20
Alistair and I have the mother of all fights, outside the moulin one evening. We are supposed to be going to a party, and I have made it as far as sitting in the front seat of the Deuche. In a new white dress, heels, make-up, newly washed hair, perfume even, I am ready. What I am not prepared for is the argument that erupts. I should have been. Alistair has been on a low simmer all day, because of something unrelated to me, but now he’s fully on the boil. The yellow Citroën has become an angry saucepan, and the lid is about to start rattling with the pressure of the steam.
As is the way with relationships, the immediate topic of debate isn’t the real issue. What does matter is that Alistair speaks to me coldly, I get triggered, then angry, then Alistair gets mad, then I get out of the car (with the must-have slam of the door), there is shouting, and he drives away. For all I know, he’s gone for the night. On the most perfect of summer evenings, when the sun pours down like honey (thank you Leonard Cohen), in a setting made for romance … I am left standing alone. I have no money, no keys to the locked house, and no car keys. Everyone appears to be out or on holiday so I can’t even take my party-ready self to the neighbours for a pick-me-up and a calm down. Instead I am forced to clamber into the moulin by a first-floor window, in a little white dress. When I say ‘forced’, I mean it’s the only productive channel for my fury. I first have to heave a steel ladder eight times my height and weight from the barn down a series of stone steps and prop it beneath the window. It is a feat of determination and strength that leaves me frankly astonished and Alistair, as he later admits, highly impressed. Once inside the mill, I book a plane ticket to London and pack my case much like I am stuffing information into this paragraph — chaotically, inadequately and leaving more questions than answers.
Alistair returns after an hour and is surprised to see me doing things to a suitcase that would give Marie Kondo conniptions. But I insist; I am not staying.
Leaving the country after a tiff may seem like an overreaction; and let’s face it, a walk around the block would be a lot cheaper. However, I am so angry and upset that I need to get away for a decent chunk of time. And I don’t yet know anyone well enough in the village to turn up on their doorstep requesting asylum. I need time to think. It can’t go on like this; our arguments just seem to be getting progressively bigger and louder.
Over the next two weeks, staying with my brother and sister-in-law in a leafy (aka posh) west London suburb, I have plenty of space to reflect. They are immensely kind and nurturing and astonishingly non-judgmental. Not an eyeroll in sight — which is remarkable given they’ve seen the Maria Heartache Show before, several times. Kept the programme, bought the poster, got the T-shirt. Instead of lecturing, they whisk me away for a weekend to their holiday home in idyllic Dorset. We walk to the pub along a narrow pathway cut through a field of towering corn — shimmering and golden in the evening light. We eat hot Cornish pasties, laze on the beach, attend a village-wide hat competition (a woman with a home-made plastic aquarium on her head deservedly takes first prize), listen to live street music and generally bask in feel-good holiday vibes. Back in London, I take Guinness for long walks around Richmond Park. A dog is ideal live-in-the-moment therapy — we scamper along together, playing ball and tug-of-war with sticks, staying well clear of the enormous stags who wander around like herds of four-legged hat stands.
I visit old friends whose weddings I attended 30 or more years ago. Like my brother and sister-in-law, these couples are mostly still together. I observe their relationship dynamics with David Attenborough-like fascination, imagining the natural historian’s whispered voiceover in my head: Now the male is displaying increasing irritation at his mate’s attempted dominance. He feels he is in charge here, wearing the apron; he does not welcome her remark that he should either stick to the recipe or let her take over the risotto. In a moment he will issue a warning and, ah yes and there it is. The raised voice. The female looks to be retreating … but no, she responds with a joke and… the danger is over. A quick hug, a playful flick of the tea towel, and their bond is secure.
Because this is what I am witnessing. Not the total absence of conflict, but the ability to navigate it with humour and kindness. And to bounce quickly back to a default position of reciprocal love. No eggshell-treading. No hours of sulky silence. No desperate urge to flee the minute an inflammatory word is spoken. What are Alistair and I doing wrong? Are we simply emotionally incompatible? Did I rush towards a dream without checking its substance? Well, er, yes to the rushing part. I even joked about it. ‘I barely know him. Lol.’ However, I said this with the inner belief that, despite mounting evidence in my life to the contrary, love conquers all. And while it wasn’t love at the start — how could it have been? — I felt sure that would come. After all, we would be living in paradise, we had similar interests, views, and a passion for all things French. Plus, our trump card — that one fundamental element that is non-negotiable and impossible to manufacture: strong mutual attraction. Chemistry? Ten out of ten.
Geography and history? A whole other story.
