Deep France Read Free Page A

money. I called a couple whose names I had been given, andgot the husband
on the phone. ‘Come over any time, we’re pissed as newts here,’ he slurred. Was I going to turn into a sodden ex-pat? It seems to be a real danger.
    Will I miss friendly old London? Or will I only miss the filthy streets, the dismal shopping mall and my mad neighbours? Every metropolis has a high quota of roaming maniacs. On our street we
have our share of crazies, including a character, who calls the blossom from his neighbour’s apple tree ‘filth’.
    I have set up the computer, bought a French modem cable and connected up the technology. The day is starting to get a rhythm. Writing needs a rhythm. There are days when rhythm doesn’t
happen and everything slides into a pleasant sequence of pottering, which you rationalize by explaining to yourself that it is more creative to dawdle back from Rymans via the junk shop on the
corner, or that you really
really
need to tidy up that box of handy old nails and screws
right now
.
    The days which slide are pleasant but they weigh heavy on my conscience. Worse, much worse, are the days when the rhythm gets choppy then breaks into something agonizingly and disgustingly
chaotic, which is like that moment when you know you’re going to throw up, but extended for an entire morning. This is not a good feeling. My theory — get a rhythm and keep it. The day
starts with the sound of the dogs barking and my neighbour’s tractor roaring past. When the school bus, actually a luxury coach, comes by I know I should be through with the coffee and
heading for my desk.
    It snowed this morning, big fluffy flakes whirling in from the north. At first I thought they were falling leaves. They didn’t settle. This afternoon the sky cleared – mean­ing
huge grey and white clouds came surging over the intense heavenly blue above them – and when I went into Sauveterre to get my
Times
the landscape was bathed in richgolden sunlight. The trees are redder and browner every day, burnished by the sinking sun. The mountains are clear in the distance, snow-capped now. I arrange the room which is to be
my office so that I can see the Pyrenees from the desk. My neighbours, I notice, have all their shutters firmly closed.
    Sauveterre is my nearest town. It is a jewel. The name means ‘safe ground’, describing it in the lawless early Middle Ages, when its huge grey-stone fortress was impregnable and
guarded the road south to Spain. What’s left of the fortress is a grey-stone battlement, sweeping along the top of a cliff that overlooks the river, and a mighty, half-ruined tower. Huge
magnolia trees grow wild along the bottom of the cliff, and half a medieval bridge spans the water. Behind the tower of the Romanesque church the main square opens out, in front of a gracious
seventeenth-century Hotel de Ville.
    Sauveterre’s fate has always been to under-achieve its own magnificence. There are two beautiful hotels overlooking the river; one, the Hostellerie du Chateau, was shut because the
original owner has died and so many cousins have inherited the business that they can’t decide what to do with it. The other is also shut.
    A la Maison
    The house is sorted now, and ready for my books, plus clothes and the household stuff I couldn’t live without, which will come in a container next month. The workshop is
stuffed to its beams with macrame plant-pot holders and fringed lampshades. The French beds are against the wall as they were intended to be, the floorboards gleaming, the walls bare. I can see our
friends in the place. I have a little white bedroom witha dressing table and my clothes folded on shelves. This feels like my home now.
    I’ve put our family photographs on the wall, together with a couple of fine paintings by Glynn, and the framed cover of
Variety
, the American show-business newspaper, on which my
name appears. I am very, very proud of having been on the front page of
Variety
. The story