Love in a Warm Climate (16 page)

My worrying is interrupted by my mobile phone ringing.

“Hello darling, how are you coping?” It’s my mother.

“I’m fine, thanks,” I reply. At least I was until she called. Oh help, she’s bound to want to interfere in some way. “How are you?”

“Oh very well, thank you. But I’m worried about you. I’ve been talking to friends and I think what you need is a holiday. This sort of thing is very traumatic. Can you get away from the vineyard?”

“Mother, I’m fine, thanks, really. I can’t go anywhere. I’ve got to get things organised here. There’s a lot to do, you know.”

“I realise that, darling, but there’s no point wearing yourself out. I have a plan, leave it with me.”

“Please do not plan anything,” I tell her. The last thing I need is my mother carting me off somewhere when I have a whole dictionary of
wine-making
to inwardly digest and make sense of. “I am coping, really, thanks anyway.”

“Is that Granny?” says Emily, “Can I talk to her? I want to tell her about the brick.”

I hand over the phone to my daughter. Charlotte, of course, immediately wants to do the same thing, so I have to distract her by promising she can chose my outfit for the dinner party.

She is thrilled. “Mummy, you’re going to look like a princess,” she says confidently, marching me up the stairs. “Do you still have your wedding dress?”

“I think a wedding dress might be a bit over the top for a dinner party,”
I say.

“Do you like dinner parties?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” I say. “It all depends.”

“On what?”

“On what they talk about really, or who is there, if they are fun or not.”

“What do they talk about?”

I remember Nick complaining about dinner parties in Clapham. “Well a lot of people talk about commuting and nannies and schools,” I say.

“What’s computing?”

“Commuting; it is getting to and from work.”

“That doesn’t sound interesting, that’s just about trains.”

“You’re right. But I hope as we’re in France and we don’t have to commute anywhere, or have nannies, they will talk about something else.”

“I hope so too,” says Charlotte as we walk into my bedroom and she makes a beeline for the wardrobe. “Otherwise you might fall asleep. Who’s going to keep us?”

“I will get you ready for bed and then Agnès will come.”

“Oh noooooo,” wails Charlotte. “She’s so grumpy. Please Mummy, do you have to go?”

At that moment half of me feels like doing what I always feel like doing when one of my children asks me for something. I want to give in. I want to hug her and tell her that no I don’t have to go and see the relief and happiness in her lovely little face.

Then a rational voice comes into my head and tells me that my children will survive one evening with Agnès and that I need to get out, to make friends, to make a life here. It’s all right for them, they’re at school. If I don’t go out I’ll never meet anyone. I can’t expect to make friends in the vineyard every day.

“I’m sorry, darling,” I say. “I really want to go, and you can watch a film and then go to sleep, and she might be in a really good mood this evening.”

“Who?” asks Edward, who has just come in, closely followed by Emily and my mobile phone. “Who might be in a good mood?”

“Agnès,” Charlotte spits out. “Mummy is going out and Agnès is keeping us.” She makes me sound like the most evil woman alive, or ‘the worst mother in the world’ as Edward calls me when I refuse him something that he wants.

I hold my breath waiting for them all to start wailing, squealing and shouting at me. They do. But I am not going to spend my life as a single parent held hostage to a lot of noise, so I shoo them all into the bath and start thinking about what to wear to dinner.

Charlotte will not be budged from either my wedding dress or the little black number that I wore on my first date with Nick. Just for fun I try it on. There is no way I will get it over my hips, is there? Oh my God, there is! But the zip will surely refuse to do up? Okay it’s half-way up, but what happens next? I freeze out of fear of being stuck there like a contortionist, unable to get either in or out of the dress. This happened to Carla once in H&M in Oxford Street. In the end she had to get three sales assistants to wrench her out of the thing.

“They were all women,” she complained. “Otherwise I might have bought the damned thing.”

I might starve to death in my bedroom, unable to move or raise the alarm because the dress is too tight.

I keep going, rather gingerly. It seems to close smoothly. Yes! Maybe I will have to invest in a whole new wardrobe before buying the harvesting machinery I need? It’s a tricky one; new barrels or new bras? Maybe I should have kept Cécile’s. It would almost fit me now.

