Lying in our hotel bed afterwards with my arms and legs wrapped around my Latin Lover, I opened my heart and said what had to be said. It was time to say goodbye. I did not want him to come back to us in France. We would not be visiting him in Sydney. Finally, our relationship was over. Over meant over. Completely finished. The Big Discussion that I had been prevaricating over for so long was now out in the open and the words had been said. A tremendous peace and calm descended on me and I had the most wonderful spiritual feeling of contentment and happiness. It was over. We could remain friends, but no longer lovers. Our lives would no longer be entwined.
A snore rose up from the sheets. ‘Did you hear anything I just said? Don’t you dare tell me that you are sleeping!’ A hand came up and Raymond dragged me into the crook of his arm. ‘Yes. As usual you are right. We will talk about this tomorrow. You’ve had far too much to drink.’
At three o’clock in the morning, when my liver was struggling to process an excess of alcohol, I woke drenched in sweat. Lights were flashing. ‘Warning! Warning, Will Robinson!’ the robot in Lost in Space used to say while thrashing his arms about. I continued to thrash in the sheets. During our first years in France I used to sing lines from songs about staying or leaving. Tomorrow at the airport I would kiss Raymond deeply and wave him goodbye. Misty images of the last scenes between Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca came flooding through my mind. Now that it was decided, all I needed was sleep. My mother’s words played on a continuous loop in my head: wise sayings about leading horses to water but you can’t make them drink and other jolly proverbs that only seemed to concern the animal kingdom. I had tried and failed to make Raymond love me; now it was time for both of us to move on.
Red lights flashed before my lightly closed eyes. Epilepsy. I was having an epileptic fit. My brain had blown a fuse over my emotional and romantic notions about life; even my brain had given up on me. I sat up with a start: ‘Raymond, wake up. I think I’m dying. Lights are flashing in my head. I can’t go on like this any more. Why don’t you love me?’ My words were muffled as he threw me back onto the pillows.
‘Do be quiet. You had too much wine at dinner. I know exactly what you need.’ He went off to the bathroom to fetch me a glass of water. ‘You are a complete nut case. You are not having a fit. It is just those horrific lights flashing on the Eiffel Tower. Can you believe that some moron has put flashing lights all up and down one of the world’s greatest monuments? How can the French abuse their national treasures like that? Here, drink this.’ Raymond had very strong views about the Disneyfication — a word he invented — of art and architecture. He hated the way lights were strung up to highlight famous buildings and art galleries put shows together just for popular appeal. I ignored the beginnings of his diatribe about the demise of culture in the Western world as he nuzzled my neck and my breasts. ‘I don’t know what you are going on about. I love you and I love the children. I would walk over glass to get to you if you were in trouble. Nothing would keep me from your side. I’ve known you for two decades. I am not giving you up. We are not breaking up. How many times do I have to tell you that you are the only woman on this earth for me? I love you and I adore you. Let’s do something really special in Italy, if that is what you really want. We can go to Venice with the kids for Christmas or their February holidays. Would that suit you? Now either shut up and get some sleep or I will do something extremely rude to you. Take your pick.’
As my Latin Lover took me back in his arms and commenced the horizontal samba I knew that what we had was True Love, even though there was a minuscule voice in the back of my head telling me not to be seduced but to stick with my decision. The words he uttered were not a proposal. He had fobbed me off yet again. Raymond did not want an Italian wedding. He just wanted me to go back to sleep. As my brain finally turned off and I fell into a heavy slumber, I made the decision to deal with these problems in daylight.
The next morning, I decided that financial decisions were infinitely easier to make than emotional ones. It was time, I resolved, for Place de la Fontaine to be put up for sale.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Venetian Wedding
After breakfast, the children and I took Raymond to the airport for his trip back to Sydney. As he walked through the departure gates there were no tears and no heavy heart. Our partings were becoming easier.
