Tout Sweet

by Karen Wheeler

  ‘How can you tell?’ I ask.

  ‘I just can,’ he says with a wink.

  The steak and kidney pie is dished up and bottles of HP sauce are distributed. I watch as people around me enthusiastically pump it over the sludge on their plates. It is very strange to be sitting in a bar called the Auberge in the middle of a quiet French village, surrounded by British people, either tucking into glutinous pie or singing drunkenly and morosely along to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’. I feel sorry for the one French couple sitting in our midst who must have stumbled in here by mistake, perhaps foolishly imagining that the bar was still under French ownership. Now, here they are, stoically eating the food in silence, and looking like they’ve just survived a road accident as they survey the sozzled Brits around them.

  ‘Not so much pie night as pie-eyed night,’ observes Jon, as if reading my mind.

  This was exactly the sort of scenario I planned to avoid when I first arrived in France, but strangely, I find that I am enjoying myself. Jon nudges me. Miranda, as usual, has elected not to eat and is now swaying along to the music with the drunken woman who was sitting opposite me. She appears to be using Miranda’s slight frame to prop herself up. ‘Oh dear,’ I say. Then I ask one of several questions that I am dying to know the answers to.

  ‘So, what happened with the business venture you were planning with Dave?’

  ‘Business venture is overstating it a little,’ he replies. ‘Dave was interested in renting one of my barns for storing his microlight but in the end we decided it wasn’t a good idea.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Is Dave a good friend of yours?’

  ‘Not really. I just know him in the same way I know lots of people out here.’

  Suddenly there is a loud crash. Miranda has been pulled to the floor by her drunken dancing partner. There is a tangle of chairs, and a collective intake of breath. Jon is the first on his feet to check that they are OK. He helps them both up from the floor and gently assists the former fireman’s wife back to her seat. Miranda follows, swaying slightly in her high heels as she returns to the table.

  ‘So, darling boy,’ she says to Jon. ‘What about this Christmas dinner dance in Anzac in early December? Karen is coming, aren’t you?’

  The concept of a dinner dance sounds quite alien to me – something that people of an older generation do – and Christmas seems ages away, but Miranda has already signed me up for a ticket, assuring me that it was ‘oodles of fun’ last year.

  ‘That sounds like an excellent plan,’ says Jon. Then, turning to me: ‘If you’re definitely going, then maybe we could meet up and go together?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great,’ I reply, still wondering what lies behind this new charm offensive. But the dance is at least six weeks away, which gives him plenty of time to cancel.

  It transpires that Darla and her husband Geoffrey – who seem to be getting along better this evening – are also going. ‘Look,’ says Darla, leaning into the conversation. ‘If you can both get yourselves here, you can come with us. Then if you want to have a drink or two, you can crash the night at ours – we’ve got two sofa beds – and that way, you don’t need to worry about driving.’

  I haven’t done ‘crashing’ since my student days and I prefer my own bed to someone else’s sofa. But maybe I should live a little dangerously. Ex-pat events are hard work without alcohol. So, against my better instincts, I find myself agreeing to the plan. Later, we all stand outside the twinkling bar and say goodbye, our breath white and visible on the freezing night air. Darla is giving Jon directions on how to get to her house. ‘Look, it’s only half a mile up the road. Why don’t you both follow me back now, just to make sure you know where it is.’

  ‘OK,’ says Jon.

  Shivering in the cold, I realise that I have left my scarf in the bar and run back inside to get it.

  Jon is still waiting outside when I return. Everyone else has gone. I follow his car to Darla’s. She is waiting in her car outside her house and gets out when we both pull up. After giving Jon her phone number so that he can confirm plans nearer the time, she directs us to a little patch of scrubland at the end of the narrow, bumpy lane, in which to turn around. Jon Wakeman is in front of me, so he goes first, then I follow. It takes me a while as it a tricky manoeuvre to reverse in the opaque darkness, without backing into a ditch. Jon drives off without waiting for me, even though we are both going in the same direction. The darkness is rendered even more opaque by swirling pockets of fog as I drive cross-country through the narrow, winding lanes surrounded by dark open fields. It’s a little scary as I’m not even sure I am going in the right direction. But it’s very wintry and strangely atmospheric. I wonder if Jon is thinking the same thing as he drives through the same foggy darkness a few minutes ahead of me. What a shame he did not have the manners to wait.

