Our House is Not in Paris (24 page)

Like everything that happened with our Cuzance renovation, there didn't seem to be time to linger and admire our new
piscine
. As always, too, the days rapidly ebbed and the day's work was never quite completed. It was too hot to finish moving my piles of vines that had been cut down, so while Stuart plastered, I started sanding an old beam from the barn roof that would be placed as a shelf on the half-wall that we had knocked down and now divided the new kitchen and sitting room. It was something I loved doing and I finally, at the end of the day, had a huge sense of satisfaction as the 100-year old piece of oak started to smoothly shine.

In between everything else, I yet again ran down to the Hotel Arnal, this time to try to get the name of another
plombier
to contact as the septic issue was becoming increasingly urgent. ‘
Fosse septique, plombier
,' and a few dramatic ‘
Ooh la la
's conveyed the urgency of it. As it turned out, the precise moment I arrived, the
Maire
was finishing his lunch — complete with an empty bottle of wine on the table. It was my second encounter with him this week at the Hotel Arnal, which was conveniently right next door to the
Mairie
. He again greeted me quite solemnly and shook my hand. Perhaps it was befitting his important role in our small commune to be suitably serious. Again, without a word of English on his behalf and with my faltering French, I understood that if we were to present ourselves at his office at 9am on Saturday, Martin would help us. I assumed Martin was a
plombier
. Ironically, that night while having dinner, the
plombier
we left a message for on Monday morning finally returned our call and said he would come to Pied de la Croix on Monday evening. We were now left in an awkward position, for we felt indebted to the
Maire
for seemingly fast-tracking our roof. We could only wait and see what transpired and base our choice on who was available first.

Monsieur Arnal emerged from the restaurant and, as always, greeted me warmly. As always, too, I simply didn't understand a single word that he said. Fortunately, this time a Dutch couple were enjoying an afternoon
pastis
and were able to translate for me. They confirmed the
Maire
's arrangement for the morning and I then had a chat to them about their holiday and our mutual love of France. It, in fact, turned out that they had also had a holiday in Australia a few years previously. I apologised for my dishevelled appearance and explained that I was busy renovating. They were intrigued and so, after their
pastis
, they too ventured up to Pied de la Croix to inspect our house and land. It seemed that there was an endless stream of visitors.

I was in a constant state of amazement, not only by how much we'd accumulated in just a matter of weeks, but our attention to detail also astonished me. Stuart had just put on his brightly striped apron — IKEA, of course — to make dinner, our first proper meal in our
petite maison
. It was more of a winter meal, yet as the weather was not what we expected at all in a French summer, we were looking forward to his hearty stew with rich red tomatoes and French beef. I looked round our extremely well-equipped kitchen: a glass juicer, a grater for parmesan cheese, plastic containers, oven gloves, a salad spinner, a sound system and even a woven rush doormat. I then looked closely at the house with new eyes. The fact that our
petite maison
had been transformed from an empty shell in a mere six weeks — three weeks last year and three weeks so far this year — was a constant source of surprise to me. Finally, the days were calmer and the lists of daily tasks had diminished. It was a real home now, with a shopping list in the little wooden trug on the dining table and even Erick's aluminium jug filled with the bright faces of sunflowers from the markets in Martel.

Everything in our little house tells its own story. The photos we took when we were unearthing treasure from Maxim's outbuilding show an ancient room, untouched for years, full of spiders and cobwebs and piles of things accumulated from a lifetime. I had taken great care that day to wear a very French-looking black dress complete with my esteemed find in a second-hand shop of a black-and-white striped Pierre Balmain scarf. My ensemble was completed by a sweet little pale pink straw hat. However, after rummaging for treasure, I emerged festooned in cobwebs. In the photos, Brigitte and I look like we had been in a haunted house. I actually screamed at one point when I opened a set of drawers and then opened an old tin: a pile of dried sunflower seeds flew out, but I thought they were something else entirely … maggots.

