Deep France by Celia Brayfield

Author:Celia Brayfield [Brayfield, Celia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447231448
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

May Day, May Day

Until the second round of the presidential election on 5 May, the Béarn suffered agonies of anxiety. The normal favourite topic of conversation, the weather, certainly provided enough incidents for people to talk about, but all they wanted to discuss was politics. In a nearby village, Burgaronne, one man had voted for Le Pen; everyone knew who he was and nobody was speaking to him.

In Bordeaux on May Day, the Western Revolutionary Communist League and a dozen less grandly named organizations staged a demonstration that got at least forty thousand people out on the streets. In Paris, four hundred thousand people hit the boulevards to urge their fellow-citizens to vote against Le Pen.

The Club Internationale de Saliès-de-Béarn was in ferment, and no member was more tortured than Annabel. One of their French members was said to have stood up at a Socialist Party meeting and made racist remarks about Muslims. The report came from a woman, who was no longer a paid-up member, but was determined to get an apology out of the guilty one before the name of the club was besmirched, and wrote a letter to the whole committee about the alleged outrage.

As vice-president, Annabel found herself in the hot seat, pressurized by the accuser to do something but having no idea of what to do and a great fear of doing anything. Her tele­phone rang all day, with committee members eager to chew over the issue. The club’s treasurer, a Hungarian businessman whose English wife’s family had owned a holiday home near Castagnède for thirty-five years, felt so hassled by this pack of warring women that he resigned.

Nobody, however, had said anything to the alleged offender, who whizzed obliviously about the town on her bicycle with her lips fixed in the habitual half smile. She seemed to be living in a world of her own, unaware of the conversations that ceased abruptly as she approached and the speculation that erupted as soon as she was gone. In a few days later, she announced that she would give a little party, on a Moroccan theme, and warmly invited us all. A few days after that, she called the party off, saying that not enough people could come.

‘You don’t actually know what she said,’ I pointed out to Annabel. ‘It might not be true. Why don’t you just ring up the Chairman of the Socialist Party and ask him what happened?’ She squeaked in sheer distress.

Annabel was also afraid that if Gracienne, the club presi­dent, got embroiled in the drama, she too might resign. Annabel would then be under pressure to take the role of president. The position carried responsibilities. There are rules governing clubs and societies in France, even one whose members’ main activity is sitting in a cafe having coffee and practising their languages every Tuesday.

The original purpose of these regulations is to stamp out political corruption at the grass roots, an objective which many critics would argue has been pursued with tragic naivety.

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