  The big event of November is the installation of my wood-burner. The Godin, made from matt black cast iron, has been standing hopefully in front of the fireplace, waiting to be connected, for months now. I bought it on impulse in August, having spotted it on sale in a DIY store at a huge discount. At the time, I did not even know if the chimney was in good working order, and the fireplace was still all boarded up, but since it is impossible to live in rural France and not have a real log fire, I decided to take the risk. More importantly, I wanted to give Maison Coquelicot back its soul. To have a fire roaring in the petit salon again, generating warmth on cold winter evenings, seemed like the final symbolic step in bringing the house back to life.

  But buying the Godin was the easy bit. The difficulty was finding the right kind of artisan to install it. As usual, when faced with a problem, I went to the local mairie for advice. The answer, it transpired, was a plumber. The clerk in the mairie obligingly wrote down the number of a local artisan and a company to sweep the chimney. I also discovered that if you have a wood-burner and you don’t have your chimney swept once a year, your household insurance will not cover you for fire. So I organised the chimney sweeping and asked Monsieur Lazare, an artisan who specialised in installing wood-burners ,to come and give me a devis. It was expensive. The steel tubing that goes up the chimney, I discovered, costs almost as much as the wood-burner itself. But Monsieur Lazare looked like he knew what he was doing and so I hired him to do the job.

  The installation day dawns bright and clear but with a gratifying downshift in temperature. Monsieur Lazare, who has already cancelled two previous appointments, and was due to arrive at 9.00 a.m., calls to say he is going to be late. It is 5.00 p.m. when he finally appears. He rushes into the house with a young apprentice in tow, races up to the attic at speed and then hurtles back down to the van as if competing in some physical endurance test – all the time shouting breathless instructions to his apprentice. Between them they unfurl 10 metres of steel tubing from the van and run back into the house and up into the attic with it. While all this is happening, his mobile phone rings at least three times and I can hear him saying, ‘Oui, chérie, I will be there very soon. Very soon.’ Something tells me that his mind is not on the job.

  His apprentice climbs through the small attic window and onto the roof and drops the silver tubing down the chimney, while Monsieur Lazare shouts frantic instructions from outside. Then there is the sound of a saw and then a drill as he connects the elbow and collar to the wood-burner and metal tubing. Dizzy with the speed of it all, I shut myself away in my bedroom until he shouts upstairs to say the job is done. When I go down to look, the wood-burner is standing several feet in front of the fireplace rather than neatly recessed into it. Worse, there is a gaping hole crudely hewn in the panel behind the wood-burner to accommodate the connecting pipe. Even with my limited knowledge of DIY and fireplaces, I can see that this is a very bad idea as all the warm air will just disappear through this hole and go straight up the chimney. When I query the positioning, Monsieur Lazare flashes me a charming smile and tells me that
it is not possible to put the wood-burner inside the fireplace, though I do not understand why. That, surely, is what fireplaces are for? But on the matter of the badly cut hole, Monsieur Lazare smiles disarmingly, says he has a solution, and asks for directions to the nearest DIY store. He rushes off at speed, returning less than ten minutes later with a big silver funnel or ‘collar’. It covers the gaping hole around the pipe but it looks ridiculous and causes the wood-burner to stand even further away from the fireplace, so that its front legs are standing on the wooden floor, rather than the tiled hearth. When I point out the potential fire hazard to Monsieur Lazare, he shrugs and agrees that the collar is too big but tells me that it was the only one that they had in stock. With an apologetic smile, he says there is nothing more he can do today and rushes off to meet his chérie. I am not sure what to do next but it is hard to be angry as he is so very charming.

