The French House

by Nick Alexander

  ‘Did your mum and dad see each other?’

  ‘No! Well, one time Dad drove me out here and dropped me at the end of the road just as Mum was walking home, so they crossed paths. They shook hands and said hello. But that was as close as you could ever get them. Even that was too much. Mum went on a bender the second we got in.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘What did they die of?’

  ‘Dad – a heart attack.’

  ‘Like mine.’

  ‘And Mum – liver failure.’

  ‘Of course. I’m so sorry. That all sounds really horrible.’

  ‘It’s just life. Shit happens and you get through it.’

  ‘And Angela?’

  Victor shrugs. ‘I don’t know. She found someone else to pay for her cruises, I expect. Dad loved her, but we weren’t exactly mates.’

  ‘The house is beautiful, though,’ I say. ‘Are you sure you want to sell this one and keep the farm, not the other way around?’

  Victor snorts. ‘Now that’s what I knew you would say.’

  ‘Well, I hate to say it, but it’s much nicer.’

  ‘I know. But there’s no land here. And no land means no way to earn a living. And frankly there are too many ghosts for me to be able to live here, anyway.’

  ‘Right. Of course.’

  ‘Look, I’m hungry,’ Victor says, suddenly unlinking himself from me and sitting up. ‘There’s a pasta place at the end of the street. Well, there always used to be. Let’s go have a look.’

  Victor’s pasta restaurant has, like two thirds of the world’s restaurants, become a pizzeria. But neither of us care much about food tonight.

  Victor’s mind is clearly stuck in the past and the more he tells me about his childhood, the more I feel that I understand who he is and how he came to be this lovely, gentle man. He recounts amazing stories of hiding his mother’s bottles of pastis, of having to call the police because she was so drunk he couldn’t summon her to get back into the house, of putting out a fire she had caused by falling asleep while smoking. He tells of how he and his best friend, both sixteen, had to pin his mum’s equally drunk boyfriend to the floor to prevent him stabbing her with a kitchen knife.

  And then we move, somehow, onto my own family, and I tell him in detail about my father’s death, about Waiine, about Mum and Saddam, and though we have told each other snatches of this stuff in the past, by the time we have finished I’m feeling a most unusual sensation of fatigue, emotional rawness, and sadness at the meanness of life, combined with an incredibly strong sense of love for human beings in general – including those no longer with us – and for Victor in particular.

  We walk, slightly tipsy, back to the house, and there, in Victor’s childhood bed, beneath a plastic helicopter, we start to make love.

  ‘I never did it in this bed before,’ Victor whispers, staring into my eyes.

  And then, perhaps to scare the ghosts of the past away, we have the most serious, reverent sex that we have ever had before falling asleep entwined in the tiny bed.

  I’m awoken twice during the night by Victor’s erection pressing against me, and so we have sleepy sex all over again. By the time our regular morning session is over, we have made love four times. Which, being a personal best, makes me like this house even more.

  Over breakfast of croissants and coffee in a nearby café, I ask Victor about this. ‘So is it the house?’ I ask quietly. ‘Is it being here that’s making you so rampant?’

  ‘Are you complaining?’ he asks, grinning wryly.

  ‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘Not one bit.’

  Victor shrugs and sips at his coffee and stares out of the plate glass window where a woman has just knocked over her shopping trolley. She is running around catching onions as they roll away. ‘Maybe it’s the bed,’ he says.

  ‘Maybe we should take it home then,’ I say, not entirely joking.

  ‘Maybe it’s all the adolescent fantasies that happened in that bed.’

  I nod and rip off a chunk of buttery croissant. ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘Actually, it might be all the death,’ Victor says, seriously. ‘Maybe sex is an antidote to death.’

  ‘Which makes even more sense,’ I say, speaking through a mouthful of croissant. ‘Sex leading to life. Sex creating life.’

  ‘Hopefully,’ Victor says, with a wink. And the shadow of Carole’s tarot reading creeps across my mind.

