A Wail of a Departure for Chalabre

Written August 2017, edited here November 2020.

My hosts for the coming months had made Richmond Station our rendezvous, killing two birds with one stone. They had a meeting nearby about a bronze statue of Virginia Woolf, which was intended to simper on a bench on the Thames. I new little of my hosts, but that Laury Dizengremel was an American accented, French-Dutch sculptrice and the resident artist for the Duke and Duchess of Rutland, and that her husband, Joe Caneen, was an American and a videographer.

I arrived early to our rendezvous, brimming jovially from the pleasant lunch I had just had in the midst of Holborn with my old university chum, Merry. Unfortunately for him, when we split, he had the shadow of a LPC examination over him, whilst I had rays with the prospect of France.

At five o’clock I was to meet Joe Caneen and Lady Higgins outside the station. Do not mistake Lady Higgins as a lady yet, but rather as a silver and milk curled Shih Tzu. I made myself comfortable in the smoking garden of O’Neill’s, ordered a pint and gave broad thoughts to the adventures I wished to have in southern France.

On the table next to me, a pair of reposed professionals gave kind comments on my Grandfather’s walking stick – with its forked antler handle and hawthorn rod – and they invited me to join them for a tibble. Both were extremely affable and endearing. Slesha looked deceivingly before her years; she was Nepalese, smart and quick witted. Himasha held the charm of a favourite child; he was Sri Lankan and had that swooning accent thereof. With an air of thrown ties and unbuttoned shirts, they held a posture in respite of hard work and were finding reward at the bottom of a bottle of red wine. I pulled cigarettes to share with them and soon another bottle was ordered.

I had almost forgotten that shortly I was to leave England, for Himasha told the most fantastic stories that I have ever dared to suspend belief. The most incredible story was about a Christian Shaman in Sri Lanka, who lived an ascetic existence and was a sage and doctor to all the superstitious locals. He told me of the queues winding away from the shaman’s hermitage, with people eager to hear his advice or wisdom of this or that, or exorcise demons, or dispel curses. From this he told me a personal tale to do with this shaman which, to my regret, I feel obliged not to reiterate.

In a sudden interval I looked at my watch and noticed the time, then excused myself to search for my hosts at the rendezvous. By that time Slesha had left to take a flight to Scotland, but Himasha was there and ready to look after my bags and of course order another bottle of red.

It was easy to locate Joe among the crowd, not because I had seen or knew any detail of him beforehand, but because of the little Shih Tzu waiting patiently beside him, with a crown of blue-dyed curly hair. Joe and I shook hands and I led him to O’Neill’s on the corner where I was to kennel Lady Higgins for next two hours whilst waiting for madame artiste for our departure to France.

For some reason Joe had the essence of a Peter Mattheissen, seemingly carved out of the rock of America, born out of a far frontier and becalmed by years of experience and quietly replete with stories like a library. His voice was a softly, well homed American, his words were precise and never superfluous, and it seemed you could ask him anything and only a straight answer would be his response. My initial time with him was brief, before he left me in full care of Lady Higgins, yet that is how I felt.

Himasha and I continued our boozy bavardage, but it was not long before Lady Higgins became terribly upset. She began a series of high pitched moans akin to a squeaky tire or a squashed rubber toy. Himasha and I looked at one another concerned and searchingly, our brilliant conversation was being stuccoed more and more with this unwarranted addition of dog wails. But to my mind I simply said to myself that it was only two hours until the second rendezvous with my hosts and surely Lady Higgins could wait.

She let out a shrill, a cry which brought ‘awes’ of compassion, and looks of concern, from the faces of some desirable ladies nearby, and suddenly we were in situation of being thieves and abductors. Quickly, Himasha and I put our minds to solving this issue. Water, I said in a moment of genius, and requested a bowl from the barman. Nope, no hope, Lady Higgins merely quenched her parched mezzo-saprano throat, like an operatic singer, and belched her way into full contralto. Himasha’s eyes puzzled their way across the stone work on the ground and then rose to meet my wide eyes in a moment of eureka. Walk! he said, and I began to believe in peace once more. I took the leash from under my chair leg and pointed to my glass and winked to Himasha to keep it full and ready for my triumphant return with the placated Lady.

I went off with Lady Higgins like a boyfriend in charge of his girlfriend’s poodle, and to me she seemed already well settled and adjusted; sniffing at lampposts, panting excitably, and swerving across the pavement sweeping the legs of on-comers. I envisioned myself returning to Himasha, with a Lady Higgins dashing to say hello and then lying prostrate as if besides a roaring fireplace in a chateau whilst I sat down in a towering armchair with a hand tumbling a tumbler of amber.

Content with my fantasies, with this successful walk in settling Lady Higgins, I came back to O’Neill’s pub and becalmed myself in my chair whilst Himasha raised a glass to appeasement. But no sooner had we clinked our glasses we were then reeling in suspense as Lady Higgins readopted her previous moaning position, looking yet again longingly at the exit which Joe Caneen had left through. Lady Higgins murmured, we held our gasping gobs; she made an uncertain step forward and we lent forward as if to grasp a fallen coin; then she howled with a full throttled mezzo-soprano of anguish that turned heads and spilled pints. Helplessly, we gathered Lady Higgins up in our arms and stroked her in turns to quiet and distract her as much as we possibly could. I looked at my watch, it read half past five, that meant another hour and a half until the second rendezvous with my hosts – we ordered another bottle. We managed the time not too stressfully, but not without consistent attention to Lady Higgins and not without the affectionate aid from a neighbouring table.

