Lynne Rees: ACROSS THE POND

Antibes Journal II

UK Correspondent: Lynne Rees

8.

Bags of rubble accumulate at the side of the house. Half a dozen at first, then a dozen, then more that turn the corner of the house and are stacked along the roadside wall, until we run out of ground space and they’re piled on top of one another, and we stop counting. Sacs à gravats—thick, black plastic bags we bought at Castorama and heavy, white woven sacks the maçons brought with them—full of hollow clay bricks from the dividing walls we’ve knocked down, chunks of rock from the false windows we’ve opened up, broken floor tiles, wallpaper of every thickness and material and design, from every decade of the last century, metres of shattered wooden moulding, every length of old wire and stretch of iron pipe that ran through each of the four storeys. The flesh and bones of the house stripped out.

portraits of strangers
in the corner of the attic
someone else’s dust


9.

When we take out the fireplaces and their chimney breasts I keep hoping to find a reminder of the people who have lived here during the last hundred years: a coin, a shoe, something secreted away. There is only old iron, sooty terre cuite and stone. These are the things that held up their lives, not what they added to decorate it.

I examine the two framed pastel portraits signed by an Italian artist. The woman wears a blue dress; her face is flushed and smiling. The man is bearded, in a jacket, waistcoat and cravat. A watch glints from his pocket. What happened to them? Were they happy here? Were they kind to each other? Did he hold her and tell her that he loved her? The way Tony holds me and tells me not to worry?

10.

My soucis:

• the kitchen units will arrive and there will be no floor laid in the kitchen
  we will not have a bathroom by the time we move in
  the new windows will not fit
  we will fail the diagnostic test by Gaz de France
  we will run out of money
  the roof will leak

all the puddles
I step in
yesterday’s rain

11.

The maçons dig up the old tiles on the kitchen floor, hack away at the concrete screed beneath and come to damp sand.

When my parents moved into their house 51 years ago there was no garden, just sand pegged out with fence posts. Only dunes separated them from the sea, 200 yards away. My father brought in topsoil and turf. Over the years he dug in compost and manure. Today their garden flourishes with potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbages, runner beans, soft fruit, but if you dig deep enough you still find the sand. The grains bury themselves in the quick of your nails.

12.

almost a ‘local’
the neighbour’s ginger cat
ignores me

The people who live at Le Grillon, another of the few original houses that remain in Avenue des Chênes, invite us for an aperitif on Saturday lunchtime in order to introduce us to some neighbours. ‘In France, an aperitif is always at midday,’ Madame tells me on the phone, and we make sure to appear by 12.10 at the latest.

Only two other neighbours are there and the six of us sit in a circle handing around a plate of thinly sliced brioche spread with liver paté. They tell us about:

• the unpleasant neighbours
  tourists parking right outside their gate
  the neighbour who shot himself in the foot trying to kill a rat
  
  

We tell them about:

• the walls we have knocked down
  the windows we have opened up
  the plans for our house-warming—la crémaillère—at the end of the year
  
  

Just before two o’clock there’s a noticeable shift downwards in the briskness of the conversation and our excuses to leave are quickly accepted.

13.

A week of sun and rain. The season hasn’t settled yet but there are lots of women, usually in pairs, who walk past the house to the beach in the late morning, and back up towards their apartment blocks at the end of the afternoon. They wear brightly coloured, long-sleeved beach tops made from some sort of voile that flutters around them in the breeze but still modestly covers their bottoms. Mostly they speak Dutch or Norwegian and I imagine a whole country of middle-aged, northern women living together at the top of the steep Sentier de la Vertu.

50th year
‘bikini line’ slips down
my list of things to do

14.

While I am scraping thick vinyl off the lounge walls, Tony takes a break from filling holes with colle universelle and plays the piano. The piano is the only piece of furniture in the house, the only piece we bought from the old proprietor, and, while it needs tuning, when Tony plays I can feel the house breathing, as if music is what it’s been waiting for. He plays the theme from ‘Love Story’.

When the movie first came out in the 70s my older sister went to see it with some friends and came home with tears streaming down her face. I laughed at her standing in the kitchen and sobbing but when I went to see it the following week I was the same wet wreck and cried for days afterwards. Where do I begin, to tell the story of how great a love can be… A girl who loved Mozart, the Beatles, and me… Love means never having to say you’re sorry. Song lyrics, script, cliché—but as vivid in my memory as any real experience. At thirteen, I had never imagined there could be such sadness, that life could be so unfair.

This is a love story too. A love story with a house that came to be ours through a whole string of coincidences. And here I am with my couteau à grattoir and my décolleuse standing on a stepladder scraping walls back to their original surfaces. And there is Tony closing the piano lid. And on the other side of the French doors the sun spatters the terrace through the leaves of the plane trees. And Tarek, one of the maçons, comes in and says, Madame, j’ai fini la cuisine. And here is our first floor laid. A blue tile, aged with ochre and cream, called La Douce France.

washing-up
the evening’s last shimmer
of sunlight

by Lynne Rees
Antibes France

Haiku Credits:
‘50th year’ was first published in ‘Planet, The Welsh Internationalist’, August 2007

Click here to read the first instalment of Antibes Journal.