Best, Karen W.
How embarrassing to have responded so eagerly to an offer that was not intended for me but the flamboyant blonde lesbian from BA. I heard nothing for a few days and then a sheepish reply:
Hi Karen,
Oops!! Yes, the email was intended for the other Karen. But why don’t you come down anyway? Bring your laptop and maybe we can do some writing. I have also got another (prize-winning) writer friend staying. Maybe he can give us some advice.
Look forward to seeing you,
Dave.
I know I should have been too embarrassed to accept. But he had invited me that first night in Yorkshire, I was going to be in France and I did want to see his house. Shamelessly, I looked up the train timetable on the Internet and typed back the time of my TGV’s arrival.
I came out of Poitiers station to find a town in the full bloom of summer – rosy golden light bouncing off the surrounding buildings and every available surface, people hugging and kissing, the cries of ‘Ça va?’ or ‘Comment vas-tu?’ and the sounds of car boots and doors slamming shut. Everything was full of the promise of the weekend to come. But, in truth, I was a little nervous. I was about to spend forty-eight hours with a semi-stranger. It was three months since the course and I was worried I might not even recognise Dave.
Fortunately, he was waiting for me outside the station. ‘Hi Karen, so how’s it going?’ he asked, taking my bag and leading me to his car. He looked very suntanned and attractive. ‘What were you doing in Paris?’ I told him about the perfume launch I had been attending as we left the town behind and drove into the French countryside. I looked out of the open window at a vivid yellow and blue landscape, at the fields bursting with sunflowers and blond haystacks against the vibrant turquoise evening sky. As I felt the warm evening breeze on my arm, resting on an open window, and watched the long-armed irrigators send arcs of water soaring over the fields, I felt a surge of excitement for the first time in ages.
‘Bloody hell, that sounds glamorous!’ said Dave, turning to me with a smile.
‘I can’t wait to see your house,’ I said. ‘Did you say you had a friend staying with you?’
‘Yeah, that’s right, Gerard Wilton. He recently won a major literary award.’
The name rang no bells.
‘What kind of stuff does he write?’
‘Well, he likes historical stuff and is very interested in aviation.’
‘So where is… er, Gerard?’ I imagined an old buffer in a navy blazer poring over books of historical facts and aviation history.
‘I left him in the garden with a jug of sangria.’
Forty-five minutes later and we were all sitting in Dave’s garden drinking sangria with a view of his neighbours’ allotments sloping down towards the old chateau of Villiers. Now in ruins, it still looked impressive against the blue July sky. Gerard (or Gerry as he preferred to be called) was not an old buffer in grey flannel but a cool dude in combat trousers with long blond hair. He looked like he was on day release from a rock band or surf school. He was also very charming and modest – particularly since it transpired that he had won a major literary prize. He had become a writer, he said, because he wasn’t good at anything else and, apart from casual work in bars, he had never really had a proper job. But rather than talk about himself or his novels, he seemed very interested in my job – although some of his questions struck me as a little deep for a first meeting.
‘So would you say you were happy?’ he asked me suddenly.
‘Well, who wouldn’t be?’ I said. ‘Sitting in a garden in France on a warm summer evening with a view of a medieval chateau?’
Gerry looked thoughtful.
‘He seems really nice. How do you two know each other?’ I asked Dave when Gerry went back into the house to make another jug of sangria. Dave looked suddenly embarrassed and evaded the question.
‘So, what do you think of the house then?’ he asked.
‘It’s fantastic. I’m very jealous,’ I replied.
I asked him how he’d found it and why he’d chosen this village. Dave launched into a story about how he had checked weather charts and motorway maps and websites of house prices in France and had decided that this was the best area in terms of affordability, location and weather.
‘So you didn’t just stick a pin in a map then?’ I said.
‘I looked at dozens of villages and loads of houses,’ he replied, ‘before I found this. It’s by far the best village in the region.’
‘What about your wife? Does she come out a lot?’
