The French House

by Nick Alexander

  ‘So do we really need condoms?’

  Victor shrugs and takes my hand as we continue along the beach, me waiting for him to say something, he, presumably, trying to decide what to say next.

  When we reach the van, we climb aboard and he inserts the keys into the ignition but doesn’t start the engine.

  ‘What’s up?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, it’s a big thing,’ Victor says. ‘I just feel that there are things we need to discuss, things we need to say before we go down that route.’

  I release my seatbelt and turn to face him. Behind his head, a palm tree is flapping against the reddening sky, making it the perfect romantic moment for what needs to be said. ‘Like “I love you?”’ I ask. ‘Neither of us has said that yet.’

  ‘For instance,’ Victor says, turning fully to face me now and grinning in a way that makes him look young and somehow rather dorky.

  ‘OK,’ I laugh. ‘You go first.’

  ‘But I can’t,’ he says. ‘That’s the thing.’

  My smile fades. ‘Oh,’ I say.

  ‘It’s not . . . It’s just . . .’

  I sigh and wonder if this is that strange unexpected moment when everything crashes to the ground. Because history teaches that you never know when that might happen.

  ‘It’s just, well, it’s like this morning,’ he says.

  ‘This morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . .’

  ‘I’m too stubborn.’

  ‘Too stubborn?’

  ‘Yes. You have to go first.’

  I slip back into a confused smile. ‘I just said it,’ I say.

  ‘No, you said that “I love you” is something we haven’t said yet. But that’s not saying it.’ He looks amused, but deadly serious as well.

  ‘I do,’ I say, reaching out to touch his arm. ‘I love you.’

  ‘How much?’ Victor asks.

  ‘Masses,’ I say.

  ‘Me too,’ he says.

  ‘No, no, no!’ I say, laughing.

  ‘No what?’

  ‘You can’t get away with “Me too”.’

  Victor rolls his eyes, licks his lips and takes a deep breath. ‘I love you too. I don’t want you to go back to London. I want us to have this adventure together.’

  ‘Me too,’ I say.

  Victor smiles and shakes his head. ‘You said that “me too” doesn’t cut it.’

  ‘I do!’ I insist. ‘I want to come back. I want us to have this adventure together. And loads of others, too.’

  ‘Gosh,’ he says, taking my hand and squeezing it, and I wonder briefly if have crossed the line and erred into the danger zone of entrapment. ‘How lucky am I?’ he declares.

  I lean in and we kiss. ‘How lucky are we?’ I say.

  And then a shadow crosses his features.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, there’s another conversation people usually have before they, you know . . .’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  Because the other conversation is of course marriage, and having already been married, it’s such a complicated one for me that I get into a pickle even thinking about thinking about it. Right now it’s a subject that can only spoil what was promising to be a perfect moment.

  ‘Have I said the wrong thing?’ Victor asks.

  ‘Are you talking about . . . Do you mean marriage?’

  Victor’s eyes widen. ‘God, I wasn’t proposing.’

  He looks so scared that I can’t help but laugh.

  ‘What?’ he asks, his expression shifting from scared to confused.

  ‘You just looked so worried,’ I say.

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shrugs. ‘Maybe marriage does scare me a bit.’

  ‘And maybe I’ve already been married and I’m not at all sure that I want to do it again.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Actually, it’s not even that I don’t . . . It’s just that having taken all of those vows, and broken them . . . I don’t know. I suppose the truth is that I don’t have a view on marriage any more.’

  ‘Right,’ Victor says.

  ‘You look disappointed,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m not. It’s just . . . well . . . I’m not sure where that leaves us. In the great contraception debate.’

  I sigh deeply. ‘The only way I know how to do this is to be honest.’

  ‘Honesty is always good.’

  ‘Not sure about the always. But, well, I want a child, Victor.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know that I had an abortion when I split up with Brian. I told you about that.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was worried that I’d missed my chance. I was even thinking of doing it, alone. I told you that when we met.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So getting pregnant doesn’t scare me at all.’

