Gone...

I could move to France...
After all, I had no less than two houses in France, which sounds a bit grand. Actually, I suppose it was.
 I had this big stone house set in a large courtyard with a massive cherry tree in the middle, which in the summer stained the ground red with its fruit and seemed to buzz as thousands of bees devoured the syrup.
I had a big stone barn and a massive wine cellar. Next door I owned another house, though that was pretty derelict (okay, it’s either derelict or it isn’t, and it was) and I had over three acres of land, an acre and a half of it stuffed with just about every fruit tree you could imagine, and a large bed of herbs and a massive old walnut tree and a bay leaf tree and, well, I could have lived there and picked mushrooms out of the orchard every day and if I’d had the inclination or nature I could have bought a gun and popped the odd rabbit that came gambolling across the fields behind the orchard. I could have planted a veggie patch and lived happily ever after.
The houses in France had no loans on them. I’d bought them for cash in the days when I’d been gainfully employed and had lots of the folding stuff.  In my mind I had what I suppose was a romantic image; me speaking fluent French, selling apples, pears, peaches, plums and cherries from my orchard, teaching French to impressionable young French girls who would swoon at my double-plus of being an Englishman and a best-selling novelist, and one thing would lead to another and next I knew I’d be married to Emmanuelle Beart and living happily ever after, writing that definitive second novel, swiftly followed by the third and so on.
Of course, it sounds pretty idyllic. There was only one problem...there were an awful lot of French people about...
In fairness my attitude to all things Gallic was mostly coloured by the folks next door. They had more visits from the gendarmerie than criminals, which got me thinking...they must be criminals. They lived in this old falling down house in which they brewed illicit substances, which the young men of the family consumed in copious quantities.
Anyway, when I bought the first place it was pretty much run down – for example there was no ceiling, it was just open to the roof tiles. So I got my brother to come down with me for a few weeks to sort it out.
Now, I know nothing about anything practical and frankly I’m always surprised when I’ve managed to dress myself in the mornings and if a tie is involved, well if I get that right first time I feel we are cooking with gas. My brother on the other hand could take the Space Shuttle to pieces and rebuild it in a day and it will go even faster and be much improved (and possibly the tiles will stay on too...). He’s always had this gift and it is remarkable to me. I once said to him, “you must wonder how I can write?” and he said, “No, not really.”
Hmm.
The thing is, the house in France will never fall down. It was built in 1714, before the French Revolution, and I’m sure it will outlive most of us.
Downstairs there was a large flagstone-floored lounge with the biggest fireplace you’ve ever seen. You could stand inside it and look up straight out at the sky. It burnt more wood each evening than you could poke a stick at, but by golly did it produce some heat. In the winter I’d go to bed with a glowing, red face, the skin stretched tight like I’d been on the beach all day. It was great.
In the lounge there were massive roof beams, and these were truly massive, let me tell you. I don’t think you’ll see trees this size any more, not least because they were holding up the ceiling and hanging the walls together in my house in France. When the forests that contained these trees existed it must have been just awesome to walk amongst them.
There was no kitchen, just a concrete-floored room with an old gas-bottle fuelled cooker in it. Hot water was courtesy of an ancient gas fired wall mounted water heater. I tell you, you couldn’t have successfully washed a gerbil in the hot water that thing gave you at any one time.
There were some truly great things about the place though. Firstly it had been built with two-foot thick white stone, which had been quarried out of the ground not far from where it was built. There were two levels, the top being one long open-plan area with wooden floors, and not polished ones either, this was truly an original house, not one of those designer places made to look original, if you follow me. When I moved in, there was no ceiling upstairs, just the backside of the terracotta tiles, which sat on roof battens, themselves supported by a network of wooden beams. The beams were made of the hardest wood I’ve ever seen and they were not hewn straight, they still had plenty of the original trees in them, so they were knotted and curved. It was sobering to think this place had been built around 200 years ago, and it was still mostly original. It would take more than a huff and puff to blow these walls down. And the house had been built without foundations because in those days they didn’t understand that you could do with some roots in the ground. Never mind, it was solid as rock, which in fact was exactly what it was.
