‘Can I have a franc?’ I ask her. ‘For the crib?’ The crib is at the back near the door. It’s under glass. It’s a model. When you put the franc in, the figures move. The three wise men and their camels start to walk to the stable. The shepherds, too, and the little sheep nod their heads. The star moves up and down. Villagers with baskets of bread pop out of their houses. A train steams out of a tunnel and down a hill and in the stable the baby Jesus waves his arm. I love it. There’s always something I didn’t see last time. It’s a grandpa wobbling on his stick and at his feet is a brown and white puppy. The model whirrs and creaks like an old clock. It’s all over too fast.
The noise brings my mother over. She puts in one franc after another. The model makes her laugh even more than the picture. ‘A first-century train. Oh my God!’ The model creaks and creaks, I’m sure it’s going to break. The camels are jerking their legs much too fast. I’m sure the baby Jesus’s arm is going to fall off. I want to cry, but I don’t want to cry in front of my mother. We stare at the model until it finally stops with a big clunk. Then there is no sound in the church but me breathing and the door pulling on its hinges.
There was a piece of land for sale in St Clair owned by the woman in the café. Jeanette was then recently married, it was Auxille who ran Le Sanglier. We waited for them, at the tables under the plane trees, my mother, dressed in pale green, with a patterned headscarf. She was yawning and fiddling with her sunglasses. Auxille came bustling out of the café.
‘Oh, the English architect, and this is your wife! Oh, she is so beautiful, she is so chic, and this is your daughter!’ She rushed up to me and put her bony hands around my cheeks. ‘Jeanu, Jeanu, come and see a little English girl.’
Jeanette was curvy and healthy like a fresh peach. Her dress stuck to her curves. She had bare legs, brown but unshaven, and armpits full of dark black hair. ‘Oh, the little one!’ she exclaimed. ‘What beautiful skin, and such blue eyes, and such beautiful hair,’ and she too petted and fondled me, purring over me as if I were a kitten. I wasn’t used to such attention.
‘What a specimen. What a tart,’ my mother said in English.
‘You are such a lucky man to have such a fine family,’ said Auxille. Jeanette was now sitting next to me and patting my hand. I looked into her face. I decided I liked her. I felt comfortable with her like I used to with Pammy.
Jeanette had dark brown eyes, darker than anyone I knew. ‘Do you like puppies?’ she asked. I could just understand her French.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘When we get back I shall show you six puppies, they were born yesterday.’ Her hand was rough but I didn’t mind.
‘And you will have more children,’ said Auxille. ‘Some fine sons, eh?’ She winked knowingly at my mother.
‘Heavens above,’ said my mother, smiling and nodding.
We all went in the car, Jeanette and Auxille in the back giving conflicting directions and me squashed between them. We drove back down the hill. Jeanette and Auxille smelled of garlic, sweat and rose water. Their speech slipped into a language I didn’t understand. We drove up a bumpy track. ‘It’s here!’ ‘No, it’s not.’ ‘It’s further down, it’s by the farm.’ We stopped and we were nowhere. Terraces of olive trees and, behind, the woods going up the hill. ‘Now we walk,’ said Auxille, and we did, up a tiny path winding round the terraces. Herb bushes and brambles scratched my legs. My mother guarded her dress, but Jeanette and Auxille strode on.
‘My grandfather lived here for twenty years and only last month we buried him. He was a shepherd in the old days and used to take his sheep up to Alpine pastures in the summer …’
We were in front of a tiny hut, like a gnome’s house, with a tiny chimney and a tiny window.
‘God, it’s a hovel!’ said my mother. ‘Did the old boy die here?’
‘Shh,’ said my father. ‘We could knock it down. It’s a good spot. The view is terrific.’
‘Voici les montagnes!’ said Auxille and we looked, towards the snowy peaks and the clouds resting on them. ‘This is where my grandfather used to live.’
Inside there was hardly room for all of us. ‘It smells of rats,’ said my mother.
‘See, there is water,’ and Auxille turned on the tap.
‘There is a spring,’ said Jeanette. ‘You will never run out of water.’
‘Where is the spring,’ asked my father, ‘in the woods?’
‘No, at the Ferrou,’ said Auxille.
‘What’s a Ferrou?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Auxille and we walked round the back of the hut through the woods and towards the gully.
‘Good God,’ said my father and even my mother was quiet.
I’m standing by the pool looking up at the rock and the split down the rock, towards the great stone basin full of clear water like glass. The sun shines above the rock and into the water, dazzling me. I feel shivery and strange. I feel very young and very old. The water and the sun are all I can see. I put my hand into the water, thinking it’s going to be hot, but it isn’t, it’s cold. It makes me shiver more.
Saturday. Early evening
Today I walked to Rochas. I wanted to get moving again. I felt so stiff and old. I remembered walking there with Gregor once, with Sanclair on his shoulders. It seemed to take no time at all. We had a drink in the hotel and then walked up to the church to show Sanclair the crib. He was about two then. Didn’t he love it, pressing his face to the glass and saying, ‘Monster!’ when the train popped out. A sunny day, don’t I remember it, blue sky and wild flowers everywhere. It must have been May. Today it took me two hours, and I shall write this again in case I ever think about walking there in the future. It takes two hours to walk to Rochas. A tough walk along a barely visible track. Deep in the woods. There’s no view and the last bit is past the sewage works and a rubbish tip. I don’t like Rochas, with its big ugly church and the houses snaking up to it. It has stayed decayed. St Clair was always pretty, sitting in the clouds, and Lieux with its fountains and houses of flowers is in every guide book of the region, but nobody goes to Rochas. I sat in the hotel café and drank Pernod, not outside because it had started to rain, but in the dingy bar room. Was that the same group of men that used to pester my mother? It could have been.
Rochas is dirty. I’d forgotten that. It’s not a picturesque decay but one of neglect. The young people have gone away. There are houses for sale, but they won’t become holiday homes. The streets are always in shadow because of the rock. It was worse in the rain. I walked up to the church and felt like I did with my mother. The church was being renovated. It was a shell of stone with cement-mixers and scaffolding at the front and that smell of cement that makes me think of so many things: the building site at The Heathers, my father relaying the floor at the Ferrou, Stephen laying the patio in his new house, the bull-dozers and diggers on the by-pass. As the rain poured, brown rivers of mud ran down the hill. The great doors had been taken away and the church looked more like a tomb than ever. I was thinking about my father.
It was the last summer I spent with my parents in France and the one I remember most clearly. Do we all have a time we remember, that holiday, that special holiday when the world becomes
