Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog (22 page)

  
'Et bonjour tout le monde.'
Gaspar wore army trousers, boots, a sweat-stained T-shirt and a red baseball cap. He made his way along the line of dogs, holding out his hand to each of them.

  'Have you been a good boy?'

  'I see you've had a haircut.'

  He reserved a compliment for each of his canine clients. Finally reaching us, he parted the hair that covered Snuffle's eyes and fixed him with a penetrating stare. 'Ah, my new student.
Allez, on va commencer
.'

  The dogs trailed in a line through the gate. Rocky was a little slow to react and his owner took the end of the rope and whacked it vigorously across his nose, shouting a loud, aggressive
'Allez!'
Her whole face went puce as she yanked on the lead, trying to command her lethargic dog to heel. After a couple more vigorous swipes with the rope, Rocky ambled into the arena and joined the other dogs. The golden retriever bared its fangs and leapt at Rocky's throat, nearly dragging its diminutive owner from her feet. Snuffle looked on in horror.

  
'Au pied!'
cried Gaspar and we began a procession around the field. Most of the dogs pranced obediently at their owners' heels. Copying the women, I held the lead in my right hand, letting it fall across my body and grasping it lightly with my left to control Snuffle.

  'Good, Jamie,' praised Gaspar, 'training a dog without a lead is like driving a car without the key.'

  
'Tout le monde, demi-tour à droite.'
The women pirouetted on the spot. As one they turned, exchanging the leads behind their backs and walking briskly off in the opposite direction. I clumsily turned a half circle with Snuffle and rejoined the rear of the procession. This was more like a dancing class than dog training.

  A latecomer made his way across the field. It was another man, thank God; perhaps his
demi-tour à droite
would be as inept as mine. His dress suggested otherwise – suede loafers, white trousers and a polo shirt. He wore a chain around his neck, had thinning white hair, and but for the pug dog trailing in his wake, I'd have been convinced he'd taken a wrong turn on the way to the yacht club.

  
'Chiens, couchez!'
shouted Gaspar and all the dogs obediently lay down, with their long tongues panting in the heat.
'Bougez-pas,'
called Gaspar, and as one the women stepped away from their dogs, instructing them not to move. Rocky immediately disobeyed, taking a sudden interest in a dragonfly and gaining a sore nose for his trouble.

  'That's what I used to say to my wife,' joked the newcomer.

  I must have looked confused.

  
'Coucher pas bouger.'
He gave a little lecherous laugh. 'I'd like to put her on a lead,' he added as one of the women paraded past with her dog.

  The rest of the lesson drifted by in a flurry of misplaced double entendres. By the end of the hour I was pretending not to speak any French and the man had all but given up on me. Snuffle lay at my feet, exhausted. He'd managed to sit on command, but apart from that he'd expended all his energy on the nervous excitement generated by the presence of so many other dogs.

  Gaspar came over to chat to Snuffle. 'Well done, little one. Next week, we'll work on walking to heel.'

The training session had lasted longer than expected, meaning I was late for the wine tasting. I'd booked a room in a vineyard with space for fifteen people. Each tasting station had a small silver sink cut into the desk and a pad and pencil to take tasting notes, as well as some dry crackers to clear the throat between wines.

  The plan was for me to do a basic introduction to tasting and then encourage people to record their own reactions. I'd lined up ten different wines, sumptuous whites and mellow reds with the luscious depth I'd been missing so much over the preceding Rhône-less year. The alcohol in these well-made, well-balanced wines was, I believed, almost impossible to detect. The strongest wine on offer was 14.5 per cent and the weakest 12.5 per cent.

  Entering the tasting room I expected to hear a pleasing hubbub of noise, excited chatter about the wines on offer, and anecdotes brought back from far-flung summer holidays. Instead, there was a still and dusty silence. Clean glasses winked under the spotlights. Trays of assorted antipasti testified to the absence of people. I glanced at the clock. It was already ten minutes after the appointed start time. Even in Provence this was a little worrying. The door opened and my father-in-law entered. He had wispy grey hair, a brow furrowed from years hunched over legal papers, and the rosy complexion of someone who was enjoying France just a little too much. His eyes registered the empty room.

  'Might as well get going,' said Stuart kindly, 'the latecomers will just have to catch up.'

  'I guess so.' I was in a daze. I'd run five such events in the preceding year and they'd proved increasingly popular. The clientele was usually an eclectic mix – educated locals keen to develop their palates, Parisian second homeowners looking for an easy way to keep their cellars stocked and groups of tourists, including, on one occasion, four octogenarian American women who drank so much they barely made it back to the tour bus.

  The first few wines tasted bitter and confused. My palate was cold and my mind elsewhere. Gradually as the quality of the bottles improved I managed to blot out the strangeness of the situation. Five minutes into the tasting there was a knock on the door.

  A bearded man and his diminutive wife entered. They both wore shorts and stripy T-shirts and although the clothes didn't quite match, the overall impression was of twins who'd been dressed in the same gear by their mother. The sun had burnt a tan line into the man's upper arms. The skin on one side of the line was pale and freckly, on the other side a raw red. The woman was plastered in zinc block and wore a baseball cap with a curtain of material draped from the rear to keep the sun from her neck.

  'Do we have to pay?' At least they were English so I wouldn't have to repeat my spiel in a second language.

  'No, no – it's free, come on in. How did you find out about us?'

  'The tourist office.'

  'Well, take a place. To recap, tasting is a personal experience. Don't be put off by the experts who claim to detect scents of mown summer grass or fresh wood chippings. Keep it simple. Say what you see and taste.'

