My Grape Escape (12 page)

“
Merde
,” he said, rolling his “r” as only a true Burgundian can do.

“What are we going to do?”

Franck glanced at the tiny alarm clock we’d set up beside our bed. “There’s nothing we can do now. I’ll call Le Maître in the morning.” He studied the documents again and sighed deeply.

“This is crazy,” I said. “This can’t be happening.”

Franck sighed deeply. “You’re wrong there. It can be happening. Crazy things happen in France all the time.”

I woke up feeling more exhausted than when I had gone to bed. The tightness of Franck’s features told me that his dreams hadn’t exactly been peaceful either. Before he even kissed me “
bonjour
” he warned me, “Don’t try to talk to the neighbour. Let me take care of it. It has to be man to man.”

Monsieur De Luca was the neighbour in question and, according to the land registry of the Côte D’Or, also owner of two thirds of our house. He wasn’t from either Magny-les-Villers or Villers-la-Faye which, as far as everyone from the villages was concerned, meant he was an outsider. For reasons that remained murky to us, Monsieur De Luca had managed to mortally offend all three of the
grand-mères
who shared our common courtyard. We had heard vague mutterings that he was “land-crazy” and hell bent on buying up every last piece of pea gravel in our cluster of homes. The father and his son, who also lived with him, were from burly Mediterranean stock and were rumored to enjoy frequent brawls, often with each other.

All of those cases that I had poured over in the law library during my two years at Oxford sprung to life. They had taught me that when it came right down to it most people were cynical and greedy. I was certain that Monsieur De Luca would not be willing to give us back our rooms for free.

“I don’t like the idea of you going to talk to him alone,” I said to Franck as we folded away our bed.

“That’s the way it has to be,” Franck said, grim. “Maybe I won’t have to though. I’ll call Le Maître first and the land registry if need be. I may be able to fix things that way.”

There was nothing for me to do except have my shower. I shivered in the unheated bathroom. Of all the problems I had imagined when we bought this house I never could have come up with this, not in my wildest imaginings. My teeth clacked together as I stripped off my many layers of jogging pants and sweatshirts and I climbed into our turquoise iron tub. I quickly discovered that our hot water tank held just about enough hot water for a minute and a half of showering before it turned ice cold. I hated this bath. I hated the teeny water tank. Even more I hated the fact that it was our neighbor who owned them both.

An uncomfortable suspicion began to creep up my spine – maybe my “
non
” to Mr. Partridge had been, like he believed, a momentary lapse of sanity due to the stress of Finals. What if this whole French house project was a huge mistake?

By the time I stalked back into the living room my shock had morphed into anger. Judging from the sound of Franck’s voice as he talked on the phone in those strident tones that one Frenchman uses to talk over what another Frenchman is saying, I wasn’t the only one.

“But there’s been a terrible error!” he kept repeating, until his sheer pugnacity seemed to get through to the person on the other end of the line. He nodded his head, said “
d’accord
” a few times and then scrawled something down on a piece of paper he balanced on his knee. He hung up.

“I suppose there’s no hot water left.”

I decided to take that as a hypothetical question. “Who was that?”

“
Le Cadastre.”

“Who’s
Le Cadastre?”

He held up the house plan. “The land registrar. He is the only guy who can correct this mess.”

Hope rose in my chest.

“Don’t be too overjoyed. He can’t come until next week. The whole office is closing up shop for Christmas.”

The hope plummeted.

“What about
Le Maître
? Did you call him?” I demanded.

“Yes, while you were using up all the hot water ” We were both angry and unfortunately the only people available to yell at were each other.

“And?”

“He told me to call the
cadastre.
”

“Did he even apologize, or offer to have us go in and look over the documents with him, or anything
?
”

Franck rolled his eyes. “Of course not.”

“Son-of-a-”

“A French notary cannot admit he has made a mistake, just like a French doctor. He blamed the
cadastre
and I knew it wasn’t worth wasting my time arguing the point. I suspected the
cadastre
would be the one who could sort this out anyway.”

I let out a howl of frustration. We had to wait a whole week with this hanging over our heads?

“Just think…” Franck got off the couch and patted me on the shoulder. “If you had chosen law you would be dealing with this type of thing every day.”

I snorted. Of course, the actual work – dealing with conflicts day in and day out – would have been a nightmare. Still, the security of actually
having
a respectable job sounded very seductive right about now.

I wrenched open the window and threw open the disintegrating white shutters. The stumps of the
tilleuls
in front of the church across the street were white with frost. Black spots danced in front of my eyes. I couldn’t seem to get enough of the icy morning air in my lungs no matter how deeply I breathed. The world felt unbalanced and full of hidden dangers.