‘Not really. Linda runs a beauty salon and is always busy. And she’s not really that keen on France anyway.’ This struck me as a little odd – that Dave should choose to buy a house and spend large amounts of time alone in a country that his wife was not very keen on – but he seemed happy enough with the situation, so who was I to question his marital arrangements?
An hour later and we were all sitting in the garden of the local crêperie, with Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ playing in the background, drinking sweet white wine – the only kind of wine Dave liked, it transpired. It was nearly 10.00 p.m. but still warm. As the scent of jasmine drifted over from the stone flowerbed, I couldn’t believe my luck to have landed here – albeit by default. This is the life, I thought.
‘So Dave told me about the mix up with the email,’ said Gerry, as our starters arrived.
‘Yeah, bloody hell!’ said Dave. ‘How weird was that?’
‘Very. It was so nice of you to invite me anyway, even if the email wasn’t meant for me!’
‘Yes it was,’ said Gerry, suddenly.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That email was meant to go to you. Some things are just meant to be.’
It was an attractive idea and Gerry followed it up with another: ‘Shall we get a bottle of Bordeaux? I can’t drink any more of this wine – it’s far too sweet,’ he said, wrinkling his nose and reaching for the wine list.
‘I’m really glad things worked out the way they did,’ said Dave, leaning back with a benevolent smile. ‘Talking to you, I’ve realised that we’ve got a lot in common.’
I couldn’t really see that we had that much in common. His job was to liaise between the creative people at his agency who came up with the ads and the ‘tosser’ clients; I wrote about handbags and wrinkle prevention. But then Gerry and Dave didn’t seem to have that much in common either. Dave had worked his way up through the ranks of a big advertising agency; apart from writing, Gerry, by his own admission, had never had a full-time job. I could not see how their paths had crossed. ‘So how do you both know each other?’ I asked, again.
There was an awkward pause.
‘A-ha,’ said Gerry. ‘That’s a story for another day.’
After the short stroll back to the house, Dave suggested a digestif – pronouncing it ‘digestive’, as in the biscuit – and the three of us sat in the candlelit salon until the early hours while he talked about how he hated his job, his plans to turn his barn into a writing retreat and how great it would be to live in France full-time. Later that night, I lay in one of Dave’s guest bedrooms, cocooned in floral wallpaper – even the ceiling and door were papered in it – with Gerry asleep in the room next door. And, for the first time in ages, I fell asleep easily and did not wake until morning.
It was well after 10.00 a.m. before Dave or Gerry stirred. I read for a while and then walked up the cobblestone street to the bakery and bought croissants and a loaf of bread. Just walking across the square – already busy with people heading to the market with straw shopping baskets or pull-along trolleys – seemed more exciting than anything I had done in London for years. When I got back, Gerry was up and making coffee in the kitchen. Wearing wire-rimmed glasses, unshaven and with his long blond hair falling in his eyes, he looked sort of vulnerable and even more attractive.
&
nbsp; ‘What a star you are!’ he said, as I put the croissants on the table.
‘Is Dave up yet?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Gerry. ‘He’s still snoring away up there. I’ll go and give him a shout.’
Dave finally emerged – looking very much like a man who’d drunk two bottles of sweet white wine the night before – and the three of us had breakfast at the long wooden table in the kitchen. After jolting himself awake with viscous black coffee, Dave suggested going to the market. Gerry, disappointingly, wanted to work, so we left him with his laptop and walked up to the square in the sunshine.
The fashion possibilities in Villiers, I noted, were limited. Arranged around the square were a hunting shop (useful should the military look ever come back into fashion), a funeral parlour, a florist (specialising in funeral arrangements) and two women’s clothes shops, both selling an eye-poppingly awful selection of clothes in sludgy colours. Polyester partout. At least my credit cards could take a well-earned break if I lived here. But the small town also boasted two beauty salons, two pharmacies, two boulangeries, two cafes and a wine shop – all clues to the villagers’ priorities. The market, which was housed in a modern concrete hall in the centre of the square, was much smaller than I expected. There was one fishmonger, one long table laden with fruit and veg and one cheerful, round-faced teenager selling goats cheese. I was expecting piles of glistening purple-black olives, mouth-watering displays of plump saucissons, oozing French cheeses and other delicious delicacies, but, if I’m being honest, the market seemed to have far less to offer than the organic section of my local M&S. However, bivalve-lovers were extremely well catered for with no less than three different oyster sellers. One of them, I noted from his van, came from the Île de Ré.
