13 - And Then There Were Two

For some reason, if you mention 'French builders' to people it seems to strike fear into their hearts. They go pale and start having 'Vietnam Vet-style' flashbacks, recounting their experiences with a due sense of horror and injustice. I think it's unfair. Just marrying the words 'French' and 'builder' seems to have become some sort of comic shorthand for truculence and laziness, but in my experience they are no worse or better than builders anywhere. All builders are tempted by the big jobs and like diva-esque supermodels 'won't get out of bed' for trifling ventures. They'll generally take on too much work and spread themselves thin enough to delay your project while at the same time finding hidden extras that bump up the original quote. This is the same the world over.

We had had a loft converted to a bedroom just after we moved in and invited, as is recommended, three quotes for the work. One of them didn't turn up and one was such a gibbering wreck we felt sorry for him – just not sorry enough to give him the work. The third, Bernard Butard, did turn up and didn't lack confidence. An enormous, jolly-faced man, he had the manner of making us feel like he was doing us a favour with our combles aménageables (loft conversion) and that actually he had a number of chateaux on the go but could probably fit this mere bagatelle into his hectic schedule. He did, and it was over-budget and overdue, but the finished room was superb. Butard was still the only player in town and so, knowing his lackadaisical approach to deadlines, we had time to play with, time to iron out the details of what we were actually proposing to teach at our 'school'.

However, before the New Year could properly begin we first had to get through 'January the Fourth'. January 4 is a special day in our house; it's the day we moved to France, it's Natalie's birthday and it's Samuel's birthday too. Unbelievably, Samuel was born on Natalie's thirtieth birthday, in the same hospital she was born in and delivered by the same midwife. That one fact goes a long way to explaining my personality traits: I am a control freak because the singular, most important event of my life up to that point – the birth of my first child – felt pre-ordained, an event guided by something else and to which I was essentially an irrelevance. Nonsense I know, but it explains why I've tried to control everything ever since.

The feeling, absurd though it is, that they were born on the same day and therefore carry the whiff of 'sorcery' about them is difficult to suppress. The fact that every year I get congratulated for 'giving my wife a child' on her thirtieth birthday is actually a bit creepy too and makes me feel like a pawn in a wider game. And though I'm aware that most men could shrug off these coincidences with nonchalance; I hear the soundtrack from The Omen.

And once again the biblical portents for this year were looming particularly large.

It seemed to have been raining since Boxing Day – not just drizzle but heavy, build-an-ark rain and strong winds. The river Cher, the left tributary of the Loire and at a wide point here, is about 400 metres from the house and its banks had burst. It tends to do this every year anyway, but normally towards the back end of winter when the water table has taken four or five months of deluge, certainly not at the turn of the year. The playground in town, built rather optimistically on the river bank, was almost completely underwater, with just the top of the swings and slide showing; a depressing post-apocalyptic vision, like the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes.

Junior of course loves this kind of weather, facing it down like some Nordic god, angrily whinnying at the elements. I can't help laughing at him when he's like this which only makes him angrier. As usual, he came marching up to me at the fence, snorting away like a bluff old colonel, but then for some reason curiously ran out of steam and actually avoided eye-contact with me, which he'd never done before. Maybe I'm finally wearing him down, I thought, and then he snorted in my face like a spitting camel. I don't know what makes him as irritable as he is. A friend of ours suggested that we should give him mint tea, as if that would help. Frankly it sounded about as helpful as trying to massage his chi in the mornings, or re-arranging his stable to harness a more positive feng shui.

'Mint tea, you say?' I was unable to disguise my scepticism and caught her boyfriend's equally cynical eye.

'Yes,' she replied without a shred of doubt and held her mug up to his mouth.

The next five minutes was bedlam. He dipped his tongue into the mug and all was peace for a couple of seconds, then his lips curled right back beyond his teeth and he let out a primeval and very unhorse-like howl, stamped his feet, reared up at us as we scattered and fled the paddock and then went galloping off. He hasn't really been the same with me since, clearly holding me responsible for the whole debacle. Whatever properties mint tea actually has, turning a horse into a permanent Mr Hyde is not one of its best.

It's not just Junior, though, who was affected by the weather – we were all going a little stir crazy, even those who were used to it. Jean-Paul owns a farm nearby and he also supplies us with hay for the horses and pousse d'épine (a homemade liqueur made from blackthorn shoots) for aperitif. From the start he and his extended family – he is Brigitte the nourrice's father – have made us feel welcome and helped us out when we needed it, but he's knocking on is Jean-Paul, a dead ringer for Albert Steptoe, and his behaviour is sometimes, erm, erratic. As such, it wasn't entirely a surprise when he wandered unannounced into the lounge just after New Year looking for his waders – what was more of a shock was when he asked me to help him put them on.

