2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees Read online

  Immense relief greeted me, then, after that final turn on the narrow lane. Instead of regret, there was comfort. I loved what I saw. It may not have been the loveliest of days, and the view of the mountains may have been concealed by a blanket of grey clouds, but the house looked warm, welcoming, inviting and reassuring as it nestled neatly on the hillside. This felt right.

  I stood on the front porch and rang the bell, perhaps for the last time if the next few days went well. Maybe on the next occasion I was here, I’d have a big bundle of keys and a list of chores as long as the garden.

  The door opened and there stood a stocky, burly man. I was struck by an immediate thought. Rugby player. The house was in the heart of French rugby country, and there was no doubting that the man before me had indulged. His cauliflower ears bore testimony to a youth misspent grovelling around in mauls and scrums.

  “Bonjour, je suis Jean-Claude” he said. “You are Tony, yes?”

  I nodded and Jean-Claude shook my hand. It was a big, second-row-of-the-scrum-type shake. We sat down for drinks and I looked around the house. Although it wasn’t decorated to my taste, it looked cosy and I could easily picture just how nice I could make it. Soon I was chatting to Jean-Claude’s wife Annie and his thirteen-year-old son Jerome, as well as being offered some rather delicious cakes that Annie had baked herself. This worried me a little. Could it be that the notaire had already been the beneficiary of this culinary talent?

  After refreshments, Jean-Claude treated me to a technical tour of the house. Soon I was being lectured on radiators, boilers, ovens, fridges and fuseboxes. Everything was being explained at great length, but only a few centimetres were being taken in.

  “Il est simple, Monsieur Tony ,” said Jean-Claude as he leaned over a drain in the garden.

  He was on his haunches, endeavouring to explain something which, despite his ‘il est simple, Tony’, patently wasn’t simple. A house’s drainage system is a complex business even when related to you in your native tongue, but now my rusty A-level French was being severely tested by Jean-Claude’s rapid-fire delivery of technical plumbing information, spiced up with a strange twang that I took to be a regional accent. I nodded profusely at the conclusion of each utterly incomprehensible sentence, thinking that not to do so would have been an act of rudeness.

  Jean-Claude came across as a proud man, but an affable one who liked to laugh, particularly at his own jokes. I took each of his guffaws as a cue to smile politely, assuming them to be emitted at the conclusion of what he believed to be an extremely humorous remark. The explanation of the exact location of the septic tank was terminated with a comment of such hilarity that this also required copious giggling from both his wife and son—although this seemed to be more dutiful than spontaneous, an ersatz chuckle which appeared to be something they could produce on demand. After the detailed house tour, Jean-Claude announced that we should leave right away for Bagneres or we would be late for our appointment at the notaire’s office. Another tingle of nerves. This purchase was getting ever closer to the point of no return.

  §

  The notaire, or rather our notaire, wasn’t at all what I was expecting. He didn’t seem a legal type at all. I felt he had more the demeanour of a maverick doctor—the type that gets struck off for seducing patients. Tie-less and in rolled-up shirtsleeves, he had a cheeky grin and a mischievous glint in his eye. In his bland office in a Bagneres backstreet, he ushered me to sit down. He kicked off proceedings with a menu of the bureaucratic courses that were to follow. Jean-Claude and his wife Annie were beside me, whilst Monsieur L’Agent was seated on the periphery of proceedings, ready to offer timely translations of big words. Appropriately enough, the whole thing had the air of the registry office about it—after all, I was on the verge of making a huge commitment.

  For what was supposed to be a formal meeting in a lawyer’s office there was an awful lot of jollity. Jean-Claude and the notaire laughed at each other’s jokes and Monsieur L’Agent tittered obsequiously. I did my best to join in by smiling at everyone, but since I didn’t really know what was going on and couldn’t respond with a comment, this probably just made me look like a vacuous buffoon. Or a politician.

