Deep France (35 page)

Eugénie’s palace in Biarritz burned down, and the ruin was demolished by the government of the Third Republic of France in 1881, which also sold off the palace grounds for building
land. A new edifice was built, and was gutted by fire in its turn. The present Hôtel du Palais, a low-rise pink building whose resemblance to a slab of cake is only enhanced by its white
Gothic stonework, was built on the site in 1905 and was never anything but a commercial establishment, though it is an elegant spot for cocktails.

Biarritz was all the rage in the Belle Epoque, or the Naughty Nineties as the British called the sunset of the century. The town heaved with English pleasure-seekers, Russian
émigrés and Italian aristocracy, and many exotic villas in the fin de siecle and art nouveau style were built on the grounds of the former palace. While the resort she had created
continued to be Europe’s most fashionable summer destination, Eugénie lived quietly in Farnborough in Hampshire. At the age of ninety-four, she decided she wanted to see Spain again
before she died, and passed away during the trip, in Madrid. She is buried with her husband and son at St Michael’s Abbey in Farnborough.

A Girl’s Best Friend Is Her Best Friend

Finally, Gill came out, just for a week. She gets three weeks holiday a year. When we’ve spoken on the phone over the
past nine months, she’s
been yelping with stress if she’s in the office, and catatonic with exhaustion if she’s at home. She runs the finance department of a group of health clubs, a glossy business which has
grown fast. Her department is where all the bucks stop. She came alone, because her partner, a musician, couldn’t be persuaded to leave London in case he was booked for a session, and her
company immediately cheered me.

Dr Suleiman was not pleased with my ankle; the fibula which he set so carefully has moved a millimetre out of alignment, probably because I’ve been kidding myself that I really can garden
on one leg. He swapped the plaster for a splint, which makes me a bit more mobile, but no way, he said, can I walk on the injury before the end of August. So Willow and Tony fetched Gill from the
airport, Amandine made her bed and Annabel took me shopping.

Being helpless is an experience I haven’t had for a long time. Not since Chloe was a new-born baby, and I was wondering how we were going to live on my salary of £125 a week, in a
damp basement flat from which the landlady was trying to evict us, with no help from either of our families. Cometh the hour, cometh the friends – thank Heaven. Andrew looks at me sometimes
and mutters ‘so brave’ but when I compare these days with those, a broken ankle in a strange land doesn’t seem so bad.

We had planned a party for my birthday. It seems I know forty people who’re prepared to come to Orriule if promised drinks, dinner and the chance to meet new friends, though for the
antisocial the last of those was no incentive. With time on my hands, I had hand-painted invitations and, with Annabel and Margaret to help me, I had photocopied maps. I had also begun to marinate
the ingredients for Marie’s Sangria. This is nothing like the watery thirst-quencher served up beside Spanish swimming pools. A Béarnais sangria is a
dark, spicy
drink with a kick like a cow, and it’s a favourite to start a big celebration.

However, nobody could fix the weather, and they certainly would have done if they could by then. Each day seemed to be more dismal than the last. Grey was as good as it got, most of the time.
Every now and then, I called the recorded forecast from the weather station at Pau, on which the meteorologists had been getting increasingly desperate. ‘
Bonjour
. This is Francois at
the weather station at Pau with the forecast for the region for the next twenty-four hours.
Nouvelle désolation
. . .’ The question was now not whether it would rain, but only
how much.

If it rained on the day of the party, forty people would not fit into Maison Bergez. I made phone calls to people who had those little plastic pavilions which are meant to keep the sun off a
garden picnic, but would surely be just as good at keeping the rain off a buffet. For the big day, however, Francois’s forecast was cautiously optimistic. Possibility of a clear spell.
Wow.

Yes, I am a total Mrs Dalloway, I love giving a party, even in the rain with a broken ankle. This doesn’t always go down well in the world of books, where a party is a networking
opportunity or nothing. People like me, who’re always ready to put on a new dress and go out shining just for the sake of it, don’t fit the mould.

