2nd August 2010 – 100 Shades of Grey

Yavannah was there when I left. I said my goodbyes to Kira and to Josefien. We said we’d stay in touch, but this time I wasn’t so sure if it would happen. We had made good friends that week and of course I would be interested to find out what happened next in their lives, but the friendship didn’t have the depth that Kelsey, Goedele and I had found. I said goodbye to Yavannah, and hugged Michelle. She pulled me close, her cheek warm against mine, and in her embrace I felt care and love, unspoken but all-consuming. I didn’t want her to let me go. I wanted to remain and to absorb her essence until I could be just like her. She wished me luck and gave me just two kisses – right, left – rather than the customary three. Confused by this departure from the norm, I walked out of the door.

Climbing into the now familiar white car, Xavier turned the key in the spluttering ignition, only to remember that he hadn’t turned the water off to the garden and that he was currently drowning the raspberries. He jumped out of the car again and loped up the path. While I was waiting I noticed a little wooden shelter that I hadn’t seen before. When he returned I asked what it was. It was an old chicken coop. Xavier, he told me, had loved keeping chickens. He had loved being able to have fresh eggs each day, the noises that the chickens made as they went about their pecking, and he had loved the birds themselves for their kind nature and quirky personalities. But the foxes were too clever. To begin with they took one chicken at a time, and then eighteen went in one fell swoop. With regret, Xavier and Michelle had admitted defeat to the king of cunning. There was still so much I could have learned from them. 

We drove off towards the unknown. Xavier was taking me to St Agrève, a market town about 20 minutes away, where I would board a bus to St Étienne, and from there catch a train to Retournac, wherever Retournac was. The trees on the hills opposite made a patchwork quilt of corduroy, silk, brushed velvet, felt. On the dashboard was a pair of sunglasses, old and wire-framed. I watched the silhouetted reflections of the trees on my side of the road go by inverted in the lenses. We sat in silence for a while. At one point, Xavier pulled over, we got out, and he pointed out Fontsoleil in the distance, halfway up the hill, recognisable by the circles of the two yurts beside it. It looked like a doll’s house already, far away, unreal, insignificant. If Xavier hadn’t been with me, I wouldn’t even have noticed it. Was it really so easy to forget? 

As we climbed, we became more and more talkative. Passing one isolated building on the plateau, Xavier told me tales of winters so bitter that inhabitants had to tunnel their way out of their houses through metres of snow, and of his children when they were younger climbing a great old tree that sailed past to our right. Twenty years ago it had had just one branch that was still in full health, stretching out in front of the valley, but now that too was dead and the tree was a carcass, completely ravaged by storm and lightning, streaked with the rough blacks and dull browns of death. I discovered that, before he had been a farmer, Xavier had done a year of training in distribution for a large French supermarket chain, but he had soon realised that it wasn’t for him. He claimed not to have been good at school, and had decided to take a few years to travel before settling down into… he wasn’t sure what. So he had travelled and then he had taken up various uninspiring short-term jobs for a few more years, and then he had bought the farm. 

The car was dusty, and two tiny spiral seashells slid noisily from side to side over the plastic ridge in front of the clock and speedometer. As if reading my mind, Xavier pointed at the clock, commenting that we still had plenty of time to get to St Agrève. He complained that this was the only clock that had escaped Michelle’s habit of setting the clocks ten minutes fast. I hadn’t noticed that Fontsoleil was ten minutes in front of the rest of the world; time was fairly arbitrary up in the hills. But at least the pair of them would never be late for any social engagement, and given Xavier’s propensity for fussing around as he left the house, it was probably a prudent move on Michelle’s part. As Xavier turned the steering wheel to the left around the bends, my knees swung to the right, and then to the left as we twisted back on ourselves. And then we passed a sign welcoming us to St Agrève. 

As we reached our final destination we grew quiet again. Pulling up in the town centre, where a market was in full swing, we both descended onto the tarmac. Xavier hauled my bag out of the car and handed it to me, supporting it as I slung it around to rest heavily against the small of my back. It was an awkward moment. Neither of us was as demonstrative as Michelle. We kissed each other three times on the cheek - right, left, right. I thanked him for his hospitality. He thanked me for my work. He climbed back into the car. We said goodbye through the wound-down window. I turned around and walked away. As I did, I heard a very quiet voice. Au revoir, Becky. I don’t know if I was meant to hear or not. My eyes burned with impending tears and a car’s engine softened into nothingness. By the time I turned around, he had gone.

