The French House

by Nick Alexander

  The woman frowns and wrinkles her nose slightly as if she finds the sight of us a little distasteful.

  ‘Tatie?’ she repeats doubtfully. ‘Mais vous êtes qui? Et qu’est-ce que vous faites, ici?’ Which I understand to mean, Who are you? And what are you doing here?

  ‘It’s me,’ Victor answers in French. ‘Victor Ynchausty. Evelyn’s son.’

  The woman opens her eyes wide and rolls them in a wide sweep, taking in every corner of the room and ceiling. I’m not quite sure what the expression means, but I think it’s a manifestation of surprise. She holds out her hand. ‘Distira,’ she says. ‘Distira Dalmasso,’ and I think, Aha! She isn’t your aunt, you twit!

  They shake hands and Victor beckons me over with his free hand.

  ‘CC – ma tante Distira.’

  I try not to frown as I shake her cold, wet hand. ‘Bonjour,’ I say. ‘Enchantée.’

  ‘CC?’ she repeats.

  ‘Oui, CC,’ I say.

  ‘CC . . .’ she says again, then, turning to Victor, ‘Elle est Anglaise?’

  ‘Oui,’ Victor says. ‘Elle est Anglaise.’

  ‘Um, Irish, if you don’t mind,’ I remind him.

  Distira performs the same wide-eyed roll once again and then pulls her hand free.

  ‘Elle ne vaut rien, vous savez,’ she says with a nod, which I think means, She’s worthless, you know.

  I silently stand as they talk and attempt to decode the conversation, but it’s machine gun speed and within seconds I have no idea what subject they are talking about. So instead I muster a vague smile and try not to stare at her rotten teeth or dirty fingernails as I wonder if she really could have just said that I was worthless. Since Victor seems unfazed, surely not.

  Once she has pulled her hood back up and vanished into the rain, Victor closes the door and wide-eyes me.

  ‘Tell me she’s not your aunt!’ I say.

  He nods slowly. ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘And who’s worthless, anyway?’

  ‘Worthless?’

  ‘Yes, she said, “Elle ne vaut rien”, didn’t she?’

  ‘The house.’

  ‘Oh, the house! Of course. I forgot that houses are feminine. Anyway, which house? This house?’

  ‘Yeah. She says it’s badly built. Damp and cold in winter. Too hot in summer.’

  I pull a face. ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘That’s not very encouraging.’

  ‘No,’ Victor agrees.

  ‘Does she understand that you’re her nephew?’ I ask. ‘Because I couldn’t see much family love leaking out there.’

  Victor shrugs. ‘I don’t know, to be honest. That was weird, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Very,’ I agree.

  ‘I haven’t seen her for about thirty years. I think she’s just been very isolated.’

  ‘All the same.’

  ‘And I think they’re dubious about newcomers in places like this.’

  ‘Right. Except that she’s your aunt.’

  ‘We’ll have to win her over this evening,’ Victor says.

  I frown. ‘This evening?’

  ‘Yeah. You heard that, didn’t you?’

  I shake my head. ‘Not a word. She could have been speaking Swahili for all I understood.’

  ‘She invited us to dinner.’

  ‘She what?’

  I pull a face. I’m thinking about her dirty fingernails preparing dinner, imagining the state of her kitchen, and suffering over the excruciating attempts we will have to make to communicate all at the same time.

  ‘You said yes,’ Victor says. ‘I looked at you and you nodded.’

  ‘But you said we were going to a hotel,’ I protest.

  ‘Yeah, but . . .’ Victor whines.

  ‘But?’

  ‘Well, one, she’s my aunt. Two, she’s our only neighbour. Three, she just invited us to dinner. Four, she’s going to try to get me the number for a plumber and a builder. And five, I looked at you and you nodded.’

  ‘So, no hotel?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Victor says. ‘I promise, OK?’

  I sigh deeply. ‘You’ll have to translate for me,’ I say, aghast at the idea, but clever enough to know when a battle has already been lost.

  ‘Her accent is pretty bad, I know.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t believe that she’s your aunt.’

  ‘I don’t think she can either.’

  ‘Your mother’s sister?’ I ask. ‘Or your father’s?’