Geography. It’s one thing to be on the other side of the world from your daughters and home — and yes, New Zealand is still ‘home’. But to be away from those you love so deeply AND feel lonely? I don’t even know what to do with that. When Alistair and I fight, I am hollowed out. The sadness and sense of loss is out of all proportion to the disagreement itself. We have moments of happiness and incredible closeness, for sure. Yet it’s transitory. It never seems to progress, to deepen. We’re two lovers picnicking in the sunshine, but away in the distance the low rumble of thunder is always present.
The problem, I conclude, is that I have given up too much, travelled too far, to be with Alistair. It’s as if to compensate for what I’ve lost, I need to gain something tremendous. It’s a terrible pressure to place on a relationship, a demand of unblighted happiness. To expect it to go above and beyond, to make up for what you left behind. I know this. If Alistair and I had dated, even lived together, in New Zealand, it would have been different. But here, now, I can’t stop thinking Did I come all this way … for this?
History. I can’t speak for Alistair’s past. That is his story to tell. But he does have wounds. I know this because he’s told me, and also because only deep, deep wounds could make an emotionally intelligent, smart and otherwise loving man react to me the way he often does. He will say the same of me, just so you know.
I’ve mentioned my own unhappy track record in love. And it’s no excuse, your honour. It doesn’t give me the right to be over-sensitive and drift mournfully around the place like a wailing banshee. But it has affected me, in ways I am only just beginning to understand. Take another relationship, with Dan … we were living together and then suddenly we weren’t. He told me to move out. I had no money for a rental, no savings. One minute I was spooning, the next I didn’t even own a fork.
So moving in with Alistair, I lived in fear of him kicking me out. There was so much at stake. Every angry look, every silence, every sigh — I saw these as entries in a ledger that would add up to ‘Dear God, that woman has got to go.’
Alistair insists he was never, ever going to give me my marching orders. But that evening when he drove off, leaving me alone outside a locked moulin, something inside me snapped.
Which brings me onto the next gaping hole. One I should have foreseen, but didn’t. The loss of a sense of self. Give me a moment here … this one takes a while to unfold.
That break-up with Dan back in Auckland prompted a beautiful realisation. I might be down and out, but I had a currency far more precious than any other. Friends. In that currency, I was Bill Gates. Friends came to my rescue in more ways than I can mention. Lending a van here, a sympathetic ear there. Rolling up their sleeves to help me move into a new unit. Gifting me sofas, rocking chairs, pots and pans. A colleague gave me a red wall clock she was ‘only going to give to the Sally Army shop anyway’ and a million items of cutlery; a long-time mate gifted me a cushion and gorgeously kitschy tray from her family bach. I received a chandelier-style lampshade that wasn’t my taste but became a favourite because it sparkled like the friend who delivered it in a box. A former workmate drove over and heaved an enormous rolled-up sausage of a rug out of her boot. It was plush, designer and brand new. ‘Oh I just never use it,’ she said implausibly. I’d always got on fine with her … but I’d never have thought our friendship was of giant rug proportions. In winter, every time I went from bare floorboards to sinking my toes into that thick wool, I thought of her. Every time I would relive the break-up and start to feel rejected and unlovable, I’d look at the red clock, the rug and the blingy lampshade and be humbled into loving myself back.
It’s funny. I’ve always been so intent on not setting store by material things that I overlooked a simple truth. That you NEED those echoes from your past, a tangible timeline of your own story.
Here in France, in the absence of family or long-standing friends, I needed more than ever to cocoon myself in memories. The problem wasn’t moving onto foreign soil, but into alien domestic territory: one devoid of all reminders of who I was and where I came from.
The moulin is Alistair Land. Everywhere, he is in evidence. Everywhere, he is reflected back at himself. His bikes, his cars, his furniture, his TV (and unfathomable remote-control system), his habits, his photographs, his paintings, his way of cooking, his music choices. Hey, I get it. He lives here — he has every right to swaddle himself in his own comforts. So I try to embrace it. And it takes me a while to figure out why I can’t. It’s because when I feel sad and lost, there is no blingy lampshade to look at. When we argue, Alistair can retreat to his workshop but I have nowhere to go. Nowhere but myself, and that’s often not a comforting place.
When silence moves into the space where love should be, I pull on my trainers and go running down the empty village main road, passed by the occasional tractor. The running isn’t the real comfort here, the music is. Plugged into Spotify, I piece myself back together — one favourite, memory-soaked track at a time. It’s an IV drip for the soul. Eventually I feel ready to return and often go and do stretches on the river bank for a few minutes, to ensure complete calm.
So yes, rather than sell every last possession when I came here, I should have brought more of those personal treasures that kept me anchored to a sense of self. I wanted to be free, unburdened by nostalgia. And now I am so unfettered I feel I might blow away. Alistair gets frustrated when I point out that this doesn’t feel like my home because there is nothing of mine here. ‘But you don’t own anything!’ he says, in exasperation.
