My Grape Escape

by Laura Bradbury

  “What were the two of you plotting?” Franck demanded, his not unimpressive forearms like iron.

  “Nothing…rien du tout…a simple misunderstanding…it was about another house I have for sale. I have the paper work for this one right here. You are not truly ready to sign an offer right now, are you?”

  Franck extracted a pen from his back pocket. “Just tell us where to sign.”

  The realtor clawed a hand through his hair. “If only it were as simple as that! I need to go back to my car and find the paperwork.” He gnawed his lip. “But a 24-hour expiry on the offer? Ce n’est pas possible! Nobody demands that of the sellers.”

  “That’s not negotiable,” I said, waving my hand meaningfully towards the empty space where the notary’s car had been parked. “Especially given the circumstances of the last few minutes.” It was a desperate tactic, but it was perhaps our only hope of preventing the property from being sold out from underneath us.

  The realtor’s eyes darted like minnows searching for an escape route, but Franck and I stood elbow to elbow across from him, unyielding.

  He sighed and opened his trunk again. “Just let me find the documents. It may take a moment.”

  I grabbed Franck’s hand and squeezed it hard in an attempt to calm myself down. Did he feel as bewildered and angry as I did? Could this really be happening?

  Franck chewed on his lip. “I can’t believe it,” Franck said. “Les salauds.” Some urgent whispering came from around the back of the realtor’s car. “He’s on his cell phone!” Franck hissed. We darted around the open trunk in time to see the realtor gabbing into his cell phone while making frantic gestures with his hands. He was now the color of a ripe aubergine.

  “Merde!” he gasped as he caught sight of us and hung up without even saying good-bye.

  “The paperwork?” I reminded him.

  “Turns out I had it in my bag after all.” He made a stab at laughter which fell flat with his audience of only Franck and me. “Sorry, phone call with a client,” he lied.

  “C’est cela.” Franck arched a disbelieving brow. “Can we get on with it, please?”

  The agent reluctantly slid out a wad of paper from his satchel, shut the trunk to use it as a writing surface, scrawled on the papers here and there, finally shoving them over to us. He pointed to the front sheet.

  “You sign here and here. Both of you.”

  Wasn’t there supposed to be more gravitas involved in making a written offer? There was, after all, a heck of a lot of money involved. Then again realtors did this kind of thing every day…unless he was just doing this to get rid of us.

  Franck read the papers over line by line while the realtor rolled his eyes and rapped his fingers on the hood of his car. Franck then passed them to me. The metal of the car underneath my hip burned through my skirt but I took my time. One of the few useful things I had learned over the past two years was to never skim over a contract.

  “You’ve written nothing here about there being a twenty-four hour limit on the offer,” I said once I had scrutinized the last word.

  “Bah, you are not truly serious about that?”

  “Si,” Franck and I said in unison. I passed the paperwork back.

  The realtor scrawled in the twenty-four hour clause and then passed us the pen. I couldn’t believe we were making this offer in such a rush. We didn’t even know if we would qualify for a mortgage, for heaven’s sake. But if that ache in my gut was right about Le Maître’s meddling, we had no choice if we wanted our dream property.

  I felt exactly the same way about getting this house as I did about finishing my law degree at Oxford. When I walked out of the examination schools after my final exam I was fully expecting that in that very moment all my problems would resolve themselves. Struggle, worry, and doubt would become things of the past.

  Franck was there waiting for me as I came down those stairs for the final time, as well as my friends Emmeline and Melanie. They showered me with the traditional confetti and champagne and red carnations. I kept waiting for the click of everything falling into place. Elation was all around me, but it still wasn’t in me as I had anticipated.

  Now I understood. It wasn’t getting my law degree that would make everything perfect, it was owning this house.

  “You are going to call the sellers right away, n’est-ce pas?” Franck’s eyes blazed at the realtor.