  ‘Mum’s. Dad’s side is where the money was. But they disowned him for marrying her.’

  ‘Well, yes . . .’

  ‘And no, my mum didn’t look like her. Actually, Distira looked pretty different when I was little.’

  ‘Maybe it’s living here that does that to you.’ I give a playful smile.

  ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Would you still love me?’ I ask. ‘Even if I ended up looking like your aunt?’

  ‘No,’ Victor says.

  ‘Scary thought.’

  Victor performs the wide-eyed ceiling roll.

  ‘Don’t you ever do that again,’ I tell him. ‘Or I’ll divorce you.’ I wonder why I have used the word ‘divorce’ and what I shall reply if Victor questions it.

  ‘Do what?’ he asks innocently.

  ‘This,’ I say, imitating the eye-roll.

  Victor starts to smirk, and I realise that he has done it on purpose. ‘I knew you’d like that. My mum used to do it too.’

  ‘It looks completely mad,’ I say.

  ‘Oh, totally,’ he agrees. ‘Anyway, you’d have to marry me first, if you want to divorce me.’

  ‘Yes, um, anyway . . . You’re quite sure that she’s your aunt?’ I say, desperate to change the subject.

  ‘Yep. She’s really my aunt.’

  It rains all day without letting up, so we just lounge around as much as the cramped van will allow – me reading, Victor playing sudoku.

  At 6 p.m., as requested, we don our macs and head through the drizzle to the house next door.

  ‘I am sorry about this,’ Victor says. ‘But I swear I thought you said yes.’

  ‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I lie. ‘Genuine French country food. It’ll be something to tell people about when I get home.’

  When we reach the house, it looks as cold and uninviting as before. This time, though, a second car – a small red Twingo – sits next to the rusty Lada. ‘Maybe she wasn’t even here before,’ I say, nodding at the car. ‘Maybe the Lada’s dead. Maybe that’s her car.’

  When the front door opens, it is not Distira’s face that appears, but the drawn features of a pale, wiry woman with wispy blonde hair.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ she says. ‘Carole.’

  ‘Bonsoir,’ Victor replies. ‘Victor.’ He leans in and kisses the woman on both cheeks.

  ‘Hello,’ she says to me, smiling unconvincingly, as if it somehow hurts her face to do so. ‘I am Carole, the friend of Distira. You are English, yes?’

  ‘Irish,’ I say.

  She shrugs, as if to imply that it amounts to the same thing. Copying Victor’s lead, I lean in to kiss her as well, but she extends a hand instead and so, blushing due to the apparent faux pas of having attempted to kiss her, I step back and shake hands instead.

  ‘She is in the cuisine,’ she says, ushering us into the lounge. ‘Please, sit. I go get drinks.’

  Victor hands her the bottle of wine we brought and she grimaces strangely and performs an even weirder curtsy as she backs out of the room.

  Victor sinks immediately onto the monstrously ugly brown vinyl sofa, and I stand and look in wonder at the walls. ‘Come sit down,’ Victor says, patting the sofa beside him. ‘You look like a Dalmasso.’

  ‘A Dalmasso?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, doing his wide-eyed room sweep again, which makes me snort.

  ‘Have you seen the pictures?’ I ask, taking a seat beside him and watching as he scans the walls. They are plastered with photos of random anima
ls cut, badly, from newspapers.

  ‘I guess she likes dogs,’ Victor says, smirking.

  ‘And llamas,’ I say, pointing to a faded clipping in the corner of the room, and struggling not to laugh.

  ‘Great wallpaper, though,’ Victor says.

  ‘It looks like one of those interiors from an Almodóvar film,’ I say, taking in the vast orange swirl of the underlying paper.

  ‘Here,’ Carole says, entering the room with a tray. ‘Aperitif!’

  She lifts the four glasses and an old wine bottle full of a green soupy herb concoction from the tray and then sits opposite us. She must notice me staring at the bottle, because she catches my eye and says, ‘Génépi. Eau de vie.’

  I nod and smile.

  ‘Fait maison?’ Victor asks.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘It’s home-made,’ he translates for me.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, struggling to muffle the irony in my voice. ‘I spotted that.’