Dave must have sensed my disappointment. ‘The Thursday morning fair is much better. It spreads right across the town,’ he said. ‘But the fishmonger is excellent.’
It was true. The fishmonger, a man with compelling blue eyes and a big nose, had a great deal to offer, with more varieties of sea-life and crustacea than I had ever seen before.
‘So is Gerry with someone?’ I asked Dave, as he examined a large pink salmon. He shook his head.
‘He and his girlfriend split up over a year ago. It was all a bit messy.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Yeah. He’s actually a very complicated person.’
‘Oh. I thought he seemed pretty straightforward.’
‘Trust me,’ said Dave, as if reading my thoughts. ‘You wouldn’t want to get into a relationship with him.’
We were interrupted by a cry of ‘Ah, Dav-eed, comment vas-tu?’ and an elderly woman grasped Dave’s face and planted numerous kisses on it. As the only Anglais in the village, Dave, I soon realised, enjoyed something close to celebrity status. Several people (male and female) greeted him ecstatically, flinging their arms in the air with delight when they saw him. Dave spoke only patchy French and clearly could not understand what they were saying but he nodded and smiled a lot and invited at least two of them around for a drink. ‘Possi-bili-tay. Vous [pointing at the other person]. Aperi-teef [here he would mime lifting a glass to his mouth]. Shezz mwah,’ he would say, pointing in the direction of his house. This was invariably met by a delighted nodding of heads.
Our progress around the small market was slow, since when he wasn’t being greeted like a homecoming hero by the locals, Dave liked to examine everything very closely. Eventually, he bought the large pink salmon and suggested that we go to the cafe on the square for a coffee. As we sat in the sunshine outside the Café du Commerce, drinking black espressos, he was accosted again, this time by a thin, wiry man with a big, bushy moustache.
‘Ah Daveed! Ça va?’
‘This is Victor, the estate agent who found me the house,’ said Dave, inviting him by expansive hand movements to sit down and join us. Victor did so without a moment’s hesitation. He lit a cigarette and asked Dave who I was. Dave didn’t understand, so I answered on his behalf.
‘I’m a friend of Dave’s. I’m here for the weekend,’ I said.
‘So what do you think of his house?’ asked Victor.
‘It’s fantastic. I’m very jealous. I’d love to have a house in France.’
‘You’d like a house in France? Really?’ Victor suddenly became very animated. ‘Because I have one, also in the centre of the village. It has only just become available. It is very rare for a house to come up for sale in the centre of the village.’
‘Blimey, your French is good,’ said Dave. ‘What’s he saying?’
I translated. Dave looked very interested. He turned to Victor: ‘Possi-bili-tay… regard-ay?’ Nearly all of Dave’s attempts to speak French, I realised, began with the word ‘possi-bili-tay’.
‘But of course,’ Victor replied. ‘When?’
‘Possi-bili-tay main-tenant?’ asked Dave.
‘Bien sûr,’ said Victor.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Dave, as Victor went off to get the keys from the agency. ‘There’s another coincidence for you. You said you were thinking of buying a house in France and here’s one that’s just dropped into your lap.’ The three of us walked over to Rue St Benoit, a narrow, cobbled street just off the main square. The house, a two-up, two-down with a garage attached, was shuttered up and uninviting. It had an ugly grey exterior and the shutters were painted sludgy brown, rather than the pale blue-grey of the textbook style français. The front door, made from etched yellow glass and wrought iron, was also a long way from anyone’s idea of the charming French house. But, even before Victor opened the front door, I knew that I was looking at my future.