  Irritatingly the notaire found something about me deeply amusing, and every time he looked my way it was accompanied by a smirk or a snigger, followed by a comment that prompted laughter from all present. I felt like the new boy at school—totally ignorant of how things worked, unaware of who held what status, and nervous about what to do when laughed at. I was hugely relieved when the notaire finally got down to formal business and began reading from a document.

  It began with the personal details of the vendor. Jean-Claude was announced as being a married ‘fonctionnaire ‘—a state worker or civil servant. This prompted approving nods all round.

  I was next.

  “Monsieur Tony Orchs ,” announced the notaire. “Ecrivain”. (Writer.) All present turned and looked at me, raised their eyebrows and then looked at each other. Then the notaire said something, and everyone began chuckling. I smiled, but with the faintest hint of resentment. What could the joke have been? Had it been derogatory? Had it even been that funny? One thing was for sure, I would have to brush up on my French as a matter of urgency so that in future I could respond appropriately when this kind of banter kicked in.

  “Monsieur Orchs”, continued the notaire. “Demeurant à Londres, Angleterre—cèlibataire”.

  Upon delivery of this last word, he looked up, threw his head back and made a comment that drew the biggest laugh so far. Even Monsieur L’Agent, who’d been doing his best to be professional, laughed this time. I was getting a bit fed up now. Instead of smiling, I chose to adopt a gentle scowl. I didn’t much like the way this meeting was being conducted. Cèlibataire I knew meant’bachelor’. What was there to laugh about? Had the notaire made some comment questioning why I might still be a bachelor at my age? Had there been some homophobic questioning of my sexuality? What else, I wondered, could have caused such merriment?

  I guess I was also irritated by the very word itself. Cèlibataire. What a terrible word for bachelor. To think the Conservatoire in Paris is desperate to preserve the purity of the French language and to defend it against the increasing pressure of Anglicisation. What’s the point of preserving a language that calls a bachelor like me a cèlibataire? It has all the wrong implications. Instead of coming across as a carefree, fun-loving man about town who has a new girl on his arm every month, it has the ring of a loser who can’t get his leg over however hard he tries. “Monsieur Orchs—cèlibate” How dare they! It was true that I’d split up with my girlfriend some months previously and I hadn’t exactly been a Don Juan since then, but I’d got off with lots of girls in my life and I was still extremely capable of getting off with a lot more. I was tempted to stand up and argue this point, warning them to lock up their daughters when the sale was completed and I moved into town.

  Fortunately a part of me reminded myself that this probably wasn’t the best way to kick things off as an outsider trying to establish himself in a quiet little community.

  My smouldering indignation was suddenly punctured by the voice of the notaire who had launched into a long passage of French ‘legalese’.

  “Le vendeur en s’obligeant aux conditions génélares qui suivent…” This continued for some time, and I had to stop myself daydreaming. I had to keep reminding myself that this was important stuff that was legally binding and involved a lot of money. It was hard, though, because the notaire kept droning on about lead and asbestos inspections, service charges, local taxes and insurance. It really wasn’t any fun at all.

  Soon, though, when the notaire read out the price Jean-Claude was getting for the property, I became very interested, although the fun level dipped to an all-time low. It seemed that Jean-Claude was receiving considerably less than I was paying for the property. How could this be? I questioned it, and Monsieur L’Agent, who up until this point had been motionless, shuffled
awkwardly in his seat. After much discussion, the agent explained that the discrepancy was created by his commission on the sale. It was 10 per cent. An awful lot of money, given that I’d walked into his office and bought the first property he’d shown me.

  “What’s this?” I protested to the agent. “You can’t charge this much, surely? That’s 10 per cent—in Britain the agent takes no more than 2 or 3 per cent, and anyway the vendor pays that—not the purchaser,”

  “But you signed the papers agreeing to this,” he replied.

  “Did I?”

  “Yes. Look.”

  He produced the document I’d signed when I first went into his office. Oh dear. Immediately I knew that my fbrmophobia hadn’t done me any favours. If I’d read the form properly I would have seen that I was agreeing to pay a fat 10 per cent commission to a fat agent who did sweet FA. (He wasn’t fat actually, but he bloody well ought to have been.)

