All of those cases that I had poured over in the law library during my two years at Oxford sprung to life. They had taught me that when it came right down to it most people were cynical and greedy. I was certain that Monsieur De Luca would not be willing to give us back our rooms for free.
“I don’t like the idea of you going to talk to him alone,” I said to Franck as we folded away our bed.
“That’s the way it has to be,” Franck said, grim. “Maybe I won’t have to though. I’ll call Le Maître first and the land registry if need be. I may be able to fix things that way.”
There was nothing for me to do except have my shower. I shivered in the unheated bathroom. Of all the problems I had imagined when we bought this house I never could have come up with this, not in my wildest imaginings. My teeth clacked together as I stripped off my many layers of jogging pants and sweatshirts and I climbed into our turquoise iron tub. I quickly discovered that our hot water tank held just about enough hot water for a minute and a half of showering before it turned ice cold. I hated this bath. I hated the teeny water tank. Even more I hated the fact that it was our neighbor who owned them both.
An uncomfortable suspicion began to creep up my spine – maybe my “non” to Mr. Partridge had been, like he believed, a momentary lapse of sanity due to the stress of Finals. What if this whole French house project was a huge mistake?
By the time I stalked back into the living room my shock had morphed into anger. Judging from the sound of Franck’s voice as he talked on the phone in those strident tones that one Frenchman uses to talk over what another Frenchman is saying, I wasn’t the only one.
“But there’s been a terrible error!” he kept repeating, until his sheer pugnacity seemed to get through to the person on the other end of the line. He nodded his head, said “d’accord” a few times and then scrawled something down on a piece of paper he balanced on his knee. He hung up.
“I suppose there’s no hot water left.”
I decided to take that as a hypothetical question. “Who was that?”
“Le Cadastre.”
“Who’s Le Cadastre?”
He held up the house plan. “The land registrar. He is the only guy who can correct this mess.”
Hope rose in my chest.
“Don’t be too overjoyed. He can’t come until next week. The whole office is closing up shop for Christmas.”
The hope plummeted.
“What about Le Maître? Did you call him?” I demanded.
“Yes, while you were using up all the hot water ” We were both angry and unfortunately the only people available to yell at were each other.
“And?”
“He told me to call the cadastre.”
“Did he even apologize, or offer to have us go in and look over the documents with him, or anything?”
Franck rolled his eyes. “Of course not.”
“Son-of-a-”
“A French notary cannot admit he has made a mistake, just like a French doctor. He blamed the cadastre and I knew it wasn’t worth wasting my time arguing the point. I suspected the cadastre would be the one who could sort this out anyway.”
I let out a howl of frustration. We had to wait a whole week with this hanging over our heads?
“Just think…” Franck got off the couch and patted me on the shoulder. “If you had chosen law you would be dealing with this type of thing every day.”
I snorted. Of course, the actual work – dealing with conflicts day in and day out – would have been a nightmare. Still, the security of actually having a respectable job sounded very seductive right about now.
I wrenched open the window and threw open the disintegrating white shutters. The stumps of the tilleuls in front of the church across the street were white with frost. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I couldn’t seem to get enough of the icy morning air in my lungs no matter how deeply I breathed. The world felt unbalanced and full of hidden dangers.
I blinked and caught sight of Madame Parigot, the mother of Franck’s winemaker friend Amélie whose family domaine was just up the road, as she trundled down the road towards the church. I watched her, hoping a distraction would ward off the tsunami of panic that was bearing down on me. She took a hefty key from her pocket and unlocked the door to the church. She happened to look up in my direction and waved at me, a sturdy presence with her steel gray bun and sensible winter coat. I waved back, trying to appear sane. With a smile, she disappeared inside.
Franck had told me before that Madame Parigot was the caretaker of the village church: changing faded flowers for fresh ones, sweeping the floor, and making sure none of the village children messed with the wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. She was known throughout the village as an extremely religious woman. I could picture her inside the church, moving respectfully in the stained glass silence. How I wanted some of that peace.
Maybe I just hadn’t persisted long enough with law. Had I given up just short of the golden ring? Worse still, had I dragged Franck into this mistake with me? I hadn’t quite finished whipping myself with this thought when Franck came back in the room, dressed and drying off his spiky black hair with a towel.
“Now that mes testicules are frozen off,” he said, an accusing look in his dark eye, “I’m going to go over and try to talk to the neighbor.”
“I’ll come.” Anything would be better than standing here waiting to hear that the neighbour wanted us to pay an extortionate amount for something we had already bought.
“Non.” Franck was firm. “You have to trust me on this.”
“What am I supposed to do then?” I demanded, terrified at the idea of being left alone with my own thoughts.
Franck crooked a finger and I followed him into the kitchen where we had stockpiled a bunch of old tools his dad had lent us. He passed me a rusted scraper and a desiccated sponge.
“You can start scraping off the wallpaper. ”
I started in the far bedroom. At least that room was undisputedly ours. Damned if I was going to get on my knees and strip somebody else’s wallpaper.
