Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog (25 page)

  I shook my head, lowered the paper, folded it and put it back in the rack. Turning around I came face to face with Ange. We'd not spoken since the rendezvous on the
chantier
six months ago. My phone messages had remained unanswered and in the end I'd simply given up. We'd passed each other in the car. He'd kept his eyes on the road and not noticed me. There had been no chance meetings in the village to clear the air and resume our steak tartare recipe exchange.

  Now we were so close that with a slight lean forward I could give him the customary kiss. No amount of supermarket savvy body language could save me now. In fact, I was grateful for the opportunity to try to kick-start our old relationship.

  
'Bonjour.'
I held out my hand, unsure whether we were still on kissing terms.

  Ange looked the same as ever. Baseball cap pulled low over his head, clothes stained with brick, plaster and paint, hands dirty and covered in grime, fingernails chipped and broken. There was the familiar smell of garlic and if he accepted a kiss the prickly bed of his perma-stubble would greet me.

  Ange looked up. He fixed his dark eyes on me, holding my gaze for a long second.

  Finding a use for my outstretched hand I pointed at his shopping. 'What are you having with the confit?'

  A smirk cracked the corner of Ange's mouth. He then turned, put his shopping basket on the floor and walked out of the shop. The inference was clear. My presence revolted him so much he was even prepared to forego his lunch. I was left standing, arm held out, head half stooped for a kiss, so that I overbalanced and had to grope for the trolley to balance myself. The shock of someone being quite so rude was extraordinary. It was like being slapped in the face, hard, twice, and then once more for good measure.

  Mechanically, I completed the weekly shop, but my mind ranged over all our actions. I'd offered to pay Ange for his work but he hadn't called back. How can you pay someone who won't even give you an invoice? No fault there. We'd employed other builders only when the bank had refused to release funds. No fault there. Why, therefore, was he so angry with us?

  Perhaps he'd told people we didn't have the money to build the house, and then suddenly been made to face the embarrassing reality of us opening the
chantier
. Potentially there was also an element of xenophobia. Anyone outside one's immediate village was considered a foreigner. And we'd employed a company from distant Aix-en-Provence to work for us. Not only that but it was a company that used Tunisian builders – men who were prepared to work for cheaper wages and break up the comfortable monopoly enjoyed by the local artisans.

  Could Ange's anger be justified? Perhaps we could have fought harder to find another bank, but after all the excuses, the broken down cars, the clampings, the stray wild boar, we'd lost confidence. But what if the litany of accidents had actually occurred? What if, as Ange had maintained, local practice was to give estimates rather than firm quotes? We'd felt so strongly that we were being misled but perhaps there was an alternate truth that fed Ange's bitterness.

  I was still working through possible explanations as I crunched back up the drive. The vines glowed a ripe orange in the sunlight, the leaves on the oaks were a bright luminous yellow, and the cherry orchard opposite a polished burnished brown. Wisps of cloud skidded across the hills so that shadows and sunlight hid and then illuminated the vibrant colours. I gathered the shopping bags together and the plastic bit uncomfortably into my fingers. Taking deep breaths of the cool air I cleared my head.

  I opened the door and Tanya placed the phone back on the hook. She looked a little disconcerted. Elodie was sitting at her high chair covered in spaghetti. Snuffle was licking up a pool of sauce from the floor. Crayons and miscellaneous toys were scattered across the room. During my absence carnage had been visited on the sitting room.

  'Who was on the phone?' I placed the bags on the floor by my feet.

  'Oh, only Fabian.'

  'Still trying to sell us heating?' I realised too late that Tanya's tone was serious.

  'He wanted to know why we weren't at Delphine's.'

  'I thought it was cancelled.'

  'Apparently not, went ahead as usual.'

  'Where was our invite?'

  Tanya shook her head. 'I don't know.'

  Delphine was extraordinarily liberal in handing out invites to her
fête
. She'd once told us that there was no point in having a grand old property unless you shared it with people. Every year the guest list grew, the terrace became more crowded and the pleasing bubble of voices lingered ever later into the starlit night. The jazz band would have been bigger than the previous year, another loop of lights would have been added to the plane trees and an extra table to the buffet.

  'Anyway, I've got something to tell you.'

  'Hold on. I saw Ange in the supermarket.'

  'How was he?'

  'Wouldn't even speak to me. Walked out of the shop.'

  'Jamie, it doesn't matter.'

  'The wine tasting, the boules tournament and now Delphine. It's like there's a blacklist.'

  'I said it doesn't matter.' There was a tear in Tanya's eye. 'I've got something to tell you.'

  I took her hand, expecting the worst. Perhaps a malicious rumour being spread about us, or news that the
préfecture
had discovered our illegal wall. The firmness of her grip was painful. The wind blew the front door open, scattering a pile of invoices into the air. As the door clapped shut the paper drifted to the ground, settling with the silence of snow. The radio in the background announced a series of train strikes and the timer on the microwave pinged.

  'I'm pregnant again.'

  'You're what?' I gave her an enormous hug. 'That's fantastic, when did you find out?'

  'Just now while you were out.'

  'And there's no doubt?'

  'No.'

  'Have you called your parents?'

  'No, I was waiting for you.'

  'How many months?'

  'One.'

  'Do you want to wait for the scan?'

  'I'll tell them now.'

