Perfectly Ordinary People(93)

The roads down to Le Mas were rocky and steep and if you fell off there was generally a ravine below you’d fall into and die. So while Christophe and the owner of the horses shouted random instructions at me – none of which helped – I bounced around on my bloody pony, and by the time we somehow made it to Le Mas, I felt as if my buttocks had been definitively broken. As an aside, Guillaume, who travelled on Christophe’s horse with him, absolutely loved the whole thing. Our five-year-old’s superior horsemanship was something Christophe teased me about for years.

When we got to Le Mas, I refused to go any further. I’d almost fallen off on multiple occasions, and the track from the main village down to our hamlet was the steepest, most dangerous part of the journey. I was damned if I was doing it on a pony with a penchant for walking right along the edge. So despite Christophe’s protests – and we did argue about that quite violently – we paid the horse chap there and then and finished the journey on foot.

On arriving at the house we got another surprise because we discovered that Lucienne had moved in – we could hear her daughter screaming as we walked up the footpath. She was in the middle of a proper floor-slapping five-year-old temper tantrum. But the cute thing was that the second we opened the front door and she saw Guillaume she stopped crying, got up, and ran to the door to hug him.

Lucienne was in the middle of cooking supper and was mortified to have been caught red-handed living in our house. Of course, in reality, it was no more ours than it was hers. We hadn’t paid any rent since 1940, after all. But she didn’t know that and we – needing somewhere to stay – weren’t going to be the ones to tell her.

So in a flurry of tearful apologies, she threw a few things in a bag and then, promising to return the next day to clear out the rest, she rushed out the door, leaving her dinner still bubbling on the stove.

It turned out to be a delicious chicken stew that she’d made using the carrots and onions and potatoes that I myself had planted. It was only halfway through the meal that it dawned on me we were eating one of our own beloved chickens, and the next morning I understood that we’d in fact eaten the last of them. Still, at least we got a hot meal out of it.

I was in pain for days after that pony ride but even though I could barely move, it felt lovely to be back in the country. I think we were even happier to be back than we had been to leave.

The next morning we bathed in our river and relaxed on the grass in the sunshine, recovering slowly from the horror of Mulhouse and our journey from hell. We talked a lot, I remember, about how awful it was living there in winter. I suspect we were both afraid that we’d be lulled into staying on there if we didn’t constantly remind ourselves of all the significant downsides.

During the week, Christophe hiked up to the village to talk to the mayor about getting passports. He wanted to check that requesting them wasn’t going to result in our being thrown in prison for having faked our identities or something, but the mayor was able to reassure him that was unlikely.

Christophe told me that when they first laid eyes on each other, the mayor got all choked up. He assumed Christophe was back for his old job, and was so happy at the prospect that he cried! Once Christophe explained that we were only back to get passports, the mayor offered him his old job back anyway, but on a temporary basis, and because we needed as much money as we could for our trip, Christophe accepted. So that’s what happened in the end. He went back to working for the mayor and that lasted right through to mid-September.

Mid-September? So you ended up staying for months?

Yes, that’s how long it took to get passports in 1945.

But in September, just as it was getting cold and we were beginning to worry about winter, our passports arrived. We went up to the village one Saturday morning to buy food from the travelling grocer, and the mayor was there with our passports in his hand. He joked that he’d considered hanging on to them until Christophe had finished laying some pipes he was working on, and Christophe felt so guilty that he offered to stay until it was done. But the mayor had already found someone else for the job, I think, so we were finally able to leave.

You had to say your goodbyes all over again.

Yes. The only difference this time was that we told Lucienne she and her daughter could move back into the hut. I also told her the truth about how we’d rented the place from Jean-Noel for one year only, back in 1940. We didn’t want her to get into trouble if he turned up one day with new renters, after all.

And do you know what? When we told her that, she laughed so much that she cried. Because it turned out the hut had nothing whatsoever to do with Jean-Noel. It had never belonged to him in the first place.

So who did it belong to?

To a previous mayor who’d moved away many years before. Lucienne had thought we’d rented it from him – that’s what everyone had assumed. Apparently he’d been friends with Jean-Noel’s father or something – I can’t remember the details – but that was the only reason Jean-Noel even knew the place existed. No one had ever tried to live in the place, let alone rent it, because before Christophe had fixed everything, the place had been considered a ruin. He was known in the village, too – Jean-Noel, I mean. Everyone knew what a shady character he was. I haven’t thought about him for years . . . I wonder what became of him? You do rub alongside so many people in a lifetime . . . so many different stories without endings . . .