  ‘Alors!’ Distira says as she walks into the room. Actually, Distira isn’t a woman who walks. She is a woman who trudges. Wearily. But in all fairness, she has scrubbed up reasonably well. She is wearing a tartan skirt and a big grey jumper. Her hands, if not her pinafore, look clean now, and her hair is washed and bouncy. If I can just avoid looking at those teeth . . .

  She slides a plate of petits fours onto the table. They look incredibly professional, and I wonder whether she is a master baker, or simply a good defroster. She kisses Victor bonsoir and, in an attempt at avoiding my previous error, I hold out a hand for her to shake. She grabs it and uses it to pull me towards her, then kisses me twice, while holding me in a surprisingly powerful embrace.

  When she releases me, I see that Carole is staring at us. We sit again and Distira says something, apparently addressing both Victor and me, and Carole starts to slop the green liquid into the glasses. As before, I don’t understand enough of what Distira is saying to even work out what the subject is.

  A couple of hours, I think. You just need to get through the next couple of hours without upsetting anyone. They’re his family.

  Distira pauses in whatever she is saying and looks at me. I smile and shrug blankly. ‘Je suis désolée,’ I say. I’m sorry.

  ‘Distira is saying that Carole here is an English teacher,’ Victor says.

  ‘Ahh!’ I exclaim. ‘So that’s why your English is so good.’

  ‘It could be good,’ Carole says. ‘I am teaching for twenty years.’

  I frown and then belatedly understand. ‘Oh! It should be,’ I say.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Nothing . . . I was . . . agreeing,’ I splutter, realising that correcting the English teacher isn’t going to make me any friends here tonight.

  Distira pushes my serving of eau de vie towards me and lifts her glass. With some trepidation, I raise my drink. Victor catches my eye, sniffs his own and almost invisibly raises an eyebrow. The liquid smells like Deep Heat rub.

  Distira raises her glass a little higher and says something.

  ‘She toast your holidays,’ Carole explains.

  ‘Chin chin,’ Victor says, so I copy him and pretend to sip my drink. The liquid barely touches my lip, but even that’s more than enough. It tastes like stinging nettles soaked in petrol. I’m pretty sure you could run the Lada on it.

  ‘Mais nous ne sommes pas en vacances,’ Victor begins to explain. We’re not on holiday.

  Because I can’t understand Distira’s half of the conversation, I study her face for clues. And though I may not know what her lips are saying, I can read her expression perfectly. When Victor says that we will be living here fulltime, I see horror hidden behind a dishonest smile. And when Victor explains his dream of rearing goats and making cheese, I see disbelief and not a little amusement hidden behind both women’s nodding encouragement.

  Carole offers me the plate of petits fours so I take a vol-au-vent stuffed with prawn mayonnaise and bite into it. The centre is still frozen, so to disguise my inability to eat it, forgetting myself, I sip at my eau de vie. This results in such a disastrous coughing-fit that Victor, thinking that I am choking, has to put his own glass down in order to pat me on the back.

  ‘You’re not use to then,’ Carole says, nodding at the glass. ‘The real eau de vie.’

  ‘No,’ I splutter, my eyes watering. ‘No, not used to that at all.’

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘Tu parles un peu Français?’

  ‘Oui! Un peu. But it’s not very good yet. Not as good as your English.’

  ‘It’s good for me to hear the accent,’ she says. ‘I don’t meet so many English people up here.’

  ‘I’m sure. But my accent is a bit Irish. My dad was Irish, and I grew up in Ireland, so I still have a bit of an accent. It comes and goes.’

  Carole nods and frowns. ‘British . . . English . . . Royaume-Uni . . . It is complicated for us.’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I live in London now, but I’m not British at all. Or English. Or from the United Kingdom, even. I’m Irish.’

  ‘I see,’ Carole says, but I can see that she doesn’t.

  ‘You know Ireland?’ I say. ‘The island of Ireland over here?’ I draw the British Isles with one finger on the table.

  ‘Of course,’ she says.

  ‘And it’s divided in two? The top bit, Northern Ireland, is in the UK – the United Kingdom. And the rest of it is Ireland. A completely different government, no queen, we have the euro . . .’

  ‘Oh, you have the euro in England now?’ she says. ‘I didn’t know this.’

