of this tradition was the way in which my builder took to it. Whilst it would be stretching it to describe Ron as a Francophile, culturally he was at one with the concept of having a lie-down after lunch. For me, he embraced it with far too much relish. His working day seemed to take on an extraordinary shape. The combination of breakfast, mid-morning tea and biscuits, lunch, sleep and mid-afternoon tea didn’t seem to leave much time for other things. Like tiling the floor of the garage, for instance.

  Work advanced slowly. It seemed that my hope that the mountains would inspire Ron was unfulfilled. Ron would regularly fail to surface following his sieste.

  “I think I’ll just do a half day today,” he’d call from his reclining position within the woodshed.

  I would then produce a frustrated sigh. Knowing that Ron would only ever charge me for the hours that he’d actually worked, I had little grounds for complaint. I just wished I could think of a way to motivate him.

  Just after we’d first arrived I’d come close to getting him to agree to exercise a little each morning. I’d purchased a cheap bike from the Geant superstore on which I intended to undertake a daily circuit of the village, notwithstanding the precipitous gradients.

  “Ron, why don’t you walk down to the sawmill and back whilst I do the cycling,” I’d suggested. “Very healthy.”

  The old sawmill was fifteen minutes’ walk away, nestled at the bottom of the valley in an idyllic location.

  “Yeh, I think I might,” he’d said, once again skilfully concealing his excitement.

  On the first morning of this new health regime I set off zealously at 7.30am on the dot. It was a beautiful day. The sun was just rising over the distant peaks, backlighting a narrow strip of wispy clouds. The grass glistened with a hint of dew and the cowbells echoed through the valley. Against this picture-postcard backdrop, a forty-something English bloke struggled up some extraordinarily steep hills on a bottom-of-the-range bike. Sweat poured from his brow as he panted and gasped like an octogenarian lover in the throes of potentially fatal lovemaking. Neither bike nor legs could cope with what was required, and willpower notwithstanding, the Englishman ended up dismounting the bike and opting for the pushing option, so rarely favoured in the Tour de France.

  I must have cut an unimpressive figure to the drivers of the occasional cars that sped past me as I wheeled my bike up these punishing hills. The problem was that the Tour du Village involved no normal cycling. It was either gruelling, thigh-busting heaves up hills better suited for mountaineering, or legs akimbo freewheeling down the other side of them. Nothing aerobic about this, but exhausting just the same. A bit of a lose⁄lose situation.

  At the top of one of the steeper of the five slopes which le tour included, I met a little old man coming the other way, stick in hand. As I drew closer I recognised him to be Andre, the delightful elderly gentleman who would have taken me back to his place after the village dinner had it not been for the fact that he hadn’t any milk in. I didn’t recognise him instantly because the top of his head, which previously had dazzled all comers with its ‘Persil whiter-than-whiteness’, was now covered with textbook French beret.

  “B’jour ,” said Andre.

  “Bonjour ,” I replied.

  “Toon v’sage er ruj ,” he seemed to say.

  “Pardon?”

  This was going to be a difficult exchange. Andre spoke no English and made little compensation for the fact that I was not someone who was well versed in the regional accent or the fusion of French and patois in which he liked to indulge.

  “Toon v’sage er ruj ,” he repeated.

  “Encore, s’il vous plait. Je n’ai pas compris.”

  “Toon v’sage er ruj. ”

  “Ah oui!” I said, feigning comprehension.

  This was standard practice for me. Once something had been said three times and I still failed to understand, then I would fake it. It was unsatisfactory for both parties but at least things moved along.

  Funnily enough, just after I’d pretended to understand, the real meaning of Andre’s short sentence popped into my head. ‘Toon v’sage er ruj’ meant ‘Ton visage est rouge’. My face was red. Of course, given the state of me, how could he not comment on that?

  Andre then pointed to my bike before remarking that it would be much easier if I used a Mobylette.

  “Je fais de la bicyclette pour être en forme” I explained.

  Andre’s immediate frown suggested that he was some way from embracing this as a valid concept. Cycling for him, it seemed, was not a good way of keeping fit.