I look at myself in the mirror. I can’t believe I can wear this dress again. Suddenly I feel reborn. And of course you can never go wrong with black. It seems ironic that every time I look at it I am reminded of my first date with my then husband-to-be. Should I be in tears over this fact? Maybe, but being able to get the bloody thing on and done up has certainly staved off depression for now. I carefully take off the dress and carry on with my beautifying.

I rub a conditioning oil treatment into my hair. My arms are so tired from the endless downward dogs I’ve been doing along with the work in the vineyards, I can barely lift them to my head.

Next it’s time for a face pack. I have bought a small sachet containing some wondrous mix from the pharmacy in the village. It only cost five euros so I’m not expecting miracles, but as I’m learning from my book about French women, the more time you spend pampering yourself and getting ready to go out, the more confident and attractive you feel. I rub the gunk all over my face; I look like a deranged ghost. I guess the plan is that once you take it off you look so much better you think the damn thing has worked.

I decide to take full advantage of my appearance to scare the children. I creep up the stairs to their bathroom and am about to jump in with a ghostly wail when I hear Emily’s voice.

“Well, where is he then? He hasn’t been here for a long time, and no one ever talks about him. That’s what happens when people die. I saw it in a film.”

“But if he had died, Mummy would have told us,” says Charlotte. “And he has called us, lots of times.”

“Not for two days,” says Emily.

“If who died?” asked Edward. “I don’t want anyone to die.”

“Daddy silly,” says Emily. “Don’t you ever listen?”

Edward starts crying.

I run in and the girls both scream in horror. I have forgotten I look as dead as they think their father is.

“Edward, girls! Daddy is NOT dead, don’t be silly,” I say, leaning down to hug them.

“You look terrible,” says Charlotte.

“Really bad,” adds Emily.

“It’s just a face pack to make my skin nicer, don’t worry,” I explain.

“So where is Daddy?”

I decide that half an hour before I am going out is not the time to tell them about Cécile and her strategically placed bra.

“He has had to work a lot but is coming out this weekend, so you’ll see him then,” I say cheerily. “Now come in, let’s get into our jim-jams.”

By the time they are ready for bed and settled in front of the video with Agnès in charge, I have about 15 minutes to get ready, but I do at least remember to wash my face pack off.

I arrive at Calypso’s house at quarter past eight – politely late – carrying a bottle of wine and some flowers. Maybe this time next year I will be carrying one of my own bottles of wine. But suddenly that seems a long way away.

The door is flung open by a man wearing chinos and a pink shirt. He is blond, slightly balding, quite round-faced and friendly-looking. His body looks like it has undergone a lot of heavy-duty training.

“Hello, you must be Sophie. I’m Tim, Calypso’s husband,” he says grabbing my hand and shaking it vigorously. “Come in, come in, thanks so much for the wine, do give the flowers to Calypso, she’ll be thrilled.”

I follow him into the sitting room saying a silent prayer that there won’t be a sandstorm this evening. I never did buy that bulletproof vest.

Calypso is sitting with another couple on a large cream sofa. There are drinks on the table in front of them and bowls of nuts and crisps. I am introduced to Robert, who then introduces his rather mousy wife Helen as his ‘other half’. They were either both too busy to get changed or they are taking the shabby chic look to extremes.

“How long have you been here?” asks Robert, almost before Calypso has asked what I would like to drink. I have come to expect this. This is the first
question any expat Brit in France will ask another expat. For some reason, there is a competition going on among them all as to who has been there the longest, speaks the best French, has the most French friends; in short, who has become the most French.

“Only three months,” I say. I can see from the look of triumph in his eyes that Robert has won this particular round. Naturally I refuse to hand him victory by returning the question and carry on talking about myself.

“We moved here to make wine,” I say. “We live at Sainte Claire, just across the vineyards the other side of the school.”

“How interesting,” says Helen, making it sound anything but. “Do you know a lot about wine?”

“Nothing at all,” I say smiling. “But I’m willing to learn.”

“You’ll have your work cut out for you,” Robert joins in. “We’ve been here for over twenty years, and we’re still learning.”

