6
Life goes on being blissful — and how could it not? We have all the perfect ingredients. Absurdly quaint French villages; kingfishers swooping low across the river; Wedgewood blue skies; deserted roads (two cars in quick succession and it’s rush-hour); bonhomie at every turn, and of course — sorry to rub your nose in it — all that excellent food and wine. There is really very little to fret over at all.
I’m still working, but putting in a fraction of the time I have for the past four decades. This is relative luxury. My employer back in Auckland is allowing me to work remotely and we’ve agreed on four hours a day. Sending completed tasks from a laptop in rural France to a series of inboxes in urban New Zealand makes me one of that annoying new breed: The Digital Nomad.
My brother William in London emails me an article in a UK newspaper by a lady professing to belong to this fast-growing itinerant tribe. Her piece about being an older woman in a nomad community of twenty-and-thirty-somethings is funny and well written, but I’m sniffy about it nonetheless. ‘Ha, she’s only in Italy for a couple of months — that’s not being a digital nomad. That’s taking your laptop on holiday,’ I scoff, feeling vastly superior and more authentically intrepid. She didn’t throw caution to the wind and dismantle an entire life.
The new working hours are perfect, and my workmates are being insanely accommodating. They schedule meetings with ‘the French office’ for 7.30 a.m. New Zealand time so I can jump online in my evening — and then apologise to me for the inconvenient hour. They make cute little videos for me instead of emails to make our interactions more personal, and start every Zoom call with, ‘Nah, forget about work. First tell us all about you! Is it fabulous? What are you eating? Oh, your new haircut is so French …’ Huddled in polo necks, with red noses and heat pumps blasting, they ooze generosity of spirit. I love them all so much for it.
One night, Alistair and I promise to go with friends to the fortnightly outdoor performance at the Jolie Rosette, the venue where the circuses are held. If this is La France Profonde, then the Jolie Rosette is its epicentre. It’s less venue, rather a collection of fields surrounding an old manor house with giant rusty gates, three kilometres from the nearest village. Cats steal furtively through the long grass, no doubt wishing the theatre-goers would shut up, go home and leave them to their private wilderness. I have a work meeting at nine the same night, and I can’t ask for a rain check just so I can keep my date with a bottle of rosé and a cheese platter. So I mingle for the pre-show drinks then throw off my heels to dash to the field where the Citroën is parked. I settle into the front seat with my laptop and hot-spot off my phone for the video call. It’s getting dark, and the only thing that my Kiwi colleagues can see is me in a red strappy dress, mostly in shadow, the flickering outdoor lighting lending a nightmarish David Lynch quality to the scene. My teammates think this is fantastic. Every time I join the discussion, they listen and nod. But then one of them will start laughing. ‘Oh my God, you are literally sitting in a field.’
So yes, the work arrangement suits me fine, and leaves me time to do some writing. I say writing, but it’s really more scribbles in a notebook — and only because everyone keeps telling me, ‘Oh you should do a blog!’ I’m not sure about that, but I do harbour a secret ambition of writing a book. Yes, everyone is writing a book these days, but I’ve always had this feeling that it wouldn’t be a proper use of my time. Kind of ‘Who do you think you are?’ syndrome. Perhaps it’s because I come from Manchester.
Still, I have plenty of encouragement. My friends at work have given me a wonderful ‘Bon Voyage’ present — a Moleskine travel diary and a book called A Waiter in Paris. It’s by a young Englishman who finds himself penniless in France and is forced to find work at a semi-fancy but hugely exploitative restaurant. If this guy can write an entertaining memoir on three hours sleep a night, Dickensian wages and barely any food, surely my well-fed, pampered self can have a crack at it.