  ‘No. No, I suppose not.’

  ‘And I’m quite in love with you.’

  ‘Quite?’

  ‘Quite a lot.’

  ‘Me too,’ he says, then sniggers and adds, ‘I am in love with you too. Quite a lot.’

  ‘So I want things to work out.’

  ‘But even if they didn’t . . .’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Victor turns and looks out at the sea for a moment, then says, ‘So are we sure we don’t need anything from the pharmacy, then?’

  I release his hand and stroke his back. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think that I quite like kids,’ he says. ‘And I hate condoms.’

  I laugh. ‘Well, there you go then. We agree.’

  Victor nods, and smirks and reaches down to start the van.

  As we drive inland and the road begins to wind, the weather darkens. For some reason, I start to feel nervous. At first I think that it’s just the steep drop and the menacing sky, but then I realise that it’s because I’m feeling nervous about making love tonight. We have done it tens of times already, so it seems silly to suddenly be feeling apprehensive, but it somehow seems different and important.

  We stop at a tiny roadside supermarket and stock up on supplies. As we pass a rack sporting packs of condoms, we both look at it, glance at each other, and move on around the store without saying a word. I am starting to feel like a teenager who has decided that tonight is the night. For the first time ever. With all of the anticipation, and all of the excitement, and all of the fear that that entailed.

  As we load the shopping into the van, the first spots of rain start to fall. By the time we reach La Forge, it’s a deluge.

  Victor parks right next to the front door of the farmhouse. ‘I want to see if our handiwork is holding up,’ he explains.

  We run the three yards from the van and burst into the dark, cold space of the kitchen. We peer up at the broken ceiling and listen to the sound of the pummelling rain.

  ‘It looks OK!’ I comment.

  ‘It does,’ Victor agrees, bumping me with his hip.

  ‘It’s ever so damp in here though,’ I say.

  ‘It’s just the rain I think,’ Victor says. ‘We’re kind of in the clouds up here.’

  ‘Maybe we could try to light the range tomorrow. We have all that wood I put aside.’

  ‘Exactly what I was thinking,’ Victor says. ‘Now, can I tempt you to a little salmon in white wine sauce at Le Château?’

  ‘Do you think it’s defrosted?’

  ‘It’s boil in the bag,’ Victor says. ‘I don’t think it matters.’

  ‘Then that would be lovely.’

  ‘Little’ turns out to be the operative word. The meal is surprisingly delicious, but the packet, which says, serves three-to-four people is, even for two, ungenerous to say the least. But after bread, cheese and half a bottle of wine, I’m feeling warm and satisfied.

  We tidy away the dishes and fold out the bed, and there, in a camper van, with the drumming of rain upon the roof, it happens.

  Victor hovers
over me and says, ‘Are you sure about this?’ I nod mechanically and reply, ‘Yes, I think so, are you?’ And then, with a humorous wiggle of his eyebrows, he’s pressing at the gate, now slipping inside me.

  ‘Oh God!’ I say quietly. ‘God, it feels so different.’

  Victor nods, and lowers himself gently onto me. ‘It does,’ he says.

  ‘Just . . . stay . . . like that . . . for a while,’ I say.

  And so we lie, with Victor seemingly deeper inside me than he has ever been, and I hug him tight and think how much difference the absence of three microns of latex makes.

  A shudder passes through my body.

  ‘What was that?’ Victor murmurs, amused.

  ‘It’s . . .’ I say, surprised that he could feel it too. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘No. Not at all. I think it’s . . .’

  And what I think it is is love. A ripple, a wave of love.

  I’m shocked to discover that only now, for the first time, are we making love. I had thought that was what we were doing every night. But this is so different. Maybe we were just having sex before.

  Victor starts to move gently against and into me and I gasp. Is it really just the missing latex, or is it because we have now said those magical words, because we have now declared our love? Is the fact that our feelings are out in the open the reason that I am suddenly able to feel them with such force?

