Escape to the French Farmhouse

by Jo Thomas

  He doesn’t argue. I think about the ladies we meet at quiz night who love Ollie and how long it might have been before he gave in to their charms, blaming it on our ‘problems’ … like last time: just the once, he said, back ‘home’. Home isn’t there for me. I don’t know where it is, but it’s not back where we came from in a rented house with Ollie.

  ‘Look, Del, I don’t know what this is about. We agreed it wasn’t working for us out here and that we’d move home.’

  ‘We agreed it wasn’t working for us,’ I say.

  He breathes out, exasperated. ‘We’re going to miss the ferry if you don’t get a move on. I have to drop the keys with the estate agent before we go.’

  I hear the banging of truck doors, the engine starting up. And then a crunching on gravel as it starts to edge forward from under the trees. There’s a beep. Ollie and I step outside. Lexie is at the wheel, sticks an arm out of the window and waves.

  ‘See you in Blighty!’ calls Mr Broderick, from the other window, and they begin down the drive.

  ‘They’re leaving! We have to go!’ says Ollie, frustrated and angry. The wind whips up around us.

  I could stop the truck, tell them to unpack it, that I’m not leaving. But I watch it go, my old life driving off down the lane.

  Call it some kind of mistral madness, early menopause, bereavement, all the things I’m feeling, but suddenly a weight lifts off my shoulders as my past disappears down the lane.

  Ollie rants at me some more. But I’m not listening. I’ve never felt more certain of anything. I’m not going back to my old life with him. We’re over. Finally, the cracks are wide open and the ceiling is on the floor. Now all I have to do is work out what kind of ceiling I want to put up. Not the same as before, not that awful, miserable one.

  ‘We have to go now!’ Ollie says, getting more and more cross.

  ‘Ollie, I’m not going back with you. Leave me the key. I’ll take it to the estate agent and I’ll let you know my plans.’ I hold out my hand.

  ‘Do you need a doctor?’ He cocks his head.

  Instead of feeling his concern, I feel patronized.

  ‘No, Ollie.’ I smile. ‘I need what you need … I need not to go back.’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous! You’re … upset! You’re …’

  ‘I’m right, Ollie. This is right. You know it. We were just papering over the cracks, coming here. Now give me the key and you go.’

  He stares at me and I know he’s not going to argue any more. He’s put up a good show, but I sense that he knows I’m right. He looks at the big ornate key in his hand then slowly, ever so slowly, he passes it to me and swallows, hard.

  ‘I need to go,’ he says quickly. ‘I need to get the ferry. The removal people are expecting us … me.’

  ‘You go,’ I say, calmer than I’ve felt in a long time.

  ‘You’re stressed! It’s just the move, everything else.’

  I take a deep breath. There’s a trace of the old Ollie now, the one I married, the one I loved, the one who cared. He pushes his hair off his face and attempts a reassuring smile. ‘It’s your mum, the baby thing. You’ll change your mind, realize this is just madness.’

  The baby thing was where life took different directions for us, with me unable to become a mum and losing my own. The Ollie I married left me then.

  ‘I’m not coming back with you, Ollie.’

  ‘I’m not staying!’ he retorts. ‘Mad country. Nothing works! Impossible to make a living. I need to get going. Now, I’m giving you one last chance. Are you getting in the car and coming with me?’ He stares at me, challenging me.

  I lift my chin and stare back. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m not.’

  And he throws his hands up into the air. He lets out a huge ‘Phhhhffff!’ of exasperation and stomps to his car. Then he reaches in and pulls out my holdall, with my clothes and wash things in it to tide me over until we’d found a place to live and unpacked. He dumps it furiously on the drive in the dust. I don’t move.

  ‘Madness!’ he repeats, standing by the door. ‘I mean it! I’m leaving!’ He sounds like a parent threatening a child, unsure whether to go through with it. ‘I won’t be turning back!’ Then when I say nothing he gets into his car, turns on the engine and, with only the swiftest hesitation, shoots off down the drive in a cloud of dust. The last of my old life leaving without me. I watch the car disappear down the lane, then look down to see Ralph sitting at my feet. Well, nearly all of my old life.

