Arriving at the international airport in Roissy in the northeast outskirts of Paris plunged us all into bleak despair. We sniffled and coughed, pretending that we had caught colds from the air conditioning on the plane, but the harsh reality was that it was simply six o’clock on a freezing winter’s morning in January. We were back in France, but this time we would be completely alone. 2002 was going to be a fresh new beginning. We had to learn to fend for ourselves, starting with catching the TGV train to Avignon and making sure that our entire luggage arrived with us. The winter mist rolled back as we sped past open fields and rolling hills, and the occasional cow or sheep lolling in the pastures. The train picked up speed and the signs on the roads running parallel to the track became blurred. Due to my secret tears and the speed of the train, I couldn’t read any of the signs to see how close we were to Avignon, but the sudden appearance of an iridescent blue sky told me all that I needed to know; we were in the south of France.
Coming home after any holiday is difficult, but it’s even more so when the holiday has exceeded all expectations. Mimi and Harry had spent most of their holiday shuttling happily between their cousins, aunts and uncles and grandfather. They had worked their way through all sorts of Asian food, traditional Aussie cuisine — pies with sauce, pavlova, barbecues — and their favourite: seafood. Chinese beef with black bean sauce and fresh sushi would be hard to find in the French countryside. They had watched every latest release VCR and DVD, lying in front of the blue flickering screen in a children’s heaven at their Aunty Kate’s home with half of the child population of Macmasters Beach along with their two older cousins, Jake and Hannah.
Our bags, a testament to our shopping expeditions, were bulging at the seams.
‘Come on darlings, we’re here. We’re at Avignon.’
I tried really hard not to notice the tears streaming down Mimi’s face, which was creased with fatigue and jet lag. ‘Oh, Maman, I thought you said Avalon. Wouldn’t it be nice to be in Avalon now? We could go and visit the Lucinis.’
Everyone was beyond tiredness but she was 100 per cent right: it would have been wonderful to be arriving at our friends’ home near Avalon Beach for afternoon tea. Angie and I could idly pass the long afternoon chatting over endless cups of tea sucked through hard gingernut biscuits, while the children played indoors and out, slamming doors and whooping loudly with excitement as they all had when they were little.
Our trip from Sydney had taken more than twenty-four hours and then the TGV trip took three hours. I had my second wind and was feeling completely revitalised but I knew for a fact that my reflexes would be seriously dulled from fatigue. An extremely slow drive home was a necessity. Maybe this time the children would fall asleep during the fifty-minute drive to the house?
Being a single parent had taught me a few things:
1. Try to be prepared for the unexpected.
2. Try to be prepared for the expected.
3. Just as one disaster is cleaned up, another will start.
4. Panic doesn’t achieve anything.
5. Don’t hesitate to ask for help.
What if the car had been stolen or if the battery was dead and the motor did not start? A flat tyre would be the worst-case scenario. But my worries were for no reason. Our car was there, sitting in the same spot in the long-term car park, ready for action. It was really a miracle that we had all of our bags; Harry had spied my black computer case under the train seat just as we were leaving the compartment. I cajoled the children into the car and eased the gear stick into first, forgot about the clutch and promptly stalled the car at the gates of the parking area. We headed off cautiously down the main road, on to the RN100 towards Apt and then home to our house near St Saturnin les Apt. The drive along the RN100 is fast, straight and single carriageway for most of the way. There are large ditches on the shoulder of the road where you can still see the black skidmarks left by cars that have slammed on the brakes to avoid an accident with the car in front but ended up nose first in the ditch. Unfortunately, there are also too many ominous ceramic bouquets marking spots where some have been unlucky enough not to exit the ditch alive. The fields on either side of the road were dormant, the cherry trees denuded of leaves and the acres after acres of vines looking somewhat bleak and unloved, pruned back hard ready for the next season of foliage and fruit. It was such a stark contrast to the Sydney beachside landscape where we had spent the past seventeen days. But somehow, the winter-muted colours comforted my jaded senses. I had stepped into a watercolour painting that had a little too much water, and every colour blended into the next. Across the ochre-brown fields with the rich turned soil, up the unsealed track, past the neighbour’s vines and suddenly we were home.
More than ever before, I knew that I had made the right decision. Home, we all sighed. Ah, oui. Maison.
CHAPTER TWO
Eggshell White
Our holiday had been a tremendous success in every way; all of our family and friends had believed my story that I had a foolproof and well-constructed plan for our financial triumph.
All of my life my mother had been able to see through my fibs. Since she had passed away, my father Jack was without help to decipher the shroud of half-truths and straight-out lies that bubbled over my lips. Now he believed wholeheartedly in what I was doing, and after seventeen days of saying the same thing, I actually began to believe it myself. Foolhardy and ignorant, I was attempting the impossible: beginning a business with no working knowledge in any shape or form about the basics of small business, in the face of an international downturn of the economy and a very jittery tourism sector. It was only after I had bought three properties midway through 2000 that I realised the enormity of the folly that I had embarked on. How on earth was I going to find clients for short-term holiday rentals? More importantly, who was going to clean the houses? Who was going to wash the sheets and iron the tablecloths? During 2001, our first full year in business, I watched in horror as my lily-white hands turned into rough red paws and I found out the answer to those last two questions: me.
