Love in a Warm Climate

by Helena Frith-Powell

  “Coffee?” I ask.

  “Yes, please,” he says turning around. He really is very elegant – the way he moves and holds himself is just so, well, aristocratic. Actually, he reminds me a bit of Rupert Campbell-Black.

  I nip to the kitchen and come back with two coffees. We sit on the sofa. Suddenly I feel quite shy. If this were in England we would have had another glass of wine and things would have flowed more easily; we would have talked without inhibitions or possibly fallen on top of each other. But here in France one doesn’t drink after dinner – it is just not seen as normal. So I sit soberly on the sofa sipping my coffee and wondering what is going to happen next.

  We finish our coffee and chat a bit more about the vineyard and then Jean-Claude gets up to go. I watch him rather longingly, but that could be because I am feeling vulnerable and a bit lonely.

  “Thank you for a lovely evening, Sophie,” he says. “I hope to see you again very soon.”

  “It was a pleasure, thank you for all your help.”

  We walk to the door and he kisses me on both cheeks but very close to my lips. I tremble slightly.

  “Bonne nuit, ma petite vigneronne anglaise,” he says gently, and then walks away.

  As I head upstairs and set my alarm in good time for my yoga class in the morning, I reflect that it is not so bad getting divorced if you have three gorgeous men around to take your mind off things. Not so much a side-salad but a full-blown tricolore.

  Rule 19

  You are programmed to seduce

  The French Art of Having Affairs

  I check my emails before the yoga. There are no more messages, which makes me feel like weeping. It all started so well. But maybe people are thinking about it? I hope so. Because less than £3000 is not going to be enough to fund the harvest.

  How do other people do this? Maybe they have a start-up capital. We have some money from selling the house, but it is still being decided how it is going to be split because of the divorce.

  “Sophie?” Kamal is at the door to my office wearing tracksuit bottoms and a white T-shirt. He has tied his hair back. “Stop looking so worried. Remember your yoga practice begins even before you get to class,” he says calmly. “See you on the terrace.”

  He’s right – frazzled and stressed is no way to go into a yoga session. I breathe deeply in then out through my nose. I will just have to deal with the finances of the vineyard after my downward dogs.

  On the terrace outside the kitchen I find Kamal sitting with his eyes closed, cross-legged on a blue yoga mat. In fact he is not cross-legged, I see on closer inspection: he has his feet on his thighs. I think it is what is called the lotus position. You could leave me in a room for several years with nothing else to do and I still don’t think I would manage to do it. There is incense burning and a small brass elephant next to the incense. I clearly had it all wrong – I just dived into a pose whenever I had a chance. This is all very professional.

  Kamal opens his eyes and looks at me. “Sit down in any comfortable cross-legged position,” he begins. “We will start by centering ourselves. Bring your hands palms together in front of your heart. We are not praying; although you may have noticed the God Ganesh is with us, he is here more to create the right ambiance for our practice. Focus on your breath, try to make your in and out breaths equal in length.”

  I do as he says and begin to relax. His voice is lovely, his accent somewhere between Indian and Antipodean. After the centering we start the asanas, as he tells me they are called. I don’t think I was even doing yoga before. This is so much harder. During the sun salutations (of which we do sixteen on each side) I even start lightly perspiring. After those we move into triangle and warrior poses.

  “Do you mind if I adjust you?” says Kamal at one stage, looking at my triangle pose.

  “Not at all,” I say to the sky, as my head is upside down. He stands behind me and puts one hand on my buttock and the other on my outstretched arm.

  “Take a deep breath,” he tells me. I do as he says. “Good, now breathe out slowly.”

  As I breathe he pushes my buttocks and hips away from him and pulls my outstretched arm towards him. I find my body moving into a perfect triangle, I feel strong and invigorated, as well as slightly embarrassed. But I do begin to understand what it means to breathe into a pose, which all the websites I looked at tell you is essential. Kamal helps me with my sitting twists and forward bends too, gently easing me into position.

