C'est Modnifique!: Adventures of an English Grump in Rural France, page 25
Still, €137 for two jabs and some chicken tonic was a bit strong. Natalie was taking no chances with any of the animals though and feared any further problems akin to Junior's. Vespa had gone missing, something which distressed us all, but Natalie more so, so like an old-fashioned matriarch she was defending what was left of her family and at any cost.
Junior's muscle loss and overall demeanour was getting worse, his only daily respite from Ultime's bullying was when Natalie let him out into the garden to 'cut the lawn'. He would suddenly perk up, like he'd won a reprieve, a stereotypical mousy husband escaping his harridan of a wife and hiding in the bookmakers for the afternoon. This annoyed Ultime massively and she would watch from her paddock, occasionally stamping her hooves in anger and frustration as he took long sips from the swimming pool and threw a glance in her direction.
The pool was a relatively safe place to drink from; I had stopped putting chemicals in weeks ago, but the sheer decadence of the gesture was magnificent, like some ageing monarch of a crumbling empire having one last aristocratic hurrah. And in the background Tallulah would be given her sips of hen pick-me-up, while Flame and Indiana Jones tossed small rodents at each other. In animal terms it all had a whiff of the last days of the Roman Empire about it, pampered creatures pushing excess and wantonness to their depraved limits.
And it didn't end there. Having struggled to move the caravan with the punctured tyre out of the field ('It gets in the horses' way ' ,( I took a deserved shower and went looking for my slippers and some 'feet-up' time, only to be told that I couldn't have my new medically enhanced slippers as they were 'occupied'. A toad apparently was asleep in one of them and shouldn't be disturbed.
And apparently we're the dominant species…
Poor Junior, though. Natalie was keen to seek further advice, quite rightly, arguing that she could deal with bad news if it came to it, but not knowing what the problem was was eating her up. The once mighty, albeit cantankerous, beast had by now seen more horse vets than Desert Orchid, but something was terribly amiss. Some had said sand colic, some had said he was older than we thought, others had said worms or an ulcer. Our local vets had been tried and exhausted with no discernible improvement – quite the opposite – so now we were looking further afield for an explanation. Monsieur Corbeau used to be a mechanic in the area until ill health forced his retirement, but he was using his free time now, among other things, to train horses for attelage, horse and carriage riding basically, a popular sport over here. Natalie bumped into him in the market and they talked about Junior's plight. Corbeau had been the most conscientious mechanic I had ever met; I remember his look of horror when I turned up at his workshop with a camper van I'd bought on eBay.
'Where have you driven this from?' he asked incredulously and seemingly afraid to touch it.
'Manchester.' I beamed.
'Oh God! You're lucky to be alive!' he said and snatched the keys off me in case I was planning on driving it any further.
He regarded Junior as being in a similar state of disrepair and offered to drive Natalie and Junior in his horsebox to a renowned vet about an hour away.
'This is so kind of you,' Natalie said to him when they returned from the first of two long vet journeys.
He looked at her, slightly confused. 'Not really,' he said. 'It's what we do for them,' he added, slightly embarrassed and handed Natalie Junior's lead rope.
Junior was given a number of blood tests, none of which proved anything, only that the second set were worse than the first in some way. If it was an ulcer, which they couldn't apparently determine without an endoscopy, then the treatment would be €800. An endoscopy could only be done in either Paris or Le Mans, either of which are a six-hour round trip away in Monsieur Corbeau's horsebox and poor Junior would have to be starved for 16 hours prior to the camera exploring his insides. The vet, the most recent one anyway, feared the worst, however, a cancerous tumour, for which there was no treatment.
While in the garden and away from Ultime, Junior had tried to come in through the front door, clearly feeling low and needing Natalie to soothe the savage beast as it were. He briefly gave me a look of contempt when I appeared in the doorway rather than his mistress and when she did appear it was like he was asking her, 'Really, what do you see in him?'
She led him gently back to the garden, the bond between them so strong and so trusting, so loving. It was one of his last days.
They Shift Horses, Don't They?
A number of people kindly pointed out to Natalie that 'at least they're only animals', as if the cloud of frustration and despair would suddenly lift from her and everything would be just immediately hunky dory again. I never really understand this kind of remark: people who go around saying that 'humans are more important and we should take more care of them' as if you have to make a choice at some point, choose a side, like there's only so much compassion you're allowed to show for living creatures. They seem to be missing the point. It's not one or the other. Frankly, that's just errant nonsense and ignores the fact that animals, especially for us, especially our animals, are part of the family. I mean, for Heaven's sake, anyone who really thinks that I'm somewhere in the pecking order above almost any of the livestock we have clearly isn't paying attention. Besides which, both Junior and the still missing Vespa had been integral to so much that had happened to us as a family ever since we'd been here.
