Escaping

by Henrietta Taylor

  Lizzie’s red velvet scarf flapped jauntily in the wind as she drove me into Apt, pointing out buildings of interest along the way.‘That’s where the children do craft and dance, and behind is where they do painting. Over there is the indoor swimming pool. It’s small but heated. Over there is where you buy the best bread. Come on, I’ll show you what to order.’

  I was breathless just listening to her. She was divine: so open and friendly, and above all, sincere. We linked arms again and she steered me towards her favourite café. Her mobile telephone rang incessantly and she switched from flawless French back to English without missing a beat.

  She pushed her blonde fringe back from her face, laughing at the state of her hair. ‘Don’t worry, Hen, I’ll show you the hairdresser to avoid and the one where you have to queue up to get an appointment.’

  I could see that Lizzie and I were destined to become close friends.

  That afternoon I expected a storm of discontent when the children came home, but instead they both jumped into my arms, saying it was the best day ever and the best school, the best canteen and the best teacher. (I waited for them to say that I was the best mother, but I guessed that would have to wait.)

  They couldn’t believe that they only had to go to school four days per week and that Wednesday would always be a free day. We decided that on Wednesdays they would both attend the huge music school in Apt, where instead of learning the cello Mimi would take saxophone lessons and Harry would do piano. Afterwards they would go to a lady who would help them with their French. Sylvie lived in Rocsalière, just minutes from Saignon, and she and her elder daughter, Léa, took Mimi and Harry and played games. Within a few weeks, my children knew all the colours, numbers and some other basic vocabulary — all learnt through play.

  One step forward. No backward moves. No snakes ahead. Slowly I breathed out. We were already learning to cope.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Place de la Fontaine

  BUT IT ONLY TOOK a week before a large crack began to appear in our blissful new life. The cold was so much worse than I had anticipated. The walls of our house, so charmingly thick, were less charming once I realised how long they took to heat up. Lizzie had told me that it had even snowed metres deep the previous November. This was the south of France! It wasn’t meant to be cold enough for snow!

  I ordered several tons of good-quality firewood and put all ecological concerns about greenhouse emissions to the back of my mind; I would be buying as many cubic metres of Luberon forest as necessary. Kindling was easily gathered from along the sides of paths behind the village or, for the very lazy, in large bags from the local service station. Whatever it took to keep Place de la Fontaine warm. I’d never had to deal with an open fire before. It would smoke and splutter, and the embers would lie on the hearth getting colder, not warmer. At last my hands went up in complete surrender, and Lizzie had to come and show me some practical tricks for getting it going.

  Apart from the fireplace, the heating in the house was dreadfully inefficient, so at night I would often have either or both of the children lying beside me in my big bed, coats and scarves thrown on over their pyjamas, using my body heat to get warm enough to fall asleep. The chill soon got right into our bones, and it felt as if nothing except some long hot sunny days would shake it.

  But I had needed a holiday from life, and maybe this cocoon of Saignon was the place to be if I wanted to relearn the basic skills of being a mother. In this isolated little winter wonderland my day-to-day existence was becoming slower and tamer. The frenetic lifestyle of rushing children to and from school, ballet classes, gym lessons and soccer practice, the lack of parking, the city streets jammed with honking cars all disappeared like a bad dream. Tractors on the country roads constituted the nearest thing to a traffic problem here. Away from the distractions of Sydney, and far from family and friends, life was growing more ordered. The children were coping really well at school and were continuously happy, and it was very infectious.

  I soon loosened the reins of motherhood slightly and let them walk the 100 metres to school on their own. I watched them tear off up the cobbled street, skimming their hands across the water in the fountain and then racing up to the school at the top, their little bodies encased in hats, scarves and thick jackets.

  Once they were gone for the day, the sense of freedom simply to do nothing was mind-boggling. There were no constraints to do with time or obligations, and I couldn’t get enough of this new sensation.

  I started going for walks around the village, wrapped in layers of woollen jumpers, gloves and a hat, with a scarf tied tightly around my neck and head. Anything to keep out the airborne grit and the biting cold. My eyes were red-rimmed from the Mistral wind and the temperature seemed to be spiralling ever downwards. Saignon was nestled into the side of its outcrop of rock; the narrow streets and alleys acted as wind tunnels that would suck you in and spit you out at the fountain.

  Winter had a firm grip on the little village. The streetscape around me was bleak: thin ice puddles formed around the base of the fountain, the plane tree nearby was bare and ghostly, and the square was bereft of any movement. Most of the wooden shutters were closed tightly against the wind; houses snoozed patiently, waiting for their owners to return in spring from other parts of Europe, with flowers for the window boxes and brooms for the accumulated dust and cobwebs. Many of these village houses had been owned by the one family for generations, and they were often left to go to wrack and ruin. Musky and damp, their walls were collapsing beneath the weight of caved-in roofs. It is not really in the French nature to sell off your patrimony until it crumbles into dust.

