Tout Sweet Read online

  Tout Sweet

  Hanging up my High Heels for a New Life in France

  McArthur & Company

  Toronto

  First published in Canada in 2010 by

  McArthur & Company

  322 King Street West, Suite 402

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5V 1J2

  www.mcarthur-co.com

  This ebook edition published in 2011 by McArthur & Company

  Copyright © 2009 Karen Wheeler

  All rights reserved.

  The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the expressed written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wheeler, Karen, 1967-

  Tout sweet : hanging up my heels for a new life in France / Karen Wheeler.

  ISBN 978-1-55278-846-2

  eISBN 978-1-77087-079-6

  1. Wheeler, Karen, 1967-. 2. Life change events. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology). 4. Poitou-Charentes (France)—Social life and customs. 5. British—France—Biography. 6. Fashion editors—Great Britain—Biography. I. Title.

  TT505.W46A3 2010 - 391.0092 - C2009-907354-4

  eBook development by Wild Element www.wildelement.ca

  Contents

  Which Way to Portsmouth?

  The House That Found Me

  Miranda

  Full Moon

  Let My New Life Begin…

  Camping Out

  Moving In

  Lonely in La Rochelle

  Patisserie and Poetry

  Word Games

  Miranda’s Birthday

  Pink Cocktails in Paris

  Progress

  The Antiques Dealer of Angouleme

  The Long, Graceful Goodbye

  Summer

  Pie Night

  A Minx in Anzac

  Christmas Day

  New Year’s Eve

  Gone

  The Bridge to the Île de Ré

  Note From the Author

  There are several villages called Villiers in France, but my village in the Poitou-Charentes is not one of them. I have changed names and details throughout the book in order to protect the innocent (and the not so innocent) and have occasionally embellished facts for the same reason.

  Chapter 1

  Which Way to Portsmouth?

  Oh dear God, what have I done? Somewhere on the lumbering ferry between Portsmouth and Caen, my feet are not so much turning cold as sprouting icicles in their jade-encrusted Miu Miu flip-flops. Three hours ago I closed the door on my west London life, leaving behind a broadband connection, bathtub, a fully functioning kitchen (complete with floor) and a building full of attractive neighbours who I counted as friends.

  I am now a few hours away from ‘a new life’ in France. Earlier, sitting in the on-board cafe surrounded by so-called ‘emi-greys’, it occurred to me that I might be moving three decades too early. After all, most people go to France to retire. But my friends have been telling me for months how envious they are and how lucky I am. They seemed so genuinely thrilled when I told them I was moving abroad that I started to feel a little paranoid. ‘It’s going to be wonderful – you won’t want to come back,’ they said. So no pressure then.

  But what if it’s not wonderful? What if I hate it and want to come back immediately? A year ago, I was planning my wedding. Now I am planning to live alone in a remote village, where I will be half an hour’s drive from the nearest decent supermarket, several hours by train from the nearest Prada store and a five-hour journey (and Channel-crossing) from the nearest M&S food hall.

  My new home has no indoor loo, no bathtub, no kitchen sink and no hot water. It has flowery brown wallpaper in almost every room, damp climbing up the crumbly walls and a gaping hole looking down into a dank cellar instead of a kitchen floor. Then there’s the pile of rubbish the size of the Pyrenees in the rear courtyard. I don’t even have the clothes for this kind of life. After a decade and a half of working in fashion, most of my wardrobe is designed for going to cocktail parties – or, at the very least, breakfast at Claridges – and my shoes are so high that I need a Sherpa and an oxygen tank to wear them.

  Downstairs, on deck 3B, my ancient Golf is laden with the remnants of eighteen years in London. My furniture and twenty-four huge brown boxes of possessions were dispatched to the Poitou-Charentes in an enormous lorry earlier in the week. This morning – with the help of my neighbour Jerome – I packed up what remained after the removal lorry had gone. Unfortunately, what remained could easily have filled another van.

