My Grape Escape (17 page)

The week after our restful Crazy Horse New Year’s celebration, Franck called Olivier several times to ask if he’d heard from Gégé. We idly wondered if he’d been kidnapped by aliens or merely forgotten all about his promise to visit us.

“Should I call him?” Franck mused when we bumped into Olivier a week later at the
boulangerie
across from Franck’s house.

“I wouldn’t,” Olivier said. “Be patient.”

Patience. That was something we did not have. The only thing we felt equipped to do was scrape off old wallpaper, and we were getting close to the end of that with only the kitchen and the living room left to go. We only had three months and three weeks left before our first guests arrived. Olivier was asking the impossible.

Five long and impatient days later, I heard an unfamiliar scratching sound while I was scraping in the living room. I whipped around just in time to see a waft of smoke curl around the front door which I had left open a crack in an attempt to chase away the rubber smell. I lunged across the entrance tiles and flung the door open.

Gégé stood there, eyebrow cocked. “Waiting for someone?”

I was far past playing it cool. “
Oui
! You!” I grabbed the sleeve of his green utility jacket and dragged him inside, then shut the door firmly behind him.

I gave him a hearty
bises
on each cheek. “
Un café
?” He nodded, slightly stunned and let me push him into the kitchen.

The phone rang and I heard Franck pick it up in the bedroom. “Franck!” I hollered, not wanting to leave Gégé’s side in case he tried to sneak away. “Gégé’s here! We’ll be in the kitchen having a
café.
”

One of my very best Christmas gifts that year was a cornflower blue coffee maker given to me by Stéphanie. Coloured household appliances were one of the things I loved about France. Who, after all, declared that coffee makers and toasters and kettles should only be white, black or beige?

By the time Franck joined us the coffee was made and Gégé and I were enjoying a second cup each. Gégé didn’t say much but I talked enough for both of us, rattling on just to keep him nailed to his chair by the centrifugal force of my verbal diarrhoea.

The two of them shook hands and Franck leaned over and gave me a kiss that I knew was thanks for being wily enough to trap our potential saviour in the kitchen.

“Bonjour Gégé. I see Laura’s been looking after you.”

Gégé blushed right up to the bald spot on the crown of his head. Franck served himself a coffee while Gégé recovered his nonchalance. His attention became riveted by the underside of the staircase leading up to the attic.

“I’ve never seen such a crooked staircase,” he said finally. “The stonemason who built it must have been completely sloshed.”

“Maybe we could knock it out and put - ” Franck began.

“
Non!
” I said. “I like that it’s crooked.” Franck and Gégé both looked at me. “It gives the house character,” I explained.

“We could have a much bigger kitchen,” Franck reminded me.

I shrugged. “I don’t care.”

Gégé raised one thin brow. “Franck told me Canadians were strange about old things. To think I didn’t believe him.”

“You see?” Franck raked back the black hair out of his eyes.

“Anyway,” Gégé concluded, “I’m not sure you could take down the staircase without the house falling around your ears. That’s the way these old stone houses were built.” He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “Want to show me the rest of this castle of yours?”

We started the grand tour in the bedroom that overlooked the church.

“
Bon Dieu
.” Gégé placed a hand on the slanting wall. “These walls must have been laid by the same stonemason.” He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and twisted it around his nose – the French symbol for drunk. He meandered over to the window which boasted beautiful, albeit rusty, metal fixtures with an ornate handle.

“Single pane,” he sighed. “No wonder it’s freezing in here. Not to mention
that
.” He pointed up to the large patch of plaster on the ceiling above the window that was falling down in flaking yellow chunks. “And
that
!” He waved at the hole I had made in the wall. “
L’humidité
.” Humidity. He imbued this word with the same death-knoll tone as Franck.

“So…you’ll need new windows…” Gégé began. Franck extracted the notebook he carried in the worn back pocket of his jeans and started scribbling. “I can do electricity and plumbing but not plaster, tiling, or windows,” Gégé informed us. “For those things, we’ll need to find somebody else.”

Franck frowned, and scribbled something else down. I inwardly rejoiced at Gégé’s use of “we” as though it went without saying that he was already part of our team. I tried not to smile though. I sensed that if anything could scare Gégé away from our disaster it would be boisterous enthusiasm.

