20th July 2010 – All That Jazz

Tuesday came around again, and with it came the excitement of our planned evening outing to Mardi Jazzy. We had been talking to Anaïs about it over a bowl of tea after our stint of redcurrant picking, and she had seemed very keen to come with us. Xavier took me to one side as we were pulling on our shoes and polishing off our stop thumbs. He asked me to keep an eye on her, and particularly how much she drank at the bar, and to try to distract her from drinking too much alcohol if at all possible; it wouldn’t be good for her given how much medication she was on. But he also made it clear that ultimately she was responsible for her own actions.

We had arranged to meet Anaïs at the bottom of the road because we had to walk past Vivien’s farm on the way to Lamastre anyway, and the chance of meeting a car between the two smallholdings was infinitesimal. We stood at the bend in the road waiting for her for ten minutes before giving up. If she wanted to come, she knew how to get to Lamastre, but we suspected that, as with so many other things in her life, her good intentions just hadn’t reached fruition. And so we walked and talked, passing a field to our right which was home to two enormous horses. They were awesome in the truest sense of the word. I had never been a horsey girl, and I didn’t find them beautiful animals. It was their raw power that made me stop and stare in admiration, their hulking musculature barely covered by a hide of short brown velvet. I wanted to draw them, to harness their vigour on paper, but I knew that I couldn’t do them justice. The road took us through a densely- wooded patch of hill, and brought us out on the other side where we joined the main road to Lamastre and began our quest to hitch a lift downhill. 

It was a quiet late afternoon on the roads. The sun was beginning to sink over the hills behind us, and so we cast a trinity of dark, impish shadows as we skipped and twirled our summer dresses and high spirits along the roadside. We still had an hour until the music was set to start, so we weren’t concerned by the lack of cars. We were singing silly songs and enjoying the freedom of being three girls alone in all of the residual warmth of the French day. 

We did keep on hallucinating the sound of approaching traffic, though. One false alarm, two, three, and finally a car. Which drove resolutely on past us. Not to be deterred, we walked and walked and kept on walking. Another car went past with no acknowledgement of our extended digits. We slowly began to wonder whether we would make it down to the town on time. But we worked out that even if we had to walk all the way, we should still hear half an hour of music, and we suspected that there would be somebody at the concert, whether local or tourist, who would be willing to give us a lift back. But at that moment the indisputable splutter of a local set of wheels reached our ears, and once more we stretched out our arms. The car ground to a halt, and a smiling old lady welcomed us in, scolding us gently for hitchhiking. Two of us shared the back seats with three crates of raspberries, and she encouraged us to help ourselves. As we had spent the day harvesting the raspberries in the garden, however, they were beginning to lose their appeal, and so we declined with a laugh and an explanation. One thing was certain: as an international trio of young, female WWOOFers, we were a conversation-starter in ourselves.  

In the centre of Lamastre we started our search for the bar. We had quarter of an hour to find it before the music kicked off, and given the size of Lamastre, we were confident of success. Just in case, though, we asked a likely-looking woman if she could point us to where Mardi Jazzy was taking place. She pointed us down a street, but as an afterthought she shouted after us that it had finished half an hour ago. 

Our faces didn’t fall, they plummeted. There was to be no funk, and no soul, and no saxophone. We were full of righteous outrage that the poster we had seen had given us the wrong time, until we walked past the very same poster and saw that it really did say 18h. Where our joint conviction that it started at eight came from, none of us could fathom. In our disappointment we could find only one solace: crêpes and ice cream. 

Conversation turned to religion. I tended to avoid the subject of religion, especially over food. I didn’t know what I believed, but I knew it to be a truth that food was both necessary and enjoyable. This, however, was an open, deep and all-encompassing conversation. Kelsey was a Christian, loud and proud, with an unshakable faith in God. Her job in Aix-en-Provence was with an international church, working with children and teenagers. Goedele and I weren’t sure what we thought. Goedele had been leaning towards a belief in God until her brother had been lost to spinal cancer the previous year, and she struggled to reconcile an all-loving, all-protecting God with her family’s experience. I talked about my conversation with Michelle about believing in love, and I think that both of them were struck by it, in their way. I supposed that love spoke to everyone. It transcended religion. It even transcended ice cream.

The night had crept silently into the valley as we were talking, and we were faced with the question of how on earth we were going to get back to Fontsoleil. Our plan of asking a fellow jazz aficionado was scuppered, lying at the bottom of a sea of blues notes. We wandered towards the road, and made the fortuitous decision to stop by the fountain in the town square to fool around taking pictures. Parked cars lined the square. An older couple walked past us, tourists contentedly full of good ardèchois food and a little wine. They offered to take a photograph of all three of us, which we accepted, and we began to explain why three foreign girls were alone together in a little place like Lamastre. 

I had a brainwave. Maybe, just maybe, it might work. The couple seemed as if they probably had a conscience between them, after all. After Goedele gave our spiel on being WWOOFers, I chipped in. We were staying on a farm in the hills, I told them, and we were getting worried because we had been planning to faire du stop but now it was dark and we didn’t know what to do. I would normally have cringed at playing the damsel in distress, but needs must. I knew I had won when I saw the woman’s eyes. She clearly disliked the idea of us hitchhiking in the dark, turning to her partner and impeaching him to drive us to where we needed to go. He wasn’t so easy to convince – and fairly so, given as they were staying on the opposite side of the valley – but his wife was determined. Eventually we agreed that they would drive us halfway, to the turning off the main Lamastre road. 

Shutting the car doors with as many words of thanks as we could muster, we stood and laughed in pure relief at having made it so far up the hill with so little difficulty. We were skittish and high on adrenaline, thoughts and words revolving at the speed of light around our dizzy feet. We didn’t notice the forest until we were in it, and once there it was only noticeable by its obscurity. We couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces, much less each other or the path. It was frightening. It was like being a child again, but not in the magical way of the Jammery. This was childhood’s more sinister aspect: the velociraptors under the bed and the sharp-toothed bearwolves in the branches, and the groaning, creaking whisperings of threatened vulnerability, and the naked, trembling fear of the terrible terrible unknown. There was only one thing for it. We held hands and we sang and we skipped our way forward and we hoped that, like the innocent fairytale children we had become, we would make it through this fairytale forest unharmed. 

We were exhausted by the time we arrived back at the house, and flopped onto the settee. Michelle put a pan of water on to boil and brewed us up a batch of chai tea, and we laughed hysterically as we unfolded our tale of the evening.