The Americans, who made up a large slice of the market, were staying at home after the horrific attack in New York in September 2001; travel to Provence was now fairly low on the average tourist’s list. The few bookings that had been made for 2002 had been cancelled and the harsh reality of how I was going to pay for the mortgages was looming; bankruptcy became a very real possibility in my second year of business.
There was a small glimmer of hope. A small but constant trickle of clients from the United Kingdom who needed some respite from the cold in the more temperate climate of the south of France had begun to contact me. The weather reports in the United Kingdom were relentlessly dismal, with snow flurries and low depressions battering the coastline while we continued to enjoy blue skies and empty villages. Prospective clients from all parts of the United Kingdom were looking for a short break away from their hideous damp climate. Combined with the price war between the airlines that serviced the south of France, this made a short break to Provence a very feasible mid-term holiday. The little village perché of Saignon, just four kilometres from the world-famous market town of Apt, was exactly what the clients wanted.
Most clients were booking only as far ahead as Easter, but when the first smattering of enquiries for the summer break were followed by concrete bookings, I could see a tiny speck of blue at the end of a very long tunnel. Expenditure had to be kept on a short rein to stave off bankruptcy, which meant that I would continue to do the vast majority of work. My list of skills was becoming more and more impressive. I was becoming confident in a range of fields:
1. Photography — taking photographs of the properties.
2. Advertising — designing and printing pamphlets to send out to prospective clients.
3. Internet — scouring advertising sites to find those that were free or at last cost-effective.
4. Accountancy — keeping figures of income and expenditure.
5. Stocktaking —
keeping the properties well equipped.
6. Interior design — finding ways to change the look of the properties inexpensively.
7. Housekeeping — cleaning and making beds as quickly and efficiently as possible.
8. Household linen — stain removal, folding and ironing sheets became my speciality.
9. Budgeting — keeping spending to a bare minimum without overtly scrimping became an obsession.
10. DIY — house-painting became a hobby.
New Year 2002 meant a new routine for everyone. Now that Raymond was living on a different continent in a different hemisphere in a different time zone, I had to do the early morning wake-up call and the children would trot off to school by themselves. The year before had been so hectic for me — getting the properties ready to rent out to clients — that Raymond had taken up the challenge and became a home duties non-parent. It didn’t really matter that he wasn’t their father and that his parenting skills were woeful; both Mimi and Harry often pointed out that his role was more along the lines of ‘retarded older brother’. The morning trip to school had been his special time with the children without my interference. He had been ostracised by the other fathers dropping off their children when he had suggested that they adjourn to the nearby bar and have a beer at eight o’clock in the morning. Understandably, Raymond was seen to have a serious drinking problem. So rather than bonding with the fathers, Raymond put energy into the children. During this time together, Mimi and Harry learnt to wolf whistle, spit cherry stones along the road, and most importantly, spit long and far while avoiding spittle on the chin. This would serve them better than the tricks I could show them: how to iron tea towels correctly and how to ensure that the shower curtain remained mould-free.
A 2002 calendar was put up in the kitchen, featuring typical Provençal sites, with school holidays circled heavily in red ink. The children were beginning to understand that another trip back to Australia was out of the question for the best part of a year. Raymond was following his dream of studying Latin as a mature-age student at Sydney University and was planning to visit us in late June, during the four-week break between semesters. I was cursing myself for my inability to break up with him at Christmas. There was never a good time. I knew that our future did not include him beside me but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut him out of my life.
Wrapped in layers and layers of thick sweaters and woolly scarves, huddling close to the fire that refused to blaze on a cold January night, we hibernated like everyone else and waited out yet another rigorous Provençal winter (though it was not as severe as the previous year). After our fantastic — if too short — Christmas holiday in heatwave conditions, returning to wintry France had sent us all spiralling into a deep depression. Our barren home in St Saturnin les Apt was devoid of any beauty or charm and, worse still, had pathetically inadequate heating. When the decision was taken to come and live in France, we were embarrassed with a choice of three properties: two small houses in Saignon and a larger one in St Saturnin les Apt. Saignon was where I had originally lived with the children when they were seven and nine, during the six-month holiday that changed our lives. It is not on many maps, but like so many places nowadays, Saignon has been forced to adopt an international flavour as people from all parts of the world take up part-time or full-time residency. Christine and Thierry from the boulangerie put their customers at ease with some English phrases dredged out of books, movies and often from titles from pop songs.
