Tout Sweet

by Karen Wheeler

  ‘WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?’ he bellowed.

  ‘Look, Dave, please calm down and let’s all discuss this tomorrow,’ said Charlotte. The torrent of abuse that followed was not pretty. Dave persisted in shouting louder and becoming more threatening until finally, pushed to the limit, I shouted:

  ‘Look, you’re not doing your son any favours by letting him get away with such obnoxious behaviour. He even left an axe on my bed once. That’s not normal behaviour. The kid’s really messed up.’

  You should never, I know, criticise someone else’s progeny, no matter how obnoxious they might be. Dave’s face was now as red as a slice of watermelon and the effect of my last sentence was explosive. ‘How DARE you,’ he yelled, jabbing a finger centimetres from my face.

  ‘That’s enough!’ said Charlotte suddenly, her voice raised but her face a picture of steely calm. ‘Leave right now or I am calling the police.’

  I was truly scared. This was a side of Dave that I could never have imagined. But thankfully, after much more shouting and swearing, he started to back away. ‘Come on, Jason, we’re not spending the night here,’ he yelled. They stumbled noisily down the stairs, Dave still hurling random insults, Jason whimpering in his wake.

  Charlotte stood in shocked silence for a minute or so as we waited for the front door to slam.

  ‘Welcome to the New Year,’ I thought, as I closed the door to the flat. I was about to move alone to a small village in France and my only friend in the village was no longer a friend but an enemy.

  Chapter 5

  Let My New Life Begin…

  And now, here I am, just over a year since I signed the acte final, standing outside Maison Coquelicot, feeling panicked by what I have taken on. I have a feeling that she – for I have decided that the house is definitely feminine – is going to be quite a handful. It doesn’t help that what I know about DIY could be written on the back of a button and that my practical skills start and end at unscrewing lipsticks and spraying scent onto tester strips.

  I stand in the fierce afternoon sun of the Poitou-Charentes and try to visualise the facade re-rendered with lime plaster and painted creamy white, the dull brown shutters transformed with a coat of pale blue-grey, and hot pink geraniums in terracotta pots lined up on the windowsills. My mission, I remind myself, is to restore this unloved little house to a thing of beauty – to turn Maison Coquelicot into the quintessence of le style Français. I will give this sad little house back its soul and, in the process, I will learn to lead a simpler, less superficial and more connected life (and stop buying so many pairs of shoes).

  In contrast to the fashionably minimal decor of my old flat in London, I plan to fill Maison Coquelicot with colour and rustic comforts. The petit salon will be decorated with chintz curtains, colourful rugs and fat sofas piled high with faded floral cushions. The kitchen will have open shelving crammed with storage jars, colourful old china and wooden bowls filled with plump aubergines, lemons and bell peppers. And in the bedrooms I will have cream-coloured iron beds covered with linen sheets and flowery patterned eiderdowns, while the dressing table will overflow with antique perfume bottles and bath oils.

  I will fill the small courtyard with scented roses, orange-pink geraniums, climbing jasmine and herbs growing in terracotta pots, as well as beaten-up wicker chairs and an antique wrought iron table. I will string a row of twinkling fairy lights along the stone walls, and on summer evenings I will drift around the courtyard with a watering can in one hand and a glass of ice-cold rosé in the other. Maison Coquelicot will burst with colour and pattern and pieces of furniture that look like they have been there for ever. There will be stacks of colourful books at every turn, jugs of sweet peas, roses and peonies placed on every surface and candles and antique mirrors in every room. And, most importantly of all, there will be a roaring fire (and willow baskets overflowing with logs) in the petit salon, so that in the evening the house will glow with warmth.

  But this is all some way off yet, as at the moment I don’t even have hot water or a kitchen floor. In the stone passageway, I am hit by the overpowering smell of gloss paint. Turning on the light in the petit salon, which is in pitch darkness with the shutters closed, I am met with a sight that makes me gasp. The walls are no longer brown. Neither are the dado rail, skirting boards or doors. Pas du tout. Instead, everything – and I mean everything, apart from the wooden floorboards and marble fireplace – has been painted glaring, unremitting, glacial white.

