My Grape Escape

by Laura Bradbury

  “How much?” Le Maître echoed the owner’s question. “Let me ask them.” He raised an eyebrow at us. “Have you decided how much you’d like to offer?”

  With admirable restraint Franck reiterated, “The asking price.”

  Le Maître nodded and conveyed this information to the owners, again giving all credit to himself. A few seconds later he frowned and did a very clumsy job of covering the receiver. “How much was the asking price?” he hissed at us.

  The secretary slipped into the room just then with a sheet of paper in her hand and cast Franck and me a look of sympathy.

  “How much?” Le Maître mouthed at the three of us again.

  “Two hundred and seventy thousand francs,” we all answered at once. Le Maître plucked his glasses off his desk and waved his secretary away with them. She stood her ground. Whatever she was paid, it wasn’t enough.

  He cleared his throat. “Of course that’s three hundred and twenty thousand francs…bien sûr…of course you already know that.” He listened for a while without saying anything, then nodded several times. “Right then. I’ll tell them.”

  He hung up the phone, a beatific smile lighting up his face, then picked up a piece of paper on his desk and began studying it with pursed lips. We waited for a few seconds.

  The secretary rolled her eyes. “So did they accept Monsieur and Madame Germain’s offer?”

  He glanced up at us again, evidently surprised to still find us there standing in front of his desk. “Of course! Congratulations, by the way.”

  The secretary crooked her finger at Franck and me. “Follow me. We’ll work out all the details.”

  With light-speed efficiency, the secretary did exactly as she promised. First of all, she phoned the owners back. They were just as bewildered as we had been. She explained everything to them and set up the signing of the Compromis de Vente for the next day, only two days before we took the plane to Vancouver. She handed us a stack of photocopied documents.

  “The final signing will be three months after that.”

  “Ah…there’s a slight problem,” Franck said. “We’ll be in Vancouver.”

  The secretary remained nonplussed. “Do you have any family here?”

  “My parents.”

  “In that case, we’ll just set up a power of attorney and have them come in and sign on your behalf.”

  We had our new project. It was as easy as that.

  Two days later we found ourselves signing the Compromis de Vente with one of the owners – a tall gentleman who seemed in a hurry to get the signing done and get back for another appointment in Dijon – and the secretary. Le Maître stamped things with his impressive notary seal and congratulated himself repeatedly on his excellent work.

  The day we left for Canada, we woke up before the roosters for André to drive to us to Dijon to catch the early train to Paris. As we pulled away from Franck’s front gate, Franck asked his father to stop for a moment in front of the church in Magny. André pulled into one of the parking spots across from our house – our house! – stopping under the bright green canopy of the tilleul tree.

  Franck and I climbed out of the car into the soft morning air of summer and stood on the worn steps of the church, gazing across the street at the little house that would soon be our home in France. Our fingers laced together. The church bell behind us rang five times; the silvery sound didn’t rouse the sleepy village. A minute after the last bell had sounded the bell on top of the Mayor’s Office began to ring five times.

  “The two bells aren’t in sync,” I observed.

  “Anarchist bells.” Franck said. “Very French.”

  Our house would always live by the rhythm of those two bells, one slightly behind the other but both – as far as they were concerned – ringing at the right time.

  “Deux Clochers,” Franck said. Two bell towers. “We should call our house La Maison des Deux Clochers.”

  When the last ring had finished washing over the tile rooftops I lifted up his hand and planted a kiss on his knuckle. “I like the sound of that.”

  Chapter 12

  When we had left Burgundy for Vancouver four months earlier, the hollyhocks had been in full bloom and the vineyards were a riot of green. Now André’s car splashed through puddles the size of small lakes on the way up to Villers-la-Faye after picking Franck and me up at the Beaune train station. The few vineyard workers who were pruning the vines were hunched over in vast black rubber capes, looking wet and miserable in the sheeting rain.

  December in Burgundy, I remembered now, was a different paire de manches, or pair of sleeves, from July.