At the casual drop of the ‘twenty years’ I am supposed to, according to a bit I read in one of my books about moving to France, say something along the lines of “How amazing, imagine, twenty years” as though he has completed a life sentence for some crime he didn’t commit.

However, I am in a rebellious mood so don’t flinch but respond with: “I know. I have to start right from the very beginning, but I’m hoping I will find some friendly wine-maker to point me in the right direction. Although it has to be said I’ve yet to meet any.”

“Well, I think you might find things in
la France profonde
a little more complicated than in London,” says Helen with a smirk that makes me want to punch her – and normally at dinner parties I’m a pretty non-violent person. Of course, I know it’s not going to be easy to make wine alone and bring up the children, all in a foreign country with an administration system that is enough to send anyone off their head and a punishing tax regime. But how about just pretending I might make it for two minutes to make me feel better about my life? At least until I’ve had a glass of wine to cheer me up.

I am rapidly losing the will to live. A dinner party filled with what Bridget Jones so fittingly called ‘smug marrieds’ and chat about daily commutes and nannies seems exciting compared with this little soirée of smug expats.

Helen’s ‘other half’ nods in agreement. “And as for friendly wine-makers, well they’re few and far between,” he adds, spitting out a piece of olive as he speaks.

Can this get any worse? If I want to watch people spitting out food, I’ll just have dinner with my children.

“Did someone mention a friendly wine-maker?”

I recognise that voice. I leap up from my chair and am suddenly face to
face with the man from the vineyard. I try not to look incredibly excited; after all I am not sixteen years old and this is not my first prom.

“Nice to see you again,” I say as calmly as I can, stretching out my hand for him to shake. Being a smarmy Frenchman of course, he kisses it instead, without ever losing eye contact with me. Or rather, he ‘kisses and misses’ it, his lips hovering a few millimetres above the back of my hand. I will have to ask Audrey what this strange custom means and how it relates to ‘corners’.

“Ah, so you know Jean-Claude de Sard?” says Tim.

Oh no. It’s not possible. Please tell me I am dreaming. THIS is my evil neighbour? Only hours early I was slagging off this very same man to himself. Happily, the handsome Frog seems to have forgiven me and comes to my rescue.

“Sophie and I met today briefly in my vineyards,” he says to Tim. I am amazed and more than impressed that he remembered my name. “But I think she has a bad impression of me,
n’est-ce pas
?” He turns back to face me.

“Ah, well, your foreman has forbidden us from walking across your vineyards and actually once tried to shoot me,” I say, trying to ignore the seductive smell of his aftershave, which I recognise from earlier. “And he says that was on your orders, so I guess, well, no, my first impression was not good.”

“And now?” he grins cheekily, “has it changed at all?”

I somehow stop myself from melting on the spot. “That depends,” I say,“on whether or not you allow the children and me to walk across your vineyards.”

Jean-Claude de Sard laughs. “It’s a deal. And for the record, I never told him you couldn’t walk across my land. But he does like to control the whole estate in just about every way.”

Suddenly this dinner party is looking a whole lot more interesting. I can even make pleasant conversation with Mr and Mrs Smug-Francophiles without feeling irritated. We sit around drinking the champagne Jean-Claude has bought and chatting. Tim, Calypso’s husband, who is just as posh as she is (or pretends to be), tells us tales of playing rugby for the Harlequins and life in the Army. He seems perfectly sane. I can’t imagine him trying to shoot his wife, or anyone else for that matter. He is one of those classic ‘Tim-
nice-but
-dim’ types that the English middle classes are so good at producing. Not the gun-toting madman I imagined at all.

Dinner is lasagne and salad.

“Calypso only has two dinner-party menus,” says Tim, laughing as he serves us. “The other one is shepherd’s pie.”

“Lucky I didn’t come on a shepherd’s pie night,” says Helen. “I don’t eat
lamb.”

I make a mental note to only cook lamb if I ever have a dinner party at Sainte Claire.

“So, Jean-Claude,” says Helen’s ‘other half’, “what do you think of all these English invading your country?”

Jean-Claude twirls his wine around in his glass and for a moment I wonder if he might take offence at the question. But he smiles his most disarming smile and says, “We are all invaders. It’s just a question of when we came.”