Love in a Warm Climate

by Helena Frith-Powell

  “Just drive, please,” she implores me. “I’ll explain later.”

  I start the engine. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere, just out of here,” she looks around her in fear. “But quickly.”

  I drive out of the village, almost running over the village idiot as I go. This is a man who thinks it’s a good idea to sway around the middle of the road asking for cigarettes. Someone should tell him smoking is bad for you.

  We drive south on the road towards the coast. Calypso visibly relaxes the further away we get from Boujan.

  “That was a close shave,” she says, leaning back in her seat. “I reckon he’d have caught me if it hadn’t been for you. It’s the wind with the rain that brings it on; it brings up the sand from the Sahara.”

  “Who? Brings on what?” I say, wondering when I can stop driving in the opposite direction I want to go in. “What on earth is going on?”

  “It’s my husband Tim,” she says. “He suffers from Gulf War Syndrome. I didn’t mention it before because I hoped he was better, seemed silly to bore you with it. Also you might have thought I was a lunatic. But about once a year he grabs our shotgun and tries to kill me. It’s a shame but there it is.”

  Bloody hell. I thought my husband was irritating.

  “So how bad is it?” I ask her. “I mean how close has he actually got to shooting you?”

  Calypso laughs nervously and runs her thin hands through her blonde hair. I notice she has lots of silver rings on practically every finger. “I’ve been lucky so far. I can normally sense it, the weather, his mood and so on.”

  “Is he getting help for it?”

  “He was back home, but here it’s more difficult. They don’t really recognise Gulf War Syndrome, rather in the same way they don’t recognise dyslexia.”

  “They don’t recognise dyslexia? That’s shocking.”

  “Look, there are some shocking things about the French, but then there are some crazy things about us too. And you must admit life here is grand.”

  Just her use of the word grand reminds me of Nick. I swallow hard.

  “Yes, I agree,” I say. “It is grand. Do you think you’ll ever go back to England?”

  Calypso snorts. “Not likely. After three years here it’s hard to imagine. Back to what? Back to grey weather and grumpy people. Or is it the other way round? Not really much of an incentive.”

  She has a point. I guess that is what I’m heading to. How depressing.

  “Why did you move out here?” I ask her, and realise how little I know about my new friend.

  “Tim got an army sick pension and I was made redundant from Channel Four so we had a bit of a nest-egg. We decided to make a break while the kids were still young enough and make a fresh start. I have always wanted to live in France, ever since I was 15 and read Bonjour tristesse, you know, by Françoise Sagan.”

  I do know. It’s one of the books I read before moving out here; and the author is the woman who came out with the immortal line Nick is fond of quoting, “A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off you.”

  Why is it that when you least want to think about someone there are reminders everywhere? He’ll be on telly next. The selfish bastard.

  “How are you settling in?” asks Calypso. “Have you made any other friends here yet?”

  “Audrey said hello to me the other day,” I tell her.

  “Wow, I’m impressed. She normally only talks to men,” she laughs. “Watch out for your husband with her – she’s a classic French woman, her main hobby is seduction. In fact, it might be her only hobby.”

  I don’t tell her that my husband has already been stolen by a French hussy.

  “So I guess she doesn’t have many friends?” I say instead.

  “Well, she’s from Paris so she’s already at a disadvantage. They loathe Parisians here. But no, I don’t think she has many friends, at least not among the other women. Although they are probably used to it and possibly up to the same thing as well. The baker, for example, is having an affair with his wife’s best friend.”

  “How do you know all this? I always heard the French rural community was notoriously hard to infiltrate.”

  Calypso smiles. “You just need a good mole,” she says, and then adds; “I think it’s safe to go back now. By the time we get there, Tim will have calmed down.”

  I go all the way around the next roundabout and back towards Boujan. It is still pouring with rain, which won’t make the house any easier to sell, I reflect gloomily.

  Calypso shows me the way to her house. I insist on walking her in to make sure everything is all right. They live in a modern cottage close to the school – nothing as charming as Sainte Claire but a nice size with a pool and a lovely view of the Château de Boujan. At least it would be a lovely view if you could see through the endless rain.

