Deep France (3 page)

It snowed this morning, big fluffy flakes whirling in from the north. At first I thought they were falling leaves. They didn’t settle. This afternoon the sky cleared – mean­ing
huge grey and white clouds came surging over the intense heavenly blue above them – and when I went into Sauveterre to get my
Times
the landscape was bathed in rich
golden sunlight. The trees are redder and browner every day, burnished by the sinking sun. The mountains are clear in the distance, snow-capped now. I arrange the room which is to be
my office so that I can see the Pyrenees from the desk. My neighbours, I notice, have all their shutters firmly closed.

Sauveterre is my nearest town. It is a jewel. The name means ‘safe ground’, describing it in the lawless early Middle Ages, when its huge grey-stone fortress was impregnable and
guarded the road south to Spain. What’s left of the fortress is a grey-stone battlement, sweeping along the top of a cliff that overlooks the river, and a mighty, half-ruined tower. Huge
magnolia trees grow wild along the bottom of the cliff, and half a medieval bridge spans the water. Behind the tower of the Romanesque church the main square opens out, in front of a gracious
seventeenth-century Hotel de Ville.

Sauveterre’s fate has always been to under-achieve its own magnificence. There are two beautiful hotels overlooking the river; one, the Hostellerie du Chateau, was shut because the
original owner has died and so many cousins have inherited the business that they can’t decide what to do with it. The other is also shut.

A la Maison

The house is sorted now, and ready for my books, plus clothes and the household stuff I couldn’t live without, which will come in a container next month. The workshop is
stuffed to its beams with macrame plant-pot holders and fringed lampshades. The French beds are against the wall as they were intended to be, the floorboards gleaming, the walls bare. I can see our
friends in the place. I have a little white bedroom with
a dressing table and my clothes folded on shelves. This feels like my home now.

I’ve put our family photographs on the wall, together with a couple of fine paintings by Glynn, and the framed cover of
Variety
, the American show-business newspaper, on which my
name appears. I am very, very proud of having been on the front page of
Variety
. The story refers to Tom Cruise, whose production company bought an option on my last novel last year. They
bought it to turn into a film star­ring Nicole Kidman. Then Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman got divorced. The option is still current, but I suspect that all I will have to show for it is my name
in
Variety
and the memory of being briefly brushed by stardust from Tinsel­town.

On Sunday, somebody spoke to me at last. There had been a hard frost, overnight temperatures down to –3°, followed by a glorious sunny morning. I set off to walk around the village
with my camera. My neighbour over the road smiled at me as he passed in his car.

All the countryside is white with frost, every bramble leaf dusted with diamonds. Everywhere the noise of falling leaves, pattering on the branches on their way down. The hedges are foaming with
yellow-green mistletoe.

I met a woman on the road, a farmer walking down with her dog to move her cows to another field. We chatted for a few minutes about the weather. She’d found an icicle as long as that
(three centimetres) on her tap and was glad she’d taken her flowers in or they would have been dead this morning. I’m amazed that I can remember enough French to get through this
conversation. The dog’s fur was hanging in dun-coloured dreadlocks.

Orriule

The village is scattered over two small hills, and divides into the realms of body and spirit, or church and state. Maison Bergez is near the top of the temporal zone. There
are two houses above it, one just over the brow of the hill, which I can hardly see, and my immediate neighbour at the end of the field above the garden, a large, handsome farmhouse with palm trees
and oleanders outside.

Downhill from Maison Bergez is a pottery, with a showroom full of blue-and-white plates decorated with a cherry pattern and stoneware bowls glazed in a brilliant metallic turquoise, the
signature style of the potter. Behind the pottery is another business that is dependent on the natural deposit of clay in the hillside, a factory whose speciality is medieval-style roof tiles.
About twenty people seem to work here, judging by the cars, but it is well hidden by pines and cypress trees, so when you look back at Orriule from the next hill, you can hardly see the factory and
the warehouse at all.