  As requested on my last visit, Alain, the local lad who has been helping out with the redecoration, has stripped the walls of flowery brown wallpaper and has given the slatted wooden ceiling – formerly a dirty beige colour – a new coat of gleaming white gloss. Unfortunately, he hasn’t stopped at the ceiling: he has painted everything – walls, skirting boards and even the fire surround – in shiny, bright white. I feel as though I am standing in an igloo. I throw open the shutters and, with daylight to amplify it, the effect is even worse. I have no idea how this happened – or what was lost in translation – but my French is obviously not as good as I thought it was.

  ‘Coucou!’ My neighbour Claudette appears at the open window. ‘Dis donc! What’s happened here?’ she says, peering into the blinding white space.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a mistake,’ I say. ‘I only asked for the ceiling to be painted white. But as you can see, everything is white.’

  ‘Oof,’ says Claudette, shaking her head. ‘What a mistake to make! Ça brille.’

  She’s right. It is indeed shiny.

  ‘I’m going to have to get it all removed.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I bet that’s cost you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, thinking of the €200 that I left Alain to buy the paint, French paint being very thin and very expensive.

  ‘So have you moved here now?’ asks Claudette, eyeing the car piled high with stuff outside.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Permanently?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Claudette looks sceptical.

  ‘In this house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She looks even more sceptical. ‘Oof, I think there is work to do before you can live here,’ she says, squinting into my glacial sitting room. ‘Have you got someone to help you?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You need to make one room habitable. And then you can do the rest.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I am hoping to do.’

  ‘But you are not planning to live here yet?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah non! Karen,’ she says, pronouncing my name, as the French always do, with a flourish of ‘r’s. I much prefer Ka-renne, or even Kar-reen, to the English pronunciation. She points at the kitchen in horror. ‘You do not even have a floor!’

  ‘No, but one is coming soon,’ I say, sounding more optimistic than I feel.

  ‘Who is doing it?’

  I tell her the name of the carpenter I have hired and she nods her head in approval. ‘Monsieur Picherou, he is very conscientious. You need not worry about him,’ she says.

  ‘Oh good,’ I reply. ‘I also need to find a good plumber.’

  ‘To do what, exactly?’

  ‘To install a bathroom sink and a toilet.’

  ‘Yes, very important,’ says Claudette. ‘When do you need him?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Listen! If you need a plumber, I have one who is very good.’

  ‘Oh superb. Can you give me his number?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Are you here tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bon,’ she says, with a finalising nod of the head. ‘Alors, je te laisse pour le moment. Mais bon courage, eh!’

  Claudette bustles off and I imagine word spreading round the village about the Angla
ise and her bold taste in interior decor. But at least I have a functioning phone, I tell myself. I pick up the futuristic Star Trek-like gadget in the corner (the only phone I could find in the local electrical store) in order to call Monsieur Picherou. Unfortunately, the phone is dead. The line, not for the first time, appears to have been cut off. I decide to go and visit Dylan and Lola in the Liberty Bookshop on the square. If the house has any other nasty surprises to spring on me they will have to wait until this evening, when I return (oh joy) to sleep on the bare floorboards of the upstairs bedroom. As I close the shutters, the doorbell rings. It is Alain, furiously dragging on a cigarette. News travels fast in a small French village. He stamps out the cigarette and, after the usual handshakes and greetings, waves a hand towards the white walls of the petit salon. ‘Does it please you?’ he asks.

  I am tempted to tell him that it makes me want to fling myself on the ground and wail like an infant. Instead, I say, ‘The ceiling is very nice, thank you.’

  ‘Ah good,’ he says. ‘And the rest?’

