2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees (26 page)

“Going down the local for a pint,” Malcolm had replied. “I miss the pub, especially in the winter. The French just don’t go out in that way. They get together ‘with the family or at big festivals or events—but they don’t go in for the casual drink and a chat in a bar of an evening.”

“But you’re happy here?”

“Oh blissfully, but we’ve had to work hard.”

And by that I guess he meant that they’d done everything they could to immerse themselves in the local culture. Malcolm and Anne, as English settlers, were probably better villagers than most of the people who were born here. They both sat on the village social committee, and Malcolm was treasurer. They’d mastered the language (Anne with a stunning English accent) and they considered most in the village to be their close friends. They’d done well because they had become part of a culture that wasn’t ‘theirs’. Not an easy trick to pull off.

“Can you and Brad do fifteen minutes at the start of the second half?” asked Anne, shortly after turning down a cup of tea because time wouldn’t permit it.

“Sure,” I replied, as Brad looked on with some anxiety.

“See you later then,” said Malcolm. “We have to go and get your meal ready now.”

In return for displaying their talents, the musicians were to get a meal and as much as they could drink for the evening. I liked this concept of the musos playing for food and booze. Somehow it seemed ‘spiritually correct’. In this system everyone gets paid the same—unless you are particularly good, in which case you might get an extra burger.

§

Brad and I felt a little like teenagers as Ron dropped us off at the village hall. All he needed to say as we got out of the car with our guitars was: “Now, don’t drink too much and don’t be late,” and the image would have been complete.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come, Uncle Ron?” asked Brad.

“Yeh, I’m all right,” he replied, a little uncomfortably.

“Well, if you feel like it, pop back later,” I said. “Just drop by and stand at the back. No one will mind.”

“Yeh, could do, I suppose. Have a good night. See ya.”

And Ron drove off.

“Will he come?” asked Brad.

“Not a chance,” I replied. “Ron loves music, but he’s not a social animal and tonight won’t be his thing because there’ll be people there.”

“We hope.”

Suddenly Brad let out an agonised yelp. “God! What’s that?”

“What?”

“That smell! Oh God, is that you?”

Have you ever had to suffer that horrible moment when you realise that you’ve broken wind seconds before without it really registering? Have you ever had to cope with the fact that, for some strange anatomical reason, the emerging gases turn out to be rather more potent than is socially acceptable? Well, I was having one of those moments right now.

“Er yes, I’m afraid it is me,” I said, wafting my hand before me in a futile attempt to remedy the situation. “I’m sorry.”

“Uggh. That’s awful.”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

No point in denying the bloody obvious. Little to be gained from countering with: “Oh I don’t think it’s that bad—only a seven out often for unpleasantness.”

“You know what that is, don’t you?” said Brad.

“No.”

“That’s a Courgette Fart.”

Of course, Brad had hit the nail on the head. That’s exactly what it was. My body simply couldn’t cope any longer with the sheer weight of courgettes that it was being asked to process, and the unwelcome result had been this recent arrival—the Courgette Fart. The stomach may be an intricate and sophisticated mechanism but it clearly has its limitations, and my recent diet had ably managed to expose them.

“Are you nervous about our gig?” asked Brad, providing another possible reason for why I’d joined the world ranks of air polluters.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Only a little apprehensive, that’s all.”

“Well, whatever, let’s get inside,” said Brad, leading us both away from the contaminated area. “And try not to break any more wind in there. You may find you lose friends rather quickly.”

Inside the village hall we found that it had been magically transformed into a kind of jazz club. The walls had been softened with drapes and the lights had been dimmed, candles on every table providing a supplementary and yet mellow source of illumination. The ‘stage area’, where the assortment of microphones and musical instruments signalled a promise of things to come, was halfway along the far wall, on ground level. The huge raised stage had been shunned. The village social committee had quite correctly decided that placing the musicians on this elevated platform would have separated them too much from their audience. It also meant that they wouldn’t be performing in front of the vast mural of the Caribbean beach scene that would have required them to play reggae or calypso all night.

