Emergency in the Pyrenees Read online

  Dick made rapid progress through the pilgrims; by the time they reached the spot where Nick was standing below the third carriage, he was already pushing Julia’s red-labelled suit-cases out through the upper part of the window to his brother, and abusing, in fluent and idiomatic French, passengers who obstructed him because they wished to look out. ‘Voyons, Madame, on a des bagages a décharger!’

  ‘Seven—that the lot?’ he called down.

  ‘Yes—thank you so much. Oh, but hurry!’ Julia exclaimed, nervously, as that peculiar hoot common to French trains indicated that this one was starting again. Dick disappeared—the train was well under way when he succeeded in emerging from the horde of pilgrims, and leapt clear down onto the platform, where he rejoined the others. Julia thanked him warmly—‘I could never have managed alone.’

  ‘Nobody except Rugby footballers can manage their luggage alone on these pilgrim trains’ the young man said cheerfully, as he and his brother picked up Julia’s cases and carried them out to the station entrance, where they were stowed in the boot and the back of a large seven-seater car.

  ‘Time I did some introducing’ Lord Heriot said before they got in. ‘This is Dick and this is Nick’—the identical twins shook hands in turn. ‘Dick is at Oxford and Nick is at Cambridge’ he further explained, as they drove off. ‘I wasn’t going to have them both at the same University!—had quite enough trouble over their pranks when they were at Winchester, and nothing could ever be pinned on either of them. The only difference between them is that Dick is an optimist, and Nick is a pessimist.’

  ‘And unfortunately that doesn’t show, at least not immediately’ Nick observed gloomily from the back.

  This absurd set-up amused Julia; it began to revive her. She asked what they were reading at their carefully separated Universities?

  ‘Physics and Chemistry’ the twins said in chorus—‘the coming thing. If we get good enough degrees we might get jobs at Lacq, and live at home in comfort’ said one voice—the optimistic Dick, Julia inferred.

  ‘You’ll have to be very good to get jobs at Lacq,’ their Father said, rather repressively.

  ‘Oh, but we shall! You’ll have to cough up for post-graduate courses, Daddy, naturally—Nick at the Cavendish, me at the Clarendon.’

  ‘I doubt if Lacq would take you—the Clarendon hasn’t the same standing as the Cavendish’ a gloomy voice said from behind—Julia laughed; this must be Nick.

  ‘Oh tripe! The Clarendon is tops now; Harwell recruit no end of people from there’ his twin responded blithely.

  Julia was not surprised that the twins should wish to live at, and work from, their home, when at last she reached it. The huge rambling family mansion, in a park full of exotic trees on the outskirts of Pau, had been skilfully converted by the Heriots into three flats, each with large elegant rooms, but also the utmost modernisation in the matter of bathrooms and fitted basins—an immense lift bore all four of them, plus Julia’s luggage, up to the first floor, where she was greeted by her hostess. Lady Heriot was as tall as her husband was short—that was where the twins got their height, Julia surmised. She was shown into a charming bedroom, very large, out of which a bathroom had been carved—‘Quite self-contained, you see’ her hostess said. ‘Now which case do you want unpacked for tonight? Jeanne will see to it all for you—she is very good, been with me for years.’ A smiling elderly maid appeared, and began to deal very competently with the overnight suit-case indicated by Julia. ‘Dinner not till 7.45—would you like to lie down? Jeanne will call you. I do hope you aren’t very tired?’

  Julia was in fact tired to a degree which surprised and exasperated her; but after a rest and a bath, she thoroughly enjoyed her evening with the Heriots. It was fascinating to sit among a family with Scottish traits so strongly developed, here in France, at the very foot of the Pyrenees. After dinner Lady Heriot talked with affection of Mrs. Hathaway, and asked after her—Julia said that the beloved Mrs. H. was beginning to show signs of age at last.

  ‘Ah well, we all have to come to it’ Lady Heriot said. In fact she had obviously not come to it yet—she was brisk, lively, energetic, and full of interest in Julia and her concerns. ‘When is the baby due?’ she asked, as she took her guest to bed. Three months hence, Julia told her. ‘Oh—and who will be with you when the Stansteds go?’ Julia told her about Luzia—‘She comes on Tuesday.’

