A solitary tractor was sitting forlornly in the corner of a field, under a looming sky. It was the first vehicle we had seen in ten miles.
‘Look, Alice,’ I said, dully. ‘Tractor.’
Matt looked across at me as he changed gear, and smiled bravely. ‘Not quite the way we imagined it,’ he said. His laugh was short and forced. I sensed him watching me, anxious about my state of mind. He looked at the road, in the mirror, then quickly back to me. He wanted me to pull myself together and to tell him that this was a temporary blip, that everything would be fine.
I could not smile back. For once, I didn’t even pretend to be happy.
‘No,’ I told him. ‘It’s not.’
We were nearly at our house. Alice was demanding to see the tractor, but it was already far behind us. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and it was almost dark. The clouds had been building during our mammoth drive. Now they were black. The headlights were on. The storm was going to break at any moment.
We were driving past field after field. There didn’t seem to be anything growing in any of them, and the marooned tractor was the only sign of farming life. The clouds were descending. The landscape looked forlorn, barren, dead. There were no other cars on the roads. There were no leaves on the trees. Matt had promised me spring in the south of France. He had mentioned cherry blossom and sunshine and rosé on the terrace. The terrace did not exist, yet. Neither did the blossom. I would have preferred a cup of tea to a bottle of rosé, though I had little appetite for anything.
This was the road that led to our house. Our nearest town, St Paul, was behind us now. We were heading into deepest countryside, towards the tiny hamlet that was, somehow, our home.
‘Mummeeeeeee!’ called Alice from the back. ‘MummEEEEE! Where’s the tractor?’
I turned round and looked at my little girl. She was frowning, bored and cross. Her brown hair was matted with the chocolate we had been giving her for the past two hours to keep her quiet. She was sitting next to boxes and bags filled with everything that was going to keep us going until the lorry arrived, sometime within the next week. Her books and toys were strewn on top of the bags. Alice fixed me with an intense stare, and restated her demands. ‘I want to see the tractor,’ she said forcefully. ‘Let’s go back to the boat. I want milk.’ She thought for a moment. ‘More chocolate,’ she added, for good measure.
Her hair had been cut before we left, so she had a perfectly straight bob with a blunt fringe. I had dressed her for the journey in my favourite of her outfits: a blue corduroy pinafore over a red top, with red tights and blue shoes. I had wanted her to look like an immaculate French child, but she was smeared with chocolate and covered in biscuit crumbs. I was going to have to wrap her in sweaters and a blanket to carry her into the house. I had bought into the idea of spring so completely that I hadn’t even brought her winter coat with us. It would arrive later, in the removal lorry.
‘Let’s look out for another tractor,’ I suggested. ‘Anyway, we’re nearly there.’ I tried to sound as if this were a good thing. ‘Nearly at our new house. When we get there we can explore.’
‘I want milk.’
‘Daddy will go to the shop and get some milk.’
‘Want milk now.’
Matt half turned. I could see from his face that he was feeling the strain of being the person solely responsible for this move. Although he had contributed nothing financially to the whole adventure, beyond paying for the removal, he still managed to be the Head of the Family, and he was very much in charge.
‘You can’t have milk now because you’ve drunk it all already,’ he said slowly and clearly. ‘Look, this is our road. First person to see our house gets a chocolate button.’
We turned a corner. Suddenly, it was before us: a stone house set apart from the rest of the hamlet. It was huge and closed, uninhabited for years. It loomed above us. In the steely half-light, it was forbidding and unwelcoming. The façade was peeling. The shutters were closed. The creeper was dead.
Matt looked at me. I said nothing. He turned to Alice.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Can you see our house?’
She shook her head, confidently. ‘No.’
He stopped the car, turned the engine off, and pointed.
‘This one here. This is our house,’ he announced. Then he took a new packet of chocolate buttons from the ashtray, ripped it open, and poured its contents into his mouth. Brown saliva dribbled down his chin. As he chewed, he held his head in his hands.
I was steeling myself to leave the car, to take the first footsteps over the threshold of our new life, when the clouds burst. One moment the car, the house, the road were dry. Then, instantly, they were soaked. Matt opened his door, closed it again and looked at me, grinning nervously with his mouth but not his eyes. He knew I would smile back, because that was what I always did. I always put a brave face on things and made sure everyone else was all right.
