Part 7 - Who Knew Duvets Could Cause So Many Problems?

Saturday morning. The sun is shining brightly on the street where I'm going to live. The two lanes of traffic are separated by a tree-lined walkway dotted with benches. There’s a group of old men with sticks sitting on one of the benches. The code for the main door of my apartment block is 49144A. The first mnemonic that comes to mind is ‘for now, it’s fucked for Arthur’. But I tell myself Ican’t have such a negative affirmation every time I enter the building. I amend it to ‘for now, it’s fantastic for Arthur’. That’s better. Susan Jeffers would approve of that one. But it doesn’t feel fantastic as I unpack my stuff and find places for it. I feel like a divorcé, setting up in a lonely flat after she got the house. The toilet causes the first problem. The flush is operated by a button on the cistern. I push it and it flushes... and flushes and keeps on flushing. I try using my fingernails to pull the button back to the off position, but it just keeps flushing. Time to call my landlady. As her number’s ringing, I realise I don’t know the French for ‘cistern’. As she’s saying ‘Allo’, I’m flipping through the pages of my dictionary.

‘Bonjour, c’est Arthur. Il y a un problème en ce qui concerne… un instant, s’il te plaît…le réservoir de la chasse d’eau.’

‘Ah yes,’ she says. ‘Push the button again, slowly and gently. Then tap the cistern once on the left and twice on the right.’

‘Are there any incantations I need to say?’

‘What?’

‘Never mind.’ I go through the tapping ritual. The flush doesn’t actually stop but it slows down to a trickle. ‘OK, thank you.’

‘Speak to you later,’ she says, resignedly. She’s had tenants before.

The settee folds out into a bed. I decide this is better than the bunk bed above the desk. I don’t want to negotiate a ladder at two in the morning. The settee cushions can double as pillows.  But there’s no sign of a duvet or any sheets. I look in all the cupboards and drawers, but can’t find anything that looks like bed linen. I dial the landlady’s number again. ‘Bonjour, c’est Arthur encore une fois.’

‘Oui?’

‘There’s no bed linen in the apartment.’

‘Of course there isn’t. You want to sleep in someone else’s sheets, smelly boy?’

‘Well...’

‘Can you buy some?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Speak to you later.’

I need a coffee. I have a look through the cupboards in the kitchen. There are plates, glasses, mugs. In the cupboard under the cooker, there’s a lone packet of savoury rice. But there’s no kettle. There’s also no frying pan and no saucepan. But the kettle is the most important thing. I can’t go without coffee and my wife won’t come to stay in a place where she can’t get tea. ‘Bonjour, c’est ...’

‘Oui?’

I can never pronounce the French word for ‘kettle’. ‘Il n’y a pas de boo-ee-ah dans l’appartement.’

‘De quoi ?’

‘Boo-wee-wah.’

‘Je comprends pas.’ I spell the word out for her. ‘Ah, bouilloire,’ she says. That’s what I said! ‘No,’ she says, ‘the last tenant wanted to use her own pots and pans, so we took them out.’

‘I don’t have my own.’

‘Well, can you buy some?’

‘It was advertised as a “furnished apartment”.’

‘Mm... OK. What do you want?’

‘A kettle, a saucepan and a frying pan.’

‘I’ll drop them off later.’

One loss, one victory. I’m even for the day.

 I’ve never bought bed linen in a foreign country before. I think how easy this would be in Britain. I could just walk into the nearest branch of Debenhams or John Lewis. I think back to holidays in France. We used to go shopping in hypermarkets. Those places sold everything. But they were normally a couple of miles out of town. Then I remember seeing a sign at La Défense for a shop called Auchan. Something is telling me that could be a hypermarket. It’s worth trying. I catch the Métro down to Auber station and get on the RER to La Défense. It’s strange to see La Défense at the weekend. It looks nude without thousands of people in business suits rushing about. I leave the station and head towards the space age village that houses Auchan. It’s a huge shop. There’s a floorplan near the door. It seems the ground floor is devoted to alcohol, the first floor to food and the second floor to everything else. I take the escalator to the second floor. Aisles are stretching into the distance in all directions. I stop a man in an Auchan overall. ‘Excusez-moi, monsieur. Où se trouvent les duvets?’

‘Comment ?’

‘Les duvets.’