  Anyone who has lived in rural France for any length of time will tell you that the dark winter months can be difficult and it is easy to feel isolated locked away behind closed shutters. But for me, the winter gloom is punctuated by short work trips to Paris and London and the months pass quickly. Christmas is soon on the doorstep and this year I am planning to do it properly. Late one Friday afternoon in December, I head over to Intermarché to buy a tree. It is the first time in my adult life that I have had a full-sized Christmas tree. In London, I had to be content with a knee-high tree, constrained by space and the fact that I lived in a top-floor flat and didn’t really fancy hauling a Norwegian pine up three floors. The fact that I am contemplating a Christmas tree really symbolises how much Maison Coquelicot has moved on in the past twelve months. This time last year I was sleeping, eating and working in my bedroom; while the sitting room was a dangerous obstacle course of dusty boxes and bubble-wrapped furniture, to be negotiated en route to the front door. I was in no position to put up a tree or invite friends over for drinks.

  But now I have successfully renovated a house in France. Alone! In celebration of that fact, I buy the biggest tree I can find in Intermarché. An assistant helps me wheel it out of the store in a trolley and we manoeuvre it into the back of my car, leaving the hatchback open. On the way home I hit a traffic bump and the tree slides out of the back of the car. I jump out, rescue it (with great difficulty) from the road and stuff it in again, showering copious amounts of pine needles over me and the back seat of the car. At times like this, it would be so useful to have a boyfriend. At least at the other end, I only have to drag it in through the front door. Having propped it up in a bucket in a corner of the sitting room, I brave the cold, dusty attic and find the large cardboard box marked ‘Christmas decorations’. I seem to have accumulated a lot of baubles over the years. Only last week, on a work trip to Paris, I was unable to resist the hanging glass icicles and cheeky-looking fairies in Le Bon Marché department store.

  In the sitting room, I pour myself a large glass of red wine, light some scented candles and spend a happy hour draping the tree in tinsel and slipping the red and gold baubles onto the branches. When I have finished, I switch on the fairy lights and admire the effect. But it is a bitter-sweet experience putting up a Christmas tree alone. On the one hand, the tree seems to symbolise a new chapter in my life, since in the years after Eric left I could not bear the idea of a Christmas tree in the same way that I could not bring myself to listen to music. But at the same time, I feel unbearably sad when I think back to the first festive season that we spent together. Rather than throwing the tree out with the rubbish in the New Year, Eric planted it in the small patch of communal garden. Despite the hard, rocky ground, it flourished until the following Christmas, when he brought it inside and we decorated it all over again.

  ‘The difference between you and me,’ I remember him saying, ‘is that you always rush to throw things away – especially when they don’t work – whereas I like to find a way to hold on to them.’ Those were the days when he still worried that I was going to throw him away. Who would have guessed that it would be the other way round? But the last Christmas that we spent together, I recall, he did not bother to plant the tree in the garden.

  I am rescued from forlorn memories of Christmases past by the phone ringing. To my surprise, it’s Jon Wakeman, whom I hadn’t even realised was back in France.

  ‘Hi Karen,’ he says. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Fine thanks. I’ve just put up the Christmas tree.’

  ‘That’s funny. I’ve just been doing exactly the same. I hope you don’t mind but I got your number from Miranda. I was wondering if you were still on for the Christmas dinner dance in Anzac tomorrow night?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, thrilled that he has remembered. With so many weeks having passed since Miranda first proposed it, I thought he would have forgotten.

  ‘I only got back yesterday,’ he says, ‘but I spoke to Miranda and she has booked us tickets, and Darla and Geoffrey are expecting us to stay over the night. I was wondering if I could pick you up at around six o’clock?’

  ‘That would be excellent,’ I say and give him the directions.

  ‘See you tomorrow then,’ he says.

  ‘Really looking forward to it,’ I say.

  ‘Me too.’

  Chapter 18

  A Minx in Anzac

  I wake up the following morning feeling hugely excited about tonight’s ex-pat event. In the afternoon, I cycle through the bleak, wintry countryside with Lola, who has managed to escape the Liberty Bookshop for a couple of hours. The dull brown landscape is unrecognisable from the lush, yellow and green fields that we cycled through in the summer. Afterwards, Lola comes in for coffee and to rifle through my latest stash of French country-living magazines.

  ‘Oh, it looks like you’ve had your wood-burner connected,’ she says, entering the petit salon.