I walked listlessly around the market, moving without thinking and without really seeing through the thronging summertime shoppers. My bag made me slow and cumbersome. I was lost without Fontsoleil. I felt as if I had left a part of myself there. I bought five apricots in a little brown paper bag from a farmer’s five year old son. He gave me six. I found my bus stop. I found my bus already waiting there, twenty minutes early. I found a seat, twenty minutes early. Sadness inoculated me against the infectious market buzz. I had no business there.

My spirits rose as the bus rode through the bywaters of southern France. We left the Ardèche behind, driving through rural towns with names like Le Chambon and Tence, into other départments. The countryside changed, ever less rolling, ever steeper-sloped, ever darker green. We passed one beautiful graveyard, and I was transported for a while into the mountains of Slovenia. Catherine and I had spent many minutes there amid the gleaming white marble memorials, soaking in the sunset of the unexpected resting place, which nestled just over the crest of the hill above Lake Bled. I hadn’t wanted to leave Fontchouette three weeks ago. Fontsoleil had been different, and even more to my liking. I couldn’t imagine how, but perhaps this final farm would be equally fulfilling, if not more. There was no reason why it shouldn’t be.

I arrived in St Étienne. I found it to be a depressing city. The grey skies were no help, but I suspected that it was never beautiful. The train station was a modern brick building which was supposed to look old, with patterns in the brickwork of light and dark terracotta, burgundy painted wood supports and a terracotta tiled roof. The overall impression was falsely orange. It was covered in a grid of cold steel scaffolding. Outside was an expanse of grey granite paving stones with little grey iron mushrooms pushing up through them and a statue of a dying man. I wondered why the little grey iron mushrooms had been put there. They didn’t seem to serve any purpose.  

Across the road was a building site full of rubble to the left and grim-looking blocks of hotels to the right. I walked up the road between the two. There was no colour except for a luridly bright blue and yellow sex shop sign. I made my way towards it and past it. Even the few people who were around were wearing drab blacks or greys or dark denims. And there weren’t many people. It seemed to be a dead city. 

I wasn’t sure if I found the city centre, but either way what I discovered didn’t inspire me to send a postcard home. An old man passed me and so I smiled at him. He told me, deadpan, that the holidays were over. I looked for a café to find a cup of tea, but everywhere was seedy and men of all ages sat united by sleaze and their proximity to sex shops. They stared at me as I walked by. I felt utterly objectified. I might as well have been a piece of steak in a butcher’s display. 

However much the men craved flesh, I wanted bread. There were plenty of boulangerie signs but underneath every one were closed shutters of rattling rusty silver. Eventually I found a pain aux raisins and a goat’s cheese and almond toasted baguette which was flecked with little specks of green; it might or might not have been spinach. Back at the station I perched on one of the strange mushrooms and tried not to think about dog wee as I ate. I bit into my lunch and filed it in my memory bank of foods under beige tasteless Styrofoam. The bread was limp, and the cheese was cheap and chalky and I was put in mind of grainy, semi-set cement. Uninspired, it went back in its waxy bag. I pulled out an apricot instead. I never used to like apricots, with their skin like velvet. The feel of them made the hairs stand up on my arms. But this one was bright and sweet and juicy, and everything that St Étienne wasn’t.

An African lady walked past in a moving splash of colour and smiled at me. Out of the blue I thought of Xavier, and I fought tears. 

I was clearly hungry, or else bored, as I mindlessly ate the rest of the cheese abomination, followed closely by the pain aux raisins. It began to rain, just a smattering of drops, refreshingly natural in that contemporary concrete jungle. I had three hours to kill and nothing to do. I wrote a little, and passers by stared at me through empty eyes. I daydreamed a little. I watched all different shades of grey of clouds and people and cars. There were no bins, and I wondered if anybody fancied mugging me of my bag of rubbish. I was still hungry, left completely unsatisfied by my lunch. I took out a little bottle of Kombucha and sipped at it. The wind blew a green leaf, curling at the edges, towards me, and it danced at my feet. I stared at it, transfixed, until it swirled up into the sky and out of sight, caught on an invisible current of air. 