‘Je comprends pas,’he says and walks off. I stay there for a while, in case he’s gone to ask someone where the duvets are. But no, he’s just gone. Maybe some Parisians are rude and unhelpful.

There’s a bargain bin at the end of one of the aisles. Some women are picking over the contents like well-dressed vultures. They pull an item out, look at the price tag, then either claim it by clamping it between their ankles or discard it by throwing it on the floor. The area behind them is strewn with rejected items. The other customers don’t seem to think this is odd behaviour. Or maybe they’re too frightened to say anything. Single-minded in their pursuit of a bargain, these women are quite scary. I’m more interested in the items themselves – pillows. Where there are pillows, I reason, there must be sheets and duvets. I find the sheets without any problem. The duvet is a bit more of a challenge. There are lots of bulky cylindrical things that could be duvets, but they’re all wrapped in white plastic. I don’t want to get back to the apartment and find I’ve bought a roll of loft insulation.I look at the labels but can’t see the word ‘duvet’ anywhere. It’s dawning on me that the French for ‘duvet’ might not be ‘duvet’. I didn’t think to check this before I came out. ‘Duvet’ sounds so quintessentially French, it never occurred to me they might use a different word. So what is the French for ‘duvet’? There’s something called a ‘couverture’. This sounds promising. After all, a duvet is something that covers you. But when I rub it through the plastic, it feels too coarse to be a duvet. It feels more like a blanket. Then I see something called a ‘traversin’. When I rub this through the plastic, it feels quite smooth and duvet-like. And ‘en travers de’ means ‘across’, so maybe this is something you put across your bed to keep you warm. It’s a more slender cylinder than I expected, but maybe it’s just a very tightly rolled duvet. I decide to chance it. I go to the checkout and pay. But I feel a bit uneasy as I step out of the shop so I crouch down and rip a hole in the plastic. It’s not a duvet. It’s one of those bolster pillows. This is not good. I still need a duvet. And I can’t use a bolster pillow. I slept on one once and my neck was so stiff the next morning that I spent the whole day with my head cocked to one side like a curious Jack Russell. I have a strong urge to walk away. It was only ten euros. I can leave it as a present for the next tenant. But no, I decide this is not a resourceful approach. It’s not what Jack Canfield would do. I have to go to the customer service desk and return it. There’s a queue at the desk and, as I’m waiting, I imagine how the conversation will go. ‘Hello. I’ve just bought this bolster pillow, but I don’t want it.’

‘So why did you buy it, you arse?’

‘Well, I thought it was a duvet.’ And the problem of not knowing the French for ‘duvet’ would come up again. I wonder if I can work around it. ‘Well, it’s sort of like a quilt...’ But what’s the French for ‘quilt’? When I did my telephone interview, I blithely told Roddy: ‘Don’t worry, I’m completely fluent in French.’ But in twenty years of studying the language, I never learnt basic bedroom vocabulary – which is odd, given how important the bedroom is in French life. ‘It’s like a sheet, folded and stuffed with feathers.’ That might work.

I arrive at the front of the queue. ‘Hello. I’ve just bought this bolster pillow, but I don’t want it.’

‘OK. Have you got the card you used?’ I hand it over. She puts it into a card reader and presses some buttons. ‘There’s the refund slip. Your card won’t be charged.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

That went better than I thought it would.

I need some information. I don’t fancy stopping a woman on a mission to buy cheap pillows and asking her: ‘What do you call a sheet, folded and stuffed with feathers?’ But there is a feature of French supermarkets that I like very much. A lot of them sell books. And not just blockbusters: they also sell serious literature and study guides. There's a good chance I’ll find a French-English dictionary. I don’t know where the book section is but books aren’t food and they aren’t alcohol, so I must be on the right floor. If I start at one side and work my way through all the aisles systematically, I’ll find it. I’m on my way to the far side of the shop to start this, when I see a rack of Astérix books. They have a large book section. I’ve got three dictionaries to choose from. I discover the French for ‘duvet’ is ‘couette’. I go back to the bedding section, find a duvet immediately and head to the checkout for a second time.

I feel quite pleased with myself as I travel back to the apartment. I’ve risen to the challenge of buying a duvet in France. There were setbacks along the way, but I responded resourcefully. I let myself back into the apartment block. I open my mailbox. There’s a letter inside it. I assume it’s for the previous tenant, but it’s got my name on it. I open it. It’s an electricity bill.

Now, how do you pay an electricity bill in France?