  ‘Looks like it’s just you and me now.’ I bend down and rub his ears. He barks happily. I look at the key and close my hand around it. Like a plaster that’s been ripped off a wound, it hurts, hurts like anything to watch him go but already the pain is easing. I couldn’t go back. But I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do now.

  THREE

  The next morning I wake with a crick in my neck to the sound of birds singing. Not a whole morning chorus, but each bird being allowed to sing his own part – except the wood pigeon, which wants to sing over everybody else, and the cockerel in the distance heralding a new day. But apart from that, nothing. Silence. The mistral has gone as suddenly as it arrived. Came in, whipped up a storm, caused chaos and left a whole different landscape.

  My phone buzzes in my jeans pocket, catapulting me back to reality. I open my eyes: my cheek is against the cool porcelain of the bath where I slept the night. Instead of what I’d thought was a warm blanket over me, Ralph is lying on top of me, for comfort and warmth. I’m suddenly very grateful to the mad bundle of curly fur. I might not have felt quite the same when Ollie brought him home as a gift after my final cycle of IVF had failed. For Ollie it was like a full stop on that part of our lives, but to me it was like he was offering me a baby replacement. To begin with, I couldn’t accept the dog into my life, especially when Ollie suggested calling him Eddie – one of my favourite baby names had been Edward. Ollie was clearly trying to do something kind – he was kind. He would often do really thoughtful things, like making a drink for me after a hard day, driving me into town to meet up with my friends on a night out, and he always remembered birthdays and anniversaries.

  The puppy became Ralph because I would never have called a little boy Ralph. I knew a Ralph once, a long time ago, before I met Ollie. He’d been funny and adoring, not in the least bit reliable, and loved every person he met. It seemed a very suitable name for the bundle that had just landed in my life. Ralph slept with us from the first night, and as he grew and spread, sleeping right across the bed, so did the distance between us with every day that passed.

  Ollie threw himself into the idea of France, freelancing from home. I carried on working but now had a dog in my life that needed feeding, walking and apologizing for when he ran off in the park and covered passers-by with muddy pawprints as he threw himself at them. Ralph became another thing on my to-do list. But now here he was, keeping me warm as I lay in the empty bath. Last night, I went from relieved at the decision to cut the cord with Ollie to wondering what the hell I’d done in letting him drive off without me. Eventually, exhausted, I had curled up in a tight ball, my back to the bathroom wall, arms over my head, and wondered if he had been right. What on earth was I doing alone in an empty house, when all my belongings and my husband of ten years were on their way back to the UK? Would I regret this? Was my decision another symptom of my early menopause?

  My mind started to replay everything about our relationship, from how we met to how I’d ended up sleeping in the bath in an empty old farmhouse in the south of France.

  So, what on earth was I doing there? In a tired farmhouse in the Luberon in Provence. In a small mountainside town, with terracotta-, orange-, yellow-, and peach-coloured houses. With my husband, the one constant thing in my life, back in the UK. Well, he’d been there in body, except when he’d been in someone else’s life and bed for that one-off when the stress of our situation had got too much. Sex to us had become about making a baby, not making love. I can’t remember the la
st time I made love. And all the time, as I thought back over my married life throughout that night, trying to work out where it had all gone wrong, the loose shutters banged, banged, banged against the windowpanes. Eventually, when I could stand it no more, I stood up and went to tie the shutter to the wrought-iron railings we’d had made to stop any visitors falling out of the window. But no one had visited in the six weeks we’d tried to make a go of things here. Once the move had happened, our ‘fresh new start’, once we’d eaten the bread and cheese, drunk the wine, taken down the ‘happiness in your new home’ cards, once the front door was shut, it was just Ollie and me, alone, our future spread out in front of us, like a long, long night with nothing on the telly. And nothing much to talk about, apart from shopping lists, people planning to visit, Ollie’s frustration with the internet and his daily battles with the phone in the car. He’d come back to the farmhouse after a trip into the town furious that he had got no further in improving our broadband and Wi-Fi connection and that no one spoke English.

