Love in a Warm Climate

by Helena Frith-Powell

  I hear Nick walk upstairs to kiss the children goodnight and then come back downstairs.

  “Soph?” He walks gingerly back into the kitchen but keeps his distance from me. Maybe he’s worried I might have the bread knife hidden in my leggings. Actually they’re so tight he’d easily spot it. Have I really become a woman who wears badly-fitting leggings? Have I sunk so low? Is this all my fault?

  “Look, you have every right to be furious; I have been a total prat and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it did. Please give me another chance?”

  I don’t look at him. I can’t bear to. I can almost feel him contemplating walking towards me and taking me in his arms and making everything all right again. Half of me wishes he would, but instead he sighs.

  “Soph?”

  “Get lost,” I reply.

  “Please?”

  I turn around to face him. “Nick, I just need you to go, I need to think, I’m too confused. Please just get out of here.”

  He looks at the ground, takes a deep breath as if he is about to launch into some ‘please forgive me I’m Irish and genetically predisposed to infidelity’ speech, but instead he whispers goodbye and walks away.

  It seems incredible that a couple of short hours ago I was happily married, or at least I thought I was happily married. Now all of a sudden I am not. A bit like thinking you are a size 12 and realizing once you’ve tried the dress on that you are, at best, a size 14. Which is one of the reasons it is important to shop often. Unlike scales, clothes sizes cannot be ignored.

  I hear him shut the front door and walk down the gravel path towards his hire car. Ironically, if anything I thought I was the one who was dissatisfied. I was the desperate housewife longing for something else, but not really bothered enough to find it, nor in fact even sure what it was. Things were never really bad enough for me to find out. As I said, I thought we were happy. Not in an ecstatic passionate way, a let’s-have-sex-in-the-morning (yuck, heaven forbid) kind of way. But the way most married couples are happy, going on from one day to the next, coping with kids, work, money worries and occasionally finding each other again and not being irritated by a tone of voice or the way someone butters their toast or flops into a chair on top of the cat or the millions of other little things that can turn marriage into drudgery and, when things are bad, warp lust into something simmering just below loathing.

  I walk out onto the terrace. Our fish fountain is working away steadily, indifferent to the drama going on in the house. I normally love the sound of the water gently cascading from the fish’s mouth to the basin below – it’s soothing as a sleeping child’s breath. But right now I wish it would shut up. The moon is rising over the vineyards. It’s a beautiful peaceful evening but I feel totally and utterly depressed. Is there enough Calpol in the house for an overdose, I wonder?

  The thought of Calpol reminds me there are three little people who need me, all safely tucked up in their beds upstairs, totally unaware of what has happened and of how their lives might be about to change forever. I sit down on the edge of the fountain, weakened by the thought of it all. As well as the children there’s the vineyard, a house, a dog and a treacherous, petite black cat. Talking of which, the faithless creature has come out and is rubbing against my legs. I lift her up and put her on my lap.

  “Any more nonsense from you and I’ll throw you in the fountain, along with your feckless Irish friend,” I say sternly.

  She looks up at me then pushes her little head onto my arm, telling me she needs to be stroked and loved.

  “I know how you feel, Daisy,” I whisper, and I start to cry.

  But I have to pull myself together. I have to be strong. I am about to become a single parent in a foreign country.

  Rule 2

  Affairs are a way to liven up a dull marriage

  The French Art of Having Affairs

  The reason I will always remember Christmas 2008 is not because my mother’s husband was arrested for money laundering and carted off to prison just before pudding, but because it was the first time Nick mentioned moving to France.

  Harry was my mother’s fifth husband, so by then she had got used to losing them. After the police showed up, the talk was of nothing else but Dirty Harry (as he was dubbed even before the brandy butter had melted) and his laundry. But later on, when we were sitting in front of the fire, Nick changed the subject from police brutality (I mean imagine arresting a man on Christmas Day?) to our future.

  “I think we should move to France,” he said, handing me a glass of brandy.

  “What?” I almost choked on my drink. “Because of the police? Have you been laundering money too?”

  “No,” he laughed. “It has nothing to do with that.”

  He leaned closer to me. “I’m serious Soph. I’ve always wanted to live there, ever since I went to St Tropez as an eighteen-year-old and fell in love with a French girl on the beach.”

  “I don’t expect she’ll still be there,” I replied, settling into my chair.

  There are some things that seem insignificant but in fact end up changing your life. Like the time I just missed a number 36, started chatting to someone at the bus stop and ended up with my first (and last) job, at Drake’s Hotel in London. Or the day my uncle gave me a copy of Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen. A life-long obsession with the Brontës was born, resulting in me calling our twin girls Charlotte and Emily. I did briefly think about calling our son Branwell after their opium-addict brother, but was afraid it might be tempting fate. So I called him Edward. How many opium addicts called Edward do you know?

  And some things pretend to be significant but turn out to be an anti-climax, and don’t change your life at all. Like losing your virginity. The most significant thing about the whole event for me was how disappointing it was. Or turning eighteen; you think somehow you will wake up more mature and sophisticated with a clear idea of what you want to do with the rest of your life. I almost expected my features to change in some small way. But I woke up, looked in the mirror and realised that I was still the same girl. The same girl with the same spot I’d had on my forehead the day before. Only it was bigger.

