My Grape Escape

by Laura Bradbury

  Like so many North Americans, my upbringing had been heavy on the morality and light on the spirituality, whereas for Franck, like many French people, it had been the opposite.

  “Marey?” Mémé frowned and tapped her fingers on the tabletop. “It is filled with Poiriers. They’ve always been compliqués as far as families go.”

  Michèle pursed her lips in agreement. It was true that at least half the village was populated by one extended family but this didn’t worry me – I was just relieved that uniting against the villagers of Marey had apparently smoothed over the question of Emmanuel-Marie’s love for ketchup.

  “Where is it in relation to the church?” Michèle asked.

  She meant the church where Franck and I had been married a year before. It was a little stone affair dating back to Roman times with a rounded ceiling and scarred wooden benches located near the end of the village, or the beginning, depending on which direction you were coming from. The floor was made up of flagstones so worn with time that they were polished smooth with the details of the knights that had been buried beneath them several centuries ago carved in Old French.

  A house for sale in Marey when Marey only consisted of about twenty houses . . while I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the Virgin Mary or any guardian angels were looking out for me, I could believe they had thrown Franck this gift.

  Franck grabbed the ketchup bottle and poured some over his pasta, then dug in while Michèle and Mémé both pretended not to notice.

  The next morning, after polishing off our café au lait and tartines of jam made from the wild peaches that grew in the vineyards, Franck began pacing around the kitchen.

  “Do you think it’s too early to call?”

  I checked my watch. “It’s only ten after seven.”

  Franck grimaced. “How early do you think is too early?”

  “Before eight thirty is definitely too early.”

  “What am I going to do before then?” Franck raised his arms towards the ceiling and I supposed beyond that to those guardian angels of his.

  “Have a shower. Have another café au lait. Give me a shoulder massage.” He stopped to laugh at my saucy smile but then resumed his pacing. I began to heat up some more milk in the saucepan, stirring it slowly with a worn wooden spoon.

  “How can you stand to wait?” he demanded after a few minutes.

  I was eager too, of course, but there was some sort of inner calm that had descended over me since the night before. I had no idea where it had come from.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I just feel that if this house is meant to be, it’ll work out no matter what time we call the realtor.”

  Franck drew to an abrupt halt. “How many of those pills have you had this morning?”

  “None.” In fact, I had woken up with my thoughts so consumed by beautiful old doors and views over the vineyards that I had completely forgotten to take them. “I don’t know why I feel so calm about all of this,” I admitted. “I want it just as much as you do.”

  Franck peered at me. “Do you feel like it will work out for the best one way or the other?” he ventured.

  I almost felt scared as I let the word out of my mouth, as if I was going to jinx myself.

  “Oui,” I admitted.

  “You know what’s that called?”

  “Insanity?”

  He clicked his tongue. “Ma chérie, it’s called faith.”

  I stood beside Franck as he talked on the phone, wishing that his parents hadn’t updated their phone system around the time of our wedding and done away with their old orange phone with the separate earpiece called an écouteur so I could eavesdrop on the conversation. All I could do was watch Franck’s face as he listened to the realtor. It lit up within a few seconds and stayed lit.

  After he hung up, he grabbed my hands and led me in an impromptu little two-step until he whacked his head on the beam that ran across the low ceiling of the cellier. “Merde!” he rubbed his forehead but nothing could wipe off his smile.

  “What did the realtor say? What’s it like?” I pressed.

  “It sounds incroyable! The property is huge and goes all the way down to the vineyards and there are actually two separate houses on it.”

  “How much are they asking?” I asked.

  “Three hundred and twenty thousand francs.”