Nor does liking a party fit well with long-hours London life. I had not been able to celebrate my birthday this way for years. In August, most of my friends are away, and those who aren’t
are simply too busy to get anywhere before 9 p.m., by which time they would be too shattered to enjoy themselves. The city is huge and travelling around it gets more demanding and more dangerous
all the time. Relaxing in good company is a challenge in London; mostly, the best
you get are occasional opportunities to apply alcohol to the pain of living.

Then I have all these theories about parties. One of them is that it is actually easier to give a buffet for forty than a dinner party for eight, because you simply cook large quantities of
simple food and let people get on with it, instead of messing about with garnishes and cooking times and changes of plates and the possibility of people offending each other and the whole event
going pear-shaped. For a larger party, all you need to do is organize yourself to cook ahead.

I made a big tomato tart – my vegetable plot, by now, was heaving with tomatoes and the challenge was to pick them before the giant brown slugs got them. These slugs look like mobile
turds, decorated with orange frills around their flanges. They’re so monstrous that they frighten Piglet, who cautiously tiptoes round them when they meet. The hedgehog, who appears from
behind the catalpa trees to trundle about at dusk, doesn’t even attempt to eat them. Since I had started writing about Suffolk for
Wild Weekend
, I had discovered that the population
of hedgehogs in East Anglia has declined by 50 per cent since 1991, due to the destruction of their habitat by intensive farming.

Before the party, I also made a red onion
tarte Tatin
, a salad of green beans and yellow peppers and a dish of lentils with mint and garlic. I ordered cakes from M. Charrier, including
his
Mediaevale
; this is pretty much like a paving slab made of rich dark chocolate mousse, and it had become an instant legend in Ossages since I had taken one to Tony’s birthday
dinner a few weeks earlier. Finally, with Gill’s help, I added cold spit-roasted chicken with tarragon, an oriental salad with marinated pork and a big dish of prawns. With potatoes, green
salad, bread and cheese, the menu was sorted.

Gordon came over to spruce up the garden. He had been a really great friend, despite having spent the summer going from one
fête
to another and doing justice
to the aperitifs. He was still living in a caravan, with electricity at last, and the purchase of the property at Bellocq had finally come through, but Fiona and the children went home in June, and
he was angry about it. Every now and then, I floated the suggestion that she had crashed into a depression, and that this wasn’t an unreasonable reaction to having no roof over her head, no
table to put the children’s food on and no chance of getting back their life savings from the treefern disaster, all in a non-stop downpour of rain. Since Fiona could only speak a few words
of French, professional help wasn’t an option. I didn’t blame her for baling, but he did.

While they were living in the caravan, the children were out on the street every night, which Gordon saw as a good, healthy way of life. Fiona, for all her language skills were limited, could
see that the only other children on the street in a law-abiding village like Bellocq were the ones from other marginalized families. Cam’s constant companions were two much older boys. One of
them looked after his mother, who was a paraplegic. She had been abandoned by her family and shunned by the villagers, who left the child to care for her and his younger sister as best he could.
The three of them either hung about by the river side in Orthez with young toughs of almost twenty, or sat in and played violent video games all night. When their home was only a tiny caravan, it
was impossible to keep the children off the street.

Gordon had a new French friend, another
marginalisé
, a big, good-natured, open-faced man who had been promised a job as a bouncer at a casino in Dax, but it was always going to
start the next week. Meanwhile, the two of them were
making short work of small building jobs in the foreign community, and the owner of the little
bar-auberge
in
Bellocq was thinking of getting them to manage the place when she went over to Montpellier to see her family. Gordon was trying to talk himself into seeing this as a great business opportunity.

Amazingly, François in Pau was right about the weather. The day of the party was dry. Willow came to lend a hand, and my two good mates transformed the garden of Maison Bergez into an
open-air pleasure dome. Remembering the lobster challenge at Christmas, they set up tables covered in lacy cloths under the trees. Cushions were tucked invitingly into the hammock and the bar was
set up outside the kitchen window.