  ‘Bloody country!’ he’d rant. ‘And they all stop for lunch! Who stops for lunch these days? How does anyone make a bloody living here? And, honestly, it beggars belief how many of them don’t speak English.’ The last six painful weeks played over and over in my mind for what seemed like most of the night.

  I felt safer in the bathroom than anywhere else in the empty house, in what felt like the tatters of my marriage, with Ralph by my side. Suddenly my dog was there for me when I really needed someone and no one else was.

  I thought about Ollie and our life together over the last few weeks. Mealtimes had become fraught as the work Ollie had tried to pick up, then deliver, became more and more difficult to achieve, and our savings from the sale of the house started to dwindle.

  So, work was drying up for Ollie, and my French wasn’t nearly good enough yet for me to look for work in a local shop. We agreed, over the plat du jour in the most expensive brasserie in town, to put the house back on the market and phoned the removal company. Ollie complained at the size of the restaurant bill and that ‘nothing in France is cheap any more’. But we were both right. Nothing in our lives was working because our marriage wasn’t working. The glue had gone. We’d tried to fix it, but it was broken. It was over. I know I made the right decision for us both. That was how I ended up in the bath on my own.

  ‘Come on, Ralph, up we get,’ I say.

  He’s suddenly alert and scrabbles out of the bath, ready for whatever adventures the day might bring. With every joint and muscle in my body aching, I ease myself out and pull out my phone. There’s a message from Ollie.

  I’m back. Come to your senses yet?!

  I don’t reply. I’ve said all I need to say. There’s no point in discussing it any more. I ripped the plaster off our broken marriage and my damaged heart yesterday, which hurt, but it’s going to get better, for both of us.

  I walk over to the long bathroom window to retrieve my bra, the only thing I could find last night to tie back the loose shutter. I’d seen Joanna Lumley use hers as slippers when she was on a desert island, and mine did a great job last night. I untie it, then push the shutters back. I take hold of the wrought-iron railing and breathe in deeply. I can smell the pine and cypress trees. I can hear the birds singing as they flit in and out of the trees and the cockerel in the distance still heralding the new day. A donkey from up the road has joined in the morning celebrations and is braying. I can smell the rosemary plants under the window and the lavender hedge. The mistral has blown all the dust away and everything is bright and clear. They say that the clear colours after the mistral draw painters to the area, and I can see why as I stare at the valley below. I’m not mad. Ollie and I had come to the end of our journey. Going back to where we’d started would have made us even more miserable.

  The sky is streaked with blue and pink as the sun rises over our field behind the house and beyond. I close my eyes. I open them and the birdsong, the smell of the pines, the wild rosemary and thyme on the white rocks make me feel calm. I look at the view, taking it in as if for the first time. I may have nothing in the house but I have this for now.

  I smile at Ralph, sitting happily at my feet, and I reach down to stroke his soft ear. Instead of seeing it as a sign to bound around in play, he lets me. And I’m grateful for that. A smile pulls at the corners of my mouth and there’s a flutter of excitement in my stomach. Was it mistral madness? Whatever it was, this is a new day, a fresh new day, and there are far worse places I could be.

  FOUR

  The sun is warm already and I’d love to sit outside and feel it on my face, but with no food in the house, and nothing to sit on, I decide to walk into town. My large basket-cum-handbag, which I bought in the market on our first day, hangs over my arm. I tell Ralph I’ll be back with breakfast, and fill an old bucket I found in the barn with water. I think it may be the first time I’ve ventured into that barn. I also find an old blanket covering what looks like an ancient plough and put it on the kitchen floor for him, promising I’ll be back soon. I daren’t risk trying to walk him on the lead into town – we’d probably both end up in the river.

  I shut the front door and lock it, then put the key into my bag. I stroll down the drive and out on to the lane beyond the metal gates. I can feel the sunshine feeding my soul as I walk. I breathe in the scent of pine and rosemary, trying to work out what I need to buy.