I fell into line, and forced out a laugh.
‘OK,’ I said, affixing a smile. ‘It’s raining. Rain happens. It doesn’t matter.’
‘I want to get out of mine car seat!’ called Alice imperiously. I reached back and unclipped her straps, and she clambered across the handbrake onto Matt’s lap. Alice was unambiguously a daddy’s girl. It pained me, sometimes. They would go off into their own little world, share their own jokes, stroke each other’s faces. Matt spent so much time working, so many nights away from us, that his presence was the cause of endless excitement. I did everything for Alice every day, and so I was as dull as wallpaper. I knew that it was my very constancy that made me less exciting. That was what I wanted, really. I wanted to be the kind of mother who could be taken for granted, who could instil a sense of security that would only be appreciated in retrospect. I would have been quite pleased, however, if I had been able, even occasionally, to provoke a fraction of the excitement and affection that Matt did.
Alice took the steering wheel and pretended to drive. Matt and I watched rain coursing down the windscreen. Everything outside was distorted. The water was coming down so heavily that the short run up the garden path was going to leave all three of us soaked. This didn’t matter. It was a detail. What mattered was that we would soon be in our new home, that we would make it warm and cosy, despite the lack of furniture, and that we would all get a hot bath. What mattered was that nobody was allowed to acknowledge that, so far, it was shaping up to be a disaster.
I took charge.
‘Right,’ I said, dredging up some brightness. ‘Right’ was a word I often used. It signalled no-nonsense, optimistic enthusiasm. A fresh start. I saw Matt’s features relaxing slightly. Emma was making everything all right, as usual.
The rain on the windscreen turned to hail. It bounced onto the glass and up again. The stones were large. This was not polite British hail. It was its more dramatic continental cousin.
‘Right,’ I said again. ‘We’re going to run for it. I’ll go first and unlock the door. You bring Alice. I’ll take a couple of bags. We can sort the rest out later.’
Matt looked at me. He was sheepish. He was, I knew, hoping that I wasn’t going to mention his fulsome promises of sunshine. No one is in a position to make promises about the weather, particularly not in February. I had allowed myself to believe that the sunshine was guaranteed because I had wanted to believe it.
‘It may be hailing,’ I told Matt and Alice stoically, ‘but it’s still the south of France. We’re still going to have more sunshine than England. Later in the year.’
‘I suppose this is Europe,’ Matt agreed glumly. ‘It’s not the Caribbean.’
‘And thank goodness it’s not,’ I told him. I hated sounding like a Girl Guide. It was, however, my default position. ‘All that sand getting everywhere. Having to watch Alice with the sea all day long. It would be terrible.’
We both looked out at the road and our overgrown front garden, both of which were covered with stones of ice.
‘Awful,’ Matt agreed. We looked at each other and laughed. ‘Come on then,’ he said, opening his door a crack. ‘Race you.’
We rushed to the front door. Hailstones pricked my cheeks and stung my eyes. I saw Alice burying her face in Matt’s shoulder. His arms enveloped her. She burrowed into him. As we ran into the wind, I felt a rush of love for them both. I shifted from one foot to the other while I struggled with the door. There were three huge wrought-iron keys on the ring, as well as seven smaller ones. The first big key I tried didn’t fit. The second fitted into the lock, but didn’t turn. As I fumbled with the third, a gust of wind almost lifted me off my feet. It blew a faceful of hail directly at me. Alice began to wail.
‘I don’t like it!’ she said. ‘I don’t like it I don’t like it I don’t like it. I WANT TO GO HOME.’
The key turned in the lock. I gave the door a hard shove with my shoulder, and Matt and I stepped inside. Matt pulled the door shut behind him.
It was colder indoors than out. It smelt musty, and the whole house was pitch black. I fumbled for a light switch. Nothing happened when I pressed it. The wind blew the front door wide open, and a pile of hailstones hit the cold tiled floor.
‘Um, this
is
home, darling,’ said Matt, stroking Alice’s hair.
In the gloomy half-light, our eyes met over her head. I looked away.
There was no electricity and the heating wasn’t working. The interior of the house was icy and it was impossible to stand still. We had corresponded with Electricité de France, and we had been told, by Marie, that there was plenty of fuel left in the heating tank. We opened a few sets of shutters, and rushed in and out of the house, unloading the car, while Alice stood in the hallway looking stunned. She was red-eyed and puffy-faced, and she was sobbing with intermittent, shocked gasps. The hail turned back into rain, but it showed no sign of abating.
