Un Train Peut En Cacher Un Autre (One Train May Be Hiding Another) 

Un train peut en cache un autre is a warning sign you see at level crossings all over France, for motorists stopped and waiting for the barriers to come down and a train to go through. The literal translation is one train may hide another. So the driver should make sure it’s all clear before they go through after the barriers go up again.

Un train peut en cache un autre could also be used figuratively: there may be more to something than meets the eye. Or even a serious illness or symptom can be lurking behind an apparently benign one.

And my tale of meeting up with an old friend, in an old haunt, has been avoiding the shadow train of melancholy and heartache lurking behind it. Some of it mine.

There was actually a lot going on for me as I rattled around those green remembered Verdelais hills with Joel and his crew. And it was just as complicated, too, when we met up nearly ten years later in Paris, before travelling on to Verdelais, via Bordeaux on the amazing TGV, France’s high-speed intercity rail service. 

And afterwards.

When we met first, Joel was married to Martine, and they lived in a rented house just down the lane from his family home, and they had two young sons.

I got on so well with Joel and with Martine, and the two boys, aged six and four and a half when I walked up that winding back road and arrived at the house for the first time. They were all so welcoming of me and I soon fitted right in, like a key into the right lock. My valley was indeed green and lush.

Like many of my generation I fell for Betty Blue (Blue remembered thrills!) in the famous film. But having watched it several times over the years, my attention wandered more and more past the stunning Beatrice Dalle, who didn’t so much inhabit Betty as transfigure, transform and transcend her.

There’s one voice-over piece in particular I love, where Betty’s partner, Zorg, is talking about the people in the small town they were living in before Betty basically lost the plot. He talks about them ‘having their motors regulated’. They had life sussed, Zorg reckoned.

And that’s kind of how I saw small-town France when I first lived there. The people knew who they were, and were proud of it, and couldn’t dive into that boeuf bourguignon or sniff that incomparable Merlot without rhapsodising about it in that instantly poetic language that made my Hiberno-English sound so prosaic. 

Joel, Marie Jeanne and Pappy, Francois, Eugene, and all the rest all had their motors calibrated.

But of course, like with Zorg, that was all more a reflection of my own motor being unregulated, and grasping blindly for the correct settings. Not that I would see it like that back then. I just thought I might gain something living among these ancient wisdoms.

I can still see — and hear — dreamy Bastien, the younger boy, with his big round glasses, and his no-nonsense older brother Guillaume, and us all eating outside at lunch-time that first summer in Verdelais. Bastien grew up to be a dreamy English teacher and Guillaume a no-nonsense engineer.

But behind it all, Joel and Martine were very different people, and there were tensions, which I kept well clear of, and indeed Joel was not the kind of man to share such things. Or if he did, not with me.

He was always the easiest of company, and the laughs were many and the chats were often deep and wide-ranging. But now, and perhaps confirmed by the many detours on his journey since, Joel was probably not as happy as he seemed, but is very good at distracting himself or compartmentalising stuff, and, on the surface of it, he just got on with things. 

By the time we met up again in Paris, a strange little drama was playing out, which I only came to kind of understand afterwards. 

It was all in French, of course, but without subtitles, so the subtleties were lost on me. But I sure caught the gist. It was like one of those carefully improvised French arthouse movies, so profoundly pretentious, which I loved, of course, maybe because everyone in them was so alluring and cool — and, yes, liable to get their kit off — and nobody smokes, drinks, dresses, or undresses as cooly or as alluringly as the French. Thankfully, Joel, Martine and the rest of this cast did keep their kits on when this Irish innocent was abroad …

I will always remember the day I met up with Joel in Paris anyway, March 2, 1991, as it was the day Serge Gainsbourg died. Singer, song-writer (yes, Je t’Aime … Moi Non Plus with his then wife Jane Birkin), composer and louche provocateur, he was a massive figure in French cultural life.

Joel was with two others, a self-important guy — so I reckoned anyway — in his late-thirties, never without a brown leather briefcase, and apparently trying to raise funding for some kind of centre near Verdelais to do with Toulouse Lautrec, whom he claimed to be an expert on, and a woman, in her mid-30s, who was, I gathered, some kind of art expert, and also hugely interested in Lautrec, and in this proposed centre.