  We had already planned to spend several hours looking through our newly purchased house the next day, but now all we wanted was a bed. Dusk was falling and we had been travelling for more than thirty hours.

  As our representative, André had signed the Act of Sale last month and we had paid our first mortgage payment only two weeks ago. It was ours - this little stone house built in the year of the Revolution would come into view in just a few seconds, as soon as we rounded the corner.

  Franck leaned over me, squinting out of the rain-splattered window and asked me if I still didn’t believe in praying to the Virgin Mary. I wondered if he could feel the erratic rhythm of my heart skipping in my chest. I was pretty certain I knew what he was thinking…we had a little over four months to do all of the renovations, and a budget of fifteen thousand dollars.

  Oh yes, and this unedifying state of affairs was mostly my fault. Entirely my fault, truth be told.

  Back in Vancouver I had gone through the motions of researching how to convert my British law degree into a Canadian law degree.

  “It’s complicated,” I told people when they asked when I would start practising. “It takes time.”

  I had phoned the law society and filled out all the forms for them to review my situation, as well as talked to several high school friends of mine who were practising lawyers. But the motions were just that – motions. They were hollow inside, not fleshed out with any passion or desire. All my ambition had scurried off somewhere.

  It wasn’t the conversion of my law degree that invaded my daydreams during the four months in Vancouver. It was the cheese cupboard in our petite maison and that ancient door in the kitchen and the wide stone stairs and the crooked walls. These would be my responsibility now. I not only cherished such stewardship, I took it very seriously. Yet somehow in my mind’s eye, I always pictured our house looking exactly on our return as it had for our departure in July: blooming, stunning, blue-skied, full of hope. . .not to mention being a cinch to renovate in four months.

  One night, a few weeks after Franck and I had moved into our snug Vancouver apartment, we were lying in bed listening to the sirens wailing down West Broadway and debating how we would pay our monthly French mortgage payment. I was nestled in that spot between Franck’s shoulder and his neck that seemed made just for me. Given that our monthly income was currently only about twenty five hundred dollars and that we had to pay exorbitant rent on our tiny Vancouver apartment, the mortgage amount was huge to us, almost unmanageable.

  We lay intertwined in the dark. My thoughts drifted from our mortgage payment to the beaten iron latches on our cheese cupboard. Maybe when we had renovated the house, some of our friends could come and stay. Maybe some of them would find the latches on the kitchen door and the ornately wrought metal banister on the stairs as entrancing as I did. It would be amazing to set up the house so that Franck and I could welcome a lot of people and share the experience of living in an authentic French village for a few days or a few weeks.

  Then it hit me. Why didn’t we try to rent out the house when we weren’t using it? At best, we would be able to use the house for about a month every year. It seemed a travesty to have the house all shut up and empty in the interim.

  “Wouldn’t it be great if we could share our house with anyone who was interested?” I whispered in the dark to Franck. “We could charge a bit o
f rent – enough to cover the mortgage. And even if we couldn’t quite manage to do that, any little bit would help, n’est-ce pas?”

  Franck lay beside me, silent for a long while.

  “Who on earth would want to come to vacation in Burgundy?” Franck said at last.

  “Franck,” I reminded him, “my mom and dad have taken two very expensive bike trips to Burgundy in the last five years. And they loved Beaune and they loved the wine and they loved the food. They just loved the Frenchness of it all.”

  Franck made a disbelieving sound in the back of his throat. “Magny-les-Villers is not exactly Paris.”

  How could I make him see? To Franck, Burgundy was just his home – simple and familiar like the Pacific Northwest was for me.

  “Do you remember your first ferry ride from Vancouver to Victoria that very first Christmas after you had moved to Montreal?”

  Franck nodded.

