Escape to the French Farmhouse

by Jo Thomas

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  RECIPES

  About the Author

  Jo Thomas worked for many years as a reporter and producer, first for BBC Radio 5, before moving on to Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and Radio 2’s The Steve Wright Show.

  In 2013 Jo won the RNA Katie Fforde Bursary. Her debut novel, The Oyster Catcher, was a runaway bestseller in ebook and was awarded the 2014 RNA Joan Hessayon Award and the 2014 Festival of Romance Best Ebook Award. Jo lives in the Vale of Glamorgan with her husband and three children.

  Also by Jo Thomas

  THE OYSTER CATCHER

  THE OLIVE BRANCH

  LATE SUMMER IN THE VINEYARD

  THE HONEY FARM ON THE HILL

  SUNSET OVER CHERRY ORCHARD

  A WINTER BENEATH THE STARS

  MY LEMON GROVE SUMMER

  COMING HOME TO WINTER ISLAND

  Ebook short stories:

  THE CHESTNUT TREE

  THE RED SKY AT NIGHT

  NOTES FROM THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

  To VP, Vicky Palmer, for her passion for books, enthusiasm, laughter and unwavering support in helping me become the writer I always wanted to be and for bringing me to my new home.

  And to France, because I have always loved you! Santé!

  ONE

  Bang! Bang! BANG!

  Why today? Of all days? On moving day!

  The noise goes right through me, jangling my already shredded nerves, as one of the heavy wooden doors upstairs slams, the wind whipping in and around the house, like a gaggle of overexcited spirits at Halloween, teasing and causing havoc. Except it’s not Halloween, it’s early June. And it’s not spirits causing havoc: it’s the mistral wind that blows regularly here in Provence and has chosen to create mischief today, of all days. I can hear it howling, laughing at me.

  ‘You really thought you could do this?’

  More doors bang. Glasses I’ve yet to wrap fall over on the sideboard. I’m exhausted before the day has even begun. My arms, legs and spirits are heavy, as if I’m dragging heavy sandbags behind me, draining my already depleted energy supplies.

  I walk slowly along the empty hall towards the front door. It was the wonderful terracotta floor tiles I’d noticed when we first arrived. Their red is worn to orange in places, and they seem to tell a story of their own, of the many footsteps that have crossed them over the years. We’ve made barely a dusty footprint on them, let alone been here long enough to leave an indentation.

  I step outside, holding my face defiantly to the wind, which is blowing up dust and carrying it through the just-cleaned house. My eyes stream and I blink. At least we did it, I think. At least we tried. I wipe my eyes with the corner of my poncho. I’m not sure I have a coat to put on later when we arrive back in the UK.

  ‘Don’t worry, love,’ shouts the removal man over the wind. He’s in a dark burgundy polo shirt with ‘Broderick and Daughter Removals’ in gold on the breast. I nod and try to smile at him, but inside I know I’m out of my depth. My life is way out of my control. ‘Me and Lexie are doing moves like this all the time!’ he yells cheerily, walking back from wrestling with and eventually tying back the heavy doors of the removal truck.

  It’s parked in front of the house under the plane trees, their branches waving enthusiastically, like they’ve seen a long-lost friend. They’ll need pruning next year … The thought drifts through my confused mind, like a train pulling up at a station exactly on time, despite the weather conditions. Pollarding, I think randomly, letting the word sit in my mind, relishing the calm it brings, as if the wind has dropped, just for a moment, bringing calm. And then it blows up again, with a vengeance.

  Why am I thinking about the plane trees at the front of the house? I won’t be here next year. I’ll be … Where will I be? The chaos that the wind brings shreds my nerves all over again as the van doors bang and outdoor pots, gathered together, topple over and roll around.

  Ralph barks excitedly and barges past me, catching me on the back of the calves and making my knees buckle. He skids over the tiles to rush out and greet the visitors. Well, at least he may have left a scratch mark or two on the floor, I think sagely.

  Mr Broderick walks up the couple of steps to the front door. The shutters, firmly closed upstairs, rattle in their holdings. One breaks free from its tie and bangs against the wall. I look around for Ollie to help, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Oh, yes, he is: he’s sitting in the dust-covered car, on the phone, making calls. Making plans. I sigh. More plans.

  ‘Honestly, love,’ says Mr Broderick, as he kindly touches my elbow, clearly mistaking the dusty cause of my tears. ‘We do this all the time! Move people over here for a taste of the good life, then get a call to move them back six months later when they realize what a mistake they’ve made. They’re missing everything about good old Blighty and want to go home! It happens all the time! You can’t beat Blighty, that’s what I say. Isn’t that right, Lexie?’ He raises his voice to call over the wind to the woman – possibly the same age as me, late thirties – jumping down from the back of the truck and walking towards us. She’s wearing a matching Broderick’s polo shirt, smiling. She has short, spiky white-blonde hair and leopard-print jeans. She seems oblivious to the wind swirling around the driveway, the rolling terracotta pots and the clouds of dust pluming around her steel-toe-capped boots.