  Between 9.00 a.m. and noon, we stuffed my remaining clothes and possessions into bin bags and plastic carriers and ferried them down four flights of stairs. ‘Darling, this really is very last-minute,’ said Jerome, lips pursed disapprovingly. ‘Even by your standards. Most people would at least have dismantled the bookshelves and packed everything in boxes weeks ago.’

  ‘But I did,’ I protested. ‘And this is what was left over.’

  The last three hours of my London life seemed to slip by in minutes. Finally, I ran the vacuum cleaner around the bedroom, left a bottle of champagne and some chocolates in the fridge for the new occupants and locked the door for the last time. Downstairs, I surveyed the colourful pile of miscellanea on the pavement with dismay. In addition to the bin bags stuffed with clothes, there were work files, my laptop, table lamps, rugs, plants, dusters, random coat hangers, a pair of zebra-print stilettos stuffed inside a wastepaper bin and a big black hat trimmed with roses that I kept specifically for weddings. The car boot was already filled with duvets, pillows and fifteen bags of dried fruit, the rear seats with bin bags, boxes of china and my stockpile of Farrow & Ball paint, along with the handbags and shoes that I put into storage… and then rescued again. It can’t all be mud and waxed green jackets, I told myself.

  ‘You’ll have to get in the car,’ said Jerome, a window dresser by profession. ‘And I’ll somehow stuff the rest of it around you.’ When he had finished cramming in shoes, clothes and magazines at random, I couldn’t see out of the rear window and my nose was almost touching the windscreen thanks to the giant potted palm wedged behind the driver’s seat.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Jerome as I pulled away. ‘Don’t forget to email me when you arrive.’

  ‘Bon voyage!’ yelled Daisy, my neighbour. ‘Hopefully see you in France next summer.’

  As the car limped to the end of the road, its suspension several inches closer to the ground than usual, I realised I had forgotten something. Panicking, I reversed at speed, the sound of china rattling ominously as we hit the traffic bumps.

  Fortunately, Daisy and Jerome were still standing by the gate.

  ‘How do I get to Portsmouth?’ I yelled.

  ‘The A3,’ Daisy shouted back. ‘Follow the signs from Hammersmith.’

  ‘I give it a month,’ said Jerome, shaking his head, ‘before you’re back.’

  So my exit was not an orderly one. But as I drove through the familiar streets of west London – sunny but empty on an August Bank Holiday Monday – it felt liberating to leave behind the playground of over a decade, which, in truth, had started to feel like a prison over the past year. Even my flat had become a place of sad memories, filled like the streets of my neighbourhood with the ghosts of my last relationship. I couldn’t walk past certain restaurants in Notting Hill, sit in the French cafe behind Kensington High Street or stroll through Holland Park without fe
eling sad at the thought of what I had lost. But as I whipped past Olympia that August morning and flew around the Hammersmith roundabout – both normally choked with traffic – it seemed that London was releasing me without a fight.

  In addition to the flat, I also gave up a career that many would kill for, as fashion and beauty director of a glossy magazine. Although I had loved working in fashion in my twenties and early thirties, I had reached the stage where I could no longer deal with fashion designers and their ridiculous egos. It had taken me fifteen years to come to the conclusion that I couldn’t bear fashion people. I was tired of conspiring in key fashion myths: that it’s necessary to spend £600-plus on a new designer handbag every six months, or that a grown-up woman could look good in a ra-ra skirt, micro-shorts or whatever unseemly trend designers were pushing that season. I also felt guilty about persuading readers to rush out and buy ‘must-have’ items that I knew were ‘must-nots’ and that would end up on a fast track to landfill within six months.