  “Moi, j’ai six vaches”, he said.

  Andre seemed to be suggesting that having six cows was a better way of achieving a peak of fitness than the method I had chosen. He explained that although he was retired, a nice little EU subsidy made keeping the cows worthwhile. There was another reason for keeping them too, he claimed with a defiant smile—because what else would he have to fill his day? The comment acted as something of a reminder as to how our two worlds differed. Over the years I had become very accomplished at leading quite an active life without any recourse to cows. Ideally, I hoped to keep it that way.

  Then, for reasons that his accent rendered utterly incomprehensible, Andre led me the few paces back to his house and beckoned me into his yard. It was like another world, full of farmhouse equipment that appeared to date from the nineteenth century. He began to take me on a tour, pointing out different things whilst all the time shooing away an overenthusiastic dog that was gambolling about his ankles. The reason for the yard tour became apparent when he opened a barn door and showed me his Mobylette, as if it was an exhibition piece. In fact, judging by its age, it might well have been. I nodded approvingly at the contraption and made some trite comment about how ‘jolie’ it was. Mobylettes aren’t ‘pretty’, but Andre didn’t mind this. He just seemed to be happy to have someone to show it to. I imagined that a good period of time might have passed since he’d last coaxed any passer-by into a private viewing.

  “Bonne journee!” he called after me as I began to freewheel down the country lane ahead of me.

  “Merci!”

  “Bonne journee” is the French equivalent of ‘Have a nice day’ but without the smarmy connotations. I’d noted that in France people seemed to say it when they really meant it, unlike in America where it often seems to roll off people’s tongues as easily as my builder succumbed to the lure of a siesta in the woodshed.

  Andre bade me farewell and headed off to tend to the six cows that helped fill his days. As I glanced back over my shoulder and saw him become a silhouette against the skyline, I realised that he’d been right. The only satisfactory way to tackle the undulating terrain of the village was on a moped.

  I didn’t tell Ron this when I got back to the house, though. Instead I did my best to be unfalteringly positive.

  “That was fab!” I declared, as I scooted down the short drive to see Ron propped up against the banisters of the balcony, sipping a cup of tea.

  “How was your walk?” I asked.

  “It was all right, I s’pose,” he replied, with customary lack of gusto. “I only went halfway, then I came back.”

  The conversation ended there. I spent the rest of the morning completely knackered but trying to look full of beans, but when it was time for la sieste I was suddenly as keen on the idea as Ron.

  “Goodnight, Ron,” I said, as the clock struck one and I headed upstairs to bed.

  “Goodnight, Tone,” replied Ron, eyes glinting in anticipation of imminent woodshed repose.

  I never ‘cycled’ around the village again and, as far as I know, Ron never went on another walk.

  And all the time the work progressed, but very, very slowly.

  10

  Mad Wood

  Oh dear. Roger wasn’t displaying his usual grin. In fact, he looked a little hurt. He’d flagged me down in my new car after I’d returned from an early morning excursion to get fresh bread f
or Ron’s breakfast.

  “Tonny. Qu’est-ce que tu as fait? You tell me that you want to have an estate car?” he said, looking rather dolefully at my red Peugeot 106.

  “Well, I did,” I replied. “But you seemed to say that they were difficult to find—and I just saw this one and it seemed to be a good deal.”

  Roger threw a look at the car as if to suggest that it might fall apart quite soon.

  “It is difficult to find an estate car, yes,” he said, “but you did not give me very long.”

  “Sorry, Roger. I thought that you might be too busy.”

  Roger shrugged and offered a little smile.

  “Pas de probleme” he said, before waving me on my way.

  As I negotiated the two bends that would return me to my house I began to wonder if I’d been too hasty. Should I have given Roger more time? Perhaps I needed to work harder at losing my impatient city ways. Things happened slower around here, and I would have to get used to that if I didn’t want to upset people. With Roger, I reckoned that I’d got away with a frown and shrug, but with others I might not always be that lucky.

  “You do realise you’re going to have to make a decision on this pool, don’t you?” said Ron, one morning over breakfast.

