I APOLOGIZED, OF course, and took it like a man when a distinctly pale Brigitte asked whether the customers in my tea room were going to get similar treatment.
As penitence, I spent the afternoon with Michel taking it in turns to scrape the toxic and non-toxic roof tiles. (Yes, who was trying to poison whom round here?)
Brigitte didn’t emerge for the apéro or dinner (for which I subversively cooked pasta with a zero-fresh-vegetable sauce), and Florence said she oughtn’t to be left alone.
‘I can’t come to the Salle des Fêtes with you. I have to stay with Maman.’
‘You’ll come with me, won’t you, Michel?’ I begged.
‘Ah non, ça m’emmerde.’ This kind of thing bores him, literally ‘shits him up’. It’s like ‘faire chier’. The French seem to have real psychological hangovers from their toilet training.
All this meant that I was alone as I wandered up the hill in the purple dusk. Huge mosquitoes tried to headbutt me to the ground and siphon off my blood, but I swatted them out of the way and plodded doggedly onwards and upwards, heading for the pool of halogen light around the Salle des Fêtes in the centre of the village.
The Salle looked as if it had been a gift from Soviet Russia in about 1970. It was modernist and proud of it, with glass walls jutting out of the ground at various angles, like the trajectory of plutonium particles in the first milliseconds after a nuclear explosion.
The main hall covered an area about the size of three or four tennis courts, but because of the angular design there seemed to be only about ten square feet in the centre where you could actually organize a fete. Through the windows I could see that this area was taken up with a long plywood trestle table covered in bottles.
I recognized all the faces I could see – they were the people Monsieur Ribout had taken me to visit. The only names I could remember were Henri and Ginette.
As soon as I walked through the double doors I was greeted with another of their ‘aah’s. This one started out with one voice and grew as other people saw what the aahing was about and joined in.
How come they’re all so pleased to see me? I wondered. Surely it wasn’t because they’d heard about my murder attempt on Brigitte?
‘Pol!’ Ribout got up and took me by the arm. His dog was snapping at his heels. The two of them shepherded me over to the table and I went all round shaking hands. The women shook my hands, too, presumably because I was too young and foreign to kiss. I was the youngest by at least thirty years.
It was swelteringly hot in this abstract goldfish bowl – the sun had been heating the air since early May, and now at least ten people were replacing the oxygen with smoke. No one else seemed to be sweating, though. The men looked very comfortable in their Sunday-best shirtsleeves, and a couple of the women were even wearing light cardigans. I was in T-shirt, jeans and flip-flops, but feeling that everything except the flip-flops was extraneous.
We raised glasses of warm red wine and toasted the Queen and the memory of Princess Diana (or ‘Leddy Dee’ as they called her).
I had a few conversations along the lines of ‘I expect it’s not as hot as this in England’ and ‘so you live in Paris, do you?’ while Monsieur Ribout looked on benevolently, as if I was a stray puppy that was putting on a good display of tail-wagging and was about to find itself a new home, just like his Retriever had done.
When he finally joined in the conversation, everyone stopped talking and listened.
‘Do you see that house across the road? That used to be the café,’ he said. ‘And the commune’ (the village) ‘has just bought it. We’re going to open it as a café again. We’ve got the licence.’
There were nods of approval, and someone reminisced about the last owner, who, if I understood correctly, had hanged himself in the back garden.
‘And we have a little shop that’s open in the mornings. But we have the tabac licence so we’re going to find someone who’ll open it all day.’
‘And Sunday mornings,’ a woman at the end of the table chipped in.
‘And Sunday mornings,’ Ribout confirmed.
I drank a sip of congratulations, and felt it instantly shoot out of my pores as sweat.
‘We have a Dutchman living in the village, but he doesn’t try to integrate. He comes in summer, and at Easter, sometimes at Christmas, but he drives here in his camping car and he brings everything with him. We see him unload his cans of beer, his packets of cheese.’
‘And his PQ,’ someone added, and got a big laugh. PQ was toilet roll, I knew. Short for papier cul, arse paper.
‘But the English aren’t like that,’ Ribout went on. ‘There are some English families over in Tulle, and they live in their houses most of the year. And they buy local cheese and wine.’
‘And PQ,’ the same man added, and got a bigger laugh.
‘They integrate,’ Ribout said. ‘This is why the Dordogne still has its markets. The English even send their children to the local school.’
A circle of smiling faces seemed to suggest that the healthy state of the Dordogne’s economy was all thanks to me.
‘So we are happy that you have decided to come here. You are the first, but as soon as there is one English person in the village, others will come. We know this.’
The faces were still smiling at me, but my expression of goodwill to all men had faded ever so slightly. What was Ribout saying here?
‘We are sure that you will find what you are looking for in one of the houses you have visited.’
‘Or fields,’ Henri said, raising his glass to me.
‘Yes,’ Ribout said, ‘if you prefer to construct, I can guarantee that you will have no problem with the building permission, if you see what I mean . . .’ Chuckles all round. ‘The same goes if you wish to renovate to your taste in the English style, it will be no problem. And of course it is so much cheaper here than in the Dordogne.’
They were all looking expectantly at me. I’m sure my half-smile was stuck to my face like a pickled anchovy, just hanging there waiting to fall off and reveal the grimace of horror beneath.
Strangely, my first thought was not, How could they think I’d want to spend the rest of my life in this place? Because I could see the upside of living in a village where the biggest sources of stress were Who shall I have the apéro with today? and What the hell am I going to do with five tons of unfreezeable fruit and vegetables?
