‘When they found out that I was on my way, they were going to get married, but then he died in a road accident – a collision with a tractor,’ Monsieur Fillon continues. ‘My mother was just four months pregnant at the time.’
‘Oh my goodness,’ I say. This is sad news, but not as sad as the script that in my head I had written for Madame Mauboussin, living here in a brown-wallpapered house on her own. It also explains why Claudette was reluctant to talk about her scandalous former neighbour.
‘And then my wife and I lived here with her for five years after we got married,’ Monsieur Fillon continues. ‘In exactly this room. It had bright pink wallpaper.’
‘I know,’ I say with a smile, overjoyed to have all my received ideas about the house and its former occupants overturned.
‘In fact, two of our children were conceived here,’ continues Monsieur Fillon, confirming my theory that the house had once been full of love and life.
‘And how is your mother now?’
‘She is in good spirits. She was always very independent but now she is in need of medical care, which is why she moved to the nursing home. But my family and I, we visit her there often.’
Monsieur Fillon, given his connection to the house, is clearly the man for the job, and so, after receiving his meticulously detailed devis, I accept immediately and he returns towards the end of August to carry out the work. The transformation is amazing. In less than a week, the stonework has been spruced up and restored and the ugly grey pebbledash facade replaced with smooth lime plaster. Monsieur Fillon and his team also paint the dull brown shutters a pretty blue-grey and, with red geraniums in full flower on the windowsill, Maison Coquelicot is once again in full bloom, or épanouie. It’s as if the grande dame has had her old, flaky, over-made-up layers exfoliated and is ready to present her best face to the world again.
With the house almost finished – but for the installation of the wood-burner – I throw myself into French country pursuits: the cooking, the gardening and the cycling. I learn how to cook paella, grow tomatoes and take a cutting from a plant. I promise myself that when I lead a more organised existence, I will get a dog. And life starts to develop a slow, easy rhythm: on Wednesday I go to the Entente Cordiale conversation group in the Liberty Bookshop to improve my French; early evenings I go for long bike rides with Lola; on Saturday mornings, I drive into Poitiers, where I stock up on organic vegetables at Le Pois Tout Vert before stopping off at Jardiland to buy a new plant for the courtyard. Sometimes I drive into the centre of Poitiers and look around the market that takes place in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral every Saturday morning, and afterwards I will arrange to meet Sebastian and Mathilde for a café crème in the Café des Beaux Arts. And it is there, one Saturday morning in July, that I receive another big surprise, which turns my perceptions on their head. I am sitting in the sunshine outside, flicking through the latest miracle creams in Madame Figaro magazine while waiting for Sebastian and Mathilde, when suddenly I spot the bespectacled lawyer from the Île de Ré – the one with the beautiful wife and children and seemingly perfect life – walking across the square. He did say that they lived in Poitiers, but this is the first time that I have spotted him and his wife. Except that… the woman he is with… the woman he is holding hands with… is not his beautiful wife. Behind my sunglasses, I squint in the sunlight to make sure I am not imagining it, but it is definitely him. And now he is stopping to kiss the woman in broad daylight. He is having an affair. I avert my eyes, shocked at this realisation. To think I was jealous of their perfect life. Nothing, it occurs to me, is quite what it seems and you never know what is really going on in other people’s lives.
As for me, I have reached a state of equilibrium, living in sync with the seasons and increasing my knowledge of nature. Admittedly, I’ve started from a low base point but I now know that (global warming aside) blue hyacinths appear in my stone flowerbed in February and bluebells appear in the surrounding countryside in May, closely followed by poppies, while my favourite flower, rose trémières or hollyhocks, are in full bloom in June.
