Escaping

by Henrietta Taylor

  The cold Mistral wind blew along the streets and alleys of Saignon, licking the façades in a vain attempt to gain entry. We were out of the wind and safe behind the thick stone walls and heavy oak door while I typed away on the top floor of our lopsided medieval house writing emails to Sydney.

  In the stillness of the night your mind plays tricks on you, but I often felt Norman’s presence there in Place de la Fontaine. It might have been the red wine, but I felt happy and safe, and if he wasn’t right there with me, he certainly wasn’t very far away.

  From February until early April, as my portfolio grew fat with dot.com shares and Sydney sweltered under hot summer skies, I shivered into the early hours under a mountain of blankets, hunched over my computer, with its long cable connecting it to the telephone line. My umbilical cord. My life-support system.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Easter at Kamila’s

  THE WEEKS WERE FLICKING past. I was spending more and more time mesmerised by the computer and the stock market. They had infiltrated my every waking moment. Half listening to my children chatter about their school day and other activities, I would drift into the empty back-lots of my mind and plot my next frenzied attack of buying and selling. No more exploring the countryside or plundering the local markets for me; now profit margins ruled my life. It never occurred to me that I might have changed my addiction from hard liquor to adrenaline. But what was important was that at last I was trying to do something positive for myself, and for the children.

  I tried rating my life in terms of a scorecard, and the results weren’t too bad:

  1. Happiness with children (most days) 9

  2. Happiness with myself (every day) 2

  3. Personal financial stability (purely accidental) 9.5

  4. Emotional stability (the intense sadness was slowly ebbing) 2

  5. Ability to cope with problems (on the improve) 5

  6. Self-analysis (always steady and constant) 10

  On days when the weather was good I’d take my laptop outside and sit on a stone slab in front of the house. Some of the older men would greet me with a nod as they carried their metal pétanque balls to the pitch for an afternoon game — to them I was the foreigner who sat typing into some sort of portable computer; the technical words failed them. I’d often see animals trotting along the cobbled stones of the square, and ninety-year-old Marc from further down in the village would shuffle along in his slippers to take some air and check that the fountain hadn’t been spirited away during the night.

  People in the village had begun to acknowledge our existence, with a small nod or a quick movement of the hand out of a warm pocket on their way to their cars in the car park beside the church. Outside the school gates, mothers were usually too busy trying to cajole little ones away from their friends to engage in spirited conversation. After school in winter it was already dark, and children either had to be dropped off by the school bus or picked up by their parents. We all wore the same smiles, frozen onto our faces by the driving, bitterly cold wind.

  The solitude of my life in the village did not scare me, as I had always enjoyed my own company. I had not expected to make friends with the inhabitants of Saignon immediately, but I had thought they would eventually accept me into the village circle. In the first few days after our arrival I had told a few people that I was a widow. Twisting my wedding ring around on my finger, I said that I still felt very married but with a non-active partner; I didn’t know if I would ever be ready again for a lifetime commitment. Some women gave me a wry smile in reply, saying that they were married to partners who were alive but also not very active — and even the ‘alive’ part was debatable. At least my words achieved the desired outcome: the news spread through the village and kept unwanted advances from the male population at bay.

  The villagers began to warm to the children and me in small degrees while they watched our ineptitude at the winter pastime of bingo in the town hall, where the entire village turns up to help raise money for the primary school. It might have been the red wine offered to me, but I finally began to understand the complicated way of counting in French.

  It was bizarre living in a society as an outsider. Having experienced it first-hand really made me admire the people of different nationalities who choose to make Australia their home. It was different for us; within a few months we would be back in our cultural comfort zone of Sydney.

  Sometimes I felt I would never cross the cultural divide, that I would always have to battle to be accepted in this community — when suddenly someone would extend their hand and offer me friendship and kind words. Maybe the chasm wasn’t so wide after all?

  Across the square from Place de la Fontaine, on the first floor of the recently refurbished, centuries-old washhouse, was the village library. I couldn’t believe such a thing existed behind the massive medieval façade. I wondered what other mysteries were contained behind the closed doors of the village. As I browsed the shelves, I would listen to the librarian and the villagers discussing the current winter drought, predicting that a long hot summer was on its way — ruinous for the cherries but good for the lavender. I came to learn that their moods were closely intertwined with the weather.

  They asked me with mixed curiosity about a country that they would probably never visit. I gave them a quick sketch of Australia and its arid climate. ‘It sounds exactly like here during July and August,’ observed the librarian. Maybe we had more in common than we realised.

  But at other times they would deliver sharp barbs about the number of strangers coming into the area and buying up properties. Snide remarks were made about some foreigners who worked and lived in the area and professed to understand the Provençal way. As in many small communities, unbridled jealousy and suspicion seemed to simmer just beneath the surface.

  Apart from the library, the other hub of activity in Saignon was the recently opened bakery. Clean, new and bright, it stood out from the rest of the village and drew people in like a magnet. Christine stood behind the counter, always smiling and courteous, dealing in a currency that is so important to the French: their bread.

