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  Nathalie was a young woman with two children roughly the same age as mine. She came from the Champagne region of France but had recently moved to Provence after her marriage breakdown. She was still finding her way emotionally and we had had many a long dinner consuming too many bottles of red wine while she came to terms unsteadily with the reconstruction of her family life. But when it came to financial matters, she was clear and concise. Her fingers flew across the number pad of the calculator as she too, like Monsieur Perrard the previous day, dissected my financial affairs. Patiently she explained to me that only four-fifths of my revenue from the holiday houses could be taken into consideration, to allow for a margin of error. The family home in Sydney was rented out and that was bringing in some money, then there were some small dividends from my investments. Nathalie explained about icing a cake too thinly. I nodded in silent agreement. Once again those in the know were right and I was definitely wrong.

  Having lived in Sydney throughout an extremely aggressive property boom, I possessed a fairly distorted and naïve view about real estate. My previous forays into property had always been more about having incredible good luck than possessing the astuteness to hunt for the ultimate bargain; here in Provence, the bottom line was that there were few barnyards or farmhouses to be had at giveaway prices. The Wild Thyme Patch had a load of positives: the size and location of the land dominated the list. Granted, it was not a bargain but at the same time, it was relatively good value and it would work perfectly for my needs. The little house was not ideal, but that could always be changed at a later date, when things became more financially stable. The presiding factor was that if I kept Villa Agapanthe rather than selling it, three rental properties would add more scope and flexibility to my business. In the short term, we would downsize our family needs for the sake of the business. My heart had ruled in the past three transactions, but on this occasion, I desperately tried to convince myself that it was my head that was ruling my actions.

  Buying the Wild Thyme Patch made good economic sense in the long term but the short-term problem was tricky: how was I going to pay for it? Bridging finance interest rates were gruesomely high, and it would have been an act of utter recklessness to even entertain the idea. I had a small amount of money in reserve for real emergencies but not enough to put down a deposit on the house. It was purely academic how much the loan would cost. I simply couldn’t afford the house at this price. It was time to speak to Véronique, half of the husband-and-wife team from St Saturnin les Apt Real Estate, to see if we could negotiate a price and a deal with the owners.

  After hours of throwing figures into the calculator, Nathalie formulated an arrangement that was vaguely agreeable to me and very acceptable to the bank, so the deal was sewn up: I could buy the Wild Thyme Patch without resorting to my favoured alternative of selling one or both of the children. However, the bank now owned the children, the two cats, the four properties and me. On the positive side, we would make the Wild Thyme Patch our new home and live happily ever after.

  All property transactions must come before a notary in France, whose title is Maître rather than the usual Monsieur. I felt slightly ill at ease when I discovered that Maître Jaffary, who had processed my previous transactions, was unavailable. Instead I would be dealing with his associate, the very capable Mademoiselle Pruvot. Her office was streamlined, neat and tidy, with few personal belongings in view — 100 per cent professional. While waiting for her to seek out the thick file of the transaction, I mulled over the problem about the French language and its obsession with correctness. Should I call her Maître to reflect her legal status or did one use the feminine word, Maîtresse? I had limited experience with problems such as this. At the children’s primary school, the children addressed their primary school teachers in the masculine or feminine form, using Maître and Maîtresse. It did not make sense for me to address someone in the same way that a five-year-old would address their teacher. Such aspects of the complexity of the French language perplexed me on a daily basis.

  My French vocabulary had increased spectacularly over the past year, living and working with tradesmen while renovating Rose Cottage. Now that Latin Ray — a firm non-French speaker — was living in Sydney and our circle of French acquaintances was growing, the percentage of time that I spoke French during the day was increasing rapidly. But there was still the old stumbling block of my cultural inadequacies. When you have a disability you learn how to disguise it or make light of it. My method was to wait until Mademoiselle Pruvot introduced herself and if she called me by my very formal name of Veuve Taylor — Widow Taylor — I would know that I should do likewise and call her Maître, thus establishing the culturally and socially correct gap that existed between us. You only get one chance to make a good first impression with the French. I would take my cue from her. She introduced everyone with their correct titles and used vous, the polite form of ‘you’. For the next hour or so I would be Veuve Taylor and she would be addressed as Maître. Once the formalities had been dispensed with I could slip into the comfort zone of words and business dealings that were now familiar to me. Her choice of language indicated to me that she was extremely friendly but still highly professional — observing all the correctness that her profession warranted. The German vendors of the Wild Thyme Patch were finding the whole operation very stressful, mulling over every sentence as they struggled with all the nuances that were explained to them with dreary monotony in French, English and finally German. But at last the contract was signed and we could begin to pack our bags.

