Au Revoir (22 page)

I haven't got a full-length mirror in Villefranche which is just as well, but I can notice the extra chin I am now carrying. And when I look downwards I can see a sizeable belly. A middle-age spread. A French roll. The dramatic change of lifestyle—no work, not a lot of gardening and wicked five-course meals—is the obvious cause and I am faced with some grim alternatives. Diets are a waste of time. It's either get into an exercise regimen or just cut back on the eating and drinking. I opt for the exercise.

To my mind walking is the least painful way of exercising, but it can be boring if you walk the same way day after day. Here, of course, there is so much of interest to see that walking will be a pleasure and I plot several routes out of the village that will give me an hour of pounding the roadside every day. The weather is still blazing hot, so early morning is the best idea. I have some good walking sandals and shorts, even though I have to expose those flabby bits around my knees. Like most bastide towns, Villefranche is set on a hillside so I can walk down towards the market gardens, where the local women are harvesting vegetables before the sun rises high in the sky. They wave as I stride past, looking a little curiously at my determined gait. I am walking on small back roads which are paved but narrow, and if a car or white van comes by, I must step into the roadside ditch. Not really a problem.

The last part of the walk, up the steep hill into the lower side of the village, brings me out in a healthy sweat so I arrive home bright red in the face and ready for a meagre shower in my tiny cupboard. I also do some stretching exercises, some full knee bends and sit-ups. It all helps a little, and although I don't actually drop any kilos, I seem to reach a plateau.

I begin to wonder if losing weight at this stage of my holiday is really so important anyway. Is it just that I am feeling uncomfortable in my clothes, or is there a deeper reason for my feeling anxious about this sudden change of shape? I have always had rather an ambivalent attitude towards my body. In truth I have never regarded it as my best asset. During early adolescence I was teased by my father about my emerging shape, being the classic Irish female with a flat chest, broad hips and generous backside. I was terribly jealous of my slim-hipped, large-breasted
girlfriends, especially at the beach where they looked so gorgeous in their skimpy bikinis. Not only did I not have the prerequisite bosom and boyish hips, but my pale skin simply burned, blistered and freckled, creating an overall effect that was a long way from the sixties surfie beachgirl image I so desperately desired. Those friends who had mousy brown hair simply bleached it blonde to complete the scenario, while I was stuck with a tight frizz of bright red curls. It was all too humiliating.

Having a poor body image helped me to remain a virgin for much longer than my contemporaries. Not only did boys not compete to conquer me, I was reluctant for any of them to actually see me naked, so in one way being ‘unattractive' in my own eyes did have some long-term benefits. While my girlfriends were busy sneaking out their bedroom windows at night for illicit trysts in the backseats of cars with spotty members of the local football team, I was not even vaguely aware that such activities were a possibility. I didn't have my first period until I was sixteen, so I remained quite naive and childlike long after other girls around my age were embarking on their sixth or seventh serious sexual affair. When I finally did become sexually active, not long before my eighteenth birthday, I still felt very uncomfortable about my flat chest and lumpy hips. I had a series of unsatisfactory relationships which I am sure were the result of my insecurity about my body. I was not particularly sporty, but I loved swimming and sailing and was always active, getting enough exercise at the weekends to remain reasonably fit and trim. My shape was pure genetics, not the result of too little exercise or too much fatty food. I just had to live with it.

I became more relaxed and accepting of my body shape in my early twenties, but the first time I ever really thought I looked
beautiful when unclothed was when I was about six months pregnant with Miriam. I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on my way to the shower, and saw my curved hips and belly in quite a different light. It took my breath away. I actually had breasts for the first time, and pale pink nipples that were full and ripe. David also adored my new pregnant shape, and constantly stroked my rounded tummy and full bottom and told me I was gorgeous. I believed him, and this probably helps explain why I took to pregnancy and motherhood with such great enthusiasm. At last my body was doing what it was shaped for. Not parading for the lustful eyes of surfies at the beach but carrying a child. The fact that my body then performed brilliantly during the birth, doing all that was expected without complication, also lifted my self-esteem and confirmed my belief that my body was finally serving me well.

In my late twenties and thirties, when I became seriously involved in gardening, my body became strong and flexible in a way that again was very satisfying. Years of lifting toddlers onto my hips, chopping wood for the fires, lugging great bags of manure to the garden beds, digging and barrowing and working in all weathers gave my body a power and strength. In spite of my fairness, my arms and legs became quite tanned and tough, although I now protected my freckled face with lots of creams and broad-brimmed hats. The breasts I had developed during my various pregnancies and when feeding my babies didn't disappear or turn into pancakes, instead they remained quite firm and perky.

My mother had always been and always remained very thin. I suspect it was her terrible smoking habit that caused her appetite to dwindle more and more as she grew older. As a young
woman in photographs she always seemed unnaturally thin to me, with dark circles under her eyes. And the few grainy snapshots of her when we were little, especially those taken after baby Jane died, show a woman who looks as though she has just been released from a concentration camp. For me, my mother's thinness was a legacy of her ill-health and the hardship of her life, and so I never aspired to be like that. I was happy in mid life to have my own shape, but to be fit and well-muscled at the same time.