A quick bus ride took us to the TGV station at the other side of the sprawling airport. The TGV train arrived on time in Avignon; the other travellers looked daggers at me when I stood up refreshed from a heavy two-hour sleep. I noticed that the children had changed seats, pretending not to know me. What I did not know, but could guess, was that the snores and snuffles that I make when deeply asleep may have disturbed the quiet in the carriage. Raymond often compared the sounds emanating from my slumbers to those of a warthog. I am not sure that he has ever slept with a warthog to be qualified to judge. However, I was rejuvenated and ready to tackle all the problems that the season could throw at me. I wanted to immerse myself in my latest passion: writing.
My number one priority was to stave off bankruptcy; although it was not at the front door as yet, there were signs of it looking for me in my street. A tight rein on the budget, keeping paid help to the barest minimum, and not spending a Euro centime on any unnecessary work would be the key to keeping insolvency at bay.
Now that the agonising decision to sell Place de la Fontaine had been made, there were no buyers. The real estate market had not just gone flat; it had died a very quick death. French buyers were very thin on the ground due to the sluggish French economy, but this sort of property was the ideal second home for foreign holidaymakers. Taking a quick look around the supermarket car park showed that even in the height of summer, it was now mainly occupied by cars with number plates starting with a large F (signifying France), with few cars from other countries. They were mostly compact cars, too: Peugeots, Renaults or Citroëns. There were virtually no oversized four-wheel drives, as they are an economic impossibility with the spiralling cost of fuel in France. Conspicuous by their absence were the Germans with their large Mercedes and D for Deutschland embossed on their number plates, the English with GB for Great Britain, the Dutch with NL for the Netherlands. There were few Italians and never any Spanish or Portuguese. As usual, there was a sprinkle of Belgians with their red and white number plates marked with a large B. The French say unkindly that in any road accident the chances are extremely high that a Belgian will be involved. I have learnt to give the Belgians a wide berth on the road just in case.
While helping me to load the car, Mimi asked why there were so many cars from the Czech Republic. ‘Why on earth do you think that?’ I replied, only half listening, desperately trying to remember if I had bought light bulbs, cakes of soap and white toilet paper for the Saturday changeover. ‘The Czech Republic must be at least 1300 kilometres away. Do you remember when we drove to Venice and then on to Vienna? Well, it’s even further. It would take more than twelve hours to do a trip like that. I don’t think that many would come here.’ Then the penny dropped, but Harry beat me to the punch. ‘Oh, why are girls so dense? CH stands for Confoederatio Helvetica, which is the real name for Switzerland.’
Out of the mouths of babes. Of course the cars with CH belonged to the Swiss, who could whip down the expressway and be at our doorstep within four hours. More often than not, though, they were leaving their gold bars behind in the safe confines of Swiss banks. The Swiss were coming for holidays, not to buy a second home.
Traditionally, the biggest tourist slice in the Luberon goes to the Dutch and the Germans, who descend from the north in the hope of finding better weather and enjoying the culinary delights of Provence. The world economy was tightening, so buying a second home in Provence was the last thing on most tourists’ minds. It was not easy to market Place de la Fontaine, given that inspections could only be done on Saturdays between midday and three o’clock, after the week’s clients had left and everyth
ing had been cleaned and made ready for the next arrivals late in the afternoon. The problem did not lie there, though: no one, whatever the nationality, was interested.
I discovered during the tourist season that not many secrets of the clients escaped me — unfortunately. Claire cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms and I did the bedrooms. So it was my hand that went under the bed or under the mattress, and it was I who discovered that three people had been sleeping in one bed — but it was Claire who discovered that someone in the party had extremely long hair that had completely blocked the shower drain. Too often clients left bins overflowing, the fridge stuffed full of opened jams and yellowing and hardening cheeses. But it was the big surprises that were most distressing: the soup tureen still brimming with a combination of lentils and smelly sausage, or the baking dishes with burnt remnants of meat or rotting vegetables floating in a sea of olive oil that marked the clients’ forays into French regional cuisine. Luckily, the vast majority of clients left the properties as requested, with the beds stripped, the linen in the large blue bags, the fridge empty and no bottles or garbage left lying around.