When the time came to part, Himasha and I shared details and said our goodbyes and words of gladnesses having met one another. Lady Higgins and I found Joe Caneen a few streets up, dealing with a large reinstated BT-box trailer, hitched to a Land Rover. As I approached, the artiste herself, Laury Dizengremel wandered up. I was first struck by her electrical blue hair like Lady Higgins’, voluminously falling off her short trim. She was instantly energetic however tired she proclaimed herself to be from all the meetings she had just endured. We orientated the luggage in the car and trailer and in not much more time made off, out of London, away to Dover and France. Laury recumbent, snoozed on the back seat with Lady Higgins at her feet, whilst Joe and I in the front seats engaged in flowing conversation, which caused Joe to miss time and time again each service station to fuel in.

We took a French liner, then plummeted south as fast as we could drive through the night, playing musical chairs in the Land Rover, between Laury and Joe taking turns driving. We all sat or snoozed in the front or back seats and Lady Higgins enjoyed the variety of warm ankles to rest her jaw upon.

The next day, as Toulouse approached ever nearer on each road sign, the heat of the air increase. The air-con refused to function, so the windows were lowered and a billow of the aire thundered in, and our hair was charmingly agitated by this and all I could think of was escapism. We passed through the heart of France, a wondrous landscape of undulating hills and sudden steepled villages on the knolls of hills, ensconced in trees.

Toulouse passed on by and the hinterland rose into plains bordered by hummocks. We took a road that went straight south to the town of Pamiers, along a plain of husbandry, and ahead the foothills of the Pyrenees began to kneel up in front of us and the peaks surmount. We turned parallel to the chain of the Pyrenees and went between the nodes of hills and saw clusters of tiny red-tile roofed villages in the hollows of valleys passed. A ruinous castle appeared like a craggy cliff on a promontory which grinned like a set of teeth; that is Chateau de Lagarde, they said.

I was told later that one of the castle’s aristocratic occupants, who having missed many court sessions in Versailles or Toulouse (can’t remember which), was asked by the king or count why? the seigneur replied, ‘It is obvious that Your Majesty by your question, with all due respect, that you have never experienced the pleasures of Lagarde?’, the king or count replied no, ‘Because if you had been, your Majesty, you would understand why one is so unable to so easily part with my country’. Could I ever, now having seen it?

This countryside once upon a time was ranked with groves of vines (that I was told and read about separately), and the crops were abundant and the climate ideal for it. This was the land of romance and the troubadour, of songs of courtships and love, where it is said that sun of the dawn of the age of medieval romance arose in the courts of the French aristocracy. This country in the middle ages was once richer in life and commerce than one might have known, the burghers were uncommonly free and the Counts of Toulouse were wealthily liberal folk. But this place was also a lay of the Cathars, a people who subscribed to a heretical sect of Christianity, which led them ultimately to the pyre by the hands of Crusading soldiers in the name of the Papacy. France has always been a wealth of history and that shadow of it had then eclipsed my mind and I looked blindly to it.

My hosts lived in the very centre of a small town called Chalabre, on the Place d’Halle which is a roofed square where music and fetes are enjoyed. A resin replica of Laury’s Lancelot Capability Brown statue (which in bronze overlooks the Thames in London) strode at the door of her very home. It was a tall town house, rendered yellow and had dark caulk-blue shutters that imitated the tones of the square.

An elderly lady lent out of the first floor window as we pulled up, it was Lore, a family relation to Laury. She was in her eighties, white haired and had spectacles on the end of her nose. She was extremely robust , I saw her  later spin around the bars of a park swing, apparently a hobby of hers since her youth. Lore was a yogi of yoga apparently and made a fantastic salad with pesto and could speak many European languages — she was Laury’s step mother.

Lady Higgins burst out from the car and squealed at two ladies who had just come out of the house to meet us, they were Eve and her daughter Deirdre. They were both American, Eve had found settlement and sanctuary here after four years in Ireland after facing eviction from the visa police, she had a ‘beau’ (Laury’s word) and worked in selling cosmetics. Deirdre Darling was tall and had the most beauteous and captivating visage under spacious peach-dyed locks; she was an artist and when she was seventeen she’d spent time on an Italian renaissance art tour in Italy. We all got on instantly.

Inside the abode, busts of her mistress’ works mantled drawers and tables, like John Travolta in the living room, Churchill in the loo, and her series of Chinese countenances in the library. In the kitchen and dining room, a chandelier of polished brass pots, kettles and urns dangled upside down and gave a curious, eclectic ambiance to the room. Where rooms had been finished, great artistic care had been taken to detail the paint and the furniture, and there were heavy wooden chests and wardrobes and drawers. The library was half complete but already full to the brim with curious variations of French encyclopedias, Larousses and reference books, and large hardcover tomes that kept pictures and texts of chateaux, sculptures, architecture and famous painters; moreover novels and histories abounded, some of Napoleon, some by Victor Hugo and beaucoup poetry.

I had found myself in a place of intrigue and energy, and in the coming weeks I would be gifted such a summer of hued memories. There was work to be done, castles to see, things to read and wine to drink. People of various relations, friends, family and villagers, would pass through in quick moments of excitement. There would be excursions to the sea, Collioure, and Lac de Montbel over the hill to swim in; dinners and fetes to sing and tables to dance on. This was where a wail was to be had, I was damn fortunate to stumble upon it.