Lavender & Linen

by Henrietta Taylor

  The children and Amanda came tumbling down the stairs from the attic, only to be dispatched back up them again to search for some large zinc tubs that Didier had seen the day he had been in the attic looking for a mysterious leak in the roof. Meanwhile, Raymond looked for something larger than a tea strainer to scoop up the smaller fish. The one and only net that we had was in the safe hands of Nicholas II, who was galloping around the pond on his imaginary white charger, brandishing his net in front of him like a lance, doing his best to bring his bulging biceps into sharp relief under his tight white cotton T-shirt.

  On my return, the scene had become even more chaotic, with Didier thigh deep in the pond, catching fish with his bare hands. Nicholas II was trying to emulate his uncle but to no avail. The children were rushing back and forth between the ponds, splashing most of the water from the pots as they delivered the distressed fish into the smaller pond. Mimi was scooping up the fish that had jumped or been sloshed out of the buckets onto the ground. The young men had stripped down to their jeans, exposing their divine young torsos — lean, muscular and heavily tanned. They looked like Greek gods at play. Then I saw the reason why: Amanda. The young men’s eyes were on swivel sticks as they watched her every move. They flexed their muscles as they carried the large zinc hipbaths back and forth to the small pond. They preened and posed. Their inadvertent comic relief made the situation slightly more bearable.

  Didier had made the executive decision in my absence to drain the pond of all the muck and putrefying plant life. Nicholas was seated in the mini-digger brandishing the trowel, scooping up the detritus from the pond. Sandals and shoes were lined up along the edge of the main pond as everyone was sliding around, the mud oozing between their toes as they attempted to catch as many fish as possible in the small amount of stinking water that was left. There were cries of joy and exasperation as they scooped up the mud and the fish with the large nets. Even Laurent had come to lend a hand and had installed himself under the pine tree in a comfortable chair, delicately sifting through the mud for fish. Didier called out in high excitement that finally he had one of the largest fish.

  ‘Madame, go and fetch the bathroom scales. Let’s see how much this fish weighs!’

  I had never realised that the fish were quite as big as this. They were enormous. Didier jumped on the scales without the fish and then with the fish: 7.4 kilos. Laurent looked up lazily and asked if they were good eating fish.

  The oppressive heat was now almost unbearable and some of the smaller fish were dying from shock and the rapid change in habitat. The pond floor was hosed out and most of the remaining mud shovelled out. It was time to fill up the pond as quickly as possibly.

  ‘Didier, which is the tap for the agricultural water to fill up the pond? Isn’t it lucky that we have that? It would cost a small fortune to use the drinking town water. This pond is so big it would take more water than a normal size swimming pool.’

  ‘Eh oui, madame — as usual you are right. But that was something that I wanted to talk to you about this morning. You have in fact the cheap water supply connected to this property but you must go to Cadenet this week and pay for a reconnection fee. If you do not do this before 1 August there is no way that you will have it during the heat of summer and even then maybe not before the middle of September.’ Raymond understood enough French to get the gist of Didier’s words. He stepped in front of Didier as I gave myself over to my mounting rage. I would have to pay for full price drinking water for the Luberon’s most expensive fish.

  Later that week, I stopped off at the aquaculture showroom on the road to Avignon where they sold all types of water fountains, water lilies, real and fake rocks, thick black plastic liners for do-it-yourself ponds, plastic floating birds and other exotic creatures to place around the garden and pond. I spoke to Monsieur de Moncuit and begged him to make a home visit. I needed his advice to ensure the security of my fish and the vastly diminished pond life.

  Two days later he arrived to inspect my pond. It was like a school inspection. I waited anxiously for my report card. As he took samples of the water I could see that I was failing miserably. He pulled on some thick waders and went to the middle of the pond to retrieve the floating remnants of the lilies and begin his silent work repotting them into specifically designed aquatic pots with perforated holes.

  ‘Madame, this pond is in terrible state. The plants must be grouped together so that the fish can have as much shade as possible. You must leave that hose running day and night until I get you a suitable pump that will recycle this water, giving the fish the oxygen that they need desperately. If only you had rung me before you emptied the pond. Never, ever empty a pond, madame. It has taken years to build up a fine ecosystem that was perfect for those fish. All that was necessary was to put the hose into the pond for forty-eight hours and the problem would have righted itself, saving you the disaster that you yourself created.’

  There was no way that I would understand country life, I was just too much of a city slicker. There was a good chance that the pond life would survive, but I wasn’t sure that I would survive his account, which he handed to me saying that there was a small discount given if paid within fourteen days.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Domus Latina

  With the increasing heat of summer, one day melted into another as we got used to the routine of the new house and having two additions to the family: Raymond and Amanda. Subconsciously or consciously I was looking for more ways to bring Raymond back into our life on a permanent basis, and it was obvious that it would take more than English television to make him want to stay. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel the same way as I did about living in France or why he didn’t want to live with the children and me. He loved us, of that I was sure, but as he said time after time, how can you want to live in a country where the language is so strange? He would cite his favourites: vagina — le vagin was a masculine word; cock — la bite was feminine. It was pointless to counter-cite the beauty of the language and the culture. Unfortunately my habit of making lists had rubbed off on him, so periodically he would rearrange his Top Ten French Faults depending on what latest news item had provoked his ire:

  1. They were linguistically insane.

  2. They were doomed to economic failure with the pursuit of the thirty-five hour week.

  3. They refused to initiate microeconomic reforms.

  4. They refused to acknowledge the growing social problems that existed in France and were becoming more evident with the lack of education and growing unemployment in the Arab community.

