‘Come and look at the bedroom,’ I say, leading her upstairs and showing her the floor.
‘Oh, c’est magnifique!’ she exclaims. ‘You did this yourself? With Alain? Since yesterday evening?’
‘Yes,’ I say, proudly. ‘But it is not finished yet.’
‘Oh you have worked well, the two of you. Ecoute! When this floor is done, we will put up your bed and move in your furniture and then you can be totally calm and tranquil in this room. Just tell me when you are ready, and my husband and I will help you.’
‘Thank you so much. It’s very, very kind of you,’ I say, thinking how lucky I am to have Claudette as a neighbour. In west London your neighbours were more likely to run off with your bag or steal your car wing mirrors than knock on your door with cake and offers of help.
‘It’s nothing,’ she replies, waving away my thanks. ‘It’s normal.’ But I have done nothing to merit the kindness of my neighbour and it is incredibly humbling.
While Alain returns to the thankless task of removing the tenacious white gloss, I apply the vitrificateur, or satin finish varnish that I brought with me from the UK (where for some reason paint and varnishes are much cheaper and far better quality than their French equivalent) to the floorboards. This is a very slow and painstaking process since, according to the instructions, you must do no more than a couple of boards at a time to avoid overlapping. It also releases another toxic burst of volatile compounds into the bedroom. And since it is too cold to open the windows and ventilate the room as advised on the tin, I inhale a concentrated dose of the noxious, sickly smelling vapours. The other problem with this task, I realise, is that if you are not careful, you can end up stranded in the middle of the room surrounded by newly varnished boards and with no escape route.
Alain and I work late into Saturday evening, listening to some of my old Ibiza CDs, which he seems to like. Before leaving, he shakes my hand, scrupulously polite as ever, and wishes me une très bonne soirée – even though there is only an hour left of it. I walk back to my little room at Le Vieux Chateau, feeling exhausted but happy, the tiredness, brought on by hard physical labour, a pleasant one. The air is cold and scented with wood smoke – the scent of rural France in winter. I inhale deeply: it is a pleasure to breathe the night air after the potent mélange of chemicals in an enclosed space. The village is deserted, as it always is at this hour. In the summer that I first saw the house, Dave told me that there was a set of secret underground tunnels running underneath the village, which is why you never saw anyone in the heat of the afternoon. (He was joking of course, but for a while I believed him, thinking they were old war tunnels or something.)
It’s a similar story in winter. After 7.00 p.m., Villiers is as impenetrable as a fortress, with not even a chink of light visible from the surrounding houses. Everything is closed for miles around; no nipping down to the corner shop for an emergency supply of Quality Street as I once would have done in London. Instead, there is a real sense of closing the shutters, lighting the fire and climbing into one’s burrow with a bottle of Bordeaux. I cannot wait to be able to do the same at Maison Coquelicot. As I head back to my hotel room, I think of the lives unfolding behind those closed shutters: the families and the elderly couples gathered around dinner tables or chatting around a roaring log fire. I think of Dave, who is still in residence on the other side of the church. I figure he must have quit his job in the UK but I wonder how he is surviving financially. I have tried to casually extract information from Lola and Dylan, but they are far too discreet to give anything away, although Lola did let slip that Dave had invited them over for dinner this evening. Back in my hotel room with just French TV for company, I picture him in his cosy, terracotta-tiled kitchen with his comprehensive selection of cooking equipment and his roaring log fire and I wonder who else he has invited this evening. Dave always liked to entertain in large numbers. If I’m honest, I cannot bear the fact that I am no longer part of it.
I return to Maison Coquelicot the following morning to apply another coat of lacquer (eight hours’ drying time is required between each one) and then late in the afternoon, I repeat the procedure for the third and final time. When I’ve finished, I look at the smooth expanse of glossy chestnut and feel something akin to euphoria (although it could just be the effect of all the chemicals I have ingested over the past forty-eight hours.) There is, I realise, a sense of achievement from physical labour that you don’t get from sitting in front of a computer all day. Still, I must be patient and wait another twenty-four hours for the lacquer to dry before moving in the furniture. Downstairs, Alain is finally winning the battle with the white gloss.
