Perfectly Ordinary People(77)

Oh, it existed all right. It just wasn’t quite as we’d imagined.

To start with, it was so far away. That was the first surprise. We drove up and up, through Grasse and then on, higher and higher into the Alps. I hadn’t even known there were Alps behind Cannes. We drove past little hilltop villages, and every time we saw one I thought we’d arrived, but no, it was always further.

After a couple of hours driving, he drove down a winding dirt road, and then down another really bumpy dirt track, and there, behind the trees, in the middle of a clearing, was a tiny stone hut.

A hut, you say? Not a house?

Well, it had a front door and an upstairs window, so in a way it looked like a tiny house, but it wasn’t really a house at all. It was an old shepherds’ hut that, until recently, someone had been using to rear rabbits. In a lot of ways, it fitted the exact description he’d given us, so it was hard to accuse him of lying. I mean, there was a river running along the bottom of the garden, it’s just that the garden was a chunk of forest. It did have two floors, only to get upstairs you had to climb up a rickety ladder. The front door was rotten, full of holes and didn’t close properly, and the ground floor was of beaten earth mixed, judging by the smell, with lots and lots of rabbit poo.

There was a battered old table and two chairs, and an open chimney that was more like a campfire made of stones. And that was it.

A stone hut, with two chairs and a table.

Yes. There was no electricity, no toilet, no kitchen, no sink. It didn’t even have running water.

Oh my God. What did you do? How did you react?

Well, Pierre laughed. He said something like, ‘Well this is a tad more basic than I imagined,’ and then got this crazy fit of the giggles. He really sounded quite mad.

And you?

I did what I always do when I’m stressed. I cried.

We all got into an argument, then, with everyone shouting at once.

I pointed out there was no water and Pierre that there was no electricity.

Jean-Noel smilingly batted away each criticism as if he was playing a game with us, pointing to the spring water which flowed across the land – water that he claimed was the purest water in France – and producing a battery radio from the back of the van as proof that we didn’t need electricity.

I asked how I was supposed to wash nappies without a sink, and he said there was a communal lavoir in the village.

‘There’s not even a bed!’ Pierre shouted, and Jean-Noel pulled the heap of blankets from the van, saying, ‘You’ll be really comfortable on that lot. You’ll be like baby birds in a nest.’

‘Light!’ I said. ‘There’s no light! Are we supposed to go to sleep like birds, when the sun goes down too?’ and Jean-Noel magicked up a paraffin lamp.

‘There’s no cooker,’ I said, and he delved inside the van to produce a single burner army camp stove.

Pierre begged him to be reasonable. He said there wasn’t even a toilet, not even an outdoor one, and Jean-Noel scuttled comically behind the house to fetch a shovel. ‘You want an outdoor toilet?’ he asked, gesturing at the surroundings. ‘The biggest toilet in France. You can shit in a hole, or shit in the river. Out here you can shit anywhere you want.’

And the funny thing was that, faced with his complete lack of anger or remorse, or even apparent self-doubt – in the face of his absurd salesman’s confidence – I was beginning to doubt myself. My complaints, to my own ears, were sounding more and more like those of a petulant child.

‘It’s in the middle of bloody nowhere!’ Pierre said. ‘What are we supposed to do for food? For meat? For vegetables? For bread?’

Jean-Noel opened the lid of the hamper and pulled out a jar, then, looking skyward, he said, ‘I give them foie gras, my Lord, but they want bread!’

Eww.

I’m sorry?

Oh, it’s just, you know, foie gras . . .

Ah, yes, I know. I wouldn’t touch the stuff these days, but back then we didn’t know much about how things like that were produced. No one talked much about animal cruelty. Plus, I suspect it probably wasn’t quite so brutal in the old days. I’m sure they force-fed them and everything, but I expect they lived outside and not in those awful tiny cages.

Anyway, I told him we could hardly live on foie gras so he produced a pack of those dry slices of toast as well.

‘There’s a village ten minutes down the lane,’ he told us. ‘You can get anything you want from there. Just relax, will you? Look around. Look at how beautiful it is here!’

I asked if there was really a village and Pierre got angry that I was even considering believing the man. Even if there was a village, he said, how would we buy things now Jean-Noel had taken all our money?

‘Only I haven’t taken it all,’ Jean-Noel said. ‘You’ve still got five hundred left. That’ll buy you plenty of bread. And goat’s cheese from the farmer over that way . . . And potatoes.’ We didn’t think until much later how strange it was that he knew exactly how much money we had.

‘And when that runs out?’ Pierre asked, at which Jean-Noel just shrugged and pointed out, quite reasonably, that what we did once we ran out of money wasn’t really his problem. ‘But a young man like you, you’ll find work in the village,’ he said. ‘You’ll trade labour for food. You’ll find a way.’