  ‘I am a little… disturbed,’ I say, searching for the right words in French, ‘as to why you also painted the walls in gloss paint. It is not precisely what I wanted.’

  ‘No?’ he says looking surprised. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t ask you to paint the walls – only the ceiling,’ I say.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘I thought you wanted me to do it all.’

  There doesn’t seem to be much point in arguing – or trying to figure out how the misunderstanding occurred. Instead, when he hands me a bill for €700 for making my walls resemble a fridge, I just write out the cheque. He also asks me for another €50 in additional paint costs, having spent the €200 I gave him. It’s galling to have to pay for this disaster – but not quite as galling as having to ask him how much it will cost to undo it all.

  I drive around to the Liberty ‘English Bookshop and Organic Tea Room’ on the square. Many of les Anglais who move to France suddenly profess a profound abhorrence of their fellow countrymen and a desire to avoid them as much as possible, but I bear no such prejudices. One of my biggest fears about moving to France alone is that it will be difficult to make friends, so I am not going to start ruling people out by nationality. Dylan and Lola Liberty, both former youth workers in their late thirties, are lovely. They arrived in Villiers six months after I bought my house, but in the time that I have been shuttling back and forth from London for meetings with artisans, they have turned a cavernous shell of a shop (once an electrical wholesaler’s) into a pristine and carbon-neutral Internet cafe and bookshop with solar panels. They have also become experts on la vie française – and a support system for every newly expatriated Anglais in the area. And because they are so charming and generally helpful to everyone, the Liberty tea room also has a very loyal following among the French people in the village, many of whom visit regularly for a cup of PG Tips and a slice of Lola’s lemon drizzle cake.

  Since I bumped into the Libertys in the estate agent’s office a year ago, they have really gone out of their way to help me. A few months ago, they even managed to stop bailiffs from entering the house and seizing goods to the value of €34 (although at that point the only thing they could have taken was my Laura Ashley iron bed). The problem arose because France Telecom sent the bill to the wrong address, and when I first became aware of the arrears the matter was already in the hands of bailiffs. Dylan and Lola stepped in at the last moment and very kindly paid the bill, thus ensuring I had a bed to sleep on when I arrived. They have also offered to let me leave my sofa and my clothes (and anything else that would benefit from a dust-free environment) in their vast back room until the work at my house is finished.

  Dylan comes out to greet me, wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow on it, faded jeans and flip-flops. ‘Now listen,’ he says. ‘Lola and I have been giving it some thought, and we don’t think you should move into your house just yet.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Apart from anything else, it’s dangerous having to leap over the hole in the kitchen floor to reach the staircase. We think it’s better that you stay in our spare room for a week or so, until you have at least sorted out the basics.’

  I want to fling myself on the floor and kiss his gnarly, dolphin-tattooed feet.

  ‘So, no arguments,’ he says. (Did he really think I was planning any?) ‘It’s totally cool for you to stay here. I’ll just call Lola down and help you in with your stuff.’

  I was hoping we could put this off for a while, but Lola emerges from the kitchen, where she has been making carrot cake, to take over the shop for half an hour. She is wearing a beautiful red and cream printed sarong tied around her hips as a skirt and her dark, curly hair is wrapped up in a floral scarf.

  ‘You made it then?’ she says, giving me a hug. ‘Finally! We thought you would never come.’

  ‘Yeah,’ adds Dylan. ‘What took you so long? We were expecting you in June and it’s now August.’

  ‘I know. That was the plan. But it took longer to wrap things up in London than I expected.’

  ‘Come on then,’ says Dylan. ‘Let’s unload the car.’

  And so, in the August heat, we divest my car of its contents, including the 15 kilos of organic dried fruit that I have brought over for Lola to make fruit cake with. Dylan and I ferry my possessions up to the apartment above the shop and pile them in a large, sunny room with wooden floors and windows overlooking the mairie and the square.

