Riding With Giants by Peter Holmes a Court

Author:Peter Holmes a Court [Court, Peter Holmes a]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743484272

XVII

On Ice, Thinly

If the activities didn’t exhaust them, another château visit would always finish them off.

The next day I woke to an email from Aymeric to say I should return by 9 am to the factory to watch the cutting of the steel tubes. As it was a Wednesday, the French day of parent/child interaction, I had to beg that we postpone. A short, grumpy email came straight back to remind me that he couldn’t be held to the delivery schedule if I kept moving dates.

‘We have a factory to run, Peter.’

A short, humble email went back from me, excusing him of all responsibility, and we agreed the tube cutting would take place on Thursday.

I hadn’t heard of the midweek, school-free day before arriving in France. When Aimée first told me about it during registration, I looked at her with a combination of cognitive dissonance – like, no school for anyone? – and some fear – what about my schedule? She told me there were lots of activities I could do with the girls in the local area, including horse riding lessons in Saumur, ice skating in Bourgueil, and even going to the heated indoor pool in Avoine. Consulting a map, I found that a circuit of Saumur–Bourgueil–Avoine would be most logical, and allow a visit to the Hyper U supermarket on the way back. So every Wednesday I embarked on a three town, multi-activity-plus-pantry-restocking triathlon that had the desired effect: fill the fridge and exhaust the girls.

After the first of these Wednesdays I returned to the school with the girls by my side and told Aimée how well it had worked and thanked her for the suggestion. She laughed and let me know they were the complete list of activities in the district, not meant to be packed into the same day. ‘One each week,’ she said. However, once the girls were hooked, they weren’t having anything less of a midweek adventure.

We found the horse riding behind the home of Dominique and Sandrine, a warm-hearted couple who were equally large in both personality and size. Dominique was a handsome man of Algerian/French descent with hands the same size and colour as a baseball mitt. Sandrine had been a professional tennis player and as I had arrived in mid-winter, she welcomed me as the human embodiment of the Australian Tennis Open, the blue-courted vision of searing temperatures that plays incongruously on European TVs every late January. We were able to talk tennis before I could talk French, as the vocab was mostly made up of players’ names that I knew.

Their small plot was better loved than well kept, full of animals, their twin boys, a rotating supply of foster kids they looked after, and horses of all shapes and temperaments. They shared a political philosophy bordering on revolutionary, but ran a business that catered to the children of the château’d class. I had come for the riding instruction but would have returned for the chance of their company. As a

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