Deep France (16 page)

Golden-glazed confit pot

The snow melted. There were four different species of violets blooming in the garden: very tiny dark purple ones, bigger purple
ones, blue-and-white speckled ones and pink ones. They were so abundant that it was impossible to walk across the grass without treading on them. ‘You don’t have lawn here,’ said
an English woman with a wistful voice and a little house in the next village. ‘It’s more like meadow, really.’

The weather was milder, but still stormy. I began digging the vegetable garden. The original patch had been almost overgrown with grass, and nothing but some strawberry plants had survived.
Being under the mimosa tree, whose gloomy overhang was taking over the ground about the rate of two metres a year, it was doomed anyway.

I’d asked for a book on growing vegetables for Christmas, and Chloe had given me Monty Don’s
Fork to Fork
. In his previous incarnation, Monty Don had a wonderful jewellery
shop in Knightsbridge, on Beauchamp Place. I still had at least two pairs of his ear-rings, including some fabulous diamante chandeliers, which I did not anticipate wearing that year.

His book is full of inspiring pictures of a vegetable garden as a jewellery designer would plan it, intricate, precise, neat square beds of velvet-black earth, hoed to total submission between
little willow fences. The garden of Maison Bergez is more a piece of wilderness. Almost a mountain
wilderness, since it slopes steeply. There are plenty of hazel bushes, with
long straight branches, from which I could have made little fences easily, as long as I had no plans to do anything else with my life for a few weeks. But the ground is uneven and no portion of it
is anything like flat. It divides into the tamer area close to the house, where the grass is finer and there are a few flowering shrubs, and the wild area beyond a geriatric lavender hedge, which
gets the full sun.

I spent a wet morning drawing an ambitious plan for a semicircular plot in the sunniest position, divided into four triangles like a demi-Camembert, with a new lavender bush at the inner corners
and wigwams of hazel twigs for beans and sweet peas on the uphill sections.

Sweet peas are my favourite flower. On my eighteenth birthday, the first time a man ever gave me flowers, it was a posy of multicoloured sweet peas. There’s something utterly romantic
about the intense scent and the brilliant colour carried by blooms as fragile as butterfly wings. Back in London I could only manage to squeeze a few sweet peas into a pot on the patio. Now I
wanted to grow them in towers of flowers, the way I remembered from the gardens of my childhood.

The downhill sections were to be devoted to tomatoes, courgettes, herbs and artichokes. I had been fantasizing about growing artichokes for years, imagining the huge grey-green fountains of
foliage topped with great purple globes. In Ossages, in the terraced vegetable garden behind her house, Marie grew enough artichokes to feed an army. I once complimented her on them, and explained
that in London an artichoke could cost as much as fifteen francs. She looked at me with a mixture of pity and horror, and the next time we went for dinner she treated us to a huge platter of
artichoke hearts, fried in butter and piled three deep.

In December and January I had gone out with gloves, hoe
and secateurs to exterminate the brambles which had invaded the beds around the house. Adding these to the dead
leaves, the fallen branches, and all the sad detritus of neglect, I had made a bonfire over half the projected vegetable patch. The potters, out walking their three yappy white dogs, came in to
inspect the works and offer advice. No way could I have a bonfire without permission from the
mairie
, they said. Rubbish, said Annabel. But the mayor was said to be very correct. So I
compromised, and let the fire burn slowly on a still day. The ash was added to the heaped leaves on my very first compost heap, down on the far side of the garden. A compost heap! What joy.

The fire had done what I hoped it would do, and burned off the grass and weeds over a large area. With the beds marked out with string, I left this easy bit until last, and began digging into
virgin turf. It was such hard work that I could only manage about an hour a day, which was handy since I was so impatient to start planting that I would never have got any writing done if I’d
been able to dig all day.

A routine established itself. I wrote from 9.30 a.m. to 1.30 p.m., by which time it was 12.30 in London, the hour at which publishers go out to lunch and newspaper editors need their copy for
the next day’s edition. I lunched
à l’anglaise
, on bread and cheese, then went out to dig until 3 p.m., by which time the shops in Sauveterre would be open and I could
make the trip in for my newspapers and the post. I would then be back at my desk at 4 p.m., which was 3 p.m. in London. Talking to my editor was becoming increasingly important.

A red squirrel appeared in the walnut tree as soon as the icy weather gave way to milder days. Soon he was waking me up at dawn every morning by dancing all over the roof. He was extremely shy,
and never came out if he thought that the cats or I were in the garden, unlike Squirrel Nutter, the
grey squirrel who stops by my London yard, who runs down the tree trunks
yammering insults at Piglet and the Duchess.

Fat Rabbit, however, was not shy in the least. He deluded himself that if he froze, and allowed only his jaws and whiskers to move, I wouldn’t be able to see him. He spent long periods
posed like a rabbit-shaped tea-cosy, thinking that he was invisible. This worked perfectly on Piglet, who stalked importantly around the garden looking for game and never noticed that there was an
overfed rodent right in front of him. Fat Rabbit had a favourite patch over by the new compost heap, and sat there, as still as a cardboard cutout, watching me at work. Since his eyes were on the
sides of his head, he could turn a full profile and still keep me in view.

A Proposition

By now, dropping into la Maysou to pass on my
Times
had become almost a daily habit and Gerald had laid in a bottle of gin especially to tempt me over at aperitif
time. Annabel cleared her throat nervously and announced that the Club International Salisien would like me to give a talk about writing to their members. On the face of it, this should have been
easy. I have a standard lecture on storytelling and popular fiction which adapts to almost any occasion, even as an after-dinner entertainment for a convention of dentists.

Translating this, however, would take me about a week and I was not at all certain that my French was up to expounding my theories of narrative structure. Annabel proposed that we consult a
professional translator who finds the club useful for keeping up her English.

