Tout Sweet Read online

  I sit down next to the phone and spot the number for the gendarmes, or police: 17, which I gratefully dial. A gruff male voice answers: ‘Oui?’

  ‘I am in a hotel in Caen, La Baleine, and I am scared because there is a strange man outside my room.’

  ‘Outside your room?’

  ‘Yes, he is walking up and down in the corridor.’

  ‘Is your room locked?’

  ‘Yes. But he could break in.’

  ‘Has he tried to break in?’

  ‘No. But he is walking up and down all the time. It is very strange.’

  ‘Madame, if your room is locked, there is no problem.’

  ‘But please could you come to the hotel and find out what this man is doing here?’

  The voice of emergency services wishes me a good evening and hangs up – just as I hear a sudden bang outside in the corridor. Someone is knocking loudly on a door – not my door, but nonetheless it is terrifying. Then I hear the footsteps heading towards my room once more, and then away again. What is this man doing? He is clearly psychologically unbalanced. I phone 17 again. ‘It’s me again. At La Baleine hotel. I already phoned.’

  ‘Yes, Madame,’ says a weary voice.

  ‘The man is now standing outside my room and he is making a strange noise in the corridor.’

  The voice on the other end of the phone asks again if my door is locked and when I reply in the affirmative, repeats that there is no problem. He remains unmoved by my pleas to dispatch a gendarme to investigate. Instead, he wishes me goodnight and hangs up. Outside in the corridor, Staircase Man continues, terrifyingly, to pace up and down outside my room.

  I phone the gendarmes four more times over the next couple of hours but fail to convince them that I am in mortal danger. And still, the pacing in the corridor continues. At one point I can even hear him talking to himself – in a low, gruff voice. I sit bolt upright in my bed, terrified. The first night of My New Life in France is turning into a scene from a Hitchcock movie. Not since the night I spent on a fashion shoot in a Kenyan safari park with food poisoning and a large, heavy-footed beast snorting and pacing around outside my tent have I been so desperate for morning to come. This wasn’t what I had in mind for my first night in France. I was planning to expand my horizons, seek happiness and harmony in nature, and find a new sense of ‘belongingness’. (In London, the place where I had come to feel I most belonged was the shoe department of Selfridges.) And, if all that failed, I told myself, I could always seek happiness in an excellent supply of red wine.

  To be honest, my life in London had started to seem very empty. I had wardrobes crammed with ‘It’ bags and ‘must-have’ shoes, most of them gifts from designers to thank me for articles I’d written, and I had cupboards full of free beauty products. I had spent most of my life so far focused on work and chasing material possessions. Now I had them in abundance and yet, at thirty-five, I was unhappy. There had to be more to life, I decided, than a stockpile of sought-after accessories.

  And if I am being truthful, there was another reason for moving to France. Finding myself unexpectedly single again at thirty-five, I could not cope with the competition. In the four years I had been living in blissful complacency with my French boyfriend, Eric, the competition had been in training. They had put in the hours at the gym and with the Botox specialist, the hair colourist and the cosmetic dentist. They had also developed some very aggressive tactics. Wherever I went out in London – whether to a friend’s dinner party or the local wine bar – I noticed with alarm a new breed of very predatory female, taking an alarmingly proactive approach to the hunt for a man. In her twenties or early thirties, she had permanently radiant skin (despite a copious intake of alcohol) and a very flat abdomen. All the designer shoes in the world, I realised, could not compete against a determined twenty-something with a low BMI, Agent Provocateur underwear and an ability to down ten units of Sauvignon Blanc without blinking. Better to make a graceful exit, I told myself, to slink off to rural France where, as a single Englishwoman, I would at least have novelty value.