I can now also match most vegetables to a season. In Marks and Spencer on Kensington High Street, strawberries and green string beans – indeed any fruit and vegetable you could possibly want – were available all year round, air-freighted in from Kenya or Peru. At Le Pois Tout Vert, the organic shop in Poitiers, I learn to live with what is available that week. The seasons are also reflected in the gifts that friends give me from their gardens. I drop by Elinor and Desmond’s house to walk Royston, and leave with four perfect-looking green peppers from their garden and three carrier bags full of small, bitter black grapes – an eighteenth-century variety, which Elinor assures me makes excellent grape juice. I spend an afternoon washing and de-stalking them. The grapes are small and fiddly and roll everywhere as I try to stuff them into the juicer. Soon there is purple grape juice splashed up the Farrow & Ball Pointing white walls and squashed into the new oak floor.
‘What have you been doing?’ says Lola, when she calls by one evening to go for a bike ride. ‘It looks like a scene from a Hitchcock movie in here.’ And all for two jugs of gunky purple juice, already fermenting in the fridge. Factoring in the time spent juicing them and the incidental damage to clothing and decor, the home-produced grape juice has proved more expensive than a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem. But this is the sort of thing that you do in the summer in rural France. In late July and August many of my French friends devote entire days to making jam or turning the surplus from their garden into gratins and cassoulets to stow in the freezer for winter. Since moving here, I too seem to spend a very large proportion of my time in the kitchen. In the French countryside, a degree of self-sufficiency is essential, since if the fridge is empty after 7.00 p.m., there is no corner shop to fall back upon. No more instant lasagnes or bags of pre-washed salad from M&S for me; instead, almost everything I eat is made from scratch.
As a lifelong urban dweller, it is blackberrying that provides one of the biggest thrills of my new rural life. In August I cycle into the surrounding countryside with Lola, where we discover narrow lanes brimming with blackberry bushes. We nickname a particularly abundant stretch ‘Blackberry Alley’. We go back the next evening, armed with plastic tubs, to pick the shiny black fruits. I acquire bramble cuts and nettle stings and almost sustain an ankle injury jumping across a ditch. But by the end of the evening, we have buckets of a fruit that is free, naturally organic and just a ten-minute bike ride away. ‘I can’t believe you have never been blackberrying before,’ says Lola, amazed. ‘I had you down as a real country girl.’ This feels like a huge compliment, if completely erroneous, as I grew up in a suburb of Liverpool.
The next day I discover how easy it is to make an apple and blackberry crumble. High on the aroma of caramelised sugar, I make three in rapid succession, making inroads into the blackberry mountain. I give one to Claudette, put one in the freezer and save one for Sunday lunch. To celebrate the first anniversary of My New Life in France, I have invited Claudette and her husband Michel, along with Mathilde and Sebastian, to experience traditional English cuisine in my little courtyard garden. Their expectations, I suspect, are low. But I am planning to do my bit to turn around my host nation’s uncharitable view of British cuisine.
The secret, I have decided, is not to try and compete on the same playing field. That means nothing fancy, stuffed or traditionally French. Instead, I dig out an old copy of Delia Smith. Now Delia might have been eclipsed by trendier chefs in the UK, but her cottage pie with leek and cheese topping proves to be big hit with my French friends. Even Mathilde, who normally eats only a tablespoon of anything, asks for seconds. The blackberry and apple crumble is an even bigger hit.
‘Bravo, chef!’ declares Mathilde, at the end of the meal. And then, surveying the latest work on the house, she adds, ‘You know Ka-renne, she has not bad taste for une Anglaise.’ Praise indeed!
‘This hous
e,’ says Claudette, ‘has a very happy feeling.’
Sitting in the warm, shaded courtyard with my friends, as lunch morphs into early evening, I feel a deep sense of belonging. Later, as Claudette stands up to leave, I wonder how I didn’t notice her shoes – a pair of eye-catching silver Roger Viviers, which she must have bought from the local dépôt-vente where I offloaded my surplus designer clothes. Designed for evening, they look charmingly eccentric worn with Claudette’s grandmotherly floral dress.
