The next morning I wake with a crick in my neck to the sound of birds singing. Not a whole morning chorus, but each bird being allowed to sing his own part – except the wood pigeon, which wants to sing over everybody else, and the cockerel in the distance heralding a new day. But apart from that, nothing. Silence. The mistral has gone as suddenly as it arrived. Came in, whipped up a storm, caused chaos and left a whole different landscape.
My phone buzzes in my jeans pocket, catapulting me back to reality. I open my eyes: my cheek is against the cool porcelain of the bath where I slept the night. Instead of what I’d thought was a warm blanket over me, Ralph is lying on top of me, for comfort and warmth. I’m suddenly very grateful to the mad bundle of curly fur. I might not have felt quite the same when Ollie brought him home as a gift after my final cycle of IVF had failed. For Ollie it was like a full stop on that part of our lives, but to me it was like he was offering me a baby replacement. To begin with, I couldn’t accept the dog into my life, especially when Ollie suggested calling him Eddie – one of my favourite baby names had been Edward. Ollie was clearly trying to do something kind – he was kind. He would often do really thoughtful things, like making a drink for me after a hard day, driving me into town to meet up with my friends on a night out, and he always remembered birthdays and anniversaries.
The puppy became Ralph because I would never have called a little boy Ralph. I knew a Ralph once, a long time ago, before I met Ollie. He’d been funny and adoring, not in the least bit reliable, and loved every person he met. It seemed a very suitable name for the bundle that had just landed in my life. Ralph slept with us from the first night, and as he grew and spread, sleeping right across the bed, so did the distance between us with every day that passed.
Ollie threw himself into the idea of France, freelancing from home. I carried on working but now had a dog in my life that needed feeding, walking and apologizing for when he ran off in the park and covered passers-by with muddy pawprints as he threw himself at them. Ralph became another thing on my to-do list. But now here he was, keeping me warm as I lay in the empty bath. Last night, I went from relieved at the decision to cut the cord with Ollie to wondering what the hell I’d done in letting him drive off without me. Eventually, exhausted, I had curled up in a tight ball, my back to the bathroom wall, arms over my head, and wondered if he had been right. What on earth was I doing alone in an empty house, when all my belongings and my husband of ten years were on their way back to the UK? Would I regret this? Was my decision another symptom of my early menopause?
My mind started to replay everything about our relationship, from how we met to how I’d ended up sleeping in the bath in an empty old farmhouse in the south of France.
So, what on earth was I doing there? In a tired farmhouse in the Luberon in Provence. In a small mountainside town, with terracotta-, orange-, yellow-, and peach-coloured houses. With my husband, the one constant thing in my life, back in the UK. Well, he’d been there in body, except when he’d been in someone else’s life and bed for that one-off when the stress of our situation had got too much. Sex to us had become about making a baby, not making love. I can’t remember the last time I made love. And all the time, as I thought back over my married life throughout that night, trying to work out where it had all gone wrong, the loose shutters banged, banged, banged against the windowpanes. Eventually, when I could stand it no more, I stood up and went to tie the shutter to the wrought-iron railings we’d had made to stop any visitors falling out of the window. But no one had visited in the six weeks we’d tried to make a go of things here. Once the move had happened, our ‘fresh new start’, once we’d eaten the bread and cheese, drunk the wine, taken down the ‘happiness in your new home’ cards, once the front door was shut, it was just Ollie and me, alone, our future spread out in front of us, like a long, long night with nothing on the telly. And nothing much to talk about, apart from shopping lists, people planning to visit, Ollie’s frustration with the internet and his daily battles with the phone in the car. He’d come back to the farmhouse after a trip into the town furious that he had got no further in improving our broadband and Wi-Fi connection and that no one spoke English.
‘Bloody country!’ he’d rant. ‘And they all stop for lunch! Who stops for lunch these days? How does anyone make a bloody living here? And, honestly, it beggars belief how many of them don’t speak English.’ The last six painful weeks played over and over in my mind for what seemed like most of the night.
I felt safer in the bathroom than anywhere else in the empty house, in what felt like the tatters of my marriage, with Ralph by my side. Suddenly my dog was there for me when I really needed someone and no one else was.
I thought about Ollie and our life together over the last few weeks. Mealtimes had become fraught as the work Ollie had tried to pick up, then deliver, became more and more difficult to achieve, and our savings from the sale of the house started to dwindle.
So, work was drying up for Ollie, and my French wasn’t nearly good enough yet for me to look for work in a local shop. We agreed, over the plat du jour in the most expensive brasserie in town, to put the house back on the market and phoned the removal company. Ollie complained at the size of the restaurant bill and that ‘nothing in France is cheap any more’. But we were both right. Nothing in our lives was working because our marriage wasn’t working. The glue had gone. We’d tried to fix it, but it was broken. It was over. I know I made the right decision for us both. That was how I ended up in the bath on my own.
‘Come on, Ralph, up we get,’ I say.
He’s suddenly alert and scrabbles out of the bath, ready for whatever adventures the day might bring. With every joint and muscle in my body aching, I ease myself out and pull out my phone. There’s a message from Ollie.
I’m back. Come to your senses yet?!
I don’t reply. I’ve said all I need to say. There’s no point in discussing it any more. I ripped the plaster off our broken marriage and my damaged heart yesterday, which hurt, but it’s going to get better, for both of us.
I walk over to the long bathroom window to retrieve my bra, the only thing I could find last night to tie back the loose shutter. I’d seen Joanna Lumley use hers as slippers when she was on a desert island, and mine did a great job last night. I untie it, then push the shutters back. I take hold of the wrought-iron railing and breathe in deeply. I can smell the pine and cypress trees. I can hear the birds singing as they flit in and out of the trees and the cockerel in the distance still heralding the new day. A donkey from up the road has joined in the morning celebrations and is braying. I can smell the rosemary plants under the window and the lavender hedge. The mistral has blown all the dust away and everything is bright and clear. They say that the clear colours after the mistral draw painters to the area, and I can see why as I stare at the valley below. I’m not mad. Ollie and I had come to the end of our journey. Going back to where we’d started would have made us even more miserable.
The sky is streaked with blue and pink as the sun rises over our field behind the house and beyond. I close my eyes. I open them and the birdsong, the smell of the pines, the wild rosemary and thyme on the white rocks make me feel calm. I look at the view, taking it in as if for the first time. I may have nothing in the house but I have this for now.
I smile at Ralph, sitting happily at my feet, and I reach down to stroke his soft ear. Instead of seeing it as a sign to bound around in play, he lets me. And I’m grateful for that. A smile pulls at the corners of my mouth and there’s a flutter of excitement in my stomach. Was it mistral madness? Whatever it was, this is a new day, a fresh new day, and there are far worse places I could be.