Almost French (20 page)

Usually, we leave Paris after work on Friday nights. Heading in any other direction we’d be trapped in the trail of cars crawling out of the capital but on the northbound A16 traffic is rolling nicely. After almost two hours’ driving, the scent of cow manure seeps into the car. This is Frédéric’s cue. Even in the middle of winter, he winds his window right down and sticks out his head, high on the pleasure of inhaling the countryside. The smell of cow dung reminds him of school holidays on his great aunt’s farm near Ardres.
Not far now.
In the dark his eyes are like diamonds.

By the time we pull up outside the house it’s usually around midnight and his father has gone to bed. Quietly, Frédéric carries out his ritual: a proprietorial pee in the garden, followed by a perusal of the grounds, straining in the darkness to see how each tree has grown. Inside the house, he straightens a portrait of his great great grandfather to whom he bears a remarkable resemblance, feels the weight of an old, handmade
boule
for French bowls, its nail-studded sphere not quite perfectly round, carefully examining objects as though seeing them for the first time.

He knows the Boulonnais by heart, knows all the tiny picturesque routes, the lovely manors and châteaux hidden from the main roads, he can even describe the paintings above their fireplaces because some of them belong to childhood friends. His face falls as we drive past run-down farmhouses with crumbling walls and collapsed roofs. He wants to restore every one of them, to be the saviour of all that is local and beautiful. He rails against local mayors, whom he blames for allowing development and industry to spoil the
region’s patrimony. ‘
C’est scandaleux
,’ he’ll fume, pointing to an ugly new factory that has shot up next to a small château or farming hamlet. ‘Couldn’t they have built it somewhere else?’

Frédéric could write poetic pages about the melancholy skies, the sensuousness of ribbed fields of charcoal earth, the coastal cliffs which overlook the English Channel from where on clear days you can see the chalky contour of Dover. These are the scenes he loves to paint time and time again with his old friend Olivier, a homeopath in Boulogne. Invariably Frédéric’s efforts end in frustration: he can’t render a brilliant shaft of light spilling through the clouds to illuminate a green hill, can’t capture the force of the wind whipping the figures walking along the cliff nor the dampness of the ploughed soil. In his eyes, his watercolour paintings can never do justice to the reality.

Lunch is the central focus of our weekends in northern France. Even though there’s usually just the three of us, Alain, Frédéric and I (Frédéric’s sister and her husband live in Lille), a certain ceremony applies, beginning with the apéritif and ending with dessert. Having discovered the joys of cooking late in life, Alain has mastered an impressive repertoire of dishes ranging from home-made pâté de foie gras to delicious fruit tarts. His cooking is traditional: the crowning component is always a master sauce. ‘
Je suis un saucier extraordinaire
,’ he boasts, without a trace of irony. To him, a sauce must have substance—it is not an aside, not an optional extra. To make him happy, you have to take lots of it.

He is a meticulous man, Frédéric’s father, always impeccably dressed in well co-ordinated berets and tobacco toned jackets. Spills on his tablecloths send him racing for a stain remover that bubbles and pops around your plate. When a
lovely whole sole stuck to his brand new barbecue grill and had to be scraped off in delicious, flaky pieces, there was no consoling him. ‘
C’est la cata complète
!’ he fumed furiously, ‘
cata
’ being short for ‘
catastrophe’.
He rails often against the English—France’s ‘historical enemies’—who, not content with Waterloo and mad cow’s disease, have now invaded the local golf club.

Together, he and his son make a pair of mad militants, the sort of fanatics who’d attend Defence of the Boulonnais meetings, if only such a group existed. They’d like to be mayor of Baincthun—mayor of all the villages in northern France, actually—such is their abiding love for the region. They are convinced that the rest of France and probably the whole world have conspired to tarnish the image of their adored homeland. ‘Did you see all that bad weather they forecast for us on the news?’ Alain will grumble. ‘Just trying to scare away tourists.’ Never mind the howling wind outside, the rain hammering the window panes. Also in on the scare-mongering are journalists who write about the region’s social problems such as the high levels of alcoholism and unemployment. In August, when half of Europe invades the Côte d’Azur and the evening news shows packed beaches and traffic jams, they gloat. ‘Ha, look at those poor sardines! We don’t have crowds like that in the north!’ It doesn’t seem to occur to them there might be a good reason for this.