On Saturday afternoons when the cleaning had been finished and the first of many bales of washing was rumbling away in the workshop, Claire and I would sit outside in the shade of the persimmon tree and make up a list of the top ten qualities of our dream clients:
1. Bald clients would be the best, as there would be no problems with the drains; preference was given to those who liked to wax every part of their body.
2. Gay men would be excellent because they were always tidy.
3. Oversexed clients would be great if they could all sleep in the same bed. This would save on the washing.
4. Dark-skinned people would be an advantage as it was impossible to remove instant summer tanning products from the white sheets and dressing gowns.
5. No babies because the cot is too difficult to pack away.
6. No friendly pets because they eat the stuffing from the sofas.
7. Only women who had natural hair colour because hair dye was difficult to remove from the white towels.
8. No smokers because they burn holes in the furniture and tablecloths.
9. Nobody who is in love, as they massage litres of scented oils into their partner’s flesh, leaving stains that are impossible to remove from the sheets and mattresses.
10. Nobody who isn’t in love, as they end their marriage or fight bitterly while on holiday, keeping the neighbours awake.
We fell about laughing as we progressed through our demands for the Perfect Client. There was no room on our list for those who rang desperate for directions because they were stuck somewhere in the middle of page forty-five of the Michelin guide, or for those who were in St Saturnin les Avignon, a village over sixty kilometres away from St Saturnin les Apt. We had a wealth of anecdotes, some funny and some sad: the clients who came to celebrate forty years of friendship but had a roaring dispute on their first evening in Saignon, ending up with one couple taking the car and leaving their former friends stranded; the bride who rang in the middle of her honeymoon desperate for something to read because she was unbelievably bored; the well-known Australian clients who asked for a ground sheet to be put across their bed for some activity that remained nameless; the child who accidentally locked herself in the bathroom; dealing with broken teeth, infected insect bites and the gynaecological problems that beset some women the moment they stepped away from their home. Our list was endless and we both knew that it would be added to with every season.
I was in full swing writing my memoir, and a space on the bottom shelf of the bookshelf had been cleared ready for its much-anticipated arrival. During summer, while the children were on the long school holidays, the only time that the house was completely silent was at four o’clock in the morning. I would put a load of washing and the kettle on, read the main newspapers from London, Paris and Sydney on the Internet and an hour later force myself to be creative. Through a week’s trial of writing to a fixed program, I had discovered that writing was extremely pleasurable but sitting in front of a blank page was horrifying, especially first thing in the morning. After two days I suspected that for me, creativity only came if there was no alcohol in my system. After one week, I was positive; I could not drink one drop if I were to write at the pace I wanted. It was a huge incentive to write creatively and quickly.
Our house had so few rooms that I was forced to use a space in the living room as my office. The children pointed out to me that unless I gave them each a television for their bedroom we would have to share the space, so often I would be writing frantically while my children sat transfixed in front of SpongeBob SquarePants, the talking sponge, and his best friend Patrick the Starfish. The task was to write a minimum of 1000 words per day.
In the cool of the evening, I would sit with Zorro beside the Monet pond and read through my words — most of which were marked in red and consigned to the bin. If luck was going with me, I would manage to salvage 300 words, but often every sheet of paper had a large red pen mark zigzagging through it. It was depressing, but at the same time I was incapable of stopping. It was a long hard grind, as my mind took me back to places I never wanted to revisit. Inappropriate tears kept springing to my eyes. One minute I would be mid-flight talking to clients about what to do with their garbage, the next minute my eyes sprang a leak that would not stop. It was not just glistening moisture at the edges of my eyes. It was Niagara Falls, with the sounds effects from a horror film. Embarrassed, I would always claim some terrible allergic affliction that clogged my nose and made my eyes stream. I fooled no one.