  “Bien sûr, bien sûr. I will try them tonight without fail. Are you sure you don’t want to extend the deadline by a week or so?”

  “Non,” Franck said. “I will be expecting a call from you tonight after you speak to the owners.”

  The realtor grimaced, then shook our hands with a perfunctory goodbye and drove off. I watched his shadow as it disappeared in the distance. He was holding his phone to his ear before even rounding the first corner in the village road.

  Chapter 7

  Franck and I spent that evening in his parents’ cellar staring at the old-style cord phone in shifts. We gave his family the abridged version of the perfidy of Maître Ange and everyone crept around us, murmuring in hushed tones like someone had died. Mémé brought us plates of her boeuf bourguignon to our station on the cellar floor but the succulent meat felt like rubber in my mouth.

  We continued to stare at the phone until nine o’clock when Franck finally capitulated and picked up the receiver.

  “I’m going to call the realtor,” he said, unnecessarily. We both waited, breathless, as he dialled. It rang three times, and then a fourth and a fifth, then clicked over to the realtor’s voice mail. Franck was left with no other choice than to leave a curt message that we were still expecting his call.

  We finally dragged ourselves up to bed around eleven, and I fell into a restless sleep filled with dreams of scheming, silver-haired notaries.

  We woke up early and compared headaches. Franck went over to the boulangerie to buy us some croissants while I waited by the phone. My skin prickled and my throat seemed to swell with the powerlessness of it all. Maybe I was, in fact, allergic to waiting?

  We were just opening the crinkly bag from the boulangerie when the phone rang. Franck leapt up and spilled pastries all over the room.

  “Allo?!” he yelled into the receiver. I was at his side in an instant. It all seemed quite cordial at first - bonjours and ça va biens and all of that. Then Franck asked, “Have they seen our offer?” and as he listened to the realtor’s answer, a storm descended over his face. It couldn’t be. This couldn’t be happening.

  Franck slammed down the receiver without even saying au revoir or merci.

  This was happening.

  Franck swore vividly and at length. “He had other offers. Higher offers,” he spat. “One in particular from Switzerland.”

  My hand flew up to my throat and I backed up to use the wall behind me for support. We weren’t going to get our dream house.

  I stomped my foot. If only I could go back and rewind time. I would never have suggested an inspection; we would never have been duped by Maître Ange. I should have trusted our instincts that the property was an amazing deal and gone ahead and bought it right away.

  Franck stalked outside and I followed him. I lowered myself down on the front step and cradled my head in my hands. I waited for an onslaught of anxiety to crush me. The dream of the house had distracted me from obsessing about my final examination marks or getting into the Master’s program next year at Oxford. My future without the fantasy of our French house seemed bleak indeed yet, bizarrely, the panic didn’t come.

  The next few days were depressing ones filled with lots of melancholy drives past what I began to think of as our Paradis Perdu in Marey-les-Fussey.

  Then came our worst drive by, and our last.

  As we slowed down in front of our maison de rêve (or maisons, more accurately, because I clearly have a masochistic bent) we saw the Maître Ange’s silver Mercedes ranged alongside an equally gleaming black BMW with a Swiss license plate. We could make out some figures
walking down the lawn of the house.

  Fury made my heart gallop. “Can we sideswipe their cars?” I asked Franck.

  Franck didn’t answer, but sped up and did a violent enough U-turn in the dusty parking lot in front of the church to wake up the dead underneath the flagstones.

  “Assez!” he shouted to the air. “Enough. It’s done.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. I wanted more than anything to yell at Maître Ange and his fancy Swiss buyers, as well as punch them and maybe throw them down the well. My fists were balled up in my lap, but deep down I knew Franck was right.

  Franck pulled the car up in front of his parents’ house. He reached over and took my hand in his.

  “Assez?” he asked, gently.

  “Assez,” I whispered.

