Chapter 16 - Summer

IT IS JUNE and the courtyard is in full bloom. The French have a word for this: 'épanouie'. But it doesn't just apply to flowers. It can also be used to describe the blossoming of a person. Admittedly, I have cheated as far as the courtyard is concerned, shipping in the plants from Jardiland rather than trying to grow them myself. But my jasmine and Provençal lavender plants are thriving in their terracotta pots, gently scenting the courtyard in the early evening, while the scarlet rosebushes, purple hibiscus and orange-pink geraniums are a joy to behold through the kitchen window. The taste police probably wouldn't approve of the clashing colours – I've read enough gardening magazines to know that white and green is the good-taste colour scheme du jour – but to my untrained, novice gardener eyes, the courtyard is beautiful. I eat my breakfast there in the morning to the sound of birds singing, and in the evening I sit in my secret garden with a glass of chilled rosé, inhaling the scent of jasmine, lavender and often the barbecue smoke from my neighbours' courtyard on the other side of the high stone wall.

I am never short of company. In fact, I have made more genuine friends in the short time I have lived here than I did in almost two decades of living in London. Mathilde and Sebastian, who fortunately are still speaking to me after my brusque exit from the boatyard in Marans, call by several times a week with surplus celery, tomatoes or herbs from their garden, while Lola and Dylan sometimes swing by for a glass of wine after closing the bookshop for the day. Claudette pops in all the time, often with a little gift from her allotment overlooking the chateau. 'Naturally bio [organic], eh?' she jokes, as she hands over a lettuce or a bulb of purple-hued garlic. But it is Desmond and Miranda who are my most frequent (and most entertaining) guests. They often drop in announced, usually on their way back from a shopping trip to Poitiers, full of energy and infectious good humour. The three of us will sit around the wrought-iron table and chat for hours in the warm evening sun, with an aperitif turning into a bottle of wine or two and usually a simple meal of risotto and salad. I have stopped feeling guilty about Elinor, having asked her once, very directly, if she minded Desmond spending so much time with Miranda. 'Darling, if it keeps him out my way and gives me peace and quiet for my yoga, I'm happy for him to spend as much time as he likes with her,' she replied.

Despite the fact that I am nearly forty and on my own, my life feels that it too is in a state of 'épanouie'. This is partly because I have decided to scoop up all the sad feelings I have been travelling around with for so long and pack them away, like old clothes. Rather than wait for happiness to drop down out of the sky, I have decided that I am going to find it in small ways. I find pleasure in the simple, daily rituals of French life: waking up to the peal of church bells and birds singing above the high stone walls; throwing open the shutters first thing to the sight of sunshine and geraniums; walking up to the bakery on the square to buy freshly baked croissants. And then, after a day working at my computer, the early evening ritual of watering the roses and the potted herbs – basil, sage, chives and rosemary – in the courtyard signifies that it's time to relax. My favourite ritual of all, however, is hanging out the washing. Having lived in a top-floor flat with no outside space for most of my last ten years in London, being able to peg my clothes on a washing line and watch as they sway seductively in a subtle breeze is a real luxury. There is no bottled scent as lovely as that of just-washed cotton sheets hung out to dry in the sun. Finally, I have found pleasures that do not involve a credit card.

The house, meanwhile, is nearly finished: the brown wallpaper has been obliterated, replaced with walls freshly painted in pale, chalky colours from Farrow & Ball; I have a kitchen with a fridge and an oven and a sitting room with sofas to sit on. Even the horrible bathroom has been transformed into a light-filled, pristine white space with a new super-flat shower tray surrounded by watery-green mosaic tiles. And through the recently installed skylight I now see an intense summer blue sky as I take a shower in the morning. Life is definitely looking up. Maison Coquelicot, filled with colour and prints, is unrecognisable from the sad, unloved shell that I bought. The work is not finished yet. In fact, the two items left on the 'to do' list – the installation of a wood-burning stove in the fireplace and the renovation of the exterior – seem like the most significant. But still, I wonder what Madame Mauboussin would make of it now? Despite enquiring of my neighbours, I have managed to find out very little about my spinster predecessor. 'She kept to herself,' is all that Claudette will say when pressed on the matter.

