Cross Channel (15 page)

The D-road climbed sharply towards a barrier of high mist or low cloud. I switched on my windscreen-wipers in anticipation; then twisted the headlights to full beam, prodded the fog-lamp, wound the window down a little and chuckled. What an absurd idea to escape from an English October to one of the wettest parts of France: like the American who saw the Second World War coming and relocated to Guadalcanal. Visibility was no more than a few metres, the road was narrow, and on the nearside the ground dropped away into the unknown. Through my half-open window I thought I heard cowbells, a goat and the squeal of bagpipes, unless it was just a pig. My mood continued to be one of cheerful certainty. I didn’t feel like an anxious tourist groping for a destination; more a confident writer who knows where his book is going.

I came out of wet mist into sudden sunlight and a sky of Ingres blue. The village of Marrant was deserted: the shops had their shutters down; the trays of vegetables outside the
épicerie
were covered with sacking; a dog snoozed on a doorstep. The church clock showed 2.50 but creakily struck three as I looked. The
boulangerie
had its opening hours engraved into the glass of its door: 8h-12h, 16h-19h. It made me feel
nostalgic: these old-fashioned timings had ruled when I first discovered France. If you hadn’t bought your picnic lunch by twelve you went hungry, because everyone knew that in French villages the
charcutier
has to take four hours off to sleep with the baker’s wife, the baker four hours to sleep with the owner of the
quincaillerie
, and so on. As for Mondays: forget it. Everything would shut down from Sunday lunchtime to Tuesday morning. Now the pan-European commercial impulse had reached everywhere in France, except, oddly, here.

The station also had a lunchtime look as I approached it. The booking-office and newsagent’s kiosk were both closed, though for some reason the public-address system seemed to be broadcasting music. An amateurish brass band oompahing away: Scott Joplin by the sound of it. I pushed open a grimy glass door, turned on to an unswept platform, noticed thistles growing between the sleepers and saw, to my left, a small welcoming party. A mayor, or at least a man looking like a mayor, from sash of office to chinstrap beard. Behind him was the most peculiar municipal band I had ever seen: one cornet, one tuba and a serpent, all going hard at the same bit of ragtime, music-hall or whatever. The mayor, young, plumpish and sallow, stepped forward, grasped my upper arms and gave me a ceremonial two-cheek kiss.

‘Thank you for meeting me,’ I said automatically.

‘Attendance is performance,’ he replied, smiling. ‘We hope you are pleased to hear the music of your country.’

‘I’m not American, I’m afraid.’

‘Nor was Satie,’ said the mayor. ‘Ah, you didn’t know that his mother was Scottish? Well. The piece is called “Le Piccadilly”. Shall we continue?’

For some reason unknown to myself yet approved by the
mayor, I fell in directly behind him and kept step as he led the way. Behind me the ad hoc trio struck up ‘Le Piccadilly’ again. I got to know the piece pretty well, since it lasts just over a minute and they played it seven or eight times as we processed down the platform, over an unguarded level-crossing and through the dormant town. I expected the
charcutier
to protest that the brassy blast was affecting his sexual concentration with the baker’s wife, or at least an inquisitive urchin to speed out of a shady alley-way, but we passed only a few inert pets, who behaved as if this three o’clock concert was normal. Not a shutter stirred.

The village petered out by a lilting
lavoir
, a humpy bridge and a spread of immaculate but untenanted allotments. An old Citroën appeared from nowhere and suavely overtook us. You don’t see many of those cars any more: you know, the black ones that sit wide and hippy on the road, running-boards at the side, Maigret at the wheel. But I didn’t spot the driver as he disappeared in a dusty curve.

We passed the cemetery, with my backing group still pomping out ‘Le Piccadilly’. A high wall, the steeply prongs of a few plutocratic tombs, then a quick view through a chained gate. Sun flashed on glass: I had forgotten the custom of building little greenhouses over and around the tombs. Is it symbolic protection for the departed, self-interest for the mourners, or simply a way of ensuring fresh flowers for a longer season? I never found a gravedigger to ask. In any case, you don’t really want answers to every question. About your own country, perhaps. But about others? Leave some space for reverie, for amical invention.