  5. Ethnic urban ghettos were allowed to grow unchecked due to archaic political strategies.

  6. Television programs did not start on the hour or half hour.

  7. ‘1664’ was inadequate as a beer.

  8. There were more than 365 cheeses in France and yet none of them was remotely like good English cheddar.

  9. Strolls in the French countryside were off limits during hunting season due to the numbers of accidental shootings that occurred.

  10. Quality, age and provenance were considered the most important factors in red wine, as opposed to quantity, a prized Australian attribute.

  Our first try at long-term domesticity had come a little unstuck the previous year, when I had spent a great deal of time screaming at everyone as the tension over house renovations in Saignon hit fever pitch. Life was definitely calmer nowadays. We had turned a corner. The renovations were complete, and although my small business was struggling through a very grim period, I was confident that I would avoid bankruptcy and the forced sale of the properties. At three o’clock one morning, I hit upon an idea. It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that deep in my heart I did not want to — and was not able to — make a clean break from Raymond. If he hadn’t irritated me so much, and if we’d both lived on the same continent, maybe I could have fallen hopelessly, completely and utterly in love with him — yet again. It was the same old question that had occupied my min
d ever since Norman died: would my children benefit from having a substitute father figure? How much happiness did Raymond bring into my life that then flowed into my children’s lives? Did he bring stability into my life, making me a better mother? Was I kidding myself about my love for Raymond? Did I in fact just need another adult to help raise my children? I couldn’t bring myself to admit defeat over our floundering relationship. The only solution was to make him fall so madly in love with me that he would not leave — and that would not happen unless he had his own private space. Then I could dispatch him back to Australia when it suited me.

  In Australia, there was an unwritten agreement between spouses that the ‘bloke’ — the husband or the eldest male of the tribe — could claim the garden shed in the backyard, where he could slip away for a few solitary moments each week to read the sports section of the Saturday paper while listening to the cricket or the rugby on a little transistor radio, affectionately called his ‘trannie’, while he drank a couple of beers called ‘tinnies’. Nowadays ‘trannie’ means transvestite, and in the world of iPods and MP3s nobody even knows what a transistor looks like any more. There were some accepted rules in Australian society, one of which was: women are not allowed to approach The Shed — it was for men’s business only. The female elders could discuss their Secret Women’s Business with the girls on card nights, at bowls or on the golf course or tennis court, and the younger women could do the same while waiting for children at the school gate, helping out at the school canteen, watching children’s sport or sitting through interminable music or ballet lessons or private tutoring. It was an unwritten Australian law that men and women needed their own space. I set out to investigate every room and every shed on the property for its potential as a Latin Study.

  The previous German owners were passionate gardeners and had large compost pits dotted all over the property for grass clippings, vegetable matter and old horse manure, and there were numerous sheds to house all of the equipment needed to keep the land looking its very best. At the back of the property was a large run-down second garage that was in a fair state of repair. There was even a lean-to where a small car or a trailer could be parked under shelter. There was ample room to put the lawnmower, rakes, shovels, spades, axes and picks and just about every other gardening implement the previous owners appeared to own in triplicate and the many different sizes and kinds of jerry cans and oils they’d had to keep everything in impeccable Germanic running order. When I first saw the property, I couldn’t help noticing that the wooden handle on each implement had been sanded back and linseed oil applied to stop the wood cracking. They were lined up in neat vertical lines, attached by hooks to the back wall. The blades of the shovels had been cleaned and washed of mud, sharpened with a whetstone, oiled, and then placed into buckets of sand to avoid contact with the hard cement floor that would dull the blades. You could see that there was a great sense of devotion to the garden. Originally, I had aimed to keep my meagre gardening equipment in the same shed, though perhaps not in such a pristine way. But the windows had no glass panes and some roots from nearby trees were making an appearance through the cement floor, which had cracked with age and neglect. The garage was not particularly weatherproof, so it was no good for my new project.