  We spend that first day visiting estate agents and arranging evaluation visits, the second sorting through the possessions in the house, separating out which items Victor wants to keep, those he doesn’t care about, and those that he can’t bear to see ever again.

  What time we have left is spent wandering around the pretty mediaeval town that is Baixas, sipping coffee, sleeping, and, of course, having sex.

  Back in the same café, over an identical breakfast, Victor asks, ‘So do you still want to go to Perpignan? Because we can, but it’s just that I feel kinda ready to get back and get on with things.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say, even though it isn’t really true. ‘With our new sofa and new sideboard and new garden furniture.’

  ‘If it all fits in the van,’ Victor says.

  HOME ALONE

  When we get back to La Forge with our haul – the sofa doesn’t fit but the armchairs do – the sense of disappointment at the state of the house overrides any relief at being ‘home’. There is no sign whatsoever that Clappier has even visited during our absence.

  ‘Un-fucking-believable,’ Victor spits, looking as angry as I have ever seen him and already reaching for his mobile.

  As I light the range and warm a carton of soup, Victor leaves Clappier a message that is so acidic it makes my ears hurt.

  After a bad night’s sleep, caused mainly by the cold – it seems that it takes about twelve hours for the house to warm up again – I make coffee and, in an attempt at smoothing the tense atmosphere, pancakes. Funnily enough, it’s what my mother used to do when Dad was upset about something.

  ‘I can’t believe that he hasn’t called back,’ Victor says as I place a plate in front of him.

  ‘Well, give him time,’ I say, stroking his shoulder. ‘It’s only half nine. And he does have other clients. He has been incredibl—’

  ‘It’s about keeping your word,’ Victor interrupts. ‘He promised it would all be finished.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t change anything getting all bent out of shape, so just try to enjoy your breakfast.’

  He smiles weakly at me. ‘Sorry. I didn’t sleep well.’

  ‘Me neither. It was cold.’

  ‘I got up and added more wood to the boiler,’ he says.

  ‘So did I. I reckon we might need some kind of back-up heating so the place doesn’t freeze just because we’re out for the day.’

  Victor nods. ‘Maybe,’ he says, fingering his mobile again.

  ‘Does this coffee taste weird to you?’ I ask.

  He sips his, pulls a face, and stirs in an extra teaspoon of sugar. ‘It’s just cheap, I think. Robusta instead of Arabica.’

  ‘It’s the same coffee we had before,’ I say. ‘But it tastes like paracetamol.’

  Victor shrugs. ‘It’s just cheap coffee,’ he says.

  Though I never have sugar in coffee, this morning I follow Victor’s lead and sweeten it, but it still doesn’t taste right to me.

  Victor looks at his mobile and then frowns. ‘It says I have a message,’ he says. ‘How did that happen? The bloody thing didn’t even ring.’

  He one-handedly forks pancake into his mouth as he listens to the messages.

  ‘Clappier?’ I ask when he hangs up.

  ‘No. The estate agent. They phoned yesterday while we were driving home. They have a buyer.’

  ‘No!’ I say, realising as I do so that I have a mouth full of pancake and raising one hand to cover it. ‘They’re offering the full price?’

  ‘Yep. And they want to rent it until the sale goes through.’

&nb
sp; ‘That is keen. But great news, surely?’

  ‘It is, I guess. I just can’t help but think we should have asked for more. I’ll have to go back down to Perpignan now. It was hardly worth coming home.’

  ‘How soon?’

  He shrugs. ‘They’re gonna call me back, but it sounds like they want to move in within a week if possible and rent it until the sale completes. I need to get someone in to take away all the furniture.’

  ‘Are you having second thoughts about selling the place?’ I ask, hopefully.

  Victor shakes his head. ‘No. It’s just, you know . . . the end of one thing. The beginning of something else.’

  ‘You’re not going to call Clappier again?’ I say as Victor raises the phone to his ear. ‘Give the guy time to see he has a message at least.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Victor says. ‘I’m calling Georges.’

  I head through to the bathroom and sit on the cold seat for ten minutes as I wait to see if my feeling of queasiness is going to transform into something more definite. Like projectile vomiting. I might still have, I figure, the remnants of swine flu. But other than a vague sense of icky dis-ease, nothing manifests.

