29th June 2010 - Mess

Anne-Marie’s bad knee meant that she could no longer do the house-keeping to the standard that she wanted to, so I roped myself in to helping her out. It meant that I was able to have a good nosey around the house.  The main room was vast and open-plan, comprising kitchen and living area. Next to the front door was the inside toilet, around which stairs ascended. Half of the wall facing out onto the valley was window from top to bottom, and this, coupled with the fact that the walls were as white as snow, meant that if there was light to be seen outside, the house was pleasingly full of it, bouncing up off the shiny wooden floorboards. In front of the window was a dining table, immaculately wiped down after each meal, and to the left were a fireplace and a small sofa in a medium state of collapse, surrounded by assorted wicker baskets from which the reassuring clutter of life was overflowing. I was glad that there was clutter; I had never trusted clinical, clutter-free houses. This clutter was an intriguing mixture of discarded toys, discarded books, and screwed up pieces of half-used paper. 

The other half of the room – the one not dominated by the window feature – was the kitchen. Along the wall with the window ran a hob, work surface and washing up area, covered with cooking paraphernalia and just slightly too low for me to be comfortable at. Beneath the hob was an unpredictable old gas oven which was either on at full blast or else not at all, and below the rough-hewn wood surfaces ran shelving to contain the clutter and sometimes a token cat, hidden behind faded terracotta-coloured curtains. 

Leading off this room by way of a doorless door frame was Anne-Marie and Pierre’ bedroom. I once owned a postcard proclaiming words which appealed to me: Why should I tidy my room when the world’s in such a mess? The two farmers clearly held this as a motto. I didn’t realise that adults sometimes lived in pigsties as well as teenagers and pigs. They slept on a double mattress on the floor, which they shared with underwear which may or may not have been clean, whilst shirt sleeves made a bid for freedom from drawers around the room. The most bizarre aspect of the room, however, was the window through to the bathroom. I couldn’t work it out. The bathroom was in a central location in the house, and must always have been a part of it, yet it was designed like a potting shed with a capacious open shower at the far end, and with this window overlooking the garden of tangled bedsheets and blossoming trousers. This was the only place where ablutions were possible, except for au natural with the hosepipe in full view of the valley. I wasn’t quite ready to brave the latter, so on the rare occasions that the water was heated (about once a week), the former it was; I hoped furtively that nobody would walk into the bedroom and catch me starkers. Anne-Marie promised me that she would try to keep the men occupied while I got myself clean.

The boys were confused by the fact that Anne-Marie wasn’t her usual self, but they were too young to understand fully that she couldn’t act as she normally would. After all, she looked exactly the same. So they pestered and pestered, and eventually their parents agreed to take them down into the valley to go swimming. It was warm up there on the hillside, but in the valley it was much hotter. The boys loved to go to an area of the river Doux near to a campsite which had been roped off specifically for the purpose of swimming. The only problem was that to access the grassy bank where non-swimmers could recline on dry towels we still had to ford the shallowest past of the river and then tiptoe along a thin, one-sided iron bridge. With Anne-Marie supported between Pierre and me, we eventually made it across. We must have made a funny spectacle. Meanwhile the boys had splashed into the water and met some of their water-logged classmates. They came out after a while, dripping and begging for fromage. I lay back and gave myself up to the sun-drenched ambient murmur of French.

Later that evening, Anne-Marie suggested that we watched a film once the boys had been put to bed. I was tired myself, but I didn’t want to turn down the opportunity to immerse myself in the language. There was no television on the farm, but Anne-Marie bought films online and so the three of us squeezed on to a creaky wooden bench on the mezzanine that overlooked the dining table, watching the computer screen as moths were attracted out of the gloam to the eye-straining glare of Audrey Tatou’s face.