Here the brown and orange flowers that spangled the walls of the living room had given way to a flurry of blues and greens. I filled a chipped ceramic bowl full of freezing water from the kitchen sink, squirted in some rosemary-mint dish soap, dipped the sponge in and started soaking a patch of wallpaper. I hadn’t even lifted the scraper before a wet patch of wallpaper peeled back and slithered down to the floor beside me. Underneath it there was another layer of wallpaper – this a far older looking pattern of periwinkle blue stripes and orange roses. I soaked it but it wasn’t nearly as obliging. I scraped away on the same little five inch by five inch patch, searching for the bare wall like a miner searching for diamonds. I hadn’t thought I would enjoy this at all but it was strangely preoccupying, not to mention the fact that it distracted me from listening too hard for the sounds of a brawl from next door.
The older paper with the stripes and roses must have been stuck on with some sort of super glue made from horse hooves or pig ears way back when. I began to sweat despite the fact that the bedroom had no radiator and the temperature was probably hovering near zero. Millimeter by millimeter, I scraped. Finally I began to make out something behind it that didn’t look like wallpaper. I picked up the pace, my scraper rasping back and forth over the uneven surface. Maybe there would be a fresco under here depicting the seasons of the vineyards! That wasn’t unheard of in old houses. A band of deep blue revealed itself. And then lower down another band of bottle green. Not a fresco then. I sat back on my heels to look at it from a bit further away. It looked instead as though the wall had been painted to look like wallpaper. I attacked the mystery again with even more vigour until a particularly energetic scrape dislodged a chunk of plaster from the wall. Merde.
There was no way I could hide it. When Franck came back it would be the first thing he would see.
I cocked an ear, but there was only silence. That could either be a very good or a
very bad sign. I started to wonder if maybe Monsieur de Luca had killed Franck and was busy hiding his body in the old well in their courtyard, then I forced myself to look back at the hole in the wall. At least it was a manageable problem.
I stuck my finger in it and my fingertips met cold rock. I must have dug down to the original stone structure of the walls. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. Someone had piled these rocks around at the same time as the beheading of Marie Antoinette in Paris. I knelt down to collect the bits of plaster and debris that had fallen on the floor. They scratched my hand and I looked at them more closely. The mortar contained little pieces of crushed glass and stone as well as bits of horsehair. Revolutionary horsehair! Incredible, yet somehow I didn’t think Franck would be transported as I was by the historical significance of the hole.
Another few chunks of plaster tumbled down like a mini-avalanche while I was still inspecting my treasures. Just then I heard Franck’s footsteps on the veranda.
“Where are you Laura?” he called out.
“Bedroom,” I answered quietly, wondering how I could cover up my achievement.
He strode around the corner and his eyes went from me to the hole and then back to me again.
“Et merde. Et merde, et merde, et MERDE!” I couldn’t figure out if he meant the hole or Monsieur de Luca. Perhaps both.
“How did it go?” I stood up and tried to dust the plaster bits off my thighs. “What did he say?”
Franck leaned over the top of me and touched the side of the hole. More plaster crumbled away under his fingertips. “I was praying the walls wouldn’t be in this state.”
“Look!” I held out my hand. “I think this may be Revolutionary-era horsehair! I found it in the plaster. Can you believe it?”
Franck gifted me with an icy stare and kicked the wall, unleashing an impressive shower of plaster. “The humidity has gotten into them.” He said ‘humidity’ with the same tone one would use to say ‘gangrene’ to a soldier in the trenches.
“I’m sure we can fix them. What did Monsieur de Luca say?”
Franck ignored my question. “Does my wife have a special skill in plastering that she has been hiding from me until now?”
My eyes shifted back to the hole. “Not exactly.” I was, on the other hand, convinced that Franck could develop plastering skills in no time. I also sensed, however, that this wasn’t the most auspicious moment to declare my faith in him.
“With these old walls everything can fall around our ears, and until the wallpaper is off and you start going at it, you just don’t know.” He scanned the walls around us, worry growing in his eyes. “This could be a much bigger job than we bargained for. I’m not sure we will be able to get it done by May.”
“We have to get it done by May.” We had accepted - and spent - the deposits our prospective guests had sent to us. They had booked their plane tickets and their rental cars. We couldn’t cancel on them.
Franck’s index finger twitched on his right hand. He was dying for a cigarette.
“We only have to worry about these two rooms until the plans are sorted out,” I said. “What did Monsieur de Luca say?”
Franck turned and stalked into the kitchen, his finger still twitching. I followed and watched him, concerned, as he slumped down on one of the mismatched wooden chairs. “He agrees that none of this house is his…”
“That’s perfect!” I made a move to hug Franck but he stopped me with a quick hand gesture. “However, he wants to talk to his notary about it.”
Two years in law school had been long enough to learn that consulting one’s legal team was rarely a precursor to a simple resolution. I sat down in the other wooden chair.
