“Do you think you should mark out where you want him to put the living room radiator?” Gégé asked Franck the next morning.
“I think he got the point about needing to center them,” Franck said. “I don’t want to compound the insult.”
“Not to mention you’re scared he might disembowel you,” Gégé said.
“You’ve got that right,” Franck smiled and slid his arm around my shoulders.
That day we rushed into the living room after Tintin had left for lunch. Franck had been wrong about Tintin getting the point. Although he had centered the radiator vertically he had placed it way over to the right.
“Mon Dieu,” Franck buried his head in his hands. “I never even thought…wait! Laura, go to Claire’s and buy three bottles of wine. Nice ones.”
Claire’s mother, in her comforting gray bun and flowered housedress, sent me home with a slightly effervescent Aligoté, a 1995 Hautes-Côtes de Nuits and a 1996 Hautes-Côtes de Beaune – Cuvée Printemps. The spring weather made me want to meander through the vineyards and canola fields on the way home. However, I knew I couldn’t dawdle. My mission was an urgent one.
I walked in the door just in time. Tintin was shooting daggers at Franck and packing his tools in a huff. I passed Franck the carton of wine and he passed it to Tintin with a flourish.
“These are to say sorry for being such difficult clients,” he said. “They’re made by my friend Claire, just up the road. She’s a superb winemaker.”
Tintin took the bottles in his meaty hands and studied them for a time. Franck and I remained frozen. Then, for the first time since I had met him, I saw Tintin’s fleshy mouth crack open into something that looked suspiciously like a smile. He nodded and set back to work with an energy akin to enthusiasm.
That evening, after installing the radiators in the living room and the blue bedroom in an admirably centered fashion, Tintin came into the kitchen while Gégé and Antoine were having their evening kir.
“Would you like one?” Franck asked him.
“Yes.” He sat down and drummed his dusty fingers on the tabletop.
“Ah…what have you got planned for the weekend?” Gégé asked.
“I’m going to hunt wild boars.”
“Really? Where?”
The conversation and Tintin became quite animated, and one drink led to three and then four.
“I make the best omelette in the world,” Tin Tin boasted, the kirs making him downright loquacious. “Do you know what my secret is?”
Antoine leaned forward, always interested in talking about fine cooking. “Truffles?”
“Non! Boar’s blood. Just a few spoonfuls.”
“Really?” asked Franck. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“If I make a kill this weekend I’ll have you all over to taste one of my omelettes,” Tin Tin promised.
Franck’s eyes opened wide. “Wow. Merci.” I was touched, but sent a silent prayer to the Virgin Mary statue across the street that TinTin would return from his next hunting trip empty-handed.
After he left we all sat in stupefaction.
“Three glasses of kir and it was like he had a personality transplant,” I mused. “Incredible.”
“Five,” Franck corrected me. “And I was rather heavy-handed with the cassis liqueur.”
“Not that incredible.” Antoine shrugged. “All anyone needs is to feel appreciated for what they do.”
Chapter 24
A few days later I woke up and, unusual for me, bounced out of our sofa bed. Antoine had finished installing our new windows and he was going to start building our bookshelf in the fireplace. Better yet, I had finished the boring white undercoat in the far bedroom at around midnight the previous night and now I could actually begin painting the walls with color.
The color I picked for the bedroom – a lovely crisp Granny Apple green – was not a color that one sees on walls in France (or anywhere else, for that matter) very often. When Franck brought the paint pot home from the store I pried open the lid immediately. My breath caught at its beauty. Franck and Gégé had just stared down at the paint.
Gégé nudged Franck. “Glad you’ll be sleeping in the room, not me.”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to actually sleep in a room that color,” Franck said. “It tickles my brain.”
Pushing their doubt out of my mind I walked across the cool tile and flung open the shutters. The dawn was pink and promising and the tilleuls in front of the church had burst into life with a profusion of baby leaves. It was a perfect day for my colour green.
I almost danced back to the bed to wake up Franck, but I was greeted with a moan.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m dying.”
I went in the bathroom in search of our thermometer. Franck had looked pale yesterday and had been dragging his sander around as though it weighed a hundred pounds. I found the thermometer and brought it back to our sofa bed where Franck was curled in a fetal position.
“How does dying feel exactly?”
“I ache all over. My throat is on fire and my head feels like it’s being squeezed in a vice.”
“Open your mouth so I can take your temperature.”
“No,” he said. “I know I have a fever.”
I sighed. Franck didn’t get sick very often - almost never actually - but when he did he was difficult in the way of people who enjoy almost perfect health. He was always incredulous and resentful of the fact that a virus would dare bring him down.
“Come on,” I coaxed. “Open your mouth and let me stick this in, then I’ll make your breakfast for you.”
“I’m not hungry. Or thirsty.” While he was talking I managed to slip the thermometer under his tongue.
When it beeped, it read 39 degrees Celsius. Definitely a temperature. I went in the bathroom and rummaged through the shelves but realized we didn’t have any aspirin.
“I’m calling Docteur DuPont,” I announced as I returned to the living room.
