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Andrews UK - Craig Low Roderick

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131 pages

English

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On a touring holiday in south-west France, a young English couple, Jennifer and Peter Robbins, quickly fall under the charms of the Lot region - a land of wide meandering rivers, wooded hillsides, rugged moors and quaint stone villages bathed in warm sunshine (not to mention the more worldly pleasures of good food and curiously strong drink). Their holiday takes a step into the unknown when they decide, on impulse, to purchase a house in need of restoration in the remote and pretty village of Lecul-en-Quercy. During their frequent visits, they get to know many of the local characters, including Thomas Chene, the wily mayor; Maisie Connell, the English estate agent who has special techniques for promoting business; Messieurs Blanc and Grospetit, the rival bakers; Marie, the Mayor's long suffering sister and reluctant spinster who daily faces the challenges of computers, community keys and the temperamental town-hall toilet. The Robbinses also have to deal with incomers like themselves -William Montgomery, the retired palaeontologist with a deep secret; Gilbert and Nancy, who impress the locals with their fertility; Stephanie de Chartres, with her out-of-place airs and graces, and even President Jacques Chirac. But it's the hilarious situations that prove the most memorable - the hunter's dinner, where British honour is at stake; the annual snail race, when extreme steps are taken to ensure victory; the terrible revenge meted out to an ambitious mobile trader; the auction of the beer-drinking billy goat; the curious consequence of the incomers' visit to the cemetery that divides the community, and the pending disaster that brings them all together again. And all this in a village that, due to a cartographer's deafness and a faulty telephone, has been removed from the Michelin maps since 1939.

Sujets

Humour

France

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Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	14 mars 2013
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781782342106
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Title Page
GOING NOWHERE

A Novel By
Roderick Craig Low

Publisher Information
Going Nowhere Published in 2012
by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Copyright © 2012 Roderick Craig Low
The right of Roderick Craig Low to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Dedication
For Chantal.
Thank you for everything.
This book is dedicated to the great many people, past and present, who have brought me joy, companionship, good conversation and love along the way. I will never forget you and will always be grateful. I hope my clumsy affection will be remembered with a smile.