  I would spend a lot of my days driving through the various villages that are dotted along both sides of the Luberon valley. In Australia we get excited by buildings that are barely two hundred years old, but here I was surrounded by houses and streets that had stayed more or less the same since the Middle Ages. I was quickly seduced by their charm and beauty. Nowadays the children laugh at their reaction back then: they thought that all the medieval village buildings should be pulled down and rebuilt. (Our own little house was hopelessly lopsided, with leaning walls, doors that were too low — there wasn’t one ninety-degree angle in the whole building!)

  In every village a variation of the same theme is found. The narrow cobbled streets weave through the village and suddenly open onto a wide public space with freezing cold spring water spouting from a central stone fountain. With space at a premium, cars are usually clustered around a car park that might be near the village church, or in a field designated by the mayor’s office as a parking area. I fell in love with them all: Caseneuve; St Martin de Castillon; tiny Villars, perched high up on a hill; Rustrel, with its wonderful wood-fired bakery; St Saturnin les Apt, which had a little supermarket open on Sundays; Roussillon, surrounded by fields of ochre; Gordes, looking so elegant and beautiful, the epitome of the village perché; and one of my favourites, Goult, where time really has stood still for centuries. And this was only on the northern side of the valley!

  Unlike so many of the divine villages perched on top of outcrops, such as Gordes, Saignon was unable to accept large tourist buses. The main street was in truth a confined passageway that barely accepted modern vehicles. This was the village’s saving grace, allowing it to retain much of its original character without a constant flow of visitors. It was a little haven just on the outskirts of the tourist invasion. It was hard to imagine that by summer the weather would have changed dramatically and the influx of foreign cars would choke Apt and the surrounding villages.

  Some days I would explore the country around Saignon on foot. Occasionally I would see hikers with their strong boots, layers of clothes, backpacks and walking sticks, marching up the hill behind Saignon to the fork in the road that would lead them further away from civilisation, maps strung around their necks to guide them through the thousands of kilometres of signposted tracks in the Luberon. I preferred sticking to the little country track
that led down to Apt through the fields of dead sticks in neat rows that were in fact vineyards and lavender fields. And the more exercise I did, the stronger I started to feel physically and mentally.

  The French countryside was a massive shock to my system, given that I had grown up in a big city and wasn’t used to seeing large open spaces except from the windows of planes. I was an urban girl, yet the hills of Saignon fascinated me. Here too everything was cloaked in winter. Fields full of clumps of turned earth ready for spring planting. Orchards of bare trees; I couldn’t even hazard a guess at what fruit they would bear. And the stillness was intoxicating.

  Our twenty-week stay would only give us a thumbnail sketch of how the seasons operated. I couldn’t hope to understand what these people had imbued into their lives from the day they were born. Yet there was some sort of magic woven around the village that I did understand through my foreign eyes: a serene hibernation that had wrapped its arms around Saignon. All the Provence guidebooks talk about the lavender, the cherry trees, the sunflowers and vineyards, but nothing is ever said about the cold beauty of winter — the silence and slowness of the land and its people, waiting patiently for the advent of spring and the tourist season that comes with it.

  To my relief, the winter weather had turned out to be different from my initial expectations. The days were certainly colder than I was used to, but on most days the sky remained crystal-blue and cloudless. The grey skies that had greeted us originally had now become a vague memory. Across the valley to the north, Mont Ventoux was always clearly visible, dominating the skyline with its snow-crested peak.

  On a few occasions at weekends I managed to entice the children to go out exploring with me in the hills behind Saignon, along the many walking tracks up to the next village of Auribeau, along the Claparèdes, the flat plateau behind the village filled with lavender fields, or down to the Aigue Brun River to wander the banks in search of the perfect picnic spot for the warmer weather.

  Living in the village had made me aware of my priorities as a single mother. Sometimes beds didn’t get made or dishes were left lying in the sink because the three of us were out in the forests picking up kindling for the night’s fire, or watching the moon rise in the night sky. A new feeling of peace, calm and finally much laughter reigned in the funny little house.

  During the week I prized the delicious luxury of having the entire day to meander down to Apt on my own and unearth treasures in the local markets. But on Saturday mornings the children and I would take wicker baskets and head off down to the markets together, where they would peruse the stands for anything that resembled a toy whilst I inspected rows of stalls groaning with the fresh winter harvest: carrots, parsnips and the first of the new baby peas; thick plaits of garlic displayed alongside freshly dug up potatoes, leeks and cabbages. On the street corners, vendors sold brown paper cornets filled with chestnuts that had been roasted in large open pans, ready for children and adults alike to peel off the skins and pop into their eager mouths. The scents of the different herbs and spices rose up from the North African stalls, mixing with those from the cheese stalls, especially the goat’s cheeses, whose smell permeated the air. People’s straw baskets were weighed down with goods, the obligatory bunch of winter flowers balanced on the top along with the crusty baguette for lunch.

  With the incredible variety of produce available, from biodynamic vegetables to plump free-range chickens, my appetite was slowly returning and I was gradually becoming a normal shape again. In the evenings, delicious aromas of roasting chickens or hearty thick soups wafted around our kitchen. Everything was consumed with gusto. The quality of various crusty breads and the differences between soft cow cheeses and goat cheeses became topics of intense discussion around the dinner table, as the children voiced their increasingly informed opinions. They still couldn’t get enough of school, and that smoothed the way for endless happy nights, enjoying our own company.

