My Grape Escape (18 page)

Franck tutted at this and shepherded them into the living room. “That would have been a shame as I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of offering you a drink.
Kir
?” He found chairs for everyone and beckoned them to take a seat.

Franck’s Burgundian charm, even turned up to full wattage, slid off our guests like eggs on Teflon. They sat silently and surveyed the room with pained expressions. I followed their eyes. Ah yes, the holes in the wall. Preoccupied with the snakes in our cellar, I had momentarily forgotten about those.

The tallest man nodded curtly. “
Kir
would be fine but we will not be staying long.”

“The weather is dreadful,” Franck agreed, but the man stared at him as if to drive home the point that the weather was not the reason for their speedy departure.

Franck waved me to the table. “Laura, you sit down with our guests. I’ll get the glasses.”

I cursed Franck under my breath but took my seat. The silence around the table was full of reproach. I meticulously arranged my jacket across the back of my chair.

“I’m so sorry for the wait,” I said, finally. “We have at last
found someone to help us with the renovations and so we have to go where he wants us to go. There is just so much to do here.”

The shortest man
,
who also sported an impressively florid nose
,
sniffed around the room. “What needs renovating? This house is” - his lips curled back as he surveyed the pock-marked  walls - “or rather,
was
in pristine condition.”

I followed his affronted gaze around the peeling flower-explosion wallpaper and the cracked plaster of the ceiling.

“I guess
renovations
isn’t the right word.” I made an apologetic gesture with my hand. “My French, you know…”

Franck swept into the room carrying a tray laden with bottles and six glasses. I was impressed despite myself that he could do it so steadily with all that
cassis
and white wine flowing through his veins. “A bit of freshening up,
c’est tout
!” he finished for me.

The woman, a sinewy, nervous sort, began to blink furiously. Her eyes became shiny and worked their way over every inch of the room. “I so loved coming here. We’d wake up in the morning to the sound of the bells and then have our bowls of chicory in the kitchen. The house still has the same smell.”

Mothballs and burning rubber?
  I wanted to ask.

“I love the bells too,” I said, instead. “Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night or in the early morning I can tell what time it is without ever having to look at the clock. They don’t have church bells like that in Canada.”

They all turned to me, interested despite themselves. “
Vraiment
? No bells? What is on the churches then?”

“It’s true.” Franck picked up the gauntlet and in an amazing feat of multi-tasking, proceeded to pour them drinks and pass them out while regaling them with the confounding state of religion in Canada, where even “cults”
–
as the French considered Jehovah’s Witnesses and Scientologists
–
could have their church anywhere they pleased – even beside a real (meaning Catholic) church. There was much marveling over this, and several times I was called upon to confirm that Franck wasn’t merely pulling their leg.

“If you have never been to North America, especially the West Coast, I think it is difficult for you to understand how very new everything is,” I said. “That’s why I love your mother’s house so much.”

The shortest man looked like he was near tears now. “My mother lived here during the war, you know. My father was a prisoner in Germany for two years. There are probably letters from him up in the attic. A German soldier had to be billeted here with us. Of course, he took the best bedroom, the one that looks out onto the church. She put up with him though. She put up with so much, and now to think…”

Two large, round tears rolled down his cheeks. His sister reached across the table and grabbed his hand. “We didn’t have any choice,” she said in a faint voice.

“She never wanted to leave this house! She always said so!”

“She couldn’t take care of herself anymore,” the sister’s husband intervened, sounding exasperated. “It was becoming dangerous. She was going to burn the whole village down with those damn cigarillos of hers.”

“It must have been a very difficult decision for you
to make,” I said.

“It’s not like they threw her out in the street!” The husband rolled his eyes. “She’s in a lovely retirement home in the South. I can only dream that my children will pay for
m
e to go and live in Uzès! I would eat olives and drink
Pastis
all day long. Trust me – your mother is surely doing exactly the same and not weeping and wailing over her sort. She’s far from stupid, although she is gifted at riddling her children with guilt.”

The taller brother waved away the brewing argument. “We need to figure out who wants what. I want these chairs.” He pointed at the coloured cane chairs that he was perched upon and then looked around the room. “Not much else.”

“They go nicely with the buffet.” I gestured up to the object of my nightmares.

“
Oui
, I suppose they do.” My heart rose with hope. “
Maman
always loved that buffet. She would spend hours polishing it. My ceilings,
hélas
, are just too low. It is very valuable, I’m sure, but someone else will have to take it.” He rubbed his chin as his eyes travelled up the expanse of dark wood. “It goes perfectly in this room. It would be a shame to move it anywhere else.”

“I agree,” the woman said. “It would never fit in my little house. Besides, Patrice has a bad back.” Her husband made a show of reaching back and rubbing his spine with a grimace. I didn’t miss, however, the relief in his eyes.

The shortest brother stood up and ran a delicate finger down the fat barleycorn corkscrews of wood. “Do you remember mother polishing this? She always said it was the kind of furniture that was made for aristocrats. She said it made her feel like a
duchesse
.”

“You want it?” his older brother asked.

“Of course…”

“Franck could help you move it,” I jumped in, avoiding Franck’s eyes. “His back is exceptionally strong.”

