First draft

My notes filled new files. Despite my residual infirmities as a non-native speaker, the joy of writing outside the conventions of academia took hold. The patient Anglophone copy editor at hand on a daily basis did much for my morale. The structure of a novel began to emerge. A diary. A man’s diary. Early forties. Living in France in spite of his best judgment at first and then drawn into the rich tapestry of a France riddled by divisions. A goat as a pet. From the start, the diary suited him well. As his confidence grew, his writing becomes less stagy and self-conscious, more fluid. Within the diary, glimpses of his sessions with a therapist, giving me a free rein to enter William’s Coventry childhood and early adult life in Leicester.

The goat turned into a potbellied piglet who found central place in everyone's hearts. Animals, children, adults. The initial hamlet Montjoie attached itself to a small town, Forac, with a gaggle of locals – a politician, a town hall secretary, a school teacher and Ali, the gifted cook. Lovers, real or fantasised. Gendarmes. Abuse. This was not the Midi as an idyll of lavender and peace. Even the most remote of villages live in the twenty-first century: and they also bear the scars of a long history of intense power struggles over faith and culture. This is why right at the beginning I introduced a French-Moroccan family, ‘Muslims’ being our Cathars. A contemporary tale took shape, ebbing backward and forward in time as Françoise, reading her husband’s diary, finds that far from bringing her closer to him, as she had expected, William’s stories serve to amplify her own muddles and self-delusion.