  The exchange of contracts was negotiated for the beginning of the summer of 2002, just before the onslaught of the arriving visitors — Latin Ray, followed by various members of my family arriving from Australia in continuous waves throughout July and August. In the midst of the general chaos, I had several emails from Amanda Wood, a young Australian girl working in Switzerland who had stayed with her family at Place de la Fontaine in February. At the end of her idyllic week in Saignon, Amanda had been reluctantly preparing to return to her job as an au pair while her parents and sister headed back home to the sweltering heat of summer in Australia. I jumped straight in, offering her a position with me. I was in dire straits, with a complete lack of computer knowledge and skills in basic office administration tasks such as filing, photocopying and scanning documents. I needed a mother’s help in the office, not with the children, who were almost autonomous. Amanda seemed competent and organised and had the computing and office skills I needed — and she was fluent in French. Looking abashed and somewhat embarrassed, she said that she would think about my fabulously underpaid job. I told myself that Amanda Wood would never be seen again.

  I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t jumped at the chance, but maybe it was because she knew that winter would be unbearable in Villa Agapanthe due to the very limited heating. Four months later, in late spring, the weather was warming up, she was looking to move closer to the sea and her sights were firmly set on Provence, where she could work on a honey tan to enhance her lithe body. Thinking that we could help her achieve this, she contacted me. Why I agreed to allow her to come to stay on the cusp of summer was a mystery, as we were about to move and the onslaught of visitors was about to commence. The Wild Thyme Patch had three bedrooms and one bathroom. Pitching a tent in the enormous garden was becoming a serious option.

  Amanda arrived one day at Avignon airport with a backpack larger than herself. I had dropped everything to go and pick her up from the airport. She slid into the passenger’s seat of the car, leaving me to manoeuvre her overladen backpack into the boot. Already things did not augur well. As I negotiated my way around the other cars in the car park, I told her the one strict rule that I did not bend under any circumstance: no smoking anywhere near me, near the houses, near the children. No smoking meant no smoking. She blithely said that she did not smoke, but I noticed that her nicotine-stained fingers were crossed as she gazed out the window asking about the nightlife in the village. Act
ually, there is none, I told her. And that goes for our swimming pool, too. There isn’t one. Amanda began the lip tremble: a trembling bottom lip perfected by my older sister Kate in her youth, designed to melt the hardest of any adult’s heart to gain whatever she wanted — but I looked purposefully ahead for oncoming kamikaze cars hurtling towards me along the straight and narrow single carriageway of the main road that cuts through the countryside in a straight line from Avignon to Apt. The wonderful, clever Amanda was going to help me with my problems with the computer and arrange my filing systems to make things work more efficiently, in between lying in the sun reading and cycling around the neighbourhood. I was deliriously happy. Finally someone would show me tricks about computers to make my life easier. What Amanda didn’t know was how big a role I needed her to play during the three days after her arrival. There was the packing and unpacking of boxes for our move to the new house and the washing and ironing of sheets for the clients for Saturday. Summer was my busiest time with the properties, and the sheets and housekeeping still had to be done while all hell was breaking loose around us.

  Early the following day Raymond arrived from Sydney via Paris. He had a vague notion that I hadn’t taken his advice about the purchase of the house as I had told him that I had a really big surprise for him and he was learning from experience what that meant. The last time we spoke, he said that he was exhausted from his first term of studies and was desperate to get to France to enjoy sitting around with me under the shady trees as we had in the summer of the previous year. I wasn’t about to shatter his illusions. I couldn’t afford to let him change his mind so I decided that it was best to keep him — like Amanda — in the dark. It would be highly unlikely that any time would be devoted to sitting around doing nothing.

  The big move into the Wild Thyme Patch took place a couple of days later, at the end of June, to coincide with the end of school. Harry and Mimi had been loudly voicing their opinion that it was time for a new television to replace the one that was slightly larger than the size of a postage stamp. Amanda offered to take me shopping for large-screen televisions.

  Yet again, the issue of English television was raised. In the non-French community, many opt for English satellite television to be beamed into their homes, at great expense. At the back of my mind, I thought that if we had English satellite television and a larger screen, Raymond might be influenced to give up his studies in Australia and move to France in order to live with the children and me. Maybe even one day enrol in an English university where he could study Latin to his heart’s content? If only I could find somewhere he could study nearby, he might want to stay.

  That was if I decided that I wanted him in my life full-time. He was a man of basic needs: loads of sport on television, where they called the play in English not French; cases of beer; roast chicken and lamb as often as possible, washed down with a palatable red; and — whenever the children were at school or out of hearing distance — a compliant woman, namely me. It revolted me that I could be so pathetic. Total and utter confusion reigned in my mind. I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that one moment I was desperately in love with him and the next I wanted desperately to move on with my new life in France. The bribe of expensive English satellite television was to get him to stay with me for just a little longer so I could make up my mind.

