My Grape Escape (6 page)

Now I understood. It wasn’t getting my law degree that would make everything perfect, it was owning this house.

“You are going to call the sellers right away,
n’est-ce pas
?” Franck’s eyes blazed at the realtor.

“
Bien sûr, bien sûr.
I will try them tonight without fail. Are you sure you don’t want to extend the deadline by a week or so?”

“
Non
,” Franck said. “I will be expecting a call from you tonight after you speak to the owners.”

The realtor grimaced, then shook our hands with a perfunctory goodbye and drove off. I watched his shadow as it disappeared in the distance. He was holding his phone to his ear before even rounding the first corner in the village road.

Chapter 7

Franck and I spent that evening in his parents’ cellar staring at the old-style cord phone in shifts. We gave his family the abridged version of the perfidy of Maître Ange and everyone crept around us, murmuring in hushed tones like someone had died. Mémé brought us plates of her
boeuf bourguignon
to our station on the cellar floor but the succulent meat felt like rubber in my mouth.

We continued to stare at the phone until nine o’clock when Franck finally capitulated and picked up the receiver.

“I’m going to call the realtor,” he said, unnecessarily. We both waited, breathless, as he dialled. It rang three times, and then a fourth and a fifth, then clicked over to the realtor’s voice mail. Franck was left with no other choice than to leave a curt message that we were still expecting his call.

We finally dragged ourselves up to bed around eleven, and I fell into a restless sleep filled with dreams of scheming, silver-haired notaries.

We woke up early and compared headaches. Franck went over to the
boulangerie
to buy us some
croissants
while I waited by the phone. My skin prickled and my throat seemed to swell with the powerlessness of it all. Maybe I was, in fact, allergic to waiting?

We were just opening the crinkly bag from the
boulangerie
when the phone rang. Franck leapt up and spilled pastries all over the room.

“
Allo
?!” he yelled into the receiver. I was at his side in an instant. It all seemed quite cordial at first -
bonjours
and
ça va biens
and all of that. Then Franck asked, “Have they seen our offer?” and as he listened to the realtor’s answer, a storm descended over his face. It couldn’t be. This couldn’t be happening.

Franck slammed down the receiver without even saying
au revoir
or
merci
.

This was happening.

Franck swore vividly and at length. “He had other offers. Higher offers,” he spat. “One in particular from
Switzerland
.”

My hand flew up to my throat and I backed up to use the wall behind me for support. We weren’t going to get our dream house.

I stomped my foot. If only I could go back and rewind time. I would never have suggested an inspection; we would never have been duped by Maître Ange. I should have trusted our instincts that the property was an amazing deal and gone ahead and bought it right away.

Franck stalked outside and I followed him. I lowered myself down on the front step and cradled my head in my hands. I waited for an onslaught of anxiety to crush me. The dream of the house had distracted me from obsessing about my final examination marks or getting into the Master’s program next year at Oxford. My future without the fantasy of our French house seemed bleak indeed yet, bizarrely, the panic didn’t come.

The next few days were depressing ones filled with lots of melancholy drives past what I began to think of as our
Paradis Perdu
in Marey-les-Fussey.

Then came our worst drive by, and our last.

As we slowed down in front of our
maison
de rêve
(or
maisons
, more accurately, because I clearly have a masochist
ic
bent) we saw the Maître Ange’s silver Mercedes ranged alongside an equally gleaming black BMW with a Swiss license plate. We could make out some figures walking down the lawn of the house.

Fury made my heart gallop. “Can we sideswipe their cars?” I asked Franck.

Franck didn’t answer, but sped up and did a violent enough U-turn in the dusty parking lot in front of the church to wake up the dead underneath the flagstones.

“
Assez!
” he shouted to the air. “Enough. It’s done.”

I bit the inside of my cheek. I wanted more than anything to yell at Maître Ange and his fancy Swiss buyers, as well as punch them and maybe throw them down the well. My fists were balled up in my lap, but deep down I knew Franck was right.

Franck pulled the car up in front of his parents’ house. He reached over and took my hand in his.

“
Assez
?” he asked, gently.

“
Assez
,” I whispered.

Two days later we dragged ourselves to the Notary’s office - not Maître Ange’s office, but back to Franck’s family notary, Maître Lefebvre, who was too slipshod to be truly devious – to see if any new houses were for sale. Maybe the perfect house was waiting for us at Maître Lefebvre’s office. A pinprick of hope pierced the disappointment.

