The French House

by Nick Alexander

  I sigh and nod. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘I’ll try it, but if I’m ill again, then it’s the last time ever, OK?’

  Victor laughs and pulls two paper plates from the plastic bag we use to keep them dust free. ‘I was fine last night, wasn’t I?’ he points out.

  The stew tastes good, in fact. It reminds me of something my mother used to reconstitute on camping trips. It came in freeze-dried form and was called ‘Hungarian Goulash’. To her dismay, it was a childhood favourite, and Waiine and I would ask for Hungarian Goulash in preference to her normal cooking once back home. Even Dad once secretly admitted that he liked it better than her own stew.

  Once we have eaten and thrown our plates in the bin, Victor says, ‘Bed, then?’

  ‘It’s eight!’ I point out, glancing at my phone.

  Victor shrugs. ‘I’m knackered,’ he says, ‘and it’s freezing in here.’

  And so I laughingly concede.

  We cuddle until the bed warms up and then Victor levers himself from our joint impression in the mattress and rolls to his side of the bed, almost immediately starting to snore.

  I lie there and think about the feel of the foam closing around my body and wonder if that’s how it feels to be eaten by a Venus flytrap. Waiine had one when we were kids and it would snap closed around flies and then open again a week later revealing only a dried carcass.

  I am woken at 1 a.m. by one of Victor’s gymnastic body-flips and open my eyes to see that the towel has fallen from the window too and moonlight is now flooding the room. My stomach is gurgling alarmingly, so, fearful of a repeat episode of the last time I ate Distira’s food, I pull on a dressing gown and quit the warm bedroom for the icy wasteland of our unfinished bathroom.

  Sitting on that cold seat, surrounded by pipes and tools and rubble, my breath rising visibly in the frosty air, waiting to see if I’m going to be ill again, is about as depressing at it gets.

  Once I have ascertained that I have indigestion, nothing more, I creep back into the bedroom and grab a handful of clothes, which I take through to the kitchen.

  Dressed in jeans and a thick sweatshirt, I pull up a chair, and try to imagine the room finished, but only hear instead Distira saying, ‘You’ll never be happy here’, and once again I feel unreasonably desolate about the whole project.

  I shiver with the cold. It’s impossible to remain here tonight, but I don’t want to return to bed. I want to sit in a warm room with a cat and read a book. It would sound silly to some, no doubt, but I miss Guinness. Actually, right now, I miss my entire London life. I acknowledge that I am feeling sorry for myself, but even that self-awareness doesn’t seem to help.

  The bedroom door creaks and I turn to see Victor appear in the doorway, naked. He hops from one foot to the other and rubs his eye with a balled fist. ‘It’s freezing in here,’ he says. ‘Are you OK?’

  I shrug miserably. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Because of the mattress?’

  ‘In part,’ I reply. ‘And indigestion. And the full moon. It does that to me sometimes. Can I go and sit in the van?’

  Victor pulls a face. ‘Why?’

  I shrug.

  ‘It’s freezing out there. Worse than here.’

  ‘Can’t I put the heating on?’

  ‘It takes forever to warm up,’ he says. ‘Just come back to bed. Come and talk to me.’

  I return to the warmth of the bedroom to find Victor stripping the bed. ‘I thought we could try the other side of the mattress,’ he explains.

  ‘It said to sleep on this side,’ I point out. ‘It has a label that says specifica—’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Victor says. ‘I would if I could, but I can’t.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I say, pitching in. ‘It can’t be any worse really, can it?’

  ‘No,’ Victor says, manhandling the mattress into vertical position and then letting it fall. ‘Let’s just hope that that shitty memory foam stuff is on one side only.’

  Slipping back into the now-cold bed, we snuggle together and wait to see if it will attempt to digest us all over again.

  ‘It’s depressing being cold all the time.’

  ‘It’s getting me down, too. You’re not regretting coming, are you?’

  ‘No!’ I say. But I’m not sure if it’s a lie.

  We lie in silence for a while, and I decide that having Victor’s arms around me makes everything seem OK. Just about. But just as I think this he rolls away. He manages this without having to somersault.

