SIX

I could not face the wreck of the Norman garden, not first thing, and not this trip. I had only a few days, and my main task at the moment was to make sure the house was habitable. I stumbled out of the garden into the darkness of the house again and crossed the dining room to the west side, prepared to hang on to the casement when I opened those shutters—because on that side of the house, the sky sucks at you, and you’ll go flying if you don’t watch out. It is the continually disorienting genius of this floor to assault you with burgeoning, rampant green where the rooms open on the garden to the east, whereas the windows on the west want to drag you right out over the valley. That window had a hot blue sky in it today. I left the window open, like the garden door, because the house was cold. Then, too, the damp seemed greater than usual, and I hoped it might burn off if enough of the day outside washed through. Once the doors and shutters were open, the dining room became visible. I knew it well, but it felt odd—not so much clean as smeared. It was now, and must always have been, the most used room in the house, originally the big farm kitchen where meat was roasted on a spit and pots were kept boiling over a constant fire in the fireplace that took up most of the wall between this room and what was now the library. Something was wrong in here that I could not put my finger on. I realized that I was tired, discouraged by the state of the garden, gritty from travel, and disoriented by the change of time as well as by hearing someone not saying, in a voice resembling Julia’s, How can we take on this place if you can’t even manage to get the garden trimmed?

Julia had driven me to the plane and seen me off, loquacious with the combined hopes and anxieties that accompany a loved one on a transatlantic flight—a loved one, that is, who has been instructed to buy three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of flight insurance. Because of the time difference, it was still too early for me to call and let her know that I’d arrived safe, and to hear her disappointed exclamation of relief that doom this time was coming in an as yet unimagined form. But I did pick up the telephone to make sure there was a dial tone.

Her first words to me in the past, when I was here without her, had always been, “Is it beautiful?” Because, of course, it was—and that was true rain or shine, and whether or not the garden looked like Jacob’s room and my studio at their worst, combined, and tramped through by extinct and flightless birds of prey. Outside the west window, over the dining table, the blue air wavered with the sound of birds—not just the relentless chorus of doves, which had already so merged with my expectation that I no longer heard it; but songbirds I could not name darting in the orchard, and a cuckoo, and Mme. Vera’s ducks and chickens. Across the road (two hundred feet below, and invisible from here because of the intervening vegetation and the ruin of the cider press), on my level on the opposing hill, half a dozen cows wandered, nosing the edges of a patch of bracken. I heard metal knocking somewhere, sounding like cowbells, but probably only Mme. Vera careening a tin basin; and a tractor trimming the nettles, thistles, and brambles out of a field nearby. This should be done to my fields also—and would be, I told myself, if I were here often enough to cause the farmer renting them to make the place look cared for.

The dining room, looking west across the valley, 1986. Photo Dana Perrone

In spite of the garden, I’m still ahead, I thought. I’ll have a cup of tea and then see to the house. I found the teakettle where the O’Banyons had hidden it in the upstairs kitchen. Unless we were overwhelmed with guests or family, this was the only kitchen we normally used. It had once been a butler’s pantry and was connected to the dining room by a window opening as well as a door. Julia and I found it easier to get by on two propane burners than to run upstairs and down to use the big, dark, cold, and damp downstairs kitchen—so long as we were neither ambitious in our cooking nor too numerous in our eating.

I took the kettle to the sink to rinse it out and found there was no water. The plumber had not come to get it started. Now I understood the persistent smearing I had noticed in the cleaning job. A femme de ménage had come, seen, but not conquered, though she’d done the best she could without water.

I did not try to turn the water on myself. The piping in this big house was a palimpsest and mystery of interconnected pipes, sluices, conduits, valves, and siphons going back to the Cenozoic, and far beyond my comprehension. When, on a mistaken occasion in the past, I once fell back on my American self-reliance, I succeeded only (working by flashlight) in opening the connection to the town supply, underground in the pasture on the far side of the driveway, as well as the main valve in the downstairs kitchen: water began pouring not only from all the faucets that had been opened to drain the system the previous winter, but also from stopcocks located here and there on walls and ceilings throughout the house. I had to turn the whole thing off and spend a wet night of drought before I could make contact with a plumber.

It occurred to me that the electricity had been running long enough to burn out the empty hot-water tank. I went downstairs, shut off the main switch, and was instantly back in 1493 A.D.

I checked my watch. Everyone else in the civilized world (i.e., France) should now be on the waning edge of lunch, replete and somnolent and therefore at my mercy. I telephoned M. Joffroy’s, four miles down the road, and apologized to Mme. Joffroy for the interruption.

“Ah,” Mme. Joffroy said. I was in France? Good. And I had got into the house this time? Good. There was a problem. Since last winter, the key had been with the plumber, who had given it, as instructed, to the femme de ménage, who in turn had disappeared into the countryside. Therefore, what could the plumber do? It was a good thing I had brought my key, and “all is going well with your family?”

Absconding into the countryside with the house key did not sound like the responsible woman I had met last summer, I said.

Ah, but she was not the one. That one had gone. No one knew where she was. It was another one.

The practical voice of conscience, which often sounded like Julia’s, whispered something in my ear that I refused to listen to. Instead, I telephoned M. Le Planquay, the plumber. He was at home, at table, and spoken for by Mme. Le Planquay, who had her own explanation for the nonexistence of running water in the house, somewhat different from Mme. Joffroy’s but with the same sad ending. But knowing that it was now possible to get inside, she promised to send a gars tout de suite.

I followed the plumber’s gars (workman/stripling) around the house when he came chittering up in the bright-yellow vehicle in which he had been returning from lunch to whatever job he was on. I remembered his car from the previous year, but it now bore a new trophy on its aerial, a woman’s frilly garter of the kind Americans fling at wedding receptions. This was the same man who the summer before had transformed the worst end of the useless upstairs passage closet between bathroom and billiard room into a shower, eventually completing the job by laying tiles directly over the closet door, glass panes and all. One of my hopes for the future was that no one would ever attempt to open the door from the other side.

The gars and I shook hands and agreed about the weather. He was a young man, though already well seasoned in his trade and out of the apprentice stage, fairly short and stocky, with an inch of cigarette living on the right corner of his bottom lip. He let me watch what he did, both of us recognizing that his livelihood was not at risk: it would take years of apprenticeship before I could do this job myself, even supposing I had any aptitude for it. I might come to own this plumbing, but I would never master it. Starting the water involved running back and forth between the house and two underground valves in the pasture, dashing from the wood room on the northwest end of the ground floor to the furnace room on the southwest end, then to the laundry room, the downstairs kitchen, the upstairs kitchen, and the bathrooms on the first and second floors, then finally to the water heater (again in the furnace room). The house even boasted valves where no one would have thought to look for pipes—a strange feature in a structure in which all the walls were solid, and nothing could be concealed, plumbing and electricity being very recent additions. We had installed the present systems only at the end of the summer of 1968, intending them to serve as a temporary measure.

The gars, while stopping this cock and releasing that valve, congratulated me on my not having blown up the hot-water heater. He finished, wished me joy of my water and a long prolongation of the good weather, and chittered back down the driveway in his little yellow car. Now that I had running water, I felt I had abolished the dark ages. Civilization would be assured once I had tea. I put the kettle on.