“Non,” Franck groaned but I had already begun to dial. They had an appointment available in thirty minutes’ time. Parfait. I bustled Franck into some clothes and out of the door just as Gégé and Antoine let themselves in the veranda.
“Franck’s sick,” I announced. “He’s going to the doctor right now.”
“She’s making me.” Franck rolled his eyes in my direction.
They clucked in commiseration and Franck cast me a dark look. “I’m sure it was the idea of that green color in the bedroom that made me sick,” he muttered.
Gégé, Antoine and I decided to have our breakfast on the sunny stone steps while we waited for Franck. We were licking up the last crumbs from our pains au chocolat when Franck’s footsteps crunched on the gravel under the passageway.
My husband settled down on a step below me, carrying a huge plastic bag emblazoned with the unmistakable green pharmacy insignia. The size of the bag didn’t take me by surprise. The first time I got sick in France – a run-of-the-mill cold when I was only eighteen and a Rotary exchange student - my host mother in Nuits-Saint-Georges called her doctor who made a house call and prescribed a dizzying array of seven different medications for me. In Canada I would have been told to go home, drink a lot of orange juice, and maybe take a vitamin C tablet. One box contained pills so huge that I couldn’t figure out how I was possibly going to swallow them until my host brother explained to me with the help of some very urgent hand miming that they were actually suppositories. I didn’t take any of the medicine, especially not the suppositories, but I got better anyway.
“What did the doctor say?” I asked, kneading the rigid muscles of Franck’s shoulders.
“He says I’ve caught a cold in my stomach,” Franck said, leaning his head back in my lap and picking up the last croissant.
“A what?”
“A cold in my stomach. You always steal the covers at night, so voilà! Now I have caught a cold in my stomach.” Franck’s theory was preposterous, but at lea
st he wasn’t still blaming it on my choice of green paint.
“You can’t catch a cold in your stomach.”
Franck coughed to prove that yes, you could.
“Gégé?” I arched an eyebrow at him for some back-up.
“I catch cold in my stomach every winter,” Gégé said.
“So do I,” Antoine said. “It is the worst place to catch cold. What did he give you?” Their faces perked up like they did when they delved into a profound debate about plumbing valves. They started to rifle enthusiastically through Franck’s pharmaceutical loot bag.
“These ones mop up anything,” I heard Gégé say, reading the label of Franck’s box of antibiotics. “They give me terrible diarrhoea though.”
I shook my head at the lot of them and went to the bedroom.
My breath caught as I poured a ribbon of crisp, chlorophyll-filled color into the paint pan and dipped in my brush. Corners and edges first, then I could go whole hog with the roller.
Ten minutes later any doubts I harbored had vanished. The green completely transformed the room. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done something so satisfying. My brushing fell into a meditative rhythm and my thoughts began to wander. I could still hear Franck coughing and sniffing in the kitchen. I didn’t believe in the existence of stomach colds but I hated to see him so sick. My husband had such an incredible capacity for hard and sustained physical labour that sometimes I forgot that his body also had limits to what it could endure. Of course he had hit the wall. If it had been anyone else besides Franck doing all the plastering and lifting and troubleshooting they would have hit the wall two months ago. In our couple I was the one with the crazy ideas and the ability to sell them to those around me but Franck was the one who threw body and mind into making them happen. We were a pretty effective team, although today it hit home how much I needed him by my side to move forward on our project. We were racing down the final stretch and couldn’t afford any casualties, but especially not Franck. There was no way we could finish without him.
I attacked another corner. It was scary to depend so much on someone else. I ruminated on this for a few minutes and then it dawned on me that at Oxford I had been independent. During those two years I had relied on no one but myself…and I had been miserable with the isolation.
Franck and I were a team again. Franck couldn’t finish this house without me any more than I could finish it without him. We both needed Gégé and Antoine, and even Paulo and the enigmatic Tintin. We were all locked together in this project. It was still possible that we were locked into a huge disaster, but the bottom line was we all needed each other.
I was hard at work on my final wall when I heard the chatter of voices from the street below.
“What do you think it means?” I heard one person say.
“I have never seen anything - ” another began.
“Can you just imagine what Marthe would say?” a third voice interrupted.
I went and leaned out the window. Gathered out in the middle of the road in front of our house was a band of villagers, not people who I saw together very often but who must have been out strolling around enjoying the warm spring air.
“Bonjour!” I called out, my bright green paintbrush over my shoulder. “What do you think of the new colour?”
They fell silent.
“I’d better get back to work,” I said. “Just wait until you see the colour of the shutters!”
With a wide grin I left them to their gossip and continued painting. I started rolling paint on the walls with the big roller. My arm soon felt like it was going to fall off, but I kept painting. Gégé came in to take a break from plumbing the kitchen sink and check on my progress.
“What do you think?” I surveyed my work. Almost three quarters of the walls were now green. “Is it growing on you?”
“Non. Definitely not.”
“Not even un petit peu?”
“I do believe that you may be un petit peu insane,” he conceded.