  ‘Do you know the time of her train? I’m a little vague about the Spanish connections.’

  Julia said that Luzia had promised to write that; she expected to find the letter at Larége.

  ‘Oh, then send me a wire, and the boys shall meet her, and drive her up. What a pity you didn’t bring a car! What does she look like? Will she be as recognisable as you?’

  ‘Well not my colouring, but she will be the most beautiful thing they have ever seen’ Julia pronounced. ‘Dark, grey eyes, very white skin—rather what people think of as Irish colouring. But I’ll telephone when I get her letter.’

  ‘My dear, you can’t; the Stansteds haven’t got a telephone. You can only do that by stumbling down over those appalling cobble-stones to the Post Office—and once you’re there you might as well send a telegram; you won’t have to wait so long. In French’ Lady. Heriot said with emphasis. ‘They aren’t much good at telegrams in English.’

  Julia’s heart sank a little. No car; no telephone. Was Philip’s idea really such a good one, compared with the familiar safety of Glentoran? She fell asleep slightly disheartened.

  She was encouraged, when she awoke next morning, by the astonishing glory of sunrise over the Pyrenees—the great range of peaks, some snow-capped, all lit by the eastern sun, standing up on the further side of the Gave de Pau. And this encouragement was enhanced when she arrived, driven by the twins, at what was really Philip’s house. In fact the car could not drive to the house itself, the small cobbled track was too narrow, but there was a car-turn barely 100 yards away—thence the Heriot boys carried her suit-cases along the stony path.

  ‘You’re lucky; the road was only widened, and the car-turn put in, about a couple of years ago’ Dick said. ‘Before that one had to park in the square outside the inn, and hump everything from there—more than a quarter of a mile.’

  ‘Heavens!’ said Julia, wondering—a little unhappily—if her Philip was aware of the new car-turn when he suggested this stay at Larége. If not, how did he suppose she would have managed? —without the Heriots, whom he didn’t know. She owed their help entirely to Mrs. Hathaway.

  Many newly-married women are assailed by such doubts as to the quality of their husbands’ grey matter when they presently encounter such lapses from what, to the female of the species, is the most normal commonsense. But when Julia actually reached the house, she felt that there was a strong excuse for Philip having wished her to come there. The straggling village of Larége is strung out along a shelf of the Pyrenees facing south-east, above the valley leading to the Grandpont Pass into Spain; above and below it spread pastures and meadows, with silvery ridges and peaks behind. The house was almost the last one on the northern end of this shelf, surrounded by sloping green fields; one looked across these at the big church and the central huddle of houses. It was an old Pyrenean farm-house. What had once been the stable for the beasts was now a single, enormous, ground floor room, the entrance reached by stone steps from the path above; it had been floored with cement, and at the further end were a sink, a range of cupboards for stores and crockery, a refrigerator, and not less than three cooking-stoves—one electric, a wood-burning range for cooking large joints, and a small gas-stove fired by ‘Buta-gaz’, the French equivalent of Calor-gas. In the centre, under a wide window, a sofa and several arm-chairs were ranged; on the opposite side stood an enormous walnut table of local make, with rows of bottles of wine upright below it, and behind piles of cut wood for the Briffault stove. Near the entrance, again quite a distance from the central portion, stood a table laid ready for lunch; this end of the vast apartment was s
erved, as regards light, by the open upper half of the old farm door, made as usual in two sections.

  Julia, seated on the sofa drinking Vermouth, looked about her and listened to Mrs. Stansted’s explanations with immense pleasure. She loved the roominess of this vast ex-stable, the light; and the simple practicality of sitting, eating and cooking all in one place. ‘But what is that?’ she asked, pointing to a small walled excrescence in the corner to the left of the big doorway. Mrs. Stansted laughed.

  ‘Oh, that’s the down-stairs bathroom. It used to be la maison des cochons, the pig-sty; but it just fitted for a bathroom, so old Mr. Jamieson put the bath and shower in there, and the immersion-heater. Come and look, if you’re not too tired.’

  Julia went and looked. The immersion-heater was vast. ‘Doesn’t the hot water cost the earth?’ she asked.

  ‘Costs nothing!’ said Mr. Stansted, also laughing.

  ‘What can you mean?’

