2006 - A Piano in The Pyrenees

I
would like to apologise for not having a ‘Thanks’ section at the front of this book. Frankly, these are very dull to read unless you happen to be one of the people getting a mention, and, let’s face it, you probably aren’t. However, if you do happen to be one of the people who have helped with this book in some way, then well done. Without you, this apology section wouldn’t have been possible.

Not so Young, Free and Single

“What do you mean you’re not going to play any more?” said Kevin.

The dressing room smelt, we’d just been beaten 8–2, and I was close to exhaustion.

“I mean exactly what I say,” I replied. “No more five-a-side football for me. I’m forty-four years old and this is clearly a game for a younger man. Like you, for instance—you’re forty-three.”

“Don’t be too hasty about this,” said Brad, a mere forty-one.

“Yes, are you sure you don’t want to think this through?” said Tim, forty-three.

“There’s nothing to think through,” I said firmly. “My body’s hurting too much. I can still meet you guys in the pub after the game and do the boysy catch-up. I just won’t bother with the football bit.”

“It won’t be the same,” said Kevin.

Of course it wouldn’t be the same. Life changes. It’s supposed to change. I wasn’t going to make the mistake of trying to hang on to something that ought be allowed to become a pleasant memory. (Or, in this case, simply a memory.) Nothing stays the same. Our bodies get older, our children get bigger (or, in my case, godchildren), our pets die on us, our friends get jobs abroad and move overseas, our passions ebb and flow like the tides, governments rise and fall, and natural disasters destroy life with a callous contempt and an alarming regularity.

So why was giving up five-a-side football such a big deal?

“What are you drinking,Tone?” asked Tim from close to the bar.

Dave, the team’s fifth player, had gone home to his wife and kids, so that left me sharing this smoky atmosphere with three of my oldest and closest friends.

“The usual please, Tim,” I replied before sitting down with the other two weary members of our heavily defeated team.

The pub opposite the sports centre was heaving, mostly with drinkers I recognised as being younger, if not healthier, than all of us. We watched the back of Tim as he fought for the barman’s attention. He stood there: tall, good-looking—particularly from the angle we were now surveying him. His gende, roguish sense of humour was something that had made him enormous fun in our younger days when, more likely than not, we would have been in a pub like this one with the sole purpose of trying to chat up women. Unlike me, Tim had settled down. He’d met Lucy when they were both jobbing actors specialising in poor quality adverts for German toothpaste, Belgian coffee or Norwegian shower gel. Shakespeare it hadn’t been, but it had provided them enough money to get a nice house and the means to support their two boys, Archie and George.

“Tony, what’s ‘the usual’ again?” asked Tim, who had quickly popped back from the bar.

“A pint of lager,” I replied. “Not one of the strong ones. Cooking lager please.”

“Righto.”

Tim’s question revealed just how infrequently these vaguely sporting liaisons actually occurred. Many years ago, we’d played weekly in a five-a-side league, but now our busy lives prevented such frivolous indulgences. We were lucky if we managed three games a year. All the more reason, I would have thought, for my retirement from the game to have been accepted more readily.

“Well, I suppose you should listen to what your body’s telling you,” said Brad, who was always the first to be conciliatory.

Brad looked younger than his forty-one years, boyish almost. I looked at him and remembered how much irritation his looks had caused me over the years. Too many girls thought he was ‘cute’, and it wasn’t fair. I’d always taken some comfort in the fact that he wasn’t a very good footballer (that’s why we put him in goal), although regrettably my retirement from the sport now made that consolation redundant.

Brad’s emotional life had always been much more complicated than mine. We’d met in 1985 as performers in a West End musical called
Lennon
, and at that stage Brad was already a father figure to Sarah, the daughter of Kate, the woman he lived with. He and Kate no longer lived together but they were great friends. In fact, Brad was now married to someone else—Claire—but then he didn’t live with her either. Instead, they too were great friends, who happened to be waiting on a divorce. A pattern was beginning to emerge in Brad’s love life, but this wasn’t the time or the place to discuss it.