  Our neighbours, nine-year-old Benjamin and his family, had just left our street and moved to the village of Rustrel, seven kilometres away. I had placated Harry with the fact that Benji would be coming almost daily to swim in the public pool in our village so they would still remain friends. A week after their move, I dropped Benji off at their new home after the boys had been playing together after school. Fairy fingers had been at work. Objects, photographs and books lined the walls of their new living room, in the same controlled order as always. It was almost possible to think that a magic wand had been waved and everything had been transported to the new house without skipping a beat. I should have known that it was Claire who had organised the move; she had the whole thing taken care of before Pierre, Benji’s father, even knew that it had happened. She was simply an extraordinary type of woman. Someone I could admire greatly from a distance — a very long distance. Boxes had been packed, labelled and put into the truck that Claire then drove to the new abode, where she unpacked and arranged everything in order. By the time that Pierre had finished work, all he had to do was to remember to drive to his new home.

  As Claire’s son Raphaël was in Harry’s class, she had found out from the school grapevine that we, too, were about to move. Although I found her to be the bossiest and most overbearing person I had ever encountered in my life, I was secretly relieved the day that she presented her services to help with the move. At least I would have another adult able to help, as both Amanda and Raymond were lying under the trees in a state of exhaustion from waking up just before lunchtime. Mimi adored Amanda, seeing her as the older, clever sister she never had, and both children continued to consider Raymond as slightly mentally deficient. Lazy or stupid, it was irrelevant as at least they could both drive, which was a major asset. Claire arrived bearing large armfuls of cartons and thick brown tape with instructions for everyone about how to pack successfully. Both Raymond and Amanda jumped to attention and were given a list of directives for the day. It occurred to me that maybe Claire wasn’t so bad after all. Amanda was placed in charge of packing boxes and proved to have a natural flair for wrapping, stacking and packing in a careful, orderly manner.

  Somehow we managed to move the mountains of boxes from one end of the village to the other, to our new abode nestled in the outskirts of St Saturnin les Apt. Then Raymond and the children began the hideous job of unpacking and rearranging our life into shelves, cupboard and closets. Most of the boxes with my folders and important papers remained beside the desk waiting to be unpacked — much later. Claire issued the order that the priorities were to unpack the kitchen and make the beds. We hurried to comply. All the pieces fell into place when Claire mentioned that her first husband had been a military man and her second husband, Patrick, had been one too until recently. She had lost count of how many times she had moved the family’s belongings. As twilight was falling she returned with Patrick and Raphaël, bearing a huge bottle of wine tucked under her arm. Her eyes twinkled with amusement as she watched Raymond rummaging through the boxes of kitchen equipment looking desperately for a corkscrew. ‘Don’t you know that we French always carry one in the glove box of our car?’

  Everyone was in a state of exhaustion, lying supine under the shade of the large pine tree. Some clean glasses were fetched from a box and Raymond opened the bottles of red wine and apple cider to weak applause from us all. Moving is said to be one of the most stressful times in your life; in one day we had achieved the near impossible due to Amanda’s incredibly methodical packing and with Claire and my family unpacking in the new house.

  Amanda was installed in one of the attic bedrooms and the kids would soon join her upstairs in the other large space, which Claire and I had converted into a makeshift bedroom, anticipating the impending arrival of family members. Raymond was still suffering from jet lag and wanted to play up rather than get under the yoke and start unpacking boxes of books and clothes or even better, washing and ironing. He insisted that the work would still be there the next day and that we should unpack gradually so that everything would go into the correct place first time. After all, the television and the fridge were working, the beds were made; nothing else was urgent. It was time to go to the local bar. There, Amanda caused a sensation among the young males of Apt. Blond, petite and very cute, as only twenty-something girls can look in strappy barely-there summer clothes, Amanda’s arrival whipped the local young men into a frenzy of testosterone.

  Over the past two years, I had come to realise that I was far from being incapable and incompetent in all fields. With Amanda’s help putting in order my computer and files and streamlining my various stabs at basic accounting, I woul
d find the money to pay for the mortgages. Nothing would stand in my way. I was ready to pack away my poor weeping widow garb and replace it with my new guise of Wonder Woman, sleeves rolled up, wearing a crisp linen apron and bearing a cake of Marseille soap.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Long-term Clients

  The immediate and pressing challenge that lay ahead was how to obtain clients for my latest rental property, Villa Agapanthe, especially as nobody in the United Kingdom, America, Canada, Australia or New Zealand knew of my lovely holiday home’s existence and now, midway through the tourist season, it was far too late to begin any sort of advertising in the print media. Most clients booked well in advance, so the chances of obtaining enough last-minute bookings were slim. This third property would stand very little chance of bringing in any sort of revenue, constant or otherwise, for the 2002 season. Nathalie, the bank manager in Apt, felt that I was approaching serious over-extending and kept repeating the ‘too many eggs in one basket’ mantra. After our first meeting she had spelt it out clearly so that there could be no misunderstanding:

  1. The three properties had to be taking in paying clients.

  2. They had to be open all year round to obtain maximum capacity.

  3. There was little to no room in the budget to pay for help with the cleaning, washing and ironing.

  4. Inviting family members for free holidays did not help the budget.