  Two days later we dragged ourselves to the Notary’s office - not Maître Ange’s office, but back to Franck’s family notary, Maître Lefebvre, who was too slipshod to be truly devious – to see if any new houses were for sale. Maybe the perfect house was waiting for us at Maître Lefebvre’s office. A pinprick of hope pierced the disappointment.

  When we outlined what we were looking for to Maître Lefebvre’s secretary she blew out between her lips in that French sign of hopelessness and shook her head. She pointed to the corkboard beside her desk where a few dilapidated, overpriced properties were featured on yellowing bits of paper. A brief perusal drove home just how thoroughly we had been shafted by Maître Ange. The Marey property had been a complete steal; it was head and shoulders above all the other ruins and shacks for sale. He had doubtless turned a pretty bit of coin thanks to our naïveté. Without any real hope we spoke to the secretary again about what we were looking for in a property. She rolled her eyes but finally wrote a note on a scrap of paper.

  The drive back to Franck’s house up into the undulating vineyards of our Hautes Côtes was a silent one. There was nothing else we could do except wait for me to get accepted in the Master’s program at Oxford in the fall. Our Oxford life would continue behind that shiny blue painted door of our flat on Little Clarendon Street in Jericho. I would spend most of my hours, like I had for the past two years, toiling away behind a pile of dusty casebooks in the law library. Franck and I would hardly ever see each other. Once I had done my articling and paid my lawyerly dues in the form of crazy hours, dull work, and no personal life to speak of, I would become a solicitor in one of the City law firms in London. We would have enough money. We would have steady jobs. Those things would protect us. Maybe we would even be content…

  I had chosen law after a blissful four years as an undergraduate English and French Literature student for no other reason than I had been schooled to set my sights on a prestigious career, and Medicine was out of the question for a math-phobic hypochondriac like me. I knew after my first week in Oxford that law was far too analytical and rational for my quirky mind. Quitting, however, equalled failure for me; it simply wasn’t an option. Besides, everyone around me - everyone except Franck that is - was as convinced as I was that an Oxford law degree was a sure-fire path to success.

  Never once during my two year immersion into the legal world had my soul ever vibrated with excitement like it had over the Marey property. My legal studies were all about safeguarding myself against an uncertain future; the French house was a different kind of dream. It was a leap of faith based on the premise that the future would be fantastic. The dream of owning our paradis perdu had changed me. It had given me a taste of something I had forgotten was there.

  “Are you nervous about the call?” Franck tucked my hand into his as we meandered through the vineyards between Villers-la-Faye and the village that was perched on the opposite hilltop, Magny-les-Villers. It had been a difficult, aimless week in the aftermath of the swindle and tomorrow my Oxford tutor would be calling me with the marks on my final examinations.

  I picked a green grape off the vine and squeezed it between my fingers until I felt a satisfying pop. I needed a 2:1, also called an Upper Second, to gain my definitive admittance into the Master of Law program at Oxford. The disastrous Criminal Law paper I wrote as my very last exam haunted me. If I got a 2:2, or a Lower Second, my application to the Master’s program, which had already been conditionally approved, would no longer be automatic. I had no clue what I would do in that instance. I had to get an Upper Second. Even though I couldn’t stir up much excitement about returning to our life in Oxford, not getting into the Master’s program would essentially be like hitting a dead end in the maze I had taken my entire life to navigate through.

  “So?” Franck prompted. “How are you feeling about it?”

  Frustrated. Resigned. A bit hopeless even…but I didn’t feel it would be fair to admit that to Franck.

  The flagstones on the kitchen floor at the house in Marey popped into my head. That’s what I wanted. I had fallen in love with those flagstones, with the idea of preserving something more steeped in history than any house back home in Canada. I longed to continue my life in a place where generations of other people had lived before me, having Mémé teach me how to make her mousse au chocolat in the kitchen and diving under the duvet in that uppermost bedroom with Franck after a long winter’s walk through the frosty vineyards…

  Franck squeezed my hand. I could tell by the set of his mouth that he was worried about me. Those flagstones were somebody else’s property now, I reminded myself. Besides, I owed it to my parents to continue with law. They had paid for the last two years. I had picked my path. If I did indeed get a 2:1 it would be insanity not to continue down it.

