L'amour Actually (8 page)

  'Oh, don't worry,' he said noticing my unease, 'you'll get used to it. Everyone does the
bisous
round here. That's French for kisses. It's rude not to.'

  'Oh, right,' I answered. The thought of having to kiss Madame Brunel made me faintly uneasy. 'You were expecting me, weren't you?'

  'Yes, yes, sorry, it's just that, well, I was expecting someone French.'

  'Yeah well, this is Little England. Rumour has it there are still a few of the locals left here and there.' He smiled, eyes sparkling, clearly mocking me. 'Nah, I do all of Sylvie's, Madame Mollet's, removals. She says she doesn't trust the Frenchies not to nick everything.'

  I was a little taken aback. 'Sorry?'

  'Dodgy lot, the frogs, you make sure you're careful round them. Anyway, where do you want this stuff?'

  'Umm… Let me see what you've got and then I can decide where you can put it.'

  Nick opened up the back of a rusty old transit van that was stuffed to the gills with furniture; most of it looked like it had been knocked off from a charity shop, and not a particularly upmarket one at that.

  'Hmm, not exactly The Conran Shop is it?' I started rummaging through the back of the van. It looked as if there were a couple of beds, a sofa, an armchair, a table and chairs, some wardrobes and sundry bits and bobs.

  'OK, let's get it inside. Have you got someone to help you unload it?'

  Nick looked sheepish. 'I was kind of hoping you could give me a hand.'

  I sighed to myself. Oh well, what the hell. I'd been in a tractor, two ditches and a death-trap taxi so far today. What difference would it make to have another new experience – furniture removals?

  'OK, let's start with the bedroom furniture,' I said, motioning at Nick to grab the other end of the bed. 'On the count of three, one, two, three, lift…'

  One hour, several broken nails and a skinned knuckle later, the little stone cottage was looking a bit more like home. A rather lumpy-looking double bed took pride of place in the master bedroom along with what was a really quite a nice old bedroom suite of a dark oak wardrobe, tallboy and bedside cabinets with a linen fold design. I'd found an old wooden lamp that would have been more suited to my grandmother's house but it would do for the moment and at least it offered me some sort of light for reading at night. I placed it on the bedside table and stood back. Not bad. A bit rustic perhaps but never mind. I had every intention of filling my home with gorgeous shabby chic (rather than just shabby) French antiques but there was plenty of time for that.

  In the lounge, or
salon
as Nick kept calling it, I'd got a sofa, which was just about retro if you were being generous, an armchair, a coffee table that looked as if it had been hewn from an ancient oak tree and quite likely had, a couple of reproduction end tables and an old analogue television that weighed more than the rest of the furniture combined. It had taken ten minutes to carry it into the house, with me having to stop and start constantly to save myself from dropping it. Now it sat perched on a rather flimsy-looking table that threatened to collapse under its bulk at any moment.

  The second bedroom was sparsely furnished with just a bed and a canvas wardrobe but the big mystery was still the toilet and bathroom which I had yet to locate.

  'Hey Nick, do you know this house at all?' I called to him as he connected the gas bottle to the cooker in the kitchen.

  'Yes, why?'

  'Well I can't find the bathroom.'

  'Ah, the bathroom...' he answered mysteriously. 'Madame Mollet didn't tell you about the bathroom then?'

  'Tell me
what
about the bathroom?' I was worried now.

  Nick led the way through the kitchen and to a door which I had assumed led to a pantry, and with great ceremony, flung it wide open.

  'TA DA!' He stood back to reveal a kind of wet room affair with a bit of a 'Colditz meets Ray Mears' theme going on. There was a shower with a concrete floor set with hundreds of pebbles and a half wall of glass bricks but, worst of all, the toilet was little more than a hole in the ground with a white porcelain surround and two plates for the feet.

  I gasped and fell silent. This couldn't be it, surely? I felt myself starting to panic. 'I can't… I can't use that thing... Jesus Christ...'

  'Oh, it's not that bad really. Lots of the old French prefer them. Turkish toilets they're called,' said Nick helpfully. 'Very popular with the Arab ladies as well. Apparently it's easier with their long dresses. I did the bathroom. Do you like it?'

  'Well as I'm neither an old French woman nor an Arab...' I was gobsmacked. 'Didn't you think to put a bloody pedestal toilet in?'

  Nick looked hurt. 'I thought it had a certain rustic charm.'

  'Rustic charm?' I flopped down on one of the kitchen chairs while Nick stood around awkwardly shuffling from one foot to the other and taking a sudden interest in his shoes.

  'Would you use it though? I mean, would you?' I asked.

  'Well, um, I suppose...'

  At least he had the decency to look a bit shamefaced.

  'OK, no, I wouldn't use it but what about the shower?' he said, trying desperately to move the conversation away from the hole of doom. 'Great isn't it? My boys collected all those pebbles themselves from our garden.'

  'Lovely, I'm sure,' I answered with just a tiny hint of sarcasm in my voice.

  'Oh, and by the way, a little tip for you, free, gratis and for nothing.'

  He was starting to get on my nerves with all his south London bonhomie.

  'Get yourself a Sky box and card and then you can pick up English telly. You really wouldn't want to watch the crap on the French channels, trust me.'

  I was struck by just how little I already trusted Nick but I thanked him for the advice anyway.

  'There's a satellite dish here already. I put it up myself,' he told me proudly.

  Bloody marvellous, I thought. It probably only picks up Bollywood.

  'Well, I'd better crack on. Places to go, people to see and all that.'

  I didn't respond.

  'Listen, I'm a bit of a DJ on the side. Used to do some of the big clubs, you know, Ministry of Sound and all that, before we moved out here.'