“Nice floors.” Gégé turned his attention to the oak parquet underneath our feet. He kneeled down and laid his hand on them. “These rooms are over the passageway,
hein
? Feel this floor. It’s freezing.” Franck gave an apologetic shrug in the affirmative.

Gégé beckoned us down to his level, and we both placed reluctant hands on the beautifully worn and old floorboards. The glacial air coming up from between the strips of oak took my breath away.

“There’s probably no insulation between the floorboards and the plaster on the top of the passageway. It’s a wind tunnel down there.” More problems and we hadn’t even made it to the second bedroom. Suddenly the renovation budget that we had planned of 50,000 francs seemed like a pittance. A knot formed under my sternum.

The visit continued in much the same vein as we revisited the kitchen (bad plumbing and no space for a dishwasher, not to mention the parlous state of the single paned window), the living room (the tile floor near the fireplace was irretrievably stained, and the fireplace could probably never be used again), and the WC (linked up to a septic tank, meaning no end to the problems that entailed), until we reached the end of the line, the bathroom with its turquoise fittings and meager hot water.

Gégé climbed up onto the rim of the bathtub to inspect a patch of the wall where there was a big dark splotch on the wallpaper.

“Do you have a hammer?” he asked Franck.

By the time Franck brought it to him Gégé had peeled off the wallpaper that was barely clinging to the wall, revealing a sprawling orange stain underneath. He began to hit the wall with the hammer as Franck and I watched. Franck reached for my hand, his eyes filled with foreboding. A shower of plaster rained down with each hit. The hole got deeper and deeper. Would he end up in the neighbour’s living room? Oh well, I reasoned, seeing as we hadn’t been graced with a visit from the
cadastre
yet the neighbor still owned our bathroom anyway. Still, maybe this wasn’t the best time for us to burst through his wall.

The chunks of plaster that fell from the hole got bigger and bigger, but instead of looking grimmer Gégé’s shy smile grew. At last the hammer clunked on something more solid sounding than the muffled ‘shlunk’ of wet plaster.

“
Le voilà
!” He beckoned us over with a crooked finger.

The hole in our wall was about half a foot deep. Franck and I peered inside, neither of us particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of what we were going to see.

“
La pierre
!” Gégé crowed as I took in the sight of Burgundy’s famous pink and ochre stone covered by a fine layer of white dust.

I didn’t know what to think. I’d always wanted exposed stone walls, or
pierres apparentes
as the French called them, but I’d also heard that they took an epic amount of work – not to mention a stonemason - to uncover and restore properly.

“Is that good or bad?” Franck asked, cautious.

“It’s certainly not good!” Gégé exclaimed with joy.

“I’ve always wanted a wall in
pierres apparentes
,” I said. “Does this mean…”

Gégé snorted with laughter and jumped down to the irretrievably-stained tile floor. “
Impossible.
There’s plumbing and wiring running through the plaster.”

“So what can we do then?” Franck asked.

Gégé took a last appreciative glance into the hole. “Dig out these rotten spots, refill, and re-plaster.” He lit a cigarette with a langor that I normally associated with post-coitus. “Are you religious?”

Franck glanced at me. Not
this
conversation again. I shrugged. “Sort of. Sometimes. Depends.”

“In that case” - Gégé let out a short, staccato of a laugh - “I would recommend a lot of prayer.”

Thirty minutes later Gégé was back at the kitchen table, cheerfully outlining his plan for digging out the humid sections of the walls and re-plastering them. The only problem was, he seemed delighted to remind us, that plastering, like the making of a truly good baguette, required un
sacré coup de main
, or skill,
which he simply did not possess.

“I can learn,” Franck said. “But I need somebody to teach me.”

Gégé played with his cigarette for a very long time. “I may have an idea,” he said, just when I began to worry that he had gone mute. “Paulo.”

“
’
Paulo?” I echoed. Was this a place or a thing or a person?

“A friend of mine from work. He talks non-stop, but if you can put up with that there’s no better plasterer.”

“What’s his number?” Franck asked.

“He’s Portuguese,” Gégé added, a stickler for full disclosure.

“So?” I asked.

“Hot-blooded. Good guy, but never disagree with him or interrupt him when he’s telling a story. I’m warning you, he tells a
lot
of stories.”

“Can he talk and plaster at the same time?” Franck said.

Gégé considered this and then blew a puff of air between his lips. “
Pourquoi pas
?”

Franck nodded. “Let’s call him.”