  “I’ll be okay,” I answered Franck. He didn’t look convinced. We passed the stone cross that marked the entrance to Magny-les-Villers.

  “What are the people who live in Magny called?” I asked Franck. I loved how in France the inhabitants of the biggest city to the smallest hamlet had a name for themselves, from Parisiens (Paris) to Nuitons (Nuits-Saint-Georges) to Buissoniers (Buisson).

  “Magnotins,” Franck said, pronouncing the word with a soft “g”. “The women are called Magnotines.”

  “I like that. It has a medieval ring to it.”

  We made our way past the stone house of the maître d’école who had taught Franck, Franck’s sister Stéphanie, and their little brother Emmanuel-Marie at the village school. His garden was taken over by wild hollyhocks, many taller than Franck. Next was the communal well where an old red rose climbed up and over the crumbling stone wall behind. The road wound down in front of the village church. It was a small, Roman affair like the one on Marey. It glowed ochre in the late afternoon sunlight.

  “Have I ever brought you here before?” Franck asked me.

  I shook my head. It had been Franck who had come to Burgundy on his own and toured every single church in Villers and the surrounding villages, looking for the perfect one for us to get married in. I had stayed back at Oxford, chained to the casebooks in the law library.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but this church was actually my first choice for our wedding.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was booked for a christening so I booked the one in Marey instead.”

  The wooden door, intricately carved and only made more beautiful by the scars of the centuries, was fitted with one of the most ancient iron locking mechanisms I had ever seen. The metal swirled this way and that, and the notched keyhole could undoubtedly only be opened by a mammoth key. Franck turned the handle and pushed open the door.

  The church was cool and seemed almost pitch black until my eyes began to adjust to the softly coloured light that filtered through the stain-glass windows. On the floor were massive stones carved with names and dates in old French. The biggest ones led up to an austere little nave of pale stones behind a wooden altar.

  To the left of the door stood a stone basin with a pool of water at the bottom. Franck dipped his fingers in it and crossed himself with the ease of someone who had been baptized, confirmed, and communed a Catholic. Envy prickled at
my fingertips.

  I had never had a religion. Well, that was not technically true - I had been baptized in an Anglican ceremony and to this day I’m not really sure why except that my cousin was also baptized then. Perhaps the church was running a two for one deal. It was definitely odd considering that my family and most of our friends considered organized religion suspicious at best. My father never failed to regale us with tales of the hypocrisy of churchgoers, such as the local bishop who bet the entire diocese’s money on racehorses and lost, the Catholic priest who was found to have a wife and children stashed away in Vancouver, and the minister who fiddled with the altar boys.

  As a result, I felt like an interloper in every church I entered. There was something about this church, though, that made me want to believe in God the same way I had believed in Santa Claus during those brief but magical years of early childhood.

  I didn’t discover the truth about Santa Claus until I was eleven, rather late in the scheme of things. I had begun to notice that Santa and my mother had remarkably similar handwriting and often used the same wrapping paper. That morning I bounced into my parents’ bed at the ungodly hour of five o’clock and began pestering my mother.

  “Is it really Santa who puts the presents under the tree or is it you?”

  “What do you think?” she asked me, groggy.

  “I think it might be you. Is it?” I wanted more than anything for her to tell me I was wrong.

  “Yes.”

  That single word turned my world of magic into a gray, rational planet where everything had an explanation. An aching void remained.

  “Viens.” Franck pulled me over to one of the wooden benches near the front. The seats were polished and scarred with centuries of use. He sat me down, and pointed to the inscription carved deep into the wood in front of me. “Look at that.”

  “F. Germain,” I read, surprised. “Was that carved in there for your ancestors?”