“Tony, if it feels right to stop the football, then you should do what you want,” continued Brad.

“Yes, but what do you want?” enquired Kevin.

“What do you mean?” I replied.

“Well,” said Kevin, somehow adopting the swagger of a courtroom barrister, “if you had to pick two things you wanted—if you had to—what would you pick?”

I hesitated. This was a bigger question than was usually asked at these post-match debriefs. I resisted the temptation to opt for the easy way out—the humorous reply, so often the Englishman’s refuge from confrontation with his true feelings.

“I suppose the honest answer would be,” I said, still accessing the last pieces of required data from a jumbled mind, “the two things would be: meeting my soulmate, and finding an idyllic house abroad somewhere.”

“Where?” asked Kevin.

“Where what? If you mean where will I find my soulmate, then God knows.”

“No, where would you buy the house?”

“In France, I think. In the mountains somewhere—so we could ski in the winter.”

Kevin produced a satisfied smile of anticipation. Like me, he was a keen skier. He’d introduced me to the sport years ago in what now seemed like another lifetime. In 1982, he’d worked in a school in the French Alps as part of his university degree, and when I’d visited him he’d insisted I join in with the pupils’ ski outing on Wednesday and Friday afternoons. Kevin had been my ski instructor, even though at the time he himself had no real idea how to ski. His tuition had taught me two things.

How to do an emergency stop when travelling at dangerously high speeds.

How to suspend all natural instincts for self-preservation or feel any concern for the safety of others who were foolish enough to be ‘in the way’.

Kevin had been married, but despite a promising start, matrimonial bliss had somehow disintegrated, and for the best part of a decade he’d been adapting to the life of a divorced man. I guess, along with the rest of us, the five-a-side football had been one of the things that helped him through it all. Kevin is roughly the same height as Maradona, but despite his best efforts doesn’t resemble him greatly in any footballing sense. He’s a nifty little player, however, and although I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was the best in our team, he was definitely in the top five.

“Why France?” asked Brad.

“Because I speak pretty good French, and I’ve been there a lot and always liked the place.”

“France is good,” said Tim, who’d finally arrived with a large tray of drinks and crisps. “That’s where we’ve got our place.”

I turned to him in shock. “Your place?” I asked.

“Yes. I thought I’d told you, Luce and I have bought a run-down house not far from Limoges.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, still surprised. “You sneaky bugger. I thought it was always going to be me who’d be the first to buy a house abroad.”

The fact that Tim had omitted to discuss the purchase of a French house with me wasn’t so much a sign that we were best friends who’d drifted apart, more that he was a father of two and I wasn’t. Our lives didn’t really coincide any more. I went to drinks parties and he went to PTA meetings at the local school. On occasion, when I’d been heading off to a book launch or a cocktail party, I might have noted a soupcon of envy in his eye, just as he might have spotted the same in mine each time his children leapt into his arms when he opened his front door.

“Tim, why on earth did you buy a house in France?” I demanded.

“We see it as a good investment. Property is cheap. We’ll do the place up and it’ll make money. Plus, it’ll be a fab place for family holidays.”

“It makes sense, Tony,” said Brad. “You should do it. Of all of us, you’re the one with the most disposable income.”

“Yes,” I said, still somewhat confused as to how the conversation had turned to this subject from that of my retirement as a five-aside footballer. “But just because it’s disposable doesn’t mean I want to throw it away.”

“You know that skiing weekend you have booked with Kevin next month?” said Brad.

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe you should take some time off to look at houses then.”

“No, Brad. It’s a ski trip, and ski trips are for skiing.”

“Yeah, but you could take an afternoon off and—”

“No. That’s final. The house thing can wait.” And at the time I meant it.

§

It had been Kevin’s idea to try the Pyrenees.

“We’ve skied just about everywhere else in Europe,” he’d said. “It would be wrong not to give the Pyrenees a go.”