I moved out of the rain and into the shelter of a secluded part of platform E. It wasn’t secluded for long, because soon my peace was invaded by a school party of ten year olds, and I found myself surrounded by raucous French kids. One of them in particular caught my eye. He sat quietly, apart from the others, dangling his legs onto the track. Once upon a time, that had been me. 

I attracted a crowd around me, the children intrigued by the spider diagram that I had been drawing of all that I had learned so far on my travels. They asked all sorts of questions, trying to work out what the diagram was about. Most lost interest quickly, choosing friends over a stranger, but three of the more insistent boys picked out some English words that they knew, as well as the name Valentin. It turned out that one of them was called Valentin. The other two were William and Samuel. Valentin was little, pale, quiet and shy, and he blushed when the others found his name on the diagram. Samuel was of African parentage by the looks of him, and spoke German better than he spoke English. William was chubby, blonde, talkative and inquisitive. He looked as though butter wouldn’t melt, but my teaching experience led me to suspect that he was a handful. Speaking in English, he claimed not to be able to speak any English and to hate salad, admitting that salad would be better with chocolate. The train journey was comparatively uneventful.

I waited for my lift from Retournac station. Sitting on the cold stone steps, there was little I could do when I found that there were no cars left in the car park. I did have a phone number, it was true, but it was hidden under many layers of tightly-folded clothes. Besides, I decided to give my hosts-to-be the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they had got stuck in traffic. There was another girl about my age perched a little way off on a large bag, so I wasn’t totally alone. I wondered if she was WWOOFing too. It didn’t seem such an impossibility: I had no idea whether I would be the WWOOFing solo or as part of a crowd on this farm. Five minutes went by. Ten minutes went by. I nearly asked the girl if she was waiting for Colin too, but inhibition reigned supreme. Fifteen minutes went by. A red car rolled into the car park and stopped in front of the steps. Before I could make a fool of myself, my silent companion ran excitedly down the steps into a very French embrace. Probably not a fellow WWOOFer, then. 

Just as I was starting to panic, another car pulled into view, white and battered, with a couple in the front two seats. It had to be the farmers. It crossed my mind that driving a clapped out old white banger could be a qualifying criterion for a WWOOF host, along with growing or making organic produce. My experience thus far would certainly lead me to believe such a supposition. They pulled into the closest parking bay to me and the woman jumped out, wild dark-blonde hair a mane around her healthy suntanned face. We were the only people on the tarmac, and we both looked as if we were looking for somebody we didn’t know. It was a safe bet. I asked if she was Marta, and she was. Thank goodness. I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my days rotting halfway up the stairway of a grim provincial station. 

Marta didn’t say much. In retrospect I speculated that she didn’t know how good my French was so didn’t want to scare me, but at the time she seemed rude. There was no small talk. She helped me place my bag between plastic bags of groceries, and I realised that that must have been why they were late. They’d been shopping rather than making the effort to collect me on time. Following Marta’s suit, I clambered into the back. I shut the door behind me and trapped my seat belt. I made to open the door again, but the car had already started, so I tensed my thighs and hoped that the drivers here were more sensible than in the Ardèche, holding onto the seat behind the surly driver. All I could see of him was a mass of wiry black hair tied back in a ponytail, and swarthy skin. He was introduced to me as Abelard. Abelard? I was sure his name was Colin. I discovered later that evening when I checked my paperwork that Colin was his surname. At least he hadn’t got out of the car to greet me. I would have asked him if he was Colin and I would have felt humiliated.

I was humiliated anyway. I tried to make conversation. Because there were two of them, I naturally used the plural form vous when I spoke. Vous! Abelard spluttered, shoulders shaking. I could only assume that he was laughing rather than crying; as little as there was to laugh about, there was less to provoke tears. Vous! Ou-ou-ou-ou-OU. Marta chuckled too. They were mocking me. My accent was so derisible that strangers couldn’t help but comment and the strangers so graceless that for the second time that day my eyes burned dry behind my glasses. But I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. I was stronger than stupid, unkind words. I knew I could speak French well, and I would show them. I just wouldn’t show them for a while. I closed my mouth, ashamed of my Britishness, and became mute.