  ‘What’s that, Dad?’ she shrieks, over the wind.

  ‘I said,’ he shouts, over the banging shutter, ‘we do this all the time. Move people over here and move them back six months later.’

  ‘We do.’ She smiles widely. ‘He always says there’s nowhere like Blighty.’ She’s stand
ing next to her dad now. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she says, and suddenly her warmth feels like a glimmer of home.

  This time actual tears spring to my eyes. Home. Where exactly is home? We sold the house, paid off the debts we’d run up, when we moved out here. Now Ollie is organizing us a house to rent ‘back home’. But I have no idea where it will be, or what home looks like.

  ‘Six months, that’s the norm,’ says Mr Broderick. ‘Mind you,’ he chortles, ‘yours is the shortest I think we’ve ever done. Six weeks is probably a record.’ He chortles some more. ‘Now, where shall we start?’ he says, clapping his hands together and stepping into the farmhouse.

  Six months is the norm, I repeat in my head. But ours is the shortest he’s ever done. Six weeks, from moving in to moving ‘home’. Six long weeks. I sigh.

  Ralph runs excitedly in circles around Mr Broderick and his daughter. I make a grab for his collar but he swerves past me and thinks it’s a game. Then he lies down in the dust, tingeing his cream coat a kind of peach, barking at me. I throw up my hands, despairing at his disobedience.

  ‘Ollie!’ I call to him in the car. But Ollie waves a hand to indicate he’s busy. He says he gets his best phone signal sitting in the car on the drive. I think he’s spent more time on the phone in his car than in the house over these six weeks.

  The mistral blows harder. It can send people mad, they say. I pull my arms around myself, holding my face to the warm wind, closing my eyes against the dust, feeling the change in the air on my skin.

  ‘Where shall we start?’ says smiling Lexie.

  I open my eyes and turn to the packed boxes stacked on the furniture that is going back into a truck, and possibly storage, if the rental house doesn’t have room for it. ‘Anywhere you like.’ I try to smile back, feeling drained and exhausted. The boxes had barely been unpacked before I was packing them again. Some haven’t been unpacked at all and I have no idea what’s in them. Most of the photographs never made it on to shelves, but, then, that’s a blessing as I hate having photographs of myself staring at me when I walk into a room. In our last house, Ollie insisted on having framed photographs in the hall and up the stairs. Us on our wedding day. His graduation picture. A picture of the two of us at his cousin’s baby’s christening. I thought I looked dreadful in that one but he liked it, said it was lovely of the two of us. To me, it just reminded me of how I’d felt that day: happy for the new parents but hollow and empty inside. It wasn’t long after Mum died.

  And I’m not sure which loss people meant when they said they were sorry for mine. I was sorry for my loss too. Both of them. Losing my mum and my final chance to be a mum myself. Just before we decided to move out here, which was soon after Ollie bought Ralph. I say we decided … It was Ollie’s dream. He’d become addicted to A New Life in the Sun and Escape to the Chateau, when he was made redundant, and thought that this farmhouse, with its peach-coloured stone walls and peeling painted shutters, was the answer to all our problems.

  I still had my job at the big department store in town and loved everything about it. I was a department manager. I was good at it. I was respected. It was where I fitted in. I loved talking to customers, arranging the stock, cashing up the tills at the end of a busy day. I knew who I was. Now, I have no idea where I fit in. Not here in France any more, that’s for sure. Not that we ever did. We went to a few parties laid on by some of the expats living here when we first arrived, but I didn’t meet anyone I really connected with. I found no one who loved the food of the area, or wanted to learn French with me and could tell me about a local class, or anyone who was making a living that might have given me some ideas on how I could start a business of my own, a way of putting my experience at the department store to good use. We met the group of expats every Thursday in the local ‘pub’, the bar in the middle of the town, on the square, for a few drinks and English quiz night, organized by a friendly, smart woman called Cora and two of her friends. Ollie had loved those nights. I was never one for quizzes. A wide general knowledge has never been top of my list of attractive qualities in a person. But Ollie loved the glory of being on the winning team.

  I wander back inside to the kitchen, hoping Ralph will follow if he thinks food’s on offer. The kitchen still smells of the ripe melon I had for breakfast, trying to eat up the last of the food from the fridge, and feeling I should have something, although my stomach was tight with tension. I look out of the French windows at the terrace, to the side of the house, where we’ve yet to enjoy one of those long, happy, friends-surrounded meals we kidded ourselves we would, and the field that slopes to the valley and the river. The other side looks out over the town and the purple lavender surrounding it.