  But France, it seemed, was not exactly waiting with welcoming arms. I have always had an ambivalent attitude to the land of the long lunch and epic dinner. My first visit was a school trip and, unimpressed by the bread and cheese we were given for breakfast and the pigeon that targeted my eleven-year-old head from high above Galeries Lafayette, I couldn’t wait to get back on the ferry home. Nor, I imagine, could Mr Pugh, our beleaguered French teacher. As he marshalled us around the sights of Paris, we were invariably followed by a pack of hormonal French teenagers, mesmerised by one of the sixth-formers among us who had long blonde hair. In Notre Dame, I recall, certain members of our group (from a strict Catholic school in the north of England) stuffed their pockets with rosary beads and mini prayer books lifted from the gift shop. The only bright spot in that school trip was the Palace of Versailles, where, intoxicated by all the gilt, I felt that France was offering me something mesmerising and beautiful.

  Later, as a student, I went back and endured several penurious and far-from-perfect weekends in Paris. Even as a fledgling fashion writer for a trade fashion magazine, things did not improve. Dispatched by my boss to a dismal two-star hotel on Rue Bonaparte to cover the ready-to-wear shows, I was assured that the tickets from various designers would be waiting at reception. But – quelle surprise – there wasn’t a single ticket when I arrived. I spent a stressful twenty-four hours phoning and eventually doorstepping snooty French PRs, who remained impervious to my smattering of A-level French and desperate pleas. As yet another well-dressed piece of asparagus delivered a disdainful and very final ‘non, ce n’est pas possible’, I hated Paris and its inhabitants almost as much as I hate taupe trousers.

  Later, when I was the fashion editor of a very successful British newspaper, tickets were not a problem. They were waiting in my hotel room, alongside a swag pile of gifts, tasteful arrangements of white flowers and ‘Bienvenue à Paris’ notes from well-known designers. But my biannual secondment to the City of Light was never going to show the city off to its best advantage. Each day was comprised of a 9.00 a.m. until midnight obstacle course, trying to get to the various shows on time fuelled only by black coffee and (if really lucky) a croque-monsieur. It was hard to love Paris when locked in total darkness in a dilapidated church with a scrum of well-dressed people and no fire exits, waiting for a fashion show to start, or shivering in a disused Métro station as a hot young ‘deconstructionist’ designer unveiled his latest shredded offerings. The glossy magazine editors had chauffeur-driven cars at their disposal; newspaper journalists were forced to endure endless slow shuffles to the front of a taxi queue. Invariably, there would be a (very welcome) champagne interlude at some point in the evening, but then it was back to your hotel room to write copy until 2.00 a.m. The strange diet, punctuated by frequent coups de champagne and combined with a lack of sleep, does strange things to your blood sugar levels and mood. No wonder fashion people are so unlovable.

  The turning point came when I met Eric, my French boyfriend. Only then did I really learn to love France. With him, I saw Paris through different eyes. I have a particular soft spot for the Hôtel Costes, where, dressed in shabby jeans and summer flip-flops but always given a warm welcome by the staff, we would go for early evening drinks. Usually, I would be there for work (the magazine that I worked for at the time insisted on sending me to Paris to do cover shoots) and Eric would meet me there, before the two of us travelled on to his father’s place on the Île de Ré. Engulfed in the Costes’ moody, sexy, rose-scented atmosphere, we would drink aperitifs and then head to a dimly lit dinner in the Marais. I almost feel more affection for the Hôtel Costes than I do for the city itself. My future, as I had often smugly reflected, seemed assured: a sexy French husband, a second home in France and bilingual enfants dressed in Bonpoint clothing.

  I consider the day spent crab fishing with Eric on the Île
de Ré to be possibly the happiest of my life. The summer evenings spent cycling through the island’s narrow village streets lined with hollyhocks or fields of sunflowers on our way to the little port of St Martin had a bitter-sweet resonance now. But with Eric in my life, France opened up from a tight flower bud into a big, voluptuous bloom.

  He had asked me many times to marry him, from the earliest days of the relationship, but then, just as I was ready to sign up to the deal and had started to plan a glamorous wedding on the Île de Ré, he returned from a trip to France, where he had been escorting rich American tourists around ‘Van Gogh’s Provence’, and told me that he was leaving. I still don’t know where he went – it could have been round the corner for all I knew – but such was his haste that he left behind his wine rack, coffee machine and the skyscraper-sized speakers of his sound system. I gave the speakers to my friend Brigid and left the other stuff on the street, so that all that remained of him was a twisted metal hanger in an empty cupboard and some very painful memories.