  Once inside, Calypso gets a text from Tim. She shows it to me. “Sorry, am in bar having coffee, all calm again,” it reads.

  “Poor man,” I say. “It must be a bit like being a werewolf or a vampire.”

  Calypso laughs. “Sadly that dark secret is all he has in common with Edward Cullen,” she says. “See you at school later on? Thanks so much for everything, you’re a darling.”

  “Don’t mention it, yes, I’ll be there,” I say.

  I get back in my car and try to remember what I was supposed to do with my morning before it was hi-jacked.

  Welcome to the quiet life in the south of France. Since I moved here, my husband and I have split up, I have been chased by a beret-wearing Frenchman carrying a gun, and my only friend’s husband has tried to murder her. I turn on the radio again. At least Bonnie Tyler has shut up.

  Rule 10

  Remember that nothing has to last forever, or even for an afternoon

  The French Art of Having Affairs

  The people that might want to buy our home are from Sussex. She is vast, he is painfully thin. The semi-deaf agent told me on the phone that they want to set up a pottery school at Sainte Claire.

  I ask them how they decided on this part of France.

  “It’s nice and convenient from the airport,” Mrs Spratt tells me breathlessly as she heaves her frame up the stairs. I should hang out with this woman more often – I feel as lithe as Kate Moss. Bugger the yoga. “And we like the countryside, so pretty with the vines and the olive trees and the lavender.”

  “Why are you selling, if you don’t mind my asking?” asks Mr Spratt.

  I don’t mind him asking but I’m not going to tell him the truth.

  “My husband has just been made a great job offer and so we want to go back to England,” I lie. “It’s such a shame, we love it here, but he has to be there full-time.”

  I show them into my bedroom.

  “Oooh, how lovely,” says Mrs Spratt. “What a beautiful bath.”

  I’d be amazed if she’d fit into it but don’t mention that.

  “Yes,” I say, sounding like an article from Hello! magazine.

  “This is the room that really made me fall in love with the place. I have always wanted a bedroom and bathroom in one, and the balcony is just heavenly.”

  We walk onto the balcony. I expect sighs of ecstasy or at least some comment on the totally awe-inspiring view that still makes me gasp every time I look at it. It is now late March and spring has set in. The greens are vivid and the smell of fresh thyme is everywhere. The château to the right of the view looks imposing and stately in the afternoon sun, and the vineyards, which I have been pruning despite the uncertainty over our future, are neat and pretty, with the leaves just starting to make an appearance, transforming them from candelabras to living, breathing plants.

  I resist the temptation to say hello to my rose in case they think I’m a loony and run screaming from the property. The potential buyers are as silent as the rose. I look at them, imaging them not appreciating the view for years to come while I sit through Sunday lunch with yet another of my mother’s un
suitable husbands. It’s not fair. Bloody Nick. But then maybe they are just trying to seem unenthusiastic to get a good price.

  “We’ll be in touch, dear,” says Mrs Spratt conspiratorially, before squeezing her way back into their rented yellow Peugeot. They drive away, almost running over Lampard, or maybe Frank, on their way out.

  I go back into the house to get a cup of tea. I feel the need for something warm and comforting. I walk into the sitting room. The first thing I see is our wedding photo on the bookcase. Nick is tall and slim with his floppy hair and a cheeky smile. He looked extremely handsome that day.

  While a lot of my friends were having dramatic affairs with married men or tempestuous relationships, Nick and I settled very quickly into a comfortable and seemingly secure coupledom. That never bothered me; I have never been the drama queen type, in desperate need of constant highs and lows. I was happy planning our weekends in the country and our quiet nights in. From quite early on I was convinced that we would end up together. There really didn’t seem any option. Where do you go when you have found someone who suits you so perfectly? Anyone else would be a let-down. Looking back on it, maybe we were too comfortable too early on. Maybe the spice we lacked is the spice he has now found with Cécile. I guess by some standards we didn’t do badly, after all, we lasted over ten years.