  Victor moves gently, then with increasing gusto until he is thrusting into me, building almost to a climax, and then – because neither of us wants this to end yet – freezing, waiting a terrible, wonderful, tremble-inducing moment, and then starting all over again. This is not aerobics. It’s slow, gentle, rhythmic heaven. It’s a quasi-spiritual experience, and by the time Victor and I gaspingly collapse into orgasm almost an hour after we started, I feel as if I have been dragged through a sea of chocolate and licked clean by angels.

  We sleep, sweatily interlaced, and I have floaty, gorgeous dreams of underwater swimming and tadpoles chasing Easter eggs, but when I wake up, my first thought is that we have perhaps made a terrible, terrible mistake, and that it might already be too late.

  I lie there in an unexpected, sweaty panic, wondering if somewhere inside me a sperm has already met an egg and if we should go and find a pharmacy which sells morning-after pills, pronto.

  And then Victor wakes up and the second he kisses my neck and wraps his arms around me, the fear is replaced with a feeling of everything being just perfect, of this all being no more, no less than destiny.

  MEETING TATIE

  We spend the next day in the dank interior of the house, dragging the rotting remains of furniture out into the rain, creating a fresh pile of rubbish in the space we had just cleared. I clean out and then attempt to light a fire in the wood burner, but smoke just billows back into the room and eventually we have to throw water inside to extinguish the flames.

  ‘Chimney must be blocked,’ Victor says.

  ‘Maybe birds have built a nest in it. That’s what always used to happen at home.’

  ‘I’ll climb up and check it later.’

  ‘But not in this rain?’

  ‘No, not today.’

  Mid-afternoon, lacking supplies and tools, or even a coherent plan of what to do next, we retire to the van. The bed is still in place from this morning, and so Victor lies back and I put my head on his chest and feel the vibrations as he speaks.

  ‘What do you think we should do tomorrow?’ he asks.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You seem quite good at all that planning malarkey.’

  I shrug. ‘Unblock the chimney?’

  ‘Sure. But after that?’

  I sigh. ‘I don’t know. It depends what you intend to do to the place.’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘The ceiling, I suppose.’

  ‘Right. Well, I need a plasterer for that.’

  ‘Maybe we should fix up the smallest room, just so you can sleep there comfortably.’

  ‘The ceiling’s down there too.’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. The bathroom then. Pull up that horrible lino, see what’s underneath. Put in a flushing toilet. A new bath. Heating . . .’

  ‘Which requires a plumber.’

  ‘Then I guess that’s your answer. Finding a plumber and a plasterer is what to do next.’

  ‘I have tried,’ Victor says. ‘But it’s like the roofer. Incredibly hard to get people to come up here even to look – even to provide a quote.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because it’s January.’

  ‘Sure. Maybe. But if I have to wait until summer.’

  ‘Till spring maybe. Hey, look!’ I say, pointing at the closest house, some hundred yards away. ‘There’s a light on.’

  ‘I can’t see,’ Victor says, lifting my head and sitting, ‘you’ll have to move. Oh! She’s home!’

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘There was no light there yesterday,’ he points out.

  ‘But wouldn’t she have come and said hello? She knows that it’s her nephew moving in here, right?’

  ‘Of course. Shall we go see her?’

  ‘I suppose we had better,’ I say.

  We pull on our fisherman’s macs and squelch across our yard, and, to avoid the track, now a sea of mud, climb the wall and cross his aunt’s land as well. The rain is torrential, and when it starts to hail huge, painful, gob stopper sized balls of ice, we begin to shriek and laugh and run.

  From the porch – which is so tiny, it only just shields us from the hail – we can see a rusty four-wheel-drive Lada parked behind the house.

  Victor knocks politely, then raps harder, and finally hammers on the door.

  ‘Maybe she’s in bed,’ I say, stepping briefly back into the hail to peer up at the yellow-lit window shining weakly from the dark stone frontage of the house.

  ‘Not at six,’ Victor says.

