French Leave

by Liz Ryan

  Nonetheless, there are those who, even after living in France for years, insist that the French are unfriendly. Getting to know them is, they allege, like trying to thaw an iceberg with a match – feasible, but slow. And it must be conceded that yes, French people are reserved. Polite, but not exactly rushing round with welcoming cakes and invitations to drinks at, oh, let’s say six this evening?

  There are also those who accuse them of snobbery. Pride, even vanity, in their language, history and culture. Few seem to notice the insecurity under the polished veneer, the nibbling fear that France might be lagging behind in the headlong rush to globalisation, to a safe, bland world where everything is standardised, pasteurised and homogenised. In fact, they are anxious almost to the point of paranoia, convinced that nobody loves them and that the future is a dark, deeply unsettling place. They need foreigners, if only to cheer them up and add to the gaiety of the nation. Not that there are any pubs (outside the towns) to offer convivial evenings; most villages are comatose by 8 PM, and rural social life is extremely family-centred. If you love your Rover’s Return, you are unlikely to love rural France.

  And yet, there is wonderful quality of life to be had, an elusive aura, that mysterious whiff of magic. I couldn’t think of anywhere else I’d rather live, although I did democratically consider the alternatives for at least ten minutes. But memories of Spain involved roaring motorbikes, chaos and criminals, a loud harsh country with too many burger bars, anglophone golf clubs and a dodgy attitude towards animals. America offered no mystique, and anyway you’d want to be desperate to battle through all the bureaucracy involved in emigrating there. Portugal seemed to live exclusively on sardines. As for Italy … ah, bella Italia! But who could handle all that drama on a daily basis? Holland? Belgium? Germany? Austria? Denmark? Each has its own merits of course, only nobody ever seems to articulate them very persuasively. I couldn’t imagine falling passionately in love with Denmark, pining for Austria, yearning piteously for Germany …

  No, it had to be France. After Serge, I was ruined for anywhere else. But where, exactly, in France?

  This is a major decision. It will dictate your lifestyle and there is a huge difference between, say, a farmhouse in the Ardèche and an apartment in the suburbs of Paris, a townhouse in Bordeaux or a manoir in Montpellier. Inland, or near the coast? City or countryside? Hot climate or cool? France offers a vast choice, and each region has its distinct topography, architecture, atmosphere, food, customs, even language. Fluent French isn’t much use in Perpignan, where you’d be better off with Spanish. Celts bond well with Brittany, while Londoners might find Picardy deathly dull.

  My first choice was the Languedoc, a southern area of earthy charm with an unspoilt coastline, near Provence but much cheaper. The poor man’s Provence, you might say. But a recce trip revealed two flaws. The first was the weather: spectacularly violent storms, frequent floods, stifling summers and freezing winters. The other was inaccessibility: at the time, Ryanair wasn’t yet flying direct to Carcassonne, and somehow I couldn’t see my eighty-year-old mother sprinting round Stansted for her connections. If you have elderly relatives – or very young ones – you will want to be close to airports with direct flights to Ireland. (Unless, of course, the idea is to escape your family, as may sometimes be the case.)

  Paris? No sea, no beach unless you count Paris-Plage in August, and they’re even talking about dropping that. Nice? Too expensive, and it might get exhausting trying to swim while wearing all one’s diamonds. Toulouse? Great, if you work in aviation and enjoy discussing it 24/7. Bordeaux? Very pretty, only the Atlantic can get rough and all that wine might prove addictive.

  Wherever I might end up, I wanted it to be somewhere healthy. An area with lots of walking, cycling, swimming, tennis and so forth, to make up for the gym I would no longer be able to afford and never had time to use anyway. I’d spent a year teaching in Cambrai many moons before, but northern France is neither the most scenic nor the most exciting of regions. The Sologne, perhaps? This little-known area, heavily forested, lies just south of Orléans and has undeniable allure. As a student, I spent a summer there playing au pair to two little girls, one of whom I nearly killed.