All things considered, it wasn’t the best of starts. In many ways it was my own fault. I had been so happy at Fontsoleil and felt so at home there that I had let myself become too attached, when I knew it could only ever last for just over three weeks. And I had been so reluctant to leave that I had told myself even before I arrived at Retournac that I wouldn’t want to be there. Had Abelard not laughed at me before even so much as saying salut, things might have worked out differently. As it was I didn’t give it a chance. The power of my mind outdid sense. 

We drove taciturn over the causeway of a wide river. The water lapped up close to the concrete despite the heat wave. In normal weather it must surely have flooded. My surprise that it was ever passable nearly jolted me from inarticulacy, but I caught my questions in my jaws. We rose up through twisty roads, more hair-pins than in a ballet dancer’s bun. I saw cows to one side and the ubiquitous yurt to the other. Fields bordered the road, and thick trees bordered the fields, stretching upwards and downwards and away to the distance. And then, when we could rise no further, we began to fall, bumbling down a dirt track that went on for ever. There were pot-holes like I’d never seen before. Once I found my tongue again, about a week later, I would learn how to say pot-hole in French. Le nid de poule: the hen’s nest. They must have had some pretty enormous, calloused-bottomed hens hiding in those woods above Retournac.

A voice came from the front, telling me that we were arriving. I looked down into a steep-sided valley, at the far side of which ran a river. I presumed it was the one we had almost had to ford ten minutes previously, which I also presumed to be the Loire. In the wide valley base, fields stretched away towards the water. Clearly this was a much bigger farm than I had become accustomed to. In the direction we were driving there were a few large stone houses and an assortment of scattered outhouses and sheds. We chugged past a wooden board that served as a sign, the writing in bright primary school paints. GAEC de la Graine. Otherwise known as La Range. Abelard parked up carelessly on the stony dust. Hello home.

Abelard wandered off into the fields. I followed Marta inside, she with the shopping, me with my bag, slipping my shoes off at the front door as it seemed was the done thing. There were two doors. The first was a normal wooden door. The second was a door of fine wire gauze on a thin wooden frame. I didn’t even notice it as I walked in, and was chastised gently for not closing it behind me. There were two people sitting in the overwhelmingly orange-stained wooden kitchen to my right. The little dark-haired woman was called Sophie, but my head didn’t retain the name of the tall thin man. There would be time for that later. 

The hall was large but practically empty, and all that caught my eye were a couple of large trunks pushed against the left-hand wall, and through an open door next to them I glimpsed a television and a bookcase and what was probably the back of a settee. Up the loudly creaking wooden stairs we went, with me holding on to the banister to avoid falling backwards with the weight of my load, which I still hadn’t set down. The landing ran in a square around the stairs, with rooms leading off in all directions. I was shown first to the one furthest away from the top of the staircase, which was a spacious but grimy-looking bathroom in primrose yellow flecked with the liver spots of age. In the corner was a proper toilet! Marta led me back around the landing to the opposite corner, knocked, and opened the gloss white-painted door. Inside was a huge room with a double bunk bed, a high single bed, and mess everywhere. Reigning over the mess was an equally messy ginger-haired girl, about my own age. I was introduced to Hannah in French. And then I was left to my own devices and to the mercy of my new roommate until such time as dinner was announced.  

I made to sit down on my new bed. It was so high that I had to hoist myself up onto it as if I were climbing out of a swimming pool. Unexpectedly, I bounced. I had been sleeping on old, thin mattresses for over a month. This was anything but old and thin. I was lying on a fat rectangle of firm jelly, gently supportive and gloriously jiggley. Hannah was sitting in her bed, the lower of the two bunks, watching something on her laptop. We exchanged pleasantries in English, and, noticing that I was making to unpack my bag, she obligingly cleared me a little space in the bombsite. I didn’t need much space. I couldn’t conceive how this girl could possibly have so much stuff with her, no matter how long she was staying for, and how the room could be so disreputably messy. But she was back to watching whatever it was on her computer, and I didn’t feel much like talking. I pretended to fall asleep.