  ‘Don’t get me started on that,’ I reply. Every time I look at the Godin, rather than experiencing a rosy glow at the thought of warm, cosy evenings to come, I feel hugely irritated at a job badly done.

  ‘Well, at least it’s plumbed in now,’ says Lola, looking on the bright side as usual. ‘Have you tried it out yet?’

  ‘No. I’m waiting for a wood delivery and also I’m not sure it’s safe. Though I might be able to find some bits of wood in the garage and I suppose there’s no harm in giving it a go…’

  In the garage I find a few pieces of pine, which I put in the wood-burner along with screwed-up pieces of newspaper and a couple of firelighters. I throw in a match and Lola and I stand back expectantly. Amazingly, it starts to burn. There is smoke and flames. Not exactly roaring flames, but flames nonetheless. Lola and I stare at the flames, transfixed. Unfortunately, the pine releases a noxious, sickly odour before burning itself out. ‘Hm. It’s probably been treated with something,’ says Lola. ‘Still, it’s going to be so brilliant when you’ve got proper logs.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, thinking that I am still several steps away from that all-important, roaring fire. The house hasn’t quite got its soul back yet.

  After Lola has gone, I take a shower and get dressed in a green knee-length skirt with a big bow at the front and a little black cardigan. For once, I am ready ahead of schedule and chatting to Desmond on the phone – he is considering coming to the dinner dance in Anzac too – when the doorbell rings. I stick my head out of the upstairs window and see Jon standing below in the darkness.

  ‘Be right down,’ I shout.

  ‘Possibly see you and Elinor later, then,’ I say to Desmond.

  ‘Oh, Elinor won’t be coming,’ he says. ‘Ex-pat dinner dances aren’t really her thing. It will probably just be me on my own.’

  I rush downstairs to open the door. In the low-lit salon, the lights on the Christmas tree are glittering, rose-scented Diptyque candles are burning on the mantelpiece (to remove the sickly chemical smell of the pine I burnt earlier) and two red table lamps cast a soft pink glow over the room. A Buddha B
ar CD is playing softly in the background. I hadn’t planned it that way, but it couldn’t be more romantic if I’d tried.

  ‘Come on in,’ I say, as the cold air rushes into the hallway. ‘I’m ready to go. I just need to find my sleeping bag.’

  ‘This is very nice,’ he says, his cheeks pink from the cold night air. He pauses for a second and looks around the room. ‘But, you know, there’s one thing I just don’t get.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got that lovely marble fireplace there. Why didn’t the artisan recess the wood-burner into the surround, rather than standing it in front of it? After all, that’s what fireplaces are for.’

  ‘You know, that’s very weird,’ I say. ‘You have just walked in and pinpointed the exact thing that has been preoccupying my thoughts for the past couple of weeks.’

  He laughs. ‘Well, I guess it’s uppermost in my mind as I’ve just installed mine,’ he says.

  ‘You did it yourself?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s really easy.’

  I think of the money and time I have thrown at the installation of this wood-burner, only to be unhappy with the result, and not for the first time, I think how much easier life would be if I had someone in my life to share the burden of DIY.

  ‘I could probably have installed it for you,’ says Jon, as if reading my thoughts.

  Now there’s an offer. ‘OK, found my sleeping bag,’ I say, blowing out the candles. ‘Shall we go?’

  Jon drives fast but competently and during the twenty-minute drive along dark country lanes to Darla’s house, I find out more about him. He tells me that he’s sold his house in the UK and wants to move out here full-time but his girlfriend isn’t so keen. He is still in the process of converting his house in a nearby village into a B&B – targeted at visitors to the racetrack and airfield nearby – and he is also planning to have rare-breed animals on his land. Gloucester Old Spot pigs (whatever they are) seem to loom very large in his future plans. I also learn that he has a four-wheel drive (which he refers to as his ‘tank’) and a shotgun and comes from a family of gamekeepers in Gloucestershire. I forgive him for the carbon-catastrophic four-wheel drive, as he rarely uses it and at least he could argue that in the country he needs it. And there is, I have to admit, something quite sexy about a man with a gun.