“Let’s summarize.” If I wasn’t logical, I would be swept away with another wave of fear. “We have bought a third of a house for the price of a full one and even that third is looking like it might fall down around us. We may be engaging in an expensive legal battle, and we have tons of work to do on this house before the first of May with no idea how to do it or where to start. Is that about it?”
“We don’t have much money,” Franck added.
“Oh yes. I forgot about that.”
“We don’t have a car.”
“I forgot about that too.”
Franck rapped his knuckles on the scarred wooden kitchen table. “And in about a week or so, the seller’s children will be coming to collect all the furniture, so we won’t have anywhere to sit, eat, sleep, or faire l’amour.”
I didn’t think my heart could sink any lower, but it did. “And we have no money to buy new stuff,” I confirmed.
“Correct.”
“Christmas is in four days and we haven’t bought anyone presents yet.”
“Right.” Franck nodded.
I dropped my head to the table and began to laugh. It was so ridiculous, what else could we do? I heard Franck begin to chuckle above me.
“So, what the hell do we do?” I asked without lifting my head up.
“We give up,” Franck said.
“We can’t give up!” My head snapped up. There were our future guests, of course, but I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t at least try to make it work.
“Not forever,” Franck said. “Let’s just give up for a few days. I propose we borrow my dad’s car, go to Beaune, have a coffee, buy presents, and then eat and drink and try to forget the rest of it until Christmas is over.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but in truth the image Franck painted was just too seductive. I twisted up my hair, slipped on my warmest sweater, and swiped on a coat of lip gloss I had found in the bottom of my backpack. Denial had an undeservedly bad reputation.
Chapter 14
The kitchen in Franck’s parents’ house smelled of snails. Well, not snails exactly. Snails don’t actually smell like much all by themselves. But the way Mémé was preparing them, sautéed in parsley and garlic butter and then stuffed back into their shells, they smelled like heaven.
In the past four days we had managed to forget all about our house in a flurry of Christmas shopping, wrapping, and long frosty walks in the vineyards. We had just finished our last-minute shopping. The cold had taken grip in earnest while we had been fortifying ourselves post-shopping with stiff espressos at the Café Carnot. When we emerged, laden with wrapping paper and shopping bags, the cobblestones under our feet had become slippery with ice.
It felt like the whole world and everything in it, including myself, had fallen into an enchanted winter’s sleep. Granted, since arriving at Franck’s house to celebrate Le Reveillon with them, I had drunk two rather large glasses of kir royale - a regular kir that had been gussied up for the holidays by adding crémant, a bubbly champagne-style wine made in Burgundy – instead of the usual local white wine called aligoté.
Mesmerized by Mémé’s deft movements, I watched as she assembled the French version of a Yule log. With her spatula she spread the gateau de savoie with her homemade chocolate ganache. She then rolled it up and wrapped the cake – which now resembled a very large sausage – in a damp tea towel she had prepared in advance. This accomplished, she peered into the oven where the escargots were bubbling away.
“You can’t cook and do something else at the same time,” she told me. Mémé had a penchant for doling out unsolicited advice, and never more so than when she was in what she called her domaine, the kitchen. “You need to keep an eye on things at all times. Even stopping to answer the phone can ruin everything.”
I nodded. I was one of the only ones in the family who didn’t tease Mémé when she gave advice, partly because I was brought up to be polite, and partly because I considered her instructions on life to be sound.
Her discourses tended to be on one of two subjects. The first was cooking, bien sûr. The second was men, philandering men like her first husband in particular. This specimen with a chronically wandering eye had been the father of Franck’s two aunts (or his mother’s half-sisters, technically). Even in France, whe
re philandering was relatively commonplace, Mémé’s first husband had been a philanderer beyond compare. One of the favourite family stories was that as he lay practically on his deathbed in the hospital, he was caught by his second wife with a hand up the skirt of one of the nurses.
Mémé always advised me that philandering men couldn’t be changed: “Quand ils sont comme ça, ils seront toujours comme ça.” When they are like that, she said, they will always be like that.
Mémé hadn’t reacted to her first husband’s philandering the way women were expected to do in the 1940s, which was simply to put up with it. On the day she found him reconnoitering with a fellow villager in the hayloft, she declared she had endured enough. She divorced him, moved to Villers-la-Faye and set herself up as the village boulangère. It required a stiff spine to withstand the whispers about her scandalous divorced background and her liberal ways. Still, her bread was delicious and the villagers came in droves. The villagers referred to Mémé as la sauvage or “the savage” because she seemed to have no need for any company besides that of her daughters and her own sisters and brothers.
That all changed when her first husband up and married one of his many paramours, a woman named Aline who, from that point onwards, became Mémé’s nemesis. Aline became pregnant almost immediately. Mémé decided she had to get remarried too. She selected Georges, who lived across from the village bakery. They were married quickly and within months she was pregnant with Franck’s mother.
My Grape Escape Page 11