Читать книгу Our House is Definitely Not in Paris - Susan Cutsforth - Страница 13

Each time we return to our other life, we try to implement all that we have learnt from our previous, precious French sojourns. We adapt our daily rhythm and rénovation demands to the nuances of the ever-changing weather. No matter the outcome of the unpredictable summer forecast, each day starts in the same way, for despite the fact that it is été, summer, there is always a distinct crisp chill in the air. Sometimes, however, the temperature can almost double in the space of a mere few hours. On those days, the sun suddenly scatters the soft white particles of mist that shroud the countryside. A new world sparkles and shines, shimmering and fresh, awash with promise. The birds chirp ever more vigorously as the hours move on, as delighted as I am to welcome le soleil.

Other days are pervaded by an ongoing damp chill. The jardin and vista remain cloaked in a fine, ethereal haze. Just like the softer green of the European trees, somehow the rain is different in its gentleness, for it falls in a soft shimmering veil.

The gloominess of a Thursday morning in our first week dictates my day. All the glasses are clouded in a clinging film of calcium, and after just a few short years, we have accumulated an inordinate number of glasses from the clear-out-the attic markets. Unfortunately our glasses are not clear, for the filter on our water pump has broken. A French household means seeking out new products in the supermarché, to address the issue of calcaire, the calcium that has built up in the pipes over the past year.

Voilà, we find a product in Carrefour supermarché, Anti-Calcaire/Anti-Kalk tablets. While they are intended for use in the washing machine, for ‘protecton’, as the box emphatically states in capitals, Stuart decides that they will do the trick for our glasses. Such is the life of rénovation in a foreign land that improvisation is often the order of the day.

I spend hour after hour filling the sink with scalding water and glasses, adding a new tablet each time that fizzes and lifts the calcaire cloud. Incroyable. It works. As the sink is stone and I tend to be clumsy, I have to be exceptionally careful. No wonder at all the vide-grenier there are always sets of glasses in odd numbers; there is invariably one missing and rarely the full complement. Too many apéritifs I think, as I continue to wash our collection of mismatched glasses. What is a summer in France if it is not to enjoy the superb wine every evening? Despite it not yet being the apéritif hour, I manage to crack and break another glass against the stone. I carefully wrap the evidence. This is not a task that I would ever embark on at home, washing every single glass in the house by hand. I spend the rest of the day setting our petite maison to rights after a year of being shrouded in dust and darkness.

I whisk down a year’s worth of cobwebs lurking in the fire-darkened beams of our salon. It is through my devotion to domesticity that new words enter my vocabulary, and so I learn the word ‘to clean’ in our French home: à nettoyer. I learn this from Dominique when I tell her what my matin — morning — will hold. As in previous years, it is only through necessity or as an act occurs that my still-feeble French vocabulary expands, step by step, like a child’s. I whip off the red and white check tablecloth to replace it with a clean one that I have tucked away. Its very pattern is enough to make me smile, for it is oh-so-very French and was a gift from Françoise from her long-ago trousseau. While the patina of our farmhouse table is lovely in its old, scratched way, and dating from WWII as Jean-Claude discovered from a fragment of newspaper tucked away in one of its three drawers, nevertheless, a French table somehow looks naked without a tablecloth.

I spend the morning as a French housewife, glossing over the fact that I never, ever cook. Stuart, meanwhile, sets off to the troc for the second day in a row. He’s on a mission to buy a new bed for our spare chambre, ready for when all our visitors start to arrive for their French summer. I’m hoping that he will also buy the armoire that we both admired the previous day on our first outing to Brive-la-Gaillarde. The cupboard would fit perfectly along the wall as you enter the guest bedroom, for like many of the oddly shaped nooks and crannies in our old farmhouse, the measurements have to be quite precise. I already have the perfect quilt cover in pristine readiness, French farmhouse red and white fleurs, for when I style and decorate the room. This is the part I most love when we rénovate. I fervently hope that my pretty pink roses will still be blooming when our first visitors arrive, so I can pick them with a flourish. They will be the perfect finishing touch on our new armoire. It was one of the very first things I did on our arrival; pick the graceful buds to breathe new summer life into our home.

The beauty of the roses, as I glance at our le jardin, distracts me to some extent from the veritable invasion of les mouches. The marauding hordes of flies are something we tend to gloss over when we are far away. Each year when we return, we never cease to be amazed anew at the dreadful swarms of them. How is it possible that they are far worse than in Australia? Oh yes, we have chosen a country life far from Paris. However, it is still perplexing, for there are not any sheep in our immediate vicinity. We learnt during our first French vacances that it is disastrous to buy a house in the French countryside that is too close to otherwise picturesque-looking sheep. This is not a fact that is likely to be highlighted in any real estate guide. Non. It is all bucolic pastures and gambolling lambs. Bitter experience has taught us, though: where there are sheep, there will be les mouches in abundance.