  Growing up on Vancouver Island, I had been brought up resenting the ferry trip between our island and the mainland. Like most fellow islanders, to me British Columbia’s ferries meant reheated Baron O’ Beef, unintelligible safety announcements over the PA, and cancelled sailings. I would invariably spend the crossing hunkered down in the cafeteria with a stale coffee in a Styrofoam cup and a trashy magazine. That was where I headed on Franck’s first ferry trip, but he grabbed my arm and dragged me out onto the deck into the freezing December air.

  “This is amazing!” he shouted over the noise of the engines, his head whipping to and fro to scan the scenery. We hadn’t even left the ferry terminal. He installed us on top of one of the wooden life vest lockers on the deck and we stayed there for the whole journey, huddling together against the cold. He couldn’t stop exclaiming over the beauty and the grandeur of our route through the Gulf Islands.

  That trip opened my eyes to what had been in front of me my whole life: secret coves, cedar fringed cliffs, and even a pod of orca whales that swam alongside the ship for a few minutes. I needed to do the same for him with Burgundy.

  “That’s what’s so great about this idea.” I wound my leg around his and ran my finger lazily up and down his bicep. “I know what North Americans would want out of a vacation rental in France.”

  “A nearby McDonalds?”

  I gave Franck a pinch. “No, not fast food - a comfortable mattress, a proper shower, functioning toilets, but lots of history and period details too.” He traced little swirls on the nape of my neck, thoughtful. “And you, mon chéri, have the local connections that can make everything happen,” I added.

  Whenever we talked about our jobs in Vancouver we became stressed and distant but I had noticed Burgundy had a magical way of binding us back together again.

  The swirls became light kisses. “Maybe it could work,” he admitted.

  Shortly after that Franck fell asleep. I lay staring at the path of headlights criss-crossing our ceiling. We could furnish the house with all of those amazing old armoires and tables found so readily in the brocantes all over Burgundy. I would make sure the bathroom was brand new and that we installed a proper wall hook-up for the shower. I would also find out as much about the history of the house as I could so that I could leave its story for our guests to read. Maybe other people would be as enthralled as me to think that the house was built in the same year as the Revolution, and that those stone steps had been quarried by men who were concerned not only about their stone cutting, but also about the fact that in Paris the aristocrats were having their heads lopped off.

  “But who are we going to rent it to?” Franck asked me the next morning over breakfast. “How can we let people know that we are doing this?”

  This gave me pause. As certain as I was that there were kindred spirits who would want to stay at our little French house, I hadn’t given any thought yet as to how we would actually find them.

  “We’ll start by sending a letter to the people who came to our wedding last summer, and ask them to spread the word.” I said the words as soon as they popped into my head.

  “That’s actually a very good idea.”

  “Merci.” I bowed.

  As Franck finished eating I slipped off to my computer. I opened an empty Word document and began typing. I had to put in a date when people could start renting it, I realized as I got about half way down. I did a quick calculation in my head. We’d been planning to go over at Christmas, but we couldn’t leave our jobs here for too long. Since we had been back in Vancouver, I had been working for the family company trying to sell earplugs to the managers of a chain of optical stores. They were called “earbugs” and were a hard sell from the name on downwards.

  What needed to be done? Taking down the wallpaper – that couldn’t be too hard - repainting the heck out of the place, redoing the bathroom and a bit of the kitchen, repainting the shutters. All that wouldn’t take very long at all. Four months, tops. That would give us all the time we needed and then some. Besides, I had to be back in Oxford on May 1 for my graduation ceremony. I typed down in the letter that our house would be available for rent as of Mayday.

  Once I’d finished my letter, I found the email list for the hundred or so people who attended our wedding reception in Victoria, attached it, and hit “send.” Two days later Franck cobbled together a rudimentary website.

  Three days later I had a call from the brother and sister-in-law of one of my Mom’s friends who had been at our wedding. They wanted to rent our house for the first two weeks in May. I dragged a rather stunned looking Franck down the road to Solly’s Bagelry to eat a celebratory breakfast.