Somewhere between artifice and truth, sleep really did creep up through the bedclothes and into my eyes, because when I opened them again Hannah was gone and it was growing dark outside. I was surprised: that meant that it must be at least 9 o’clock. I hadn’t just taken a twenty minute nap; I’d been out for the count for hours. I wandered woozily downstairs, trying to creep but inevitably causing the step halfway up the stairway to yelp woodily. 

There were four of them around the vast kitchen table which took up most of the room. Hannah was still sitting engrossed in her laptop, throwing an occasional word of English or French at the three French people. I assumed they were all French. At any rate, that was the language in which they were chatting fluently. Sophie and Rafael – so that was his name. Rafael. I tried to remember it – were sitting, she propped up on her elbows and he with palms flat down on the table top, chasing a coin with his fingers. Marta was bustling around with the conversation, tidying up and stashing saucepans here from the wall, glasses there on the shelves behind the curtain. She offered me a drink. The others were nursing wine, but I couldn’t see evidence of a bottle and as it wasn’t specifically offered to me I didn’t like to presume there was anything left. I took a glass of water. I was amazed by the quantity and variety of crockery crammed into the kitchen. I wasn’t in a position to sit and count plates, but they were stacked high in multiple columns and a range of sizes; I would have been willing to bet that many restaurants were not so well stocked. I began to wonder how many other WWOOFers to expect at the table that evening. 

As it turned out, there were no more WWOOFers. We were just waiting for Abelard to return from the fields, which he did as darkness engulfed the outside world. I realised quite how hungry I was. Hardly surprising given as my uninspiring lunch in the dreariness of St Étienne had been eight and a half hours earlier, and I had eaten nothing in the meantime. It was probably a good thing I hadn’t been offered wine. 

Nobody made an effort to talk to me, or to find out about me, and over a meal of a beef stew, green beans and rice, conversation turned to cars. I counted the number of cigarette lighters in my field of vision. There were twelve. Somebody asked me if the conversation was too fast. That wasn’t the problem; I followed the words, but I had nothing to say. I had no interest in the topic. An ant was crawling over the table top and so I followed that instead. A huge St Nectaire cheese was brought out, and I took some, but I was too sleepy to enjoy it. I was lost halfway between tiredness, determination not to have my accent ridiculed again, and not understanding why nobody was bothering to include me. I was an outsider. I was even more an outsider when everybody laid down their forks and took tobacco from their pockets, rolling the dried brown shavings into thin white twists and passing around one of the dozen cigarette lighters. I was the only one not smoking. I watched the rolling process, trying to understand how it worked. I gave up. The smoke was rising in curls, floating, obscuring. Hypnotic. I stared into nothingness. 

I made my sleepy excuses and went to bed for the second time that evening. On my way I padded around to the bathroom. It was good to sit on a proper toilet with a proper door. Two doors. That was odd. The one that I had entered from the hall was normal enough. I had closed and locked it behind me. I got up to investigate the other door. As I had thought, in my toilet-induced contemplation, it wasn’t closed. I closed it and sat back down. It was open again. I sighed. Why were toilets never simple? And then the flush refused to perform, bringing me to a hat-trick of dodgy toilets. My presence clearly was a curse upon toilets across the land. 

I left it alone and brushed my teeth in front of a crusty mirror-fronted medicine cabinet, and decided to keep my toothbrush and toothpaste in my room; I didn’t trust the basin. I toed the lino gingerly, which was equally crusty and peeling away from the walls a little. Still, it was a proper bathroom, and it did have the air of being well-used. It wasn’t to be sniffed at. On closer inspection, the second door led to a bedroom, clothes strewn over the floor, and from a cursory glance I surmised that this was where Marta and Abelard slept. I wasn’t sure I liked the fact that the door from their room to the bathroom didn’t shut – it felt a little creepy – but I was past caring. I tried the flush once more – still no luck – and fell into my jelly-soft bed.