  When all my possessions have been brought upstairs, I plug my mobile phone into its charger and immediately it starts to flash with messages, several of them from one of the newspapers that I write for in the UK. ‘We were hoping you could write something for us today,’ says the commissioning editor, who fortunately has not realised from the ringing tone that I am abroad. (I haven’t bothered to tell any of my editors that I have moved to France, for fear they will stop commissioning me.) ‘We need a really bitchy, cutting 800-word piece on Victoria Beckham’s new hairstyle and thought you’d be the perfect person to do it… in the next couple of hours… for tomorrow’s edition.’

  I call her back. ‘I am so sorry,’ I say, realising that I don’t even know where my laptop is. ‘I don’t think I’m going to be able to help this time.’

  Surveying my possessions piled up against the wall – most of them thrown into black bin bags in the rush to leave – I realise the enormity of what I have done. After so many years of fiercely cultivating my independence and a comfortable lifestyle in London, I have thrown myself on the mercy of virtual strangers. It is not an easy feeling for me. But there is no going back now. The question is: how on earth am I going to be able to function as a freelance journalist from here?

  I wake up at the Libertys’ wondering where I am. This is the moment I have been planning and dreaming of ever since I bought the house a year ago. So why do I feel so strangely deflated? Although I have had nine hours sleep, I feel like I have just limped across the finishing line in a marathon. I cannot believe how tired I am. The last frantic week of packing up in London, followed by the (almost) sleepless night in Caen and the long drive from the ferry have taken their toll. I am tempted to stay under the duvet until tomorrow. But this is not the moment to lie in bed like a giant escargot. This is the first day of My New Life in France.

  There is no sign of Lola and Dylan but I am pleased to find the bathroom unoccupied. Inside there is a very futuristic-looking shower unit with numerous knobs and dials and shower heads. When I finally figure out how turn it on, jets of ice-cold water pummel me from every angle. I jump back in shock and try to turn the shower off, but whatever I do has the opposite effect and the hydra-headed beast assaults me with more icy water. As I fiddle with the various levers and knobs embedded in the plastic torture chamber I am alternately scalded and then pounded by glacial jets. I am not good at staying in other people’s homes and feel a pang of
longing for my former flat in London and the well-behaved shower, with its simple chrome controls. Back in my room, cheered by the sight of sunshine streaming in through the open windows, I rummage through my pile of black bin bags for something to wear. It doesn’t take long to realise I don’t own any clothes suitable for renovating a house.

  Lola is in the pristine kitchen and laying out ingredients to start baking as I leave. ‘Morning!’ she says, brightly, looking me up and down quizzically. ‘I thought you said you were going to start working on the house today.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am. Why?’

  ‘Oh! Well, it’s just that you look a bit… dressed up, that’s all.’

  ‘I know, but I can’t find anything else to wear,’ I say, with a shrug.

  ‘Why don’t I lend you a pair of dungarees? They’d be much better for decorating.’

  Dungarees! I don’t wear dungarees. Under any circumstances. ‘Um… maybe tomorrow. I think I’m mostly going to be organising stuff today anyway,’ I say. And so, in my flower print dress and gold gem-encrusted sandals, I set off to renovate a house, stopping at the bakery to buy some breakfast. The smell of vanilla and sugar and sweet pastry is so comforting that I am tempted to curl up in a corner and sleep for an extra couple of hours.

  At Maison Coquelicot, I open the tightly closed shutters and, perched on a cardboard box, eat my pain au chocolat in the brilliant white sitting room, wondering if I have taken on too much. I have no idea where to start. If only Sarah Beeny would walk through the door and tell me what to do. The problem is that almost everything that I could feasibly do myself, such as painting walls or plastering in holes, must wait until the major works such as the electrical rewiring and plumbing are done. And since my phone is out of order, I can’t even make calls to chase up the various artisans – ‘artisan’ being the rather poetic term used in France to describe any skilled workman. I feel very unanchored and alone. Where there was once calm and order and hot running water in my life, there is now clutter and chaos.