Opposite the pottery is the
mairie
, a new building, clean-walled and grey-shuttered, plus the post box, the phone box, and the new village hall, the
salle
multiactivités
, essential in every small village because the national budget for rural regeneration has to be spent on something. The hall is one storey, connecting at right angles to
the village school, with the
fronton
, the court on which pelota is played, filling the open space between them.

The noise of a ball being knocked about the pelota court by an idle boy was to become one of the most evocative sounds of Orriule in the months to come. The slow, echoing
ka-pok, ka-pok
is to the Béarn what the smack of leather on willow is to an English village. Pelota is a Basque game which exists in many different variations, most of which are
like
squash played with wicker scoops instead of racquets. Orriule is not a Basque village, of course, but pelota, like many other Basque institutions, seems to offer an enhanced sense of identity to
the entire region, so when the hall was built the pelota court was considered an absolute necessity.

Beyond these buildings are the farms, their barns spilling down the hillsides in attitudes of dilapidation. Every old building is crowned with a Bearnais roof, ending in fantastic pointed eaves:
Gothic, fanciful, the roofs of the tumbledown cottages of the poor woodcutters in the stories of Europe’s childhood. The house walls are of the local white limestone, rendered with
crépi
which, after several centuries of weather, mud and cow shit, takes on a pale beige hue, the colour which people in Notting Hill pay fortunes to paint mixers to achieve.

You can work out the organic evolution of a Bearnais farm. First, somebody builds a fine stone farmhouse, usually on the shoulder of a hill where he will have a good view of his cows, and plants
a handsome pair of palm trees outside the front door. Then he builds a fine stone barn, usually at right angles, and then a second barn a bit later, usually of a different size and in different
materials. Then the next generation inherit the place, ambitions of grandeur trickle away, and they chuck up the add-ons, the pig sties and the poultry house, with maybe another barn, or a smaller
house for the younger brother, then perhaps a nice concrete all-purpose building, and a tin-roofed lean-to and wood store. After the first hundred years, the whole complex starts to surrender to
gravity, rain, wind and the occasional earthquake, all of which encourage the walls to crumble downhill a few centimetres more each year. The result is chaotic, dilapidated, picturesque and nothing
like the super-neat farms of Normandy, with their matching stable blocks and semicircular gravel drives.

As you keep walking downhill, the next thing you pass is the fish pond and/or reservoir, created by damming a stream
in a hollow of the hillside. There is a small pine wood
behind it on one side, and the rest of the land around it is marshy and covered with tufts of that spiky grass that’s half a reed and always grows where there is underground water. The stream
itself trickles out of a pipe at the foot of the dam, but picks up momentum from ditches feeding into it at the bottom of the valley, and rushes happily away to the south, overhung with alders. It
will eventually hit the bottom of the big valley and run into the big river, the Gave d’Oloron.

Then the road climbs again, up the next hill, which belongs to the church and the spirit. The church looks like not much more than a pile of rocks, a building with vastly thick walls but so tiny
that it is dwarfed by the slabs of porphyry marking the family graves in the minute churchyard. It too stands on the hilltop. I paced out the walls to measure them, allowing for the massive stone
buttress on the downhill side. Twenty-five metres long, with an immaculate tiled roof.

The interior is beautifully plain, white walls rising to a dome over the altar, which is an oak chest carved with Maltese crosses. The pine pews are recent. Against the back wall, in the shadow
of the wooden balcony, stands a line of prie-dieu chairs, every one different, carved in country style from different woods. The copper cover of the font is highly polished, and by the door a bowl
from my neighbour the potter holds the holy water.

Across the road from the church is a very old and largely dead oak tree, its gnarled roots rising clear of the tarmac. The oak was a sacred tree to the Basques, and to the Celts, and the fact
that nobody has tidied up this hulk and turned it into firewood suggests that the tradition has lingered. A half-rotten notice board, with nothing on it, is nailed to the trunk.

I walked down through the village then turned up the hill to Orion, the next village, on the road that runs along a ridge of hills. We are on the pilgrim route to Compostela, and
just outside Orion is a medieval hostel for the faithful who’ve set out to walk over the Pyrenees to the shrine of St James in Compostela, in Spain.