And so in small pleasures, the company of my new friends and the beauty of the French countryside, I achieve a state of equilibrium. The summer months pass all too quickly but, during the long hot days and drawn-out evenings, my love affair with the French countryside – and my happiness – grows. But then, just when I am least expecting it, the past jumps out and ambushes me again. One Monday morning in late August, I log onto Eric’s old email account in order to make some changes to the credit card used for billing – for he is still the master name on the account and for some reason the service provider cannot change that – and discover an email entitled ‘holiday pictures’ from one Rob Bolton. I know I shouldn’t probe any further and I know it’s wrong to read other people’s emails but I do – shamefully, without even a moment’s thought. Clicking open the email, I find the following:
Hey Eric!
Hope all is cool with you. Back in the US now and wanted to say thanks for all the great pizza. We had a great time on Ré and really enjoyed eating at your restaurant. I am attaching a couple of pictures of La Flotte. You might recognise the pink sun hat that my mother is wearing as belonging to your wife.
Keep in touch!
Rob.
I know I shouldn’t but I download the pictures. The first shows a woman in her fifties, sitting on a seawall, with a red and white lighthouse visible behind her. The second features a man standing outside a restaurant wearing a long white apron. His hair looks short but it’s hard to tell – it could just be tied back – and he looks like he has gained a little weight, but it is unmistakably Eric. The expression on his face is a mixture of reluctance and bemusement. Obviously, he has deliberately given his over-enthusiastic customer his old email address.
And, so, sitting in front of my computer, I discover that:
1. Eric owns a pizza restaurant on the Île de Ré.
2. Eric has possibly been eating too much of his own pizza. (And he is no longer the boy with the long, golden hair, frozen in my mind from all those summers ago; nor is he the man I saw jumping off a fishing boat in La Rochelle back in May.)
3. Eric is married.
The last discovery is painful but the pain, like having your legs waxed, is sharp and swift rather than lingering. I always knew that I would have to face this moment. But now that it has finally arrived, it feels like resolution of sorts. I study the photograph for an age and then, I can’t stop myself: I run up to the spare room and dig out a box of photos of us together, including my favourite picture of the two of us holding hands on the steps of Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, Paris – me in a long Marni rosebud print skirt with sunglasses on my head; him in a white shirt and jeans.
‘Coucou! Anyone at home?’
Just as I am about to embark on another sad trip down memory lane, Miranda calls in through the sitting room window. I can see Desmond standing outside in the bright sunshine with her. They had mentioned that they might pop in en route to Castorama, the DIY store in Poitiers.
‘What’s the matter?’ says Desmond, as I open the door. ‘Why the glum face? Aren’t you pleased to see us?’
‘No, no… it’s not that.’
‘Who’s this?’ says Miranda immediately spotting the photograph of Eric that I have left lying on the sofa. ‘Gosh, isn’t he handsome?’
‘Miranda, that’s so not what I want to hear,’ I say, quietly. ‘That’s my ex-boyfriend and I just discovered that he’s married.’
‘Oh!’ says Desmond, uncharacteristically stuck for something to say.
Miranda does not miss a beat. ‘I think, my darling girl, that it’s time you found a new one.’
Chapter 17
Pie Night
The Auberge de Bléssy is decorated with multicoloured fairy lights and makes a romantic spectacle in the foggy darkness. It looks like a scene from a movie and although the event I am about to attend is inauspiciously known as ‘Pie Night’, it feels like there’s magic in the air. This, I think to myself, would be a perfect place to meet someone, although there’s not much chance of that at a gathering of (mostly) retired ex-pats. I’ve come along partly out of curiosity but mostly because I promised Miranda, who was strangely insistent that I come. Tempting though it was to stay at home with a bottle of red wine and a good book, I’ve driven 20 kilometres on a cold October evening to eat pie and chips and watch an outfit called the Blue River Band.