I woke up from a rare afternoon nap to discover that Jean-Claude had secretly slipped into the garden, despite his back problems, armed with an enormous pair of wire cutters, and had cut down the sagging wire fence that bisected the garden as a surprise for me. The previous day, when I was walking round the land with him, Jean-Claude had informed me that I needed to take the fence down. I explained to him that I had, in fact, taken the first section down by myself. No easy task by any means, as I didn't even have any wire cutters at all. It involved sitting down in the dirt in the burning heat and unfurling each piece of wire, by hand, which was wrapped tightly round the sagging old wooden fence posts. I then had to rock the posts back and forth in the dry, sun-baked earth to loosen them and finally prise them out. I remember feeling hugely triumphant at this achievement. I also remember then looking at the long stretch of fence remaining and knowing that it was far beyond what I could possibly tackle. Like so many of the daunting jobs I took on in the
jardin
, it was usually with the feeblest of equipment. Even I knew that strong wire cutters were in order for the rest of the job.

So it was with a very baleful look that I told Jean-Claude, yes, I knew the fence had to come down. Yet, with all my other work on the land, I simply hadn't found the time. Plus, some of the work I did actually tackle, like dragging huge tree stumps right across the garden, were, I thought, quite extraordinary accomplishments singlehanded. So when I woke up from my afternoon sleep, Stuart told me there was a surprise. I looked out the dining room window and saw it straight away. I was utterly delighted. Later that afternoon, when we had an
apéritif
with Jean-Claude and Françoise, I walked round their garden with Jean-Claude, admiring their velvet red roses and yearning for the figs to ripen before we left for home. I told him that, like the gift of the wheelbarrow, taking the fence down was one of the best presents I'd ever received.

It was our hope that, once the
petite maison
was fully renovated, it would be a place to gather our family and friends. However, they started to arrive while we were still in the midst of serious upheaval. The first to arrive was Sylvie, who we had, met in India when she was travelling with her friend Martine. There was no way that we would have ever expected in our wildest dreams that, five years later, she would come to visit us in our own home in France. We caught up on our little porch over gin and tonics, not very French but delicious on a hot summer evening, and she told me she would honour the house as our very first visitor to stay for a night.

Friends and family meant that my two lives overlapped and collided. While in Cuzance, I always tried to consciously shut myself away from the ‘real world'. I did, however, finally make time to check some more chapters of
Colon Art
. Note: this book is not about pigs' colons or the dreaded
andouillette
, but rather the art in the French colonies. Mind you, a more enviable and glorious proofreading spot would have been hard to find, as, late one afternoon, I set myself up next to their pool in their beautiful
jardin
. I was plied with cold drinks and ice-cream and, at the end, rewarded with a beer. Then, an impromptu dinner invitation was thrown in as well. Françoise told us it would be a casual evening supper of salad, homemade bread and an omelette — which was the most delicious thing I'd ever tasted. It was probably not quite how I ever imagined being invited to eat with friends in France, either. I was still wearing my damp swimming costume, complete with a short summer shift thrown over it. It was very cool in their home, with its flagstone floors and enormous dining room, and as we sat down for
dîner
I borrowed Françoise's brown cardigan hanging on a hook in the dining room. It was a measure of the friendship we had made that I could simply grab her cardigan without even asking and feel completely relaxed about it in the way that you usually only can with very old friends.

When we arrived home later that evening, in my usual Saturday night ritual, I got my going-to-the-
vide-grenier
outfit ready to pull on in the morning, counted the euros in my change purse, got my basket out, and all was ready for a quick getaway for the Sunday pursuit of bargains.

We tried to not work constantly and made time to spend with our friends. Wandering down through the village to have an
apéritif
with Jean-Claude and Françoise was always a pleasure. Whenever I was sitting on their terrace overlooking the pool and garden, a sense of utter pleasure and relaxation swept over me. I always felt that I had temporarily booked into a luxury resort, for it was so magnificent and soothing.