  I leaned back heavily in the seat as the car pulled in front of the wooden gate to chez Germain. Things didn’t appear quite in the same light back here in Burgundy as they did in Vancouver. We had exactly four months and ten days to get our house ready for our first renters, and the five groups of renters that followed immediately after them. My plan had worked even better than I could have imagined. Only the wooden statue of the Virgin knew if this was good or bad.

  The next morning over a late breakfast (we had slept a solid fourteen hours due to jetlag, not to mention a certain reluctance to face reality) Franck’s parents presented Franck with the huge clutch of keys that I had first seen in Le Maître’s hand four months earlier. Franck passed them ceremoniously over to me. They were substantial in my hands and had a metallic whiff of permanence. There were at least fifteen keys of different shapes and sizes on the interlocking rings.

  André sighed. “It’s all yours now.” He clearly relished the thought that our house was no longer his responsibility. Given the gushing drainpipe we had seen last night as we drove past, I could hardly blame him.

  Mémé marched into the kitchen from the dining room, bringing the smells of butter and flour with her. She was staying at chez Germain over Christmas and she had already informed us that her plan for the day was to stuff several hundred escargots.

  “Are you finished with breakfast yet?” she asked us, dropping a kiss on her beloved Franck’s head. “I have a lot of cooking to do.” I found that hard to believe as almost every surface of the kitchen was covered in freshly baked bread, mini-quiches, mini-pizzas, and two gâteaux de savoie that she had informed us were for her Bûches de Noël.

  “More cooking?” Michèle asked. “What else can you possibly need to cook? Besides, we’re almost out of flour.”

  “I noticed that.” Mémé handed over a neatly penned list to André. “I will need you to go into Beaune and get these things for me. Don’t try to palm any of those generic products off on me. I can only work with mes produits.” André stared down at the list and his mouth tightened. Mémé whipped her dishtowel over her shoulder. “I’ll be needing those ingredients soon,” she said, nodding towards the door.

  Michèle took a deep breath and rolled her eyes at Franck and me.

  “Let’s go have a shower.” Franck pulled me up. When Franck had shut the bathroom door behind us he said, “I think now is a good time to go and inspect our hou
se if we don’t want to be drafted in as sous-chefs.

  Once we were clean, we let ourselves out the door and scurried across the frosty courtyard to the stone barn where we found André. He had wisely embarked on a thorough cleaning project of the barn to keep himself out of the way. Franck asked if we could borrow the Citroën and André took the keys from his pocket, handing them over to us. He waved good-bye as he shut the courtyard gate behind us and I’m sure he hightailed it back into the tranquility of the barn.

  I cranked up the heat. “Maybe we should move to our place sooner rather than later.”

  Franck looked grim. “We’re also going to need to buy a car, you know. My dad needs this one to get back and forth to work. ”

  Merde. I had never considered the obvious need for a car, nor had I budgeted for it. I put my hands in front of the air vent, but the air coming out was frigid.

  “Do you realize how cold it is going to be in our house?” Franck asked me. “Chez nous?”

  “I think I’m about to find out.”

  Franck slid the car into one of the two parking spots in front of the church in Magny. There was a nervous flutter in my chest. It felt similar to the one I had when my friend Sandrine and I were driving to Franck’s house to pick up him and Stéphanie the night after Franck and I had first met. Within an hour of being introduced we were making out on the dance floor of a local discothèque. I knew I liked Franck, but I figured he probably only wanted a one-night fling like most other guys. Then, as now, I was filled with equal parts excitement and uncertainty.

  I glanced up at the tilleuls which arched over our car. In the summer they had been covered with an explosion of pale green leaves. Now the leaves had fallen and the branches were all cut off, leaving only truncated stumps like a passel of fists gesticulating at the sky.

  I clutched the bunch of keys as we crunched across the pea gravel that only scantly covered the frozen dirt of the passageway underneath our house. The stone stairs were frosty. I held on to the gray metal railing so as not to slip. Was I still going to see potential in this place? I rubbed the keys for luck.