When we outlined what we were looking for to Maître Lefebvre’s secretary she blew out between her lips in that French sign of hopelessness and shook her head. She pointed to the corkboard beside her desk where a few dilapidated, overpriced properties were featured on yellowing bits of paper. A brief perusal drove home just how thoroughly we had been shafted by Maître Ange. The Marey property had been a complete steal; it was head and shoulders above all the other ruins and shacks for sale. He had doubtless turned a pretty bit of coin thanks to our naïveté. Without any real hope we spoke to the secretary again about what we were looking for in a property. She rolled her eyes but finally wrote a note on a scrap of paper.

The drive back to Franck’s house up into the undulating vineyards of our
Hautes Côtes
was a silent one. There was nothing else we could do except wait for me to get accepted in the Master’s program at Oxford in the fall. Our Oxford life would continue behind that shiny blue painted door of our flat on Little Clarendon Street in Jericho. I would spend most of my hours, like I had for the past two years, toiling away behind a pile of dusty casebooks in the law library. Franck and I would hardly ever see each other. Once I had done my articling and paid my lawyerly dues in the form of crazy hours, dull work, and no personal life to speak of, I would become a solicitor in one of the City law firms in London. We would have enough money. We would have steady jobs. Those things would protect us. Maybe we would even be content…

I had chosen law after a blissful four years as an undergraduate English and French Literature student for no other reason than I had been schooled to set my sights on a prestigious career
,
and Medicine was out of the question for a math-phobic hypochondriac like me. I knew after my first week in Oxford that law was far too analytical and rational for my quirky mind. Quitting, however, equalled failure for me; it simply wasn’t an option. Besides, everyone around me - everyone except Franck that is - was as convinced as I was that an Oxford law degree was a sure-fire path to success.

Never once during my two year immersion into the legal world had my soul ever vibrated with excitement like it had over the Marey property. My legal studies were all about safeguarding myself against an uncertain future; the French house was a different kind of dream. It was a leap of faith based on the premise that the future would be fantastic. The dream of owning our
paradis perdu
had changed me. It had given me a taste of something I had forgotten was there.

“Are you nervous about the call?” Franck tucked my hand into his as we meandered through the vineyards between Villers-la-Faye and the village that was perched on the opposite hilltop, Magny-les-Villers. It had been a difficult, aimless week in the aftermath of the swindle and tomorrow my Oxford tutor would be calling me with the marks on my final examinations.

I picked a green grape off the vine and squeezed it between my fingers until I felt a satisfying pop. I needed a 2:1, also called an Upper Second, to gain my definitive admittance into the Master of Law program at Oxford. The disastrous Criminal Law paper I wrote as my very last exam haunted me. If I got a 2:2, or a Lower Second, my application to the Master’s program, which had already been conditionally approved, would no longer be automatic. I had no clue what I would do in that instance. I had to get an Upper Second. Even though I couldn’t stir up much excitement about returning to our life in Oxford, not getting into the Master’s program would essentially be like hitting a dead end in the maze I had taken my entire life to navigate through.

“So?” Franck prompted. “How are you feeling about it?”

Frustrated. Resigned. A bit hopeless even…but I didn’t feel it would be fair to admit that to Franck.

The flagstones on the kitchen floor at the house in Marey popped into my head.
That’s
what I wanted. I had fallen in love with those flagstones, with the idea of preserving something more steeped in history than any house back home in Canada. I longed to continue my life in a place where generations of other people had lived before me, having Mémé teach me how to make her
mousse au chocolat
in the kitchen and diving under the duvet in that uppermost bedroom with Franck after a long winter’s walk through the frosty vineyards…

Franck squeezed my hand. I could tell by the set of his mouth that he was worried about me. Those flagstones were somebody else’s property now, I reminded myself. Besides, I owed it to my parents to continue with law. They had paid for the last two years. I had picked my path. If I did indeed get a 2:1 it would be insanity not to continue down it.

“I’ll be okay,” I answered Franck. He didn’t look convinced. We passed the stone cross that marked the entrance to Magny-les-Villers.

“What are the people who live in Magny called?” I asked Franck. I loved how in France the inhabitants of the biggest city to the smallest hamlet had a name for themselves, from
Parisiens
(Paris) to
Nuitons
(Nuits-Saint-Georges) to
Buissoniers
(Buisson).