The bar is warm and welcoming, with a wood-burning stove blazing in the stone fireplace. Amazingly for a British-run bar in rural France, there are even some genuine French people present: four elderly men playing a card game at a table in a corner. I pay my seven-euro entrance fee to Ernest, the English owner, and head for the back room, where I can hear the Blue River Band playing an old Eric Clapton number. The band consists of a husband and wife hippy duo, who have lived through the Woodstock era, and a weather-beaten old roué with more lines than a map of France. I am wearing my black hippy coat, trimmed in shaggy astrakhan, which, without having planned it, fits perfectly into the late 1960s/early 1970s groove. Everyone is seated at long trestle tables. I spot Miranda, dressed in black sequins and with glitter in her hair, sitting at a table with Darla and her husband Geoffrey, the rather odd couple that I met at Miranda’s birthday. So they haven’t got divorced yet then, I think to myself. Jon Wakeman is sitting with them.
‘Darling girl,’ Miranda cries over the music as I arrive. ‘You made it. I’m thrilled skinny.’
Jon is tapping his hand on the table in time with the music. Based on previous encounters, I am preparing to be cold-shouldered but to my surprise, he flashes me a very friendly smile.
‘You know Karen?’ Miranda shouts at him. He nods and pulls out the chair next to him for me to sit down. His long hair looks madder than I remember, sticking out in all directions. I want to be cold with him, given that he stood me up so rudely a few months ago, but it’s difficult.
‘How’s the house going?’ he shouts.
‘Yeah, not bad. How’s the B&B?’
‘It’s coming along… slowly,’ he says. ‘I’ve had to go back to the UK to earn some money.’
‘How long are you out for?’
‘Only for a few days unfortunately. Then back again at the end of November until the end of January. Would you like a drink?’
Has Monsieur Wakeman undergone some kind of personality makeover? I wonder, as he heads off to the bar. I’m certainly intrigued as to what’s caused this sudden turnaround. Miranda waves at me excitedly. ‘Isn’t he adorable,’ she says. ‘Look at his hair – all over the place. Apparently, he cut it himself this evening. He’s just so lovely… and guess what?’
‘What?’
‘He might be single soon. It sounds like things aren’t going well with his girlfriend.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Apparently, she doesn’t want to come and live here. She’s an accident and emergency doctor. He says that she’s got to make a decision soon or it’s over…’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, he wants to get the B&B finished as soon as possible and move out here full time. But she’s dragging her feet.’
‘He told you all this?’
‘Yes, he’s quite philosophical about it,’ said Miranda, her eyes twinkling with excitement. ‘If she doesn’t come out soon, it’s going to be curtains for her.’
Am I imagining it or is Miranda trying to set me up with Jon? It would
explain why she was so keen for me to come along this evening.
‘How long have they been going out?’ I ask.
‘Seven years apparently, but it hasn’t been right for the past year, which is why he never mentioned her. The only thing is, darling girl, for some reason he thought you were married.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes, apparently the man who runs the wine shop in Villiers told him that not only did you have a husband who was away most of the time but that you also had a lover in the SAS, fighting in Afghanistan.’
‘What?’ I say, wide-eyed.
‘But don’t worry. I’ve put him straight on all of that.’
‘Shh, look, he’s coming back.’
‘So, darling girl, have you seen Elinor or Desmond recently?’
‘Not for ages. They both seem very busy at the moment.’
‘Are they? Doing what?’ asks Miranda.
‘I don’t know. I invited them along tonight but they said they were already busy.’
‘Oh,’ says Miranda. ‘Probably a good job you didn’t. Strictly entre nous, Elinor and I have had a bit of a fall-out.’
‘A fall-out?’ I think back to the showdown on Miranda’s birthday but having seen them together since, figured that they had kissed and made up. ‘Nothing too serious, I hope?’
‘Darling girl, let’s not go there.’
By the time Jon returns with the drinks, I have been accosted by the man on my right – a former fireman from Wales, who wants to know what I am doing out here, how long I’ve been here, where I live, etc. He introduces me to his wife, a thin woman with a grey bob, bottle-thick glasses and a startled expression on her face. It’s hard to hear above the noise of the band but when I try to speak to her she just stares at me, like a startled rabbit. I yell louder but get the same blank gaze. Jon comes to my rescue.
‘You’re wasting your time.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I saw you trying to talk to her but she’s too drunk to speak.’
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