  At one stage I sneak a look at him doing a seated forward bend. His head is resting on his knees, whereas I can barely reach my shins with my hands. Infuriating. I sigh and try to push myself further down.

  “Yoga is not a competitive sport, Sophie,” says Kamal, still with his head on his knees. How on earth did he know I was checking him out? “We all do what we do within our limitations and that is good enough.”

  At the end of the practice we have a relaxation, which is slightly interrupted by the children yelling at me because they couldn’t find me. I thank Kamal.

  “You’re welcome, I practise most mornings; you are always welcome to come along.”

  “I ought to be paying you extra for the private lessons,” I smile.

  He shakes his head. “The gift of yoga is free,” he says and then with a “namaste” he is off to get ready for work.

  After breakfast the children and I drive to meet Nick at Montpellier airport. I suppose to an outsider we must look like any normal happy family; three children excitedly trying to peek in through the arrival doors every time someone comes out to see if they can glimpse him. Their mother watching them and waiting for her loving husband.

  Except this loving husband is arriving with his even more loving mistress. Oh yes, we’re so mature now that we are all going to be jolly polite and act as if nothing is wrong at all. So instead of saying ‘Hello, you must be Cécile, the bitch who stole my husband and broke up my family’, I will shake her hand and say ‘Nice to meet you’, even though it’s most certainly not. Okay, so I may have spent yesterday evening with a handsome French aristo and very nice it was too, and the week before getting drunk with a film star, but all that aside, poor Edward saying how much he missed Nick made me think that, if I could turn the clock back, I would much rather we were all together.

  Dining with a French aristo and hanging out with Johnny is obviously just my extremely resourceful way of dealing as best I can with a bad situation. And I should be commended for making such an effort to adapt to the local culture of having affairs. Something my husband – sorry, soon-to-be ex-husband, obviously did before he even got here. Talk about forward-planning.

  I may not be keen to meet his mistress, but I am looking forward to seeing what this vamp looks like in the flesh. Thank God I went on my ‘Lose your husband and your love-handles’ diet. I am wearing the black outfit from St Tropez; black for mourning my dead marriage, rather like Victoria Beckham when she showed up the day after the news about her husband and Rebecca Loos broke wearing virginal white.

  “There he is,” shrieks Charlotte, running towards Nick. The others follow. I watch him from a discreet distance as he kneels down to scoop them all up and cover them with kisses. Then I turn my gaze to the woman at his side. Fuck! – she’s thinner than me, and beautiful. Great. Stealing my husband may be forgivable, but being thinner and more beautiful than me is not.

  She smiles at the children as Nick introduces them. She looks a little bit like a young Anna Wintour, with a perfect bob and lovely skin. She is extremely well-groomed in that way that French women are famous for. She is wearing jeans and loafers and a very pale pink silk shirt and blue and pink silk scarf. Her shoes and bag are clearly designer.

  She seems a bit high maintenance for Nick – they look rather odd together I think. If you saw them at a party, you certainly wouldn’t think they belonged together. Although I can see she has tried to smarten him up a bit; he has had a haircut and is wearing chinos and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt. Oh please! Since when d
oes Nick wear fucking Ralph Lauren? He would only have heard of him if he played for Chelsea.

  “Hi Soph,” he says. He seems unsure of whether to kiss me hello or not, so does nothing.

  “Er, this is Cécile,” he adds, motioning to his mistress.

  Cécile smiles and holds out her hand. I could be really immature and refuse to shake it, but I am Miss Mature so I shake the hand that has spent the last few months caressing my husband.

  “Hello,” she says, “it’s good to meet you, Sophie.”

  “You too,” I lie, forcing a smile. “Well, have fun you lot. I must dash, busy at the vineyard. See you here tomorrow evening at 7pm?”

  “Yes, thanks a million Soph, saves us a lot of driving,” says Nick smiling at me. “We’ll call you from Uzès to say goodnight, won’t we, kids?”

  “Yes,” shout the children jumping up and down. I kiss them goodbye.