I didn’t twig it at the time, but Joel was into this woman, though nothing would really come of it. As for the other guy, best not say much more than his Lautrec scheme never panned out, and there would be bad feeling around that between them all, and others, afterwards.

After a day and an overnight stay in Paris — during which a promised meeting with the legendary singer song-writer and actor Jacques Higelin, whom I adored, fell through — a story for another time — Joel and I headed for Verdelais.

Joel was due was to meet up with his two companions from the Paris trip in Toulouse shortly afterwards, but for now, we were staying in the old rented family home in Verdelais. 

Nobody had thought to warn me, but it became obvious that while Joel and Martine were still sharing the house, they were sharing little else, bar largely unexpressed enmity and bristling silences, looking after the two boys and the usual day to day stuff. 

Awkward for me? Oh, oui!

To say Joel is good at distracting himself is actually quite the understatement as at the time, I discovered, he was going through what I would describe as a creative frenzy. 

Out in his little work shop at the side of the house, there were loads of paintbrushes, easels and battered tubes of paint on splattered tables and chairs, and paintings finished and unfinished everywhere, all abstract, all done by Joel, and his sculptures in wood, stone and plaster. Some were hung or on display but mostly they were like himself, all over the place. While his home life burned, Joel painted and sculpted on.

It reminded me of Pascale, with whom I had shared a wonderfully poky old cottage in the village of Cerons, 8km or so from Verdelais, while working with Joel. Pascale was actually a friend of my sort of girlfriend — more later — and the cottage belonged to her boyfriend’s grandmother.

At the time, Pascale’s relationship seemed to be taking a long time to go nowhere. She was with a guy I don’t think she even liked, when it came down to it. Dizzyingly energetic and dramatic, Pascale, back then, was also in a creative frenzy. She would paint face after face, in all sorts of colours and styles, all surrounded by weird motifs and patterns. They were going up like post-in notes, rapidly filling the walls. They were also on top of the fridge, on tables … everywhere. 

Maybe Pascale and Joel were similarly coping with their existential distresses in an outwardly directed way.

At the back of it all, I didn’t see Joel as someone to share my existential angst with — even if I could identify it as such, or even begin to express what was in my addled head, in English or French. Or think to go into my own misfiring love life. There was also maybe  a vague feeling that so much would go missing in translation.

Or maybe it was because when it came to it, we dealt with these things in vastly different ways. Joel painted and I brooded.

Work and friends were my distraction: left to myself I would have done nothing, and aspired to even less. Working with Joel and the rest kept me going, in every sense.

Then again, things can be so confusing you really don’t know where to start to even understand them, not to mind resolve them, or get out from under the weighted tarpaulin of their burden. 

The very first summer I moved to France, from the Netherlands, I got work picking fruit with a Monsieur Boyer, in his massive apple, peaches and nectarine orchards. My ordinary level school French got me only so far, and mostly I conversed with my fellow, mostly French, pickers in a loose affiliation of simplified English and stripped back French. I became quite friendly with a slightly older guy, Jackie, who one lunch-time, sitting with our backs against a nectarine tree, neatly summed up his approach to life’s challenges and dilemmas:

“When I have little problem, I worry about problem,” began this hard-drinking but jovial man from eastern France, “but when I have big, big problem, I say ‘Fuck you, problem’.”

So some of us shut our eyes on our problems, others painted around them, and guys like me tossed in our secret retreats by night, and drank and cavorted and picked peaches or mixed cement by day.

All this is by way of interpretation and revision, and regressions too, the rippling afterthoughts of a hundred thousand ruminations on my time in France, and the years since that filter and maybe even fabricate in parts.  But even that fabrication is as real as any so-called facts, as I facilitate my own thoughts.

So much was wonderful, so much was liberating and enlightening back then. But a lot was opaque too. Yes, Mr Prine, broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see.

It’s interesting that I never felt down when with Joel, or to a lesser extent, with Pascale. Their distractions, and the wider deviations of food, wine and friends, seemed to distract me also. More than that, I actually loved Joel’s distractions. And him. And those provided by the lovably ditzy Francois and the expansive Eugene, and all the other daily exotics.

But behind it all, as far as love and longing went, I was, as the Bonnie Tyler song goes, Lost In France … 

TO BE CONTINUED