L'amour Actually (26 page)

  'But I thought it was CeeCee. I was convinced it was her.'

  'Nah, it was him all along. You have no idea what a lot of messed-up people work in the music business. Sometimes I think I'm better off out of it. So anyway...'

  A ringing in her bag had Tracey diving for her phone. She looked at the number on the screen. 'Effing hell! I've got to take this. See you later.'

  She jumped up from the sun lounger and headed back to her house, talking into her phone in a hushed voice.

  I lay back for a few more minutes, listening to the birdsong and the far-off puttering of a tractor. A slow smile crept across my face.

'Oh my goodness, I had no idea this place was here. I mean, I've seen the signs on the road but I didn't realise it would be like this.'

  I stopped to admire the huge lake surrounded on all sides by a wide sandy beach.

  'It's not at all what I was expecting.'

  The lake nestled in a valley in the middle of a pine forest. Log cabins were scattered around the shore interspersed with colourful tents, dotted like confetti. Children were paddling in the shallows while the more adventurous older ones were diving off a pontoon moored in the deeper part.

  'Let's go and get a drink shall we?' He placed a hand gently on my back and led me up some steps to a terraced area with tables and chairs beneath huge blue and white parasols.

  Choosing a table overlooking the lake, we sat down to order a bottle of
rosé
. With the sun starting to set on the horizon, casting a vivid orange stain across the water, I could almost believe I was down on the Mediterranean.

  'This is really lovely,' I said raising my glass to him. '
Santé
. Thanks for bringing me.'

  We sat quietly watching the last few children playing in the water. A lifeguard was tying up a flotilla of bright yellow canoes that visitors could hire for a few hours, and the water on the big waterslide was gradually reducing to a trickle.

  Julien reached across the table and took my hand. I smiled, marvelling again at my luck to have found him. He gently stroked the back of my hand before lifting it to his lips.

  '
Chérie
, you look beautiful tonight.'

  I blushed slightly. 'Thank you, you don't look so bad yourself.'

  'You English girls,' he smiled, 'you can never take a compliment.'

  I smiled back. 'You French boys, always so smooth.'

  He poured me some more wine. 'Trying to get me drunk now, are you?' I leaned across the table and kissed him. 'So where is the concert then?'

  'At the cultural centre on the other side of the lake.'

  'A cultural centre? That's so French! What do you have there? Poetry readings? A bit of Molière?' I teased him gently.

  'Ah, we French like a bit of culture.'

  'And add in a bit of philosophical navel-gazing and you are happy.'

  'A bit like you British are with vodka, eh?'

  'Oh Julien, you've got us so wrong,' I paused, 'it's gin!'

  'You need something to save you from the London fog,' he laughed. 'You know, when I first went to England I thought that everyone stopped working at four o'clock to have tea and cucumber sandwiches and went everywhere in red double-decker buses. That's what we were taught in English lessons at school. Prince Charles went to Rugby School and it rains all the time.'

  'Rugby? It was Gordonstoun. Well, I suppose it's no different to the British believing that the French are all rude and never speak English.'

  'And that we are all cheese-eating surrender monkeys.'

  'Well, I wasn't going to mention that.'

  'Come on, drink up. The concert starts in ten minutes.'

  I downed the last of my glass of wine and let Julien lead me down the steps and round the lake, linking my arm through his and leaning on his shoulder. The sun had gone down and a sprinkling of stars was beginning to appear in the sky. The gentle lapping of the water on the shore, mingling with the soft chatter of voices in the distance, created a sublime effect and I felt a rush of love for my adopted country, and for the man next to me. I looked up at him, feeling suddenly quite emotional. He smiled at me and bent to kiss me gently, looking perplexed at my misty eyes. 'What is it,
chérie
?' has asked anxiously.

  'Oh, nothing. Don't mind me. I just feel so ridiculously happy.'

  'I'm glad. Me too.'

  The cultural centre turned out to be a large hall with a semi-circle of plastic chairs occupied by a motley collection of local people, campers and holidaymakers with an average age of sixty. The younger ones had obviously found something better to do.

  We took two chairs in the back row and sat down. Julien recognised a few people and chatted to them while I listened, pleased that I was actually starting to understand a bit of what was said, although the local accent was proving hard to crack. Anything that ended with a short 'a' sound, like
bien
or
pain
or
vin
had an extra 'g' so it became 'bieng', 'peng' and 'veng'. It was very unlike the Parisian French I had learned at school and was now relearning from Martine. I pondered whether it was the French equivalent of a rolling West Country burr or the harsh sound of a Black Country accent. If Julien and I were to have children would they sound like French yokels? I smiled at the thought, watching him as he talked animatedly to some friends.

  A few more people started to arrive, some older, some younger, swelling the crowd to about fifty. A bunch of young French people with hair in dreadlocks and clothes that came from Army Surplus sat down behind us. The unmistakeable aroma of marijuana started to waft across the room. No one else seemed to take any notice. It wasn't the first time since I'd moved here that I had come across people smoking dope in public. They seemed to have a much more liberal attitude to it here.

  After a while, the lights went down and the band appeared: a lead singer, two guitarists and a drummer. They were clearly oblivious to the fact that they were playing the cultural centre in Bussières and were so hyped up that you would have thought they were playing a stadium.