No, my first thought was, I’ll kill that Brigitte. She set me up, inviting her neighbours round to sell me their field and then getting the mayor to take me on an estate agent’s tour of the region.
But immediately afterwards – and this is where the horror kicked in – came the thought, Florence. That first evening, Henri and Ginette must have thought, bingo, un Anglais, and improvised from there. Otherwise they’d have taken me down to the field in the daytime, wouldn’t they? You don’t sell a house or (I supposed) a field when all you can see is its current population of moths and mosquitoes.
Florence must have known what was going on when she walked me down that lane. And when I went off for the afternoon to be force-fed strawberries by every farmer who ever voted for Ribout. And she must have known what was going to happen tonight. I doubted very much whether every boyfriend she’d brought chez Maman had got a civic reception like this one.
She also knew that I’d tried – and failed spectacularly – to buy a house in the country the previous year.
This was the biggest case I’d ever known, and I have known a few, of dropping your boyfriend in the merde.
‘Merci, merci,’ I mumbled, clinging desperately on to that anchovy of a smile. I took a big gulp of wine, and let Ribout refill my glass. ‘I am very . . . touched. Your words . . .’ I couldn’t think of a verb to finish the sentence. ‘Your words really . . . correspond.’
Everyone nodded happily. Maybe it meant something after all.
‘But I must return to the house now,’ I said. ‘Brigitte is a little bit ill.’ Thank God I poisoned her, I thought. What a brilliant excuse.
‘Oh no!’ So they hadn’t heard about the verveine incident yet.
‘Yes, a mystery illness. We don’t know what it is.’
I stood, grinning as if a dentist was trying to photograph my newly fitted dentures, and shook everyone’s hand farewell.
Outside in the warm but smokeless air, I poked at my phone, speed-dialling Alexa. At that moment she just seemed like the most sensible, and most neutral, person I knew. The only person who would understand what was going on.
‘You are stuck in Corrèze?’ she asked, and I could hear the amusement in her voice.
‘Oh yes.’ I headed out of sight of the Salle des Fêtes and told her everything. Not just the house-buying stuff but the wet marks in the bathroom, my inability to pick the correct size of courgettes or dig the right sort of hole, and the attempted poisoning.
I was halfway down the hill by the time I’d finished, and I stopped walking so as not to lose the signal.
‘It is simple,’ Alexa said. ‘Both my parents have been in therapy since before Sigmund Freud’ (she pronounced it ‘frod’) ‘invented therapy. So I know. Liquid is sexuality. The wet marks in the bathroom, even the herbal tea, it is a sexual exchange.’
‘Exchange? No way.’
‘Yes. She herself is the house, the bathroom floor. And the courgettes are phallic, of course.’ She wasn’t joking either. ‘The digging? It is sex, that’s for sure.’
‘No, it was just digging a hole, Alexa. With a spade, not my—’
‘A big, hard spade?’
I thought back to the shovel’s long, straight handle. My God, if it had been painted pink it couldn’t have been any clearer.
‘And she said I wasn’t digging in the right place. Oh no.’
‘Oh, yes, she wants you to dig with your spade somewhere else. Like between her legs.’
‘Alexa, stop, please.’
‘I’m sorry, it is very clear to me.’
‘OK, OK. But it’s all over now, she doesn’t want me to dig any more. She’s got me cleaning moss off the barn roof. So she’s calmed down, right?’
Alexa thought about this. ‘How do you clean this roof?’
‘With a knife.’
‘Hmm. She is probably fantasizing that you are shaving her pubic hairs.’
‘Oh God save me.’
‘What?’
‘Now she wants me to hose it down.’
‘Yes, you see, it is so clear. She wants you to shave her and then spray her with your hose. Or maybe, when your courgettes are big enough for her—’
‘No, please, Alexa, stop! This is all bullshit. They’re just random household tasks. Picking vegetables, digging in the garden, cleaning a roof. Totally normal country stuff.’ Though I had to admit that wandering around in a see-through nightdress and accidentally-on-purpose getting a faceful of my dongler were not quite so normal. ‘But now that I’ve tried to poison her, she’ll take it as a kind of subconscious message, won’t she? Leave me alone or I’ll kill you?’
‘Yes, don’t worry, I expect it will stop now.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘And apart from this, everything is going well?’ Alexa laughed. ‘Oh, poor Paul.’ She sounded almost nostalgic.
‘Yeah, yeah, what about you?’
‘I’m coming back to Paris in two or three weeks from now,’ she said. ‘I will work on a film.’
‘You’re making films now as well as taking photos?’
‘Trying. This is a – how do you say – work experience? On a real feature film.’
‘Wow.’
‘They’re filming some scenes in Paris and I will be an assistant. You could come along one day. But I don’t suppose you’ll be in Paris?’
‘I don’t know. What if they won’t let me leave this place?’
She laughed as if I was joking.
When I got back to the house, things were in uproar. All the lights were on, and the front and back doors were wide open. Florence and Michel were running about with cloths and mops.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s Maman,’ Florence said. She was wet and soapy from the knees down. ‘She got up to turn on the washing machine and forgot to put the hose in the shower basin. The machine has just pumped ninety litres of soapy water over the bathroom floor. It has gone down into the cellar, too, and soaked all the vegetables you picked.’
‘Ninety litres of warm soapy liquid? Out of a hose? All over my courgettes?’ Brigitte had gone into Freudian meltdown.
That was it, I decided – as soon as the water was mopped up, we were getting out of the house. Out of the village. Out of Corrèze. Somewhere where there were no spades, no mossy roofs and no courgettes. Definitely no courgettes.