  Now here I am, holed up in a cold hotel with a scary stranger prowling around outside my door. For a moment I dabble with the idea of booking myself a passage right back to Portsmouth on the 8.00 a.m. ferry tomorrow, but there’s just the small question of where I am going to live if I do that. At least in France there is a decaying old house waiting for me. Miraculously, at some point before dawn, I fall asleep. When I wake up it is 10.00 a.m. and the door is still intact. No one has broken in and it feels like I have survived the first major test of My New Life in France. And with a huge surge of relief, I am grateful for the simple fact that it is morning and I am still alive.

  There is no sign of Staircase Man as I leave and I am beginning to think I might have imagined him. Downstairs, I ask the receptionist if it is possible to get a coffee and a croissant.

  ‘No,’ is the reply. ‘You are too late. Breakfast finished at ten o’clock.’

  ‘But I got up late because I did not sleep very well.’

  ‘Ah, no? How do you wish to pay?’

  ‘It was very cold in the room.’

  ‘Ah, no, it wasn’t cold,’ she says.

  ‘Yes it was. The radiators weren’t working.’

  ‘Yes, they were working.’

  ‘No, they were not.’

  ‘Yes, but of course, they are,’ she grimaces at me as if she has just bitten into a sour citron.

  ‘And there was no hot water.’

  ‘No hot water? But of course there was hot water,’ she insists and in my fatigued state, I want to slap her or at least drag her back upstairs to prove the point.

  ‘And more, there was a strange man asleep on the stairs,’ I say. She arches an overly plucked eyebrow as if I’d just told her that the sun is croissant-shaped.

  ‘A man asleep on the stairs? No, it’s not possible,’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I am telling you. There was, for sure, a strange man asleep on the stairs.’

  ‘What was he wearing, this strange man?’ she asks, looking sceptical.

  I tell her.

  ‘Aah,’ she says. ‘That was not a strange man. That was a gendarme.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He wasn’t wearing the clothes of a gendarme.’

  ‘Yes, he was a gendarme,’ she says, pointing behind me, ‘but he was in normal clothes. Look! There are some more gendarmes – his colleagues.’

  I turn around, just in time to see five uniformed policemen climbing out of a dark van and coming our way. It starts to feel like the denouement of George Orwell’s 1984, where the Thought Police come storming in through a window. Finally, I think, the gendarmes are reacting to the emergency calls that I made last night. But now that Staircase Man has gone, they are probably going to arrest me instead for wasting their time.

  But the gendarmes head straight up the narrow staircase without stopping.

  ‘Who are they looking for?’ I ask, feeling nervous.

  ‘A clandestin,’ she replies.

  ‘A clandestin? That means what?’

  She explains that it is someone who is in the country illegally.

  ‘So the man on the staircase was a clandestin?’

  ‘No, Madame,’ she says, losing patience. ‘He was guarding the clandestin. Those are the other gendarmes who have come to make sure that the clandestin leaves. He is going to your country, I think, as he has family there.’

  ‘But if he was a gendarme, why wasn’t he wearing a uniform?’

  ‘Because he was performing exceptional duties and staying in a hotel; we did not want to frighten the other guests.’ Suddenly, in my fatigued state, I understand what she is telling me and my cheeks turn pink with embarrassment.

  Feeling like the village idiot, I pay the bill and get out of that hotel as quickly as possible, skulking shamefacedly past the three gendarmes who are guarding the van outside. The exquisite irony of it all is not lost on me: I spent the entire night worrying that I was about to be murdered and desperately looking for a policeman and there was one outside my door the whole time. There is a lesson in there somewhere. Safely inside my car, I see the funny side – well, almost. And then I head off, uncaffeinated – and with a stack of shoeboxes obscuring my rear window – to negotiate the terrifying, multiple merging lanes of the Caen périphérique.

