Reflections of Sunflowers Read online

  Fortunately, all my other guests were late. The strict rules about midi-et-demi for lunch have been gradually eroded by the next generation. When the old people were alive they were always on time. Véronique, Raymond’s daughter, and her husband Jean-Michel strolled up from their house on the other side of the orchard, their daughter Océane, now eight, still drying her bright pink nails. She is not much younger than her mother was when we first came. A plump shy ten-year-old, who helped us sweep out the cobwebs and gave me dictation to improve my French, Véronique is now extremely svelte and the deputy mayor.

  Raymond came to apologise for Claudette who had still not returned from her second ‘vide-grenier’ of the morning. The local version of a car boot sale, Claudette can’t resist them. They are so popular now that there is one somewhere almost every weekend. Of course the real bargains are to be found when a whole village turns out its attics for the very first time. Then you must be up really early to beat the dealers. With their sharp and expert eyes they soon scoop up great grandmother’s old soup plates, copper preserving pans or her heavy, folded, linen nightdresses. You might find the proverbial dozen, damask, dinner napkins, long forgotten, with hand-embroidered initials, or pillow-cases trimmed with handmade lace. There are photograph albums, old lamps and tarnished silver. Claudette is still searching for an old bread slicer but she usually finds something to amuse her. After an aperitif Raymond went back to the farm to fetch her and this time, with many a blast on the klaxon, they drove up in the newly refurbished 1929 Citroen. It now looks very different from the time we first saw it over twenty years ago.

  Matthew, my younger son, and Raymond’s Philippe were much the same age and in those early days while Mike and I worked on the house they spent a great deal of time roaming about together. Phillipe’s English was better than Matthew’s French but they both benefited. One day Philippe took his new English friend to see his Grandpa’s car. Matthew came home in great excitement.

  ‘It’s brilliant!’ he said. ‘It’s really old. You should see it. It’s huge. And you know what? It’s even got DUNLOP written in English on the spare wheel.’

  Raymond owned a barn close by the church, which he never seemed to use. We had presumed that it was simply inconvenient, being a distance from the house. We had no idea that inside the rough stone walls was a museum. When the following day Raymond and Grandpa pushed open the massive doors we saw that the vast space was crammed with ox carts and traps and antique farm implements. We stood in amazement while the boys scrambled to the back where we could just glimpse the Citroen up on blocks and protected by old blankets and sacks.

  ‘Can we uncover her now, Papi?’ begged Philippe.

  The old man nodded and we stood round admiringly as she was revealed in all her stately glory. Grandpa brushed the high, dusty mudguard with his small gnarled hand and told us that she had been there ever since the war. They had successfully hidden her from the Germans who were then commandeering every vehicle. He patted her bonnet and smiled. He seemed perfectly happy to leave her there for another forty years but everyone else was eager to bring her out and, a few days later, with most of the village as spectators, she was ceremoniously towed from the barn and trundled off to be repaired. Claudette’s cousin, the mechanic in a nearby village, was delighted when he eventually made her roadworthy and drove her back in triumph to the farm.

  Not surprisingly her progress could be erratic. Over the years, mostly on Sunday afternoons, Mike and Raymond, accompanied by anyone intrepid enough to withstand the noise, the draught, and the occasional breakdown, have made sporadic trips to surrounding villages. Recently, however, Raymond decided that it was time to have the Citroën completely refurbished. Now the dark green bodywork gleams, the nickel sparkles, and she has beautiful new leather upholstery which is much more comfortable. Indicators are the only addition. Just as, all those years ago, the car conferred status and glamour on Granny and Grandpa—he was the only young man anywhere in the region with a car she once told me, smiling—now it does the same for Raymond. He has a new identity as a proud member of the Club des Anciennes Voitures de Villeneuve. They plan many trips, prudently always complete with a mechanic and spares.