Chapter 19

From that day on, Gégé arrived in the morning with a hearty appetite for disaster and a bag of hot croissants and
pains
au chocolat
from his favourite baker in Nuits-Saint-Georges. By the end of the first day I knew he took his coffee piping hot and with three sugars. Gégé had a call in to his friend Paulo, the Portuguese plasterer, but the word was he had gone to Portugal and no one seemed entirely sure when he’d be back. Franck, Gégé, and I surmised that maybe he was having a stolen vacation with the
cadastre
, or surveyor, who had cancelled two visits to our house and now managed to be “out of the office” every time we called.

“At least we still have the furniture,” Franck said. “I’m starting to hope that the owners’ children have forgotten all about it.”

I knocked on the wooden table top for luck. They had said they would call us after Christmas to set up a time to pick up
everything
,
but it was now mid-January and we hadn’t heard a peep out of them. I wasn’t sure what we would do if they did in fact remember. If we did only what Gégé insisted was the bare minimum needed for our reno, we would have absolutely no money left over to buy ourselves so much as a solitary chair.

A few days after Gégé became part of our team the three of us finally scraped off the last bit of wallpaper. Franck frowned at the yellowish stained plaster underneath.

“What can we do next without Paulo? We can’t afford to waste any time.”

“I can help you dig out the wet plaster,” Gégé offered. “We should do that first before we re-plumb the bathroom and the kitchen.”

They started in the living room and made huge cavernous holes in the plaster. I grew used to the ‘thunk’ of pick axes and the ‘shlunk’ of wet plaster falling to the ground. I poured over paint chips and plotted out the paint colors we would use once the now hideous walls were made pristine.

I was contemplating a marvellous shade of poppy when the phone rang. I heard Franck pick it up and from his hesitation and then formal use of “
vous
”, I knew it wasn’t any of his family or friends. I hurried into the living room and tried not to notice the swiftly multiplying craters in the walls.

“Is it
le cadastre
?” I mouthed to Franck, bouncing on my toes.

Franck’s lips pressed into a thin line and he shook his head. “Tonight?” he said in the speaker. “Yes, that would be just fine. How about seven?” He nodded and then hung up the phone.

“
Alors?
Who was it?”

“It was for the furniture.” Franck tossed his pick-axe down with a clatter. “The seller’s children didn’t forget. They’ve just been busy. They’ll be coming by tonight to arrange the move.”

I slumped down on a chair. “
Zut
.”

Gégé had come back up from the cellar where he had dumped off another load of wet plaster. His brown eyes shifted from Franck to me and back again.

“Does this mean you already know about the snakes?” he demanded.

Snakes?” Franck and I both echoed.

“In the cellar.” Gégé gingerly lifted up Franck’s pick-axe from the table and transferred it to the chimney ledge on the far side of the room. “A nest of them.”

“What kind of snakes?” Franck asked, quietly and almost menacingly. I knew how he felt. Gégé was only the messenger, but I simply felt like I couldn’t take one more shred of bad news.

“
Les couleuvres
,” Gégé said. “At least they’re not poisonous like vipers. But if you didn’t know about them, why do you both look like you’ve just smelled an
Époisses
cheese?”

That got a smile out of me. Even Franck’s lips twitched. “That was one of the children of the previous owner on the phone. They’re coming tonight to arrange picking up all our furniture.”

“Their furniture,” Gégé noted.

Franck and I glowered at him. He laughed. “That is a problem, but not one you can do much about. You should have negotiated to buy all the furniture when you bought the house.”

Gégé had a gift for giving sterling advice when it was far too late to act upon it.

“Well, we didn’t,” Franck said. “Where exactly are the snakes anyway?”

“I didn’t get close enough to count and just for the record I won’t be going down to the cellar unless you do something about them. I am terrified of snakes.” Rather than being embarrassed about what many people would consider a weakness, Gégé straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin in pride at this fact.

“I’ll go down to the cellar.” Franck’s eyes were dancing now. “I imagine I can get rid of the nest too, although I’ve never actually done that before.”

“Olivier got rid of one last year,” Gégé said. “We should go to him for advice.”

I checked the time. It was five o’clock. “OK, but we have to be back here by seven.”

“Perfect.” Gégé shrugged on his camouflage jacket. “We’ll just be in time for
l’apéritif
.”