We halted outside the gates of a small manor-house of proportions laid down by God. Biscuity stone, thunder-grey slate roof, modest pepper-pot towers at each corner.
A venerable wisteria in its miraculous second flowering hung over a front door reached by double-sided steps which no doubt had once served as a mounting-block. The mayor and I now walked side by side across the gravel, our feet inciting a distant, unthreatening bark from the stables. Behind the house were some rising beech woods; to the left a shaded pond with several varieties of edible wildlife; beyond that, a sloping meadow eased towards the sort of lush valley that the British would convert into a golf-course. I stopped; the mayor propelled me forward by an elbow. I climbed two steps, paused to inhale the wisteria blossom, climbed six more, turned and saw that he had disappeared. I was not in the mood to be surprised - or rather, what would normally have surprised me struck me as perfectly understandable. In ordinary, pedantic life I might have asked myself at what precise point the band had stopped playing, whether the Maigret Citroën was garaged in the stables, why I hadn’t heard the mayor’s feet on the gravel. Instead, I merely thought, I am here, they are gone. Normally, I would have tugged on the bell-pull which hung down through a rusty, iron ring; instead I pushed the door.

Part of me expected a bobbing chambermaid with gauffred mob-cap and an apron tied in the middle of her arching back with a floppy double bow. Instead, I found some more purply Roneoed words informing me that my room was at the top of the stairs and that I would be expected in the
salon
at seven-thirty. The boards creaked, as I knew they would, in a comforting rather than sinister fashion. The shutters of my room were propped half-open, giving enough light for me to take in the jug and bowl on a marble washstand, the brass bedstead, the curvy armoire. A Bonnard interior, lacking only a cat, or perhaps Mme Bonnard sponging herself in the
bathroom. I lay on the bed and hovered halfway to sleep, untempted by dreams, unperturbed by reality.

How can I describe the sense of being there, in that village, in that room, the familiarity of it all? It was not, as you might think, the familiarity of memory. The best way I can explain it is to make a literary comparison, which seems fair enough in the circumstances. Gide once said that he wrote in order to be reread. Some years ago I interviewed the novelist Michel Tournier, who quoted me this line, paused and added with a certain smiling complacency, ‘Whereas
I
write to be reread on the first occasion.’ Do you see what I mean?

Downstairs at seven-thirty, I was greeted by Jean-Luc Cazes, one of those old-fashioned, Left-Bank, anarcho-rock characters (tired leather blouson, pipe wedged in the corner of mouth), the sort of genial zinc-bar philosopher you suspect has an alarming success rate among women. Handing me a
vin blanc
so viscous with cassis as to arouse the suspicion that Canon Kir must have had a lot of inferior white wine on his hands, he introduced me to the other guests: a Spanish poet, an Algerian film-maker, an Italian semiotician, a Swiss crime-writer, a German dramatist and a Belgian art critic. Cazes was fluent in all our languages, though we each spoke French more or less approximately. I meant to ask the others about their invitations, their arrivals, their receptions, their tunes, but somehow it never came to that; or if it did, I have forgotten.

Dinner was served by a shy peasant girl with high, nasal vowels, her
a
moving towards
i
: ‘Si vous n’ivez pas suffisimint, vous n’ivez qu’à deminder,’ she told us with nervous authority. A thick, cabbagy, ham-bony soup which I imagined snoring gently in a large copper for five days or so. A tomato salad
with a vinegary dressing. An omelette
aux fines herbes
which ran
baveuse
when you put the spoon into it. A plate of pink
gigot
with gravy like thinned blood. Round, big-beaned
haricots verts
cooked until floppy, and drenched in butter. Salad. Four types of cheese. A fruit bowl. Wine in unlabelled litre bottles with a row of stars across the shoulder like an American general. Cutlery handed down from course to course. Coffee and a
vieille prune
.