  I suspected that the nearest he'd ever been to the Ministry of Sound was one of their albums in HMV. I thought back to what the woman on the plane had told me about everyone having these fantasy lives. Maybe she was telling the truth. 'I'm doing a gig up at La Fontaine in Bussières on Saturday. It's in the square opposite the church. My wife, Libby, will be there, she'd love to meet you. There aren't that many young people around here so it would be great for her to have someone her own age to talk to. Eight-ish?'

  'Yeah, we'll see. Not really sure what my plans are just yet.'

  I was too upset about my Turkish privy to think about what I would be doing at the weekend.

  'Right then, I'll be off.' Nick made a hasty exit and the last I heard of him was his transit van coughing its way down the hill back to his house with his proper toilet.

  I sighed. I'd been doing a lot of that on my first day in France. I headed to the bedroom to sort out my clothes, which were still lying in a heap on the floor and wondered just how much use I'd have for that Phase Eight suit and the Joseph linen trousers. From what I'd seen so far, with the obvious exception of Tracey, it seemed like casual-casual was the preferred dress code. Oh well, a good excuse for a new wardrobe, not that I ever really needed one. One by one, I hung up my clothes, smoothing them over a little, then set about sorting my underwear, removing the ones which had footprints on from their unscheduled outing at the airport, and putting them aside for the wash. That little job done, I lay down on the bed. My early morning was catching up on me. I'll just close my eyes for a moment, I said to myself. It was the last thing I remembered before drifting off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Jolted awake in what seemed like only moments later, I was surprised to find it was nearly dark. I reached for my watch from the bedside table. It was gone nine o'clock. I'd been asleep for over four hours. Stretching languorously like a cat, I briefly considered just staying in bed but knew that I'd then be awake at four in the morning twiddling my thumbs and wondering what to do with myself. In any case, I hadn't even made up the bed.

  I wandered into the lounge and decided a spot of telly was what was needed. The old set buzzed and hummed before springing to life and for a moment I thought I was in some kind of parallel universe. The screen filled with a talent show suspiciously like the one that Tracey Tarrant had been on, just in French.

  The sets were the same but the three judges were certainly different. There was a slightly 'mutton dressed as lamb' older woman, a youngish man with a 1980s-style haircut and someone who looked like he'd taken the wrong turning on his way to the
Question Time
studio. A young girl was on stage, ready to sing. She was dressed in a minidress, over-the-knee socks, platform shoes and the biggest pair of geek glasses I'd ever seen in my life.

  The backing music started and the girl opened her mouth to sing. A thin, reedy voice came out as she wailed her way through 'Chasing Pavements' by Adele or 'shazing payments' as it came out. God, I thought, it's good to see that the auditions are every bit as bad here as they are at home!

  I grimaced. It really was dreadful but I felt strangely compelled to watch it. Car-crash reality television in French. Maybe life wouldn't be so different after all.

  After a few minutes, I couldn't stand it anymore and flicked over to another channel which was showing a gritty police drama, all sludgy colours and pouring rain. Trying hard to follow what was being said, I stared at the television until my eyes started to hurt. This was no good. What I needed was a good dose of
Corrie
or
EastEnders
. I'd look into the Sky thing the next day. Turning off the television I wandered into the kitchen where the bottle of
rosé
I had bought earlier was chilling in the fridge. Oh well, the house may not have a proper toilet but at least I can open a bottle of wine. The French windows were still open and despite the late hour, it was warm outside. Clutching my wine glass, I stepped into the garden. It was incredibly dark, far darker than at home. I chided myself. I had to stop thinking of England as home. This was home now. I'd never really thought about how little of the night sky you could actually see in London. I sat down on the ground and tried to count the stars. Above me, I quickly identified Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, The Plough, Orion – I was a bit of an anorak where constellations were concerned thanks to an ex-boyfriend with aspirations of becoming an astro-physicist. In the heady thrall of new love I had set about devouring my dad's copy of Carl Sagan's
Cosmos
with the same single-mindedness I'd later put to good use in my university degree. The ex had been unimpressed with my failure to grasp the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and had gone off to Switzerland to work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

  Lying down on the cool grass, I gazed at the night sky above, and with no light pollution to spoil things, it was a mass of stars. The Milky Way was as clear as the pictures I'd seen in
Cosmos
. Hundreds of bigger stars were suspended in a pale wash of smaller ones that swirled across the sky. It was amazing. I took out my phone to text the girls back home.

'Lying on my back looking at a million stars. What are you doing?'

Pressing the send button, I could just imagine where they were now. Fighting their way home on the Underground after an evening standing in an overcrowded bar shouting at each other over the noise, slinging back vodka jellies. Now actually... No, this was my life now. I had said goodbye to the breakneck pace of London life and
bonjour
to the peace and beauty of rural France. I sighed deeply, feeling a wave of unadulterated contentment wash over me. And then the first mosquito bit.

'Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Bugger, fifteen mozzie bites!'

  I examined my arms and legs in the mirror to see if I had any more. I could cope with the ones on my body; it was the red, pulsating ones spotting my face that were the problem.

  Today was market day in Bussières and I was desperate to go and check out the French lessons at the club, but I looked like I'd gone down with a nasty case of the pox. This really wasn't how I wanted to meet people, especially after the debacle with Monsieur and Madame Brunel. I was quite sure they would be dining out on that story for years. Damn it, I thought, I'll just have to brazen it out. I opened the wardrobe door, pulled out a large, floppy sunhat, and tried it on. In the right light, it cast enough of a shadow across my face to make me look secretive and mysterious rather than the last square meal of the local mosquito population.