For now, my half-time wage goes a long way. Especially because Alistair is not charging me rent or other expenses. We split the groceries occasionally but that’s about it. I mention this because it’s to become important in this particular love story. Romance is all well and good, but it’s nothing if you can’t afford the candles. Financial stability is a much underplayed factor in successful relationships. I’d like to take every fairytale ever written and throw in some personal-finance advice for impressionable young minds: ‘Yes, he says he has a castle and will take care of you. But do you have a pension fund, just in case he changes his mind?’ — while of course adding in a link to reputable providers. ‘Sure, he says your eyes are like oceans he can do backstroke in, but are you putting a little cash aside? You know, just in case he’s screwing the lady-in-waiting?’
I used to love that Times newspaper column, ‘A Life in the Day’, where they ask famous people what their daily routine looks like. I was always fascinated by the featured celebrity’s work ethic, energy and monastic restraint. Their day often went something like this: ‘Get up at five a.m. Do an hour of Alexander technique. Drink a hot water. Go for a jog in Hyde Park. Walk our beautiful saluki, Serafina. Dial into the team in New York/Paris/Tokyo and schedule my day’s meetings …’ and so on and so on. They never seemed to eat, and if they did it was a green detox juice and perhaps some steamed sole for dinner with a cheeky glass of Chablis at weekends. Such a packed schedule, so little food. Maybe that’s it. Maybe if you want to have the sort of success that makes Times readers interested in what you have for breakfast, you can’t afford to stop for breakfast.
I’m not famous, but I am going to tell you what my new routine looks like anyway. And it involves a lot more snacking, procrastination and online word puzzles than the above-mentioned example. So here goes:
7 a.m. Get up, make myself strong coffee and a lemon juice and honey for Alistair. Tell Alistair, ‘Ooh I wish I could be that healthy. But it’s so hard to adopt a new habit.’ 7.30 a.m. Sit at my laptop. Do three Wordles — The New York Times, La Palabra del Día (Spanish) and Le Mot (French) — managing to be at once time-wasting and pretentious. 8 a.m. Log on to work emails, make a list of what needs addressing urgently. 8.30 a.m. Head downstairs for breakfast (baguette, butter and jam, more coffee). 9 a.m. Work for an hour. 10 a.m. Zoom with my daughters. Work until lunchtime (fuelled by fruit, nuts and the occasional strawberry tart). 1 p.m. Sit outside with my notebook, novel and a plate of baguette; sweet, nutty P’tit Basque cheese, juicy green tomatoes and olives. (Sometimes we hit a local auberge and have a four-course lunch with a 50 centilitre pichet (jug) of rosé. On those days little happens after 3 p.m. except napping. 2 p.m. Dip in the river. Sit on a rock, look for the telltale V on the water indicating an otter swimming below and dream about writing a book. 3.pm. Bike ride. 4.30 p.m. Grocery shop. 6 p.m.–6.30 p.m. Bowl of peanuts and a Kir (crème de cassis liqueur and white wine. I appear to have no trouble making this daily habit stick). 7–7.30 p.m. Dinner. Either fish/saucisses/steak and salad (with more baguette) on the deck overlooking the river, or a neighbour’s place for a barbecue, or moules-frites at the camping ground, or a meal at the local pizza joint. I was going to write ‘cheap and cheerful’ pizza. But it’s neither. The food is fine but the chef-manager François is a brooding and rather rude 30-something. The story goes (and like I said previously, take this with a big pinch of salt) that he used to own the place with his best buddy but had to sell up when they had a falling out. The impending closure came as a blow to one of the part-time locals, a wealthy Italian who holidays here. So he bought the place (as you do when you want to secure a steady supply of quattro formaggi) and persuaded François to stay on as manager. Clearly it’s no longer a labour of love for the probably once genial pizza chef. Luckily his sourness doesn’t extend to the food.
So this daily routine all sounds idyllic, does it not? Well yes. And no.
Because, you see, I have deep pockets of loneliness. And something I think might be grief. Well, duh, you are no doubt thinking. You yanked yourself away from everything you know, and haven’t had time to fill the vacuum with any deep friendships yet. Yes, I knew this would be hard. But ‘This will be hard’ as a thought, and ‘This is hard’ as a tangible reality, are very different things.