Franck coughed his way into the room, one hand crossed over his stomach to protect the cold in there. His eyes widened as he took in the walls and he clutched his head. “Arghhhhhh,” he moaned. “Why do I let you make such crazy decisions?”
“You’ll love it,” I said. “Eventually.” I put my roller down and went over to give him a kiss.
“Careful,” he said afterwards. “I don’t want to get you sick.”
“You won’t. This green colour seems to have medicinal properties for me.” I pivoted him around. “Now go and try to rest in the living room.”
“Antoine is building our bookshelf in there. I’ll just have to drag around today and do what I can. Aren’t you worried about getting finished in time?”
I shrugged. “I figure that one way or another we will finish. We have no choice.”
“I just don’t see how we’re going to get from where we are today to finished.” Franck massaged his forehead.
“We don’t need to see how in order to do it,” I said.
“Hmmmm.” Franck walked out of the room. “I think my wife is becoming a philosopher.”
Mid-afternoon somebody knocked timidly on the bedroom door where I was working on my second coat. I turned around to see André, Franck’s father, glancing around the room with a stunned look on his face.
“Bonjour!” I said and went over to give him les bises.
“You’ve been working hard,” he observed.
“Oui. What do you think of the color?”
He blinked several times and cleared his throat. He finally patted my shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Laura. I’m certain it won’t look quite so green when there’s furniture in the room.” André gave the room one last horrified look and then departed.
I studied the color again. I didn’t seem to be seeing it with the same eyes as the others. I loved it. Could I continue loving it knowing how much everyone hated it?
Franck came back in. “Mon dieu. I didn’t think the color could be as bad as I remembered but it’s actually worse.”
“It’s just paint.”
“I’m sure I will never be able to sleep in here.”
“It will be dark. Your eyes will be closed.”
“What about when we’re in bed during the day? I’m not sure I can do you justice surrounded by this color.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
He crossed his arms and sighed but the corner of his mouth twitched. “I suppose we’ll just have to work at it.”
“I’m game,” I said. “But not right this second. I have to finish this coat before it dries.”
I needed to trust my instincts. Maybe nobody could see the beauty of my color choice yet but, just like the house when we had purchased it, that didn’t mean beauty wasn’t there.
Antoine was the only one who didn’t have just bad things to say about my paint color. It was “très original” according to him.
Half way into my second coat I felt like my back was going to snap in two if I didn’t stretch it out. I meandered into the living room where he was cutting shelves for the bookcase in the fireplace. I admired the precision of his movements.
“How is the painting going?” he asked.
“Good,” I said. “Except that everyone but me and you hates the color.” He shrugged, as if to say this was small potatoes indeed.
“Is the other bedroom next?”
“I think I’ll paint the kitchen buffet after, while it’s nice out. Who knows how long this hot weather is going to last.”
He plucked his pencil from behind his ear and made a mark on the piece of wood he was working on. “What color will you paint it?”
“White. I love the lines of the buffet, but that faux wood varnish that Marthe must have painted it with is horrific.”
Antoine laughed. “That varnish was all the rage thirty years ago. You’re going to have a rough time trying to paint over it. It repels every substance known to man.”
I decided
this wasn’t really worth contemplating at the moment and gazed around the room while I did a few backstretches. My eyes wandered over to the living room buffet.
“That monster” - I nodded over to it - “is going straight to the antique dealer as soon as we can find enough people to help us squeeze it through the door.”
Antoine stopped his measuring. “Quoi? How can you say that? That buffet is by far the most beautiful piece of furniture here.”
“Seriously? You really think that? It gives me nightmares.”
Antoine held out his hand to me. “Come here,” he said, and led me over to the buffet. He put my hand down on the wood top and motioned at me to stroke it. The wood felt silky and smooth under my fingertips.
“It is carved out of pear wood I believe,” he said. He pulled out a drawer and pointed to the tight fitting tongue and groove joints. “Have you noticed this? There’s not a nail in this whole thing and yet it fits together like a perfectly crafted puzzle. Can you imagine the skill of the person who carved it? It’s old too.”
“It is?”
Antoine ran his fingers down the glass fronts of the two upper cabinets. “Look closely,” he ordered. “Do you see the tiny bubbles? This isn’t manufactured glass, it was pulled by hand.”
There were tiny bubbles in there, caught in the wavy glass. They were quite fascinating actually. “I never noticed those before.”
“If I were to hazard a guess I would say this dates back to the mid 1800’s. It is without a doubt the most exquisite and oldest piece you have in this house. Do me a favour – don’t sell it yet. Think about it for a bit longer.”
“D’accord,” I found myself agreeing and ran my hand over the wood again. “I’ll wait a bit longer.” Maybe I too could be blind to beauty right in front of me.
Chapter 25
The sun rose hot on our last day. I sipped my morning café au lait on the stone stairs and turned my face up like a sunflower to the warmth of the spring sunshine. The lavender planted in the dirt below seemed to have doubled in size during the night as I had slept. A riot of sweet peas had sprung up from nowhere.
My Grape Escape Page 22