Deep France (2 page)

It’s not a traditional Béarnais house, either. The Béarnais style is a tall, narrow stone-walled building with a steep brown-tiled roof whose hipped ridges run down to
drooping eaves. It’s the house you know from fairy-story illustrations, as owned by Cinderella’s father. Maison Bergez isn’t typical. Its roof shape is low-pitched, like the
Landais or the Basque houses, and it boasts the plastered walls and the double-fronted layout of a nineteenth-century town house. Only the dark green shutters are of the region.

Inside, half the wall in one of the front rooms is taken up with a magnificent stone fireplace, with a massive iron basket and a chain to suspend your cauldron from. A full-on peasant-style
cheminée
, no pretensions here. Upstairs is some of the original furniture,
lits-bateaux
in oak and mahogany, huge armoires, one with a key labelled, in tiny writing,
chambre de maman
. This
maman
chooses the smallest bedroom, for the ease of heating.

It’s the beginning of November and deadly cold. The house’s guardians have left a vase of red canna lilies, a welcome card and a bottle of wine. We carry in our bags, shut the doors
and open the cat boxes. We make the beds and Chloe sleeps, but I can’t. I am as wide-eyed as the night after childbirth. A new life starts here.

In the morning, we give the cats the run of the house.
Obese metropolitan that he is, it takes Piglet about five seconds to realize that there are mice in the kitchen, and to
jam himself under the hot-water tank in pursuit of them. We hear squeaking and scuffling, then the bulk of our youngest reappears, cobwebby and elated. Just like us.

We go outside to stand on the steps and look at the mountains. The house faces south, with the two catalpa trees in front of it. The fields slope down to the valley from the far side of the
road, and the Pyrenees fill all the horizon, a 180 degree kaleidoscope. Foothills, blue and purple ranges, snow-capped peaks. As the clouds race up from the Atlantic, the air changes constantly,
and the view with it. One minute you can see the grey crags of the middle ranges as clear as a photograph, the next there are only the peaks, sparkling in the sun.

‘Are you in my dream or am I in yours?’ asks Chloe.

We could watch forever but there is work to do. The owner of Maison Bergez has left in situ a vast quantity of knick-knacks which would shame a car-boot sale: dozens of postcards with curly
corners, metres of dog-eared romance novels, malevolently bad paintings, ugly lamps, a sinister doll in a blue velvet dress with a rabbit-fur hat who flops like Coppelia on a bedside table.

From the beams hang macramé plant-pot holders dripping with sad spider plants. The sofa is in the dining room, the table and chairs in front of the hearth. It takes two days to move the
basics into position.

There is some urgency, not only because a writer has to keep cheerful and my mood tends to crash in ugly surround­ings, but because our first house guests are expected for Christmas.
‘You are still going, aren’t you?’ asked Glynn, the painter. ‘Of course I’m still going,’ I replied. ‘Oh, good. Because I’ve got an exhibition of
paintings of France and the gallery got
tremendously
excited when I promised them
some of Biarritz. Only thing is, I’ve got to be back in London by January the
sixth.’

We shop, briefly, to fill the fridge, and I cook some of our favourite things, pumpkin gratin and
poulet basquaise
, recipes from the region which we love and have put in the family
cookbook. I want to convince both of us that the basic things in life aren’t going to change. When I realized that I was to be a single mother, I vowed to make an extra effort to prepare good
meals and serve them with proper ceremony, realizing that our home was to be the centre of our social life and afraid that one day Chloe would be judged inferior if she wasn’t used to napkins
and home cooking. Besides, my mother was a cook by profession. She taught me to stir sauces as soon as I was old enough to hold a wooden spoon, and it seemed the right thing for me to do in my turn
with my daughter.

So there will be recipes in this book – how could there not be? The South-West is the breadbasket of France. Farming is the bedrock of the regional economy. The rolling hills are
perpetually changing colour with what they are producing, gold with corn, white with flocks of ducks or sheep, brown with kiwi fruit, russet with vines, red with apples, grey with melon vines,
black with the plastic that brings on the strawberries. Every week throughout the summer a different town puts out the flags and opens the bars for the festival of whichever harvest it claims
– the peppers, the beans, the ham, even the salt.

People eat what’s grown and raised around them, which seems to me the way things should be. Amazingly, even though I grew up in a desolate London suburb, only a few streets away from the
neighbourhood where Zadie Smith’s
White Teeth
was set, our family grew their own fruit and vegetables, and kept chickens. We had Hitler to thank. My parents had lived through World
War II and obeyed the government’s exhortation to ‘Dig for Victory’ and turned
their suburban plot into a market garden. Food was rationed in Britain for years
after the war was over, so they kept on gardening and never completely lost the habit.