  He watched my expression while I engaged in a series of quick mental calculations. Three hundred and twenty thousand francs - that was about $100,000 Canadian. From Franck’s description of the property, it sounded like a downright steal. Of course, that didn’t change the fact that it was still a fortune for Franck and me; we had no real source of income between the two of us. We had forty thousand for a down payment though, which would make the mortgage quite small…

  I should have been terrified about our ability to pay the monthly mortgage payments, but somehow I just wasn’t. Compared to the dark phantoms flitting in and out of my mind over the past two years, dealing with concrete dollars and cents, or francs in this case, was a relief.

  Besides, my conviction that we could make this work one way or another was still there. I wasn’t ready to call it faith yet, and I had no idea why my confidence manifested itself in French real estate rather than in God, but there it was.

  Chapter 4

  We visited the property in Marey-les-Fussey the next morning. The realtor was driving in from Châlon-sur-Saone, about half an hour south and the only free slot he could give us was eleven o’clock. Right away would have suited us much better, but we reminded ourselves that it wouldn’t do to appear desperate.

  We walked to Marey-les-Fussey, only a leisurely ten minute stroll through the vineyards from Villers-la-Faye; we arrived a half hour early. We had driven by the sprawling property about a dozen times the day before so we knew exactly where we were headed.

  I crossed the street to walk right up to the front gate of the property. It looked deserted. The agent had told Franck that the sellers, two elderly sisters, had already moved into a nursing home. The red tiled roofs and the old stone well in the courtyard seemed to be calling me. Franck grabbed my arm and yanked me back into the shadows on the other side of the street.

  “Everyone in the village will be watching,” he hissed. I surveyed the empty cobblestone thoroughfare. A vineyard tractor rumbled in the distance but that was the only sign of human life. “In here!” Franck ducked under the thick stone walls of the village washing house and pulled me in behind him.

  “What’s wrong with just walking around the yard of the house?” I asked, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the dark. “Nobody’s there.” It wasn’t like Franck, or any other French person for that matter, to be so rule-abiding.

  “We mustn’t be seen,” he answered in a whisper. “Or overheard.”

  There was a little round window looking out to the street. I stood on my tiptoes and peered out. Still no sign of life except a few chickens clucking around a grassy patch two houses down.

  “There’s nobody out there, unless you’re worried the chickens are spying on us.”

  “Trust me. They’re there even if you can’t see them.”

  “Who?”

  “The villagers. They’ll be watching us. That’s how it is in ces villages.”

  Franck was always full of tales of the mysterious workings of ces villages, or “these villages”, but I remained sceptical. I looked out of the window again. It was just past ten thirty but the day was already so hot that waves of heat shimmered over the cobblestones and seemed to slide down the slopes of the vineyards that dropped from the village on either side of the road. There were worse places to wait than under the cool of the ancient lavoir, to be sure, but I still couldn’t believe there was any need for cloak and dagger furtiveness.

  “Even if the villagers are watching us,” I countered, though I was far from convinced, “surely we’re allowed to visit a house that’s for sale, aren’t we? Or is there a law against that that I wasn’t aware of?” />
  He reached over and pulled me against his firm chest. “It’s not that.” He nipped my earlobe. “The fact is that if they see us visiting the property they will start to think they should take more interest in it. They’ll steal it from under our noses.”

  “Why would they want another huge property when they all own a house in the village already?”

  “To keep an outsider from buying in their village.”

  “You’re not an outsider. You’re from one village over.”

  Franck’s eyes flashed in the dim light. “I might as well be from outer Siberia. Don’t forget the fact that I also married an etrangère.”

  The roar of a car engine drowned out the chickens’ clucks. Franck used one strong arm to pin me against the wall while he peeked out. Cool humidity seeped through my T-shirt and a pointed rock poked into my back.

  “It’s him,” Franck released me. We emerged from our hiding spot and tried to walk as nonchalantly as we could across the blistering road.

  As we approached the black car that had pulled up in front of the gate, a red-faced man stumbled out of the driver’s seat. A file folder full of papers slid out and scattered over the dusty ground. Franck collected them swiftly, passed them back to the realtor, and stuck out his hand.