  But after the dinner things had been cleared away, there was surprisingly little to occupy us. There was a no-homework policy at the school that was enforced wholeheartedly by children and parents alike. Whatever the under-elevens couldn’t learn in school supposedly could not be learnt at home. The television at Place de la Fontaine had a VCR unit, but having watched all the videos endless times, it got to the stage where we could recite all of Inspector Morse’s lines; I often preferred simply watching the flames in the fire all evening. Our television was set up with free-to-air satellite stations, which for some reason meant hundreds of German channels, but no French channels whatsoever. There were also two English-speaking channels available: the international news service CNN and the financial news channel Bloomberg. Since my German skills had waned since my days at university, I quickly became a devotee of CNN and Bloomberg. At first I found Bloomberg mind-numbing, but when there’s nothing else on offer, after a while it becomes quite addictive. I could frequently be found listening to interminable hours of in-depth reports on the ‘dot.com’ boom, which was at its height, while sweeping up the cinders around the fire. Often the children and I would just lie by the fireside reading or rolling impressive lengths of clay ‘snakes’ to make pots — a craft that they had recently acquired from the MJC (Maison des Jeunes et de la Culture), the Youth and Culture Centre of Apt. Moulding and stretching the clay had a very soporific effect on us all.

  To ease the children’s night-time boredom, I took a step towards doom: I bought them a Nintendo 64 system with two games. Mimi and Harry thought all their Christmases had come at once. I’d vowed they would never have electronic games, but since I’d already given in with Gameboys, I decided to join the club and descend the slippery slope of mass consumerism. Here we were, in the most unbelievable twelfth-century village, surrounded by the latest goods and chattels of the twenty-first century. The irony was certainly not lost on me.

  That gave the children something to occupy them, so now it was my turn. Surely I shouldn’t be spending so much time modelling clay ashtrays when nobody in the house smoked? I needed to pick up my game and channel some of these creative urges into other areas of my life. If our outdoor activities were going to be curtailed by the winter weather, I would have to make more of an effort to find productive indoor activities.

  At this point I remembered the oh-so-romantic present the Latin Lover had given me at the airport. On our second day in Place de la Fontaine, my shiny new laptop, bought the week before our departure, had refused to shut down; I didn’t understand that you had to click on the Start button to stop, so I rang the technician, who unfortunately was in Sydney. I wished that Latin Ray had included a book on basic computer skills and not just a typing program. I didn’t just need to learn how to type; I needed to learn to use my computer too.

  Sometimes I can be quite obsessive; I can make up ridiculous rules and then force myself to stick to them. So I decided on a minimum of an hour of typing practice per day and another to explore the computer and how it worked.

  During the long winter evenings beside the fire, a plan began to germinate. I started to look at our future with clearer eyes. I mulled over the idea of making some money during our twenty-week stay in Provence. That money would be 100 per cent mine. I alone would be responsible for the profit or loss. The thought was daunting but exhilarating; now it was just a matter of finding a way to do it. How on earth could I make money in this little rural backwater, with very few practical skills?

  I wrote a list of them:

  1. I loved cleaning ovens and other domestic chores.

  2. I spoke fluent French, good Italian and passable German.

  3. I loved bonking the Latin Lover (when he was around).

  4. I loved making the children happy.

  5. By now I could touch-type quite well.

  Even in my biased view, the list was singularly unimpressive. I looked up from my list and watched the latest update on Bloomberg about dot.com stocks that had just gone way above expectations, and the realisation hit me head-on. I would trade o
n the stock market!

  That same night I stayed up till late so I could speak to my broker in the early morning Sydney time.

  ‘Ms Karbowiak, I want to make big money fast.’

  ‘Isn’t that funny, I’ve never heard that line before,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Can I give you a few words of advice? Make decisions quickly and repent at leisure.’

  By now I had acquired enough computer skills to start writing emails and surfing the Net. Armed with a list of Web addresses given to me by Liz Karbowiak, and with instructions about how to initiate Internet banking while away from Australia, I plunged headlong into an unfamiliar world.

  After the court settlement, when Norman’s assets had been transferred into my name, I had gone blithely along to Liz Karbowiak and allowed her to guide me in the construction of a solid blue-chip portfolio. After my initial choices, very little had needed to be done on a day-to-day basis. But from now on it would be different. It was time to make some decisions by myself.

  Sad but true: I was — and still am — a no-hoper when it came to money and the stock market. I would urge Liz Karbowiak to buy me dot.com shares, especially when I could find parallels to the US market. Basically I was firing in the dark. I knew virtually nothing; I continued to ask Liz questions and she’d give me explanations for the rank beginner. She also directed me to several information sites, and I spent a great deal of time reading financial papers and various articles online. Often these only treated the US market, but I hoped there would be a trickle-down effect on the Australian market too. Once I felt I had broken the ‘code’ for making money, I started to find the process fascinating.