The place felt empty. In the days that followed Junior's death Natalie tried to get through, as she always does, by planning big, outdoor things for the spring. The goats had helped her in the garden redesign project by escaping again, and eating her precious rose bushes and prized fern, a particularly stupid and wanton act of vandalism when you consider that their only ally around the place was Natalie herself, but it didn't bother her that much. She was dealing with the death of Junior, probable death of Vespa and decidedly unoptimistic future of Tallulah in her usual way.
I also suspected that she had plans in the animal department too. She had tried to convince me a week after Junior's death that what we needed was another puppy, to which even the boys were sceptical and I could tell her heart wasn't really in it, yet. She was just laying down a marker. We had a new neighbour who had moved in in the autumn and who had set up a dog-breeding business, and although they live half a mile away, they could be heard. We're not keen on the whole pedigree dog-breeding industry anyway, and although we had never actually seen them, around feeding time, if the wind was blowing in our direction, you could hear dozens of highland terriers all yapping excitedly for their dinner. Natalie had taken to standing on the terrasse listening to the cacophony, her head tilted like she was trying to understand them. I feared that at some point over the next few months she would attempt a night raid or at least a reconnaissance mission to check on their conditions.
Junior was irreplaceable though and, being Junior, was never likely to go quietly, staying in character right to the end, and beyond.
'Darling, the swimming pool engineer refuses to come in until we've put the horse away' is pretty much the apotheosis of middle-class, first-world problems. I found myself shouting this up the stairs to Natalie and immediately needed a sit down, a few moments to take a good long hard look at myself.
The truth was that I had every sympathy for Monsieur DeFrenne, the poor pool engineer. He had arrived, probably in a mood of late-afternoon optimism, no doubt feeling that this would be his last call of the day, a simple hivernage (putting the pool into winter hibernation) and then it would be home to a warming cognac or something. What he hadn't expected as he tried to get through the gate was a seriously ill-looking horse acting as bouncer and clearly taking a dislike to the poor man. Junior was very obviously unwell and a shadow of his former size, but there was still enough residual hate in his veins for snorting maniacally at boiler-suited strangers who had the temerity to turn up unannounced.
I tried to move him myself but he was having none of it from me, and so the three of us just stood there awkwardly filling time, Junior very obviously not taking his eye off the increasingly nervous Monsieur DeFrenne. We tried to make small talk about the weather and so on, but each time one of us finished Junior would just let out a snort as if he was making derogatory remarks about our shallow and uneasy attempt at bonhomie. Natalie duly arrived and of course the old sod was immediately politeness itself, though as he was led away he would stop every few yards and turn his head back to the anxious and still unwilling-to-enter pool technician, just to let him know…
To be fair, Junior hadn't been behaving like this as often as he used to. To us it seemed obvious that he had cancer; the length of his illness and the loss of weight seemed to indicate that. We were guessing of course and no-one in the horse-related veterinary world seemed willing to commit to such a diagnosis. The tests, though why this is I still don't know, would have to be carried out miles away and at some absurd expense while all the while it was obvious that the poor horse was fading. I'm not sure then if the tests would have told us anything we didn't already know but instead just added to the distress of the poor animal. Ultime didn't know how to respond either; one minute she would be crying out for him when he was allowed to roam outside the paddock and would then give him something of a beating on his return, to the extent that she now had to be separated from him altogether.
Tallulah, the oldest hen, was still suffering too and her 'tonic' drops were becoming less and less effective as she croaked quietly away to herself, her crest now lying so limply across her head it was like a Bobby Charlton combover and her feathers on the face of it seemed paler. Vespa had now been missing for six weeks, leaving Natalie heartbroken. Vespa had gone missing before but never while the hunting season was on, she stayed close to home then, and not while we had a seeming epidemic of foxes in the area too. Monsieur Girresse, now apparently allowed back in the public eye by his watchful family, proudly announced to us that he had shot 52 foxes since September. Vespa, he therefore suspected, had been the victim of one of the 'red vermin'.
In all the time we have lived here I had only seen one fox and that was two miles away, so there was a nagging feeling, possibly and hopefully unfairly, but expressed by other neighbours too, that poor Vespa may have been the victim of Girresse himself. But unless Vespa – in some form or other – turned up, who knew what had happened to her.
Either way, what with Junior's death and Vespa's disappearance, Natalie was taking it badly. I'm not one necessarily to pooh-pooh modern mental health disorders, we live in a relentless world and the pressures that come with it bring forward new issues, but it always struck me that seasonal affective disorder (SAD) was one of the woolliest of these new-fangled maladies. Maybe, and as a direct result of my job, it's that I spend so much time in darkened rooms or am out late at night that the idea of bleak, dirty grey, long winter days isn't that much of a culture shock. Also, I find it hard to credit that anyone born in the British Isles would possibly suffer from SAD as most years it's pretty much the one 'season' anyway.
I've changed my mind on this, though.