  The meal was a success. The gammon appreciated, although I almost ruined it at the last moment by putting it under the grill to caramelise the sugar on the crisscrossed fat, studded with mustard and cloves. I am still not used to cooking with electricity and can’t believe how long it takes to heat the oven. The grill, however, is quicker. The gammon was rescued just in time. As we were drinking our coffee Philippe and Corinne, his wife, arrived with eleven-year-old Clement. They were looking very fetching in twenties costume and straw boaters and had come to borrow the old Citroën to complete the effect and to visit friends. Clement presented his grandpa with a rose for his birthday and the young family drove off sitting up high and waving regally from the very smart, old car. Raymond had to leave, too, as the wheat was ready and the moissonneuse due that afternoon. He is part of a farmers’ cooperative who must wait their turn for the combine. Naturally everyone needs it at the same time and there are many anxious moments and frantic phonecalls when the crop is ripe and rain is threatened.

  All our guests gone, we dozed in the shade wondering when M. Escoffier would arrive to open the pool. We had already been here three days, three very hot days, and the sight of the heavy, mudstained, blue winter cover still securely in place was extremely frustrating. Once upon a time we would have just got on with it ourselves but those days are, sadly, over. We knew, of course that M. Escoffier, like the combine, was simply overloaded with work.

  We had first met him the previous summer. He had a stand at the local fête. We had only just arrived and for some reason had been quite unable to contact our ebullient M. Bourrière who always dealt with our pool, or his manic son.

  It was most unusual. We had written to fix a rendezvous, as we always did, before leaving England. They had given us excellent service for many years, ever since the day when they arrived with the digger and the first great clods of earth were gouged out of our meadow. It took us so many years to decide to have a pool, both for aesthetic and financial reasons, but we have never regretted it.

  Until now, it was always a confident, red-faced, M. Bourrière in his cowboy boots who would arrive promptly to solve any problems. He replaced our calcified filter when, one summer, the chalk level in the water was too high, and he changed the location of our pump. The original underground plastic pump housing, with its large heavy lid, had two disadvantages. It was not frost-proof and therefore the pump had to be removed for the winter and replaced in the spring, and in the summer, the shelter and dark humidity proved irresistible to snakes.

  For many years at Bel-Air we never saw a snake. I was actually quite miffed when others told of the size of the one they had seen in their garden. They are not vipers, just harmless grass snakes, called here couleuvres, but they can be two meters long and have thick bodies. Mike does not care for them but I wanted to see one at close quarters. Our mayor, now retired, told me a tale of once being summoned in a hurry by the holiday-makers from Colchester who were staying in his gîte next door.

  ‘La dame a crié, “snick! snick!”’ he told me dramatically. ‘C’était un grand serpent.’

  He killed the snake and gave it to his somewhat eccentric English neighbour who said she would like to show it to her children. The following day she invited the mayor, his wife and his tenants to dinner. One of the courses was a delicate slice of something in a good sauce. After they had all eaten and pronounced it delicious she revealed that it was in fact ‘la couleuvre’. The mayor laughed, showing his gold fillings, as he described the horrified reaction of les Anglais de Colchestaire.

  ‘Mais ce n’était pas mal du tout,’ he said musingly.

  Mike became very tired of our resident snake. He carried a large stick to thump on the lid before lifting it to check the filter. Eventually he had had enough. M. Bourrière and his son removed t
he pump from underground and promised to build us a cabine. It would solve the problem of the snake, they said, and also the over-wintering of the pump. We imagined a sort of small sentry box but arrived back one evening to find a substantial Wendy house complete with window.

  But where was M. Bourrière the next summer? It was a mystery. He didn’t even answer the phone. M. Escoffier, standing calmly behind his stand at the fête with samples of plastic pool liners and pictures of other pools, simply smiled and shrugged. He is the complete opposite of M.Bourrière, being dark, slender and very quietly spoken. He must have known that his competitor had gone bankrupt and disappeared, but he said nothing. He was presumably aware that, eventually, we would inevitably be in touch.

  About eight-thirty in the evening we saw with relief his white van snaking up the track.

  ‘Trop de travail,’ he said clambering wearily out. ‘Et comme toujours – tout au même moment.’