  ‘I think the mattress is better this way up,’ I say, and Victor replies with a snore – which I can only assume means that he agrees.

  When Clappier rolls in at eleven the next morning, we decide to put our agreed plan into action. I busy myself tidying the yard while Victor talks to him ‘man-to-man’. The agreed script is that his ‘wife’ is giving him hell, and that Clappier needs to ‘help him out here’ by getting the heating working.

  After about fifteen minutes, Victor comes out to get me. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’re on radiator hanging duties.’

  ‘Did he say he can get it working today?’ I ask, straightening and leaning the rake against the wall.

  ‘He said he’ll try. But he has another job at four. Apparently someone else’s wife is even worse than you.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I say. ‘We’ll have to see about that.’

  The division of work for the day is that Clappier and Jean-Noël are to cut and braze pipes while Victor and I drill, rawlplug and screw the brackets that hold the radiators to the walls. With all four of us on the job, and Clappier, for once, concentrating on a single task, we make sterling progress. By 3 p.m., the entire heating system has been piped, the range is back in place, and Clappier is ready to open the filler valve.

  ‘S’il n’y a pas de fuite,’ he says, a Gauloise hanging from his bottom lip, ‘c’est bon, on peut chauffer. Sinon ça sera pour demain.’

  As I can’t understand anything that the man says when he is smoking, Victor translates this for me. ‘If there are no leaks, we can heat. Otherwise it’s going to be tomorrow.’

  I discreetly beckon Victor through to the bedroom where the radiator is pinging as water fills the system.

  ‘If he tries to leave before it’s done, I reckon we should up the ante a bit,’ I say.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘I reckon we should show him I’m worse than whoever the other guy’s wife is.’

  Victor grins. ‘Are you going to become the girlfriend from hell?’

  ‘I could storm off,’ I suggest with a smirk. ‘If he says he’s going to the other job, I could storm out of the house.’

  ‘To where, though? To Distira’s?’

  ‘To the van, maybe. I could take the keys. And a bag. I could start the engine, make it look like I’m leaving you or something.’

  ‘It’ll never work,’ Victor says, but his grin reveals that he thinks that it might.

  ‘And you could say something like, “come on, matey, get the heating working, otherwise I’m gonna lose my bird”.’

  ‘I’m gonna lose my bird?’ Victor says, snorting now.

  ‘Or whatever you menfolk say to each other when you’re being patronising, sexist pigs,’ I say. ‘But—’

  I’m interrupted by Jean-Noël asking for a bucket. We have, it transpires, a leak.

  We run through to the kitchen and I empty the washing up bowl for the purpose of catching the jet of water squirting from one of the newly soldered joints.

  ‘There’s a leak,’ Clappier tells Victor, stating the obvious. He then continues with another phrase, but I don’t catch its meaning.

  ‘It’s gonna be tomorrow,’ Victor tells me, raising one eyebrow comically.

  ‘Tomorrow?!’ I shriek, and Clappier looks suitably stunned.

  ‘He has to drain the whole system, pumpkin, so that he can—’

  ‘Don’t pumpkin me!’ I spit, rather enjoying myself. ‘I don’t care what he has to do. Either you get that bloody heatin
g working, or . . . or I’m out of here!’

  Victor glances at Clappier, who looks at his watch and shakes his head hopelessly. ‘Je ne peux pas,’ he says.

  I storm off to the bedroom, smiling to myself as Victor, behind me, pleads with him. I throw some random clothes in a bag, Victor’s mainly, and swipe the keys from the windowsill before marching back through the kitchen where the men are now arguing quietly.

  Victor grabs my arm. ‘CC! Where are you going?’ he asks.

  ‘Home!’ I shout. ‘To England! Where they have HEATING!’ And then I storm from the house.

  I cross the gravel and open the door to the van, throw my bag inside, climb into the driver’s seat and, after a few attempts – I forget the manual choke – start the engine.

  Victor appears, jogging across the gravel towards me. ‘Are you OK?’ he asks.

  ‘Of course,’ I say quietly, in case Clappier is listening.

  ‘God, you’re good. You had me worried. So what now? He still says he can’t stay.’