  In truth, I had been persuaded to take the magazine job by a friend, the then features editor. After the cut and thrust of a newspaper, I figured it would be a cushy number. And it was: decisions that took me five minutes to make on a newspaper were discussed and mulled over for days by at least half a dozen people. We spent hours sitting around in the editor’s office drinking coffee and eating cake. The only problem (and it was a big one) was that I ended up having to work with an unedifying procession of photographers chosen by the bookings editor, many of whom were his personal friends or the baggage of his love life. And so I travelled to Miami with a photographer who had an ego the size of Africa, to New York with a borderline psychopath and to Australia with a photographer who had never done a professional fashion shoot before, where I stood for hours on an unsheltered beach, slowly being barbecued while he fiddled around with his exposure. I could have painted a watercolour of the scene in the time it took him to focus his lens.

  And invariably, they would do the exact opposite of the brief. Floral and pretty? The photographer would instruct the make-up artist to kohl up the eyes and do something ‘edgy’ with the hair, ‘edgy’ being the photographer’s favourite word – no matter that they had been hired to work for a magazine that was very unedgy, commercial and safe. If I had a euro for every photographer who thought he was pushing the envelope by making a model look ugly, I would be moving to a villa in St Tropez now rather than a small cottage in the Poitou-Charentes.

  The final straw, or as the French would say, ‘the drop of water that caused the vase to overflow’, however, came in the form of Larry Malibu, a fashion photographer who nearly every magazine editor in London refused to work with because of his unpredictable behaviour and inability to stick to a brief. One of my editors, however, had once enjoyed a passionate fling with him, and so it was that I found myself en route to California with him to shoot summer covers. This might sound wonderful in theory – being paid to spend a week in California – but let me tell you: it so wasn’t. On the flight over, Larry Malibu became drunk and abusive, insulted the gay hairdresser and reduced the make-up artist to tears; on the first day, he told us all to ‘fuck off’, since he needed to be left alone to ‘bond’ with the model and ‘create some chemistry’. He then disappeared into the sand dunes with her for several hours. The resultant shots – which showed a model lying supine in the sand, emerging topless from the sea, and ecstatically clutching her breasts while straddling a sand dune – were more suitable for Loaded than a fashion and beauty magazine, and totally unusable. On the second day, he refused point blank to shoot the visuals for a ‘Get That Summer Glow’ feature, saying that the shots were ‘effing boring’, and on days three and four, he refused to shoot anything at all. On day five, he threatened to kill the make-up artist, who then asked to be flown home. I didn’t bother arguing. I just came back to London and resigned.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are now approaching Caen…’

  It is time to ditch the cabin where I have been holed up with a mound of magazines for the past six hours. As I am closing the door in the narrow corridor, I overhear a couple in their mid-thirties emerging from a nearby cabin. ‘DON’T. EVEN. TALK. TO. ME,’ the guy is saying, the palm of his hand raised towards her as if to keep her out of his face – and they are not even in the car yet. It seems like a sign of encouragement. Better to travel alone, I tell myself, than with an angry companion.

  I make my way to the outside deck and, with a sea breeze whipping my hair across my face, watch Caen draw closer in the fading summer light. The lights of the port twinkle like Harry Winston diamonds in the semi-darkness, but all I can think about is the five-hour drive through the night to Poitiers that awaits me on landing. Suddenly exhausted from all the packing and dismantling of the previous two weeks, I make a snap decision: I will spend the night in one of the little hotels around the ferry port and set out early tomorrow morning. That way I can start the first day of my new life in sunshine rather than darkness. And there is a more pressing reason: while waiting to disembark, I notice the petrol tank is almost empty. And since the self-service petrol station near the port does not take credit cards – as I discovered to my detriment on a previous visit – I wouldn’t get much further than passport control this evening, even if I wanted to.

  An hour or so later I am standing in the dingy reception of La Baleine, which, like most of the bars and brasseries in the centre of the town, has a few modest hotel rooms attached. The restaurant stopped serving moules frites, the standard dish around the port, an hour ago and the bar is deserted. I seem to be the only person checking in. Most of the passengers on my ferry – if not stoically pushing down to the south during the night – will at least get as far as Caen to stay in the Novotel there.