  I was painfully aware of this fact. There were just too many ways to build a swimming pool, and too many reasons being offered by each manufacturer for why theirs was the best. Paul and Berry had done their best to help but I remained as confused as ever.

  “All right,” I replied. “We’ve got one more place that sells them to visit. We’ll go there this afternoon and then I’ll take an executive decision.”

  Ron looked sceptical.

  §

  It was a guy of about thirty who approached us and offered to help.

  “My name is Fabrice,” he said, demonstrating that he had a smattering of English words.

  I warmed to him immediately. He was slim, dark-haired, Gallic to a T, and with a cheeky grin not redolent of your average salesman. He invited us to sit down at his desk in one corner of the pool showroom and announced that he would talk slowly so that I could try and understand. This already put him ahead of his competitors. He took us through various options but he touched on one method of building a pool that seemed to have Ron very interested indeed. This was the method of using polystyrene blocks that you slotted together and then filled with concrete. Fabrice demonstrated how these blocks fitted together by pointing to pictures in a thick brochure. Pictures instead of technical French.

  What a joy. We learned that the blocks were extremely light, and what’s more they suffered less heat loss than your ordinary concrete block.

  “This sounds like your best bet,” said Ron, leaning over to me as Fabrice nipped off to fetch some more pool literature.

  “You think so?”

  Ron nodded.

  I couldn’t help suspecting that he had been drawn to this system because polystyrene blocks are considerably lighter than concrete ones. For a moment I looked at Ron and I imagined a Homer Simpson-style bubble appearing above his head containing an image of him standing and drooling over a pile of polystyrene blocks, just as Homer might over a bag of doughnuts, purring, “Mmm. Polystyrene. No heavy lifting.”

  Having agreed on how we should build the shell of the pool, the subject then turned to pumps and filtration. For this Fabrice called over a young lady to help, whom he introduced as Audrey. Ron’s eyes lit up and so, I have to admit, did mine. Audrey was a young woman you might have expected to see working in a fashion house or at a perfume counter in a department store. Not in a swimming pool shop. She was immaculately turned out, perhaps a tad too heavily made up, but generally she was quite a stirring sight for two men who had been living together in a remote village with an extremely sparse population of women with Box Office appeal. Audrey explained about various pumps and filter systems and seemed to display an exceptional grasp of her metier.

  “Blimey, I wouldn’t mind grasping her metier!” I nearly announced. If, seconds ago, Ron had been Homer Simpson, then I was now in danger of becoming Sid James in a Carry On film.

  Twenty minutes later I was writing out a cheque.

  “You just bought the pool off them ‘cos you fancied Audrey,” said Ron as we drove home. “I saw the way you were flirting with her.”

  “Not at all,” I protested. “It was because I liked Fabrice.”

  “Rubbish!”

  “Look, Audrey’s very nice but she’s too young for me and knows far too much about chemical pH balances and chlorination systems,” I continued, citing two examples of Audrey’s unsuitability, both of which I might have been prepared to overlook in the right circumstances.

  “Well, either way that’s it,” said Ron. “You’re committed now—you’ve got yourself a swimming pool.”

  If only that had been the case. All I’d purchased was a load of polystyrene blocks, lots of square metres of liner, a pump and a filter. It was hardly a swimming pool yet. Somehow it would all need to be put together. Nervous though I was, I attempted to exude confidence.

  “It’ll be a piece of piss,” I said.

  Not the best choice of words when referring to a swimming pool.

  §

  One of the disadvantages of having building work done is that you don’t get as much time as you’d like to practise the piano. The opportunities that arose between running errands and generally helping out were inevitably interrupted. Every time I sat down to play, Ron instinctively sensed that this would be an excellent moment to switch tasks and engage in thunderous banging or drilling. Then there was the further obstacle caused by unreasonable and unnecessary guilt. However much I tried to tell myself that I earn my living by being creative, and that piano practice could therefore justifiably be described as ‘work’, I felt guilty whenever I played during Ron’s working hours. It was pathetic, but it felt like I was thoughtlessly leaving ‘my man’ to toil subserviently in the garage below whilst I decadently dallied with the pianoforte like an aristocratic overlord.

