Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

It was the year of the dog days - la canicule - 2003, when we came to the village. The heat began in May, building up, up and up to forty degrees and more and lasting until September. At night the temperature stayed above twenty degrees.

   All that summer we did up the presbytère with the help of Willi, from Belgium. We found him on the road outside Carcassonne airport when he was hitching a lift to Mirepoix. In the car, he told us he lived locally with his family. We wondered why no one had come to pick him up. He offered us his services as a handyman. In fact he begged us to take him on. ‘I have problems,' he said, ‘but I am honest.’ We were needy and desperate, having taken on a thirteenth century presbytère when neither of us was the least bit handy. We didn’t enquire as to the nature of Willi’s problems and gave him the job.

   Every day Willi came to labour. He laid floors and tiles, wired up and plastered. During his lunch hour, after he had eaten his sandwiches, he said prayers in the church attached to our house. His wife, Claudine, came to pick him up at the end of each day. She was a skinny person with ill-fitting false teeth. She would give me a warm bisou on arrival.

   My neighbour Claire said that that woman was no better than she ought to be and she was a bad mother. I thought that was going a bit far. Her children were anyway grown up - one boy a gym teacher and the girl working in a bank in Toulouse. The adolescent boy was overweight and Willi did his best for him by taking him to an obesity clinic.

   Nevertheless I didn’t take to Claudine. Neither did I care for her dogs. She bred Westies - small dogs with grubby white fur - very smelly in la canicule. Although I told her I didn’t care for Westies, she kept offering me the pick of the litter, for an exorbitant 800 euro.

   The presbytère project soon started to get me down. I became anxious and unhappy. It was impossible to sleep because of the heat and the distress brought about by constant interaction with difficult people. We were spending a fortune on Willi’s daily rate and hardware. We got to know every hardware store in the departments of Aude and Ariège. Trips to Bricomarché at la Roque d’Olme, Monsieur Bricolage in Pamier, Point P in Carcassonne and Chausson in Mirepoix gave shape to the week. En plus we suffered extreme heat exhaustion whenever we went out, as our old Peugeot car had no air conditioning.

   The only time we took off from the monumental mission we had undertaken was for the daily dips in the man-made lake below the village or in the larger lake at Montbel or else a plunge into the river Hers. But I got nervous in the river after I saw an adder in the water as well as large toads at the water’s edge - all of us creatures seeking to cool off in a year of extreme heat, when 14,000 French citizens were to die of dehydration.

   That summer we also had the dapper Monsieur Serre come to install central heating. He came every day with his plumbing assistant - a simpleton boy on work experience. He bored his way through the three-foot-thick walls of the presbytère laying pipes and tubes.

   Willi took to disappearing from work, which, in one way, was a relief, even though the presbytère with the walled jardin de curé needed so much attention from him. When he finally showed up, he told us, quite smugly I thought, that he was an alcoholic and voilà that was his problem.

   Soon his wife took to ringing us up to complain about Willi’s drinking, then saying he was not a bad lad (Willi is well over fifty). Il n’est pas mauvais garçon mais quand il boit il est violent .

   My neighbour Claire said Claudine was the drinker. In fact, Claire opined, Claudine and Willi were both drunks.

   The tales they told about each other became more and more personal.

   'My wife is unfaithful', said Willi. Elle me trompe.

   'Willi is violent', said his wife. Il me bat.

   Relationships deteriorated, not only that of Willi and his wife but also mine with the couple and with my husband who defended Willi.

   ‘I got drunk yesterday because she brought home her mec.’ Willi told us one day with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘She went to the woods with him in my car. The car wouldn’t start and she rang me on her mobile to come and bale them out. So, voilà, that’s why I got drunk.’ In fact the wood incident was to mark the end of Willi’s thirty year marriage with Claudine. Il était mis a la porte - dispatched without ceremony to live in lodgings in Lavelanet.

   The crunch came for me when Willi was rewiring the atelier. Because of his drinking, his hands were shaking and he couldn’t thread the wires. After several days of watching him fumbling and having to pay his full daily rate, I told him I was off to the coiffeur and that I expected him to finish the job before I got back.

   ‘What have you done to Willi?’ asked my husband.

   ‘Nothing. Told him to finish in the atelier.’

   ‘He’s very upset. You’d better go and apologise.’

   ‘You’re joking.’

   ‘Go on, apologise. You are so stubborn and you’ve really upset him.’

   ‘Not likely.’

   Willi roared into the kitchen: ‘Your husband is fine,’ he said. ‘I’d do anything for him. Mais toi ! Everything would be fine if it wasn’t for you.’

   ‘He’s drunk’ I said. ‘How come?’

   ‘The gin’ said my husband, gesturing towards the new bottle on the worm- eaten oak sideboard. ‘He’s drunk almost a bottle of gin. Neat.’

   Willi was slumped over the table. ‘We’ll have to get him out of here. Quickly before he passes out.’

   ‘He lives in Lavelanet. I’ll drive his car and you follow in ours.’

   We went through his pockets to find his car key and set off in convoy. I followed the car and saw Willi slump towards the driver. My husband held him at bay and at intervals shoved him over to the other side of the car. When we arrived in Lavelanet, we shook a sterterous Willi and asked him where he lived.

   ‘Down there’ he said smiling foolishly, and off we went.

   ‘Not here’ he said when we arrived. ‘That way. Down there.’

   Several similar moves later we decided to abandon an unconscious Willi in his own car in a square in Lavelanet.

   For weeks we worried about him. Perhaps he had died? The gendarme would come and accuse us of not attending to a person in distress - a French crime we had recently discovered, as committed by the journalists who watched the Princess of Wales die in that tunnel in Paris. But after a while, because of extreme torpor induced by la canicule and when no policeman came to the door, we forgot about poor Willi.

   Then we only had the dapper, flirtatious Monsieur Serre to worry about. He wore a boiler-suit and had a thick gold chain around his neck. When it was pointed out that he had wired the boiler wrong, he became upset. He did not take kindly to criticism.

   My husband told me not to criticise the men of the south of France. ‘But I am a feminist,’ I said. ‘I must and I will. The men of the south of France be damned.’

   My husband bundled me out of the kitchen whenever Monsieur Serre entered for an exchange of civilities. I had to bite my tongue when the simpleton boy stole the little compass my son had given me to calculate the exact position of the presbytère. Once, the boy barged into the lavatory unannounced - on purpose, I was sure.

   I sought refuge from the never ending travails of renovation and the heat in the cool bosom of our barrel vaulted church, where the familiar presence, in plaster, of French female saints: Jeanne d’ Arc, Thèrése of Lisieux and Géneviève of Paris provided consolation.