It took me nearly ten minutes just to get his boots off, but the process of actually getting him into the waders, which clearly weren't his as they were at least five sizes too big for him, was one of the most undignified halfhours of my life. This short, stocky Frenchman barking orders at me to pull harder and do it this way, not like that, like this, hold that, not there! I felt like a serf getting his knight ready for battle and in the end he looked utterly ridiculous; the massive pair of waders made him look like the cruel victim of a shrinking experiment or a small boy in his dad's clothes. I pointed out to him that the waders wouldn't be very effective in water because they weren't the right size, something I immediately regretted saying as I suspected he'd agree and ask me to get him out of them. He looked at me like I was an idiot. 'I'm not going anywhere near water!' he said, rolling his eyes at my obvious stupidity. 'I'm going to kill a rat!'

'Oh,' I said, 'there was a mouse in my car the other day.' Again, he just stared at me. I wasn't making it up, I know it sounds like one of those sentences you say in a foreign language because they are the only words you know like 'the castle is open on Sundays' or 'I have a blue bicycle', but it was true, I had had a mouse in the car the other day. It lives under the bonnet and has eaten through the heat lining and some cables, but I hadn't told Natalie for obvious reasons and Jean-Paul wasn't that interested either.

He leaned closer to me and narrowed his eyes, 'a rat!' he seethed and spread his hands out to show how big it was. He cackled, said a cheery 'Merci' and waddled off to face what I can only imagine was a quite ferocious rodent and leaving me utterly baffled by the whole episode.

By now, I was ready for a lie down, but there was a lot to do preparing for the next day, what with birthdays and the first day back at school after the Christmas holidays.

'Ian, come and look at this.' My heart sank. It was the way Natalie said it. I knew it wasn't good, it wasn't an 'I've found a four-leafed clover' come and look at this, it was more of a 'there's something amiss here' come and look at this. Had I known then that it was a 'take a look at Junior's dangle' come and look at this, I wouldn't have gone and looked at that at all. 'I think there's something wrong with his willy,' she said.

Firstly, 'willy' seems highly inappropriate to describe a muscle that when fully extended, and it often is, the randy old sod, is actually thicker and longer than my arm. 'Willy' suggests something cute and manageable, not this brute of an appendage. And secondly, Junior tries to attack me when I approach him with food for heaven's sake; the chances of him lying back and thinking of England, or France or Norway for that matter, as I try to get a closer look at his love baguette were pretty slim, so I kept my distance.

'Looks alright,' I said, watching Junior watching me.

'Hmm,' said Natalie, 'looks like it needs cleaning to me. Anyway, look at this as well.' She pointed to Junior's rump where there were a series of cuts on each side, 'Ultime has them too.' My first thought was that we had some kind of horse-arse equivalent of crop circles, something other-worldly and unfathomable, but Natalie knew better having already done some investigating. The horses, clearly feeling that their sex life needed a lift and presumably having watched Pierrot 'get off' by rubbing himself on anything and everything, had taken to doing the same on tree stumps and had cut themselves in the process to such an extent that their wounds needed cleaning and treating.

Natalie stomped off leaving me eye to eye with Junior in the stable. 'Where are you going?' I asked.

'I'm going to google how to clean these wounds. And cleaning his "thing".' She shouted over her shoulder leaving me and Junior for the first time in our relationship near to some kind of understanding.

'She's going to search the Internet for horses' willies,' I said to Junior matter-of-factly.

'Yup,' he seemed to reply.

The rain just wouldn't relent; even the pond in our garden had reached worryingly high levels. In the summer it looks like an asteroid crater with a puddle at the bottom, due to the water table in that part of the garden being quite low, but that didn't stop our predecessors filling the thing with goldfish. Every year they seemed to 'hibernate' in the mud at the bottom, the water being completely frozen, and re-emerge bigger in the summer. That wasn't going to happen this year. The water was high enough to have engulfed the bench that Natalie had erected and a heron had feasted on the entire fish population, no doubt this being the first year he could see the things. Meanwhile the current in the Cher must have been making river fishing more dangerous than usual, even for a water bird.

Natalie was surprisingly indifferent to this massacre; I'd assumed that on hearing the news she'd be straight off to the local Fish Rescue Centre and come back with an angry, maladjusted carp or something, but no. She'd been oddly quiet about animal adoption over Christmas and the New Year, and it left me uneasy, like something was in the offing.

Despite everyone in the family, Natalie's parents included, being aware of my jumpiness around this time of year and the fact that the weather itself was depressing, it was apparently 'no way any excuse' for the quite 'appalling' birthday cards I had bought. And to be fair, they were bloody awful. Despite these days of Twittermob outrage and gender sensitivity, I'm willing to go out on a limb here: women are good at choosing cards and men aren't, simple as that. In the same way that packing a car boot effectively is purely a male preserve, women have a nose for the right card and also have the common sense to buy 'blank message' cards if, as is normally the case, the printed message is so cloying it makes you feel like you've been licked all over by a slobbery dog.

The French don't really do cards. A neighbour popped round for my birthday just before Christmas and despite being there specifically for my birthday she still asked what all the cards were for.

'Well, they're for Ian's birthday!' Natalie said.

'Oh,' she said, 'why?'