  So if work was progressing slowly, piano practice was too.

  Things didn’t get any better when Kevin and Nic arrived. The moments of peace that the evenings had previously afforded were no longer dotted with sporadic and gentle piano tinkling, but were now filled with playful banter, games of Perudo,↓ and wine consumption.

  ≡ A Peruvian dice game for all the family, but mainly the immature ones.

  Kevin had come back to the house that he’d first seen on our abortive skiing weekend. This time he came with his girlfriend Nic. For a couple of years now he’d been seeing Nic, and they appeared to be getting on just fine. Nic adored the outdoors and, unlike many of the women I know, she preferred a tent to a hotel room, and a long walk to a comfy taxi ride. She loved sport, enjoyed staying healthy and had an admirable tolerance level for some of Kevin’s eccentricities.

  One of which was wood.

  In recent years Kevin had acquired an inexplicable attraction to this substance, filling his home with bits of driftwood that he had picked up on seafront walks during overseas holidays. When most of us fly home, we carry bottles of spirit or gifts in our hand luggage, but not Kevin. He walks down the aisle of the plane nearly taking people’s eyes out with oversized and interestingly shaped (in his opinion) lumps of wood. The stewardesses have to change the spiel that they deliver to passengers upon landing: “Do take care when removing articles from the overhead lockers as items may have moved about during the flight, and that big bit of wood which that bloke brought on board might fall on someone’s head.”

  Despite the first few days of their stay being uncomfortably hot, Kevin and Nic embarked on several mountain walks. On each occasion they returned with a car full of wood. On every journey back to the house, poor Nic had to endure large branches around her ankles and on her lap. She accused Kevin of being mad, but he would cleverly counter with:

  “No I’m not.”

  He was a formidable debater.

&n
bsp; Within a very short space of time these bits of wood started to appear around the house—on the mantelpiece, on windowsills or on top of the bookshelf. Kevin had taken it upon himself to become the interior designer of my new house.

  “They’re like natural bits of sculpture, don’t you think?” he said as we sat down to dinner only three nights into their stay.

  “I’d love to see it, Kev,” I replied, “but to me they’re just rather bulky bits of wood. Can we call it a day soon? The house is getting too full of the stuff. We’re almost certainly contravening fire regulations.”

  “OK,” he replied. “All future pieces will be for outside.”

  Nic rolled her eyes.

  By the following weekend Kevin had created a kind of mini-gallery of wooden exhibits in front of the house on the grass verge by the roadside. He had set his pieces in mud, all in a line for passers-by to admire and enjoy. Art for the people. A chance to elevate the spirits of the farmers as they trundled by on their tractors. Undoubtedly viewers of these exhibits would be filled with a sense of wonder (“I wonder why he’s done that?”), and this innovative ‘wooden art’ would challenge and provoke (“What’s the idiot gone and cluttered up the verge like that for?”).

  “What do you think of it? Honestly?” Kevin asked one morning as we set off for a day’s outing.

  “I think it’s terrific that you’re in touch with your creative side,” I replied. “It’s just a shame that this has to happen when you’re at my place.”

  The locals thought I was odd enough as it was. My love of cork, my predilection for making phone calls under bushes and my childish games had seen to that. I could have done without the ‘mad wood’ thing too.

  “But the best part is,” continued Kevin, “delivery men will have no problem finding your house now. Just say it’s the house with the wood.”

  In one sense, Kevin’s ‘exhibition’ had been my fault. I had complained that the house didn’t have a number. My address was simply my surname and the name of the village. Apparently this sufficed for ‘le Postman Patrice’. However, arranging deliveries from builders’ merchants had been something of a nightmare as I’d had to go through a long and detailed description of where the house was, often having to draw a little map. Why not just have a number? It was one of those French paradoxes. They love bureaucracy but they don’t want to give you a number. And of course if they had deigned to supply me with one, it would have needed to be sufficiently ‘official’, and I’d have ended up living at number G10976835RYV423.