As I passed through a wood I heard birds calling. The notes were rounded and expressive, but much deeper than the call of the doves. I didn’t recognize the sound and wondered what silly
species would advertise itself to predators so noisily. Then a line of birds flew low overhead, about fifty of them, a long ribbon of silhouettes, wing tip to wing tip, rippling across the clear
blue sky above the bare tree tops and calling to each other as they went. The cranes were flying south for the winter.

Not all the wildlife is so majestic, or so far off. Something brown scuttled into the bamboo thicket by the front gate yesterday. Something black shot out of the woodpile into the undergrowth
this morning. It was a rat – there are half-gnawed walnut shells in all the gaps between the logs. I’m not a woman to freak over domestic rodents. I think mice are rather sweet, but
only outside my own living space. Rats really aren’t my style. I decided it was time to let the cats out for a stroll.

Tarmac, old and stiff as he was, was still a deadly hunter. He stalked down the front steps and investigated the garden systematically, spending a lot of time sniffing around the kitchen window.
He made the other two look like amateurs, and they watched him gratefully.

Maison Bergez seemed to have a terrifying case of subsidence. There were huge cracks in all the walls, and the floors sloped in all directions. By local standards, none of this was cause for
concern. However, I was so unused to uneven floors that the first time I got out of the bath I nearly fell over.

My spiritual friend Adrienne had given me her feng shui guide, from which I diagnosed the house as a major disaster zone. The front door jammed and wouldn’t open, nor would
the door to the room that was now my office. Instructed by Adrienne, I had packed away the clutter from the hall and the landing, but feng shui divides a home into areas bringing good
luck to various specific aspects of life, and it seemed that the wealth zone of this house contained the loos, the drains and, worst of all, the septic tank, all guaranteed to bring ruin on the
occupants. When I worked it out, the bathroom has been in the wealth area of every house I’ve ever owned.

Adrienne advised a mirror or several to attract the right chi. I moved a mirror into position and the pin holding it fell out of the wall immediately. On the phone, Adrienne cackles with
laughter. ‘That’s what happens,’ she says, ‘houses fight back.’

Where Are You, Exactly?

People are calling, people are emailing, and this is the question everybody asks. I’m in the Béarn, I say. They’re confused. They ask: Er – where
is
the Béarn? Between Pau and Biarritz, I say briskly, having worked out that a lot of people have heard of Biarritz, the big seaside resort on the Basque coast, and some have also
heard of Pau, which is not only the Béarnais regional capital but also one of those towns to which the English, in the past century or so, have taken a particular fancy. Pau is also the
setting for
Aspects of Love
, the story by David Garnett which inspired the Lloyd-Webber musical. So the Pau–Biarritz formula seems to have the highest recognition factor.

Not a high recognition factor, however. People say, ‘Is that near the Dordogne? Is that near the Lot? Is that near Beziers / Foix / Cahors / the Aveyron?’ No, no, no, no and no.
I’m south of the Dordogne, where the British are so well established that some have even become village mayors. I’m
south of the Lot, with its hard-baked fields of
sunflowers. I’m even south of the Gers, which the British property finders are pushing as the new Dordogne.

I’m hundreds of kilometres west of Beziers and the rest. They’re on the Mediterranean side and I’m near the Atlantic coast. Oh, people say, groping for geography, you must be
near . . . er . . . Bordeaux? Not really. Two and a half hours south of Bordeaux.

Then there is silence. People run out of map references. I’m in the south, I say. The deep south. As far south as you can go without getting to the Basque Country. Mystification can be
heard. Isn’t the Basque Country in Spain? Not entirely. There are seven Basque provinces. Four in Spain and three in France – Soule, Labourd and Basse-Navarre. The Soule is nearest to
us, it starts on the other side of the big river down in the valley here. Then people say, ‘Oh.’ Then they say, ‘And when are you back in London?’

It doesn’t help that there are at least four perfectly accurate ways to describe this location. First, the departmental. Orriule is in Département 64, the
Pyrénées-Atlantiques. When I want the weather report from the
Figaro’s
telephone weather service, I key in 64. Simple.