Françoise and I have chatted about the demands of cleaning. We lament les mouches and the perpetually fly-spotted fenêtre. She gives me a cloth to borrow, claiming that you simply wet it, wipe it over the windows and voilà, they will be sparkling. I’m hopeful and sceptical in equal measures. I’ve not had much success with Dominique’s pruning advice: count five leaves then cut the rose branch. It sounds simple in theory; the undertaking is an altogether different matter. I only have a day to use the magic cloth before Françoise needs it back for her char. Every time she uses this word, I smile at the quaint idiom. I rinse the cloth and hold my breath. Voilà indeed, I exclaim aloud. It works! Just as French women seem to innately know the trick to staying slim, so too they seem to have unlocked the key to the tricky task of window cleaning. There’s a catch, though. Apparently the cloths are not readily available. She tells me she will make enquiries for me in her nettoyage network, a ‘secret’ society for women and cleaning.

For some very odd reason I have chosen to wear a black robe to clean. Possibly it was the first thing to hand in the demands of a rénovée life. It is the closest I will ever get to owning a little black dress from Paris. I bought it one day when a van pulled up and rapidly assembled a display of illegal racks on the footpath. Women swooped on the ten euro bargains and then, just as quickly, the van disappeared before the gendarme could swoop in turn.

To clean all the windows I have to clamber on the old kitchen sink to reach them. Naturally, the extremely ugly but extremely necessary flypaper is dangling in the window over the sink, to attract les mouches. Naturally, it gets caught in my hair and sticks to it. Mon Dieu! I exclaim.

Then, while on our petite porch, I scramble on a wicker stool to clean the fenêtre. As I reflect ruefully on my strange choice of cleaning attire, I feel sure that I will now definitely be on the tourist trail, for the dress also happens to be rather short and I do have to reach quite high while outside. However, in the way of the world and windows, the sound of late afternoon thunder rumbles just as I’m finishing. There is only one word for what I think — merde.

Before my decorating fantasies can come true, the petite chambre rénovation work needs to actually be fini. Putting skirting board and conduit in place are not in my repertoire of rénovation skills. However, I am always a willing apprentice and labourer. The luxury of a French summer when rénovation is our whole life rather than squeezed into our normal working days at home means that this year it is in many ways like playing in a French doll’s house. I hold onto my fairytale concept of rénovation until it is time to embark on the heavy manual labour that lies in wait.

After the all-day rain on our arrival, the petite porch is littered with sodden leaves from the sixty-year-old lyme tree planted just in front of it. I seize the fact that the leaden skies have cleared and grasp the stiff, ancient farm broom to vigorously sweep away the clinging leaves and sodden blossoms. A farmer passing on his tractor gives me a welcome-back wave, full of bonhomie. It is gestures like these that fill me with a sense of belonging, both in Cuzance and our other life. His cheerful smile conveys that he remembers us from previous summers. Some farmers simply sail past majestically on their enormous John Deere. I know that for some, we will always remain strange foreign interlopers.

There is no need for the incessant clamouring of the church bells at twelve, telling everyone that it is the déjeuner hour, to remind me to down tools. Enough is enough of nettoyage and acting like a French housewife, I tell myself, even if I am cleaning a French farmhouse. I would, in fact, rather engage in hours and hours of beaucoup travail in our sprawling jardin. To my enormous relief, thanks to Gérard and Dominique’s gardener, Nicolai, ours has never looked better. Thank goodness, I think, for it is our third attempt to find a gardener who meets our needs. The others were simply très cher. It is all part and parcel of starting a life in a foreign land. It is hard enough at home to source reliable tradesmen, let alone in a country where the language barrier is as high at times as the Eiffel Tower.

The pretty-as-a-picture doves flutter in the prunier tree. Later, as the sun sinks slowly, a pale pink orb at the end of another contented Cuzance day, the glow bathes le jardin in exquisite beauty. As I go into our chambre to get ready for bed our neighbour, Monsieur Chanteur, sits on his wooden bench outside the stone doorway of his maison, poignantly alone. The sadness etched in his face at the loss of Madame Chanteur, just months before, washes in waves across his jardin. His solitude fills my heart with sadness.