With childhood memories of collecting eggs and picking raspberries, I have always felt uncomfortable living in a greedy, ignorant metropolis, and being tempted by invisible food chemists to live
off the labour of harvesters in another continent. I am that woman who causes a trolley jam in a London supermarket as she stands rooted to the spot by the fruit chillers, trying to calculate the
food-miles per grape in a bunch labelled ‘Country of Origin: Guatemala’. I was also that mother who grew tomatoes on the balcony and runner beans on the patio and took her daughter
fishing. If I have to be the last link in the food chain, I’d like to be at least partly conscious.

Besides, this is also one of the great gastronomic regions of France. Food is its past, its present and its future. And its politics. Its greatest king, Henri IV, started out as plain Henri of
Navarre and won the heart of his people by promising that in his reign every peasant would have a chicken in the pot every Sunday. Many dishes that ordinary people from here have cooked and eaten
for centuries were eventually reinvented in Paris and became the basis of classic French cuisine. Many others – for me, the better ones – remained the keynotes of French country
cooking. And if Alexandre Dumas, the supreme mythologist of all Gascony, could travel round Europe writing cook books, I think I’m allowed a few recipes.

After two days, Chloe went back to university. She had just begun her second year of a degree in literature and film studies, and she was anxious to do well. On our last evening we drove to
St-Palais, a little Basque market town about half an hour to the south, to have dinner at the cheap and cheerful Auberge du Foirail on the main square. It was packed
with beefy
young men having a piss-up after the kiwi harvest. For the coming year, for me, there will be no more heaving bars, no more slumping girls with pierced navels, no more slobbering lads going on
about the footy, no more irony, no more vodka-with-everything and no more getting mugged for your mobile on the way home.

Chloe hates flying, so next morning she took the TGV from Dax to Paris, then the Eurostar to Ashford in Kent, which is handily near her university in Canterbury. It was a slow and hair-raising
drive, because a thick white fog came down overnight. Maison Bergez is on a hill. Actually, half of the Béarn is made up of steep little hills, laced about with hedges and copses, the
hollows filled with woodland. It is the landscape of a medieval tapestry, full of flourishes and short perspectives, embroidered with oak trees and mythical beasts. When a fog gathers, however, you
can’t see a thing.

I waved goodbye to her on Dax station. She sent me a text. ‘Don’t be sad, Mum. It’ll soon be Christmas.’ I saved it, next to the clever message featuring a semaphoring
stick person made of letters, saying:

The fog was melting away and the sun rising over the invisible mountains as I drove back. The tops of the hills were clear in the sun, but where the mist still filled the valleys it looked as if
someone had poured milk into them. I’m on my own now, for the first time for twenty-one years.

The First Week

I’ve been here almost seven complete days. I’m so tired I can hardly type. Yesterday I almost fell asleep at the wheel of the car. My bum aches, my quadriceps are
screaming and at the end of the day a gin and tonic goes down really easily. I’m too tired to feel lonely, which is just as well, since I have met only several cheeky dogs, who run in and out
of the open gateway as if they own the place.

It is possible that Orriule is actually run by the dogs. They are all outrageous mongrels, from a tiny genetic absurdity with a shaggy coat, a curled tail and legs two inches long to things that
look almost, but not quite, like pointers. They meet every morning on the corner of the lane opposite Maison Bergez, have a lively discussion about their affairs then disperse in self-important
groups to patrol different parts of the village.

The few humans I pass on the roads around the village stare at me with open curiosity, but nobody says hello, although they must know who I am. There are very few British here. The Béarn
is a wild frontier for ex-pats; previously, I’ve met two kinds of foreigners in this region: those who have settled here for the love of it, and the rest – which includes the broke, the
crazy and the people who got in their car in Sheffield and drove blindly south until they ran out of money. I called a couple whose names I had been given, and
got the husband
on the phone. ‘Come over any time, we’re pissed as newts here,’ he slurred. Was I going to turn into a sodden ex-pat? It seems to be a real danger.

Will I miss friendly old London? Or will I only miss the filthy streets, the dismal shopping mall and my mad neighbours? Every metropolis has a high quota of roaming maniacs. On our street we
have our share of crazies, including a character, who calls the blossom from his neighbour’s apple tree ‘filth’.

I have set up the computer, bought a French modem cable and connected up the technology. The day is starting to get a rhythm. Writing needs a rhythm. There are days when rhythm doesn’t
happen and everything slides into a pleasant sequence of pottering, which you rationalize by explaining to yourself that it is more creative to dawdle back from Rymans via the junk shop on the
corner, or that you really
really
need to tidy up that box of handy old nails and screws
right now
.

The days which slide are pleasant but they weigh heavy on my conscience. Worse, much worse, are the days when the rhythm gets choppy then breaks into something agonizingly and disgustingly
chaotic, which is like that moment when you know you’re going to throw up, but extended for an entire morning. This is not a good feeling. My theory — get a rhythm and keep it. The day
starts with the sound of the dogs barking and my neighbour’s tractor roaring past. When the school bus, actually a luxury coach, comes by I know I should be through with the coffee and
heading for my desk.