L'amour Actually (9 page)

  And there was also the fact that Julien had offered to give me a lift. He had been on my mind a lot since our meeting in the café, in fact, since he nearly ran me over in the combine harvester if I was being honest, and every time a message arrived on my phone, I grabbed it excitedly in case it was him. Eventually, a few days later he did send me a message apologising for not contacting me sooner and asking if I wanted to go to the market on Saturday. I skipped around the room for a good half hour after that.

  Turning back to the mirror, I dabbed some concealer on the worst offenders. It didn't really help much. There was no getting away from the fact that I looked like a teenager (which was good) with a nasty dose of acne (which wasn't). Last time I had seen Julien I had just had my second French Ditch Adventure and I was really hoping to make a slightly better impression this time. It wasn't looking good.

  Going into the kitchen, I took the remains of the previous day's baguette, some butter and jam from the fridge and arranged it all on a plate before heading out to the little table in the garden and the early morning sunshine. I paused to listen for a minute. Nothing. Just the happy trilling of the birds as they swooped among the trees. I still couldn't get over the peace and quiet here.

  I tried to break the baguette – but it was like reinforced concrete. Overnight my lovely, fresh bread had turned into an offensive weapon. I banged it on the table and ducked as a piece splintered off and shot past my head. Oh well, maybe just coffee then.

  At the sound of tyres crunching on the gravel drive, I grabbed my bag and hat and rushed outside to meet Julien who was just climbing out of an old Renault 5. Dressed in a pair of straight-legged jeans, which showed off his rather excellent thighs, and a tight white T-shirt, he looked good enough to eat. Wicked thoughts flashed through my mind that made me blush. 'Hey neighbour, how are you?' I said coolly.

  'Good,' he said leaning down to plant a kiss on each cheek. '
Mon Dieu
, what happened to your face?'

  'You're not supposed to comment,' I smiled. 'The least you could have done is warned me that you have mosquitoes the size of jumbo jets here. All I did was lie out in the garden…'

  'After dark?'

  'Yes, after dark,' I continued.

  'Well you must use lots of
citronelle
… you know, insect stuff, to keep them away. You know we breed them especially to like English blood. Well, we have to get our revenge for Mers-el-Kébir somehow,' he smiled.

  '
Your
revenge?' I smiled, even though I wasn't entirely sure who or what Mers-el-Kébir was. 'Who gave us
Come Dine with
Me
and
Fort Boyard
? That's revenge enough in my books.'

  'Ah yes, a bit of our great French culture, that you English are so fond of,' he said. 'Anyway, look, I have something for you.'

  I looked around, curious, then turned back to him, shrugging my shoulders.

  'The car,' he said, laughing.

  My mouth fell open and I stared at him, speechless.

  'Look, it is just an old one that has been sitting around doing nothing on the farm for years. It is no beauty but it works. It is yours until you find something better.'

  'Oh my God!' I cried, aware that my voice had climbed about two octaves. 'I don't believe it! Thank you so much!'

  Sensing an opportunity, I flung my arms round him and squeezed him tight, enjoying the feel of his taut body through his shirt. I pulled away and looked up at him, seeing my face reflected in his velvet brown eyes. For a split second, I thought time had stood still. The only thing missing was the violins.

  'OK, let's go,' he said, pulling away and opening the car door, the slightest hint of colour showing in his face. I instantly felt stupid. Here I was, only a few days into my new life in France and already throwing myself at the first friendly face. Pull yourself together, I chided myself. You don't need a man. You are a strong, independent woman. Who was I kidding? Julien stood back and let me climb in to the driver's seat.

  'OK, have you ever driven a left-hand drive car before?' I shook my head. It seemed very weird having the gearstick on the other side. Oh well, I thought, I'll soon get used to it.

  Julien ran through everything: the indicators, the gears, the air conditioning.

  'Whatever you do, don't leave the aircon running with the engine off or you will flatten the battery,' he told me. 'Are you ready?'

  I put the car into reverse, eased out the clutch and manoeuvred it gingerly backwards round the side of the cottage, then headed up the drive. At the top, I had to think for a minute about which side of the road I had to be on, but as I'd seen all of three cars on the lane since my arrival, the chances were it wouldn't really matter.