It was obvious why we would live in St Saturnin les Apt rather than in one of the two properties in Saignon:
1. The garden was huge, sunny and incredibly tranquil.
2. There was a good selection of shops in the village.
3. The village shops were open all year.
4. The village faced due south and was sunny and reasonably protected from the harsh Mistral.
5. The village school was thriving and had a first-rate canteen.
Once bitten, twice shy: I was coming to terms with basic survival techniques. The previous year I had learnt the hard way that the moment the mercury took the tiniest dip, you made a mercy dash to the supermarket to fight it out with your neighbours, who were also stocking up on provisions like long-life milk, pasta, rice, vegetables and meat for the freezer before being snowed in. Around the house I stocked up on ten-kilo bags of industrial salt to spread on the path to stop the ice, and checked that the woodheap was piled up high with the extra cubic metres of firewood that had been ordered at the end of summer, avoiding the risk of having to make do with the poor-quality ‘green’ wood that gives off black clouds of smoke rather than heat. The chimney had been swept and I listened to the same lecture from the chimney sweep about how burning pine cones was not good for the flue as the resin sticks to the sides, increasing the fire hazard. The pinecones might be hazardous, but when the fire starters are still sitting on the supermarket shelves, they guarantee a blazing fire every time. A stockpile had been assiduously gathered and stacked into boxes in the cellar and in the courtyard. The thick winter duvets had been aired and put onto the beds, with blankets at the ready for the nights when the mercury would plummet below minus ten degrees; the garden had been pruned and elegant winter plant sheets had been draped and secured around the more fragile plants to protect them from the frosts; thick mulch had been ordered from the agricultural supplier and applied liberally around the garden beds to help protect some of the roses and lavenders. Inside the house were towers of books that had been ordered, to be devoured during the long winter evenings.
Another chain of reactions was under way too, starting with a telephone call from Raymond. During the course of our conversation, I had managed to pull off a large section of the extremely ugly wallpaper in the hall. There was no stopping now; I had to continue. Like everything else in the house, the wallpaper had been put up meticulously and underneath the psychedelic colours was yet another layer of plain paper for the base. Removing it all was going to be a nightmare. The former owners had an eclectic collection of the worst wallpapers that had been produced in France in the late seventies, which they had married up with some very nasty brown floor tiles.
At first Mimi and Harry were positively delighted about my homemaking efforts and became stars at the school as all the local children wanted to visit and help in the removal of wallpaper. Discreetly at first and then boldly, they would write obscenities in French and English across the old wallpaper and then I encouraged them to rip large swaths of wallpaper from the wall.
Masses and masses of paper were collected and jammed down tightly into extra-large black plastic garden bags, then taken to the local tip in Apt, where the official recycling garbage inspector told me the news I could have done without: all paper had to be sorted according to type: plastic-coated wallpaper in one skip and paper in the other. An hour was spent sorting the bags at the side of the skips, to the great amusement of the inspector, who watched me grappling with metres of billowing wallpaper. I had finally ripped the hideous heavy wood and brass hall light from the ceiling and thrown it into the car, too, for a one-way trip to the tip. The garbage inspector asked me greedily if I really meant to throw away such a quality lamp; he surreptitiously placed his hand on it, waiting for my response, which would allow him possession. I graciously permitted him to call this icon of interior décor his own.
Making the most of the period when there were just the three of us, I had made an executive decision about the children and the canteen at school. It seemed silly that they should stay the entire day, from nine o’clock to four thirty in the afternoon four days per week and a half day on Saturday. It was far too long, in my opinion, especially when there was a long lunch break and we lived so very close to the primary school. More to the point, I really missed them. Since I was working nonstop at the house, it made sense to have a break with them and eat our main meal at lunchtime, like the French. I approached their teachers to see if I could take them out of school for their two-hour lunchtime. It transpired
that their teachers had always been completely baffled by the fact that my children ate at the canteen when we lived so close by and especially since, as far as they could see, I did not work. It is crucial to the French and their culture to eat together at lunchtime. Step by step we were pushed into becoming more French.
So our family lunches began. The first few days I was constantly running late. Twelve o’clock came around so quickly. I would just get into cleaning and stripping wallpaper from room after room and it would be time to stop. As children came flying out of the school at midday, greeting their parents waiting patiently at the gate with three kisses on the cheeks, the teachers asked the two red-faced children remaining if it was a typical Australian habit or just a particularly quirky one of their mother’s to leave them behind.
One day, they were taken away to ask the cook if two extra children could be fed. The canteen at the St Saturnin village school is renowned for the quality and variety of its menus. The cook has children begging for vegetables and dishes with Simone’s Special Sauce that at home would not pass their lips. I arrived just as all the students were about to sit down at the many round tables in the canteen; the crunchy baguettes had been cut into manageable sizes for the little breadbaskets, and the salads, consisting of pieces of baby corn and cucumber and carrot sticks glistening with Simone’s Special Salad Dressing, were in front of each place setting. I was in everyone’s bad books with a black mark against my name but more was to come. Mimi and Harry looked aghast when they realised that I hadn’t even bothered to buy the bread at the boulangerie at nine o’clock when I dropped them off at school, meaning that I would have to buy any type of baguette and be suitably grateful if there was any bread left at all. How could I be such an inadequate mother? I didn’t have any time! I was rushing back to steam the wallpaper, a horrendous job that left hot sticky water in pools up and down the hallway in between the mounds of wet congealed paper. At least we could eat together in harmony, so I thought. At the table, we sat down with a glass of milk and a sandwich; both children raised their eyebrows in disgust at my plate of crunchy baguette with butter and Vegemite.
Lavender & Linen Page 2