Love in a Warm Climate (5 page)

“The what?” I asked.

“The
cave
,” said Nick. “It’s the winery, where the wine is made and aged. Can we go on?”

I was keen to linger in the kitchen cooking imaginary feasts for the children, but we walked out into the hall and crossed over to the sitting room.

“It’s quite small,” said Nick.

“That’s because it hasn’t got any furniture in it,” I protested, walking over to the window to touch the marble windowsill. I loved the fact that everything seemed so solid and well made. “Rooms always look smaller when they’re unfurnished.”

If we had been sitting down I think Nick would have kicked me in the
shins. Instead he shot me one of those looks I have grown to hate over the years. It’s his ‘Oh, how could you be so stupid, Sophie? I really am getting angry’ look. And in that phrase I am always Sophie, not Soph, so I know I’m in trouble. It reminds me of being told off at school and makes me feel about seven years old. It is usually followed by an LIC (lecture in car).

A tour of the dining room next door followed. I kept my mouth shut, half sulking and half worried. I really didn’t want an LIC. Mr Vorst would probably drive us into the ditch.

Then came the sitting room, which had a vast fireplace in it – proof, I guessed, that it must get cold here. I imagined us all snuggling around it in our pyjamas with cups of Horlicks playing card games, and wondered if by next Christmas we would be leaving brandy for Father Christmas here. Even Nick couldn’t hide the fact that he was impressed with the fireplace, or maybe that look was more dread at the thought of chopping logs big enough to fit in it?

We climbed the stone staircase and onto the first floor, the agent going on ahead to open the shutters. Each opened shutter revealed another part of the house. The stairs were broad and worn smooth but looked like they would last at least another five hundred years. I loved the feeling of space; I could stretch out both my arms and still not touch the walls.

We walked into the master bedroom. This is where Madame Gréco had her boudoir, bathroom and dressing room. The floors here were wooden, giving it a warmer feel than downstairs. There was a large Victorian bath on a raised platform at one end of the bedroom and a double sink.

“I can’t believe it, I’ve always longed for a Victorian bath,” I whispered to Nick, unable to contain my excitement any longer. I had to stop myself from jumping up and down on the spot.

We opened the large shutters in the middle of the room and walked out onto the balcony. Mr Vorst was fiddling around with something inside so Nick came and stood next to me.

“This view reminds me of a postcard,” he said. “Just look at the vineyards. I think I can see more shades of green than there are in Ireland.”

He was right. There was everything from the bright grass to the olive trees to the oak and the plane trees lining the road that leads to the village and the cypress trees leading up to Château de Boujan. There were vineyards in every direction, perfectly planted rows of vines with leaves on the cusp of turning from green to autumnal bronze and red. They seemed to be a couple of weeks behind those closer to the sea. The lines of the vines led to the mountains in the distance, inviting me to walk between them towards the deep green hills.

I noticed a perfect rose bush growing from a chipped blue ceramic pot. It had worked its way up the soft light stone and looked like it was part of the masonry. It had wax-like petals that at the tips were almost black, the red was so intense.

The plant was about three feet higher than me. I asked Nick to take a picture of me in front of it. An Alsatian dog wandered past the house beneath us and Nick took a picture of him too.

“He’s beautiful,” said Nick. “Where is he from?”

I sensed that Nick was keen to adopt an animal before we even bought the house. He grew up with lots of dogs in the countryside and misses not having them. I had vetoed a dog in London. Partly because I think it would be cruel to have a dog cooped up all day but also because I don’t know anyone who has one who doesn’t find walking them a chore. Apart from my friend Carla, the one who is having an affair with her tennis coach. She uses the walks as an excuse to call him.

When we had coffee mornings together, she told the rest of the amazed mothers all about her trysts; in the car, at the tennis club, even in her own broom cupboard.

“Has your tennis got any better?” I asked her once.

“No darling, I gave up tennis when I discovered sex. I found I was much more talented at it and I never lost. Surely you realise that tennis coaches are not really there to teach you to play tennis?”