I blinked and caught sight of Madame Parigot, the mother of Franck’s winemaker friend Amélie whose family
domaine
was just up the road, as she trundled down the road towards the church. I watched her, hoping a distraction would ward off the tsunami of panic that was bearing down on me. She took a hefty key from her pocket and unlocked the door to the church. She happened to look up in my direction and waved at me, a sturdy presence with her steel gray bun and sensible winter coat. I waved back, trying to appear sane. With a smile, she disappeared inside.

Franck had told me before that Madame Parigot was the caretaker of the village church: changing faded flowers for fresh ones, sweeping the floor, and making sure none of the village children messed with the wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. She was known throughout the village as an extremely religious woman. I could picture her inside the church, moving respectfully in the stained glass silence. How I wanted some of that peace.

Maybe I just hadn’t persisted long enough with law. Had I given up just short of the golden ring? Worse still, had I dragged Franck into this mistake with me? I hadn’t quite finished whipping myself with this thought when Franck came back in the room, dressed and drying off his spiky black hair with a towel.

“Now that
mes testicules
are frozen off,” he said, an accusing look in his dark eye, “I’m going to go over and try to talk to the neighbor.”

“I’ll come.” Anything would be better than standing here waiting to hear that the neighbour wanted us to pay an extortionate amount for something we had already bought.

“
Non
.” Franck was firm. “You have to trust me on this.”

“What am I supposed to do then?” I demanded, terrified at the idea of being left alone with my own thoughts.

Franck crooked a finger and I followed him into the kitchen where we had stockpiled a bunch of old tools his dad had lent us. He passed me a rusted scraper and a desiccated sponge.

“You can start scraping off the wallpaper.  ”

I started in the far bedroom. At least that room was undisputedly ours. Damned if I was going to get on my knees and strip somebody else’s wallpaper.

Here the brown and orange flowers that spangled the walls of the living room had given way to a flurry of blues and greens. I filled a chipped ceramic bowl full of freezing water from the kitchen sink, squirted in some rosemary-mint dish soap, dipped the sponge in and started soaking a patch of wallpaper. I hadn’t even lifted the scraper before a wet patch of wallpaper peeled back and slithered down to the floor beside me. Underneath it there was another layer of wallpaper – this a far older looking pattern of periwinkle blue stripes and orange roses. I soaked it but it wasn’t nearly as obliging. I scraped away on the same little five inch by five inch patch, searching for the bare wall like a miner searching for diamonds. I hadn’t thought I would enjoy this at all but it was strangely preoccupying, not to mention the fact that it distracted me from listening too hard for the sounds of a brawl from next door.

The older paper with the stripes and roses must have been stuck on with some sort of super glue made from horse hooves or pig ears way back when. I began to sweat despite the fact that the bedroom had no radiator and the temperature was probably hovering near zero. Millimeter by millimeter, I scraped. Finally I began to make out something behind it that didn’t look like wallpaper. I picked up the pace, my scraper rasping back and forth over the uneven surface. Maybe there would be a fresco under here depicting the seasons of the vineyards! That wasn’t unheard of in old houses. A band of deep blue revealed itself. And then lower down another band of bottle green. Not a fresco then. I sat back on my heels to look at it from a bit further away. It looked instead as though the wall had been painted to
look
like wallpaper. I attacked the mystery again with even more vigour until a particularly energetic scrape dislodged a chunk of plaster from the wall.
Merde.

There was no way I could hide it. When Franck came back it would be the first thing he would see.

I cocked an ear, but there was only silence. That could either be a very good or a very bad sign. I started to wonder if maybe Monsieur de Luca had killed Franck and was busy hiding his body in the old well in their courtyard, then I forced myself to look back at the hole in the wall. At least it was a manageable problem.

I stuck my finger in it and my fingertips met cold rock. I must have dug down to the original stone structure of the walls. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. Someone had piled these rocks around at the same time as
the
beheading of
Marie Antoinette in Paris. I knelt down to collect the bits of plaster and debris that had fallen on the floor. They scratched my hand and I looked at them more closely. The mortar contained little pieces of crushed glass and stone as well as bits of horsehair.
Revolutionary
horsehair! Incredible, yet somehow I didn’t think Franck would be transported as I was by the historical significance of the hole.

Another few chunks of plaster tumbled down like a mini-avalanche while I was still inspecting my treasures. Just then I heard Franck’s footsteps on the veranda.