  That trip got off to a thrilling start. Arriving at Le Bourget airport, I was met by Lionel, the Parisien businessman whose daughters were to be my charges. I was eighteen and I was dazzled, drop-dead delighted by the beauty of Paris as he drove me to the family apartment in the fourteenth arrondissement where – voilà! – there turned out to be no wife or children whatsoever. With growing horror, I realised that mother had been right: this Frenchman was a serial killer or worse, intent on doing terminal damage to the young innocent he’d lured into his clutches.

  When he invited me to a drink from the fridge, I guessed what the fridge was about to reveal: the severed heads of his previous victims, neatly lined up in Ziplock bags, labelled and dated like frozen steaks. Perhaps the French actually ate their victims, as they apparently ate just about everything else?

  ‘And now,’ Lionel murmured, handing me a glass of a dark and presumably lethal substance (grape juice, as it turned out), ‘perhaps you would care to follow me through to the bedroom?’

  Waah! No mobile phones then, no way to call daddy or anyone else to inform them that I’d fallen prey to the fate worse than death. ‘Er,’ I gulped, ‘why would I want to do that?’

  ‘Because,’ he said, smiling reassuringly, ‘there is a little balcony, and evening is falling, and Paris is at her most beautiful at dusk. You must see the Eiffel Tower lighting up. As the sun sets, it will start to glow.’

  Reluctantly I followed him – unmolested, but surely any moment now – through his bedroom and out to the balcony, and there below me lay Paris. Shimmering in the silken summer dusk, the Eiffel Tower was slowly blushing gold as the sky turned mauve, the dome of Sacré Coeur glowing ghostly white on its hill far across the Seine.

  And that was that. Dhunk! At one irrevocable stroke, I was in love, locked in for life. I no longer cared what this view might cost, what horrors Lionel might be lining up for me when the grape juice took effect. Paris had stunned me, seized me, and I knew I would adore it for the rest of my life, even if that should turn out to constitute only the next three minutes.

  But no. Next day, Lionel drove me down to the family estate in the Sologne, where a wife, children and even grandparents were duly produced, and I was given a sturdy black bicycle. On that bike, over the long hot learning curve of that distant summer, I discovered the French countryside, the poppies and the poplars, the massive white bulls and the eternally chiming church spires – and the French language – all but beaten into me by Mémé after I’d inadvertently fed eggs to her tiny granddaughter, not grasping what she was trying to tell me, which was that the infant was violently allergic to them. After the ambulance sirens died down and we all eventually regained our powers of speech, by way of punishment she made me read Voltaire aloud for an hour every day up in the attic, a slow, exquisite torture to us both. But after I left her chateau and her miraculously intact family, a surprising thing happened.

  I found that I hadn’t left at all. Somehow my heart had stayed behind, hiding out in that dusty attic, cycling through the forests, whispering hopefully to itself as it awaited the day when, at last, France would finally be mine.

  It would take nearly thirty years, but it would be well worth the wait. I was going to get some of that bien être at last, no matter what it might cost. After all, the old cologne brand of that name was still available, affordable and an enduring bestseller, which I took to be somehow symbolic.

  2.

  Buyer Beware

  Yes, à la Peter Mayle, of course it all began with lunch.

  ‘Santé!’ beamed Natalie the estate agent, clinking her glass of Martini to mine. Ruby-red Martini, speared with green olives which, this glittering morning, might have been emeralds. ‘I hope you will be very happy in your new home.’

  Yes. I hoped so too. Fervently p
rayed so, the way you do when you’ve chucked your job, sold your house and burned your bridges with the pyromanic splendour of a routed general. It wasn’t a question of hoping to be happy any more: it was a question of having to be happy, whether I was or not. France, I prayed, don’t let me down. I’ve put my shirt on you.

  Natalie was a fresh, lovely girl on that fresh, lovely February day, bouncy in her blue jeans and blonde ponytail. I was someone Old Enough to Know Better, dizzily watching her home, family, friends and pension plan spinning down the drain. ‘Bonkers,’ everyone was muttering, ‘Soon come to her senses.’

  The thing was, I had come to them. Smacked into them the way a car smacks into a brick wall, crashing through with debris flying in all directions. My father had died at fifty-six and I remembered people commenting on his having been ‘so young’ and ‘missing out on so much’. But I also remembered thinking that ‘missing out’ depended on the pace at which, and the intensity with which, you lived. In Ireland, I’d increasingly felt that there had been no going forward; now, in Normandy, there would be no going back.