“The organisers have excelled themselves,” I said to Brad, who nodded in agreement.

“All we need now is an audience,” he said.

“And some food. I’m starving.”

A small area had been set aside in the corner of the hall for the purposes of the musicians’ pre-concert dining. We looked over to see that the Irish boys were tucking into the nosh with gusto, along with a few others I didn’t recognise.

“Come on. Let’s go eat,” I said.

“Righto,” said Brad. “But can I suggest you steer clear of the courgettes?”

“Fair point.”

We were immediately greeted by the delightful Christine—the young lady who had taught me how to play the card game belote at the village dinner all those months before. As she ushered us to the table she told us that her tasks for the evening involved wait-ressing for the meal that we were about to eat, and then filming the concert on her dad’s video camera. The young people in this village had to be versatile.

I found myself on the end of a long table seated next to a man called Michel, who seemed delighted to be beside someone on whom he could practise his slightly rusty English. With a cheeky smile he offered a series of short soundbites that initially did little to establish a relationship of great depth: ‘How is the Queen?’ or ‘Ah yes—you is Tony—like Tony Blair.’ His curly bouncy haircut resembled the one favoured by Kevin Keegan in the 1970
s
, just one of several things about him which led me to believe that he wasn’t a local farmer. His clothes were stylish and well presented, and his hands bore no traces of the hard skin and deeply ingrained dirt that usually defined those of the manual worker. The long thumbnail on his right hand also revealed to the astute observer that he was almost certainly a guitarist who played with a picking style. The only other alternative I could think of was that he’d been in the process of cutting his nails earlier in the day when he’d been interrupted by a visiting gypsy woman who’d advised him against completing the job or else a curse would fall upon his family.

“Do you play guitar?” I enquired.

“Yes I do,” he replied, holding up his thumb, in a gesture that cleared up any lingering doubts on the gypsy theory.

Michel poured me a red wine and lapsed into French, finally enabling a meaningful exchange to develop between us. He began to tell me how he had moved to the village from Nantes, an area in France where he’d built a following as a songwriter and raconteur. He returned there regularly for tours and recording sessions, but village life in the Pyrenees provided him with the home where he could nurture his creativity. I began to wonder if this made him a little like a kind of French version of me. One notable difference was that he’d chosen to live here with his wife rather than his builder.

By the end of the meal, which had been pleasingly free of courgettes, the first smatterings of audience were starting to make their way into the village hall. The sight of them brought home the reality of an imminent performance for which we weren’t properly prepared. I felt a ripple of nerves sweep through my body, and a slight rumbling in the tummy. This was followed by an unpleasant moment in which I realised what the obvious bodily corollary of this was going to be. Something that was unlikely to endear me to my new friend Michel. I had to move, and quickly, so I jumped to my feet and announced that I was going to the toilet, quite possibly at a volume that normally would have merited a statement of greater profundity.

I began to make my way across to the toilets, happy in the knowledge that an embarrassing incident had been averted. Then I heard a female voice behind me.

“
Bonjour, Tonny!
”

I spun round to see two diminutive septuagenarian ladies looking up at me. It was Odette and Marie, two of the lovely older women I’d first met on village dinner night. By the twinkle in their eyes I could see that they wanted to chat.

Was it true that I was going to perform tonight with my friend?

What were we going to sing?

Would I be singing a song in French?

And then quite suddenly all the questions stopped and their faces displayed a mixture of pain and shock. I knew what had happened. The worst.

I am not proud of what I did next. Not knowing the French for ‘He who smelt it dealt it’, I made an excuse about having to go and tune a guitar, and moved off with a fleetness of foot that bordered on downright evil. I just left them. I left them wondering who was to blame for the disagreeable odours that were currently engulfing them. Not being ladies in the fresh flush of youth, they both probably had their fair share of medical conditions and would therefore reasonably assume that the other was responsible. They wouldn’t for a moment suspect the young, dashing Englishman who was soon to serenade them.

