Another long-lost offering, written in December 1992. Untouched, unimproved, unimaginative, unworthy – I could go on. Not quite twenty years ago, seems a lifetime away now.
Two days before our first Christmas in France, and the house was in chaos when the newly installed telephone sounded its strange chirrup chirrup.
It was Josette, our neighbour and closest confidant since our arrival in France. We’d arrived in France knowing little of the language, and even less of the inhabitants of this rural community tucked away in the Loire Valley. From the first day, when she’d called at our gate with enough food to last us a week, Josette had been a one-woman welcoming committee. She lived at the farm perhaps half a mile along the single-track road that ran behind our barns.
‘English people in the next village. You must call on them,’ Josette ordered. We’d been adopted as her pet foreigners and were now well accustomed to being given instruction. All had been organised and we were to call on the new arrivals the following morning.
We arrived at a shabby old house the following morning and were met at the gate by our host. ‘Welcome,’ he boomed. ‘Theodore Alfred Forbes, what a mouthful, eh what? Just call me Taffy, everyone does.’
Introductions over ‘Taffy’ quickly ushered us inside and put the kettle on. A bunch of mistletoe was pinned to a massive beam overhead, but that was only the first indication that Christmas day was imminent. The main sitting room was decked out as Santa’s grotto: a massive tree, groaning under the strain of innumerable baubles and festooned with tinsel dominated one corner while exotic streamers crisscrossed the room at a height low enough as to make any further progress on my part impossible. Stooping awkwardly I shambled to the relative safety of a vast sofa.
‘You’ll have to excuse the wife, she’s not at her best in the mornings,’ our host said, bustling off again to the kitchen to seek out biscuits.
While tea and biscuits were laid out Taffy told his life story in graphic detail. Nothing was spared and I could only conclude I was in the presence of the most unfortunate man in the world. The final insult had been the crushing blow of redundancy. Flush with cash, the ruine he had chosen as a project to begin a new life needed a great deal of sympathetic renovation. That much was clear.
It was also evident that his efforts to date had severely diminished most – no better make that all – of the house’s value and appeal. A wonderful bread oven, now reduced to a heap of rubble, had been gutted and replaced with a Formica topped bar, original granite fireplaces had been torn out to make room for modern electric fires and just about every available surface was covered in stencilled cherubs. Taffy was inordinately proud of his workmanship and took pains to explain each project to me in vast detail; all delivered in a voice one would normally expect to find on the parade ground.
He did not speak to my wife at all, apart from the niceties of the tea ceremony. On these occasions his speech was at a normal level. Perhaps he considered me particularly dense and thought I would understand better if he shouted at me.
‘Look at the bevel on that work-top’, he bellowed, indicating a perfectly hideous strip of fake marble. ‘Took me hours to get it just right’. I nodded in apparent appreciation. ‘Mind you’, he confided, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial roar. ‘It’s a damn sight easier to work with no bloody women cluttering up the job.’
I nodded again and kept on nodding at regular intervals as we examined each and every area of the house. My poor wife was abandoned with the tea and biscuits as we men discussed the relative virtues of power and hand tools, sandpaper versus sanding blocks, paint brushes or rollers and every other subject known to the modern handyman. Perhaps ‘discussion’ is the wrong word for this was a lecture, a master class from a supreme craftsman, delivered to a particularly retarded apprentice. My only contribution was to impersonate a nodding dog.
Hopefully, my instructor took my silence as fascination with the subject and reverential awe at his abilities, rather than the shell-shocked trance into which I had plunged.
Upon completing the tour of the ground floor, he led me upstairs, steps swaying away from the wall and creaking ominously and, in the absence of any handrail, a precariously sheer drop to the tiled hall floor below.
‘Not quite finished the staircase, but it’s safe enough,’ he declared as we reached the upper storey. Three velux roof windows had been inexpertly fitted, each with a large damp patch beneath, testament to the inadequacy of their seals. Light shone through the walls and I could see blue sky through much of the roof space. In the far corner a huge pile of rubbish: two car windscreens, a dozen or so old pallets, bales of straw and general builders’ rubble extended across the whole width of the attic almost as high as the roof. Removal would be an enormous task, even more so now that the only access was the rickety staircase. Taffy drew my attention to the floorboards, several of which were ominously stained.
‘Quite a lot of these are new; rotten as a pear, you see? Obviously I’ve poly urinated all over the floorboards. That wet part over there is what I did last night’. I could clearly hear my wife’s hysterics in the kitchen below as I traipsed after my host and the tour continued.
‘I suppose you’re completely bisexual by now, damn handy that’.
I was too taken aback even to nod. I felt sure he meant bilingual, certainly hoped he did, but then again…
‘ Yes, damn handy. I know the words, well most of them, but I’m not dramatically correct, know what I mean?’
‘Grammar?’ I said in a daze.
‘That’s the fellow.’ I went back to nodding. If it ever becomes an Olympic sport, I was ready to nod for England.
Back at ground level, at last, the lady of the house finally put in an appearance. ‘Poor old Mavis, been on the lav all night, haven’t you, pet?’
Mavis gave a brave smile and proceeded to describe her symptoms in graphic detail. I tried to ignore the battering my ankles were taking as my wife’s evident, and understandable, desire to leave manifested itself in surreptitious kicking beneath the table.
Mavis paused for breath, finally, and changed the subject. ‘And then there’s Christmas and all. They don’t really have Christmas, do they? The Frenchies, I mean.’
‘Are you on your own for Christmas?’ I asked, belatedly realising my polite enquiry could be construed as an invitation to join us on the following day when the assault on my ankles reached the point of meltdown. We’d waited many years for a Christmas on our own, risked the ire of family and friends to ensure we could enjoy a special day together in our new home.
‘Oh, good heavens, yes,’ Mavis replied. ‘Just as we like it. I’m really excited, actually. This has every sign of being our best ever Christmas.’
Taffy waved us off at the gate, bellowing his farewells and admonishing me to drive carefully. My ears were humming and I was suffering from shell shock, but even when he was completely out of sight I could still hear that amazing voice.
I just about managed to drive out of sight of the house before hysterics set in. I parked up with one wheel hanging over a deep ditch while we howled uncontrollably for a good ten minutes, tears streaming down our cheeks.
The following morning, our French Christmas was ushered in by clear blue skies. We opened our presents and were about to start preparing the long-anticipated feast when the telephone rang.
‘Your mother,’ I said, anticipating yet more recriminations on our failure to be in England for the traditional family get-together. When my wife finally replaced the receiver, I knew it was bad news.
‘Josette,’ she said, ‘She was on her way back from Christmas mass when she saw the police car outside the house and stopped to see if she could help. Mister Forbes died in the night, just after midnight, apparently. That means he died…’ Her voice tailed away.
‘On Christmas Day,’ I said. ‘Shit.’
