L'amour Actually

L'AMOUR ACTUALLY

Copyright © Melanie Jones 2013

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'Ladies and gentlemen, as the captain has now illuminated the "Fasten Seatbelts" sign, would you please return to your seats...'

  The gentle Irish lilt of the stewardess roused me from my daydreams and as the plane started its descent into South West France, I took a deep breath. I knew that the slightly sick feeling in the pit of my stomach had more to do with the reality of starting a new life in another country than the change in altitude. What on earth had I been thinking? Was it really only three months since that awful day at work when I had decided to leave everything I knew and loved in London, and move to deepest rural France? It had seemed such a good plan at the time. Well, at least to me. Now, as the reality began to sink in, I had to admit that the whole thing seemed like a rubbish idea.

  I had secretly hoped my boyfriend of the past year would want to share my dream of living the good life, but Alex had just laughed and told me to let him know when I came to my senses. He had said it in that particularly patronising way of his that made me want to squeeze his neck. Tight. Although he wasn't Mr Right – more Mr Right Now – a friendly face beside me and a bit of moral support would have made all the difference.

  'Ahhhh, I always breathe a sigh of relief when I get home,' commented the woman in the next seat, leaning across me and absorbing the view from the tiny window as if she was a Russian dissident being allowed back to her homeland for the first time in decades.

  And I'll breathe a blooming sigh of relief when you get home too, I thought. She was one of those irritating expat types and clearly felt she owed it to the world to impart every ounce of her superior knowledge about life in France.

  'You speak the language of course, don't you?' had been her first question when I told her I was moving to France. We had barely taken off when the interrogation started.

  'Well, not exactly. I did French GCSE but, it wasn't exactly my greatest moment.'

  'But you did do a refresher course before you left, at least?'

  'Er, not exactly.' Leafing through the pages of French
Vogue
at work probably didn't count. 'Oh!' she exclaimed. 'How on earth will you manage?'

  'I'll be fine. I have a French dictionary, a phrase book and some language tapes, and I'm sure I can find some lessons when I get there. I mean, how difficult can it be?'

  'Ah,' said the woman, wagging her finger in my face, 'many a person has said just that until they got to the subjunctive.' She was, as it turned out, a retired French teacher.

  'Oh well,' she continued, 'I suppose you'll manage the same way as all the others who couldn't be bothered to learn the language. You'll just rely on those of us, like me,' she said pointedly, 'who do.'

  I smiled politely and went back to the book I was reading, determined not to spend the rest of the flight being talked at by this woman. If I avoided engaging with her, I might just stand a chance. 'And then there's integration…'

  I smiled and carried on reading. The woman was clearly on a roll and had no intention of stopping.

  'Integration is the key. You have to find yourself a few nice French friends. Get to know them and their way of life; join their clubs, not the expat ones. Learn how to play
boules
. Have people round for
apéros
or hold a few
soirées
. Watch out for the Brits, most of them are on the run from the taxman or their ex-wife.'

  Or her, I thought before saying aloud, 'Oh, I'm sure that's not true. It's France, not the Costa del Crime.'

  Damn. I'd broken the rules and engaged her in conversation. That was definitely A Bad Move.

  'They're all builders from Birmingham…'

  'What? All of them?' I was starting to get a bit irritated.

  'Well, those that haven't re-invented themselves. Everyone's apparently had some fantastic job and a marvellous life with a huge house in the country. No one ever comes from a council estate in Bradford. Which, of course, begs the question, why are they here? So what did you do?'

  'Celebrity PR, films, that sort of thing.'

  The woman looked at me disbelievingly.

  'Of course you did. Well Trevor, that's my husband...'

  Poor bugger, I thought.

  '... and I never mix with the English. What's the point of moving to a foreign country then building your own Little England?'

  I realised that if I didn't stop her right then, she'd be bending my ear all the way to France.

  'Actually,' I said, leaning in towards the woman, 'I'm planning to integrate my way into the boxers of the first good-looking Frenchman I see. Can't think of any better way to learn the language myself. You wouldn't happen to know the French for "Fancy a shag?" would you?
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi
just seems a bit 1970s these days.'

  The woman recoiled as if she'd been slapped. I winked at her and went back to my book. Shock and bore, I thought. It works every time. I shock you because you bore me.

  Still, at least the woman had given me a whole new vocabulary to look up in my ridiculously outsized English/French dictionary, a present from my former boss, office Lothario and all-round buffoon.

  As the plane touched down, I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of my newly adopted homeland. From today onwards I was no longer Miss Jones of Flat 6, Morton House, Wandsworth; I was
Mademoiselle
Jones of Les Tuileries, a little cottage that I'd found on the Internet in the hamlet of St Amans de Pierrepoint. How cool was that?

  Well, not very, according to my friends. There had been a real tumbleweed moment when I'd dropped that particular bombshell. I could still picture their looks of complete disbelief that a confirmed city girl like me would even entertain the idea of moving to the country. They really didn't get my need to change my life and slow down a bit, or understand that I felt I couldn't do this just by moving to the Home Counties, as my sister had suggested.

  'Yes, but why France?' Daisy had asked me on that fateful evening when I'd told her.

  I couldn't really explain why France. It was just something I wanted to do while I was still young enough to give it a try. Still, at least they had come round to the idea in the end.

  The plane taxied to a halt outside a small metal hut, which, I was reliably informed by Ms Know-all in the next seat, was the airport terminal building. I'd been expecting the airport to be something along the lines of Exeter, or maybe even Bristol; but frankly, I'd seen bigger village halls than this. Blimey, I thought, how on earth did O'BrianAir ever find this place, never mind decide to operate flights to it? It was little more than a runway in the middle of open fields.

  Tripping gingerly down the aircraft steps in my heels – well, a girl had to keep up appearances, even in the French countryside – I paused for a moment to breathe in the pure, clean air of rural France. The pollution of central London was a thing of the past for me now. I took a deep breath.

  'Jesus Christ!' I spluttered. 'What on earth is that awful stench?'

  A few hundred metres away I spotted a large herd of doe-eyed, cream-coloured cows all lined up along a fence like a welcoming committee. A mist of flies hovered around them. Cows mean only one thing to me. Cowpats. And these cows were filthy. Nothing like the ones in the butter adverts at home.

  Up to that point, my only real taste of country life was when a client had invited me to his country house for a weekend shooting party. It hadn't been my sort of thing in the slightest and I certainly didn't see myself as a tweed and wellies girl; but sometimes you just have to take one for the team. His 4,000-acre estate had been put to good arable use, so to me the countryside was a fragrant place, heavy with the rich smell of ripening corn. I was the first to admit that my idea of rural life came from
Country Living
magazine rather than
Farmers Weekly
, but I still hadn't expected it to be this smelly.

  At least the sun was shining. A brief twinge of pity for my friends, stuck in their dull offices in cold, rainy London, pricked my consciousness. OK, so the weather had been beautiful when I left, but it made me feel better to imagine it that way. I tottered across the tarmac towards a sign saying '
Entrée',
that hung drunkenly over a doorway leading into the terminal. Inside, I found myself sweltering in the intense heat of a single room which served as either Arrivals or Departures depending on the time of day, but had certainly never been blessed with anything as twenty-first century as air conditioning. Within seconds, little rivulets of sweat started to course down my back and the fetid smell of several hundred perspiring bodies assaulted my senses.