  ‘Oh, it’s a nice story. Further down the valley the French Government started to instal a hydro-electric scheme, which would tap the waters from the upper valleys. The Larégeois didn’t care for having their water used, so as fast as buildings and pipelines were installed, they bombed them by toppling rocks down off the hills above, and busting them. In the end the Government gave way, and signed a formal agreement with the Commune of Larége: if they would leave the pipelines alone, they should have free electricity for a certain number of years, for every house marked on a large-scale map.’

  ‘And this is one, of course?’ Julia asked, fascinated by this demonstration of independence in the state-regimented modern world.

  ‘Indeed yes. And that’s why the carpenter has electric saws, and the inn and the grocer vast friges; and why the peasants leave their lights burning all day. The whole of Larége hums with electricity!—I wonder you didn’t hear it as you came through. But the sands are running out—only a year or two more, and our hot water will begin to cost money. Come and eat’ he said, rising; while he was recounting the agreeable story of Larége’s free electricity Mrs. Stansted had walked over to the business end of this multi-purpose room, and helped by the Heriot twins set bowls of garbure, the simple French vegetable soup, on the table; while she cut slices from a crusty loaf, Mr. Stansted poured out red wine into large, thick, comfortable tumblers, rather squat.

  Julia was hungry: she enjoyed the fresh bread and the garbure, and the cold veal with salad which followed it—succeeded by cheese and butter. This was the way to eat here, obviously—no sauces, no puddings, no fussy ‘made dishes’; and she liked the rather rough, but potent, country wine.

  ‘No, we don’t get it here—too high for vines’ Mr. Stansted replied to her question. ‘But we’re leaving you some, and Dick knows where to get it if you run short. You go down and fetch a small cask, and then bottle it. The corking machine is over there’—he pointed to the huge walnut table.

  ‘Let’s have coffee by the spring’ Mrs. Stansted said when they had finished their meal. ‘Dick, you take out the tray; Nick and I will stack, and join you.’

  Dick Heriot carried the coffee-tray out through the old stable door, which his host opened for him, and across a tiny gravelled terrace, with stone and wooden seats, immediately outside it—then round the corner of the house and along a narrow path close under its massive stonework to a small lawn, at the further end of which a table and some garden chairs stood under a group of smallish trees with pale silvery trunks. At first Julia didn’t see the spring, though she could hear a very gentle noise of dropping water—as she looked round, puzzled, Mr. Stansted showed her a tiny grotto behind them, where water dripped from mossy rocks into a minute pool. ‘But we don’t drink that’he said, ‘we get our drinking-water from the spout in the washing-shed up there’—he pointed behind him, where across the cobbled path, which continued on its way above the lawn, a small open-fronted stone edifice could just be seen.

  ‘You can’t drink the tap-water?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Better not. Lovely water from the spout, and it’s no distance—Angela will show you the jar we bring it down in.’

  So one had to go and fetch one’s drinking-water from a spout, Julia thought. However the little shed was not far away. And any thought of domestic chores was soon banished by the splendour of the view in front of her, when she sat back and looked at it. Like the path above, the lawn was supported below on a dry-stone wall, from which the fields beneath it fell away; nothing impeded the view across the valley and round to its head—a huge circle of limestone peaks, gleaming silver in the midday sun like the teeth of a giant saw, with one huge, whiter, block standing up among them.

  ‘Goodness, how beautiful!’ she said. ‘What is the big mountain?’

  ‘The Pic d’Eyzies. Splendid rock—there’s some very good climbing on it.’

  ‘And where is the frontier with Spain? Can one see it?’

  ‘Come across to the edge of the lawn.’ Julia did so. ‘Now you can look right up the valley. All the head of it, and most of the ridge round to the right, is the frontier.’

  Julia looked with deep interest at the silver saw of mountain teeth curving round Larége. This was the frontier that Colin would have to watch; might indeed already be watching, from the further side, over in Spain. And it certainly was a most beautiful place. Perhaps Philip had been right, after all.

