Home > Escape to the French Farmhouse

Escape to the French Farmhouse
Author: Jo Thomas

ONE

 

 

Bang! Bang! BANG!

Why today? Of all days? On moving day!

The noise goes right through me, jangling my already shredded nerves, as one of the heavy wooden doors upstairs slams, the wind whipping in and around the house, like a gaggle of overexcited spirits at Halloween, teasing and causing havoc. Except it’s not Halloween, it’s early June. And it’s not spirits causing havoc: it’s the mistral wind that blows regularly here in Provence and has chosen to create mischief today, of all days. I can hear it howling, laughing at me.

‘You really thought you could do this?’

More doors bang. Glasses I’ve yet to wrap fall over on the sideboard. I’m exhausted before the day has even begun. My arms, legs and spirits are heavy, as if I’m dragging heavy sandbags behind me, draining my already depleted energy supplies.

I walk slowly along the empty hall towards the front door. It was the wonderful terracotta floor tiles I’d noticed when we first arrived. Their red is worn to orange in places, and they seem to tell a story of their own, of the many footsteps that have crossed them over the years. We’ve made barely a dusty footprint on them, let alone been here long enough to leave an indentation.

I step outside, holding my face defiantly to the wind, which is blowing up dust and carrying it through the just-cleaned house. My eyes stream and I blink. At least we did it, I think. At least we tried. I wipe my eyes with the corner of my poncho. I’m not sure I have a coat to put on later when we arrive back in the UK.

‘Don’t worry, love,’ shouts the removal man over the wind. He’s in a dark burgundy polo shirt with ‘Broderick and Daughter Removals’ in gold on the breast. I nod and try to smile at him, but inside I know I’m out of my depth. My life is way out of my control. ‘Me and Lexie are doing moves like this all the time!’ he yells cheerily, walking back from wrestling with and eventually tying back the heavy doors of the removal truck.

It’s parked in front of the house under the plane trees, their branches waving enthusiastically, like they’ve seen a long-lost friend. They’ll need pruning next year … The thought drifts through my confused mind, like a train pulling up at a station exactly on time, despite the weather conditions. Pollarding, I think randomly, letting the word sit in my mind, relishing the calm it brings, as if the wind has dropped, just for a moment, bringing calm. And then it blows up again, with a vengeance.

Why am I thinking about the plane trees at the front of the house? I won’t be here next year. I’ll be … Where will I be? The chaos that the wind brings shreds my nerves all over again as the van doors bang and outdoor pots, gathered together, topple over and roll around.

Ralph barks excitedly and barges past me, catching me on the back of the calves and making my knees buckle. He skids over the tiles to rush out and greet the visitors. Well, at least he may have left a scratch mark or two on the floor, I think sagely.

Mr Broderick walks up the couple of steps to the front door. The shutters, firmly closed upstairs, rattle in their holdings. One breaks free from its tie and bangs against the wall. I look around for Ollie to help, but he’s nowhere to be seen. Oh, yes, he is: he’s sitting in the dust-covered car, on the phone, making calls. Making plans. I sigh. More plans.

‘Honestly, love,’ says Mr Broderick, as he kindly touches my elbow, clearly mistaking the dusty cause of my tears. ‘We do this all the time! Move people over here for a taste of the good life, then get a call to move them back six months later when they realize what a mistake they’ve made. They’re missing everything about good old Blighty and want to go home! It happens all the time! You can’t beat Blighty, that’s what I say. Isn’t that right, Lexie?’ He raises his voice to call over the wind to the woman – possibly the same age as me, late thirties – jumping down from the back of the truck and walking towards us. She’s wearing a matching Broderick’s polo shirt, smiling. She has short, spiky white-blonde hair and leopard-print jeans. She seems oblivious to the wind swirling around the driveway, the rolling terracotta pots and the clouds of dust pluming around her steel-toe-capped boots.

‘What’s that, Dad?’ she shrieks, over the wind.

‘I said,’ he shouts, over the banging shutter, ‘we do this all the time. Move people over here and move them back six months later.’

‘We do.’ She smiles widely. ‘He always says there’s nowhere like Blighty.’ She’s standing next to her dad now. ‘Nice to see you again,’ she says, and suddenly her warmth feels like a glimmer of home.

This time actual tears spring to my eyes. Home. Where exactly is home? We sold the house, paid off the debts we’d run up, when we moved out here. Now Ollie is organizing us a house to rent ‘back home’. But I have no idea where it will be, or what home looks like.

‘Six months, that’s the norm,’ says Mr Broderick. ‘Mind you,’ he chortles, ‘yours is the shortest I think we’ve ever done. Six weeks is probably a record.’ He chortles some more. ‘Now, where shall we start?’ he says, clapping his hands together and stepping into the farmhouse.

Six months is the norm, I repeat in my head. But ours is the shortest he’s ever done. Six weeks, from moving in to moving ‘home’. Six long weeks. I sigh.

Ralph runs excitedly in circles around Mr Broderick and his daughter. I make a grab for his collar but he swerves past me and thinks it’s a game. Then he lies down in the dust, tingeing his cream coat a kind of peach, barking at me. I throw up my hands, despairing at his disobedience.

‘Ollie!’ I call to him in the car. But Ollie waves a hand to indicate he’s busy. He says he gets his best phone signal sitting in the car on the drive. I think he’s spent more time on the phone in his car than in the house over these six weeks.

The mistral blows harder. It can send people mad, they say. I pull my arms around myself, holding my face to the warm wind, closing my eyes against the dust, feeling the change in the air on my skin.

‘Where shall we start?’ says smiling Lexie.

I open my eyes and turn to the packed boxes stacked on the furniture that is going back into a truck, and possibly storage, if the rental house doesn’t have room for it. ‘Anywhere you like.’ I try to smile back, feeling drained and exhausted. The boxes had barely been unpacked before I was packing them again. Some haven’t been unpacked at all and I have no idea what’s in them. Most of the photographs never made it on to shelves, but, then, that’s a blessing as I hate having photographs of myself staring at me when I walk into a room. In our last house, Ollie insisted on having framed photographs in the hall and up the stairs. Us on our wedding day. His graduation picture. A picture of the two of us at his cousin’s baby’s christening. I thought I looked dreadful in that one but he liked it, said it was lovely of the two of us. To me, it just reminded me of how I’d felt that day: happy for the new parents but hollow and empty inside. It wasn’t long after Mum died.

And I’m not sure which loss people meant when they said they were sorry for mine. I was sorry for my loss too. Both of them. Losing my mum and my final chance to be a mum myself. Just before we decided to move out here, which was soon after Ollie bought Ralph. I say we decided … It was Ollie’s dream. He’d become addicted to A New Life in the Sun and Escape to the Chateau, when he was made redundant, and thought that this farmhouse, with its peach-coloured stone walls and peeling painted shutters, was the answer to all our problems.

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