  I felt a knot of anger materialise in my stomach.

  “I’ve been well and truly stitched up here,” I said, dispensing with the polite and simple English with which I’d addressed him thus far.

  “Not so,” he said.

  “Yes so,” I said indignantly. “I am not happy about this level of commission. I’m not sure that I’m prepared to sign the papers now.”

  Monsieur L’Agent looked suddenly concerned and he leant forward towards me to exclude the others.

  “Do not worry about this,” he said, conspiratorially. “This fee is negotiable. We will discuss it later. Also, you should know that under French law, the purchaser is entitled to a seven-day cooling-off period after signing the contract.”

  I felt hugely relieved. If, in few days’ time, I still felt that I’d been utterly shafted, I could back out and not lose my deposit.

  So, when the notaire eased the large piece of paper towards me with both his and Jean-Claude’s signatures on it…I signed.

  I felt a bit sick, but I signed. The commission was negotiable after all. It was time to get tough.

  I’m not very good at getting tough. It’s so much less preferable to ‘mucking about’. It was at times like these that I had to concede that I was an adult living in the ‘big world’. To some extent I’d been cosseted from these kinds of situations, swanning around as I had done in a world of entertainment, happy in the knowledge that if things got a little bit tricky, then my agent would sort it. The irony of this situation was that this particular agent was well and truly sorting it. Sorting it so that a good chunk of my money ended up in his pocket.

  After saying goodbye to Jean-Claude and the notaire, I stood in the rain outside the office with my newfound foe.

  “OK, let’s negotiate,” I said, trying to sound like a hard man from a Hollywood blockbuster. “Maybe 5 per cent is a fairer figure for me to pay. And anyway—you didn’t explain that the form I signed would give you 10 per cent and my French isn’t that good.”

  Monsieur L’Agent got shifty.

  “I have to call my boss.”

  He made the call on his mobile and I waited patiently for the outcome. After a few minutes of hushed exchanges, he folded up his phone and turned to me, rather sheepishly. The rain was falling hard around us on the dark backstreet, making me feel like a shady character in a film involved in some illicit underworld transaction.

  “My boss says that the fee is not negotiable,” he said, displaying something not far from a hangdog expression.

  “What rubbish,” I said. “Of course it’s negotiable. Call him straight back and give me the phone.”

  “He does not speak English.”

  “Never mind,” I said crossly. “I can speak enough French to make my point.”

  This statement turned out to be untrue. Arguing in French, I was soon to realise, requires a more comprehensive vocabulary than the one on which I could draw. As soon as I had taken the phone and stumbled to my first point, Monsieur le Boss, who was evidently a quick-tempered man, raised his voice and launched into a tirade that suggested he wasn’t embracing my rationale.

  It was such a shame that I’d signed a document agreeing to the very thing that I was now contesting. That didn’t really strengthen my position. My only argument was that the document had not been properly explained to me and that I had almost been bullied into signing it. However, when it came to it, all the French words that would have helped convey this completely eluded me. I attempted to make my case, but my sentence stuttered and stumbled before it eventually ground to a halt.

  “Il faut expliquer que…er…um, er…er…er…er…il ya un probleme…er…je…er…er…er…est-ce que…”

  My adversary would hardly have felt that he was up against a heavyweight debater. Oh how I longed for the vocabulary that the situation demanded: “Look here, matey, if this commission isn’t negotiable, which seems to be the main thrust of your recent ill-mannered and unprofessional diatribe, then how come your employee assured me in the notaire’s office that it was? Eh? Answer me that!”

  But it was no good. The required words wouldn’t come. Some were secreting themselves in the dark recesses of my memory bank, and some had simply never been there in the first place. The only half-baked sentences I did manage were shouted down by the manic ramblings of my foe. Realising that the argument was lost, I resorted to English, because, though I say so myself, I’m rather good at that.

