C'est La Folie Read online

  ‘OK …’

  ‘That was a joke, by the way.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, this is nice,’ we chime, in our different accents.

  The drive rises through a cathedral of trees, with great pillars of chestnut and oak. A soft glow suffuses the car, as the sun filters through the natural fan vaulting above us. On either side, strobing beyond the wooded curtain, I catch snapshot glimpses of bright open fields dotted with grazing sheep.

  Onwards and upwards we glide, up this track which feels as if only the trees are stopping it from sliding down the hill. It reminds me of going up the drive to Windlesham at the beginning of term, only without that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  Yes, this smells right.

  And there, at the top, is a ramshackle house, with bright-blue windows in all the wrong places, and a foreboding pair of zinc-covered barn doors, and a garden so overgrown you could hide tanks in it, dominated by a lone pine as tall as a skyrocket.

  And it is perfect.

  We scramble up a steep bank towards the front door, and I am a child of five, steaming my tricycle past the Old Ladies’ house in a Guildford suburb, hoping the three sisters who hate children don’t see me. Émilie grins like a child, too; blinking her astonishment at this wild, unkempt place.

  But, oh golly: there is the shadowy figure of the ogre moving inside the house. He looks as big as a minotaur. Huge, hunched shoulders and a biblical beard, like a vision of Satan drawn by William Blake. I let Émilie go in front of me. I always used to let Nicholas, my little brother, go first, too, when we cycled past the Old Ladies.

  A key rattles in the lock. The latch of the gentian-blue door is turning. Wood scrapes on stone.

  The beast is before us.

  Monsieur Zumbach appears more nervous than we are as he leads us from room to room. A big, burly man, whose heavy-lidded eyes appear to have been roughly chiselled out by a medieval wood-carver, he nevertheless treads lightly, with the hushed fervour of a druid welcoming visitors to Stonehenge. There is much bowing, much pressing together of palms, and frequent peals of tense laughter, which become more boomingly infectious as we progress through the house. Deep and rough as his voice sounds, it is musical, too, as if an organist were stomping out arpeggios on a pedal-reed. Sometimes he whispers with excitement at his own pronouncements.

  Nevertheless, as we wander from room to room, I feel a growing sense of awe, tinged with dread. For it dawns on me that I am not merely being shown a house here; I am being offered a glimpse of my future. And I’m not sure I’m ready for it.

  I feel it in the kitchen, where five black carriage-lamps are screwed to the rough-hewn walls, all at different heights, and two benches are set on either side of a simple wooden table in the middle of the stone floor. The combination of sandalwood incense and melancholy choral music gives the gloomy, heavy-beamed space the atmosphere almost of a chapel. I feel it as we step down into what the breathless ogre calls the salon d’hiver – the winter sitting-room – where chestnut logs are crackling and spitting in the wood-burning stove, next to an open fireplace big enough to roast a pair of oxen. And I feel it most as we walk through a pair of doors into the dusty shell of the cavernous salon d’été, when I gaze up at its great roof-beams, forty feet above our heads. The ogre slips outside to open up the zinc-covered barn doors, allowing light from across the valley to flood in through the tall French windows.

  This place is like the defunct meeting-place of some secret sect. The roof is no more than a layer of bare tiles sitting upon beams of gnarled oak. Two of the walls appear to be composed largely of dust held together with ancient stones, and the other two are built out of sugarlump slabs; breezeblocks whose slathered mortar has oozed out of the joints like buttercream filling from a Victoria sponge. Two huge cattle-troughs project into the room on one side, with the old oak stalls still supporting the wall above them.

  ‘A music room,’ I murmur, and see the beast clasp his hands together, as if in prayer.

  ‘Monsieur Wright, it makes me so happy to hear you say that,’ he says, his eyelids crisping into a grin. But there is an unmistakable catch of sadness in his voice.

  As we walk through rooms in various states of disrepair, and stumble through the jungle outside, the house weaves its spell, and I feel as if someone has just told me an awesome secret.

  ‘What do you think?’ asks Émilie, as we stand on a dusty cement floor, gazing up at the open roof of the cavernous summer sitting-room.