  Not that I didn’t like sex: with Nick I loved it, in the beginning. We did little else for the first three years – I assume like most young couples. In fact, we used to try to work out the amount of times we’d made love; it was impossible, it ran into the thousands.

  “If you put a pebble in a jar for every time you get a blow-job before you’re married and you take one out every time you get one after you’re married, the jar will still be half-full by the time you die,” Nick used to joke.

  I swore I would never become one of those women. I loved sex and would always want to have sex with him, wouldn’t I? Why on earth would I change?

  We used to laugh about a friend of Nick’s from school whose wedding we went to early on in our relationship. She had been a sex-crazed lunatic up until the wedding but, as soon as she had the ring on her finger, stopped. We swore we would never become like that. I have to admit that although it has taken longer, I have become the kind of woman I promised I never would.

  I blamed a lot of my apathy and lack of passion on the babies, but the twins are now seven and Edward is five. Surely it was time to find each other again? To start pouncing on each other and ripping each other’s clothes off? But the only time I ever felt like ripping his clothes off was when they needed washing.

  Maybe it’s like this for everyone who has been married for a few years. I’ve read articles about spicing up your love-life, full of helpful hints such as, “Dress up in sexy underwear”. Yeah, right. After seven years of sleepless nights, the first thing I want to do as soon as the kids are in bed is prance around in a thong telling my husband he is sexiest man on the planet. Apart from anything else I’m not sure I could even get a thong past my thigh at the moment.

  It was unfair, really, because Nick kept his side of the bargain – he earned enough money to keep us, he looked after us, he paid the mortgage. I suppose I should have been happy to sleep with him now and again. But I wasn’t and I hated myself for it.

  I just didn’t really fancy him any more.

  Sarah says it’s all Darwinian. “You’ve had your babies with him. Biologically there is no reason to have sex with Nick any more, so your lust for him has died,” she told me.

  Can you imagine explaining that one? No longer would the excuse be “Sorry darling, not tonight I’ve got a headache,” but “Sorry darling, I’ve got a Darwinian evolution issue”.

  I first met Nick while I was working at Drake’s. He lived around the corner and often popped in for a drink on his way home. Sometimes he was with friends but other times he would bring a book and sit at the bar with his glass of wine, reading and looking around. The reception girls noticed him before I did. One of them even tried to join him for a drink when she went off duty but had no luck. “The Classics Man,” they nicknamed him, on account of the amount of books he read.

  I noticed one day he showed up carrying a copy of Anna Karenina. “A little light reading?” I joked when he passed me in reception.

  He smiled and told me he was trying to read all the Russian classics before he was thirty. “My favourite uncle said a man should achieve three things before that age; reading the Russian classics was one of them,” he said.

  His voice was deep and smooth; his accent mellow Irish. I loved the way he sounded. I could imagine listening to him for hours. I had always been in love with the idea of an Irish man, possibly a result of reading Yeats as a teenager.

  “What were the other two?” I asked.

  I could swear he blushed. “Oh I don’t think I know you well enough to tell you that,” he laughed, and then he added “yet” before he went to sit down at his usual place.

  I was intrigued. It wasn’t every day an Irish intellectual with floppy hair crossed my path. Most crucially, he was also the first person who had taken my mind off Johnny.

  It was about two weeks after our short conversation that he approached me. As he was leaving one evening, book in hand, he walked up to the reception desk, said good evening and handed me an envelope.

  Inside was a postcard of a Degas painting called The Dance Class. It is one of my favourite paintings. My mother took me to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see it when I was little, and after that I dreamed of being a ballet dancer. I longed to be one of the girls in the picture wearing a beautiful ballet dress, rehearsing my pirouettes and leaps.

  “I know from your colleagues that you are called Sophie and that you like ballet,” he had written on the card. “There are only so many more evenings I can afford in your gorgeous bar. Will you come to the ballet with me next week please?”