In France, without my normal busy physical schedule, the weight that I gain so rapidly is more flab than muscle. I don't like the appearance of the extra chin in the mirror, and I hate the belly that I can't suck in, no matter how hard I try. I just don't feel comfortable in my own skin, which is why I am trying so valiantly to shed at least a couple of kilos here and there. I am gradually accepting that while I lead this carefree lifestyle I am bound to be well-padded. It's such a small price to pay for so much fun. Then through careful observation I realise that French women simply don't eat the same quantities that I have been so happily devouring. They do participate in every course, but always have a modest serving of each. Not several large ladles of soup and second helpings of pommes frites. So I gradually modify my eating habits and discover that I am more than full at the end of every meal. Not groaning with overload as I get up from the table, as I have done before.

I am certainly thankful that in our family eating food has always been a pleasurable activity, and not one tinged with guilt or anxiety about weight gain. Several young contemporaries of my daughter have had serious problems with eating disorders and I wonder if their own mothers' attitudes to food and eating
have had a negative effect. Miriam and I both love our food and derive a lot of pleasure from planning and cooking meals for the family. She too has weight that fluctuates, but seems to have a healthy attitude towards her shape.

For the entire time I stay in Villefranche I keep up my daily walking regimen. It not only helps clear my head of cobwebs caused by too much of the high life, it introduces me to the tremendous range of local flora that crowds the roadsides. The small things you see when walking simply can't be appreciated from a car, especially if you are the driver. As I walk from the centre of the village the views on all sides are a delight. Fields crammed with maize and old farmhouse buildings in various stages of decay. There is always a strong fragrance and looking downwards I see my feet are crushing plants along the roadside. There are wild mints, including corn mint and pennyroyal, which release abundant aromas when I crush them between my fingers or walk on them. There are also several dainty purple-blue salvias, including
Salvia pratensis
or meadow clary, which produces tall slender flowerheads that pop up through other wild weeds. Wild yarrow is growing everywhere, with its dainty, small white flowerheads and ferny foliage that forms a richly fragrant mat at ground level. Other perfumed delights I stumble across on my walks include wild basil which has bright pink blooms and foliage with an intense aroma; various wild thymes including the common
Thymus praecox
; clumps of sweet-smelling marjoram; and sprays of callamint with mauve flowers and aromatic foliage. As I walk I train my eye to pick out plants that
at home would be part of a perennial border or formal herb garden; it's often hard to distinguish them growing in the wild because they are much smaller and often jostle for space between grasses and other wild plants. Blackberry, such a noxious weed at home, is in its element here and grows down every country laneway, offering rich sweet fruits to be gathered in summertime. It's a nuisance here too, of course, because it catches and tears your clothes as you walk by and can easily invade the precious fields and meadows if not kept in check. But I must keep in mind that here they are not an introduced menace, instead a natural plant that just needs to be kept under control. Common buddleia is also omnipresent, having found its way here from China some centuries ago; it springs up against every wall and in every crevice, and has a charming habit of attracting butterflies by the hundred when in full bloom.

Over several months of walking I identify dozens of wild plants in flower, and my gardening friend, Pam, lends me several excellent English-language reference books to help me confirm my guesses at the species. I gather large bunches of those in flower and those with distinctive perfumes, and take them back to my small room where they fill the warm night air with a rich mix of aromas. There are various evening primroses (
Oenothera
sp.) with tall stems and blowsy yellow flowers, which I am surprised to learn are all of American origin, having arrived some hundred or more years ago and followed their habit of spreading like wildfire across the countryside. There are mallows (
Malvea
and
Lavatera
) everywhere, in gardens as well as along the country lanes, and they are a charming addition to the natural landscape with their profuse pink, white or mauve flowers. I also identify several species of
Silene
, commonly known
as campion or catchfly, and am fascinated to read that there are eighteen species, quite a few native to this region. I love their inflated calyxes, which in some instances dominate the petals to become the main feature of the plant. As the season progresses the plants in flower change, and in later summer I will find wild sweet peas, the showy white angelica, and banks of purple heather; these I try to identify in the more comprehensive guides without success, but eventually I track them down in a local French wildflower guide as
Erica carnea
, or Bruyère des Neiges, which translates as heather of snow, because it originates in the Alpes Maritimes. It's a truly beautiful small plant which has naturalised down grassy roadside banks, generally in half shade.

When I finally move from Villefranche it's to be near the woods, and I anticipate many more walks and botanical discoveries. But my walking days are seriously curtailed. It's not through laziness, but because of the start of the hunting season which makes casual country walking, especially in the woods, a hazardous experience. I am still able to take sunny walks around the fields that lie on the south side of the house, but any sauntering into the woods or even along the side of the road is risky; the hunters are constantly stalking prey, and all too often mistake innocent walkers for a wild boar or deer. My nervousness about the anarchistic way in which the hunts are conducted drives me back inside as the weather cools, except for Wednesdays when the hunt is forbidden. This is the one weekday when children are home from school, and previous mishaps have demonstrated that children and hunters on the loose at the same time are not a good combination.

O
NCE JULY AND AUGUST ARE
over and most of the summer holidaymakers have gone back home to England or Holland or Paris, my chances of renting something slightly larger at a reasonable rate suddenly improve. There's talk among our friends about the opportunities to do some housesitting in the autumn and winter because so many part-time residents leave their country abodes deserted for six months at a stretch, and are more than happy for someone to keep an eye on things as long as they contribute towards the running costs and maintain the garden. But the one strong possibility on that score falls through at the last moment when the owners hint that they'd also like quite a substantial rental—something I can't really justify given my limited budget. Realistically I don't need a four-bedroom house, especially if it is going to cost a fortune.