Chapter One
When Jennifer and Peter Robbins first discovered Lecul-en-Quercy, it was by accident. They later discovered that the population of Lecul-en-Quercy roughly fell into two camps - those whose ancestors had lived there since at least Napoleonic times and those who, like them, had found the place by accident.
The accident aspect is down to two factors.
The first is the car-owning phenomenon of spending holidays cruising around pretty parts of the world with no particular destination in mind.
The second is that Lecul-en-Quercy doesn’t really exist.
The guidebooks for south-west France encourage holiday-makers with their own transport to spend a happy day driving up the Lot valley from Cahors towards Capdenac and then over the top to Figeac before trundling down the Célé valley to return to the capital of the département du Lot. They refer, by name of course, to the incomparable St. Circ Lapopie, with its pretty architecture, to Pech-Merle and the famous caves, and a few other delights such as defensive ruins, beautiful views and châteaux, but Lecul-en-Quercy is anonymously dismissed by the “and too many other pretty villages to mention by name” generalisation.
Another obvious disadvantage for the place is that Lecul-en-Quercy doesn’t appear on any map. This is due to an oversight on the part of a cartographer working for Michelin in 1939. He was generally up to the usual high standard for that august and painstaking organisation but suffered from premature deafness and the provision by his employer of a defective telephone.
A year before, in 1938, the private railway companies in France had been nationalised, and SNCF - the then new organisation which bears the same name today - charged with the task of reducing costs by various methods including avoiding duplication and closing passenger stations where the meagre level of traffic barely warranted their retention, sent one of their inspectors down from Paris to the slender extremities of the network of the former Paris Orleans Midi Railway. To avoid favouritism, inspections were carried out by people without a vested interest, rather like using a South African referee to adjudicate an international rugby match between England and Italy.
So, down to the Lot came a Monsieur Plume, originally from Lille, round of stature, rounder of face, with a copy of the local railway timetable, a large linen-backed map of France published, as it happens, by Michelin, an official looking pad of pre-printed forms and, naturally, a plume to write with. He might have missed the branch line altogether were it not for a long hold-up at an intermediate station on the line from Cahors to Capdenac on a very hot day while the track ahead was occupied by a goods train collecting wagons of quarry stone from what looked to all intents and purposes like a seldom-used siding. With nothing to do, and the stiflingly hot and throbbing railcar quickly inducing one of Monsieur Plume’s all-too-frequent migraines, he decided to get off the train, find a seat in the shade somewhere and look through his timetable.
To Monsieur Plume, a railway timetable was a thing of absorbing interest. On a long journey he would invariably buy a newspaper but it was always quickly abandoned for the intricate delights of those columns of times and places, abbreviations and dates. Employed in the timetabling section of the Chemin de Fer du Nord until its recent nationalisation, he could read beneath the superficial information provided for members of the public. He would see a train from A to B, identify its return from B to A and puzzle over whether it just stood there waiting for hours, or performed some other service from B to C and back in the meantime. Thus, to him, the timetable became a complex range of subtle clues to train schedules, rolling stock utilisation and train crew provision. There was always room for improvement, always ways of reducing unnecessary train movements, always methods for employing the staff more expeditiously.
Monsieur Plume was ideally suited to his vocation. Dedicated, exacting, just a little bit pernickety and with all the attributes of police detective, Monsieur Plume was an obvious choice to join the team investigating what SNCF had inherited.
Sitting in the cool grandeur of the station waiting room-cum-booking office, having first informed the train crew of the dire consequences of leaving behind a railway official from Head Office in Paris should the line suddenly become clear, he soon found where he was on the map and realised the siding wasn’t a siding at all. Instead, it was a branch line which ran due south along a deep valley to a station with the name of Lecul-et-Mesfesses. Beyond the aforementioned station, the line continued for three or four kilometres to a quarry where it came to an end in a question-mark of a curve into the hillside.
As is so often the case in rural places, the station name referred to the two villages closest to the railway at that point. Neither was, however, remotely near the station, the centre of Mesfesses having been passed at least three kilometres before and seventy metres above the railway line in a fortified position high on the moor-like causses, while Lecul was even further up the valley, way beyond the quarry. Railways rarely made their money from passenger traffic, certainly not in those days, and stations were named as railheads - this is where to send traffic ‘for’ the above-named, rather than this is the name of the locality.
Monsieur Plume turned his attention from the map to the timetable and from that moment Lecul commenced its journey into obscurity.
It was not a dramatic moment. The pounding yellow and red railcar outside the infrequently opened door of the combined booking office and waiting room; the leisurely puffing and whistling of the ancient goods engine as it bashed its trucks back and forth into sidings before reassembling its train; the fluttering passage of a trapped dragonfly, its iridescent wings flashing in the sunlight penetrating the dusty windows; the drone of conversation from behind the glass window in the booking hall interspersed with the clatter of rubber stamps assigning a crate of live chickens to Rodez, churns of milk to Cahors, or a new bullock-hauled reaping machine to a farmer just outside the village.
Not a dramatic moment. But it was a significant moment.
For Monsieur Plume found the branch line to nowhere, saw that its twice-a-day passenger train connected with nothing on the main line, made the assumption that, at most, there would be a couple of return mineral trains up to the quarry in addition to the two out-and-back passenger workings (he was wrong because the train only worked to the quarry twice a week at most) and concluded that the line required closer examination. Had it not been for the hold-up, would there still be a train service to Lecul-et-Mesfesses? Probably not. Line closures continue to this day.
But at least Lecul-en-Quercy might still be on the map.
To cut a long story short, Monsieur Plume continued his journey to Capdenac and came back to Cahors via Figeac, St Denis - Martel and Souillac, but stayed an extra unplanned day for a return to the site of his earlier discovery. He waited at the wayside station for three hours (strictly speaking, he spent the time in the bar of the Hôtel de la Gare sampling several glasses of Pastis) before boarding the train to Lecul-et-Mesfesses after asking the booking office clerk how many tickets he had sold for the branch line in the last month.
‘That’s easy,’ the clerk said, ‘but first you must tell me how many Tuesdays and Thursdays there have been in the last month.’
‘Why must you know that?’ Monsieur Plume asked, riffling absent-mindedly through the pages of his diary as he waited for an answer.
‘Because Madame Lefeu visits her sister on Tuesdays and Thursdays.’
Monsieur Plume was not always very quick on the uptake. He was irritated by what he saw as a simple enquiry being answered by what appeared to him to be another but totally unrelated question. He had heard stories about the residents of the south-west before and guessed this might be a manifestation of their reported contrariness induced, so it was said, by rampant inbreeding caused by a chronic lack of choice in the eligible partner stakes and the parlous state of the local roads.
‘Dear me, what a question. Let me see.’ Monsieur Plume turned the pages of his diary and counted silently to himself as he mouthed the numbers. Having reached today, he closed his diary with a bang. ‘There have been four Thursdays and three Tuesdays so far this month.’
‘Four and three,’ the clerk murmured. ‘Four and three....’
‘Sev