Monday morning arrives – a momentous day. I arrange an oil delivery, and in the afternoon I check out of Le Vieux Chateau and return to Maison Coquelicot, stupidly excited, but also nervous at the thought of spending my first night there. I head straight upstairs to admire my handiwork and spend a happy ten minutes gliding across the smooth, lacquered floor in my socks, as if on a skating rink. I’m in! Finally! The bedroom, with its newly primed chestnut-coloured floor and walls stripped back to plaster and painted in Farrow & Ball’s creamy-coloured New White, is unrecognisable from the gloomy brown room that I inherited.
An hour or so later, a small tanker arrives and deposits 1,000 litres of fuel in my oil tank. After months of inactivity, now everything is happening at once. Claudette comes round to help unpack my clothes and hang them on a clothing rail. ‘Oh, ce sont jolies,’ she exclaims again and again as we unpack an embarrassing amount of shoes, handbags and laughably impractical clothes. Where in the French countryside, for example, am I going to wear a silver sequinned micro-skirt (where, for that matter, did I wear it in London?), a full-length black plissé silk evening gown or a pair of leopard-print court shoes? But My New Life in France will be vastly improved by not having to rummage around in a pile of black bin bags in order to get dressed in the morning.
Later that afternoon, with the help of Claudette and her husband, I move my desk into the bedroom (on a temporary basis until the petit salon is finished) and assemble my Laura Ashley bed. ‘Oh, qu’il est beau ton lit,’ says Claudette, when the white iron bed is in place. It takes quite a while to assemble the bed, mostly because I cannot find the bolts (despite putting them in a white envelope in London, saying NB: BED BOLTS). I finally locate the envelope stuffed inside a champagne glass – no, I don’t know what I was thinking either – in one of the cardboard boxes in the sitting room.
It is already dark when Claudette and her husband leave, not before enquiring about my dining arrangements for the evening and asking if I would like them to bring me some home-made soup. But I am too excited to bother with dinner. Instead, I unpack the new pillows and make up the bed, using the new, crisp Egyptian cotton sheets and duvet cover that I bought all those months ago in London in anticipation of exactly this moment. I put a cardboard box next to the bed to act as an impromptu bedside table, cover it with a pillowcase and plug in a night lamp on top of it. Et voilà. I have a bedroom.
I then give the bathroom a good clean, removing the mound of plaster, rubble, electrical wiring and piping that has been dumped in the shower tray. I scrub the bathroom floor using liberal amounts of bleach and attack the grimy 1970s tiling on the walls with a determination once reserved for the Prada sample sale. And then I take my first shower in my new home and wash my hair, marvelling at the simple but remarkable fact that I have hot water.
A strong smell of chemicals lingers in the bedroom but as I climb in between the sheets, everything is clean and all seems perfect. I am looking forward to a relaxed evening reading my book – another ‘good life in France’ memoir, in which the author cooks and eats lots of delicious meals – followed by a tranquil night’s sleep, with no triathletes or Phil Collins for company.
Unfortunately, I am woken in the middle of the night by pests of a different kind. The first manifestation of this is an intense, unbearable
itching sensation around my ankles. I switch on the bedside light and discover that my ankles, legs, arms and even my stomach are covered in big angry bites the size of buttons. I have been bitten by mosquitoes many times before – it’s as if my blood is made of honey as far as insects are concerned – but nothing compares to these bites. I feel ill just looking at the big berry-coloured blotches, and am alarmed as to what kind of creature has caused them. Unable to sleep for scratching, I lie in bed, waiting for morning to come so that I can rush out and buy some calamine lotion.