  ‘Go get your wallet, give it a last plea. Tell him you’re coming with me to try to talk me out of leaving, or something. We can go and get a pizza in Gréolières and see if we have heating when we get back.’

  ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Victor says, turning to jog back to the house.

  ‘Be convincing!’ I tell him.

  When he returns, we swap places and bump off down the track. ‘So?’ I say.

  Victor shrugs, glances back to check that we’re out of sight, and then leans over and pecks me on the cheek. ‘He said he’ll see what he can do.’

  After our pizza in a near-deserted restaurant in Gréolières, we drive back up to La Forge, counting the wildlife that we pass.

  As we round the final corner, Victor says, ‘Hare!’ and points to the left of the track, and I say, ‘Smoke!’ and point towards the house.

  Victor turns to look, and asks, ‘Where?’

  ‘The chimney, silly!’

  ‘God, you had me worried!’ he says. ‘I thought you meant that the house was on fire.’

  We park the van and cross the frosty gravel to the front door. With his hand on the knob, Victor pauses and says, ‘Ta-da!’ He throws the door open and we are hit by a blast of warm air.

  We quickly enter and close the door behind us. Against the far wall, flames are gently flickering through the sooty window of the range. I run, tripping on some pipe as I do so, to the nearest radiator. ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘It’s cold!’

  ‘What?!’ Victor cries, tearing across the room to feel the radiator. ‘Liar!’ he says.

  I laugh and happily press up against the warmth of the radiator.

  Once we have ascertained that all of the rooms are now warm, we return to the kitchen and pull up chairs next to the range.

  Victor reaches out to stroke my cheek, and then looks around at the mess within the kitchen and wrinkles his nose. ‘We need to spend another day clearing up,’ he says.

  I jump up to extinguish the lights, before sitting back down close to Victor. ‘See,’ I say, looking at his face in the flickering orange light. ‘Now you can pretend that it’s all finished.’

  ‘I don’t really care for now,’ Victor says. ‘I just can’t believe that we have heating.’

  The arrival of the central heating marks the beginning of a two-week period of bliss. We collect wood from the forest and prepare the walls for kitchen cabinets, while Clappier hammers away in the bathroom, whistling badly.

  And every day, it seems, something good happens: a working flush mechanism for the toilet one day; the chance to soak in the bath the next; the delivery of our refrigerator and the first ever meal cooked on the range the day after.

  In the evenings, we sit on blankets and drink aperitifs and stare, wide-eyed, at the day’s progress and then, sometimes, on those same blankets, in the mixture of moonlight and firelight, we make love. I have never felt happier.

  Though the temperatures outside remain around freezing, the sun shines daily and when we drive to the coast for kitchen cabinets, pipes, or screws, we often manage a picnic on the beach, or a beer on a sunlit terrace.

  Victor sets something up on his iPhone so that I can surf the web on my computer, and with access to Facebook, reassuring news from home arrives: Mark and Iain are fine, George and Guinness are still in love, and SJ is happier than ever to be living in Primrose Hill.

  Even Distira is, in her absence, bearable. Though I see her in the distance, pottering about, or driving past in the Lada with Carole rigid at her side, she doesn’t drop by once. When I mention this to Victor, he explains, ‘I had a word with her. After the time she pressed her nose against the window. I think she’s being more discreet now.’ Naively, I imagine that it will last.

  BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

  The spell of unbroken sunshine – both actual and metaphorical – can’t, of course, last forever, and the day the sunshine changes to rain is also the day Distira returns to visit us. Because the postman has erroneously delivered my parcel to her house, she appears in the kitchen, water dripping from her mac. As Victor and Clappier have their hands full hanging kitchen cabinets and because I’m bursting with the desire to show the house off to someone, I invite her in for a coffee.

  Distira slurps at her drink and watches the men struggling to drill holes in the heavy stone walls, while I rip open the package.

  ‘Ça ne tiendra pas,’ she tells them when Victor switches the drill off. That will never hold.

  ‘Les murs sont friables,’ she says. The walls are . . . something.