Roger arrived with his French girlfriend, Reine, who was slim, blonde and sparky. The widow of an artist, she lived in St-Jean-de-Luz and spent the weekends with Roger, either at his house in
Salies or his studio on the sea at the surf resort of Hossegor. She regarded me as a threat to be seen off – in the most charming possible way, of course. This she tried to accomplish by
darting to my side every time an unaccompanied man arrived at the party and demanding to know if this was my
petit ami
. Each time I explained that I had no
petit ami
and
didn’t actually want one at this point in my life, but she seemed not to understand. Reine was seventysomething, so from her viewpoint a luscious young fiftysomething like myself was
obviously on the pull.

It must have been a good party. We encouraged the stragglers to leave sometime around 2 a.m. The next day the friend who stayed over staggered down to the bottle bank by the pottery and was
there for half an hour, disposing of the evidence.

Meanwhile, I had the childish pleasure of opening presents and the adult satisfaction of receiving compliments. People rang to say thank you, then casually asked for a recipe. The most popular
dish was the sticky pork salad, which had simply vanished. ‘I’m so glad you did all that,’ said one English woman. ‘That’ll show the French, always going on about how
we can’t cook.’ Marie flattered me by asking how I had cooked the potatoes, but I suspect she was just choosing safe ground on which to be nice.

Pining Away

Andy wanted to find more beaches, to show the fashion editors and photographers among his non-stop guests at Maysounabe exactly what stupendous locations they would be able to
use next year. We had explored the chic, urbanized strands at St-Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz, so now it was time to venture further north, and check out the surf beaches of the Landes.

Once again, the unearthly flatness of the land and the endless kilometres of bracken, gorse and pine trees made us feel first tranquil, then sad, then peculiarly detached from the world. The
coast was another kind of hallucination, with golden sand stretching to the horizon in both directions and the waves rolling in so uniformly they seemed unreal.

The Landes, just as much as Manhattan, is a monument to human ambition. It’s hard to believe, since the trees and the dunes seem to stretch away to infinity without any sign of human life
on them, but the landscape is entirely man-made. The name,
landes
, means simply ‘moors’, but don’t think
Wuthering Heights
. The sense is of a desolate kind of a
place overgrown with scrubby heather and gorse, but no altitude is implied. The Landes is flat. Absolutely flat. Flat as far as the eye can see. Most of the ground is covered with pine forest, and
as you pass through it in a train or car the flickering light between the great tree trunks puts you in a trance. This is a man-made landscape. In fact, it’s a reclaimed swamp, which explains
the strange character of the endless golden beach and the endless dark forest behind it.

The River Adour was the first force to shape the Landes. In prehistoric times, dozens of mountain torrents gushed down from the Pyrenees and joined to run to the coast in a single deep channel.
As the centuries passed, the river began to silt up and choke itself. Then it started to meander across the flat plain of the Landes, changing course every couple of hundred years.

The Adour was always a huge waterway and easily navigable, so it was a valuable resource to the people of the region, especially those who lived near the point where it reached the ocean.
However, the river mouth was moving constantly, so no sooner was a port established and in business than the docks turned to sandbanks and the river wandered off. The towns of Bayonne, Cap Breton
and Vieux Boucau all enjoyed a burst of prosperity when the Adour was flowing their way. The boats came down from the interior bringing brandy, wine, wool and salt for export, and the boats from
the ocean brought cloth, fish and the treasures of the New World. Then the Adour changed its course and these flourishing ports suffered a miserable decline.

The vast plain of the Landes was nothing but a swamp and not a healthy environment. Epidemics of malaria and fevers added to the misery of the inhabitants. The region was impassable, and so
became a refuge for outlaws, criminals and Protestants making for the port of La Rochelle, from which they sailed to America, no doubt feeling right at home when they got to the bayous of
Louisiana. Eventually the central government decided to intervene and try to reclaim the land. In 1569, the King, Charles IX, ordered that the Adour should be tamed and Louis de Foix, the architect
of the Escorial in Madrid, was hired to begin the operation.