  'What's the bowl for?'

  'Unwanted wine.' The man raised his eyebrow to his wife, as if to say 'hark at him and his posh ways'. The concept of tipping alcohol away was clearly alien to him.

  In a show of support, Stuart upended his glass. The faintest of drops fell into the bowl.

  'The next wine is a 2005 Châteaurenard, Boisrenard red; spicy, intensely purple, and explosive on the nose, the tannins just need some time in the cellar to soften a little. It's consistently been voted one of the top hundred wines in France.'

  'Tastes like a packet of Worcester sauce flavour crisps,' said the bearded one.

  'I agree,' said his wife, biting into a cracker, unconcerned by the crumbs collecting in her bra.

  'Good,' I encouraged. 'That's the spicy notes. Can you taste the tannins in the back of the throat?'

  'Kicks like a Paint-stripper.'

  'I'm sorry?' I visualised the two of them lounging in front of the TV, sharing a tin of industrial cleansing fluid.

  'A Paint-stripper – it's the happy hour special at the Prince of Wales,' clarified the man. 'The chilli-vodka peels the moisture from your mouth. Leaves your tongue like sandpaper.'

  Stuart had tilted his glass and was busy studying the meniscus, examining the subtle variations in shade which were indicative of age. It was time to move onto the next wine.

  'The 2003 Cuvée Florence from Domaine Les Goubert in Gigondas, a profound, complex and well-balanced wine matured for twenty-four months in oak – a dream with a Sunday roast, with the final glass being reserved for the fireside in the evening.'

  'Reminds me a bit of Tizer.'

  'You mean Dr Pepper.'

  'That's what I said.'

  'No, you said Tizer.'

  In the circumstances, Stuart and I couldn't help but bond. After an hour of listening to more marital bickering and some of France's finest wines being likened to the pint glass cocktails at the Prince of Wales, we were relieved to clamber into the taxi home.

  As we did so I heard some familiar notes.

  'In the navy…' sang Stuart, who'd obviously been sipping more than he had been spitting.

  I joined in, wrapping my arm around his shoulder, pleased that there would be no more socks for Christmas and welcoming the chance to concentrate on something other than the memory of the embarrassingly empty room.

S
hortly after Snuffle started school, Elodie also began her education. Her crèche was located in a neighbouring village, sheltering beneath centuries-old plane trees. The narrow cobbled road was impassable for cars. There was a cafe on the corner where the locals sat sipping strong black coffee and smoking cigarettes on the terrace. The
boulangerie
was only paces away and the smell of baking bread drifted down the street. Feng shui experts couldn't have created a more calming location. And yet on the first morning, there were tears in Elodie's eyes as we shepherded her towards the door.

  Over the last few months she'd grown quickly and her trousers rode high above her ankles. Her hair, which until recently had remained stubbornly short, flowed in golden locks down to her shoulders, curling at the end into little ringlets. As we reached the entrance her little hand tightened around mine.

  Now was the moment to leave her alone for the first time. The headmistress, a gentle dark-haired lady, took Elodie's hand and nodded to us to go. We turned and left, both of us sneaking a glance over our shoulders as our child, apparently inconsolable, shouted our names. Then, like a number of other parents we ordered a coffee in the nearby cafe, listening as the screams subsided. By the time we'd finished all that could be heard was the sound of children playing happily.

  Within a week a routine had been established and by the end of September Elodie skipped happily into crèche. I'd taken to buying a croissant from the nearby bakery and enjoying a coffee in the cafe. The
boulanger
laced his creations with an indecent amount of butter, and the coffee was one of the strongest in the area. Sitting in the shade of the trees, with the blue sky visible through the mesh of arching branches, quickly became a treasured moment in my days. And it was here, with any income from the next truffle season still a couple of months away, that I came up with our next marketing idea for the wine business.

  Ever since the two English boules players had invaded our garden playing their extreme version of the game I'd been thinking about adapting the concept into a tournament. A little research showed that boules had not always been heavily codified.
Pétanque –
which literally means stuck feet – originated in the port of La Ciotat, near Marseille, at the turn of the century. Unsurprisingly, the idea of playing a game where little or no movement was involved quickly caught on in Provence. However, throughout the rest of France different versions of the game survived. To my delight I discovered that in Normandy a rambling version of the game was still played in farmyards. From the description the concept was not dissimilar to my proposed extreme version.

  Rolling back the years and holding a tournament without rules or boundaries should, I reasoned, appeal to the locals. Historical pageants were common and so why not an old-fashioned boules tournament? We'd get a team from our village to compete against a team from the neighbouring village and put up some wine as a prize. Spectators could be introduced to our wine business while they watched. Within a week of the Côtes du Rhône tasting I was sticking posters on lamp posts advertising Provence's first Tournoi de Boules Extrême, to take place in two weeks' time. All I needed was some players.

  The village boules club consists of a sizeable dusty square bordered by wooden sleepers. Plane trees have been planted at regular intervals, but as yet they are relatively young and do not provide quite enough shade. In one corner there's a small hut with a sign declaring that the bar is open to members only. Except during play, an iron shutter is always pulled tightly down. Pinned to the wall are notices of upcoming
concours
(competitions) and a blunt pencil dangles from a piece of string to enable people to sign up. In the summer play takes place most afternoons and there's usually an audience – a nearby car park is heavily used by camper vans and rows of tourists sit on foldaway chairs picnicking as they watch.

  When I arrived, late on a Saturday afternoon, the shadows were long and there were about twenty men waiting to play. Some members broke away and made practice throws, others chatted.