I want to call up my friend Mary in Auckland and have her come over for dinner, watch her unpack her own ingredients (allergies) and drink homemade kombucha while I sip on a cheap red, then curl up on the sofa together with tea and Whittaker’s dark mint chocolate and guffaw over episodes of Black Books. I am aching to hug the dog, to bury my nose in the soft part under his ears and breathe deep the smell of his fur. I want to go for long walks with my daughters, and laugh until I cry with them. (Note to self: do Alistair and I laugh enough?) I want to organise a catch-up with my longtime pal Becky. We’ll sit at a café, where I’ll get a half-strength cappuccino and some full-strength Becky advice. Nobody does straight-talking like she does, and she’s rehabilitated me after many a crisis. She literally drove 30 minutes to my house one Sunday when I was having a meltdown over too much work and too many chores, arriving with a bucket, mop and cleaning products. She squeezed past me and simply said, ‘I’ll start in the bathroom.’ After a live-in relationship ended and I had to move house just before Christmas, she turned up with a Christmas tree, decorations and several bags of homewares.
There are other friends, too: too many to mention, and I miss them all.
At least they are not dead — just down under. We can still Zoom and WhatsApp. But I need to find friendships here, in 3D. People I can call up for a drink, lunch, a walk. A hug. Alistair can’t be my sole support system. That way lies trouble.
Having any sort of longing at all, though, makes me feel guilty. Aren’t I living the dream? Isn’t it paradise here? For years I have been thinking to myself, if only life was less stressful, if only I could escape the urban chaos, if only I could be carefree, if only I couldlive in some heavenly European location. Well, I have that now. So it’s unsettling to realise the dream is lacking. What does it all mean? That I will never be satisfied? That I will always want what is out of reach? Or is it that this is a dream, but just not mine: something like a Chanel jacket that I’ve bought in an op shop knowing everyone else will go, ‘Wow — what a find!’ only to find myself wondering, is this really my style?
There is another layer of interpretation, one I am trying to suppress. (Get up close because I am not quite ready to say it in big font.) Maybe Alistair and I are not right for one another. Maybe this was all a mistake. Maybe I wouldn’t be so lonely if we were laughing more and arguing less.
In the E.M. Forster novel Howards End (1910), the protagonist Helen talks about falling in love with a young man even before she has met him. She becomes infatuated with his parents, the Wilcoxes, while staying with them and she wants to remain in their life forever. By the time bachelor Paul arrives home, it’s a foregone conclusion:
The truth was that she had fallen in love, not with an individual, but with a family.
Before Paul arrived she had, as it were, been tuned up into his key. The energy of the Wilcoxes had fascinated her, had created new images of beauty in her responsive mind. To be all day with them in the open air, to sleep at night under their roof, had seemed the supreme joy of life, and had led to that abandonment of personality that is a possible prelude to love.
Like Helen, was I so primed for a dream (mine being of enduring love and adventure) that when Alistair came along, I was ‘tuned up into his key’? Alistair is attractive in that distinguished silvery way, intelligent, tall and solidly ursine — and when I met him he said all the right things. He flattered me, charmed me and sent me water-mill porn. It was hard to resist. So have I just convinced myself of love? He said he loved me very early on, and I felt it was rude not to reciprocate. Well, you can’t just leave someone hanging, can you? And there is no good reason not to fall in love. Have I, like Helen, thrown not just caution but my own integrity to the wind in order to secure this dream?
The catch is that it’s hard to pinpoint any tangible flaws in the arrangement. We’ve had arguments, Alistair can be snappy (in turn, he says I ‘rage’), but we always make up and acknowledge these are inevitable teething troubles. We cuddle and laugh at the thought that this isn’t going to work.
But Alistair’s switches in mood do concern me. Sure, I am flawed. And I do get angry. Maybe to compensate for my petite stature, I raise my voice and become intransigent. I’ve been bossed around by enough men to get stroppy about my boundaries. Alistair says I yell, rant and pace. I don’t know about that, but you’re left in no doubt that there is an issue. Alistair’s moods, on the other hand, are so subtle — like fine rain you can barely see, only feel. He doesn’t fill a space with rage, he vacates it. And the effect is huge. He has no idea that he is such a big personality that when he withdraws it leaves a dimly lit space where doubt and fear grow. He is like the sun retreating behind the clouds. One minute you are warm and basking in his light, the next bathed in shadow, shivering slightly.
