A Place in Normandy (27 page)

I saw them off and had tea on my own, in the dining room, where the blossoms on the digitalis were tumbling one by one with wan damp thumps off their tall stems and onto the table—on their way downhill, like everything else. I put beside me a yellow pad on which to start listing the chores that had to be done just to keep the place from sliding further backward; others that would pull it slightly ahead; and still more that were just a matter of housekeeping before I left.

Find wicker tray,
I wrote. I hadn't yet been to the guesthouse, M. Braye's. Someone could have taken the tray over there last summer for some reason. I hadn't been to the attic yet, either. One of its window panes, it had seemed to me when I looked up at the house that first night from Mme. Vera's vegetable garden by the stream, did not glare back at sunset as it should, and was probably broken out; but if I confirmed that this was true, it would mean my having to measure the opening, or rather (because nothing was square anywhere in this house, whether door, window, ceiling, or floor), draw the missing pane, and then carry the template into Pont l'Evêque the following day, when the
droguerie
would be open again, to have a new pane cut. And if I was going to do all that, I might as well continue a project for which I had brought down a few picture frames from the attic the previous year, with the idea that I could have mirrors cut for them to brighten up the rooms that needed it. They were still leaning against a bookshelf in the library, next to three quarters of my grandfather's portable landscape easel.

If I went up to the attic to look for the tray—why it would be there I did not need to ask—I'd have to
know
rather than suspect about the window pane.

By the time we returned from town, the plumbers had left, though the afternoon was not over. I saw their tools still in the downstairs kitchen, so I knew they'd gone to get something or were responding to someone else's emergency and would finish here the next day or at some other appropriate time in the future. The latter seemed more likely, since whatever they'd jerry-rigged at least provided me with water, even hot water upstairs in the new shower—which was not, after all, a bad shower. In fact, it was a good shower, and a real improvement. We'd come a long way since 1968. For the time being, it was just worth your life to get into and out of that new shower: a hitch, but one that could be fixed.

The rain stopped and the sun shone in a pure blue sky, slanting in through the dining-room window. It hovered and was greeted by a hoarse barking that I knew to be that of the fox, Mme. Vera's enemy, teasing from the foot of the hill near her garden; the bark sounded curiously like her own bark of rage that morning when she missed him, failing in her quest to nail him on the door of the garage. The slates of the
auvent
under my window began to steam as vigorously as my cup of tea, and then the rain started again.

Frieseke's painting of the building, now Mme. Vera's, in which he kept his studio. Oil on canvas, 20 × 24 inches, ca. 1924. Collection Montclair, New Jersey, Museum of Art.

At six o'clock I was still looking at my yellow pad. It was all too much to keep track of. After the entry
Find wicker tray,
my invention had quailed at the number of things a person could and should do every day if any of this were to make sense. It all seemed stupid and impossible, but nothing could correct my basic condition of hopeless affection: not to take on the house was simply to lose it forever. “First raise the stone” was as useful a nugget of platitudinous advice to me as it would have been to Lazarus once he was underground; in my present mood, it seemed as taunting an injunction as
Find wicker tray.
Obviously, like Lazarus, I needed help.

I was arranging my rabbit in a roasting pan in the downstairs kitchen when I heard M. Joffroy's car. I had the upper half of the Dutch door to the driveway open to give me light. The rain had slowed to a clear drizzle. The butcher had tied the rabbit and wrapped it in a caul, so that it looked less like a specific beast, though its legs still emerged, bound in against the body. I wouldn't start cooking it until my guests returned; while it was in the stove, I'd have time enough to trim the green beans and do the rest of it.

M. Joffroy pried himself out of his car and called into the kitchen,
“Voici le maçon!”
—as pleased to have landed a mason so quickly as he had been to discover the snails breeding on my wall.

Normans are either tall and fair or short and dark, and the mason, M. Toffolon, was as emphatically of the latter persuasion as M. Joffroy was of the former. A square man on the mature side of fifty, he brushed his hands on his dusty white canvas pants, and we all shook.

“Belle maison,”
M. Toffolon growled, looking up at the streaming expanse of slate wall before I led them inside.
“Mais on dit qu'elle travaille un peu”
(“Lovely house, but they say she's working”—or moving—“a bit”). He spoke affectionately, as one would of a beloved elderly aunt heading into her thirteenth marriage.

“It's the floor of the
salle d'eau,
” M. Joffroy said. “Two flights up. Be careful; all day I have been having nightmares about it.” Again he did his imitation of Rodin's
Thinker
plunging three stories into the hearty soup of the
enfer.

The two men sniffed my rabbit marinade appreciatively—calvados, garlic, mace, and tarragon were hard to pass by without comment—and M. Joffroy gave me the high compliment of repeating the gesture he had used that morning when thinking of
escargots de Bourgogne
presented on the table.

I put my rabbit in the fridge to protect it from flies and covered it to keep it from drying out, and we went upstairs. Monsieurs Joffroy and Toffolon had to stand in the dining room waiting while I arranged extension cords and lamps to get some light into the jam closet. I wanted first to show them the problem from below.

“Belle maison,”
M. Toffolon repeated. “What is its date?”

I had to confess I did not know, adding that my mother claimed to have seen the date 1493 under the cement outside, to the left of the step into the library.

“Ça se peut,”
M. Toffolon said, shrugging. “It may have been a convent, with all the dormers it has in the attic—they used to do that so the nuns could sleep up there.”