‘But I had a car, a home, a dog!’
‘You didn’t own your home, your car was on finance and you could barely afford the dog,’ counters Alistair.
I guess he’ll never understand about the red clock and the non-matching gifted furniture.
He does have a point, though, about the money at least. And the dog. (By the way, no animals were harmed in the making of this adventure. Elio the whippet is fine and being looked after like a five-star hotel guest by my daughter and ex-husband.) But I did have independence, and the financial struggle aside, I largely felt in control.
None of this is Alistair’s fault. Unless you count him exerting a pull on me that I couldn’t resist. And quite honestly I am not going to complain about that. You might go your whole life without experiencing that level of magnetism, one that can draw you across an entire globe.
This is a mess of my making, not his.
I could have reduced all of the above to, ‘Hey look, it just isn’t working out.’ But I need to put a precise lens on this. To dig deeper.
And speaking of which, it’s time to talk about investigations of a different kind.
The date for my MRI scan at hospital is in a week’s time. That little tache (stain) on my chest X-ray has been largely forgotten amid climbing into windows and scanning my own emotional and spiritual wellbeing for signs of terminal damage.
I breezily tell friends, ‘Ooh and guess what! I have a mark on my chest X-ray but it’s probably nothing.’ I don’t like the way they look at me when I say this.
The test requires my return to France. I had considered trying to get it done in London, but the National Health Service is sicker than I potentially am. There is no way I will get seen quickly. Alistair insists that we put our differences aside for now, so I can come back and stay with him. At least for a while. He is worried and wants to accompany me to the hospital. I say yes because logistically it makes sense.
In truth, despite all the complications wrought by geography and history, I am missing him desperately.
Alistair comes to meet me at the airport, and seeing him standing in the arrivals hall, his face full of love and concern, I feel a surge of tenderness. At first we kiss on the cheek, and do a weird awkward half-hug, but this coyness doesn’t last long. It takes precisely one evening for us to be shakily back together. If the last rendition of our relationship was built on unstable ground, now we’re hugging at the bottom of a landslide.
The external conditions are not promising. My visa expires in just over a month and, with that scan looming, it hasn’t yet been established that I’m not about to do the same. We haven’t addressed the cause of that last fight, and continuing to live in France is untenable when our relationship is in its present form. Something drastic has to change. Unless I secure more work so I can get a place of my own perhaps, or at least feel less dependent on Alistair, the prognosis for our relationship is bleak.
However, right now affairs of the heart have to play second fiddle to affairs of the lung. I need to find out what the hell is going on.
The scan is worrying me for two reasons. First, the result itself. Then the cost. I don’t have a carte vitale, or ‘health card’. I have a social security number because I am paying social security contributions, but without the physical card I will have to pay for the scan upfront and claim the money back. My life support — my brother and his wife — have generously popped funds into my bank account, but I know how expensive MRIs can be. I might not have enough.
My first attempt at the scan six weeks ago failed because I was missing something vital. The procedure involves injecting you with a coloured dye, which improves image quality. I was meant to bring the dye myself — who knew? That’s right, BYO meds. It’s how they do things here. This time, however, I am prepared. My GP wrote me a script, the pharmacist took 56 euros, and I got a big white box full of MRI goodies. Now I arrive at the hospital proudly bearing it like I’m turning up to a party with a cake. Alistair stays in the main waiting room while my insides get their photo opportunity.
The result comes through as I am sitting by myself in a side waiting room, looking at Italian greyhound videos on my Instagram. These are the moments where life can turn on a sixpence. One minute you’re looking at designer dogs and worrying the supermarket might be closed on the way home, the next understanding that mortality means you too.
The scar on my ‘lung’ is nothing of the sort. It’s a benign tumour on my chest bone. Right now God is a middle-aged doctor in a white coat, and I want to kiss him. But I try to rein in my relief, at least until I get past the other people in that side waiting room scrolling through phones, trying to be nonchalant, awaiting their own fate.
Alistair is of course delighted. But with that worry dismissed, other concerns are up for promotion. First in line: how to pay the bill?
The admin lady looks at me sadly. ‘Pas de carte vitale?’ No, but I do have my social security number, I explain brightly, and thrust it in front of her. She remains sad. ‘Without the card, you must regrettably pay the full amount. I am so sorry. But you will get it back. Just keep all your receipts.’ I wonder what they do in these situations if you can’t pay up … What is the hospital equivalent of doing the washing up? Emptying bed pans?
She says a figure and I ask her to repeat it. ‘Dix-neuf euros,’ she repeats. Nineteen euros. Oh France, your charms are very hard to resist!
Alistair asks, ‘Shall we go for lunch to celebrate?’
It’s a lovely idea, but I suggest we simply go to the supermarket. It is not yet closed.