He’s stated his mission is ‘making me feel loved, supported and safe’, and I think he truly means it. At times I feel all of those things. At others I just feel alone.
It doesn’t help that when he is engrossed in a task — either buying electronic parts on his phone, watching a car-repair video, or downstairs in the workshop — he sees and hears nothing except the challenge in front of him. Ask a question and you’ll either get no reply, or a mumble.
He has mentioned that he and Sarah used to work well, that they did stuff together. So I really want to show interest but I lose track of which particular scheme he is pursuing. The mass of wires, tools and screws on the bench and dining room table give me no clues. The regular delivery of enormous boxes that have the couriers staggering bow-legged down the garden steps might contain anything. He could be developing a new generation of nuclear weapons for all I know.
As I alluded to before, all narratives have more than one side. And I am aware I am privileged in being able to state my own. So in the interests of fairness, I will say this. I, too, withdraw. I spend hours ensconced in my turret, on the top floor of the moulin, typing away on my laptop. Just like Rapunzel, only with shorter hair and a deadline. ‘I have to work!’ I protest when Alistair says he hasn’t seen me all morning. ‘When I last came in you were talking to your daughter,’ he points out.
This is becoming an increasing source of conflict — each of us blaming the other for not being present. And the more we disagree, the more we retreat to our respective sanctuaries.
But for now I’m not overly worried. We’re both invested in this dream and will do whatever it takes to make it work.
The house is Alistair’s, the furniture is Alistair’s, the complex stereo and TV system that I don’t know how to operate is Alistair’s, the cars are Alistair’s. The routine and daily agenda are largely Alistair’s. I came here with nothing, and have little prospect of acquiring much of my own. But one thing I can acquire is friends.
Let’s look at my progress so far.
There’s the woman in the boulangerie. She looks about twenty and I thought she was a student, but it turns out she and her husband own the business. We have a thing between us. Fashion. It all started with me complimenting her dress. (Seriously, every single day she is immaculately turned out, complete with false eyelashes, curling-tong-styled blonde hair and quite the parade of frocks.) ‘It’s from a new boutique, just opened,’ she tells me. This is music to my ears. Call it shallow, but I do miss bricks-and-mortar clothing stores. The nearest are an hour away, and the only local alternatives are the supermarket and the little minimart, which sells kaftan-y dresses and ‘quirky’ knitwear I am not quite ready for.
She and I exchange laments about the lack of tangible shopping options and being forced to take a stab at correct sizes and fabric quality online. The next time I go in for a baguette de tradition, she compliments my earrings. The time after that I admire her bracelet. We take a short break from this mutual fanfest, during which I make do with complimenting the pastries. Then one day I walk in, wearing jeans, a blue singlet and a blue- and-white striped shirt from Zara. She points her finger up and down at me and says, ‘Love your look.’
So this is great, but it means that now I can’t even nip out for bread without serious thought about my outfit choices. I have a reputation to maintain. It’s a cute little thing we have going, but I doubt the conversation will ever extend much further beyond personal styling and when the next batch of baguettes will be ready.
Then there is Danielle. Danielle I met at my first Jolie Rosette, about a week after my arrival. Alistair had taken up his favourite position, elbow on the bar with a beer in hand, chatting to Jan (he of the canoe trip). It was 11 p.m. and about an hour past my bedtime. It’s not that Alistair was ignoring me, but after a few beers he has settled in for the night. He tends to become more proficient at banter as the night wears on, whereas I invariably start to fade and fantasise about drinking tea in bed with my book. A French woman in her fifties came up and introduced herself. After a very brief and halting chat during which I made a mental note to again download the French Duolingo app, she asked if we should exchange phone numbers. In my tired haze I wondered if she was hitting on me, because nothing in my verbal communication had hinted that I was promising friend material. But she told me she worked at the retirement home so I concluded she was just a kind soul on the lookout for lonely old ladies.
