by Jamie Ivey
A year ago, in a brief, misguided foray into the Provençal housing market, Eric had treated us to a melange of falling down walls, cracked foundations, leaking roofs, ladders doubling as staircases and termite-infested beams. Owners had greeted us in an obsequious manner, pressing bottles of wine and olive oil into our hands, and almost bowing as we looked around. In all we saw ten houses with Eric. Occasionally there was a view, sometimes a swimming pool, and usually there was a large amount of scrubland which offered the potential for development. The price was always shocking: little short of six figures for a collection of stud walls and peeling plaster, most of it built without planning permission. Not a single one tempted us to go back and have a second look.
Yet the hopes of Eric's clients were not completely forlorn and some of the houses we'd seen did gradually come off the market. A single viewing by a misty-eyed summer tourist was often enough. With the lavender in bloom, the golden glow of sunset on a crumbling wall could look quite beautiful to a wealthy wife in need of a project. Thus, another paysan would hit the jackpot and the long property boom would continue.
Our tour with Eric had concluded with his promise to give us a call should anything more interesting come on the market. Nothing had, until now. Eric promised a must-see property with views across the whole valley, in walking distance of the village – he'd heard we'd had a baby and was doing us a favour showing us first. Once the summer came foreign buyers would be snapping off his hands. How could we resist?
The answer was: quite easily. However, curiosity overcame us and I booked the rendezvous. The appointed day was an estate agent's dream. Clear blue sky, warming but not hot sun, birds singing in the trees, terraces of cafes full, canvas roofs on 2CVs rolled back, and the first new leaves on the plane trees providing just a hint of shade. It was a day to fall in love with Provence, to sit and marvel like a painter at the folds of the distant hills. On such a day a house could easily steal the heart of the uninitiated.
'What's he going to show us now?' I giggled with Tanya as we followed Eric up a dirt track, 'A pigsty with development opportunities?'
The car ahead slowed as Eric negotiated a particularly vicious looking pothole. The track then took a sharp turn around some oak trees and we arrived on a high plateau above the village. In the distance I could see the spire of the church and the heavy bell of the clock tower suspended within a dome of ironwork. A patchwork of fields sloped away from us: fresh-leaved vines, lavender showing just a stirring of colour, and sunflower seedlings bursting through the earth.
I'd seen the multicoloured summer view before on postcards and in artists' paintings. The setting was perfect and there was even a glimpse of Mont Ventoux, the white giant of Provence. Tanya squeezed my hand. Both of us knew that we couldn't afford this location.
Eric threw open the door of his battered Peugeot and beamed at us. He looked as dishevelled as ever. Just the sort of person you'd fear trusting with your money: jacket stained from a decade of partying, three-day stubble, and a slogan T-shirt that smelled like it had never been washed. He did, however, have a horribly smug grin on his face. For some bizarre reason he believed he was going to make a sale.
'Regardez,' he said, sweeping his hand along the panorama. 'C'est magnifique.'
'You're right.' I nodded.
'Five-minute walk from the village, south facing, large but manageable plot.' Eric was enjoying his spiel. 'Imagine yourselves here, glass of wine in your hand, sun dipping over the hills, children playing in the meadow, perhaps a dog at your feet. Oh, it will be perfect for you. I'm so pleased.'
'We might as well see the house,' sighed Tanya, all too aware of the no doubt horrendous price tag.
'House?' queried Eric, doing his best to fake genuine surprise.
'Yes, the house.'
'But there is no house.' Eric was still smiling. For some reason he was confident his pitch was going well.
'What do you want us to do?' I asked. 'Camp?'
'With Elodie?!' Eric laughed, ruffling our daughter's hair, 'No, no, no, who do you think I am?'
'Mobile home?'
'No, no, no.' Eric swept his arms out expressively. 'You are going to build a house, Jamie, right here, and every morning you are going to say a little thank you to Eric: the man who found this slice of heaven. Eh?'
'There's a right to build?'
'Yes. A hundred and fifty square metres, plans have already been submitted and approved by the mairie, you could be in by next spring. There's already an old well for water.'
I looked at Tanya. She raised an eyebrow. Eric had both of our attention.
'There's more, follow me.'
Eric led us up a dirt track which ran along the tree line. An embankment climbed away on one side, while on the other there was a muddy field of arable land. We headed into the mottled shade of an avenue of pines, and the path turned to our right at a steep gradient, making me struggle to carry Elodie. Eric was panting by the time we reached level ground. The wood thinned and we emerged into a prairie filled with wild flowers. Cool spring air tickled my nose and a flurry of blossom induced a heavy sneeze. I removed my jumper, enjoying the sensation of freshness as the breeze stirred the hairs on my arms.
Planted in two rigid lines across the field was a series of trees, spaced equidistantly. Most of them appeared to be oak, but there was also a shorter variety, perhaps olive. It would certainly be a lovely place for Elodie to play, to build camps and to come and make as much noise as she wanted. We might even be able to harvest enough olives to earn our own label at the mill. However, the field of trees was far from the selling point Eric's demeanour had promised. If anything, I felt slightly deflated.