  I passed Laure in her front garden and waved and smiled but was rewarded with nothing but a wary stare that followed me until I rounded the corner to head down the hill out of the hamlet.

  As we passed the vegetable garden that I had noticed on my first day, I saw an elderly man stooped over a hoe, tending to his crops. I tooted the horn and waved. He stared back at me. What
is
it with these people? I thought. They all seem so unfriendly. I wave, they stare. I wondered whether to broach the subject with Julien, but not wanting to seem critical of his fellow countrymen, I let it go.

  '
Salut
, Hubert,' Julien called out of the open car window. The old man waved and the shadow of a smile passed across his face.

  Oh fine, I thought, bristling ever so slightly, ignore me, why don't you? 'So, who's that then?'

  'Him? That is Hubert Marcel, he lives in the house down the lane just before yours, you know, the one with all the rubbish in the garden?'

  'Can't really say I've noticed but then it's a bit tucked away I suppose. Maybe I'll pop round and say hello.'

  'Watch him, he's an old dog.'

  'Oh come on! Him? He's got to be at least eighty.'

  'He's fifty-three.'

  'Ah.'

  As we drove past, I caught sight of a woman coming out of the shed behind Monsieur Marcel. She was wearing a tiny gold bikini and heels, the perfect outfit for gardening. She swaggered over to Monsieur Marcel, her rather ample
décolletage
bobbing as she walked, and planted a kiss on his cheek. He squeezed her bottom playfully.

  I nearly drove the car into a tree. Clearly there
was
life in the old dog. 'So, er, who's the woman?'

  'Oh, that's Christine. She used to be married to his brother.' Julian told me matter-of-factly.

  I arched my eyebrows. Maybe Claudine in the shop was right about all the intermarriage. 'His brother? Did he die or something?'

  'Oh no, Hubert's wife ran off with Christine's husband last year. They live down in Marseilles now.'

  'Escaping the scandal eh?' I smiled knowingly at Julien. He looked at me nonplussed.

  'No, he was transferred with his company,' he replied, clearly thinking this sort of wife swapping was the most natural thing in the world.

  'Oh… right.' Life in the country was clearly never boring.

  At the bottom of the hill, I turned right towards Bussières. With the window down, the wind in my hair and a gorgeous man in the seat next to me, I thought I'd never been happier.

  The tensions of London were slowly washing away. I could feel my shoulders dropping gradually and the constant knot in the back of my neck was hardly noticeable any more. Fields of young wheat waved languorously in the sun. The sky was the fresh blue of cornflowers and puffy, white clouds scudded across it at a leisurely pace. That seemed to sum up this little part of France to me. Leisurely. Everyone seemed to have more time. No one was rushing around with a Starbucks in one hand and a sandwich in the other; in fact, no one was rushing at all. I smiled to myself and thought, you clever girl, you've done the right thing.

  My mind went back to the moment I had broken the news of my move to my friends. It was on my birthday and I had planned to meet up with my best mates at The Archangel, my favourite restaurant. With a few bottles of the bubbly stuff pre-ordered and a table booked for eight o'clock, I was ready to party.

  I had worked in celebrity PR since leaving university and although my friends thought it unspeakably glamorous, especially as I worked with so many famous faces, the truth was I'd had enough of my boss, a misogynistic public school idiot who had changed his name from Clive to Zane to try and be cool. The job paid well but I rarely seemed to have the time to spend it, what with the twelve-hour days I regularly worked. I had been starting to wonder if there was more to life than collapsing in front of the television each evening.

  It all started when I'd had a full day ahead of me accompanying one of our clients, Kitty Moseley, to a photo shoot for a Sunday supplement. Kitty was probably the most temperamental and demanding of the not-quite-supermodels and while her agent might describe her as 'elfin', 'a stunning pre-Raphaelite beauty' and 'a consummate professional', I'd describe her as a pig from hell.