  ‘I feel nervous. A sort of sinking feeling.’

  ‘Nervous, why?’

  ‘Because I have a horrible feeling that I am about to buy a house in France.’

  ‘I know,’ she smiles.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I’d like to buy it, too.’

  What disarms me is the fact that this place has everything I have been looking for, down to the smallest detail. It’s like something a genie might have created, with a spell. And on top of this, it is surrounded by five acres of wild hillside studded with fruit trees and oaks. So I would be able to have my own sheep. Zumbach describes how he thinks the place may once have been an inn – un relais –on a tributary of the old pilgrims’ route to Santiago de Compostela.

  ‘You can still see the cairn marking the route on top of the hill behind the house,’ he says, pointing at the wall behind the grease-encrusted gas stove.

  But it is the aliveness of the place, as much as its history, that leaps at me. The way the house seems to grow out of the rock on which it is built. The vivid green shoots in the fields, on which the deer get drunk. The trio of goldfish lazing in the stone pool outside the back door. The riot of young trees, spreading within the protective boundary of their elders. The lone pine, tall as a church steeple, bisecting the view of the valley beyond. And the interior of the house itself, so ancient and yet so unfinished, because Monsieur Zumbach – from what I can tell – was interrupted by the departure of his wife just when he was in the middle of renovating it.

  ‘I always … mais ma femme …’ he says, shaking his head. We wait while he gathers his thoughts. ‘It was a good joke the devil played when he made us desire each other.’

  ‘I know I’m not meant to say this,’ I tell the ogre, as he makes coffee for me and Émilie in a scarlet pot, ‘but I can’t quite believe I have found this place. Or that nobody else has already bought it.’

  ‘Je sais. I could tell,’ he says, his eyes sparkling with pleasure. ‘The house has been waiting for you.’

  Our eyes meet for a few seconds. Then he glances at Émilie, hesitates, and glances back at me.

  ‘Monsieur Wright, I take it you are not entirely sane?’

  ‘Quite correct,’ I reply with a sigh.

  ‘Good, good.’ He presses his fingers together. ‘Because I must tell you that you do have to be mad to live here. Are you married?’

  ‘No, I’d be thinking of living here alone.’

  The ogre roars with laughter. ‘C’est parfait!’ he exclaims. It’s perfect. ‘Parce que ça, ça c’est La Folie.’

  ‘La Folie?’

  ‘That’s the name of this place: La Folie. And to think of living here all alone, c’est de la folie, too. Completely mad. That’s all right for me, because I’m Polish, which comes to the same thing. But you …’

  ‘Actually, I was thinking of bringing a cat, too.’

  Monsieur Zumbach clasps his hands and shakes them vigorously, as he raises his eyes skywards. ‘You will not regret such a decision,’ he beams, though I am not really listening, so I miss the significance of his words.

  I want to repay his frankness with an admission of my own. ‘I suppose I’m also hoping I might find myself une copine française here in Jolibois. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Monsieur Wright,’ he says, suddenly serious, pouring steaming coffee into three unglazed earthenware cups. ‘I can honestly tell you that you will not find such a person here for you in Jolibois.’

 
; ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ he says. And then emits a nervous laugh, with an apologetic wave at Émilie.

  ‘I take it you are not from these parts, Madame?’

  Émilie smiles and shakes her head.

  ‘These are just right for this place,’ I tell Zumbach, changing the subject, holding up my coffee cup: a plain earthenware beaker, with no handle or lip. I make a mental note that if I buy this house – when I buy this house – I must try to find some that are just the same. For they match the place perfectly.

  Zumbach looks at me long and hard before breaking into a sunlit grin. ‘So you’re really thinking of living here all alone?’ he asks.

  I nod.

  ‘C’est de la folie,’ he repeats, in a peal of laughter.

  In the car, Émilie and I are silent for a while.

  ‘Well, he certainly liked you,’ she says.

  I don’t reply. My head is jangling with images. The sparkling landscape has changed. The present has become the future. And I’m struggling to adjust, conscious that these great trees, that strip of grassy earth down the centre of the drive and this grey stone bridge over a French river will soon become more familiar to me than the graffitied lamp-posts and wheely-bins of East Dulwich.