  “Bonjour.”

  The real estate agent was still muttering vague mercis and merdes and fais-chiers but managed to get a solid enough grip on his file to shake Franck’s hand.

  “Vous êtes Franck Germain?”

  “Oui. This is ma femme, Laura.”

  Being introduced as Franck’s wife was only a year old and still gave me a shiver of pleasure. There was a caveman possessiveness about the word “wife” in French; the word femme meant both “my wife” and “my woman” at the same time.

  The agent clasped my hand in his moist paw and then began to forage deep in his pocket for the key to the front gate. Franck was quivering with the need to get us out of the villagers’ sight. We all sighed in relief when after a seemingly interminable time the realtor extracted the key and used it to unlock the front gate.

  “So you’re from Châlon,” Franck said, his voice low as we walked into the grassy yard between the two houses. “This is a bit far away for you. Do you represent a lot of sellers in this area?”

  The agent shook his head. “Almost never. Completely out of my secteur, this is, but it is being sold by some old ladies who are friends of my mother. I’m doing it as a favour but to tell you the truth it’s a bit of a pain.”

  He led us, or rather was hustled onwards by Franck, into the first house that ran low-slung across the back of the yard.

  He unlocked the door using a huge iron key and I stepped on to flagstones that had been perfectly polished with time and wear. The room was beautifully cool. From what I knew of these old Burgundian houses, the walls were undoubtedly made with stones equally as thick and massive. The kitchen was sparse and simple but I loved everything about it: the scratched wooden cabinets, the huge double ceramic sink, even the spiral fly tape that was dotted with several large, expired victims. The back of my neck prickled; I swear I could almost feel the sweet breath of Franck’s guardian angels.

  We continued on to the other rooms. The house was small but oozing with potential. There was the fabulous kitchen, bien sûr, and then a bedroom with a deep patina in the wooden floors. I could completely look past the mustard and green velvet wallpaper, the cross complete with an impaled Jesus over the headboard, and the dried and very dusty bridal bouquet under an even dustier glass dome on the bedside table. Next to the bedroom was a small water closet with a sink but no other bathroom; I wondered where the previous occupants had washed – in the well? Next was a separate living area set off by a massive stone fireplace.

  Franck didn’t say a word but from the determined set of his mouth I knew he wasn’t missing a thing.

  The first house was slung perpendicular to the main road through the village, whereas, the second house was completely vertical. It was much newer too, according to the realtor, meaning it had been built a mere two centuries ago instead of four.

  The second house had four floors. Each floor had one or two rooms, and they were connected by a graceful wooden staircase that spiralled up the middle of the structure and became steeper the higher we climbed. The final room – a bedroom under the eaves of the roof - took up the entire top floor. A perfect spot, I thought, to come and escape from the world with a book on a rainy day…once the dead flies were cleaned up. The carpet and the windowsill were dotted with them.

  Once the house tours were done, the realtor showed us through the first of two massive stone outbuildings which had been used as barns for a few hundred years. Inside, we discovered a rusting motor scooter, an old wooden cart that was missing two wheels, and four giant glass bottles used for distilling poire william and other hard alcohols.

  “These granges can also be renovated and made into other houses,” the realtor said, caressing the wall. It was true, the stone and massive oak beams provided an amazing canvas for another house altogether.

  The farthest outbuilding commanded a view of the entire valley where yellow wheat fields gave way to vineyards and then back to fields again, topped off by a ridge of green trees. Inside, a rickety wooden ladder was propped up against a wooden overhang. Franck squinted up its length, swung his leg over, and began to shimmy up.

  The realtor called up to him, “Can’t guarantee that it is safe up there, you know! You could come through the floorboards - probably completely rotten.” Franck had already disappeared from the top of the ladder.

  “Laura, come up here!” he called down to me.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” the realtor advised.

  “What if I fall through the floorboards?” I called up to Franck.

  “I’ll catch you.”