  ‘What’s “friables”, Victor?’ I ask, lifting first a pot of Marmite from the food-parcel Mark has sent me, and then crumpets and a pack of PG Tips.

  ‘Broken,’ Clappier says, the first indication that I have ever had that he speaks any English whatsoever.

  ‘It’s more like “fragile”,’ Victor says. ‘Or crumbly.’ He then explains to his aunt that the problem isn’t that the walls are too fragile, but that the stone is too hard for them to drill into.

  Because the men are soon too busy huffing and puffing with the next wall cupboard to talk to Distira, and because conversation between her and myself has never flowed easily, I explain that I need to return to my own DIY task.

  When she simply says, ‘OK,’ and makes a sweeping gesture that I should go do what I have to, that’s exactly what I do.

  Ten minutes later, I’m completely absorbed in smoothing the holes in the bathroom wall with Polyfilla when she enters the room.

  ‘Ça change!’ she declares, sounding impressed. She sweeps the room with her bulbous eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell her. ‘Once it’s finished, it’ll be lovely.’

  ‘C’était une chambre avant,’ she tells me. It was a bedroom before.

  It dawns on me for the first time that she of course knows the history of our house. This is finally a subject that we can talk about.

  ‘Who lived here before?’ I ask her.

  ‘Evelyne et Jacques!’ she says, shrugging as if this is obvious.

  ‘Victor’s parents?’

  ‘Bien sûr . . .’ she replies. Of course, but they never lived here much.

  Feeling a little proud that my French must be improving, I say, ‘Une maison de vacances?’ A holiday home?

  ‘Oui,’ she says. She nods towards the bathtub and tells me, ‘The bed was there. That’s where Vincent was born.’ She smiles at the memory, sounding warm for perhaps the first time since I met her.

  ‘Vincent?’

  ‘Le frère de Victor.’

  I frown, wondering if she is talking about a different Victor, or if she is just confused. ‘But Victor doesn’t have a brother,’ I tell her.

  ‘He did,’ she says. ‘For a few minutes.’

  I shake my head. ‘Je ne comprends pas,’ I say.

  ‘Il est né là. Il est mort là.’ He was born there. He died there.

  ‘Victor’s brother died?’ I ask, horrified.

  ‘He lived
for seven minutes,’ she tells me.

  ‘God, how terrible. Victor never mentioned him.’

  ‘Victor ne le sait pas,’ she says. Victor doesn’t know. She raises one finger to her lips, and adds, ‘C’est mieux ainsi.’ It’s better that way.

  ‘They never came back here,’ Distira tells me.

  ‘No, I can understand that.’

  And then she spits, ‘Pff! Cette maison n’a jamais porté bonheur à personne!’ and leaves. This house never brought happiness to anyone!

  From next door I hear Victor chirp, ‘Goodbye, Auntie,’ and then the front door opens and closes.

  I look at the bathtub, and think about a baby called Vincent dying in the house that never made anyone happy, and I shiver.

  That night, snuggled up in bed, it feels safe enough to dip a toe in the subject of Victor’s knowledge, or lack of knowledge, about baby Vincent. I haven’t decided if I am going to tell Victor of my conversation with Distira yet; I’m just going to see how things pan out.

  ‘Victor? You know you’re an only child . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why is that, do you think? I mean, was it a decision not to have any more, or couldn’t they, or what?’

  ‘I think they only wanted the one,’ Victor says. ‘They never said anything about having any more, anyway. But then they never said much about much, to be honest. They weren’t the best communicators.’

  ‘And what about you? Did you want a brother or a sister?’

  ‘I would have loved brothers and sisters,’ he tells me. ‘I was dead jealous of my friends who all had big families. We were pretty much the exception.’

  I lie there for a while, the words on the edge of my tongue. But ultimately, I can only agree with Distira that it’s probably better that Victor doesn’t know how close to having a brother he once came.

  ‘Why d’you ask, anyway?’ he says, rolling towards me and laying a heavy, hairy arm across my chest. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  I laugh. ‘No. It would be OK if I was though, wouldn’t it? You haven’t changed your mind?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he says, pulling me tighter. ‘Not one bit.’