  Back at the estate agency, I confirm that I want to make an offer for La Folie, a house I only saw for the first time an hour ago. Not a cheeky offer, either, albeit that it undercuts the asking price. I want to pay what is right. Antoine and another lady in the office – a willowy thirtysomething in a rust silk dress – exchange glances.

  ‘Monsieur Zumbach and I came to an understanding.’ I cough.

  ‘What understanding?’ snaps Émilie, who heard everything. Seated behind her desk, the childlike fellow-explorer has metamorphosed, like Mr Benn, into Office Émilie.

  ‘I can’t really explain. All I know is that it doesn’t feel appropriate to try to knock him down.’

  Émilie can’t rouse Zumbach on the phone. I imagine he knows with the same certainty I have that La Folie is sold, and is wandering the rugged hillside, beginning to make his farewells. So I head out to one of the restaurants in town – le Cheval Blanc – and ask the cheery patron if he has a table for one.

  ‘Bien sûr, Monsieur,’ he says, showing me to a table in the graceful old dining-room, complete with some very brown 1940s paintings depicting the place as the eighteenth-century coaching-inn it once was; the past refracted through a grimy lens. Nearby, a grey-haired couple in matching tracksuits are peering at each other in silence. The markings are unmistakable: les Anglais.

  On the far side of the room, four young women in their early twenties are all talking at once around a table, as if they haven’t seen each other for a long time. This is more encouraging. I am determined to prove Zumbach wrong.

  I order a beer and my mobile phone rings.

  ‘He’s accepted your offer,’ trills Émilie. ‘He’s on his way.’

  ‘Er, Monsieur,’ I say, waving apologetically at le patron and pulling a face of mortification. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  And so, three hours after my first sight of La Folie, the Ogre and I are both signing the compromis de vente that commits us to the transaction: an ending for him; a beginning for me. We are to complete in July.

  This is the biggest, fastest decision I have made in my life.

  ‘Oh, that’s not fast,’ says Émilie, while the willowy lady in the rust silk dress guides me and Zumbach through the pages of the form.

  ‘Put your initials here; your whole signature there,’ she murmurs.

  ‘We’ve just sold a house to an English couple who haven’t even seen it yet,’ continues Émilie. ‘They just liked the picture on our website.’

  ‘It’s an invasion,’ laughs the other lady. France must be changing so fast.

  ‘The fosse septique won’t need emptying until the autumn,’ says Zumbach, as he sees my pen wavering.

  ‘Très bien. I shan’t forget.’

  ‘You can hardly hear the train at the bottom of the hill,’ he continues. ‘And there are only four a day.’

  ‘It’s all right.’ I smile. ‘I like trains.’

  5

  JULY: FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE

  I’m still not entirely sure why I chose France for this adventure, rather than Spain or Chad or Patagonia.

  There is a photograph of my great-grandfather looking severe in Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century, before he became an ice-cream salesman in Ealing.

  My grandparents, Pa and Nanny, camped in the fields of Provence in the 1920s, sleeping in a leaky green bell-tent called Abdul the Damned. Even before they were married, the pair of them slipped away for a risqué holiday in St Tropez – and then swiftly raced home to Blighty, because Britain had ‘gone off gold’. With only a trickle of news about abandoning the Gold Standard crackling on the wireless – and only a trickle of youthful abandon surging in their veins – I suppose Pa and Nanny were more bothered about their savings than fumbling for each other’s secrets in the dark.

  My mother fell for France, too, first as a teenager on a pen-pal exchange in Rouen, and then in Paris in 1956, smoking cigarettes with students in black polo-necks at the Sorbonne by night, and working in the offices of a company called Isolamiante by day, learning the dark secrets of le plafond suspendu. Suspended ceilings are still big business in France, and I like to think that my mother had something to do with it, simply by typing the words ‘Veuillez agréer, Messieurs, l’expression de nos sentiments les plus distingués’ on to her blue carbon-paper a hundred times a day.