I noticed him surreptitiously shifting his weight on the dining room's tiles, testing for loose ones. “A house like this,” he said, “she's always getting into some kind of trouble or another, isn't she? But it will take her a long, long time to fall down completely.”

That must be a common concept in Europe,
I thought,
since Teddy used very similar words.

M. Toffolon followed me across the vestibule at the foot of the grand staircase, and I pointed up at the worrying bathroom floor.

“Ooh, trouble,” M. Toffolon said, looking down and motioning us back.

“No, it's up there,” M. Joffroy and I told him, both of us pointing upward together.

M. Toffolon bounced delicately on his broad boots and stared down at the floor, shaking his head. “Let's go downstairs,” he insisted.

THIRTY-TWO

At the bottom of the cellar steps, three feet from the wastepipe from the upstairs toilet, in the laundry room where cheeses had once been made and where the next day I would determine, after my guests had gone, whether or not the washing machine still functioned (that is, if the plumbers were finished with their work by then), the three of us stood together like—to continue the metaphor from Rodin's canon of sculpture—the burghers of Calais about to step out of the besieged town to greet their English conquerors.

M. Toffolon was feeling better. “There, I knew it,” he said, pointing up at the beam that was supposed to be supporting that side of the grand staircase as well as the jam-closet floor and everything above it. The end of the beam was resting on a curled piece of lead pipe that the plumber's
gars
had not got to yet. “I could feel the floor was soft [
molle
],” M. Toffolon said. “As you see, the end of the beam is rotted away.”

He took a
tournevis
(screwdriver—I knew the word now, after spending a hard few minutes years before trying to act one out for M. Thouroude, having once again left my dictionary behind at the house) from his pocket and scrabbled at the softened end of oak, which was attempting to slide the rest of the way down the inside of the wall.

“Here's your problem,” he reassured me.

It now seemed to me that instead of just the upstairs-bathroom floor, the entire house was collapsing, and my face must have expressed that hideous conclusion.

“Ce n'est pas grave,”
my fellow burghers kept assuring me, admiring the fit of the noose around my neck. “Half of the beams in the house rested on the walls when it was made, and this one even in the dirt of the garden. Over time, as the ends rot—and oak takes a long time to rot, that's why they used it to make ships—you can build up new supports inside the rooms, and
voilà!
she is in business once again,” explained the mason.

“All we have to do,” M. Toffolon continued, “before we get to the bathroom floor, is raise this beam to where it was and then support it with a new
poteau
—”

“Of oak,” M. Joffroy interrupted.

“But of course, always of oak.” Mr. Toffolon spread his arms in the gesture used by those conveying unlikely innocence or reassurance. “You will have nothing to worry about, Monsieur. Always oak, a beautiful oak post we will place here.” He dusted his hands before patting the stone wall under the errant beam as if it were the flank of that same game but aging aunt he had complimented earlier. “Now we will look upstairs. The plumbers are working here?” He shook his head, climbing in front of me. “As I have often said, water is the mortal enemy of architecture. When you have pipes, you have a river running through your house. Naturally there is trouble. It is like keeping goats in your garden: nobody would do that.”

Before he left, M. Toffolon stood in the drive looking up at M. Braye's house, which was surrounded by cattle. It was all on one floor, thirty feet long and ten wide, with a peaked roof covered in newish slate. Since we had put the dormers in ourselves, there was nothing to indicate that it had ever been inhabited by anyone more nunnish than my Great-aunt Janet.

“That's your
old
house,” he said. “You can see it's where they would have built—there's a spring right above it, see? that little flat plateau with nettles on it (they like water, nettles), that's its housing. There's water in there, a
source.
I don't even have to go up the hill to look. For people who kept sheep or cows, maybe while Charlemagne was king—who knows?—it would have been ideal. The way people built didn't change until they began using steel, which I won't touch.”

He showed us how the cottage had grown, one segment at a time, laterally, starting from a thick stone cube about six feet by six (the room I'd made into the kitchen), which he was sure had been the first building on the property—a one-room house with rubble walls, to serve a family of whatever size it had to. “People were poor in those days,” he said. “Whenever ‘those days' were.”

They climbed together into M. Joffroy's car, M. Toffolon having promised to consider the situation and give me an
estimation,
as well as an idea of whether the work could be done before the August renters arrived. I tried to be jovial, but I was upset, not only because he had discovered so much more wrong than I had expected but also because it was so easy to see. I should have seen it, and the plumbers should have seen it—but I especially, given that I went up and down the basement stairs ten times a day at least.

It was small consolation to know that one of two things had happened: either the beam had rotted due to ground moisture absorbed over the centuries, and in subsiding had inflicted the large, familiar crack in the right wall of the grand
escalier
and caused the bathroom floor to sag, thus distressing the joints in the pipes serving the toilet, which eventually sprang a leak that rotted the floor; or, conversely, the toilet's leaking had rotted the floor, and the water's downward progress along the wall had slowly destroyed that end of the main beam, leading it to slip its position.…

However it had begun, it sounded like an awful lot of carpentry to me, and a big chunk of money. I watched M. Joffroy attempt to turn his car in the narrow driveway halfway down the hill—and at once back into, break, and then get stuck on what was left of one of the remaining cement fence posts. I went to help them dislodge from the shards without the loss of their gas tank or oil pan, and, joking with graveyard humor, exclaimed, “And now look, you've destroyed my beautiful fence!”