  I turn back to the hall. Ralph is circling Mr Broderick as he makes his way outside, whistling, carrying one end of the settee with Lexie at the other. As she bends I can just see the top of her leopard-print thong and wonder if I will ever enjoy wearing sexy underwear again. Since we left the UK to make ‘our life in the sun’, I’ve gravitated to cotton midis and Ollie hasn’t noticed, but that may be because he’s been sleeping in one of the spare rooms since week one, ever since he did his back in trying to be Dick – Dick from Escape to the Chateau, that is – and attempting to sort out our blocked drain, creating a leak, a flood and bringing down the salon ceiling. We had to find a plumber, a plasterer and a decorator, and used up nearly all our savings putting it right.

  Thankfully, the doctor Ollie saw about his back thought we were here on holiday and treated Ollie accordingly, without us having to worry about big medical bills as well. And that was how it felt: like one long holiday from hell. Everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong, including Ollie’s plans for working from home, doing business online: our internet is so poor he’s had to drive to the next big town to send emails. It’s been a disaster.

  Ralph goes into a barking frenzy, rushing outside, kicking up even more dust as he goes haring down the drive to whoever might be passing.

  ‘Ralph! Ralph!’ He ignores me and carries on careering down the drive. I know only too well that he has trouble stopping and is likely to crash into whoever he is greeting and knock them off their feet.

  I run after him, calling his name. Luckily I’m wearing lace-up trainers with a thick, cushioned heel, three-quarter-length jeans and a V-neck poncho over my white T-shirt. But I can hardly see him in the pink dust the wind is creating. I catch up with my dog, who is barking at nothing but the wind blowing in the trees, grab his collar and turn back towards the house.

  Halfway along the drive I stand and look at the stone farmhouse and its lavender-blue shutters, rattling in the wind. I think of all the excitement for the future it came with when Ollie brought me here, telling me he’d found and bought our perfect home while I was working out my notice in the UK.

  I look at the peeling paint now and think about the crack that had appeared in the salon ceiling before it fell down. The crack that had been covered with a thick layer of paint to patch it and make it last a little longer. That’s exactly what this house was: a thick layer of paint to patch the cracks in our relationship … and now our ceiling has fallen down.

  I watch Ollie talking urgently into the phone, leaving the packing to the people he’s employed and me. I watch him, but he doesn’t notice me. I turn back to help the removers. There’s no let-up in the mistral, making the job twice as hard, the shutters and doors creaking, whining and banging. But, in what feels like no time at all, Mr Broderick and Lexie have the truck packed. They’ve done it. My entire life is inside it, ready to go home.

  Home. That word again. Back to where we started. Back to where the cracks first appeared, after the failed IVF attempts, Ollie’s redundancy and then my mum dying. What exactly is left of our home together? What exactly is left of us? I take a final look around the empty house to make sure we’ve left nothing behind. I take a forgotten photograph off the wall on the staircase. The only one that made it on to an existing nail. When Ollie tried to put in ot
hers, the walls cracked some more. It’s a wedding picture, with all the hopes and dreams from before the cracks happened and couldn’t be filled. All that’s left is me, this picture and Ralph, now sitting at my feet, panting and exhausted by all the excitement.

  ‘Right! All set?’ Ollie is standing in the doorway, finally off his phone. ‘Think we’re all sorted,’ he says. ‘We’ve got a couple of houses to see when we get back. They’re nothing special but it’s a start.’ He goes back to trying to text from his phone.

  A start. Another new start. Starting over. The house I left was special. I loved it. I thought it was going to be our family home for ever. Just like I loved my job. Now we’re going back to our old lives, without the house I loved, or the job I was good at. Now we’re going back to the start. And if I was starting over, would I do it with Ollie, knowing what I know now? Is this a fresh start – the words have formed in my head before I know it – or is it the end? Suddenly I feel a sense of calm, of stillness, of absolute clarity among the chaos of the day.

  I look at him and say exactly what I’m thinking.

  ‘I’m not coming, Ollie.’

  TWO

  ‘What?’ He looks up from his phone as if he’s misheard me.

  ‘I’m not coming. I’m not going back,’ I say. I can’t go back to where we came from. Not the house or the job, but us. I can’t go back to feeling how I did before we came here. Ollie had moved on very quickly at the end of our IVF treatment. He bought Ralph for me, let him sleep on the bed and decided we should move to France. I can’t go back to the unhappiness and the loneliness I felt in our marriage.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! The van’s all packed up! They’re just about to leave! Of course we’re going!’

  I take a deep breath. ‘I’m not, Ollie. We have to be honest with ourselves. Our marriage wasn’t working in the UK, it didn’t work out here and it won’t work back there, because neither of us wants to be in it any more.’