  In the run-down orchard there were the remnants of a very large deluxe chicken coop. The original French owners who had built the house in 1965 had obviously designed it with the idea of having extra space for relatives to stay overnight. The roof was sound. The guttering was still in place. Unfortunately there was a major problem with the walls: fissures ran from the ceiling to the floor, where there were large gaps down to the exposed foundations. I am not sure whether any relative ever stayed there, but it was a poultry palace fit for the fussiest chickens. It was a large rectangular construction, almost twenty metres by five metres, with two smallish rooms and one enormous room featuring perches zigzagging along its full length and nesting holes at one end. The rampant weeds from the orchard had found their way into the coop and were rife. Jean-Louis Chiffot, a builder who came to do some minor repairs during our first week in the new house, gave me some free advice: tear it down. It was not habitable; it was starting to look dangerous with its tilt to one side. I had fleetingly entertained the thought that in the autumn I would buy some chickens, thus giving us daily free-range eggs. However, nobody in our household particularly liked eggs, and I was sure that there was no way I could chop off a chicken’s head with an axe — even though we could then eat hormone-free free-range corn-fed chicken. Another building was struck from my Latin Study list. This left the upstairs area of the main house or the large freestanding shed near the driveway.

  This wonderful shed next to the house was just back from the gaping hole where the brown wooden gates had been. When I bought the property, it had been described in the paperwork as a ten metre by five metre potting shed. It was here that the couple had spent hours — or maybe it was just the husband, as the day I made my first inspection of the property he had been potting up bulbs from large carefully labelled vats into earthenware tubs of all sizes and shapes. Bags of every type of soil had been stacked up high on the shelves. There were poisons, insecticides and sprays. Along one of the walls was a large board a bit like a child’s puzzle: so that every tool could go back into its correct position, the tool’s outline had been painted black in sharp contrast against the white board. It was homemade and looked very impressive. There were endless open boxes of nails, hooks and screws. It was a dream space for the home handyman. This would be the ideal place for Raymond to have as his private male space. His own garden shed. His own Latin House — a ‘Domus Latina’.

  I reasoned that I could sacrifice certain of my needs in order to give Raymond his Domus Latina, and then he would stay with me in our sunny part of France and love my children and me. It was asking quite a bit from a humble garden shed, but I prided myself on my creative thinking.

  Under the grime I saw on my first visit, there was a smooth cement floor that although not tiled, was more than adequate if it could be cleaned and polished. Now, on further investigation, I could see that the building was solidly built, with excellent floors and wide windows. Not that I knew very much about roofs, but it appeared to be solid, with no dips or missing tiles. In the Luberon, many garden sheds of this type turn magically into rental accommodation of some sort as soon as the building inspector has left, becoming very exotic and expensive cabanons — rustic cabins or country cottages — for the unsuspecting foreign tourists looking for an authentic experience in Provence. This shed would be perfect for my plan. I was sure that if I gave Raymond the Latin House, he would stay with me forever. That was exactly what I wanted at three o’clock in the morning, a time when I always seem to be awake solving my latest dilemma.

  In the midst of our drama concerning the fishponds I had seen yet another job that needed to be added to the list to make life a little better in our new house. All the wood on the little Japanese-styled bridge needed replacing, as it was looking very wobbly and unsafe. The tile capping around the pond edge needed replacing or re-cementing into place, as there were places where it had fallen off into the pond. Now that there was a small quiet pump circulating the water day and night, giving the fish the oxygen that they required, it was time to see how we could reasonably improve the overall look of the pond. I started jotting down a list of things in descending order of priority; this time the pond would definitely come last:

  1. Install lines to hang out the washing.

  2. Remove the wall in the shed to make one open space.

  3. Waterproof the third pond as a holding pond while repairs were carried out on the main fishpond.

  4. Replace all the rotten planks on the bridge over the main pond.

  5. Replace or repair all the tiles around the main pond.

  ‘Dig a hole for a pool,’ cried out Amanda. She had not spent enough time with me to know that was the last thing to mention. Everyone glared at Amanda. I did feel jus
t a little sorry for her that her summer was mostly being spent indoors surrounded by my files, computer and paperwork.

  The team of Ahmeds who had previously worked for me on the renovations to Rose Cottage were called in to do the work at our new house. A smiling black-bearded Ahmed arrived, flashing his very white teeth. In tow was his equally swarthy cousin Ahmed, to help install the washing lines. By lunchtime the next day, as soon as the cement had set, I would be able to try them out — sixty metres of line in the Provençal sunshine would soon be at my constant disposal. One problem had fallen off the list, only to be replaced by another even more pressing problem: the little four-kilo washing machine would not go the distance. Raymond’s Domus Latina was shunted further down the list as I had to rethink how I was going to accomplish the enormous task of weekly washing.

  Once, while bent over yet another basket of white sheets, the tears began rolling down my cheeks as I added up the amount of washing I had to do each week. Three beds in Rose Cottage, four beds in Place de la Fontaine, four beds in Villa Agapanthe and four beds in our home — that brought it to a grand total of fifteen beds and hours of work. Every Saturday there were twenty-one people in fifteen beds in four houses, which meant:

  Fifteen doona covers

  Fifteen bolster covers — traversins

  Forty-two pillowcases (two pillows per person)

  Fifteen mattress protectors

  Five tablecloths

  Twenty-one cloth serviettes

  Twelve tea towels

  Sixteen fluffy dressing gowns

  Sixteen white extra large towels (clients only)

  Twenty-one coloured towels

  Twenty-one hand towels