We had brought with us everything we had imagined that we might be going to need before the lorry arrived. Thus we had a big blow-up mattress for the three of us, sleeping bags for us all, and a blanket. We had tea bags, and a few utensils. I checked that the gas rings were working – they were, by some oversight – and boiled water to make black tea. We had a torch, but no candles, so I tried to do everything that needed to be done while there was still a small amount of what passed for daylight. Matt left Alice and me huddled together on the lilo, and set off for supplies. I made a nervous call to Electricité de France and hoped that I had succeeded in getting our power restored at some point in the future.
‘Come on,’ I said to a very confused Alice, forcing myself to keep up the jollity. The last thing I wanted was to face reality at that particular moment. ‘This is exciting, isn’t it? We’re camping inside a house.’
She frowned at me, cross and suspicious. ‘Why camping inside a house?’
‘Because we haven’t got our furniture yet, but it will come.’
‘Why haven’t got our furniture yet?’
‘Because it’s coming on the lorry. It should be here next week.’
‘Why should be here next week?’
‘Because that’s when the lorry will get here.’
‘Why that’s when the lorry will get here?’
‘It just is.’ All my conversations with Alice seemed to end with a firm ‘It just is’ on my part. Unfortunately, Alice did not always recognise it as final.
‘Why it just is?’ she continued.
‘Because. It. Just. Is. Now, shall we . . .’ I cast around quickly for an activity. ‘Shall we explore the house? This is our new house.’
She shook her head. ‘I want to go home to our real house. I want mine nursery rhyme CD.’
‘We haven’t got our CD player yet,’ I reminded her. ‘It’s coming on the lorry.’
‘Why it’s coming on the lorry?’
‘Come on, let’s have a look around.’
Alice and I held hands, and walked round our new home, opening it up. I opened so many shutters that my hair was soon drenched again. It hadn’t dried from the last time. I felt myself freezing to the bones.
We had first seen this house in October. It had been an Indian summer, and even to me, reluctant as I was to find a new home, it had been seductive. It was a big old farmhouse, and it had stayed wonderfully cool in the hot autumn. The floors were covered with old tiles. The plaster was crumbling from the walls. The house had belonged to an old woman who had died ten years before. Her children had finally agreed that they would sell it, and they had been delighted to find foreign buyers who were going to renovate it.
Matt had been in heaven from the moment we drove around that corner and laid eyes on the white house, with its terracotta tiled roof and the fig tree in the front garden. We had pulled up outside, with Ella, the estate agent. The fig tree was laden with fruit. Every window was open. The small front garden had been carefully tended, and the bushes, flowers and trees were tidy and pruned, with the odd late bloom. The air had smelt of pollen and warmth. The house was still partly furnished and, crucially, it had not looked as if it was going to need very much attention.
‘This is it,’ Ella had said, smiling at Matt’s rapt reaction. She was a sensible Swiss woman who knew exactly what Matt was looking for, and had led us directly to it. This was only the second house we had seen.
We stepped into the hall, which smelt old and atmospheric, as old houses do, particularly in France. Alice looked to the end of the corridor, where the French windows had been open onto the back garden. She ran straight out to play on the grass before we had even said hello to Marie, the old lady’s daughter-in-law. Marie followed her out, and told us firmly that she was going to take care of Alice while we looked around.
‘
Vous êtes chez vous
,’ she called back to us, cheerfully.
‘We are, you know,’ Matt said softly. ‘We really could be.’
It had been lovely when the outside temperature was thirty-five degrees. Both of us had pictured Alice and future children running in and out of the house in bare feet and cotton dresses, brown legs exposed. I had seen myself tending the fruit trees, making jam, perhaps painting the odd watercolour while my brood were at school. I had imagined Matt sauntering in from the airport, changing directly into shorts and a T-shirt, and the two of us sharing some cold wine on the terrace we would lay outside, while Alice and her younger brothers and sisters climbed trees and played happily together, calling to each other in a mixture of French and English. I had, in October, compared that vision with our terraced house and handkerchief of garden in Brighton, and I had realised that I was not able to say no.