I'm definitely with the French on this one. The proliferation of 'celebration' days just to sell more cards is ridiculous; birthdays are understandable, Father's Day and Mother's Day tolerable, Grandparent's Day laughable and things like Secretary's Day utterly risible. No doubt in the Hallmark head office they're constantly sending each other cards congratulating themselves on such a preposterously successful wheeze. The cards that are on offer in French shops are pretty thin on the ground and pretty ropy too, but we have an English background, so saying to your wife on her birthday that you didn't get her a card because you couldn't find one simply doesn't wash. Believe me, I've tried.

In hindsight, though, I did outdo myself. I spent ages in Super U trying to choose the damn things, but after a while you just become card blind and all judgement (what little I have in these matters) flies out of the window. For instance, Natalie's card appeared to have traffic lights on it, glittery traffic lights, and a picture of the kind of flowers that give flora a bad name – garish, gaudy things like inbred orchids from the wrong side of the tracks; the kind of flowers that would wear a low-cut top while working behind a bar, all wrinkly décolletage.

He was on the cusp of his early teens, a mature and sensible boy, serious-minded beyond his tender years, but he was on that rickety bridge between being a little boy and thinking he's an adult. As a result, choosing his card was always going to be a thorny issue. I didn't want to patronise him with pictures of clowns and balloons but neither did I want to weigh him down with images of champagne flutes and ties. I thought I'd chosen well; he'd recently developed serious computer skills, making his own films and uploading them to YouTube and so on, so I thought a laptop-themed card was ideal. It was only when I got it home that I realised that a picture of an early, massive laptop with an obviously adult hand hovering over the keyboard actually suggested a 'Beware of Predatory Grown-Ups on the Internet' campaign rather than being a 'Hey! It's Your Birthday!' effort.

In the end though, none of it really mattered.

As usual, I had January 4 all planned: Samuel and Maurice would be at school until late afternoon and Natalie and I were to have lunch and spend the day with Thérence trawling various garden centres. I was in the kitchen that morning and I heard Natalie screaming down to me that Toby was barking. I didn't think anything of it as Toby, when not being constantly surprised by his own tail, barks a lot – I just assumed it was the postman arriving. I went out to find Toby in something of a state and Natalie shouting from a first-floor window that one of the cats had been hit by a car, but that she didn't know which one or where it was. I found the poor cat by our own car near the gate and it had clearly been hit so hard that it had been thrown almost back to the house. I could see no obvious signs of injury, though, and the poor thing was still breathing so I ran off to get its bed to rush it to the vet. By the time I got back it was dead and Natalie was holding it in her arms sobbing.

We live in a very rural area, but almost because of that the road is more dangerous because there are fewer traffic police around; the traffic might be less frequent but, certain in the knowledge that they won't be caught speeding, cars drive at ridiculous speeds. But worse, worst of all, it was Fox that had died, and Fox was Samuel's cat.

Telling your son on his birthday that his beloved cat has been run over and killed is a truly gut-wrenching thing to have to do. We toyed briefly with the idea of not telling him until the day after, but that would never have worked as he would have asked where Fox was. We were all there, Natalie and me and her parents too. He was distraught. He's since said that he just wanted his birthday to end there and then, that he'll never forget Fox and that he will always think of him on that day. Like I say, he's a serious-minded boy, mature beyond his years and I believe him. How could you not now associate your birthday with this event? For the rest of his life a little part of him will always be sad on his birthday, and on that day he will always remember Fox.

Maybe I was projecting too many of my own feelings on to Samuel, in my mind saddling him with a neverending grief that would resurface every year. Taking my anger and bitterness at the injustice of life and the world and passing it on to my first born. Maybe. But it was so difficult to watch my beloved son, so young, hurting so much and on his special day. And like his dad, he's not one to let things go.

In many ways he actually dealt with the aftermath better than I did, trying to be positive and remember the good times with Fox rather than the end, though he did take to wearing Fox's collar which was a bit of a concern. He looked a bit like a trainee emo, wearing a sullen expression and a collar, though it was on his wrist, and it was luminous with a bell. All the cats have bells on their collars to give the local bird population a fighting chance. With Samuel having taken to wearing the now sadly unemployed collar, it was difficult to tell whether the remaining cats were upstairs wrestling somewhere or if Samuel was just energetically venting his anger and frustration on the Wii. Wearing the collar seemed to give him some kind of catharsis – he took it off after a week or two – and maybe Fox's death actually affected me more in the long run.

The winters seemed to be getting longer and harder with every year. I was leaving home early, and in the dark, to arrive somewhere else in the dark to stay in bland hotels and make other people laugh. I left home for work on more than one occasion in tears, wrenching myself away from my loved ones and every time with dark thoughts in my head, ridiculously, about whether I'd ever even see them again. A cat had died, but for a time (as the constant merry-go-round of travel took its toll) I built it into so much more as Fox's death left its mental mark on all of us. It also left its physical scars too. You try digging a grave in frozen ground when it's minus 10°C.