A comment that revealed the lack of research that had gone into our choice of destination. The plan hadn’t gone much beyond flying to an airport called Pau Pyrenees. Only on arrival were we going to decide which ski resort to go to. We had indulged in this slightly anarchic approach to travel before and we both liked it, not least because we could occasionally revel in the following exchange with people we met on the journey:

“Where are you guys headed?”

“We don’t know.”

What we did know was that there were plenty of ski resorts in the Pyrenees, some to the east of Pau and some to the west. Perhaps it was something of a metaphor for the current state of our lives, but we simply had no idea what direction we would take. We were both at a kind of forty-something crossroads. Kevin had been dating Nic for a couple of years now and they seemed nicely matched, but I had no idea whether he wanted to marry again. Happy though they seemed, would he risk the pain once more? And did he want to become a father? Kevin and I were close, but not geographically—we lived in different cities, and the only times we’d got together in the past couple of years had been on social occasions when a heart-to-heart hadn’t been possible. Not being female, for us the subjects of marriage and fatherhood didn’t fall into the category of small talk, sexual stereotyping requiring us instead to favour discussions about football or comments on the breasts of passing women.

If I was unsure what Kevin wanted, then I was just as uncertain of my own aspirations. Some of the questions Kevin was having to ask himself were less pressing for me since I wasn’t even going out with anybody. I wanted to, of course I did, but my soulmate hadn’t had the common decency to make herself known. When people asked me about the state of my romantic life, I tended to offer up a stock reply: “I’m still interviewing for the position of Mrs Hawks.”

Up until this point I’d conducted a lot of interviews, some more fun than others, but I didn’t seem to be any closer to making a permanent appointment. Was it because I enjoyed the freedom of being a bachelor too much? Or was it because the ‘right person’ hadn’t come along yet?

“It’ll happen when you least expect it.”

This was what I was always being told, usually by people that I didn’t know very well and who might have been better off minding their own business.

The trouble was that I’d been ‘not expecting’ it to happen for such a long time now that I simply wasn’t expecting not to expect it any more.↓

≡A team of linguistic scholars has studied this sentence for weeks and they are still split fifty⁄fifty as to whether it makes sense or not.

I looked across at Kevin. He was reading the in-flight magazine, presumably for the same reason that other people read it—because they’ve left what they really want to read in a bag in the overhead lockers and they can’t be bothered with the rigmarole of fetching it. We were an hour and a quarter into the flight and we knew that the mysterious Pau couldn’t be far away. Our imminent arrival was marked by the aircraft gently tilting its wings and swinging us slowly to the right, a move that provided us with a new and breathtaking view to our left.

“Wow!” said Kevin, wide-eyed and child-like. “The Pyrenees.”

We were getting a privileged aerial glimpse of a spectacular chain of mountains that stretched for four hundred kilometres along the frontier between France and Spain. Beyond its pristine white peaks there were lush meadows and deep canyons, fast-flowing rivers and secluded glens, an abundance of wildlife and plants. This was a playground for the nature lover. Fortunately, there were quite a lot of mechanical ski lifts too. Kevin and I would need something to keep us happy.

“Cabin crew—ten minutes to landing,” announced the captain, as if the rest of us would be landing at a completely different time.

Soon we were shuffling off the plane and filing through passport control. I glanced at Kevin’s old passport photo and it reminded me just how long we’d known each other. We’d met a quarter of a century ago when we’d been at the same school. I hadn’t deigned to talk to him back then, mainly because he was in the year below me and, worse still, he was quite small. He was beneath me in every way. However, after A levels I’d taken a year off and he hadn’t, so we’d ended up starting at Manchester University at the same time. During our first term there I’d bonded with Kevin, playing an enormous number of games of table football, some for very high stakes—the loser had to do the other’s laundry. Bored by my degree in drama, I’d left early to pursue a career in ‘not having a proper job’ whilst Kevin had hung on until graduation, subsequently carving out a successful career as a consultant in tourism and leisure.