In my opinion their passion for their homeland is irrational. To me Frédéric’s sentimentality is obsessive. As for his sense of propriety, I’ve come to the conclusion it is delusional.

One weekend at Baincthun, we decide to go for a walk in the woods. From the main road, a new paved route leads into an asphalt carpark but Monsieur Nostalgic North—ever-ready
for a trip down memory lane—insists on going the
old
way, along several kilometres of dirt road which is now closed to the public. As he drives, Frédéric reminisces about his boyhood adventures with Jean-Michel and Olivier, how they used to ride their bicycles along this very same track. I listen absently, distracted by the signs flashing past the windows: ‘Private Property’, ‘Keep Out’, ‘Go Back’.

‘Don’t you think we should turn around?’

‘
Non, non, ça va.
’

‘But what’s wrong with going the proper way?’

‘This way’s much more scenic. The new road has spoiled everything.’

Another notice announces ‘Trespassers will Be Prosecuted’. The surfeit of threats has made me nervous. ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’

‘
Mais bien sûr!
’ Frédéric sighs, exasperated by my lack of gumption. ‘We won’t be long.’

The reason for such vigilance is that this part of the woods belongs to one of the region’s richest families which has made its fortune in crystal tableware. Their holiday houses peek through the oak and beech trees. In an effort to be discreet, we try to hide our car off the road behind a dark thicket. Frédéric knows the family, you see—as a teenager he used to play golf with some of its members and later during university holidays he worked at their factory. It would be terribly embarrassing for him to be caught trespassing on their property.

In the end, we’re away about forty minutes. On our way back, we spot our car in the distance—and a powerfully-built bloke with a rifle over his shoulder peering through the windows.

‘
Merde!
It’s the guardian!’

In that split second of panic, of imagining being frogmarched to the main house, Frédéric masterminds a brilliant story to extricate us from impending embarrassment.

‘Let’s pretend we’re Australian tourists!’ His voice is low and urgent. In the distance, the guardian looks up, sees us, and like a heat-seeking missile which has found its target, charges in our direction. Suddenly the situation looks serious. ‘You do all the talking,’ whispers Frédéric. ‘I’ll pretend I don’t speak any French. He’ll just let us go.’

And before I can suggest we simply tell the truth, before I can point out the myriad reasons why this plan will backfire (the most glaring one being that no half-sane, semi-seeing person would ever believe Frédéric was anything other than French) the guardian is upon us. Dressed in military green, he looks like an SAS soldier who has sprouted a handlebar moustache. I smile weakly. He doesn’t smile back. His eyes have narrowed to slits.

‘What are you doing here? Didn’t you see the private property signs?’

Glowering at Frédéric, I say, ‘We’re on holidays from Australia, we weren’t sure what the signs said.’ I exaggerate my accent, speaking French like a four-year-old so it doesn’t seem as though I live here.

‘What about you then?’ The guardian nudges his rifle towards Frédéric.

‘No speak French,’ answers Frédéric, in absurd pidgin English. He rolls the ‘r’ in ‘French’ and gives an apologetic shrug. My eyeballs back-flip. He seems to have confused his part in this pitiful pantomime. He sounds like an English-speaker
pretending to be French,
Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau. I notice he’s taken his jumper from around his shoulders and tied it around his waist—some
thing he observed from visiting Australian friends, he’ll later explain, pleased to have remembered this detail. I’m torn between howling laughter and the desire to strangle him. You’d have to be a fool to fall for this performance.

The guardian stares at us. His face muscles relax a little, as though he no longer thinks we’re a threat. For a moment it seems maybe Frédéric was right, he’ll let us go.

But no. ‘You come, we go in car,’ he orders, gallantly attempting English for Frédéric’s benefit. ‘Big problem.’ And we are frogmarched back to our car, captive prisoners of a humourless man brandishing a rifle at our backs.

As we round a corner on the memory lane we came in on, it’s suddenly clear the guardian wasn’t joking about there being a problem. Two police cars with flashing blue lights block the track. Five officers are talking to a couple who turn out to be gardeners for the estate. As we pull up, their conversation abruptly stops, as though someone has pushed a pause button. All eyes train on us. Any humour in the situation has evaporated. Frédéric has paled.