  ‘No, we . . .’ I sigh. ‘Actually, you know what, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘I see a film recently,’ she says. ‘The history.’

  ‘A history of Ireland?’

  ‘Yes. With the Australian. Mel Gibson. I like very much.’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘Braveheart, perhaps?’ she says.

  ‘Oh, no, that’s Scotland,’ I tell her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  Victor, who has been having a parallel conversation in French, nudges me and says, ‘Distira is asking if you like the eau de vie.’

  ‘Oh, it’s unbelievable stuff,’ I say, knowing that only Victor will spot the irony in my choice of adjective.

  ‘I’ll tell you how she makes it later,’ he says, and I can hear laughter in his voice.

  After our frozen petit four and Deep Heat aperitif – is the one designed to thaw the other, I wonder – we move through to the big kitchen-cum-dining room for dinner. Despite the fact that the oven is on, the room – barely more modern than our own kitchen next door – is still about five degrees below comfortable.

  The big, rather lovely farm table, which looks as if it has been hewn from a tree with an axe, is part covered with a yellow olive-branch motif tablecloth. A huge, and rather scary-looking dog – a Rottweiler, perhaps – is asleep on an armchair in the corner of the room, but it merely opens one eye, checks us out, and then falls back to sleep.

  Any hopes of traditional French farm food vanish entirely when Distira serves the starter: a factory-made quiche served straight from the aluminium tray with pre-prepared salad tipped unapologetically from the bag. But at least there is no pretence that the food might be home-made; when Victor politely comments how good it is, Distira even gets the box from the bin to show him what brand he needs to buy.

  After this, she serves us boiled potatoes and salmon in white-wine sauce. The salmon is so similar in taste and quantity to our boil-in-the-bag meal from a few nights ago, I suspect that it probably came from the same supermarket.

  The dessert is probably the best part of the meal – the first Viennetta I have tasted since the eighties. Who knew they still existed? And in France! At the first bite, childhood memories come flooding in.

  ‘Well, that was top-class nosh,’ Victor says as we walk home.

  ‘Huh,’ I laugh. ‘It was indeed!’

  It is Victor who wakes up first. I become aware of him
moving around in the van and struggle to open my eyes, and then to focus properly in the weak moonlight. I feel cold but clammy at the same time. I shiver violently then ask, ‘Where are you going?’

  Pulling a jumper over his head, he replies, ‘The loo. I’ve got gut-ache.’

  He slides open the door to the van, letting in a blast of freezing air, and then closes it behind him with a thud. I listen to him crunching across the gravel and take in the sensations within my own body. I touch my forehead with the back of my hand – I’m sweating. I shiver again from the cold. I feel as if I have caught the flu. And then a wave of cramp sweeps through my insides making me gasp in surprise. I roll onto one side in the hope that this will feel less uncomfortable – it doesn’t.

  I try lying on my front, my back, rolled up into a ball, and then, with a sigh, I switch on the light and start to pull on my jeans.

  Waiting for Victor to return and free up the ‘facilities’ is excruciating but, just in time, I hear the front door to the house creak open. I slide open the van door and sprint across the frosty gravel.

  ‘You too?’ Victor asks, reaching out to brush my arm as we pass each other in the moonlight.

  ‘Uhuh!’ I groan.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘but I couldn’t . . .’

  ‘Jesus,’ I say, when I reach the bathroom. Because, of course, the bloody pipes must be frozen again, and what Victor hasn’t been able to do is flush.

  And thus the night from hell passes. We take it in turns to run knock-kneed to the bathroom. I eventually discover that the kitchen tap still works, so at least we are able to ferry buckets of water for flushing purposes. But the combination of stomach pain, cold and lack of sleep make it truly one of the worse nights of my life. I feel shattered, feverish and irritable.

  The temperature outside the van is, Victor reckons, about minus-five and the horrid bathroom isn’t much warmer. It’s like sitting in an industrial deep freeze. And with the constant opening and closing of the van door, even the Volkswagen’s little heating system struggles to maintain a reasonable temperature.

  Our cramps finally subside at 9 a.m., just as the sun comes over the mountain top and finally starts to warm the van. Lying rigidly side by side, our only contact Victor’s hand lain over my own, we finally start to doze.