  He had written down his mobile number. I was stunned. The Classics Man had been coming to Drake’s to see me? Not that I lacked confidence, but it just never occurred to me that anyone would make such an effort. My initial joy was slightly tempered by the nagging suspicion that he might be a psychotic stalker. I phoned Sarah for advice.

  “Is he a looker?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, there are worse ways to die.”

  I asked my mother too. “Call him,” she told me. “Talk to him. You’ll be able to tell soon enough if he’s a loonie.”

  This is a woman who has married five loonies, but I took her advice anyway and called Nick.

  He sounded happy, sweet and sexily Irish. I agreed to meet him the following week to go to a production of Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House. We met at Covent Garden tube station. I had agonised about what to wear for days. Obviously, as we were going to the ballet I needed to be properly dressed. But I didn’t want to look like a frigid maiden aunt or, even worse, like I’d made too much of an effort. Finally I settled on the thing millions of women before and after me have opted for in similar situations, a little black dress.

  “You look lovely,” said Nick who was there waiting for me when I arrived, carrying a red rose.

  “Thanks. It’s only a little black dress I’ve had for ages,” I replied, then wanted to kick myself. Why was I so bad at just taking a compliment?

  Nick smiled and handed me the rose.

  A month later he took me to Paris for the weekend to celebrate my birthday in May. I had never felt so spoiled in my life. We stayed in a groovy little hotel, south of the Place Pigalle in Paris’s equivalent of Soho.

  We wandered around the bustling streets of Paris arm in arm, ate in intimate little bistros and even went up the Eiffel Tower. I say ‘even’ because I have a pathological fear of heights and had never been up the tower before. On my school trip to Paris I was the only one who stayed below as the rest of the class squeezed into the lift and went up to the top level to admire the views. I sat on the grass practically shaking at the
thought of it. But with Nick I managed it. It took a while but he gently coaxed me to the top and I looked at the view from the safety of his arms. I knew then that this man was very special to me.

  A year and a half after our first date, we got married. I was twenty-seven and Nick was twenty-nine.

  But for me the feeling we had on our honeymoon has gone. I mean the lust bit, of course. And I thought he felt the same. I was amazed a couple of months ago, the night of the ‘mummy breasts’ incident, when I tried in vain to squeeze into the little black dress I wore on our first date. Yes, I know it was a totally mad idea, but I am often gripped by moods of inexplicable and unfounded optimism. Nick was watching me.

  “You know I still want to get that dress off you as much as I did the first time I saw it,” he said. “Remember that Sagan quote? ‘A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you’”.

  “You may have to cut it off me,” I half-joked. “It seems to be stuck.”

  I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel the same way. I felt really guilty that I didn’t. I was hoping, Darwin allowing, that I would find my libido in France, the country of seduction and affairs. My plan had been to shake off this apathy and turn my husband into my lover again. Of course I had not bargained on Cécile pitching up. I can’t believe she was already on the scene when he was ogling me in that black dress. Did I leave it too late to re-kindle our relationship? If I’m really honest was it just a plan, like a New Year’s Resolution one never keeps?

  My story with Nick couldn’t be simpler. Boy meets girl. Boy likes girl even more than he likes Chelsea FC. Girl likes boy. Girl starts to watch football. Boy and girl get married. Twins arrive. Everyone very happy. Son arrives. More joy. Family moves to France. Boy likes another girl more. Girl devastated.

  I look at our wedding picture again. I really was a lot slimmer than I am now. No wonder. I starved myself for weeks before the big day, following that well-known “eat nothing and if you feel faint have a sip of water” diet. My dress was simple but surprisingly elegant considering I started off hankering after a meringue that would make me look like a princess. It was ivory, off the shoulder, A-line in shape. My blonde hair was slightly curled (I was going for the Kim Basinger look in LA Confidential), and hung loosely down around my shoulders. My brown eyes were looking straight at the camera, full of hope. Next to me Nick stood, smiling into the camera. He had his arm around his wife of five minutes, half proprietary, half-affectionate. He looked so confident and sure of himself. I looked so happy, my hand resting on his shoulder.