  But as customers entered the bakery for the first time, their noses in the air ready to breathe in the smell of baguettes and croissants just out of the oven, you could see the instant disappointment written on their faces. The older customers would shake their heads in silent disapproval. Nowadays not all bread in France was baked on the premises; several small shops would share one oven. Christine’s bread came from the famous bakery run by her father, Henri Tomas, in Bonnieux, a village twenty-four kilometres from Saignon. This was the modern way. The little vans that would do the rounds up and down the tiny villages, giving their clients access to fresh bread, meat and vegetables, were gradually being phased out. Now cost-effective measures were very much in vogue. Christine talked of putting plastic chairs and tables outside under the trees in the warmer weather and serving coffee. I was sure that by next summer a large ice-cream machine would be installed, sitting outside the shop, where it would look as incongruous as a water buffalo.

  But for the majority of villagers, it didn’t matter where the bread was baked; quality was the overriding factor, and the baguettes that came out of Christine’s father’s oven lived up to their high expectations. Besides, any kind of economic activity in the village was a good thing.

  The crush of women queuing up to buy the bread before they hurried off to pick up their children from the primary school at lunchtime totally confused me. Prams and dogs were left in the street while infants stuck their heads out from under their mothers’ arms to be given the end of a baguette to shove into their wide-open mouths. Why did French people’s lives revolve around bread and lunchtime? Once again the cultural gap seemed so wide.

  There were others in Saignon apart from me who stood out as being different. The village women would swivel their eyes skyward as soon as the bakery door slid open and Kamila walked in, her arrival heralded by the clicking of her high heels. As
she greeted everyone in heavily accented French, you could feel the mixture of envy and grudging admiration. Instinctively, every woman in the room wriggled down into her thick pullover and looked down at her sensible winter boots, wondering what had happened to her high-heel-wearing days.

  Polish-born Kamila was the epitome of exotic beauty and elegance. She took my breath away the first time I saw her, walking down the uneven path towards the bakery on pink sequined stilettos. Her light brown hair had a mass of streaks in the same shade of pink. Even for a trip to the bakery she looked as if she’d just stepped out of the fashion pages, totally coordinated from top to toe. Years of working in artistic communities from Poland to Belgium had lent her a real mystique.

  Now she ran a bed and breakfast/art gallery in the village with her French husband, Pierre. They welcomed weary travellers from all parts of the globe and at the same time operated a residency and gallery for international artists, with a fabulous exhibition space. They were constantly appearing in upmarket magazines, which extolled their establishment and brought a constant stream of international visitors to Saignon. Their contribution to the village’s financial coffers could not be underestimated.

  With some people I feel an instant chemistry, and so it was when I met Pierre and Kamila. As a couple they were extraordinary: colourful and fascinating. They made everyone around them pale into insignificance.

  Within the blink of an eye, it was mid-April. Both the children came tearing into the kitchen one day, screeching at the tops of their voices. ‘Come down to the cherry orchard quickly, you won’t believe this!’ they cried together. ‘It’s snowing!’

  The hillside below Saignon was covered in lavender fields and the occasional cherry orchard. These orchards had become the children’s impromptu playground. In the Luberon, smart parks with primary-coloured jungle gyms simply didn’t exist. I’m sure they would be welcomed with open arms, but until councils decide to put money into building them, the local children’s only option is to hang upside down from cherry trees.

  At the fork in the road just before the entrance to the village was a very large cherry orchard that the children and I had been watching daily as the buds on the cherry trees grew. We would walk down to the orchard in the falling light of evening to see if the odourless flowers were in bloom. Finally the entire orchard was resplendent with massive white pompoms. Sitting on the rocks at the side of the road, we would listen to the drone of the bees, hard at work. Spring was in the air and the large pale moon would soon be full.

  When the children came running in I pulled my head out of the oven and left it in its dirty state, rushing out to see the snow. Down in the orchard, thick clouds of alabaster blossoms filled the sky. The light wind had blown the mature flowers from the black branches and sent them flying through the air. Underneath the cloud of petals you could just make out pairs of legs belonging to the village children, as they ran up and down the tracks between the trees. The acres of falling white blossoms filled me with an inexpressible joy.

  In six weeks’ time the villagers would be picking cherries. This posed a myriad of potential problems for them: frost on the cherry trees, the lack of water, the itinerant workers . . . the list was almost endless. But with my heart full of sadness, I realised that we would no longer be here; that was just the time when we had to move out. It didn’t seem possible that there would be only six weeks left of our stay after the Easter holidays. I strolled back to Place de la Fontaine with a heavy heart, to continue with the oven-cleaning.

  When I took the twenty-week house-sit, it was on the understanding that we would move out for a week at Easter; by this Saturday we would be temporarily homeless. Easter had crept up on me before I was ready. I’d been so consumed by the stock market and making money that I’d lost sight of the most important things — like where we were going to stay for a week. By the time I started ringing around looking for accommodation, everything was booked solid.

  To my relief, Kamila came to the rescue:‘Dahlink, you and the children come to us. You can have the studio and the children can be nearby in their own room. All mothers need a break from their children from time to time.’ Her heavy Polish accent cut across the French vowels like a sledgehammer.