Victor opened the door and we stepped into a narrow stone passageway. To the left was le petit salon. Victor switched on the light to reveal a dour-looking square room that looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades. The walls were papered in a dense brown floral pattern, while all other available surfaces – doors, dado rail, skirting boards and window frames – were painted mid-tone brown. Below the dado rail, the wallpaper had peeled away to reveal damp and crumbling plaster underneath. The house smelled old. (In beauty world parlance, you would say that it had ‘top notes of wet paper and floor polish and a base of damp, mossy earth’.) It felt like a woman neglected and abandoned – a thing of faded beauty, the paint peeling like cracked make-up on an old face. Her personality was sombre and inward looking, while the fireplace, once the heart of this little house, was boarded up and empty and had not been lit for a long time. Despite this, I could see that the house had once been very pretty and had the potential to be so again. So I ignored the peeling wallpaper and crumbling plaster, focusing instead on the beautiful old narrow floorboards and original features such as the glass panelled doors.
I had a strong sense that something sad had happened here. The house had not been shown any love for a long time. And yet it was far from depressing. As I watched Victor struggling to open the shutters and let in light and air, I experienced a huge wave of optimism.
‘Christ, look at this,’ I could hear Dave saying in the room beyond the salon. I followed him into a room that was visibly falling apart, with an ugly mass of pipes, tanks and strange tubular appendages on the wall. There was an antique oil boiler with the front panel hanging off, and a sink unit sagging towards the floor. This was covered in ancient linoleum that curled up at the corners like stale bread. The pale green wallpaper was hanging off the wall in large strips.
‘Who lived here before?’ I asked, as Victor followed us into the kitchen.
‘A very old lady,’ he replied. ‘In her eighties. She was renting it until she moved into an old people’s home.’
I wondered how on earth an eighty-year-old woman had managed to live here. The boiler didn’t work, the kitchen was unusable and there was no indoor loo. But then I noticed what Dave was looking at, and suddenly all the faults paled into insignificance. Beyond the ki
tchen there was an enclosed courtyard, with high stone walls, a stone flowerbed full of weeds and a shed in one corner with a tiled roof that housed the outdoor loo. I did not need to see any more. I had already made up my mind.
‘You see. It’s completely private,’ said Victor. ‘You can run around naked here if you want.’
‘Fantastic!’ said Dave with an enthusiasm that scared me – though not as much as his next sentence. ‘I’m wondering if I should buy it myself,’ he said. ‘Just look at that courtyard. And you’ve got a garage, which is really unusual for the centre of the village.’
‘But Dave, you’ve already got a house,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I know. Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already got enough on my hands. But this would be a brilliant project for you.’
Victor led the way up the narrow staircase (dark brown with an ox-blood-coloured ceiling) that led from the kitchen to a small landing on the first floor. The large main bedroom was decorated (you’ve guessed it) entirely in brown: brown carpet, brown skirting boards and walls covered in what looked like brown parcel paper. I lifted up the edge of the brown carpet – releasing decades of dust as I did so – to find near-perfect wooden floorboards underneath.
‘They’re in good nick, the floorboards,’ said Dave, bending over to pull up another corner. ‘You’d just have to rip up all this crappy carpet.’
We followed Victor into the rear bedroom, which looked out onto the church spire and a sweep of green and golden countryside. ‘Bloody hell,’ said Dave, as I readjusted my vision. The spare room, in contrast to the relentless brownness of the rest of the house, was papered in vibrant, hot pink 1970s swirls. It was hard to imagine anyone getting any sleep in there. But the psychedelic swirls offered a glimpse of a happier, more vibrant personality. The house hadn’t always been this sad and downtrodden. ‘That wallpaper will have to go,’ said Dave.
‘I quite like it,’ I said. Ironically, the wallpaper, like the jumpsuit and the kaftan, had been out of fashion for so long that it had come back in again. My friends in London, I thought to myself, would pay a fortune for wallpaper like this.
Tout Sweet Page 3