And then, one day in early July, I make a surprising discovery. One of the artisans, Monsieur Fillon, who comes around to give me a devis, or quote, for the renovation of the exterior, seems to be eyeing my house with more than a professional interest. I invite him into the kitchen to discuss the work and notice that he seems fascinated by the changes that I have made – to the extent that I offer to show him around upstairs too. As I open the door to the rear bedroom (once covered in pink psychedelic wallpaper) he looks very nostalgic.

Monsieur Fillon, given his connection to the house, is clearly the man for the job, and so, after receiving his meticulously detailed devis, I accept immediately and he returns towards the end of August to carry out the work. The transformation is amazing. In less than a week, the stonework has been spruced up and restored and the ugly grey pebbledash facade replaced with smooth lime plaster. Monsieur Fillon and his team also paint the dull brown shutters a pretty blue-grey and, with red geraniums in full flower on the windowsill, Maison Coquelicot is once again in full bloom, or épanouie. It's as if the grande dame has had her old, flaky, over-made-up layers exfoliated and is ready to present her best face to the world again.

With the house almost finished – but for the installation of the wood-burner – I throw myself into French country pursuits: the cooking, the gardening and the cycling. I learn how to cook paella, grow tomatoes and take a cutting from a plant. I promise myself that when I lead a more organised existence, I will get a dog. And life starts to develop a slow, easy rhythm: on Wednesday I go to the Entente Cordiale conversation group in the Liberty Bookshop to improve my French; early evenings I go for long bike rides with Lola; on Saturday mornings, I drive into Poitiers, where I stock up on organic vegetables at Le Pois Tout Vert before stopping off at Jardiland to buy a new plant for the courtyard. Sometimes I drive into the centre of Poitiers and look around the market that takes place in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral every Saturday morning, and afterwards I will arrange to meet Sebastian and Mathilde for a café crème in the Café des Beaux Arts. And it is there, one Saturday morning in July, that I receive another big surprise, which turns my perceptions on their head. I am sitting in the sunshine outside, flicking through the latest miracle creams in Madame Figaro magazine while waiting for Sebastian and Mathilde, when suddenly I spot the bespectacled lawyer from the Île de Ré – the one with the beautiful wife and children and seemingly perfect life – walking across the square. He did say that they lived in Poitiers, but this is the first time that I have spotted him and his wife. Except that… the woman he is with… the woman he is holding hands with… is not his beautiful wife. Behind my sunglasses, I squint in the sunlight to make sure I am not imagining it, but it is definitely him. And now he is stopping to kiss the woman in broad daylight. He is having an affair. I avert my eyes, shocked at this realisation. To think I was jealous of their perfect life. Nothing, it occurs to me, is quite what it seems and you never know what is really going on in other people's lives.

As for me, I have reached a state of equilibrium, living in sync with the seasons and increasing my knowledge of nature. Admittedly, I've started from a low base point but I now know that (global warming aside) blue hyacinths appear in my stone flowerbed in February and bluebells appear in the surrounding countryside in May, closely followed by poppies, while my favourite flower, rose trémières or hollyhocks, are in full bloom in June.

I can now also match most vegetables to a season. In Marks and Spencer on Kensington High Street, strawberries and green string beans – indeed any fruit and vegetable you could possibly want – were available all year round, air freighted in from Kenya or Peru. At Le Pois Tout Vert, the organic shop in Poitiers, I learn to live with what is available that week. The seasons are also reflected in the gifts that friends give me from their gardens. I drop by Elinor and Desmond's house to walk Royston, and leave with four perfect-looking green peppers from their garden and three carrier bags full of small, bitter black grapes – an eighteenth-century variety, which Elinor assures me makes excellent grape juice. I spend an afternoon washing and de-stalking them. The grapes are small and fiddly and roll everywhere as I try to stuff them into the juicer. Soon there is purple grape juice splashed up the Farrow & Ball Pointing white walls and squashed into the new oak floor.