Natalie has always suffered from it. Her desire, need almost, to be outside in the garden is trampled on by the onset of harsh weather and the dark days, and her mood – and overall happiness – suffers accordingly as she's left cooped up like a songbird in a cage, unable to spread her horticultural wings. She's always hated the winter anyway, the weather is foul and keeps her indoors, but the sense that this new winter season very much marked the end of something was compounded by the fact that by the end of it there was a very real possibility that not only would we be without our first horse, but possibly our first cat and our first hen too, and that was a very depressing thought indeed.
Junior had looked awful when I had returned home on the Sunday evening. He was stood in the stable, facing the corner like a punished schoolboy, his head hung low and his mouth open, practically motionless, and there seemed that there was nothing we could do for him now. It being a Sunday the horse vet was unlikely to come out and we weren't at all sure that we would want her to anyway, fearing that a very painful decision would then have to be made. We decided instead to wait until the morning and call the vet first thing.
As is normal for a school day, on Monday, Natalie was up early with the boys and went out to see Junior. He was lying down and the end was near. He responded to her touch, again the closeness of their relationship offering comfort, even at this stage, to both of them. Natalie briefly returned indoors to call the vet and then went back out to be with him again. It was too late. You can read all manner of things into events like this, positives and negatives, but it really did seem that through some tremendous force of will he had been determined to hang on until morning to say goodbye to his mistress and, because of the Olympian levels of stubbornness he could call on, had managed to do just that.
Natalie was inconsolable. It didn't matter that this had been on the cards for weeks, if not months; it didn't make the end any easier to bear and while Samuel and Thérence kept their distance, a naturally curious Maurice wanted to say his goodbyes too. As a sensitive and emotional little boy it may not have been the right thing to do, and affected him for a good couple of weeks afterwards, but I honestly think he would have been more upset if we hadn't let him see Junior one final time. They stood there together in the cold stable, holding on to each other.
'Can't we bury him?' said a sobbing Maurice.
'We're not allowed to,' Natalie said.
'Even just a bit of him?' Maurice begged.
I took the boys to school while Natalie began the necessary process of registering Junior's death and therefore arranging for his body to be taken away. The website for the Haras Nationaux was the obligatory first step, but in order to begin Natalie had to set up a username and password, something which even the most frivolous of websites demand these days so that they can bombard you with spam later; but it's difficult enough to come up with an original and secure password at the best of times, when it's during the registration of the death of your horse your mind is naturally on other things.
Once that had been done, the particulars had to be filled in, name, address, cause of death and so on, which is all very well and can't actually be questioned but because the website was having serious problems, every time Natalie submitted the information she would be returned to the home screen and asked to start the whole process again. Things were painful enough as they were without having some technical Groundhog Day issues stretching the thing out, meaning Natalie had to repeatedly re-enter the raw details over and over again.
She composed herself and rang the helpline instead which helpfully suggested calling back later, when someone helpful would be there to help – all, unhelpfully, at a time that suited them.
We went back out to the stable while waiting for French bureaucracy to start its working week. I had had to move Junior's considerably heavy head in order to shut the stable door and keep Ultime and the goats out but Ultime was now nudging at the door trying to get in, knowing something was wrong. The vet, who we had rung for advice, suggested that it might be better to let her in to the stable so that she too could say her goodbyes but it wasn't that easy trying to move Junior aside again.
I've had to deal with quite a few animal deaths in the past few years but the sheer size of Junior put this on an altogether different scale and I couldn't see how he could possibly be moved at all, assuming we eventually got through to the bureaucrats who could sign this off. I got the door open enough to let Ultime in and she moved in gingerly and quietly and nuzzled, kissed even, Junior's lifeless head and neck. Their relationship had been fraught for the past few months, but there was genuine affection once again in his death it seemed.
'Congratulations! You're eligible for a discount!' The horse department fonctionnaire wasn't quite as jolly as that but even so, it was a bizarre start. Why we were entitled to a discount on our horse corpse removal needs was unclear, maybe it was the beginnings of a nascent loyalty scheme and while €120 is clearly better than €200 it wasn't, unsurprisingly, our most pressing issue. We were given a job number, and an email containing a docket would be sent shortly which we would then have to print out and 'leave by the animal'. It was all so cold. I know these people deal with these things all day every day but the bedside manner left a lot to be desired.
The équarrisseur – I looked up the translation and did not like what I found, 'équarrisseur: noun (m) – squarer, butcher, hewer, knacker' – arrived late morning in a massive lorry which wasn't even going to get through the gates, never mind up towards the stable where Junior lay. We had explained this to him on the phone but he wanted to come by anyway, he said, to see just what the situation was. A young-looking, wiry man, he showed the kind of compassion and understanding which had hitherto been lacking in the whole process and despite, you would have thought, having become quite desensitised to these things, he dealt with a difficult situation with real warmth and sympathy.