  The receptionist is in a hurry to leave for the evening and does not ask for a credit card, passport or any of the usual checking-in details. ‘Second floor,’ she says, without looking up. She hands me a key and points to a narrow wooden staircase.

  A surprise awaits me on the second-floor landing, where a man is slumped on the steps. At first I think he must be drunk, but he looks me in the eye and nods, as if it were quite normal to be lying on a hotel staircase late in the evening. He is dressed in black jeans and a bomber jacket, and has a small rucksack. I assume that he has missed the ferry and has somehow sneaked up the stairs of the La Baleine to spend the night somewhere warm. ‘Good luck to him,’ I think, though it seems a little strange – not to mention audacious – to camp out on a hotel staircase rather than in the ferry terminal.

  I open the door to a small room with nicotine-yellow walls and an ointment-pink bathroom suite. Claridges it isn’t. There is no hot water in the bathroom and, despite the fact that it is late August, the room is very cold. After fiddling around with the radiators for a while and failing to get a reaction, I call down to reception. There is no reply. Freezing, I climb fully clothed under the blue and yellow flowery bedcover. After a few minutes of shivering under the thin cover and single sheet, I get out of bed and search the white melamine wardrobe for blankets, but there aren’t any. I think longingly of the duvet in my car, but to get to it would involve burrowing through a mountain of possessions in the dark. There must be somebody from the hotel around, I think. I creep out of the room and along the narrow landing, noticing that the man on the staircase has fallen asleep, using his rucksack as a pillow.

  Downstairs, the reception is in darkness and the doors are locked. There is no night porter and no one from the hotel is on the premises. It occurs to me that I could be alone in the building with the man in black on the stairs. I rush back up the semi-lit staircase and creep along the landing, not wanting to wake him. But he stirs as I pass him. Heart pumping faster than the engine of a TGV, I unlock the door to my room – half-expecting him to appear behind me and force his way in – spring inside and turn the key as quickly as I can. The thought of the spare keys hung up on the board behind reception flashes into
my mind just as I realise that there is no way of bolting my room from the inside. This is not an auspicious start to My New Life in France. Finding myself alone in a deserted hotel in Caen with a stranger on the other side of the door was never part of the script. I think of what I have given up: the cosy flat where I could go to bed without fear of being murdered and where I lived a life cosseted by every material comfort, from 400-thread-count cotton sheets to a limestone bathroom with a state-of-the-art power shower. I didn’t need to do this. I could have carried on living my easy life for decades.

  I sit on the bed wondering who I can call, but the answer, I realise, is no one – at least not without great loss of face. Having been waved off to France by enthusiastic friends, this would represent a huge failure, a fall at the first fence, to call in a panic from a hotel room on my first night. I can’t even phone my mother, as I haven’t told her I’m going to live abroad and she will probably say something typically Northern and unsympathetic such as ‘Serves you right. What do you want to go moving to France for anyway?’ As I look around the cold, desolate room, it seems like a metaphor for what my life has become.

  Now, stuck in this hotel room, and with a sudden sound of movement in the corridor, even a week in California with Larry Malibu seems preferable. The man on the staircase, I realise to my horror, is pacing up and down outside my door. What am I going to do? No one knows I am here. I don’t even know the French equivalent of 999. I rush to the window and can see some kind of small courtyard garden two storeys below. But the window is very high and it is locked. I can hear the stranger directly outside my door – which looks like it would cave in at the slightest shove – and I brace myself for a knock or a sudden crash as he tries to force it. In a panic, I place my bag – which is the size of a small cupboard and stuffed with magazines – directly behind the door. At least this will trip him up if he breaks in, giving me a few extra seconds to run for it. Who knew that last season’s ‘must-have’ bag could transform so neatly into a weapon of self-defence?