  Our move to France started as something seemingly insignificant that might never happen then turned into reality and a new life.

  Nick had long been harbouring a secret dream to sell up in London, ditch his job in the City and run a vineyard – probably along with half the commuters on his early-morning tube to the City. There’s nothing quite like a smelly armpit in your face to make you dream about being anywhere else, and a vineyard in France is as good a place as any.

  Then about three years ago his parents bought him a membership to The Sunday Times Wine Club and he went on a wine tour of Burgundy. He came back full of enthusiasm about the life of the wine-makers, the climate, the landscape and of course the wine. He developed a rather irritating habit of swilling wine around his glass before drinking it and after a few glasses would start to talk about owning his own vineyard.

  I assumed it was a phase he would grow out of because he’s not one for unfeasible schemes. He is reliable and sensible. The kind of guy people refer to as a rock. He likes football, cricket, rugby… in fact practically every sport.

  He is nice to his parents and rarely impulsive, which is one of the things that first attracted me to him. I grew up with a mother whose second name was impulsive, her first being wild, so I longed for stability and normality. To me, being normal seemed impossibly exotic. I came home from school one day when I was about ten to find my mother reading a book on nihilism and smoking a joint.

  “Why can’t you bake cakes like normal mothers?” I demanded.

  The following day there was a brick masquerading as a cake on the kitchen table; I was amazed it could withstand the weight of it. And there was a most terrible smell of burning all around the house. My mother was standing proudly next to the cake wearing a tea-towel around her waist. After that I let her get on with her nihilism, whatever th
at is.

  So while other girls looked for excitement from their boyfriends, someone to whisk them off their feet and surprise them with outlandish gestures or mad-cap behaviour, I just wanted someone who would appreciate the importance of an Aga and who could stop me from turning into my mother. Obviously he had to be handsome and good in bed as well. And preferably Irish with green eyes and floppy dark hair. But impulsive and wild? No thanks.

  Nick is that stable person. He is the kind of man who always goes to the gate to board the plane at the first call while I am still spraying myself with Eau Dynamisante at the duty-free Clarins counter. He has been supporting the same football team (Chelsea) since he was four years old. I didn’t dare be too late down the aisle on our wedding day because I knew he would be at least half an hour early. For his stag night there was no chance Nick would be whisked off to Majorca by his pals and end up shaven-headed and semi-naked in a local jail: it was held a cautious ten days before we were married and his brother, who is also his best friend, was in charge of organising it, thus ensuring Nick would come out unscathed and floppy-haired for the big day.

  So I didn’t take his plans about France too seriously. I suppose I just thought it was all too unrealistic and impulsive. I mean everyone talks about moving to France and living the good life, but very few people actually do it. It’s just like everyone always talks about drinking less and getting fit. Or reading War and Peace before they die.

  I assumed Nick was basically just too sensible to up sticks and move to France. Although secretly I wished he would. To me, France meant glamour, good wines, irresistible cheeses and everything that is good in life. But it was a dream; I couldn’t imagine how my favourite childhood holiday destination could ever become a place where we could live. It was a bit like drinking champagne every day.

  The dream all started to become more real in January when Tom, a work colleague of Nick’s, upped and left to live in Limousin. Up until then, Nick was an armchair émigré, with or without a glass of brandy. After Tom moved, he began to look at the French idea really seriously. If Tom could make his dream reality, then so could he.

  “Blimey Soph, he’s even more boring than I am,” joked Nick. “If he can do it, then so can we.”

  Rather in the same way that I developed an interest in sport soon after I met Nick, I thought it would be better to join in the French dream than be excluded. So I started reading guidebooks with titles like Life Begins at Calais and How to Realise your French Dream. I read and learnt all about the ins and outs of buying a house in France, about how important it is to make friends with your local mayor and about the perineal re-training women are put through as a matter of course after childbirth. Shame I missed out on that one. I half wondered whether seven years after giving birth to twins was too late to begin. I can see the reality TV show now: The Pelvic Floor Factor – squeeze your way to success.

  I read Madame Bovary and Bonjour tristesse. I watched incomprehensible French films like Jules et Jim and pictured myself looking glamorous in a large hat by the sea while my children made sandcastles that resembled Versailles while wearing chic stripy long-sleeved T-shirts from Petit Bateau.

  I quickly became what people call a francophile. I even started having French lessons on Wednesday lunchtimes at Linguarama on Clapham High Street, with a rather pinched-looking woman from Toulon called Valérie who had perfectly manicured nails and a constantly sore throat, probably from correcting my excruciatingly bad French accent. If someone had told me when I was at school how appallingly difficult French was to learn as an adult, I think I would have paid much more attention. One of the things that spurred me on was the thought that if we managed to move and make this dream a reality, my children would never have to go through the humiliating experience of mastering the French language when you’re at an age when your mouth simply won’t bend enough to make the right sounds any more.

  Nick was like a happy schoolboy.