  ‘Santé!’ I replied serenely, and we settled into our window seats to wait for our pizzas, gazing out over a flurry of English Channel which, that enchanted day, was as azure as the Greek Aegean. Bouncing off the white-frilled water, two multicoloured windsurfers soared like butterflies, swirling, twirling, swooping high into the wave-splashed sky.

  Only a month earlier, I had been trundling in monoxide-choked traffic and dirty rain to my grubby desk to exchange disgruntled mumbles with my equally disgruntled colleagues in a scruffy office in the middle of a scruffy city.

  ‘I will,’ I suddenly heard a voice informing Natalie, ‘be as happy as a pig in proverbial. I will be blissed out. I plan, actually, to wallow in ecstasy.’

  Natalie suppressed a tiny frown. ‘That’s good. You must be resolute. Because, you know, not every foreigner is happy in France. I do not know why’ – her frown deepened, as if she had been abruptly confronted with a page of Euclid – ‘but the drop-out rate is somewhere around 60 percent.’

  Yes. So rumour had it. Language problems. Misunderstandings with builders. Avalanches of paperwork. Frosty neighbours. Unexpected storms that ripped roofs off houses and washed cars down to Spain. Mysterious multiple taxes. And more language problems.

  ‘Natalie,’ I said as a shaft of sunlight lit her face, ‘this isn’t a whim. Moving to France isn’t just for Christmas; it’s for life. I can survive, I promise you. And’ (cue Gloria Gaynor) ‘I will survive.’

  Our pizzas arrived and Natalie gazed speculatively into hers. Of course, that must be what all the foreigners said, grinning like demented kids waving from the top of a water chute. ‘Hey, watch me, here I come, I can swim!’ Not a clue about getting in over their heads, or having to be rescued, or sinking without trace.

  ‘Eh bien,’ she replied, raising her knife over the angel’s-wing pizza, ‘in that case, bon appétit! And congratulations on finding your lovely new house!’

  Guilt settled in my throat like a clove of raw garlic. It wasn’t a lovely house and it wasn’t even in the Languedoc, in fact it was in Normandy, at precisely the other end of the country. But yes, by French standards it was new. A mere twenty years old, centuries removed from the thatched, beamed cottage of my dreams. Granted, Normandy had plenty of thatched, beamed cottages and I’d visited several of them – only to discover that every last one of them needed at least six months in intensive care, by which time I might be in it myself. So, biting the bullet, I was contemplating buying this mundane modern house in a tiny hamlet which had a church, a primary school, a cemetery next door to the salle des fêtes, and precious little else. Up on a windy plateau, it was half an hour’s walk to the nearest town, down a corkscrew hill – no, no public transport, unless you were prepared to don knee-socks and prevail upon the school bus driver. No, no pâtisserie for those hot croissants. No bar, no tabac, no butcher, baker or candlestick maker. No swimming pool, no cobbled square, no anything whatsoever actually, bar a gritty tennis court and a bulging blackbird atop the church weathervane, warbling his Pavarotti repertoire from six sharp to eight every evening. Surrounded by miles of flat fields (through which I fondly envisioned Thomas Hardy characters trudging, trailing their shawls in the mud – Roman Polanski filmed Tess here), the hamlet was as obscure as they came. ‘Just perfect,’ purred Natalie, ‘for someone like you, seeking la France profonde.’

  Well, it certainly was profonde. Nonetheless, Normandy had several critical advantages: a coastline, a good train service to Paris, pretty scenery, a ferry to England, and Beauvais airport only two hours away. It couldn’t be further from the Languedoc, but somehow I felt it was right for me. But … oh, God. How, after she’d spent days driving me all over Normandy and treated me to this lovely lunch, was I going to tell Natalie that I could not buy the house from her?

  French law decrees that buyers must purchase their house from the first estate agent who shows it to them. You have to sign a bond swearing allegiance. Sadly, Natalie was not the first agent who had shown this house to me. And, for all my confidence, I was not prepared to start my new life in a French courtroom, jauntily sticking it to the judge.

  ‘Uh,’ I gurgled, ‘I hope you’ll come to the house-warming party.’