We met in Annabel’s family room on a Sunday afternoon.
The translator wore the local insignia of a professional woman of a certain age, the silk scarf of the
Hermès-Gucci school. I often wondered what iconography a British design guru would ascribe to this item. The scarf is always worn with an outfit which might be called ‘classic’,
and is perhaps worn in the hope of persuading people that the rest of the wearer’s wardrobe came from the same posh shop.

In British fashion history, the scarf was de rigeur for the
Country Life
girls-in-pearls beauty, who wore it like a man’s cravat, tucked into the neck of a hacking jacket, or tied
over her hair, ideal for showing off a fine-boned jaw and keeping the ears warm. In rural France, however, there is no such thing as country-living chic and the silk scarf is supposed to evoke
international A-list glamour. It is folded precisely, tied loosely in the clavicle region, and sometimes pinned down with a brooch. Women confident that they have swan-like necks also fold the
scarf into a ribbon shape and knot it tightly at the throat, in the manner of Zizi Jeanmarie and other gamine beauties of the 1950s. The less confident show it off knotted around the handles of a
handbag, for which, of course, you need the kind of self-standing handbag favoured by the Queen and Mrs Thatcher. The translator had decided to make her own style statement and knot her scarf
around the high polo neck of her sweater, which must have been sweltering, even at the chilly end of the room.

After only a few weeks, the silk scarf thing had got to me. Back into the drawer went the pashmina and the Georgina von Etzdorf chiffon artwork, which were making my French associates nervous. I
found myself digging out my own Hermès-Gucci lookalike, a heavy silk square printed with intertwined harness and snaffles and gold, which, apart from a few bank manager meetings, had seldom
seen the light of day since leaving the airport shop where I had bought it a decade earlier. I was turning native.

I had turned my speaking notes, a few scribbles on a postcard, into a coherent text, and printed it out. In the section where I usually talked about fairy tales, mythology
and the collective subconscious, I added the strangely similar stories of the discovery of the hot springs in the region, all legends of the universal wisdom-of-nature genre.

In Saliès, Gaston Fébus discovered the salt spring when out hunting. The viscount wounded a boar, and the animal instinctively ran to the hot spring to bathe its wounds in the
curative waters. Being a magical animal, the boar could speak, and its dying words to the hunters were, ‘If I had not died here, none of you would live here,’ or, in Béarnais,
‘
Si you nou y eri mourt arres no y bibere
.’ Frankly, this is one of those resonant bits of folklore that doesn’t make sense. Not to me, anyway. If the waters are so
curative, why didn’t the boar get better? And the hunters were living there anyway, weren’t they? All the same, that’s the legend, and the boar’s words are carved on the
fountain on the main square, so there can be no argument about them.

Other local legends are more coherent. There’s a mountain spa which was reputedly found by an old war horse whose owner couldn’t bear to kill it, and abandoned it in a remote valley.
One slurp of the magical spring and the venerable charger came cantering down the valley to meet his master, as sprightly as a young stallion. In Dax, the story goes that a Roman centurion who had
been called to the front threw his arthritic old dog into the river to drown it, rather than abandon it to suffer while he was away fighting. The waters worked their magic, and the centurion found
his dog jumping up to greet him when he returned from the battle.

The club’s secretary, who was Dutch, had already translated the biography on the back of my last book. I sounded so much more impressive in French. My style of writing
(
une brillante satirique sociale
) and the highlights of my career to date (
elle a écrit 7 nouvelles dont la dernière, ‘Épreuve
d’Amour’, est une comédie romantique. La production de Tom Cruise l’a retenue pour un film avec le star Nicole Kidman
) lost the weary familiarity which an author gets
after writing the guff on book jackets for fifteen years, and took on a fresh, new glamour.

Describing the actual subject of the lecture, however, had been a problem. ‘Storytelling’ is one thing, ‘
comment raconter des histoires
’ isn’t the same
thing. ‘
Narration
’ didn’t quite do it, either. The words for ‘plot’ and ‘narrative’ didn’t have the same meaning, either. In fact, there
seemed to be no way in French to express the idea of constructing a narrative as part of literary technique. No wonder the French New Wave authors were so mad for the deconstructed novel.

Imagery turned out to translate more accurately, so it was much easier to talk about the process metaphorically: ‘
C’est une sorte de danse, de chorégraphie, ou, par le jeu
de l’imaginaire, l’auteur et le lecteur, en harmonie, se plaisent a créer, ou plutôt recréer, des images dont ils son porteurs
.’ This sounded like the
splendid stuff I heard French intellectuals discussing on the radio. Indeed, the translator herself was an adept user of ‘
effectivement
’.

Translating only two paragraphs took over three hours, so we decided that the best way to manage ‘
la conférence
’ was for me to speak in English and for Annie-Claire,
on her sit-up-and-beg typewriter, to provide a digest of the lecture in French. I would then input this on my computer and print out lots of copies to distribute to the audience.

Having reached decisions with which everyone was happy, Annabel made a fresh pot of tea, we discussed the eternal question of why this golden triangle of three magnificient mediaeval towns,
Saliès, Sauveterre and Orthez, had remained such a well-kept secret for so long, to the
detriment of the built heritage, much of which needed urgent restoration.

There are so many stories of similar failures, and so many tourist enterprises which fizzle out, that I suspect the Béarnais have never been convinced that they needed the help of
outsiders to make their economy work. They’re extremely jolly with travellers at a person-to-person level, but they’ve never liked the idea of hundreds of visitors traipsing through
their valleys. Perhaps the sleepy air of the South-West makes it all seem like too much trouble. Or maybe they simply share the live-and-let-live philosophy of their Basque neighbours. The story of
the decline of Sauveterre is a sad example.