LITMIR.BIZ

       FIVE

      Until we found Le Haut Bois, me and Joy were living on the campsite at Putanges. It was the summer of 1994 when Normandy was green with rain and convoys of old British Army trucks and American jeeps that had come over for the D-Day fiftieth anniversary. Solemn old men in berets, anciens combattants spattered in medals, saluted at war memorials lined with bombshells painted grey. Shy Welsh boys dressed like soldiers in fatigues stood outside cafes in La Ferté Macé plucking up the courage to go in and order a beer. The occupied French waved as we drove by, just coincidence that our old green hardtop was army surplus. We soon demobbed, but something between the exaggerated welcome, the false wartime solidarity and the distorted mission of our lives kept us there and we outstayed our welcome.

      The bocage was like a parody of its own past because every commune was a lost world. We drove in and out of eras which had vanished without trace in Britain. The past sat there like undrained land. We saw farmyards unchanged for four hundred years slipping into ruin, the creepers taking over, the discarded implements and machinery left where the horse dropped dead or the steam bailer clapped out. In corners of these yards, opposite the old farmhouses, were the new pavillons, those beige rendered, fixed-price bungalow kits the old couples had always dreamed of since the war. The farm sat like the rubbish now, strewn in the yard and on the land, waiting for ruination.

      The campsite was a one star municipal but by July it was like an overspill from the ZUP and HLMs, the council flats of Falaise and Argentan. Family caravans linked with orange awnings, the TVs on all day, the men still going to work in the Moulinex factory. In the evening they’d be in their tattoos and yellow shorts, bonnets up on smoky Simcas, revving up while their fat wives tipped bags of crisps into bowls and fetched sticky bottles from striped orange kitchenettes. Their dogs pissed up everyone’s wheels and their cats were kept on bungee leads skewered to the ground.

      We were pitched under an old beech tree twenty yards from the river Orne for seven francs a day. It seemed like the right place for Joy to forget Africa, at least till she decided where she wanted to go next. She’d sit outside under the beech tree reading while I went perch fishing in the gorge below the dam at Rabodanges. In the evenings we’d boil our tinned ratatouille on the petrol stove and eat goat’s cheese with cider from the farmer’s barrel. Then we’d stroll slowly round the village, almost door to door, like we were counting the stones on the walls, smelling the omelettes and the onion soup. We talked to cats and little girls and nodded to stubby farmers tumbling out the Bar des Sport. We lingered with our beer at the Pot d’Etain where the patron had a handlebar moustache as big as a ferret and all his cycling trophies were in a row behind the bar.

      One evening we were in the Grande Rue, a narrow curving street with tiny stone houses built round boulders big as the rooms inside. The backs plunged two storeys down to gardens which ran alongside the river. We could see them from the campsite, like an escarpment, or cave dwelling. One of the houses was a small dark office with the round, gold sign of a notaire hanging like a monocle from the wall. In the window there were faded colour photocopies of old farmyards, corps des fermes, hovels and ruins, all from a time-warp. Nobody wanted them and the pictures had faded out until you could hardly see the prices. They read like old money, two, three, four thousand pounds. No toilet, no water, no telephone. No comfort, it said. But there were bread ovens, oak beams, cider presses, rabbit hutches and kitchen gardens, cellars, attics, wells, springs, cider-apple trees, pear orchards, bee hives, stables, pig-houses and smokeries.

      We toured other villages looking for these parttime notaires’ études, one dusty window, the gold paint peeling off the hanging sign. We found more faded ruins and half the houses in these villages had an A Vendre sign nailed on the front door like a wreath for the dead. We peered through crusted windows into kitchens with stone sinks, post office calendars for 1968, black and yellow linoleum, straw chairs with half the legs gnawed off by woodworm. There was always a neighbour fussing over potted fuchsias round the step, sweeping our footprints away behind us, hanging the wet floor-cloth from a nail. Old women in housecoats and cardigans came out to tell us they didn’t know the price, or if they did they said four million old francs.

      We bought survey maps and drove all day after cheap houses. We found them along dusty brown lanes which crossed courtyards and wound between barns and cider orchards and pasture. Hamlets where every house was made of mud and lay empty, the grey net curtains like dead eyes, dried up flies caught along their edges.

      At some point we should’ve asked ourselves what we were doing, who we were, what we expected to become by slipping into skin shed by dead peasants. Until, one evening we drove out to Le Haut Bois, looking for the fermette à rénover we’d seen advertised in a window, with outbuildings, 4,964 square metres of land, pasture with pear trees, 85,000 francs. We saw a bicycle leaning against a statue of Our Lady in the hedgerow, a little man in blue overalls slashing the grass along the verge, flattening the buttercups and cowslips. Joy said we were looking for the place that was for sale. He scratched his head and looked at the nearest hovel sticking from the brambles and vines. That’s for sale, he said, and so is that, and that. Half of the commune was for sale. Everyone was dead.

      —Do you want to buy a house?

      —Yes, we said.

      The first time we’d admitted it.

      —You’re going to live here? he said.

      —We do live here, Joy said.

      By August we were lodging in the Grande Rue with Widow Cardonel while hesitating over signing the promise to buy Le Haut Bois. Madame Cardonel was so old her skin hung like a curtain. She dressed in black and put all her remaining strength into polishing cold metal, ringing out dishclothes and pouncing on infractions of the rules.

      Our room was upstairs and faced the river. We had the big brass Cardonel marriage bed but she’d locked every drawer and cupboard, taken the candles from the Virgin’s votary and told us not to run any taps. She lived downstairs, sleeping in the front room. She rose at six, took a nap in the afternoon and went to bed at 9.30 like clockwork.

      She called me le monsieur. My job from the outset was the fetching of water from the river in different coloured buckets. Blue for the washing-up, red for cooking, white for personal. Drinking water came from the supermarket. She allowed us one bath a week in the same water. One morning I eased the tap on in the upstairs bathroom to brush my teeth, but Madame Cardonel was banging on the ceiling with her cane before I’d even wet my toothbrush.

      A nurse came once a week to give her a bath. I’d fetch one bucket and hoist it onto the bottled gas to warm, not boil. The nurse sponged her down in a galvanised trough in Madame’s bedroom. Joy asked her why she didn’t use eau de ville. The river is water, she said.

      We cooked for ourselves, but Madame laid three places in the kitchen on the plastic tablecloth with its scenes of pots and pans. She’d use her hand like a snow plough on the table, chasing all the breadcrumbs into her palm when she’d finished her meal, licking up the crumbs till they were gone. And, when the milk was finished, she’d cut the box with scissors and scrape the milk dew off the insides into her cup. At night she never put the lights on, shuffling about with a little square bike torch she kept in a housecoat pocket.

      Joy did the talking in French. I was still picking up words, like banknotes in the wind. I didn’t know which to start on, chasing one too long and letting the whole sentence blow away. This meant that Madame Cardonel

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