At around 5.00 a.m. I finally stop scratching and drop off to sleep – only to be woken up thirty minutes later by someone frantically ringing my doorbell. Outside, I can hear the engine of a truck running. Throwing open the bedroom window, I peer into the darkness below and see a man in a fluorescent yellow jacket and trousers pointing at my car, which is blocking the progress of the refuse truck down the narrow cobblestoned street. I run downstairs in my floral print silk pyjamas and try to find my car keys in the chaos of furniture, dust and cardboard boxes in the sitting room. The truck outside toots its horn impatiently, ensuring that my neighbours are also woken up by my misdemeanour. As I search in a panic for my keys, the stress only makes my spots itch more furiously. This is not the peaceful start in my new home that I had imagined. Eventually I find the keys (in the door – where else?) and rush out into the dark street to move my car. I am expecting angry recriminations, but the man in the yellow suit politely informs me that the refuse collections are on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I must not leave my car outside on those days. The truck driver, meanwhile, raises his hand to say thank you as he drives by.
I return to bed, but am woken again at 7.00 a.m., this time by the prolonged and deafening ringing of the church bells on the other side of the courtyard wall. It is, I imagine, what a Butlins holiday camp must have been like in the 1950s: the bells are the cue for everyone in Villiers to get up. The campsite in Beauchamp is starting to seem peaceful by comparison. I lie in bed scratching until the bells strike 9.00 a.m. and then I drag my itching, pox-covered body over to the pharmacy in order to identify the cause of my affliction. The pharmacist looks at my bites and immediately diagnoses fleas. The people queuing behind me listen in with interest. ‘But how can I have fleas in my house when I don’t have any animals?’ I ask, appalled at the idea that there might be fleas in my brand new bed.
The pharmacist shrugs. ‘It is possible, Madame.’ He then suggests a bombe and a tube of calamine gel. I am not sure what a bombe is (I later discover it is an aerosol spray) but it sounds extreme and I’m not sure my lungs can cope with any more chemicals, so I decline. I return home with the calamine gel and marinade myself in the stuff, but it has no effect on the bites whatsoever. Driven to distraction by the itching, I call Miranda, who tells me that flea bites are a common occurrence when you move into an old house. The insect larvae lie dormant between the floorboards, she says, until being woken by the movement or warmth. I’m not convinced by this theory. The methylated spirits that I so liberally applied to the floorboards would have seen off anything living or sleeping within.
And so I spend a second sleepless night, scratching at skin which is now, in places, bleeding and raw. I cannot bear the idea that I am sleeping with fleas. In the early hours of the morning, I manage to doze off, but I am jolted awake by the frantic ring of the doorbell again. It is not Tuesday or Thursday. Yet, through the bedroom window I can see another man in a fluorescent suit outside my door, another big truck with its engine running in the narrow street outside. What is going on? Confused, I run downstairs, practically vaulting over the cardboard boxes cluttering up the petit salon in the hurry to move my car. The truck and its crew watch intently as I run around in floral pyjamas in the darkness, and then one of them explains that the collection of les sacs jaunes or recycling takes place every other Wednesday, so I must be careful not to park my car outside.
The following morning, I make my way bleary-eyed and spotty to the Liberty Bookshop for a coffee. To complete my run of bad luck I bump into Dave, who comes in to use the Internet as I am sitting alone with a newspaper.
‘Hi,’ I say, unable to summon up any pretence of cheeriness.
‘Hello,’ he mumbles, avoiding eye contact. (This suits me fine given that my skin is covered in blotchy bites.)
‘Look, Dave,’ I say. ‘This is really silly.’
‘What is?’
‘The fact that you refuse to speak to me. We were really good friends.’
His cheeks turn pink. ‘I’m not not speaking to you,’ he says.
It takes me a while to figure out the double negative, but I can tell by the expression on his face that he is not exactly seizing the olive branch. Instead, he keeps walking to the back of the bookshop, until he spots Dylan. ‘Hello, mate,’ he says. ‘Can I use the Internet?’