  ‘Don’t like her too much and don’t hold her hand and try to spill some food down her shirt,’ I want to whisper to them, but of course I don’t. Instead I leave the airport, not daring to glance back in case they are looking too happy.

  As I drive towards the house I see Kamal running like a madman towards me. He is a different beast to the Zen yogi of this morning. What the hell is going on? At least I know the house isn’t on fire; I can see it from here.

  He pounces on my car like a wild animal, standing in front of it with both hands on the bonnet. I get out.

  “What the hell are you doing? Lucky I was driving slowly, I could have killed you.”

  He is so out of breath, he can hardly speak.

  “Kamal, calm down, what’s going on?”

  “Great news,” he pants. “Fabulous news, quick, drive to the cave.” He gets in the passenger seat.

  “Kamal, have you finally lost the plot? Breathe,” I tell him.

  “I’m so excited,” he says as I do as he says, “Okay, park here. Come on, let’s go.”

  He leaps out of the car. I get out and follow him in. We walk right to the back of the cave where, until he fixed them yesterday, there were no lights. Inside there is an enormous steel vat with a ladder going up the outside.

  “Follow me,” says Kamal, climbing up it.

  “I can’t,” I say.

  He turns around. “What the hell do you mean, you can’t?”

  “I’m scared of heights.” I tell him, feeling utterly pathetic.

  He comes back down. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. You go first, and I will go behind, and so there is no risk of you falling.”

  I must look horrified.

  “And I won’t look at your backside,” he smiles.

  Yeah, right.

  “Can’t you just tell me what’s up there?”

  “Sophie, if you want to be a wine-maker you’re going to have to be able to climb up to the vats, that’s just part of the job.”

  He has a point. I look up at the vat and feel the palms of my hands go clammy at the thought of going up there. I take a deep breath and put my foot on the first rung of the ladder. Then the second and third. I look back to make sure Kamal is there. He is at the bottom, grinning.

  “I’m not climbing up until there’s a bit more distance between us, I don’t want to be accused of sexual harassment on a ladder. Now stop looking down and get moving up.”

  “For someone so young you’re quite bossy,” I tell him.

  “It comes from being the oldest in a family of five.”

  I do as he says, gingerly climbing the ladder. When I get to the top he joins me. I am beyond nervous now. What if the ladder collapses under our joint weight?

  “Kamal, what is all this about?” I ask, clinging to the vat. My knuckles are white.

  “Close your eyes,” he says.

  “I might fall off.”

  “Just hold on and close your eyes. Pretend you’re in that film Titanic,” he laughs. I do as he says. I hear him move something. “Okay, open your eyes.”

  I do as he says. “Look in the vat,” he urges. “What do you see?”

  “Nothing, it’s empty,” I say. My eyes adjust to the light.

  “Look again.”

  I do, and now I see what he’s so excited about. The vat is not empty; it is full to the brim with deep, red wine.

  “Kamal, that’s great, but it’s probably vinegar. It must have been here for years.”

  “No,” he says, grabbing my arm, making me even more nervous. “That’s just what I thought, but Sophie, it isn’t vinegar, it’s fully matured, deep, aromatic Cabernet Sauvignon. Sure we’re going to have to blend it to make it really drinkable, but the fundamentals are there for about 2000 bottles of really top-end wine.”

  “Nooo.” I almost fall off the ladder, happily towards the wine and not away from it

  Kamal catches me.

  “Wow, that’s amazing,” I say. “This could save us, assuming we can sell it that is. So what do we do next?”

  “First we get you down from here and then we’ll make a plan,” laughs Kamal, closing the lid and moving down the ladder. “But I reckon you could be talking about a retail value of say £15 a bottle, so wholesale £7 or so. In the worst case scenario, you could end up with around £14,000. But punters love aged Cabernet Sauvignon, it’s one of the most popular grapes so you might be able to sell it retail. As soon as we have it blended and get some of it bottled we should get a sign up advertising wine-tasting and sales.”

  I get down to the bottom of the vat. Solid ground feels good.

  “You’re so sweet to be so enthusiastic about this,” I say. “You’ve only been here a couple of days.”