  Things had got off to a bad start when I forgot to order Kitty's super-skinny double latte with extra foam and a shot of vanilla. Well I hadn't actually forgotten, it was more that I hadn't been told that Kitty was incapable of functioning without one. Kitty had thrown a complete hissy fit and insisted that her Reiki master, a pumped-up body-building type with the unlikely name of Derek, be summoned so she could get her chakras re-aligned before she could
possibly
start work. Kitty retired to the dressing trailer to have them put back wherever they were supposed to be, leaving Bruno, the photographer, and the rest of the crew to spend the next two hours glaring at me. Mind you, judging from the moaning that was coming from the dressing room, I was fairly sure that it was more than just Kitty's chakras that were being re-aligned.

  When we eventually got to work, Shitty Kitty, as I now called her under my breath, insisted that make-up be on standby after every single shot as she had discovered… shock, horror… the most enormous spot on her chin, so enormous that no one in the room except her could see it. Meanwhile, her personal assistant, an Eastern European called Evelina, who towered over everyone in a pair of 6-inch heels, stood off camera telling her she was 'so beautiful, darlink' every few minutes until I thought I might just barf right there on the floor.

  Shitty Kitty got more demanding as the day wore on but the last straw was a request for a particular, and very hard to find, bar of organic chocolate. Sometimes I felt more like a glorified babysitter than a PR professional. I was tempted to remind her of the link between chocolate and bad skin but decided that it might be wiser to let that one go. Bearing in mind the theme of the shoot was 'urban decay' and we were filming in a derelict warehouse in an unfashionable part of the East End, the chances of finding anything more than a bar of Dairy Milk were fairly hopeless. I tried to explain politely to Kitty, but the look she bestowed on me could have frozen the blood of an Eskimo so as the clock ticked relentlessly down towards eight, I set off in the pouring rain to find a taxi and a bar of chocolate.

  What felt like hours later and £40 lighter, I arrived back at the shoot with possibly the only bar of this particular organic chocolate in the whole of the East End. I walked through the warehouse door, chocolate held triumphantly aloft. 'Here you go! Who's a clever girl then?' I said to an empty room.

  Where the hell were they all? A noise behind me made me swing round and I came face to face with a man-mountain with a flattened boxer's nose and a snarling Alsatian at his heel. I saw my whole life flash in front of me as I pressed myself against the wall.

  'Sorry, love, don't mind Brutus here, he's a big softie really.'

  I looked at the dog, took in the bared teeth and strings of drool hanging from each side of his mouth and thought I might beg to differ.

  'I'm the night watchman. No one here I'm afraid. They left about an hour ago. I'm just locking up now.'

  'What? But… but...' I was beside myself with rage. 'She insisted she had to have this bloody chocolate. I've traipsed halfway round frigging London trying to find the exact one she wanted. It's my birthday and I'm supposed to be sitting in a restaurant in the West End with my boyfriend and a bunch of friends, not standing in some godforsaken warehouse running errands for that… that…'

  'Sorry love,' the night watchman said. 'You want me to get you a cab or something?' 'Oh, yes, sorry, yes please.' I felt near to tears at the unfairness of it all.

  Twenty minutes later, as I sat in the back of a cab watching the rain drumming on the windows and the long queue of traffic up ahead, I knew I'd be lucky to make The Archangel before ten o'clock the next morning, never mind that night. I tapped out a quick text to Alex, my boyfriend.

'Gonna B L8. There ASAP. Hugs xx'

Almost instantly, my phone dinged and Alex's reply appeared on the screen.

'Hurry up, we're all waiting for you. What time? X'

'Well thank you so much for your sympathetic reply,' I muttered to myself in a snarky voice, sticking my tongue out at my mobile.

  NEVER! I tapped in before deleting it.

'10ish. Start without me.'

He didn't even bother to reply to that one.

  With time on my hands and the traffic showing no signs of moving I started to reflect on my life. I was exhausted and just recently the bad days had started to outnumber the good ones. On the one hand, I did love my job, at least there was never a dull moment, but on the other hand, I knew I wanted something more. A gentler pace of life maybe? God, was this the first sign of a mid-life crisis? I was expecting that to start around forty-five, not twenty-eight.