Despite the wintry nip in the air, Claudette is outside cleaning her windows when I return to the house. She calls over to ask how I am. ‘Not good,’ I reply, unfurling the sleeve of my astrakhan-trimmed hippy coat to show her my bites. She takes one look at them and says ‘Aoûtats’. At first, I think she is saying the French equivalent of ‘ouch’ but she keeps repeating the word ‘aoûtats’. I have no idea what this is, but Claudette seems to know what she is talking about and I am relieved to find that it is a recognisable condition. She writes the word on a piece of paper for me and insists that I return to the pharmacy to ask for the appropriate pills and cream. ‘Calamine gel!’ she says. ‘That won’t do anything against aoûtats.’
By now I am on the point of being driven mad by these bites – the more I scratch, the more fiercely they itch – and my mind cannot focus on anything else. I am ready to try anything the pharmacist suggests. Chemicals? Pills? Bombes? Bring them on!
There are three women in white coats working behind the counter today and gratifyingly, they gather to exclaim in horror as I roll up my jeans to reveal my lower legs and backs of knees. By now, with all the scratching, the bites have melded into one big furious patch of redness. ‘Oh la la,’ says one, before recommending antihistamine pills and a hydrocortisone cream, ‘it’s not very pretty.’
But at least I now know the cause of my affliction. Back at home, I apply the cream liberally to my bites (which takes about half an hour as there are so many of them) and then Google ‘aoûtats’. I discover that they are harvest mite larvae, which usually appear in late August or early September, but, with the increasingly muddled-up seasons, they have struck in October. I am not sure where I picked them up, though, it was possibly from a patch of grass near Le Vieux Chateau, as apparently these things have legs like pogo sticks and can jump really high. My Internet search also reveals that the horrible itching is caused by ‘the powerful cocktail of digestive enzymes that they inject into your skin to liquefy the tissues before sucking them up.’ Fleas sound almost desirable by comparison.
But the cream and the pills have an immediate effect on the itching and it’s good to know that I don’t have fleas in my bed. That night I eat my dinner of bread and slice of very expensive saucisson and then, taking no chances, I drive my car up to the square and park it next to the mairie. This way, I tell myself, lies a night of uninterrupted sleep. But no, for the third morning in row, I am woken in darkness by the sound of the doorbell ringing. I throw open the bedroom window (a ritual I will soon be able do to in my sleep) and this time, instead of a refuse truck and a man in a fluorescent jacket, I see Dylan standing on my doorstep in his pyjamas.
‘Karen,’ he says. ‘It’s the foire today.’
‘Uh?’
‘It’s foire day. The big fair that takes place twice a month.’
I am confused. Is Dylan really waking me up to tell me about a fair?
‘You need to move your car now, before the market people arrive.’ he persists. ‘I looked out of the window when I got up and saw your car by the mairie. But you’re not allowed to park i
n the square today.’
I throw my hippy coat over my floral pyjamas and, still half asleep, follow Dylan up to the square. After thanking him for his trouble, I drive my car over to the car park of the local Intermarché and leave it there. This is not the peaceful life in France that I imagined. And I am beginning to think that Maison Coquelicot is fighting back at my occupation.
Fortunately, I have Claudette as an ally. She calls in regularly to check on the progress of the renovations and is particularly concerned about the lack of cooking facilities. (It seems pointless to buy a fridge or a cooker until the kitchen floor has been stained and lacquered, and I can’t face another job of that magnitude just yet. I need to give my lungs time to recover.) As we head into November and the evenings grow colder, she knocks on my door regularly with a home-made soup or potage. ‘You have to eat warm food,’ she declares, ‘or you will get ill.’
But mostly I am still living on bread and cheese and caffeine, and the stress and unhealthy diet are taking their toll. On Friday evening, my fifth night in the house, I am again woken in the early hours of the morning – this time with the worst case of migraine imaginable. My migraine pills could be in any one of thirty unpacked cardboard boxes, so there’s no point in even starting to look. Instead, I lie back and wait for the worst. My head feels like it has a metal band with spikes in it tightening against my brain, while the nausea has me running into the bathroom every ten minutes, where I bond deeply with the newly installed toilet bowl.
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