Our fifth week started differently from all the others. My mother arrived from England for a week. Nevertheless, I was up very early as the roofers were still coming and, once again, it was very cold and wet. Some summer in France. The days we worked from early in the morning to evening's end seemed long ago. It seemed dreadfully unfair that now we'd declared we too were on holiday, with a week of activities planned, the weather was so cold and miserable. We seemed to have got it all back to front, to have worked in the blazing heat and now, when we were ready to relax and have a
petite vacances
, it was not like summer at all.

The following morning, I woke late, but it was to the sound of heavy clunking machinery. As I struggled from sleep, still slowly recovering from an arduous month of strenuous physical work, though I'd not noticed it before, I assumed that the loud noise was the nearby communal bins being emptied. However, I heard Stuart tell Mum that Christian, the gardener, had arrived. Not only was there a truck and huge trailer parked outside our bedroom window, but there was also a white van in the front garden. Christian, armed with a heavy-duty whipper snipper, and Pierre, on his ride-on mower, set to work clearing all the brambles and nettles, mowing and sawing off more dead limbs from the orchard trees. Their young apprentice, Dominic, started hauling my enormous pile of dead trees and other garden debris to start a gigantic fire. We'd been tempted to do the same — in fact, we had seen our neighbours have a huge fire in their garden — but we knew from our experiences in Australia, when we were clearing the land of invasive bamboo, that no doubt a neighbour in France would similarly call the
pompier
. It had been bad enough when the fire brigade came racing up our fifty-nine steps at Austinmer, let alone imagining the consequences if we attempted to do the same in a tiny French village. Mind you, the exorbitant fee we paid for a few hours' work was probably far more than any fine for an illegal fire in France.

Soon, my month of relentless toil was a roaring blaze and then, in no time at all, the only remnant of four weeks of my life was a smouldering pile of grey ashes. What three men achieved in three hours — at an exorbitant cost, I might add — was phenomenal. It was one of the few times we didn't actually check the cost before a job and it was at our expense (literally). To some extent, my spirits matched the fading grey embers. Four weeks of work quite literally up in smoke. I reflected ruefully on what other renovating work I might have been able to achieve in the
petite maison
instead. Mind you, the staggering cost was only revealed at the end of the work, and it's quite possible that if we'd known what it would have been at the outset, we — or rather, Stuart — would have decided it was far too expensive anyway and my singlehanded struggles would have continued. And, after all, I was no match for three vigorous men, especially with all the right equipment. No wonder Poppy, the old roofer, used to shake his head in disbelief when he saw me dashing round with my feeble pruning saw, acting like a human bulldozer.

The time had come too to make the final decisions about our planting choices and
jardin
design to be done for our return next year. Just as I was about to run down the road to get Jean-Claude to act as our interpreter yet again, he magically appeared, complete with an ancient scythe in hand. His intention this time was to retrieve treasure that was possibly lurking in the brambles that had now been cleared. He told us that similar tools had been used in the French Revolution, the purpose of which I could only begin to imagine. So another three-way discussion took place regarding our simple landscaping plans. It would be simply wonderful to return to see a hedge planted for privacy for the
piscine
and a sweeping bed of lavender. Hopefully, too, one day there would be a magnificent tree at the end of the barn to provide shade and privacy. Ironically, the severe slashing of brambles on the stone boundary walls had reduced our privacy significantly — something we particularly cherish. The perils of my constant miming: my attempts to convey what I wanted had been somewhat misinterpreted.
C'est la vie
. Indeed, such is life.

There was some degree of confusion when we decided to get a new gardener. We decided that Christian was
très cher
. His business seemed to be more suitable for a
grande jardin
rather than our very
rustique
affair.

On our return home, I received an email that caused me some degree of dismay. I assumed it was from the
Mairie
requesting payment for our land, a payment that I found puzzling. As we received all our other rates notices by post, I was both confused and alarmed. So, as always, I shot the email off to Jean-Claude for an explanation.