She didn’t seem remotely ashamed or even worried that her husband would find out.

“You can’t eat the same pasta sauce every night,” she says in her thick Italian accent, flicking her long black hair, when we question the wisdom of serial infidelity. I guess you can’t if you’re Italian. Personally I had rather gone off pasta sauce in any flavour. I thought it must be hormonal. But maybe Sainte Claire with its wild capers and France with its oysters would prove inspirational.

“I think the dog lived here. The foreman next door at the château has been looking after him,” said Mr Vorst. “I will show you the other bedroom on this floor.”

“How many bedrooms are there in total?” asked Nick.

“There are four,” answered Mr Vorst. “It is not an overly large property but there is a barn that could be converted if you needed more living space. It is already semi-habitable, it is where the grape-pickers used to stay during the harvest.”

I was about to say to Nick that a barn would be perfect for the girls when they are older. They could be self-sufficient there and play loud pop music
and dye their hair green without bothering us. As long as it wasn’t French pop music, obviously. There have to be some limits. But I decided to keep it for when we were alone. More arguments to convince him Sainte Claire was the only place for us.

We went up to the top of the house, where there were two large bedrooms, each with a small attic-style window at the front and a larger one at the side. There was a bathroom in the middle of them both, with doors joining it from each one. I was already seeing bunk beds in the slightly larger room for the girls and getting butterflies.

Apparently the key to buying the right house is being able to see yourself living there. I could see myself there very clearly, as well as my entire family and all my friends. Lucy would fit right in; she would waft from room to room wearing some floaty diaphanous creation and carrying an intellectual book. Sarah would be curled up on the sofa, her blonde hair tied up in a ponytail, reading the latest copy of
Vogue
. Carla would be in the
cave
with the wine-maker, assuming we had one. Or out looking for one if we didn’t.

As we walked downstairs, Nick whispered to me to stop grinning and squeezed my hand. I took the hand squeeze as a sign that he loved it as much as I did. My butterflies intensified. I was sure Mr Vorst could hear my heart beating.

We walked outside into the bright sun, providing a stark contrast to the cool interior. The agent walked us around the house to a terrace on the other side of the kitchen.

“Look at the marble table,” I said to Nick. “Great for breakfast.”

The agent seemed to have miraculously regained his hearing.

“The marble table and chairs are included in the sale,” he said smiling. “And look at the fountain. The basin is probably big enough to swim in on a warm day.”

“Yes,” said Nick. “But it’s empty. How can we be sure it works?”

We walked towards it. An over-sized, vertical fish made of stone was the spout. I could see where the water would burst out of its mouth and imagine cooling off underneath it on a hot day.

“All the electrics are in order,” said the agent, as if he were quoting straight from the ‘How to Sell a House on the Spot’ manual.

I was sure he couldn’t possibly know whether they were or not, but I didn’t care. We could always fix the fountain. I was in love. I was like a young girl who had just met her dream boy. Small details about his electrical circuits or lack of them were unlikely to put me off.

The terrace looked out over rows of vines leading to the mountains in the distance. It was now almost five o’clock, approaching my favourite time
of day, when the shadows lengthen and the sun caresses you with its dying rays. And you know a drink is not far off.

“Take a walk to the vineyard,” said Mr Vorst. Nick and I wandered off alone.

“I love it, love it, love it,” I repeated as quietly as I could.

“I know,” said Nick. “But try not to show it quite so blatantly. We still need to negotiate a good deal here, the asking price is high for the amount of land involved.”

The vines were about one metre tall. The grapes were still on them – Mr Vorst had explained that they weren’t harvested this year.

“There are weeds all around but the vines look healthy,” said Nick, bending over to inspect a bunch of grapes. I did the same.

“Amazing to think they turn into wine,” I said to Nick, holding a bunch of grapes in my hand.

He laughed. “Soph, they don’t just turn into wine, we have to make them into wine. There’s a whole process…” He was about to tell me about it when his BlackBerry started wailing and he wandered off with it stuck to his ear, a more and more regular occurrence over the past couple of months. Funny that.