I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. Once you’ve chosen your required act of cowardice, never weaken.

Malcolm and Michel kicked off the evening’s presentation with an amusing little skit in which Michel spoke deliberately wooden English that was then translated into deliberately wooden French by Malcolm. They were playing to a packed house of about 150 people, drawn from not just our village, but from many of the surrounding ones too. I could see many familiar faces—Andre, Serges, Alain, Odette, Roger, Marie, Rene the Mayor, Leon the Deputy Mayor, my neighbour Pierre, a host of characters whose names I’d not yet properly committed to memory—and Fabrice and Marie-Laure, my new pals who had driven up here specially.

“I’m starting to get nervous now,” I said to Brad.

“In that case, I’m just going over here,” he said, moving to a safe distance.

I shrugged and continued to watch Malcolm and Michel on stage. Somehow they seemed to represent the ‘new’ rural France. An Englishman and an outsider from Nantes, performing before the descendants of people who had belonged in these mountains for generations. This was the positive spin on the ‘new’ rural France. The communities were integrating—they were learning from, and enjoying, each other. This was a fine balance that could easily be upset. Fortunately we all knew it.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Michel, “please welcome from Dublin—Nigel, Paul and Miles.”

The three men must have made quite an impression with their performance the previous year because they walked on stage to a huge reception. Paul and Miles smiled almost self-consciously, whilst Nigel looked more at ease. He picked up a cool-looking jazzy guitar and took his place behind the microphone.

“
Bonsoir—nous aliens commencer
,” he said with a delightfully Irish accent, “
avec une belle chanson qui s’appelle—“C’est Si Bon
”.”

The audience cheered. The French are often berated for being difficult to win over if you don’t speak their language, but the fact is that they don’t demand a great deal from you linguistically in order to be on your side. A poorly constructed sentence can often be enough to prompt an extremely friendly response. However, speak no French at all and nine times out of ten they’ll derive satisfaction from making things difficult for you.

Paul smoothly slipped a bass guitar over his shoulder and Miles lowered himself onto the stool behind the electric piano. Then all three did what jazz musicians do better than anyone else—they indulged in a few seconds of’warming up’. Totally independently of each other they flirted with their instruments, their hands darting over keys or strings in harmonious disorder. They seemed more at ease than they’d looked since I’d met them. Even though they hadn’t started playing for real yet, their accomplished dexterity was already apparent and it was enabling them to exude a confidence previously not evident. Their fingers were talking.

“I think they’re going to be good,” said Brad, who had carelessly allowed himself to drift back close enough to me to be in dangerous air space.

“Yes, I think you may be right.”

And he was.

Miles’s tasteful keyboard playing blended with Paul’s thoughtful bass, whilst Nigel led them from the front with a slick, bluesy guitar sound. Then, at the end of his first solo, Nigel sang. He had a wonderfully smooth jazzy voice that was both laid-back and melodic, precise yet uninhibited. It was cool. No question. In fact, the whole band embodied the very thing for which the 1960
s
had invented the word. We could have been in Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho but for the sight of Andre sitting three tables back in his beret and torn jacket, along with others dotted about the room who looked like they’d just stepped off tractors.

The first verse of ‘
C’est Si Bon
was a triumph and the audience showed it by clapping before the song was even halfway through. However, they were going to like it even more very soon, because Nigel had a trump card up his sleeve. Just after the boys had completed the musical turnaround at the end of the first verse, Nigel began to do something quite extraordinary. He sang the second verse in French. What a coup (if I may appropriately borrow a French word). The spectators could scarcely contain themselves. Not only had these boys come all the way from Ireland to play top quality jazz music in a free concert, but now they were singing in French! The audience exploded with sundry noises of approbation.

“Tony, do you know any songs in French?” said an anxious-looking Brad, during the semi-ovation that followed completion of the song.