  Chapter 2

  The House That Found Me

  It is late afternoon when I finally arrive in the square at Villiers. The little cluster of French flags fluttering outside the mairie always causes my heart to flip, as does the sight of the boulangerie and the Café du Commerce, with its tables and chairs arranged outside in the late August sunshine. I turn into the narrow cobbled street that leads to Maison Coquelicot. As usual, with its charmless grey pebble-dash exterior and its shutters closed, it looks daunting – and this time, without the benefit of a return ticket in my bag, doubly so. I think back to the Saturday morning and the strange quirk of fate that led me to the house just over a year ago.

  After I split up with Eric, I lost two stone in weight. Unfortunately, I also lost my mind – or almost. Gratifying though it was to catch sight of my jeans sliding down my skinny hips thanks to a diet of coffee and dark chocolate, it was a poor substitute for the emotional devastation of finding myself alone at thirty-five, just as my few remaining single friends were suddenly announcing that they had met ‘someone’. It was several months before I could stop spontaneously bursting into tears in public. Night after night I woke up at almost exactly 3.20 a.m. wondering what to do with the rest of my life and the endless, lonely weekends ahead of me. At no point, in those bleak days, did the answer ‘move to France and renovate a house’ pop into my mind.

  But at some point I stopped crying long enough to take my future into my own hands. I enrolled on a creative writing course in Yorkshire (courses being my antidote to misery back then) and on the first night I made friends with an advertising director called Dave. He was unpacking his car and I was reversing mine into a stone wall. It broke the ice as well as my rear light. Later, over the introductory drinks on the terrace, we got talking further. Dave worked for a well-known advertising agency in London, acting as the link between clients and ‘creatives’. He didn’t like the job very much. I could tell this because he referred to the creative directors at his agency as ‘pretentious prats’ and the clients as ‘a pain in the arse’. He was looking for an exit strategy before his new boss pushed him out, and was hoping to write an exposé of the advertising industry, loosely disguised as fiction, which is why he had enrolled on the course. Then he told me about the house in France that he and his wife had just bought, and his plans to convert his barn into a writing retreat. I was a captive audience. ‘Come and stay,’ he offered before the evening was out. ‘That’s if you don’t mind roughing it with a few pilots.’

  ‘Pilots?’

  ‘Yes, one of my mates owns an airfield nearby, where he teaches people
to fly microlights. The pilots rent rooms from me – it’s a bit like a B&B, only more relaxed.’

  I didn’t even know what a microlight was, but the invitation sounded appealing. I imagined myself sitting at a wooden trestle table, sharing a bottle of wine with a posse of flirtatious men in flying jackets. Dave was a very affable character who spent most of his time socialising and taking advantage of the retreat’s generous wine supplies and ‘honesty box’ system. One evening, word had it that he had forsaken the communal meal to drive over forty miles for a curry. As for me, I spent most of my time holed up in my monastic white room grimly determined to complete the writing exercises we had been set.

  A few months later, I was surprised to receive an email from Dave:

  Hi Karen, how’s it all going? It was great meeting you in Yorkshire. I’m going down to the house in France next week and was hoping to do some writing there. I was wondering if you would like to come? We could do some writing and give each other a bit of moral support. Interested?

  Let me know,

  All best, Dave. :)

  By coincidence, I was going be in Paris that week for a perfume launch. And I did really want to see Dave’s house which had sounded idyllic (and possibly full of pilots). So I typed back:

  I’m in Paris for work anyway that week. Could take the TGV down on Friday afternoon. Would love to see your house. Best, Karen.

  The reply came back immediately:

  Great. Let me know what time your TGV gets in (Poitiers is the nearest station) and I’ll pick you up. Best, Dave.

  PS: Does this mean you are now flying short haul?

  I was thrown by his cryptic sign-off. Flying short haul? It sounded like secret code for something naughty. And then, slowly, the embarrassing truth dawned. I typed back:

  Dear Dave,

  I am not flying short haul – or long haul. Sadly, I am stationary in London, writing about the comeback of the bob. I think you might be mixing me up with another Karen, the blonde BA stewardess!