  When I get back, Victor is leaning against one of the surviving kitchen cabinets. He looks sheepish. ‘What happened?’ I ask when he hangs up.

  ‘I wish I could delete that message I left for Clappier.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Georges says he’s laid up with swine flu.’

  ‘Oh no! And we all know who he caught that from.’

  ‘I wonder if Distira is OK,’ Victor says. ‘Could be bad for a woman of her age. I better go and check.’

  When Victor returns from his aunt’s, he has a strange look on his face.

  ‘Is she OK?’ I ask, looking up from a pot of paint I’m stirring, the fumes of which are making my head spin.

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine. But she asked me if she could come with us!’

  ‘Really?’ I say, standing and placing one hand in the small of my back as I stretch. ‘Why?’

  Victor shrugs. ‘I guess she has memories of the place too,’ he says.

  I nod thoughtfully. ‘You said no, right? Tell me that we’re not taking Distira to Perpignan?’

  Victor laughs. ‘Of course not. I knew you wouldn’t want to. And I’m not that keen on spending ten hours in the car with her myself, to be honest.’

  ‘So we’re leaving tomorrow?’ I ask.

  Victor nods. ‘Now that I know what has to happen, I just want to get it all done. Is that OK?’

  I nod and sigh in sympathy. ‘There’s still so much stuff there,’ I say.

  ‘I’m gonna phone them and arrange a meeting at the house tomorrow afternoon. See if I can flog them some of the furniture. And get a local brocanteur to come in and take the rest away. Distira asked us to bring that little telephone table back for her, by the way. It’s the only thing she asked for. It was their mother’s, apparently.’

  I nod.

  ‘You look really sexy in that.’

  ‘This?’ I say, laughing. I’m wearing an old white shirt of Victor’s as a smock. It’s splattered with paint.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. ‘It makes me quite . . .’

  But I don’t rise to the bait because I simply don’t feel that well. Waves of nausea keep building and then fading, and by mid-afternoon, I give up on painting and announce that I am going back to bed.

  ‘Is that an invitation?’ Victor asks me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘But it isn’t. I just need to sleep.’

  When the alarm clock goes at seven the next morning, it is immediately obvious that I won’t be able to go. Not wanting to worry Victor with the state of my health on top of everything else, I tell him that I have slept badly and ask if he would mind terribly if I stay behind. I’m relieved and yet vaguely irritated by how little he seems to care.

  By 8 a.m. he has gone, leaving me alone for the first time ever in the farmhouse.

  As protection against the supplementary chill left by my guy’s departure, I stoke the range to the hilt and return to bed for an extra hour’s sleep.

  When I do wake up, it is nearly lunchtime, and I have a feeling that I have been summoned from my slumbers by a noise within the house. I lie there holding my breath for a moment as I listen, and eventually decide that it must have been the wind whistling in the eaves that woke me.

  I imagine Victor still driving and, thinking guiltily about him sorting through his parent’s furniture, I briefly regret not having made the effort to go with him. But then a wave of sickness sweeps through my gut.

  I realise that we now have an armchair and that I can spend the day reading next to the range. Though I don’t dare use the internet on my phone because of the crazy roaming charges, I can still text my mother and get her to phone me with her Moroccan calling card. I can phone SJ and Mark too, to find out what’s happening back home.

  Home. I stare at the ceiling for a moment and try to work out what the word means. Where is home? Because the truth is that it still doesn’t feel like the answer to that question is ‘here’. I wonder how long it might take before that is the case. I wonder if that will ever be the case.

  Still vaguely listening to the sounds of the empty house, I get out of bed and pull my dressing gown on. As I open the bedroom door, I hear a noise – a ceramic chink of a cup against a saucer, or a teaspoon against a glass. I freeze and hold my breath.

  My skin prickles when through the tiny gap in the open door I see a shadow fly past, followed by the distinct rush of air as our front door opens and closes. I glance around the bedroom for a possible weapon, but there isn’t a single heavy object within the room.