The beams in the large lounge room downstairs were dirty brown and between them the ceiling was painted a bright turquoise colour. Now, you always think of the French as having more than a bit of style, but take a good look. They don’t always get it right. Okay, they’ve had some great painters and they keep most of their old buildings, unlike the Brits and the Australians who seem to think that if it’s old it should be flattened and something new built in its place, and they dress pretty well and their cars don’t look bad (notice I said ‘look’ - believe me, they have plenty to learn about reliability...) but have a closer look. Look inside some of their homes. I tell you, it is screamingly bad.
Now, the agents who helped me buy the house were pompous English types - let’s call them the Boulevards. He was married to this much, much younger English woman and she was like a lot of those upper class English women - they just have no confidence and so they are always apologising about things. You know, like if someone runs over their foot with a car they’ll grimace and say, “Sorry!” The funny thing is, they are usually good at something, though in fairness in her case this seemed to amount to putting croissants in the oven in the mornings and then taking them out before they burned. She was really good at that. I stayed at their place once when I was looking at places to buy and in the bathroom cupboard under the sink they had hundreds of bars of Imperial Leather bath soap. Literally hundreds. No, I don’t know why.
Anyway, my novelist’s mind soon had a story forming in my head about how he’d been married before and then thrown it all away, left his Jaguar and the wife in Egham and run off with this girl who used to be his secretary and now they were living in hiding in France eking out a living as estate agents. Under their bed they had whips and...oh sorry, the imagination went off a bit there.
They were your typical English upper middle-class who’d somehow fallen on hard times and yet they acted out this lie that they were landed gentry. They hated the idea of lowly English types like me coming to live in their corner of the world, and they didn’t even hide their feelings very well. But they really did like my money.
Boulevard heard I was coming over with my brother and he asked me if we had room in the van for a bed that they’d ordered from some swanky British store. I have no idea why they didn’t buy a bed in France, after all there seemed to be plenty of them about in the shops and most people had at least one in their houses. Whatever the reason, I said I’d bring it over.
My brother and I loaded the new bed into the van and took it down to France and turned up at his place. We had a beer with him (he never offered wine. I think he figured I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the finer points of its well-rounded bouquet, its complex texture and velvety, layered flavours) and we sat in his living room, the lights down low on this particular winter’s evening and a fire playing in the grate, its yellow and orange flames flickering as the wood crackled and hissed.
We talked about the differences between the French and the English and he said that you could never quite trust a Frenchman, which struck me as rather strange in that he’d decided to live out here in deepest France and had taken the trouble to speak what appeared to be faultless French.
Anyway, we started talking about your Frenchman’s style and as I cupped my beer and let the fire warm one side of my face I said, “You know, sometimes it amazes me what they do here.”
“You mean?” asked Boulevard.
“Mean what?” asked my brother.
“Mean?” he said.
My brother frowned at him and leaned forward in his chair to see if that would help his understanding. It didn’t.
I took over the line of questioning.
“Well, don’t you think it’s funny that they are renowned for their style and then they go and do some really stupid things?”
“Like?”
“Yes, I like it a lot,” said my brother, revolving his empty bottle in his hands and looking at the beer suds on the inside, “and yes I’ll have another one. Thanks very much Monsieur Bou-le-arse.” My brother never really got the hang of French.
Boulevard glared at him over his half-moon glasses for a second or two and then looked at me with his eyebrows raised in a question.
“Well,” I said, “take the interior of their houses. I moved into mine and between the roof beams the previous owners had painted the ceiling a hideous turquoise colour.”
“Yes,” said my brother, slowly putting his empty beer bottle on a small side table, “and that woman in the bank. We saw her house and she’d painted her ceiling bloody bright yellow and the beams were bright blue!”
“Exactly,” I laughed, “and the bloke in the house just down the road from us. Jesus, his ceiling was pink.”
Boulevard took in a deep breath and leaned back in his chair and said, "There’s no accounting for taste old chap, no accounting at all.”
And the fire crackled and a silence fell, I leaned back in my chair and rested my beer bottle on my stomach and I looked up at the ceiling and in the flickering light from the fire I discovered that it was a bright red, in amongst a collection of bright green roof beams. I didn’t move for quite some time, though I did scrunch my eyes closed and my buttocks clenched so tight my brother jumped and said, “what was that!?”

to be continued...