  The town seems busier than usual as I walk along, watching an unusual amount of traffic arriving. And now I know why: there’s a market, not like our usual Monday market but for antiques, a brocante market. I can hear chatter and bargaining from the riverbank as I walk towards the town square. This is an amazing route into town. I knew this path existed but haven’t walked it before. Ollie always insisted on driving: he didn’t want to walk back with shopping. At the end of the path, I pass a clearing with what looks to be a small hut. Fairy lights are strung from it to the trees, and a blue velvet settee, with gold trim and legs, has been placed under a huge pine. Its beauty takes me by surprise. There’s a table and chairs too, with two men playing chess, so intent on their game that they don’t notice me.

  I smile as I walk towards the busy market. I’m not thinking about last night, or yesterday, the months that led up to it, or what I’m going to do next. I’m just here, walking in the sunshine with all the other Sunday browsers. The bells I can hear from what was our house, Le Petit Mas de la Lavande, are ringing as church-goers pour out. I watch as a group of short women, dressed in black and smart court shoes, kiss each other three times on the cheek, then head off in different directions, probably going home to prepare lunch for the family. I feel a twinge of envy: there’s no family waiting for me. I think of my mum and the gaping hole her death has left in my life. I need one of her hugs to tell me everything will be okay. Will it? I wish I was here with Mum, Ollie and our child, getting ready for Sunday lunch at home. But I’m not. I’m here on my own.

  The sun is warm on my face as I walk around the stalls filling the square, the streets and side streets of the town. I don’t think Ollie would have liked it: he doesn’t like ‘second hand’. Although Le Petit Mas de la Lavande was picture-perfect, he wanted to replace all its original features with new. It needed work, but I liked it as it was, flaws and all.

  I wander among the stalls, piled with mirrors, chandeliers, milk churns, even beautifully carved dark-wood furniture, where the car park usually is, at the top of the town, in the shade of the big plane trees there. I stroll leisurely. The only thing I have to do today is make plans for the rest of my life and, right now, I want to put that off for as long as possible. It’s far more appealing to mingle with people, furniture, clothes and bedding, full of stories about the life they had before and waiting for a new era to begin. A bit like me, I think, and tears spring to my eyes. I blink them away. I have just walked out on ten years of marriage and everything I know but I can’t let myself crack. I have to keep going.

  I used to like the idea Ollie ha
d for our life, our future. He preferred things to be perfect, even though life isn’t. But I can be happy, I think, picking up a jug and running my hand over its crackled glaze.

  My stomach rumbles. I put down the jug and walk along the main street towards the boulangerie we’ve used every day since we’ve been here.

  ‘Bonjour, Madame,’ says the young woman behind the high counter. The baker is pulling baguettes from the oven in the kitchen behind her.

  ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle, Monsieur,’ I say.

  She smiles at me brightly behind her round glasses, asking me what I’d like.

  I look at the pastries. I’ve been trying to avoid them, but I point to a pain au raisin. I take a baguette too. For later, although I have no idea where I’ll be. I have to drop the key to the house with the estate agent and work out where to go from there. I take the pastry and pay from the change in my purse. I still have the envelope of cash from the sale of our sit-on lawnmower that I was supposed to pay into the bank before we left France. I push the baguette into my bag and pull it up on to my shoulder.

  ‘I thought your husband said you were leaving,’ she says. ‘Did you forget something?’ She cocks her head sympathetically.

  I look at her and see myself, a young woman with all of life’s opportunities in front of me. ‘I think I probably did,’ I say, and smile. Myself, I think.

  I step out of the shop, take off my poncho, put it into my bag, then get out my pastry and take a bite. I shut my eyes and enjoy the moment, which takes me back to a time when food was fun, when I wasn’t worried about what I ate, before food became a battle, not a pleasure. Right now, this pastry is heaven. I open my eyes, and across the street an old man with a dark lined face, wearing a flat cap and jacket, grins at me and beckons me over to his stall. He’s selling lavender bags, bundles of dried lavender and essential oil. He picks up a small bundle and hands it to me. ‘Because you have a beautiful smile,’ he says, and grins, showing the gap where his front tooth once was.