  “Oh that’s just me,” says Kamal, patting the vat affectionately. “I always throw myself into things 100 per cent. My parents always taught us all there is no point otherwise.”

  We go into the house to look up some tips on blending Cabernet Sauvignon. Kamal has done a little bit of blending before but is nervous about the huge quantity we’re talking about here.

  It is hard to find anything concrete. I wonder if Jean-Claude could help, but from what he has told me they employ wine-makers to do the blending. I guess I could ask him if I can talk to the people he uses. I suggest this to Kamal.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll call my parents and talk to our wine-makers at home about it. Can I use the phone please?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Here you sit at the desk and take notes, I’ll go and look in the wine books I have downstairs.”

  That afternoon I have a sleep. This is my idea of ultimate luxury: to go up to bed after lunch, lie on the covers and listen to the sounds of nature while slowly dozing off, thinking about nothing in particular.

  I am dreaming about bottles of wine when an almost deafening noise makes me sit bolt upright in bed. It sounds like the opening sequence to Apocalypse Now – only a thousand times louder than in the cinema. I run to my terrace and look outside. It is coming from behind the house. What is going on? Am I under attack? I can’t see where the noise is coming from.

  I run downstairs and out of the back door. On the far-away lawn, a blue helicopter with a white nose is landing. Out of it steps Johnny Fray carrying a large box. He puts his head down and runs towards the house as the helicopter’s propeller slows down.

  “Hi Cunningham,” he smiles when he sees me. “I heard from your mother they were all away for the weekend and thought you might be a bit lonely. I brought dinner with me, and champagne.”

  “Lovely to see you,” I smile. “You’re a bit like the Milk Tray man aren’t you? Jumping out of helicopters on lonely women’s lawns.”

  It is lovely to see him; he looks good – more Heathcliff than Rochester, but anywhere between the two is fine with me. A date with a French aristo one night and a film star the next; how did my life suddenly get so exciting? I just hope the former doesn’t show up tonight. This could all get very complicated. But I have in no way committed to either one or promised anyone anything. As things stand, I am soon to be single an
d keeping my options open.

  “I thought I would come and claim those three kisses in person,” he says putting the box down and hugging me. “Let’s put the champagne on ice.”

  “Yes, we have something to celebrate.”

  We go inside and I tell him all about the vat of wine. “Kamal is such a great find, Thanks so much. You’ve no idea what a difference he’s made, even in just a couple of days. And he even teaches me yoga.”

  Johnny looks confused. “Who’s Kamal?”

  “The vigneron you sent me,” I say. Has he gone senile since we met last? “You know, the Indian South African boy who is in Europe to learn about wine-making. He said you’re paying his salary and he was here to help me.”

  “He said that?” Johnny looks even more confused.

  “Well, no he didn’t mention you by name, but he said someone was paying his wages who wanted to remain anonymous and I just automatically thought it was you, you’ve been so great about helping and…”

  Johnny shakes his head and smiles. “It’s not me, Cunningham, must be one of your other admirers.”

  “How very bizarre. I wonder who it is then,” I say, taking the champagne and putting it in the fridge. “I just can’t think who else would do that for me; I can’t work out who else has the money and the imagination to do that sort of thing. It just seemed like such a ‘you’ gesture.”

  “Well, I promise it’s not me,” says Johnny, and I believe him; he’s scarily honest.

  We go for a walk in the afternoon sun. Johnny tells me all about the new film he is making in Prague and the other stars. It is so funny hearing about them all first-hand like this, hearing what their little habits and foibles are. You always assume they are somehow special and different, but of course they’re just people. Once, when I was around nine years old and madly and utterly in love with some member of a boy band, my mother said to me one day, “You know, every morning, he gets up and goes to the loo, just like everybody else.” I didn’t believe her.

  “You’ve really landed on your feet here, Cunningham,” says Johnny, “it’s a lovely place. So peaceful, so far removed from everything. You’re happy aren’t you? In spite of Nick and everything that’s happened?”