  While the realtor shook his head I put my foot on the first rung and began to gingerly make my way up. How much scarier could this really be than climbing the stairs of Oxford’s Examination Schools before my first final exam? Whatever waited for me up top, it couldn’t be as bad as the vertiginous feeling of terror and uncertainty I had felt then.

  Hope flickered inside me - this splintering old ladder might lead me to a completely different kind of place. Besides, this was perhaps the only chance for Franck and me to whisper our opinions to each other away from the realtor.

  I pushed thoughts of rotting floorboards and termites from my mind and scrabbled up the last few rungs. Such worries were slightly unnerving, but in a reassuring, concrete way. They were infinitely preferable to the other kind of doubts that had been running in a continuous loop through my mind in the past two years.

  My head poked out just over the level of the wooden beams and Franck, a grin on his face, grabbed my hand and pulled me up beside him. He led me, boards creaking ominously under our feet, to the far end of the mezzanine and a little waist high stone wall. His arm wrapped around my shoulders as we gazed out at an uninterrupted view over the vineyards. He kissed my earlobe.

  “You could write here.”

  I fingered an ivy leaf from the vine that perfectly framed the view.

  “I can’t believe how perfect it is,” I whispered back. I could become someone else here. Still…how could we possibly make it work? How was I supposed to live here and also finish my Masters at Oxford and establish a legal career in London?

  But this place was perfect. Everything about buying the property seemed so easy and self-evident, as though it was meant to be. Even if I was miserable practising law, it would enable us to keep this unbelievable place. How could anything go truly bad when I owned as magical a place as this? Desperation to make this dwelling my own made my bones ache.

  Franck must have sensed the sudden urgency in my mood because he gave my earlobe one last nip and tilted his head towards the real estate agent pacing below us.

  “Don’t let on how much we like it,” he murmured. “He’ll realize that he’s priced it too low.”
I nodded.

  We made our way back down the ladder and Franck lost no time in telling the realtor that indeed most of the floorboards had been rotten up there. “Termites, sans doute,” he concluded offhandedly.

  I followed as Franck led us all back to the first low-slung house and pointed at the roofline. “That house will need to be entirely re-roofed.”

  Now that Franck pointed it out, I noticed that the tiles did undulate like a wave.

  Franck clicked his tongue. “The beams will probably have to be replaced as well.”

  We made our way back towards the gate as Franck enumerated the herculean amount of repairs required, the epic number of hours it would take every week to mow the very substantial chunk of land, and the constant danger of children falling down the very charming old stone well that Franck laid his hand on as he came to a stop.

  I hadn’t noticed any of these things before, but I couldn’t deny that they were all true. My palm itched to slap Franck. He was ruining the spell the property had cast over me, even if it was merely to put the realtor off our scent. This house was destined for us, despite the roof and the rot and the backbreaking lawn mowing.

  As Franck gave the well a final, dismissive pat I felt a piercing pain under my baby toe. The pain hop scotched down the sole of my foot. I dropped to the grass and clawed off my left sandal. A half-squished wasp fell out onto the grass.

  I gave an explosive demonstration of my command of French swear words. It had been years since I’d been stung and I’d forgotten how much it hurt. Not just the pain, but the burning and the itching that made me want to tear off my foot.

  “C’est quoi?” Franck leaned over me.

  “Une guêpe,” I swore one last time and then took Franck’s proffered arm and hobbled back to our car. I noticed twitching curtains at the three houses across the street. Maybe Franck hadn’t been completely wrong about the spying villagers after all.

  By the time I collapsed in the scorching leather car seat my foot was beginning to swell. What could this mean? Franck’s guardian angels were sending distinctly mixed signals. The perfect house, a feeling of nearly captured peace, then a wasp sting. That was the problem with believing in signs; if I believed in the good signs from the heavens, I felt honor-bound to believe the bad signs too. Only Franck could have such mercurial guardian angels.