I took her number then promptly lost it when I changed SIM cards. ‘Hold the friendship, caller.’
Another friend-in-the-making is Jen, a British woman who lives nearby. Alistair had befriended Jen and her partner Richard at a local fête the previous summer, and when we bumped into them at the Saturday morning market, he was quick to introduce me. ‘I think you two will get on well,’ he announced to us both. This had the effect on me that it did when I was seven and my mum would foist her friends’ daughters on me with the words ‘You two should play together.’ Forced friendships are rarely a good idea. However, Alistair is right. We all go out for dinner the following Friday, and Jen and I spend a good three hours chatting just to one another. We tumble over words in our rush to declare our shared loves (the word-tumbling could also be the wine): board games, Barbara Kingsolver, retro wallpaper, BBC ‘Woman’s Hour’. She’s adorably eccentric, talks even faster than I do, and is fascinating to me. A historian, she’s super-smart and intensely animated — often she stares up into space as she talks, as if she’s a butterfly collector trying to net each bright idea before it flutters away. Jen and her partner don’t live here, though; they only come out to France for two to three months a year. So while that friendship has definite promise, it’s not going to sustain either of us for more than several weeks at a time.
The other friend is Marianne. Alistair has known her and her husband Tony since he first arrived here. At 70 years old, she radiates pure childlike energy. Decidedly more gamine than vieille dame, she’s usually in shorts, showing off her slim, tanned legs, waving her arms around excitedly and more often than not letting out her trademark soprano peal of laughter.
We were once at a comedy show together where the performers actually came up at the end to thank Marianne for her enthusiasm. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard cast members deliver a review of their audience.
Marianne’s close-cropped hair is dyed bright red: ‘I do zis myself, I get de scissor, I go tak tak … I don’t ’ave got the money to go pay someone to do it.’ No, really, this is how she speaks. If she were an actor pretending to be French, people would be horrified at the gross caricature. But it’s part of the package that makes her so delightful. A former military cook, born and raised in London, Tony does the same in reverse. As broad as his wife is slender, he gruffly manhandles each French vowel like he’s slamming meat down onto a chopping board. Imagine Bob Hoskins speaking French with absolutely zero concession to pronunciation. These two are a lifeline for the lost and lonely, as well as a hit with the party animals — they run fundraising nights for the pétanque club, they organise croquet days, indoor bowls, fancy-dress parties and integrate nervous newcomers into the community. They are the unofficial ambassadors of their village.
There are two things I personally love about Marianne. First, her tenacity. She had a hard life before she met Tony (they were friends for years first). Following her marriage break-up she brought up her daughter Luna alone. She moved from Paris to their small village, and did every single thing on a shoestring. She walked Luna miles to school each morning, made all their clothes, did all the house repairs, fitted her own insulation, took a part-time job at the school, cooked, grew vegetables, did everything to build a comfortable life for the two of them. And she succeeded.
The second thing I love is her candidness. What is interesting is how she gets away with being so outspoken. Alistair is not an easy man to disagree with, but she tells him exactly what she thinks — and with humour. One day at lunch, she blurts out, ‘I am sorry Alistair but I do not like your moulin! It is cold. Poor Maria, no wonder she is miserable! One day she will leave you if you do not move to a nice place. Sell zis ancient pile of bricks and buy a nice ’ome with big windows and ’eating!’ Clearly, the moulin is Alistair’s absolute pride and joy. It is his happy, magic place. He waxes lyrical about it on a regular basis, extolling the thickness of the walls; the view out to the stone steps and ivy-bearded barns; the beauty of the river; the absolute and utter specialness of it all. Marianne has essentially said the equivalent of ‘Your child is ugly’. But he just stares open-mouthed and laughs.
So ‘Operation Friend-Maker’ is looking promising. Sadly, just as I have my enthusiasm nicely fired up, I am forced to leave France.