  Julien's armed slipped around my shoulder as they launched into their opening number, a strange mix that sounded like French country and western mixed with whale song. It was a dreadful noise that actually hurt my eardrums. I noticed an elderly French lady in front of me surreptitiously turn down her hearing aid.

  If only, I thought, grimacing at the cacophony. The lead singer was like a demented Mick Jagger, gurning and curling his lips as he sang. He seemed to have an inordinately long tongue that flicked in and out like a lizard. It was faintly repellent. Polite applause greeted the end of the song, followed by a virtual stampede for the door which reduced the crowd by half. The band looked crestfallen. 'That was terrible,' Julien whispered. 'Are you sure you want to stay?'

  I looked across at the band, who were all droopy shouldered and sad looking and I didn't have it in me to join the exodus. 'It's OK. I'm sure it will get better.'

  It didn't. The next song, which went on for a full fourteen minutes, was about fishing for cockles in St Malo. My hopes that it would get better were fading fast. After that, they livened things up a bit with a rendition of Billy Ray Cyrus's country classic 'Achy Breaky Heart' or 'ecky brecky art' as it came out. The deaf lady in front seemed to have dozed off.

  Just as I thought it couldn't get any worse the door swung open and in breezed Chummy in a 10-gallon hat and cowboy boots, her vast behind squashed into a pair of very tight jeans.

  'Hello chaps,' she boomed across the room as all eyes turned to her. An assorted group of people, some of whom I recognised from the café and the village
fête
, were filing in behind her looking like they had got lost on the way to the OK Corral.

  'Hello Chummy, you look, er, great,' I called back.

  The band looked relieved that they wouldn't be playing to a half-empty room and immediately decided to capitalise on their change of fortune by playing a string of country classics that I couldn't quite name. Before you could say 'step, hitch, kick', Chummy and her friends had formed themselves into lines and were stepping, hopping and lassoing imaginary steers to their hearts' content. So line dancing really was alive and well in here. It was a sight to behold, this motley bunch of women (and the odd man) decked out in their sparkly, cowboy finery in the middle of south west France.

  'Come and join in,' shouted Chummy to me, a broad smile splitting her red, sweat-dampened face.

  'Oh, really, no thanks. Two left feet, me.'

  'Doesn't matter, I'm no Darcy Bussell myself,' Chummy replied, stating the patently obvious.

  'Go on,' whispered Julien, amused at my discomfort.

  'Shut up or I'll take you with me,' I replied under my breath.

  'Come on, don't be shy, girl,' Chummy was advancing on me waving her imaginary lasso above her head. 'No, really, I'm quite happy to watch.'

  Just as her meaty hand was about to descend on my arm the band struck up another tune that was vaguely familiar.

  'Ooh,' squealed Chummy like an excited teenager, 'The Tush Push! I just love this one.'

  She turned on her cowboy heel and rushed back to join the other dancers and what happened next would haunt me for years. The sight of Chummy pushing her extremely large and wobbly tush was like a study in Einstein's Theory of Perpetual Motion or possibly a jelly on a vibration plate. I could hardly bear to look, unlike some others in the audience who sat with their chins in their laps.

  'Never mind "
Rhinestone Cowboy"
, this is more like Twenty-Stone Cowboy.' I whispered to Julien.

  'Be nice,' he chided gently. 'she's having fun. She's not doing any harm.'

  Feeling chastened, I went back to watching the band. They were thoroughly enjoying the attentions of the line dancers who were shouting out requests and having the time of their lives. They had probably never had such an expressive audience before.

  Julien had a point. It was a dreadful concert and the band should have been arrested for crimes against music. Chummy and her friends should just have been arrested. There was something inherently embarrassing about a bunch of out-of-shape Brits in France pushing their tushes. My London friends and I would have been laughing and poking fun, but here it didn't really seem to matter as long as people were enjoying themselves. I didn't have to show off or prove anything to anyone here. I could just be myself. And maybe I was also learning to be a little bit more tolerant in the process.

'Living the bloody dream,' I muttered to myself as I scrubbed the toilet bowl. I straightened up, stretching out my aching back. This was my fourth week of helping Lucinda with her
gîte
cleaning and I had developed a new respect for the chambermaids who had cleaned my room on my last drunken holiday to Ibiza. On paper, cleaning wasn't rocket science but the reality was that holidaymakers seemed to be hard-wired to notice every missed cobweb and speck of dust. I had also discovered that even the nicest people seemed to leave their normal standards of behaviour firmly behind them at the airport.

  Last week I'd had the guests from hell, the Weevils. Well, they were called the Keevils really but I nicknamed them the Weevils because they were irritating and got everywhere. I had spent most of the previous week driving back and forth at the whim of Mrs Keevil who claimed the property was damp and dusty. She had stood at the door, for all intents and purposes as if she had a nasty case of the Black Lung, coughing like a poodle choking on a dog biscuit. I wasn't sure how somewhere could be damp in 35-degree heat but in the service industry, as Lucinda had told me, the customer is king so all their demands had to be responded to, however ridiculous. I had worked very hard to hold my tongue when Mrs Keevil had called me up to the house for a third time to complain about a dusty curtain rail. I was on the verge of telling the bloody woman to just get a duster and do it herself. Fortunately, Lucinda was familiar with guests' little games.