  It was decided that we would move all of 100 metres up the road, to experience something that would end up changing our lives forever. I was touched by Kamila’s kindness — after all, she was just running a B&B, not my best friend. I didn’t dare ask if they had Bloomberg and CNN on their television.

  Kamila and Pierre’s guesthouse was called Chambre de Séjour avec Vue, which roughly translates as ‘A Room with a View’ — a homage to the E.M. Forster novel. It was a huge house, with no sweeping views of anything, let alone a river that resembled the Arno in Florence, as in Forster’s story. But the interior was straight out of a book — it was like entering a fairytale, and Kamila was the Fairy Queen.

  The moment I lifted the heavy metal ring on the door and let it fall, the echo resounded throughout the house and Kamila was on hand to greet us. The long narrow corridor we entered was swathed in a dozen vertical white muslin drapes that floated and flapped in the draught from the open door. Kamila herself sported a similar look, with several scarves wrapped tightly around her head, the ends trailing and floating in her wake.

  She ushered us into a sitting room and went to check that everything was in order. The children sat in armchairs, and under the threat of an immediate and very painful death, they managed to remain calm and immobile.

  This was the exhibition space for the latest of Kamila and Pierre’s treasures, some of which were displayed on a table made of short oak logs tied together with brass hoops. The end of the room had an installation of twigs of various lengths hanging in horizontal lines, held in place by transparent fishing wire. On the ground were piles of smooth stones. The walls were covered in oversized paintings, but instead of making the whole room claustrophobic, they exuded a deeply calming effect. Music was playing in the distance; the sweet female voice would normally have jarred my nerves, but somehow I found myself leaning back and closing my eyes, enjoying the overwhelming sensation that I had been allowed to slip into a world that was extremely special.

  While Kamila and Pierre were in a class of their own, in a sense their house was typical of the Luberon spirit. On the outside, houses and buildings looked a little tired, old and down-at-heel, but then you would go behind the doors and find an interior of great beauty — like my discovery of the local library in the old washhouse. This was so unlike Mosman, where wealth had been obscenely displayed in the shape of houses, cars and clothes (including the right school uniforms for the children). The Luberon countryside was equally deceptive: it had looked grey and barren when we first arrived, yet within months it had changed into the most beautiful place I had ever seen, when the cherry trees started to flower and the green began to come back into the landscape. It took me longer to realise that this also applied to the people of the Luberon. To an extent what you see is what you get, but often you scratch the surface and there is much more to them.

  Clip-clop on the tessellated cream and burgundy tiles marked the return of Kamila, who had felt the vacillating spring temperatures and slipped into something a little warmer: a colourful silk kimono. Sitting in her presence, I made a mental note to do something about the collection of tatty — verging on dowdy — cardigans that I had carted from the other side of the world.

  We all followed as she directed us up the highly polished and waxed stairs. The combination of beeswax and the lavender oil burning in a diffuser at the bottom of the stairs was making my head spin. As a violent asthma and hay fever sufferer, there are a few things my system can’t tolerate:

  1. Anything that resembles perfume or incense

  2. Any sort of patchouli or lavender oil

  3. Cut flowers of any description.

  But Kamila had waved her magic wand over me; I fell under her spell and had no power to resist. I walked on without saying a
word about my spinning head.

  ‘Don’t touch a thing!’ I hissed at Mimi and Harry, as Kamila swept into the children’s room with us in her wake. It had been painted with deep ochre pigment applied thickly to the walls, giving them the opulence of thick rich chocolate, counterbalanced with the lightness of pale linen curtains and bedcovers. There was a beautiful table and chair made from hard transparent acrylic, and whimsical modern artefacts were scattered throughout the room: weird and wonderful lamps, strange abstract paintings and graffiti written along one wall. Their bathroom, across the hall, featured a huge bathtub with clawed feet and a splashback of multicoloured tiles in all shades of blue. I had never seen anything as original or breathtakingly beautiful. The children could barely contain their delight that we would be guests for a week in this wonderland.

  Dutifully we followed Kamila (I would follow you anywhere) down the stairs and across an internal courtyard, until we reached a door slightly ajar with stairs leading into yet another section of the house. This was the studio for me.

  My room looked as if it had come out of a film set. A large bowl overflowed with fresh fruit alongside a huge display of cut flowers. Suddenly they made me think of the bouquet that had been on Norman’s casket. My heart seized up inside my ribcage and I began to wheeze. I blurted out something to Kamila about hay fever and allergies as the tears started to prick my eyes. I knew the real reason — it was more emotional than physical. Easter Monday would mark the fifth anniversary of Norman’s death.

  Kamila replied soothingly, ‘Dahlink, the villagers say that you are a bit touched in the head. I understand: you are a single mother who needs a week of sleep and relaxation.’

  I was pleased that Kamila didn’t believe I was touched in the head, and even more so when she said she and Pierre would look after the children while I was dragged into the kingdom ruled by Morpheus, where colourful images and floating scarves hovered across my closed eyes.