Eric continued his sales pitch. 'Lavender fields, plenty of them, olive groves, everywhere, vineyards, too many to count. Bet you've never seen one of these before, eh?'
'Are we missing something?' whispered Tanya.
'Must be,' I replied.
Eric crossed his arms and stood in silent contemplative awe. Eventually he broke the confused silence. 'Usually they're kept secret, but I've found one just for you. And of course, all that rain – it's going to be a fantastic year.'
I smiled. It all began to make sense. The trees I'd mistaken for olive were in fact oak as well – just the evergreen local species. Then there was the precise spacing, to allow plenty of sunlight through to the earth below. And Eric's reference to the importance of rainfall had clinched it. From Tanya's grin I could see she had reached a similar conclusion.
'It's a truffière,' we chimed in unison.
'Beh voilà!' Eric couldn't contain his glee. 'Last year the owner harvested five kilos.'
'That's a lot of truffle risottos,' whispered Tanya.
'It's also a good earner.'
Eric slapped one of the trees like a long-lost buddy, and then wrapped his arms around another with the beatific smile of a hippy communing with nature. Perhaps we had to be French to understand. We loved eating truffles, and we'd certainly happily collect an income from selling them, but they weren't going to make us buy a house. Yet Eric seemed to think the papers were already signed and the commission in his pocket.
'And a watchtower as well.' Eric gestured to a conical pile of stones hidden among the trees. There was a small rotting wooden door, which swung loose on its hinges. With a little renovation it might have made a happy home for a hobbit, but a watchtower? Judging from the size of the walls I would barely be able to stand up inside. It was, of course, a borie, one of the thousands which had been built by Provençal peasants in which to store their tools while working in the fields. It was certainly an attractive addition, but not Eric's elusive deal clincher.
'Is it part of the sale?' I asked suspiciously.
'Might as well be – there's no one else up here to claim it,' came the evasive reply.
On our return to the lower field we discovered a white van parked next to our car. My immediate thought was that competing buyers had heard of the sale. The door swung open and I wa
s relieved to see Ange, the local builder with the penchant for steak tartare, step out of the van. We kissed on both cheeks, Ange's stubble grating like sandpaper. He smelled of lunch – a pungent mix of red wine, coffee, cigarettes and garlic.
'What was on the menu?' I asked.
'Magret au poivre, dauphinoise and tarte Tatin for dessert. Come on, let's see the plot,' he winked at Eric.
'OK, she's south facing, best to orientate the house for the village views, plenty of shade in summer, plenty of sun in winter, no reason why eventually you can't put a pool in over there, soil's a bit dodgy so you'll have to think about foundations, monomur construction's the way to do it these days, nice and speedy, you can have the shell up in a couple of months, and once the roof's on, the whole thing is easy.'
Both Tanya and I had given up on the dream of owning a property in Provence. We'd concluded that we just didn't have the budget. Now our future was open again. The two of us strolled across the land, marking the territory, admiring the view from as many different angles as possible. Without thinking I knelt down and crumbled some of the soil between my fingers. Truffles or no truffles – what an opportunity. We walked hand in hand back to the car, where Eric and Ange had spread some plans out on the bonnet.
'Three bedrooms, two downstairs, one upstairs with a sun terrace,' Eric explained. 'Open-plan living downstairs, three arches dividing the living room, sitting room and kitchen, all approved and ready to go.'
'Anything you don't like, you can speak to the mayor and can probably change,' said Ange. 'Cost-wise, you've got to be careful – plenty of criminals out there, worst sort will take your money and not even complete the job. I'll manage it myself and introduce you to everyone else you'll need – electricians, plumbers, plasterers, painters.'
'Keep the plans,' beamed Eric, as he started the ignition on his car, 'and I'll be in touch in a couple of days.'
'And I'll give you a call with a rough price,' Ange added helpfully as he stepped into his van.
The two of them bumped off down the track, leaving Tanya and I standing, a little stunned, admiring the view.
'Best not get too excited,' Tanya counselled.
'You're right. Hard not to, though. No more of Manu's banging, loads more space, a garden as big as a country estate and the truffles.'
'Why do I feel like I've just been ambushed?'
'Probably because Eric planned it so carefully.'
There's something about seeing a house that induces a buying fever. As I've grown older I've become more and more conservative in my shopping habits. A jumper has to have been practically destroyed by a plague of moths before I'll consider buying a new one. And yet within moments of Eric leaving I was thinking about calling him to check whether other parties were interested. This was Provence, remember, where the average house takes well over a year to sell. But there was my heart, pumping away as if a pack of competing buyers was prowling in the surrounding woods.
'Play it cool,' advised Tanya. Gradually the urge to reach for my mobile dissipated. We took one last look at the view and jumped into our car.
As we headed back to the village the radio station was playing a show called Les Bonnes Affaires, a Provençal labour and goods exchange. Listeners phoned up to swap things, such as a bike for a sofa. The idea was that no money changed hands. We loved the show because the proposed swaps were always so unequal that they were comical.