Olivier welcomed us warmly. Within five minutes of being ushered through his doorway I was happily ensconced in front of the fire sipping a
kir
, almost grateful to the snakes. I needed a bit of a respite before our furniture was whisked away from underneath us. I listened with only half an ear to the conversation between the three men.

“They looked big,” Gégé was insisting with regard to the new denizens of our cellar.

Olivier guffawed. “I’m sure they were only the babies. The parents like to hide their nests in the pipes.”

Gégé blanched.

“I’ll get them out for you if you find any when you’re doing the plumbing.”

“Your hands are too big. Laura will have to do it.”

I snapped to attention. “Excuse me?”

Olivier looked shocked, as though he had forgotten I was there, and leapt up to freshen my drink which to my surprise I had almost finished already. “Chances are you won’t find any in the pipes
,
Laura. Gégé surely scared them away with his little girl screams.”

Gégé brushed a cobweb off his work jumper. “They took me by surprise.”

I smiled. “Don’t forget to tell us when it’s six thirty,” I reminded Olivier, and took a few more sips of my
kir
. Fat flakes of snow had begun to drift past Olivier’s window. I shut my eyes for just a moment.

I was woken by Franck shaking me.

“We’re late!” he grasped me under the armpits and pulled me up. “Why weren’t you watching the time? You
always
watch the time.”

“I asked Olivier…” I began, but then caught sight of several empty bottles on the table and the well-used tarot cards hastily laid down. Franck was swaying; he held me as though we were waltzing. Olivier blinked mistily at me.

“You’re all drunk!”

Gégé attempted to stand up, then collapsed on his chair again. “That may be why my legs won’t work.”

“What time is it anyway?”

Gégé peered down at his watch. “Twenty to eight.”

Franck swore explosively and dragged me out of the house.

I shivered in the cold. The snow was still coming down in fat clumps and it was impossible to make out where the road had been.

“Our car can’t drive in this,” Franck stated the obvious.

“As if you should be driving anyway!” I said. Just then Dominique’s car crept along the snow towards us and the window opened.

Franck waved at her. “How are the roads?” he asked.

“What roads?” she said. “You can’t see them anymore.”

“Can we get a drive to Magny?” Franck asked. “We’re really late and - ”

“Get in!” She waved towards the back seat. “It’s getting worse by the second.”

“Maybe they’re late too,” I surmised, looking out at the white drifts outside the car window.

“Come to think of it
,
I’m sure they didn’t even set out at all,” Franck hiccupped. “I mean, look at it out there!” He began to nuzzle my neck in the back seat while I prayed – to the Virgin Mary, Jesus, God, Franck’s guardian angels or anyone else who would listen - that the seller’s children had decided not to come.

Dominique dropped us off in front of the church and I half dragged, half pushed my very merry husband under the stone archway of our house. A car with fogged up windows and several people inside was parked at the bottom of our steps. Judging from the thick layer of snow on the car roof they had been waiting for us for quite some time already. This time anyway, my prayers hadn’t been answered.

Our arriving over an hour late was not a propitious start to the negotiations. I had been hoping to sweet talk them into selling us the pieces of furniture I loved - like the kitchen buffet, the pine table, the rosewood bedside table with the marble top - for a cheap price.

“They’re going to be furious.” I peered through the driving snow as we trudged towards their car.

“I forgot to tell you,” Franck said, his voice pregnant with humor. “We will probably need their attestation when we are finally able to meet with the surveyor.”

“Attesting to what?”

“That our neighbour doesn’t own half of our house.” I could make out some pinched faces inside the steamed-up car now.

“I can’t believe you drank so much,” I began. “I can’t believe you didn’t - ”

“Let’s divide and conquer.” Franck shut me up with a kiss, dropped the clutch of keys in my hand and pushed me towards the stairs. “Remember what Réné said about not confusing what is urgent with what is truly important. Go and open the door and turn on the lights.”

I took the snowy stairs two at a time, unlocked the doors in record time and turned on every light switch within reach. Before I knew it, Franck had ushered our visitors, three men and a tall, angular woman, out of their car and was jollying them up the stairs. In the front hall he divested them of their jackets and scarves before they could so much as utter a protest. He apologized charmingly for our
retard
and explained that we had been discussing with our plumber the best way to remove snakes from pipes over a few
kir
.

The shortest man sniffed. “We were just about to leave.”