  Chapter 2

  The twins drove off after drinking their coffee, and Mrs. Stansted presently led Julia up a broad modern wooden staircase into a big low sitting-room on the first floor, with several doors opening off it. ‘We’ve put you in here’ she said, throwing open the door of a fairly large simply-furnished bed-room with an immense double bed, where the twins had already installed Julia’s luggage—‘We moved up; we thought you wouldn’t want too many stairs. But alas the other bath-room—well it’s only a shower and a loo and a basin, really—is up on the next floor. Now can I help you to unpack? Then I expect you ought to rest, oughtn’t you?’

  Julia said she could manage her own unpacking, and did so—cleverly-arranged built-in cupboards, shelves, and drawers made the bestowal of her belongings easy, but aroused her curiosity: had Philip done this, or his old Uncle? There had been no modern contrivances in the other Uncle’s ‘set’ in Gray’s Inn, below Philip’s rooms, when they took it over. Having unpacked, she was quite glad to lie down on the huge bed; in fact she fell asleep, lulled by the soft dropping sound of water from the spring, and a distant tinkle of cow-bells from the upper slopes, which she could see from her window.

  After tea Mrs. Stansted showed her the more immediate arrangements which life at Larége involved. Taking a large glazed earthen-ware jug in one hand, and the rubbish-bucket in the other, she led her guest up the steps onto the cobbled path, and a little way along it to the open-fronted shed where the spout which produced drinking-water flowed steadily into a stone trough, overflowed, and trickled away. ‘We’ll fill the jug as we come back,’ she said, dumping it; ‘I want to show you where to empty la poubelle’

  ‘The what?’ Julia asked.

  ‘This—the trash-bucket; they call it “la poubelle” here. They walked another hundred yards up the path to a spot where from a projecting spur above a steep slope, it was evident that many poubelles had had their contents shot down the hillside. Back at the shed they filled the jug at the spout.

  Julia absorbed these details with interest, and with a certain degree of pleasure; she liked the simplicities of life when she was equal to them, and no doubt Luzia would empty the poubelle and fill the drinking-water jug. Over tea she asked about edibles—‘I didn’t seem to see any shops.’

  ‘No—they don’t go in for shops here. The meat van comes on Tuesdays and the vegetable van on Thursdays.’

  ‘Comes here?’ Julia interjected.

  ‘No no—to the square outside Barraterre’s—that’s the inn. And you get bread from there—they always have bread.’

  Julia vaguely remembered passing through a square with an inn;
it had seemed to her quite a long way from the car-turn. ‘And who carries the stuff up here?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, one has to do that one’s self. No one in Larége will ever go out to work, or even do small jobs for pay,’ Mrs. Stansted said.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Oh, they’re most strange people; rather savage, and completely anti-social.’

  Mr. Stansted here put his oar in.

  ‘Historically and ethnographically, the reason is rather interesting’ he said. ‘When Charles Martel threw the Moors out of France and back into Spain across the Pyrenees, small pockets got left in isolated places like this. Of course they intermarried with the local people, but the Moorish strain is a very strong thing, and quite untameable.’

  ‘And is it certain that they settled here?’ Julia asked, interested.

  ‘Oh yes. Tomorrow I’ll show you one of the very old, massively-built houses which the people still call “La Maison des Sarrazins”.’

  Julia was half-appalled, half-fascinated by these highly original features of Larége. But with her usual practicality she presently pursued her enquiries into the matter of supplies. ‘Where do you get your groceries—flour and sugar and so on?’

  ‘At Labielle, down in the valley. I usually walk down and take the train, and then have a taxi back. But it’s quite a walk from the station up into Labielle.’

  ‘Is there a taxi here?’ Julia asked.

  ‘No, but there is at Labielle. One telephones for it from the Post Office!’

  Wishing more than ever that she had brought her car, Julia decided that she must at least learn her way to the Post Office, and next morning she walked down there with the Stansteds; on the way they showed her one of the Maisons des Sarrazins, built with enormous, almost megalithic blocks of stone in the lower storey. Besides finding her way, Julia wanted to telephone to Lady Heriot—she had received a telegram from Luzia giving the time of her train’s arrival at Pau two days later. She put in the call, and then waited for the connection, sitting on a bench outside the little building in the sun. Below it a long narrow strip of garden stretched down to the next row of houses; the lower part of this was full of potato-plants, but the upper half only contained bare stems—not dug, the soil was undisturbed. Curious as always, Julia got up and went to examine this odd phenomenon.