  ‘Maybe she can’t hear us with all the rain,’ I offer.

  ‘Maybe.’

  At that instant, there is a flash of lightning, followed by a delayed clap of thunder. ‘It’s like a horror film,’ I laugh. ‘Maybe we should split up.’

  ‘Split up?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I shout, having to raise my voice as the intensity of the rain increases. ‘They always split up in horror films so the zombies can pick them off one by one.’

  Victor laughs. ‘I never watch horror films.’

  ‘I like them,’ I say with an embarrassed shrug.

  ‘OK,’ Victor says. ‘So, we split up for the zombies?’

  ‘That’s the rule.’

  ‘OK. You stay here, I’ll check around the back.’

  I squeeze myself into the corner of the porch and watch the hail bouncing off the step, and within seconds I start to feel nervous and wish he would return.

  When he does, he simply says, ‘Nada,’ and so we return, running and laughing at the absurd downpour, back to the van.

  As we run I glance back and think that I see a curtain twitch, but I nearly trip and have to look back to where I’m going. I decide that I probably imagined it – all part of my horror film scenario.

  We’re so wet that the van steams up the second we close the door, creating an unpleasant, stuffy feeling of being in a sauna, only fully clothed.

  ‘Maybe whoever was there just didn’t want to answer the door on a dark evening in the middle of a storm,’ I volunteer.

  ‘My aunt lives there,’ Victor says.

  ‘You know that for certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s definitely the house, then? Not the other one round the bend?’

  ‘No. That’s hers,’ Victor says. ‘Maybe she’s just really tired from driving or something.’

  Or maybe she isn’t very nice, I think, admonishing myself for the thought even before it is fully formed. But after all, if I came home to find my nephew and his girlfriend camping in a van in a muddy field in the midst of a vast storm, t
he first thing I would do would be to say, ‘hello.’ And the next thing I would do would be to invite them into my big, cosy house. But maybe that’s just me.

  The biblical deluge continues all through the evening and on into the night.

  By the time we have eaten breakfast the next morning, I’m feeling distinctly stir-crazy from the crushing confinement of the van, made worse by the fact that the windows now seem to be permanently misted up.

  ‘Let’s go and do something in the house,’ I suggest.

  ‘But it’s all cold and damp in there,’ Victor reminds me.

  ‘I know,’ I say, ‘I just can’t stand another minute cooped up in here.’

  But the house is cold and damp, and we’re at a loss to know what to do next.

  Victor sighs deeply as he sinks into one of the tatty dining chairs.

  I drag another chair across the room and sit and take his hand. ‘It will all be OK in the end,’ I say. ‘It’s always depressing at the start.’

  ‘Sure,’ he says.

  We sit for a moment, staring at the curtain of water gushing past the window from the blocked guttering above.

  ‘And everything’s always worse in the rain,’ I point out.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘But this is horrible, isn’t it?’

  I nod. ‘I’m quite cold as well,’ I say. ‘We need to find something to do, some way to get moving, or do something else instead.’

  Victor sighs again. ‘Let’s fuck off to a hotel for the night, eh? Let’s treat ourselves to a nice room with a big hot bath.’

  I start to smile. ‘That sounds fabulous,’ I say. ‘Down on the coast somewhere?’

  Victor nods and winks at me.

  ‘Maybe we should try your aunt again first,’ I say.

  I shriek. An embarrassing, girly, squeak of a shriek. Because beyond the window, a face has appeared, nose squashed against the glass as the figure peers in at us.

  Victor jumps too and then bounds to the front door to wrench it open.

  Silhouetted against the grey daylight outside, it’s hard to see if the mac-wearing figure is a man or a woman.

  ‘Bonjour,’ Victor says, upon which the figure steps inside and lowers her hood.

  ‘Tatie?’ Victor says. Auntie?

  I’m not sure how I imagined Victor’s aunt to look, but I’m convinced enough that this lank-haired, dirty-looking old crone isn’t her to momentarily doubt Victor’s sanity.