We talked easily: this was not, after all, a conference, and M. Cazes was less
animateur
than encouraging presence. The others … you know, I can’t remember what they said, though at the time it made sense to me, especially in the light of what I knew, or thought I knew, about their reputations. For myself, I discovered an improbable spontaneity when my turn came to address the table. I had, of course, prepared nothing, secure in the promise that attendance was performance; yet I eased into a confident tour d’horizon of various French cultural topics, and managed strangely well. I talked about
Le Grand Meaulnes, Le Petit Prince
, Greuze, Astérix, the
comédie larmoyante
, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, pre-Great War railway posters, Rousseau, Offenbach, the early films of Fernandel and the semiotic significance of the yellow triangular – nay, tricornic – Ricard ashtray. You should understand that this is not how I normally behave. I have a poor memory and little capacity for generalisation. I prefer to discuss a single book, or better still a single chapter, or best of all a single page which I happen to have in front of me.

I told them a story to illustrate what I meant by Gallic charm. I once appeared on ‘Apostrophes’, the television book programme, with a French novelist who had written the autobiography of his cat. He was a well-known writer who had unhooked several domestic literary prizes. When the host
asked him about the composition of his latest work, he replied, ‘I did not write the book, my cat wrote the book.’ This response irritated the host, who began attacking the novelist. ‘I did not write the book,’ he replied every time, a Gauloise smokescreening his white polo-necked sweater and mustachioed smile. ‘My cat wrote the book.’ We all chuckled at this example of whimsical provocation.

I’d better warn you that there was no
coup
. No sudden electrical storm across a midnight sky, no
feux d’artifice
or irruption of mime artists. No one walked, arm mythically extended, towards a full-length mirror, vanishing into and beyond it; there were no
visiteurs du soir
. Nor was there a coup in the French sense: no flamboyant episode with svelte
conférencière
or tangy servant-girl; Mme Bonnard did not get out of her bath for me. We went to bed early after shaking hands all round.

Cheese is supposed to provoke bad dreams, but the combination of Brie, Saint-Nectaire and Pont-l’Evèque (I had declined the Bon Bel) had the opposite effect. I slept eventlessly, without even one of those tranquil episodes in which someone whom I knew to be me yet was not moved across landscapes both strange and familiar towards a reward both surprising yet predictable. I woke clear-headed to the sound of a late-season bumble-bee butting against the peeling slats of the shutters. Downstairs, I dipped my still-warm baguette into my bowl of hot chocolate and set off for the station before the others were up. Dewy spiders’ webs caught the early-morning sun like Christmas decorations. I heard a clattering behind me and was overtaken by one of those itinerant butcher’s vans made from silvery corrugated metal. At the station I picked up my car and drove through the village which seemed dormant, though I could see that the pavement
in front of the shops had already been sluiced and broomed. It was 7.40 and the creaky church clock struck the three-quarter.

When I started the car, my headlights and wipers came on, and I soon needed both as I headed down through damp morning mist to rejoin the N126. At Aurillac, another smart, four-carriage train was ready to take me to Clermont-Ferrand. There were few passengers, and my view was unimpeded; at times, I could even see the N126, which helped locate me. We stopped at Vic-sur-Cère and thereafter I paid particular attention. I was apprehensive about that misty cloud, but the soft October sun must have burnt it off. I watched, I switched my head regularly from side to side, I listened out for the train’s warning whistle, and all I can say is that we didn’t pass through the station of Marrant-sur-Cère.

As the plane ended its first curving climb, and the levelling wing erased the Puy-de-Dôme, I remembered the name of the French writer who had written the autobiography of his cat. I also remembered my reaction as I sat next to him in the studio: you pretentious twat, I thought, or some such words. The French writers I am loyal to run from Montaigne to Voltaire to Flaubert to Mauriac to Camus. Does it need saying that I am unable to read
Le Petit Prince
and find most of Greuze nauseating? I am sentimental about clarity of thought, emotional about rationality.

When I was an adolescent I used to come to France with my parents for motoring holidays. I had never seen a Bonnard. The only cheese I would eat was Gruyère. I despaired of the way they ruined tomatoes with vinaigrette. I could not understand why you had to eat all your meat before you got your vegetables. I wondered why they put grass-clippings in their omelettes. I loathed red wine. Nor was it just the
alimentary apprehension: I was nervous about the language, the sleeping arrangements, the hotels. The absorbed tensions of a family holiday played on me. I was not happy, to put the matter simply. Like most adolescents, I needed the science of imaginary solutions. Is all nostalgia false, I wonder, and all sentimentality the representation of unfelt emotions?