  “It’s nice to see you so excited about something that doesn’t involve a ball and men wearing shorts,” I said to him.

  “I could say the same about you,” he joked.

  His face lit every time we talked about moving to France. We spent hours making plans. We sat up until late into the night drinking wine, talking about what sort of life we would have, what sort of wine we would make, how we would cope with the move, what to do with the cat.

  “She has to have a piece of paper from the vet to certify that she hasn’t got worms or fleas before they will let her in,” I told Nick one evening.

  “As if French cats don’t have either,” he said.

  “Maybe the French will introduce a similar rule for English women going to live there,” I said. “Making sure they are pencil thin and wearing matching underwear. According to this book Sarah gave me about finding my inner French woman, they won’t be seen dead in non-matching underwear.”

  It was like we were having another baby – one less fattening and hopefully less painful but certainly as expensive. Nick had found a quotation in a wine book that read “The only way to end up with a small fortune from making wine is to start with a large fortune”. But we were not going to make money; we were going to change our lives.

  “We could have peacocks, Soph,” Nick said. We were wine tasting at the time – our new hobby and one so much more practical than other hobbies as it is easily done in the comfort of your own home so you don’t have to risk getting arrested for drunk driving.

  I felt like a woman in the throes of a new romance. I looked at my stable and predictable husband in a whole new light. He was no longer Nick of the dreary job and pin-striped suit. He was Nick the brave, Nick the conqueror of new territories, our leader into a new adventure surrounded by vineyards and peacocks.

  “I can’t wait. How many peacocks shall we have?”

  “First we have to have a realistic strategy,” said Nick, who had obviously not tasted enough wine.

  “I agree,” I replied, although I was really thinking it would all be fine once we got there and we shouldn’t panic too much.

  But we did our maths on the inside cover of one of my guidebooks in Charlotte’s pink marker pen. The plan was this: once we had found a vineyard and house, we would sell our house in Clapham, use what we needed for a deposit on the property, get a mortgage for the rest and use the remaining capital to buy machinery, invest in the business and live on until we started to generate an income. Nick calculated that if we bought a vineyard of around 15 hectares in size, depending on the local appellation rules (how many bottles you can produce and so forth) we should be able to produce around 100,000 bottles a year.

  “If we sell them at around three euros a bottle we will have a turnover of 300,000 euros,” he said, jotting down the numbers as we chatted. “Around 200,000 of that will go on costs, leaving a profit of about 100,000.”

  Nick would carry on commuting to his job in the City, living in London during the week with his brother to save on rent until the first harvest in September the year after we moved. Then we could use his two bonuses to invest in the business. Once the wine was ready to sell he would leave and work full-time with our business.

  All this planning took place in February. Nick’s moving to France full-time seemed a long way away. But he would come out at weekends and holidays, and also once the office was set up would try to work one or two days a week from France, providing they could hook him up with the software from the London office. We would also employ someone a couple of days a week to work in the vineyards.

  Meanwhile, I would be in charge of not only overseeing the vineyards when he wasn’t there but also marketing the wine using my contacts in the hotel business and new ones I would build up. I would get a database of restaurants and bars to target. I might even have business meetings again, I would be part of the working world once more after spending the last seven years looking after the twins and Edward. It was an exciting but slightly scary thought. What was it like out there nowadays? When I thought a
bout it I felt a little like a woman who was suddenly being thrown back onto the dating scene after years in a stable relationship. Would the punters respect me in the morning? After all, what did we know about making wine?

  “Soph, you’ll be fine,” Nick reassured me. “You’ve given birth to twins, nothing can be more difficult than that.”

  We started looking seriously at places where we could buy a vineyard. Nick quickly ruled out Burgundy and Bordeaux; they were far too expensive. We would have to look elsewhere. We narrowed our search to the biggest wine-producing region in the world; the Languedoc region of southern France, an area spanning hundreds of miles between Provence and Spain.

  On our first visit, in April this year, I was immediately captivated by the landscape. It was like someone had taken everything that is beautiful about France and put it into one place. The light was the thing that I noticed first. It was one of those crisp, clear spring days, with just a hint of the warmth to come in the sun. The sky was a shade of bright blue I don’t think I have ever seen before. It was exhilarating to look at. I read somewhere that the light is so beautiful because of the lack of pollution. It was so clear and sharp and seemed to give the landscape such beautifully defined contours.

  We drove from the airport towards our hotel in a small town called Marseillan.

  “‘Some say Marseillan is like St Tropez used to be before Brigitte Bardot decided to take her bra off and made it famous,’” I read out loud from my guidebook while Nick drove. “‘The port is one of the nicest places in France to sip a glass of wine or simply stroll watching the boats come and go.’ Maybe we should buy somewhere near there,” I suggested.

  “It sounds lovely,” said Nick. “But properties near the coast are much more expensive.”

  I gazed out of the window at the countryside. It was as if the motorway was the only evidence of modern man. The rest was bright green vineyards with pretty stone houses. In the distance I could see medieval villages on top of hills. I longed to explore them all. I felt like a kid in a sweet shop desperate to get out there and experience it all.