  We watched with pleasure the heavy cover being rolled back and saw that the water was clear above the muddy bottom. Tomorrow we would swim. We left him quietly and methodically going about his work, almost in the dark by now, and went down to the farm at about nine-thirty for, as we thought, dessert and champagne and to give Raymond his birthday present, which we had forgotten to do earlier.

  They had only just begun their meal. At the long table under the hangar, where we have eaten so many alfresco meals, sat the whole family with both the grandchildren. There was also the driver of the combine, his hair full of chaff, the amiable patron of the farmers’ cooperative and Ken Farrington, our nearest English neighbour who had let his house and was consequently homeless that night and staying with Raymond and Claudette. We resisted the soup, the home-cured ham and melon, the galantine of chicken; but the roast veal…It smelt so good…

  ‘Servez-vous, Servez-vous,’ called Claudette.

  ‘Eh, oh, il faut manger, Michel,’ urged Raymond. ‘You need to build yourself up.’

  Well, perhaps. Just a taste. Plates and cutlery appeared like conjuring tricks. We gave in. The moon appeared round the edge of the roof. Much, much later a large cake was carried in, candles were lit, Raymond opened the champagne and we all sang ‘Bon Anniversaire’.

  CHAPTER THREE

  And the next day we swam. We thought it might be prudent to wait for the water to warm up but by 11.30 the sky was a blazing blue, and the stones on the terrace burnt our feet. The water was only 20 degrees but, oh, the joy of plunging in for our first swim of the holiday. Actually, a holiday was not the most accurate description of the next few weeks as we wrestled with the garden, falling asleep, exhausted, every time we sat down, ten minutes turning mysteriously into half an hour.

  The worst battle was with the pampas grass, which should, of course, be cut back in December. As we are never here in the winter and as it looks too glorious to cut when we leave in early October, it is always a sorry sight by the following spring. It was an even sorrier sight by July. Our long hedge of pampas protects the pool from the east and the forty to fifty silvery plumes are reflected in the blue water when the sun is low. They are beautiful, we always tell ourselves, as with long sleeves, long trousers and strong gloves to protect our wrists, we struggle to twist out the old stalks and cut the hedge back without ruining the newest shoots.

  When we began to trundle the debris down to the rubbish heap we found we had another problem. At the end of the previous summer we had been unable to have a really good bonfire. The maize harvest was unusually late and with our bonfire site close to Raymond’s field there was a risk of setting the whole crop alight.

  ‘We’ll leave it till we come in the spring,’ we had said. But of course fate had intervened and we had not come. And now the great sodden pile was still there and a new crop of maize, already head high, rustled gently in the heat. It looked as though, by the end of the summer, our heap of garden rubbish would be larger than the house.

  As a change from gardening we slowly began to carry out all the outdoor furniture, most of it stored in the north-facing bedroom. As it is the one used by my two grandsons it is the least tidy, but as we gradually unearthed piles of chairs and tables we were unable to find two umbrellas and two recliners. We looked in the other rooms. Where on earth had we put them? They were not to be found. Perhaps Raymond and Claudette had borrowed them. It seemed unlikely but we do frequently borrow from each other. Or perhaps Véronique and Jean-Michel had needed them for a party?

  After lunch we wandered down through the lower wood, across the stream and up through the meadow, to Raymond’s farm. Those cows still in the barn lowed as they heard us approach, the young hunting dogs barked furiously, racing frantically up and down inside their compound, but there was no one else at the house. They were all away. Raymond and Claudette, as we later learnt, on a motoring spree in the old Citroen and the others at the coast. There was no sign of our chairs and umbrellas. We walked back, skirting along the edge of the field to where Jean-Michel had recently finished building a splendid terrace by their new pool, and it was clear that they had ample furniture around it without ours. We climbed slowly back up again, crossing through the orchard, grateful, this time, for the shade from the plum trees already heavy with fruit. As we reached the top of the rise and glimpsed the roof of our new Wendy house we began to laugh. Of course, that’s where we had put them. We’d simply forgotten. Our preoccupations of the past worrying months had eroded so many memories, or perhaps we were just having a ‘senior moment’ as a friend calls her forgetfulness.