“Of course I would take it if I could,” the short brother continued, “but it might frighten my cat. Robert is right. It goes so well in this room. It belongs
here.”

The four of them smiled benevolently at Franck and me. A hook of guilt caught inside my chest. I cleared my throat and tried to ignore the weight of Franck’s foot coming down on mine. What I was about to say went against all of Franck’s deeply held Burgundian precepts of gratitude and hospitality, but I had to say it nonetheless.

“I don’t like the buffet.” Four sets of eyes widened in amazement. Franck’s were telegraphing me desperately to backtrack while I still could. “I don’t think I would keep it, even if you left it here. I would probably sell it to a
brocante
.”

“
Mais…pourquoi
?” The woman demanded, getting teary again. “It is so very
élégante
.”

They waited for my answer. Franck took advantage to do the only thing that was left for him to do now that I had desecrated the
ambiance
. He poured everyone another
kir
.

I shrugged. “I suppose one can’t explain tastes.”

“
Non
,” agreed the eldest brother, eyeing me with patent dislike.

“I really think one of you should take it,” I insisted.

This was followed by a babble of protests. As much as they all professed their undying love for the buffet, none of them seemed to carry that love so far as to welcome the monstrosity into their own abode.

Franck cast me a dirty look as he finished pouring the
kir
. “I won’t lie to you,” he said
,
to them. “We do need some furniture to get started. We don’t really have anything of our own, not even a bed.”

“Not even a bed!” the woman exclaimed to Franck, ignoring me. “
Mais alors
! We cannot take your bed!”

With this the eldest brother hauled himself up to his feet. “I suppose we should look around at what’s here. Where should we start?”

Franck led all of us into the far bedroom – the one with the window that looked onto the church and the neighbors’ boisterous roosters and ever-pecking chickens – the bedroom that the German soldier had picked out for himself.

The beds in here had been removed. All that remained was the prim little wooden bedside table with a marble top. “One bedside table.” The eldest brother scribbled down on a pad of paper he had extracted from somewhere.

The inner bedroom was next, the one that led out onto the veranda. There was an old bed frame here, with a rose carved
in the wood but no mattress on the bed.

“My mother insisted on taking that mattress to Uzès with her,” the younger brother explained, apologetic. “It must have dated back to the war, perhaps even the first one. I know for a fact it was stuffed with dusty old horsehairs. She insisted she could sleep on nothing else.”

Then we continued into the kitchen, which was furnished with a rudimentary oven and fridge, as well as the battered kitchen table that I quite adored, and the charming kitchen buffet. It had been varnished with some horrendous faux-wood sticky stuff but I was sure clear pine was underneath. Contrary to the beast in the living room, I had loved the kitchen buffet from the moment I set eyes on it. I held my breath. It was a far easier piece of furniture to move than the living room buffet. Which one of them would claim it?

“We don’t have anywhere to store dishes except this buffet,’ Franck said, feigning an offhand tone. “If you want it, go ahead and take it, but if you don’t want it maybe we could buy it from you.”

The brothers, sister, and brother-in-law didn’t answer. They all appeared to be busy thinking. We quickly toured the other rooms, where Franck pointed out the few items that we were interested in buying from them, including the sofa bed. We finished back in the living room.

“I think I could use that kitchen buffet in my garage,” mused the youngest brother, taking a deep pull on his
kir
. “It would be handy for storing my tools.” I suppressed a shudder. Everyone had sat down again, everyone but Franck.

“We’re not done yet,” he announced, a gleam in his eye. “We’ve forgotten the attic.”

Four pairs of eyes widened in horror.

“Come on.” Franck waved them up. “We must discuss how you are going to go about sorting through all the treasures up there. ”

The attic was absolutely packed with towering boxes of papers and old cast iron pans and what looked like little glass jars that Franck had told me were “
les ventouses
”, which used to be steamed up then vacuum-sucked onto the back of anyone suffering from ailments ranging from impotence to lumbago. Apparently Franck’s
Pépé Georges
swore by them. It was amazing that the rotting floorboards in the attic didn’t collapse under the weight of over a century’s worth of accumulated stuff.

Franck dug out a flashlight from the drawer of the buffet.

“Laura, while we are up there can you go and fetch a fresh bottle of
crémant
from the cellar?” He winked at me as he passed by. What was he up to? In any case, the attic always gave me an asthma attack and I vastly preferred snakes to a trip to the ER.

Our guests’ shoulders slumped as they grudgingly began to make their way up the crooked stairs behind Franck. By the time I returned from the cellar the attic stairs were disgorging them one by one. They were all coughing and brushing dust off their shoulders. Franck brought up the rear with an almost undetectable upturn of his lips.

“I’m sure you cannot wait to go through all of those boxes!” I exclaimed to the younger brother. He slumped back in his chair and picked a dusty cobweb off the sleeve of his fine lamb’s wool sweater. Franck gave me an infinitesimal nod of encouragement before ducking into the kitchen.

“I don’t think there’s much of value,” the younger brother muttered.

“Maybe not monetary value,” I said. “But as for sentimental value…it will be like a treasure hunt. How exciting!”

“I’m not sorting through that
bordel,
” his sister announced to her brothers. “Don’t think you will make me do it because I’m the only female. I refuse.”