  My father was in France at the same time, drinking his way through a rugby tour with his Cambridge college. ‘The French cheated shamelessly,’ he once told me. ‘They would send one team to drink us under the table on the eve of a game. And then, when we were all nursing our sore heads the next day, they sent a fresh team to play in the match. But it was damn good fun.’

  I am told that I was horizontal when I first saw France, gurgling in an expensive pram with a navy-blue hood and chrome-spoked wheels. When I was one, my parents took me with my older brother and sister on a family holiday to Brittany.

  There are flickering cine films of me looking improbably beautiful at the time, a mass of golden curls and a dimpled beam as bright as a lighthouse. I like to think that my smiles reflect my love of this strange new land. Or is it that – as the camera whirrs – I have not yet discovered that I have no sense of direction, short sight, flat feet, and a hopeless tennis backhand?

  Learning to be resourceful and self-reliant is all very well, but I’m jolly grateful when Simon from across the road in East Dulwich offers to help me load and drive the van with all my worldly goods to France.

  Simon is one of my heroes, in that he sails through motorbike crashes, skiing accidents, lost car-keys and catastrophic engine-failures with spectacular élan, always with a smile and a wry wince of theatrical mortification. Although he works as a journalist, you’d think he was a 1950s racing driver. Tall, slim and eccentrically old-fashioned, here is a man who never seems happier than when he is giving up his time to help a friend, especially if the favour involves driving cars or vans, or – better still –riding ancient motorcycles on dusty foreign roads. With his collection of heavy old bicycles and wooden tennis racquets (‘the Hazel Streamline has never been bettered,’ he assures me), Simon belongs to an era when the world was simpler, chivalry was rife and people didn’t react to every minor mishap as if it were a major crisis.

  It takes us nearly five hours to heave everything into the rental van and tie it up in a cat’s-cradle of string. The last thing to go in is one of Simon’s vintage motorbikes. He says we may be glad of it. At midnight we finally slam the tail-gate and disappear into our opposing houses, like two duellers retreating their ten paces.

  I don’t sleep. At five in the morning, we are out there again, whispering so as not to wake the other neighbours in the street.

  ‘As long as we get there b
y noon tomorrow, we’ll be fine,’ I declare. I turn the key in the ignition, and the van rumbles into life. ‘That’s when I have to sign the papers at the notaire’s office.’

  Six minutes later, the beastly thing conks out on the corner of a dodgy Peckham housing estate, one mile into our six-hundred-mile journey from London to the Limousin. An amber warning light rages on the dashboard. Figures dart in the shadows. Turning the key in the ignition yields only an eerie silence. Our journey has ended, no sooner than begun.

  ‘I’m afraid this is not a very good omen, Michael,’ says Simon delicately.

  ‘A little teething trouble, perhaps. I’m sure it’s nothing you can’t fix.’

  Simon is good with engines, and I can’t think of anyone with whom I would rather break down on a long and significant journey. We’ll soon be on our way.

  His face orange in the sodium glow of the streetlamps, Simon emerges from under the bonnet with a smile that could mean anything except that he has fixed the van.

  ‘Electronic fault,’ he mutters. ‘It’s not like with the old engines, where you can fix them yourself. They’ll have to send out a replacement.’

  We both stand motionless for a few seconds, listening to a distant police siren, and trying not to think about unloading the van.

  ‘Oh well, it’s good this happened close to home,’ I declare, ‘and not in a traffic jam on the Périphérique.’

  Simon peers into the shadows. ‘Yes, we’re much better off surrounded by murderous drug-dealers than French lorry-drivers, aren’t we?’

  I glance at my watch. We must be in France by noon tomorrow, or I shall miss the completion date for La Folie.

  ‘I’ll just phone Helen and tell her to get the breakfast on,’ continues Simon, sounding a bit like Paris on the eve of the Trojan War.

  ‘Let’s try it one last time,’ I say. ‘Just in case.’ Simon folds his arms and watches from the pavement. I cross my fingers and nudge the accelerator.

  ‘Come on,’ I murmur, shutting my eyes. ‘This time. Please.’ I turn the key. A bird flits in front of the windscreen, making me jump. And the engine rumbles into life.