  As we cut the grass we found other forgotten delights, a white, double althea, planted the previous summer, the fat buds almost ready to open. There were strong new shoots on a hardy hibiscus, which has spectacular pink flowers as large as a tea-plate, and a row of montbretia glinted through the grass. But the gardening debris was piling up and, after a few days, we were simply too weary to move it. There were sprawling heaps all over the place. At just the perfect moment, two strong young men arrived, Mike’s godson, Guy, and his friend, both just down from university. They were very keen to earn some Euros, they said, as they downed a cold beer, and promised to solve all our problems the following week.

  On Saturday we took a day off. We went to market at Villeneuve-sur-Lot, an elegant small town, which somehow manages to preserve much of its medieval past while flaunting many stylish boutiques and bars. Outside the old Porte de Paris, one of the original thirteenth-century gateways, the wide boulevard is built where once the moat, for hundreds of years, helped to defend the town. A raised flowerbed now colours its entire length, beneath lagerstroemia trees pink with blossom. There are hanging baskets and tubs on every corner dripping with petunias, bidens, and whatever else is in horticultural vogue that season.

  Set back, further down the boulevard, is Villeneuve’s controversial new town hall; the old, fine building near the river having become too small to contain the ever-burgeoning bureaucracy that is the curse of France – and of everywhere else, come to think of it. It is a bold attempt to blend the old and the flamboyantly modern. Opinions vary as to its success. Presumably they could not entirely demolish the sixteenth century convent which, gracefully if shabbily, spanned the far end of a simple, bare square with a few benches for weary shoppers. Here, pétanque was played under the trees and on the second Tuesday in the month the stalls of la Friperie, the flourishing second-hand clothes market, unfurled their ragged line of bright umbrellas all down one side of the square.

  Today each classical end-wing of the convent remains but the entire centre of the old building has been demolished and replaced with a startling 21st-century statement of municipal pride. The changes to the rest of the square are easier on the eye. It is laid out as a formal garden where you may sit and marvel at the impeccably weeded and watered lawns and flowerbeds. The planting is stunning. There are beautiful swathes of colour, and many unusual varieties. La Friperie would, of course, completely spoil the image, and has been banished. We must now take our tape measures to the far
thest and least elegant end of the boulevard if we wish to browse through the crumpled garments and find a bargain.

  Villeneuve really was new in 1263. It is one of a chain of small, fortified towns, or ‘bastides’, created across the south-west of France by Comte Alphonse de Poitiers, brother of King Louis. In the middle of the thirteenth century he came south to inspect his new territories of Quercy and Agenais, which he had acquired by his marriage to Jeanne de Toulouse. He found a region devastated by the wars between the church and the heretics of the time, the Cathars. Their beliefs were named in France l’Hérésie Albigeoise, being most powerful around the town of Albi. The people of the south-west were to pay heavily for their religious defiance. Marauding northern knights, sanctified by a church alarmed by the fervour of this growing heresy, rode south on a crusading opportunity conveniently much nearer home than the Holy Land. They did not discriminate. Anyone who spoke the langue d’Oc, the language of the south, was deemed to be a heretic. The whole region was pillaged and the massacres were ferocious.

  No doubt Alphonse, as he travelled in the aftermath of such destruction, soon realised that there would be little revenue to be collected from such an impoverished region. To become prosperous again it needed completely replanning. Near to the Benedictine Abbey of Eysses he saw what could be a fertile valley. ‘Un endroit suffisamment spacieux et convenable,’ as it was then described in the charter which was drawn up. The nearby Château of Pujols on the hill had been completely destroyed, but, he reasoned, if he were to join the two villages which lay below on either side of the Lot and fortify them he might create a place of safety, ease ‘la misère et la souffrance’ of his people and eventually fill his coffers.