  My heart now beating double time, I creak the door open and peer out, then slowly edge my way into the kitchen. Seeing that there is no one here, I run to the window and look outside, and then, grabbing a full bottle of Bordeaux for defence purposes, I dash to the front door and run barefoot outside, determined to see who it was.

  The chill of the howling wind takes my breath away. I scan the horizon, half expecting to see Clappier’s car, or Jean-Noël’s moped, or some other entirely innocent explanation as to why someone has been in my kitchen while I was asleep. But other than Distira’s distant Lada, no one is present. And then a figure appears from behind the Lada, walking towards Distira’s house. It’s Carole.

  As she crosses the front garden to Distira’s porch, she glances towards me. She’s a long way away, so it could be my imagination running riot, but it seems to me that the way she moves is somehow fox-like, the way she turns her head is edgy, nervous, guilty, perhaps. And then she raises one hand, and waves and smiles at me. Which, let’s face it, is a first.

  The front door closed behind me, I stand and survey the kitchen and try to imagine what on earth Carole could have been doing here.

  Perhaps she thought that I was out; in fact, that’s almost certainly what she would think. They would have assumed that I had gone to Perpignan with Victor, and seeing no car outside would imagine that the house was empty. But that doesn’t explain what she was doing here.

  I remember the ceramic ‘chinking’ sound and scan the various pots and pans for a possible source. I cross the kitchen and lift the lids of various jars in an attempt at finding the source, sniffing the contents of the tea, coffee and sugar jars as I do so. But it’s no use, because everything smells strange today. Everything smells metallic, like snow.

  Maybe they had run out of coffee, I figure. Maybe they came to borrow something. With the nearest shop an hour away, that would be understandable. So maybe she was caught in the act of borrowing something, and suddenly felt like a thief and chose to run away rather than fessing up.

  A sinister explanation crosses my mind. Maybe everything smells strange, tastes strange because . . . well, because it is strange.

  I shake my head and tell myself to think like an adult, rather than a paranoid child. Because what possible explanation cou
ld there be for such craziness? Unless they simply don’t, as I have always suspected, like having us living next door. But as Victor says, from that to suggesting that Carole is creeping in and poisoning the coffee . . . There! I have said it. I only said it in my mind, but I have said it!

  Feeling vaguely ashamed, I shake my head and head through to the bathroom. By the time I have showered, the idea seems like nothing more than a silly fantasy I have entertained. I decide to be a grown up and deal with this in an adult, head-on way.

  I make coffee from a fresh pack, nibble half a slice of toast and then, because I still have no appetite, bin the rest. Taking a deep breath, I pull my big winter coat from one of the new pegs that Victor put up yesterday and head off to face them.

  My knock on Distira’s front door goes unanswered, but knowing that if her Lada is present, she is too, I head around the side of the house to see if they are out back. Seeing no sign of either, I weave my way through the junk and head towards the top of the hill, thinking that even if I don’t manage to see them from there, it’s a beautiful bright day for the walk. As I near the top of the hill I’m rewarded with the sound of Distira’s voice carrying on a gust of breeze.

  I discover the two women collecting something from the undergrowth. I’m unable to see what this is because the second Distira sees me, she throws a tea-towel over the contents of her basket.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I say. Thinking that if we’re going to live here, it’s probably worth knowing what bounty the forest has to offer, I nod at the basket. ‘Vous collectionnez quoi?’

  Distira frowns at me as if my question is unintelligible, and well aware that I may have used the wrong verb, I try Carole instead. ‘What are you ladies collecting?’ I ask her, flashing my warmest grin.

  ‘Is nothing,’ Carole says.

  ‘It can’t be nothing,’ I reply.

  ‘Elle veut savoir ce qu’on est en train de cueillir,’ Carole says to Distira, looking vaguely panicked. She wants to know what we’re picking.

  ‘Des herbes,’ Distira says.

  ‘Lovely,’ I say. ‘Which herbs grow here?’

  ‘Wild herbs,’ Carole says. ‘Traditional. For medicine.’