  “You are a greedy little man,” I said, puffing out my chest and handing the phone back to Monsieur L’Agent.

  Not big. Not particularly clever. But it made me feel a bit better.

  I’d calmed down considerably by the time I made it back to the village, but I was still cross. I felt cheated, and I was no longer sure that I was prepared to go through with the transaction. Also, the dispute at the notaires meant that I was now running twenty minutes late for lunch at Malcolm and Anne’s. Surely they wouldn’t mind? They’d probably been living in the south of France long enough to have developed a healthy regard for those who shun meticulous punctuality.

  Jean-Claude had suggested I meet them. He’d announced rather excitedly over coffee that there was an English couple in the village who were ‘tres gentils’ and who often came round to his place to watch big rugby matches on his TV. I had telephoned them to say hello and they’d immediately invited me round for lunch.

  As I made the scenic ten-minute walk from Jean-Claude’s to Malcolm and Anne’s house, I decided that the village wasn’t really a village at all. Kevin and I had driven round it after the first visit to the house and we’d discovered that it was more of a hamlet—a group of houses dotted around on the two sides of a pretty valley. There was no main street with shop, bar or post office. Rather ludicrously, however, for something of its size, it did have a small church and a mairie, or town hall. This meant that it was given the administrative status of ‘une village’, complete with the trappings of a mayor and a deputy mayor, plus planning and social committees. All for a population of 130.

  Having walked up the gentle incline past several of my potential neighbours-to-be, I reached a small fork in the road. I was immediately greeted by a boisterous gaggle of chickens geese and ducks. It was almost as if they were questioning my very presence. “What are you doing here? We’re not sure if we approve of your sort—I mean, you’re not from round here, are you, mate?” Foul fowl.

  I left the noisy birds behind and turned left down the narrow lane that led down one side of the valley. Soon it would rise steeply again, leading the walker to the other ‘half of the village, but I didn’t need to go that far. My destination was on my right, marked with a sign saying ‘Gites de France’. For a moment I amused myself with the idea that Malcolm and Anne were advertising themselves as ‘French gits’, but I knew that it far more likely meant that they had converted a part of their house into self-contained accommodation that could be rented out in keeping with the regulations of the French Tourist Board. That must have been a fun process to go through, I thought, as I walked up the steep gravel path.
r />   Soon I could see a couple in their mid- to late forties standing on the terrace in front of a house that bore a strong resemblance to the one I’d spent the morning endeavouring to buy. As I drew closer, the couple (who were now smiling and waving) became more clearly defined. They were both light-framed, and they sported deep suntans, shorts and stress-free expressions.

  “Welcome to the village,” said Malcolm.

  “Thanks,” I said, resisting an initial urge to point out that it wasn’t really a village.

  “Come and eat,” said Anne, directing me to a table on the terrace.

  I sat down and basked in the spring sun, looking out across a view that included a different mountain to the one visible from my place, owing to the more westerly aspect of the house. As we tucked into charcuterie accompanied by tomato salad, it soon became clear that I was with two very kind people who shared my sense of humour and relaxed outlook. I felt confident that we would become friends.

  Malcolm and Anne had done what many British people dreamt of doing—they’d left the rat race behind. Malcolm had been an accountant and Anne a teacher, and whilst neither had been unhappy in their work, they’d felt sure that they somehow wanted more. That ‘more’ had turned out to be a Pyrenean home and a relaxed lifestyle, financed by organising walking tours and renting out the apartment they’d created on the second floor of their tranquil home.

  “Another glass?” enquired Malcolm, bottle of red wine poised in his left hand.

  “Oh, why not?” I said, demonstrating a will of aluminium.

  “So, how is the purchase going?” asked Anne.

  I explained about the morning’s fracas with the estate agents.

  “You’ve got a two-week cooling-off period,”Malcolm reminded me.

  “Yes, that’s an excellent idea, that is,” I said. “I need to reflect a little back in England. I’m still not certain that this is the right thing to do.”