Perfectly Ordinary People(79)

Though we had a paraffin lamp and a stove, we didn’t, it turned out, have any matches. And so that first evening, we went to bed just as soon as it went dark, sleeping on the blankets to start with, and then moving under them as the night got colder.

That was a bit of a shock – the fact that even in late July it was still cold up there. That should have given us a clue as to what winter was going to be like, but it didn’t. We were young, I suppose, and inexperienced.

We both slept badly, in part because of all the weird noises coming from the forest, but mainly because we didn’t have a bed. Because, of course, we had to use the blankets as, well, blankets rather than as a mattress. So we ended up sleeping on the planks.

You said there were noises? Were you scared?

Yes, a bit. There were all sorts of horrible screeches and strange shrieks and we had no idea what kinds of animals were making them. Pierre withdrew the ladder at one point, ‘just in case’, and once he’d done that, I did feel a little bit safer.

By morning, we were both absolutely shattered and the first words Pierre said – and I remember this like it happened yesterday – the very first words he said the next morning, were, ‘This is shit.’ He said we were going to Cannes and we were going to get our money back.

I’m guessing that by this point you no longer disagreed?

No. I’d spent one of the worst nights I’d ever spent anywhere.

But then we got up and climbed down the ladder and stepped outside. And the morning, that morning in the forest, was so very beautiful, it sort of stopped us in our tracks.

Can you describe it to me?

I’m no poet, but I can try. The sky was a very deep blue and there were some big mountains towering above us, because we were right down at the bottom of a valley. The stream was sparkling in the sunlight and there were birds tweeting, so many birds . . . The grass was knee high and bright green, almost fluorescent really, and it was dotted with wild flowers.

It does sound heavenly.

You know, in summer, that place was heavenly.

We bathed in the stream – which even in summer was icy cold – and Pierre saw some trout dart past and said it was a shame he didn’t have a fishing rod. We ate more of our toast things for breakfast, along with a lump of Camembert and some olives. I fed the baby his condensed milk and then let him suckle on my breast until he was calm. And then we set out to find the village.

Was that to buy food, or did you want to find a way to leave?

By then, I was starting to want to stay again, I think, but Pierre was still determined to leave.

That’s starting to sound like a bit of a theme between you two?

Yes, it’s funny really, because he always had this view that I was the high-maintenance one out of the two of us – that if someone was going to blow all our money on luxuries, it would be me. But I was far more adaptable to the idea of living in a very basic way than he was. In the end, he was always more scared of running out of toilet paper or whatever than I was.

The footpath to the village weaved along the river’s edge, cutting occasionally through the trees. There was wildlife everywhere and just on that first morning we saw deer and a squirrel and a hare. There were eagles and buzzards soaring above. It really was quite magical.

Evidently, the village was farther away than we had been told, and it took well over half an hour to get there. And even from a distance we could see it was little more than a collection of houses, most of which were ruins.

There was a stone lavoir filled by an ice-cold spring-water fountain where you could wash clothes – that much at least, had been true. We passed a tethered donkey in a field, and some pigs in a boarded pen as well, but those really were the only visible signs of civilisation. There didn’t seem to be any people around and there certainly weren’t any shops.

We turned into the little alleyways that weaved between the houses and eventually we heard the sound of someone hoeing the earth.

When we tracked her down and Pierre said ‘Hello’, the woman, in her fifties, jumped in fright.

She was incredibly suspicious of us at first, keeping her distance and scowling, but as always, the baby helped break the ice. No one ever seemed able to resist a woman with a newborn baby.

As our only reference points were trees and the river, we struggled for some time to explain where we were staying, but eventually the woman seemed to understand that we were in what she called the ‘Rebuffel refuge’, though we didn’t know if we’d explained that to her correctly or not. There seemed to be a lot of very similar stone huts dotted around.

We asked her where we could buy food, and when we mentioned shops she just rolled her eyes.

The ‘main’ village, she explained, was up behind the rocky outcrop that towered over us, but even in the village there were no businesses of any kind, merely a grocery van from a neighbouring village, Sigale, that came to town on Saturdays.

I asked her how we could get up to the main village, and she sneeringly replied that we could either walk or, alternatively, we could walk.

Pierre told me to forget about groceries and asked the woman how we could get back to Cannes.

She explained that if we walked to the village then the grocer would take us back to Sigale, and from there we could catch a bus to Nice, and from there another to Cannes.

Pierre looked at me and nodded, as if to say that was all decided then, and I realised he’d missed a crucial bit of information.