  She nodded that she would. But it was not to be. The next time I went looking for Natalie, her boss sourly snarled that she had left his employment. A French estate agent, beaten to the draw, bears startling similarity to a cuckolded husband. For the first time, I glimpsed a furious Frenchman. It was not a pretty sight.

  But nothing could mar the memory of that first crystalline day, the day we sat looking out over the sea caressed by a breeze vibrant with hope, optimism and potential. This obscure little pizzeria, I silently promised myself, would be my haven; this was where I would hole up on rainy days, reading Flaubert in my window corner, making a Martini last four hours, scribbling notes as I played at being Colette. Hell, I might even buy a fountain pen.

  French buyers don’t get surveyors. Irish ones do. Eyebrows shot up when I produced mine. A little bumble-bee of a man, he danced up and down on all the bedroom floors before racing out to the front lawn, where he stood buzzing furiously.

  ‘Ah, non. I am desolate, madame, but it is completely out of the question. You cannot buy this house.’

  What? But why not? What’s wrong with it? Okay, I know it’s not high-spec like an Irish house, it doesn’t have a jacuzzi or a brushed-steel Aga or any of this month’s other accessories, and whoever floored the hall seems to have had very short arms. But it’s safe, surely?

  ‘Ah’ – despairing sigh – ‘it is the attic floor, madame. You hear how it creaks. It will not hold. All will collapse.’

  Will it? But the vendors say they only put it in two years ago. It looks okay to me.

  Stroking his chin, he inspected me speculatively. ‘Tell me, madame, have you considered building a new house?’

  No. I wanted to buy, not build, and I wanted to do it now. A buyer was ready to move into my house in Ireland and neither she nor I had decades to spare while builders started brewing pots of tea. I knew people who’d gone that route – ‘Ooh, lovely, let’s restore this old wreck and put in a pool’ – and most of them were now sucking their thumbs, gently crooning to themselves in some secure institution.

  Furthermore, this surveyor happened to work for a building firm. Seeds of doubt were starting to blossom in my mind – not about the house, but about him.

  ‘Well, thank you for your verdict. I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Certainly, madame. That will be €400, s’il vous plait.’ Pursing his lips, he gave me a paper-thin smile.

  Handing over payment with the cordite whiff of rip-off in the air, I got back in my rented car and drove to the nearby lake, where the thinking process was speeded by the prospect of the departing plane which, four hours hence, was to whisk me back to Ireland. A hitch had arisen in Ireland: at work, the union was objecting
to my redundancy application. If the application fell through, so would my plan of making a new life in France. I had to get back to do battle.

  So, let’s decide about this house then, fast! It seemed to make sense. Four bedrooms, a tiny kitchen (curiously, for a nation that cooks so much but is allegedly allergic to hygiene, French kitchens are minuscule whereas bathrooms are vast), a living room, TV room, study, laundry and garage. Plus some kind of kids’ playroom in the basement, two bathrooms for the impending hordes, and a wine cellar. And – an important consideration, this – a small, manageable garden. (In Normandy, you’re lucky not to get a couple of dozen acres thrown in – many foreigners end up mowing lawns the size of Lichtenstein.) When I first arrived to view ‘the product’, as estate agents so callously call prospective homes, other viewers were already leaving, and by the time I was leaving more were arriving. Clearly, this house was going to sell fast. Plain as a pikestaff, it was nothing to write home about, but its price was affordable, barely half what I would get for my Irish house. At a stroke, I could be free of the mortgage that strangles so many lives like a noose.

  But what about that attic? Would it really collapse? Might some visiting child crash down into the simmering coq au vin on the kitchen stove below? And … it didn’t have termites, did it? I’d heard how they were marching up from the Midi, invading Normandy as the Nazis had done before, destroying all in their path.

  Or moles? Evidence of moles was everywhere: they were busily rotovating Normandy as if nostalgic for Passchendaele. Rumour had it that one day all their tunnels would merge and France would collapse into a crater somewhere in the core of planet earth.

  Or dry rot? Oh, please, not that. I’d heard about the the havoc dry rot could wreak with people’s heads … but no. The house wasn’t old enough to even contemplate that … or surely the surveyor would have said if it was?