My days were occupied with writing, washing and ironing sheets and trying in vain to train Zorro, who was becoming bigger by the day but was still completely untrained. Claire continued to give me good advice on his management, which I continued to ignore, even in the face of the number of shoes, mobile telephones, television controls, handbags or items of lingerie I lost as Zorro continued to create complete havoc. The huge mistake I had made by taking on a large dog, combined with a lack of training, was making the situation completely untenable. Sheets could no longer go on the line to be dried; in fact, nothing could go on the line. Zorro would leap up and drag item after item into the Monet pond until the lines were completely empty. The items that went first always belonged to me, but finally, through boredom, Zorro would take just about anything that wasn’t nailed down. At night time he continued to dominate my life, scratching on the door and barking at unknown noises until I relented and allowed him in, whereupon he would take up residence on the leather sofas. Walks to neighbouring villages were meant to exhaust the young dog but afterwards he would snooze by my feet recuperating happily while I tried to continue to write yet another chapter, my legs aching. It was a total disaster of my own making.
At first Zorro was quite happy to bound up to the car when I opened the large electric gates to pass through into the garden. Then one day the unthinkable happened: he ran out, looked at me and continued to run. Five or six hours later he returned, barking at the gate waiting to enter. On talkback radio there had been endless discussions about people who abandoned their pets during the summertime or pets that were stolen while their owners were out. So when Zorro arrived home with a bedraggled little terrier cross that was evidently malnourished, unhappy and abandoned, my heart melted and I allowed the dog to stay until I could work out what to do with her. The following day Rosie — as I came to call her — had an epileptic fit and lay on the road frothing at the mouth and stiff as a board, so I did not doubt for a second that nobody loved this very unattractive dog. Zorro, however, was in love. His castration appeared to have been unsuccessful — he continued to wander, and Rosie certainly held his interest. The problem about what to do with the dog had to be resolved before the children arrived home from a short break with friends by the sea. They would think that it was a fine idea to keep the dog.
The postman cleared up the mystery one day when he asked me why P
earl was living with us when her real owner lived in the farmhouse behind the vines about 200 metres away, which we passed on our daily walk. So that was the reason behind Rosie’s quickened pace. I was now more adept in my dealings with the Provençals, so it did not surprise me in the slightest when they began to tell me that Pearl (her real name) was a wonderful family pet and hunting dog. Naturally, they were prepared to negotiate a price for the animal. This stance changed radically when they realised that I had already visited the vet and the police about the forms required for the abuse of animal rights.
I look at her now, entwined in a black and white ball with Samba, our latest black cat, and think about the first few months we had her, when she would not even put her little paw inside the house, a place she had never been before. Things have changed. Rosie has her own pet chair beside the fire. Even though nowadays she sports a pink leather collar and a matching pink winter coat encrusted with diamantes, ribbons and bows that she wears for walks into the village to show that she is truly loved, she remains very ugly. My friends, the Wise Sages, said that Rosie would calm Zorro down and that his misdemeanours would decrease rapidly with her arrival. I’m still waiting. They continue to escape and spend their hours of freedom sitting beside the cheese vendor in the village on market day, in the hope of scoring some samples of his wares.
After the children’s return from the seaside, we moved into the latter part of summer and all that it entails: finishing off incomplete kites and cubby houses, riding bikes and revising last year’s lessons with Claire in preparation for the new school year, which starts the first week of September. Coaching for Harry was increased to a couple of hours per week with his teacher and mentor, Madame George, who was becoming more demanding as Harry’s capabilities increased. The book lists had been received and over two hours had been spent in the large office supply store in the north of Avignon collecting the regulation colour exercise books with matching coloured plastic protective covers. They had to have the correct size, colour and type of paper. The different types and sizes of squared lined paper that were used by the French bewildered me but not the children, who understood the nuances of the little squares. The book list included a pen list with detailed quantities of the correct assortment of coloured pens: red, black, blue and green. All were thrown into our trolley. Different fountain pens with appropriate refill ink cartridges had to be bought. Long and erudite discussions about the types of nib took place between the two budding scholars. The list was endless and confusing but Mimi and Harry seemed to know what was required of them for their schooling needs, so I stood waiting patiently with money in hand, ready to do my part of the transaction.
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