'What have you been doing?' says Lola, when she calls by one evening to go for a bike ride. 'It looks like a scene from a Hitchcock movie in here.' And all for two jugs of gunky purple juice, already fermenting in the fridge. Factoring in the time spent juicing them and the incidental damage to clothing and decor, the home-produced grape juice has proved more expensive than a bottle of Chateau d'Yquem. But this is the sort of thing that you do in the summer in rural France. In late July and August many of my French friends devote entire days to making jam or turning the surplus from their garden into gratins and cassoulets to stow in the freezer for winter. Since moving here, I too seem to spend a very large proportion of my time in the kitchen. In the French countryside, a degree of self sufficiency is essential, since if the fridge is empty after 7.00 p.m., there is no corner shop to fall back upon. No more instant lasagnes or bags of pre-washed salad from M&S for me; instead, almost everything I eat is made from scratch.

As a lifelong urban dweller, it is blackberrying that provides one of the biggest thrills of my new rural life. In August I cycle into the surrounding countryside with Lola, where we discover narrow lanes brimming with blackberry bushes. We nickname a particularly abundant stretch 'Blackberry Alley'. We go back the next evening, armed with plastic tubs, to pick the shiny black fruits. I acquire bramble cuts and nettle stings and almost sustain an ankle injury jumping across a ditch. But by the end of the evening, we have buckets of a fruit that is free, naturally organic and just a ten-minute bike ride away. 'I can't believe you have never been blackberrying before,' says Lola, amazed. 'I had you down as a real country girl.' This feels like a huge compliment, if completely erroneous, as I grew up in a suburb of Liverpool.

The next day I discover how easy it is to make an apple and blackberry crumble. High on the aroma of caramelised sugar, I make three in rapid succession, making inroads into the blackberry mountain. I give one to Claudette, put one in the freezer and save one for Sunday lunch. To celebrate the first anniversary of My New Life in France, I have invited Claudette and her husband Michel, along with Mathilde and Sebastian, to experience traditional English cuisine in my little courtyard garden. Their expectations, I suspect, are low. But I am planning to do my bit to turn around my host nation's uncharitable view of British cuisine.

The secret, I have decided, is not to try and compete on the same playing field. That means nothing fancy, stuffed or traditionally French. Instead, I dig out an old copy of Delia Smith. Now Delia might have been eclipsed by trendier chefs in the UK, but her cottage pie with leek and cheese topping proves to be big hit with my French friends. Even Mathilde, who normally eats only a tablespoon of anything, asks for seconds. The blackberry and apple crumble is an even bigger hit.

Sitting in the warm, shaded courtyard with my friends, as lunch morphs into early evening, I feel a deep sense of belonging. Later, as Claudette stands up to leave, I wonder how I didn't notice her shoes – a pair of eye-catching silver Roger Viviers, which she must have bought from the local dépôt-vente where I offloaded my surplus designer clothes. Designed for evening, they look charmingly eccentric worn with Claudette's grandmotherly floral dress.

And so in small pleasures, the company of my new friends and the beauty of the French countryside, I achieve a state of equilibrium. The summer months pass all too quickly but, during the long hot days and drawn-out evenings, my love affair with the French countryside – and my happiness – grows. But then, just when I am least expecting it, the past jumps out and ambushes me again. One Monday morning in late August, I log onto Eric's old email account in order to make some changes to the credit card used for billing – for he is still the master name on the account and for some reason the service provider cannot change that – and discover an email entitled 'holiday pictures' from one Rob Bolton. I know I shouldn't probe any further and I know it's wrong to read other people's emails but I do – shamefully, without even a moment's thought. Clicking open the email, I find the following:

I know I shouldn't but I download the pictures. The first shows a woman in her fifties, sitting on a seawall, with a red and white lighthouse visible behind her. The second features a man standing outside a restaurant wearing a long white apron. His hair looks short but it's hard to tell – it could just be tied back – and he looks like he has gained a little weight, but it is unmistakably Eric. The expression on his face is a mixture of reluctance and bemusement. Obviously, he has deliberately given his over-enthusiastic customer his old email address.

The last discovery is painful but the pain, like having your legs waxed, is sharp and swift rather than lingering. I always knew that I would have to face this moment. But now that it has finally arrived, it feels like resolution of sorts. I study the photograph for an age and then, I can't stop myself: I run up to the spare room and dig out a box of photos of us together, including my favourite picture of the two of us holding hands on the steps of Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, Paris – me in a long Marni rosebud print skirt with sunglasses on my head; him in a white shirt and jeans.