‘YOU do the talking now,’ I mutter.

As chance would have it, one of the houses was robbed while we were on the property. We are suspects—the only suspects so far, in fact. Our car is searched while the guardian relates our story to a no-nonsense officer who appears to be running the investigation. He examines Frédéric’s driving licence, then fixes him with a don’t-bull-shit-me-son stare.

‘An Australian tourist, eh?’ And with the exaggerated patience of a country cop who’s got all the time in the world to solve his crime, he reads out our Paris address and Frédéric’s full, unmistakably French name. His tone is so dry it crackles.

‘Doesn’t sound too Australian to me.’

Over the next hour, Frédéric explains the whole silly truth as best he can, smiling cheesily, his manner reduced to total genuflection. My eyeballs roll further and further up inside my head until by the time he’s finished they’re almost stuck there. Eventually, we’re free to go. It’s obvious to the officer we couldn’t even contemplate a burglary, let alone pull one off. For one rather thrilling moment it had seemed Frédéric might be slapped in a cell. (Under French law you can be held in prison for up to twenty-four hours without charges being laid, even forty-eight in special circumstances.) The guardian—livid to have been duped—urges the officer to teach us a lesson. But although the prospect of locking up a lawyer is no doubt appealing—a journalist, too, what a double bonus!—the policeman doesn’t want us cluttering up his station. He wants us out of his sight, out of his jurisdiction, back in Paris, where in his opinion idiots like us belong.

Naturally, this experience does nothing to arouse my enthusiasm for the place. I don’t think that anything can. The problem is, Frédéric’s passion for his
pays
is matched by the strength of my aversion to it. Perhaps unconsciously, the intensity of his feelings triggers a corollary of negativity in me. Mostly, though, it comes down to the fact I simply don’t like the region much. Without childhood memories and generations of family attachment to enhance it, I find the landscape depressing. It reminds me of one of those tenebrous oil paintings at the Louvre. I’d prefer honey-coloured hilltop villages any day. The weather doesn’t help (it always seems to be raining), nor does the fact that I’m unaccustomed to this notion of fleeing to family homes on weekends, of being holed up indoors over long lunches. My eyes don’t see what Frédéric sees—or at least they see it differently.

The last one hundred years have delivered tidal waves of tragedy to northern France. Some cities such as Dunkerque have been twice devastated by world wars. Boulogne-sur-Mer escaped damage in the first but was less fortunate during the second. From 1940 it was occupied by the Germans and the subsequent Allied bombardments destroyed much of the city apart from an impressive cathedral and a small medieval quarter. The fishing industry is less vibrant; the Channel ferries from Dover and Folkstone increasingly call at Calais instead of Boulogne. Once a relatively wealthy town, these days Boulogne-sur-Mer is synonymous with soaring unemployment and social problems.

To me the lovely landscape has been spoiled by expanding industry and motorways. The villages and towns were no doubt once charming too—the proof lies in places like St-Omer and Montreuil and coastal Wimereux which escaped destruction. But the ubiquitous post-war buildings are grim. Beauty exists but only in snatches—no sooner have you found a lovely stretch of countryside than you arrive at a sprawling commercial centre or a new stretch of identical low-cost houses, painted a ghastly peach. The loss, the melancholy, the hard times, to me they hang over the Boulonnais as obstinately as the clouds.

Nowhere do our visions diverge more sharply than on the beaches.

‘It’s gloomy,’ I’d declared the first time we went to Dannes, about twenty kilometres from Baincthun. The tide was way out, exposing an expanse of beach so wide it looked like an autoroute under construction, the concrete surface not yet dry. That’s Hardelot, Frédéric had said, pointing in the distance to a cluster of grey high-rise holiday apartments stabbed into the sand. It had all the charm of the communist-built
‘resorts’ I’d seen along Romania’s Black Sea coast, I thought. Tossed papers and empty drink bottles cartwheeled in the wind. Clouds were busily building a leaden continent overhead, the roiling ocean matched the grey-brown sand. ‘Opal,’ Frédéric had corrected me. ‘It’s called the Opal Coast because of the colour of the sea.’ And although the gemstone does come in many colours, this claim seemed a bit rich;
‘Un peu trop,’
I’d told him, smart-arsed and sceptical.