'I am looking for a girl to come and do two hours' cleaning a day.' The voice was female and quite old. 'Ironing, making the beds, cleaning the floor, generally helping out around the house, and in return I am prepared to teach the girl the basics of home economics, budgeting, making ends meet.'
'Remind the listeners of your phone number.' The presenter's voice was weary. The morning had been full of people trying to swap caravans for houses, and bunny rabbits for horses, and here was another chancer with no realistic possibility of a swap. Still, the show aired for two hours a day and there was never any shortage of people trying their luck.
Chapter 7
There should be some sort of obligatory oath sworn by all foreign buyers in Provence – a type of wedding vow to their new house. Hold your hands up and repeat after me: 'A property transaction is not to be taken in hand lightly or thoughtlessly but reverently, soberly and in the fear of God.' Perhaps friends and relatives could be invited along to the signing of contracts and the notaire could ask them to show their support for the couple by chiming in 'we will' at the appropriate moment.
Reverent and sober were certainly not words that could describe us in the weeks after seeing the plot. We were giddy with excitement, in lust with the idea of finally achieving our dream. At every opportunity we visited the terrain. We joked that it was like a courtship. Each day a new delight was unveiled to us, a hitherto undiscovered plum tree or a hidden corner filled with wild herbs. We were being teased and seduced by the thought of owning a tiny part of the countryside we loved so much. In the past we'd always laughed at wide-eyed tourists who could be duped by a whiff of wild thyme into a lifelong relationship with an old whore of a house. Now we were behaving exactly like them.
Sensible thoughts like whether we could afford to take on such a project only fleetingly entered our heads. Instead, we sat down on a daily basis and drooled over pictures of cast-iron doors, distressed kitchens and antique baths. We annotated the plans – a larger opening here, a utility room there – and took them off to the mairie for approval. We visited ongoing chantiers (construction sites) and watched artisans create gleaming polished concrete floors, recessed alcoves and drystone walls. Somehow we convinced ourselves that we were special and that we'd manage to build the house within budget and on time.
Our weekends were spent raking vide greniers for furniture for our new house. We fooled ourselves that the prices quoted were so cheap, it didn't matter if the purchase fell through. However, a quick inventory of several days' hard shopping showed that all the small items had added up. Our cellar was crammed with rash purchases such as: an old sewing table (in need of repair), an eel catching net (we thought we would convert this into a light), a wicker table and chairs (believed valuable, later identified in an IKEA catalogue), a set of large glass bowls with tapered necks (to decorate new kitchen), a fireguard (so cheap we had to purchase it even if it was the wrong size) and finally a set of truffle digging tools.
Other than this final impulsive purchase, we'd given little thought to the truffles or the practicalities of finding them. A little further investigation had shown that the borie and the truffière formed part of the garrigue, or wild countryside, but as Eric had explained the current owner harvested the truffles, so why not us?
As a result, given the price per kilo of the black diamonds, there was an unspoken assumption that we'd probably, rather reluctantly, get a dog, but no more than that. At least my grasp of truffle technicalities was helped by an article in La Provence about the Ménerbes mairie. Rather than devoting funds to such mundane things as rubbish collection, the mayor had decided to plant a communal truffière, gambling that the way to secure re-election was through his constituents' stomachs.
The article went on to explain how truffles were a fungal disease carried by some oak trees, rather like you or I might have athlete's foot, but tastier. The truffles were attached by a gossamer-thin thread to the trees and grew by sucking nutrients from the oak. Take an acorn from a diseased oak, plant it, and the chances were that you would one day have a truffle tree. Plant lots of acorns and you'd end up with a truffière, just like the one we were going to purchase.
Our buyers' ardour couldn't be dented. Local records showed the terrain had previously been used as landfill for the village clay works and Eric advised us to consult engineers about reinforced foundations. This was a startlingly honest revelation, even romantically dressed by Eric's story of rows of women sitting in the shade of the trees casting roof tiles on their ample thighs. Yet instead of heeding the warning that the clay soil would swallow any normal c
onstruction like a horror-movie child snatched into hell, we discussed names for our house. To stabilise our proposed humble three-bedroom family house we'd apparently have to build the type of concrete foundations more commonly used for office blocks in earthquake zones and yet, such was our optimistic state of mind, we settled on the name 'Le Paradou'. To the English ear the word sounded like paradise, hence our choice, but in fact a paradou is something much more prosaic: a type of watermill.
Eventually the misty-eyed courtship came to an end and financial reality impinged. I asked Eric for help and soon a plague of advisors were on the phone trying to sell us mortgages, life insurance and even pensions. Our application headed off to all the respectable banks and a coterie of dodgy, far-flung institutions. The latter offered ridiculously low interest rates teamed with default clauses so punitive they could have been drafted by the mafia. The results, when they came back, were all the same – unsuitable for finance. We might have only missed out by the tiniest margin, but it didn't matter – there was no more money.