I was left alone in the vineyard. There were rose bushes at the end of some of the lines of vines, both yellow and red. I thought about where we might be a year from now if we bought Sainte Claire. We would have harvested the grapes, either by hand or machine if we could afford to rent a machine, we would have bottled the wine and we would be trying to sell it. We would have pruned the vines, sprayed them to protect them from disease, weeded around the base and trellised them. It seemed a lot to achieve in one year but I was longing to give it a go. I was longing to make a life here for all of us, to live off the land, to go back to nature and get away from tarmac, crime and traffic wardens who seem to multiply every week like hordes of locusts, as well as the rude men with bad taste in breasts and handbags (why would you otherwise mug a woman carrying an old Marks & Spencer special?).

I saw Nick walking back towards me. I might once have thought this was a pipedream, but by now I was all for it now and even grateful to him for coming up with it.

“The estate is at the boundary where the appellations of Faugères and Saint-Chinian meet. Monsieur Gréco was with Saint-Chinian,” Mr Vorst joined us, “a respected and popular appellation. When Monsieur Gréco was alive he used to work the vineyard and did well out of it. When he died Madame Gréco just sold the grapes to a local
négociant
who sold them on to
other wine makers or the local wine cooperative.”

In the vineyards we were standing was a little stone hut, which I guessed was where the workers would stop for lunch. It had a tiled roof and a jasmine plant growing up the walls. It was like something from a scene in a dreamy, hazy French film with no discernible plot.

“Any minute now Gérard Depardieu is going to lumber past swigging a bottle of red wine and chewing on a baguette,” I said nudging Nick.

“I hope Emmanuelle Béart is with him,” he laughed.

We walked down a dusty track that Mr Vorst told us was often used as a
boules
pitch. The
cave
or winery was between the house and the vineyards, opposite a barn used to house the grape-pickers during harvest time. It was a whitewashed building and the most chaotic thing about the property. Inside bits of broken machinery lay around and there were bottles all over the place. I couldn’t imagine how it would ever be cleaned up. But Nick looked ecstatic.

“What a mess,” I said.

“It’s marvellous,” said Nick under his breath. “Look at these
foudres
; they must be over one hundred years old. This is like walking into wine-making history.”

There was a row of around twenty huge oak casks along both walls. They were on their sides.

“Once the wine juice is squeezed it is pumped up into the casks through the top and then left for a year or so to take on the taste of the oak as it ages,” Nick explained.

“Well, it’s great they’re all here,” I said.

“Not on a practical level,” said Nick, suddenly coming into his own. “Nowadays everyone uses stainless steel or concrete so they can control the amount of oxygen that gets to the wine and also it’s easier to reduce the temperature; which is essential if you want to avoid the wine turning to vinegar. We’ll have to invest in some of those. And some peacocks of course.”

I was so happy to hear him say it. Not that I could see how anyone could fail to be charmed by Sainte Claire but I needed to be sure that Nick could see himself there as strongly as I could.

We walked back out into the early-evening sunshine. I had the sensation that nothing had changed for generations. The view to the mountains was the same, the vines, the roses and the beautiful stone house and barn. It felt secure and peaceful.

“I wish I had a TARDIS and could just transport the family, the furniture and Daisy right this minute,” I said to Nick.

I was reluctant to leave as we walked back towards the house and to the agent’s Berlingo van. Before I got in the car I took one last look up at the rose on my balcony and said a silent prayer that we would be back soon, crossing my toes and fingers as I did so. The agent went around closing all the shutters again. I said a silent prayer that next time they were opened it would be by us and that we would be here to stay.

We drove back with the agent to his office in silence, partly for fear of endangering our lives but also overwhelmed with a sense of how important it was for us to buy the house, how it encapsulated our whole French dream, how it was the one real chance we had to turn our dream into reality.

We sat down in his office. “The asking price is €850,000. They had an offer,” he told us looking through some papers, “of €790,000, which they have rejected. But I know they are keen to sell before the end of year for tax reasons.”