  We hugged again. Buoyed by the change in mood, Elodie started laughing and clapping. There was a bang from the cellar as Manu ripped the door from another old car. I leaned on the wall for support. I was going to be the father of two. What a responsibility, what a delight. I couldn't wait. Then came the realisation – getting the house built on time was suddenly more important than ever. We now only had seven and a half months.

T
hroughout October and November I was a regular at the dog training classes. The lessons were undoubtedly good for Snuffle. He calmed down and learnt to tune himself in to the sound of my voice. On our morning walks he obediently returned when called, and gradually we began to develop a genuine bond. He shadowed me all day and I enjoyed his reassuring presence. For the first time in my life I began to appreciate why some people were so mad about their dogs. Snuffle, like a child, had his own personality – playful, affectionate, forgetful and slightly dotty.

  Despite my new found enthusiasm for dogs I still felt an outsider at the training classes. My gender (95 per cent of the other attendees were women) and nationality obviously marked me out as different. I also felt conspicuous because I had such a small dog when compared with the majority of the women, who manhandled great beasts.

  At times it looked an unequal battle, with the dogs the obvious winners. Lightweight, nail-varnished, made-up women with spangles on their tops would yank on the thick ropes they used for control. The dogs lazily obliged. The tempers of the women were remarkably short and at the slightest hint of disobedience they would be wrapping the rope around their hands and beating the dogs on their haunches, screaming
'Non!'
at the tops of their voices. Since they'd all opted to buy male dogs, I couldn't help but think that some form of anger transference was going on. A particular dog's transgressions might only be small, but perhaps because the husband of the owner had just started an affair, the dog got a blast of concentrated, unforgiving female anger.

  
'Non!'
The word was screamed, at times almost spat out. It wasn't much of a leap of the imagination to picture these women at home in the kitchen, rope in hand, beating their husbands in a similar fashion. Putting them all together in a field seemed to feed their righteous indignation at the male species. The more aggressively one of them corrected their dog, the more the others nodded in support. If their husbands were indeed having extra-marital dalliances, they were wrong to choose male dogs as pets. The average man might think about sex ten times a day, but the average male dog thinks about nothing else.

  The other reason I felt excluded and different was my inability to perform the basic turns and manoeuvres that Gaspar demanded. I'd always had two left feet and felt inhibited whenever I stepped on a dance floor. Now I was being asked to twirl in time with ten to fifteen Frenchwomen. It would have been hard enough to do without a dog, but with Snuffle in tow it became a simple exercise in limiting the embarrassment. My particular bête noire was still the
demi-tour à droite
. When the women did the
demi-tour
, there was a blur of motion, a swivel of the hips, and a little jazzy kick as they set off in the opposite direction, dogs seamlessly following. There was one lady who did the whole class without a lead. When she moved, her dog followed, and her
demi-tour
was a thing of beauty, while mine was a confused mess of lead and dog that often ended in me stumbling forward onto the grass.

  My presence at the dog training sessions ruined the marvellous synchronicity that these women had achieved. As one they anticipated Gaspar's commands, forming criss-crossing choreographed patterns in the arena. Occasionally, a spectator would occupy the row of orange bucket seats, and spontaneously burst into applause after a particular complicated set of moves had been flawlessly performed. Needless to say, whenever there was any clapping, I was taking a break.

  This being France, the highlight of every class was food. The exercise was initially a simple one. Gaspar would take a handful of sliced-up saucisson and offer it to each of the dogs. Meanwhile, the owners would say a firm
'Non!'
and the dogs would obediently turn away from the food. Needless to say, the women were excellent at this exercise; their
'Non!'
could not have been more vehement had it been one of their husbands pawing at the cleavage of a lover. My initial efforts were rather timid, but I was soon mirroring the female owners with a loud firm
'Non!'
.

  One week Gaspar forgot the saucisson. Hercules' owner volunteered to contribute a
chausson aux pommes
she had in the car, however. Spiced with ginger and nutmeg, the sliced stewed apples had been encased in light pastry. It really was too good for the dogs, she said, but just this once she would make an exception. As owner after owner shouted a firm
'Non!'
, the group became distracted discussing the precise quantities of each ingredient needed.

  The classes were never the same again. After that, everybody agreed that to train the dogs properly they had to be really tempted. Saucisson was fine, but a dog might behave completely differently if, for example, he encountered a juicy
poulet roti
(roast chicken). Thus began the tradition of each member of the class bringing in some home-cooking to tempt the dogs. In the space of a few weeks we had a
roti de porc
, a
daube de boeuf
, a
blanc de veau
and a
fricassée de poulet
. Each recipe was lovingly prepared and then described, and for a while it felt like I'd signed up for a cooking course. The tradition came to an abrupt end when Rocky got loose, leapt into a car boot and devoured an entire casserole. If dogs could talk, he would have said,
'Oh là là, c'est bon.'

  At the end of each lesson Snuffle and I spent a little time with Gaspar honing our truffle-hunting technique. We used an artificial substance bought on the Internet called Canitruffe, to simulate the smell of the truffles. With more and more success Snuffle located the Canitruffe and Gaspar was convinced that he was following the truffle smell, not my smell. He had one caveat, though. Before I could be sure that Snuffle would turn into an effective truffle dog, Snuffle had to accept the
couche
command. For a dog, complying with a 'lie down' command is the ultimate act of submission. So far Snuffle had resisted, growling in anger when I'd tried to encourage him into a prostrate position. Towards the end of October, Gaspar decided that it was time to force the issue.