Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Marlow arrived at the mairie just as Rémy did. Guillaume was nowhere in sight. Oh well, she thought. Here we go.
“Bonjour, Madame, comment allez-vous?” said Marlow, diving in.
“Très bien, merci, et vous?” said Rémy, letting them into the mairie, opening the office and stepping behind the counter.
Marlow passed over the appeal, smiling her best fake smile. “If there were any way to push through the appeal now, rather than September—” she started in.
“There is not,” said Rémy. “Will the house be empty until then? Because if the house is uninhabited for over seven weeks, the penalty is activated.”
“You mean the security deposit?”
“No, the uninhabited house penalty.”
“The what?! You never mentioned an uninhabited—”
“Did I not pass you the conditions of sale? Ah. Désolée. My mistake.” Rémy rummaged through an in-tray, found the paper she needed, slid it across the counter, and then pointed out rules with her manicured finger, translating as she went.
“Home improvements over five years. No vacancy for over seven weeks at a time. Participation in local matters. All accounts settled. A ten thousand-euro penalty should one fall delinquent.”
“Ten thousand—oh my G—what kind of local matters?”
“Perhaps there might be a vote. Or … a municipal meeting. A census …”
You couldn’t force people to vote or attend a meeting or fill out a census! OK, you could make someone answer a census. But the rest was some Orwellian Big Brother bullshit.
“I have a life in Toronto,” said Marlow. “I have an apartment and bills to pay and plants to water. I’m not getting squeezed into some impossible situation that’s, you know, impossible!”
Marlow felt faint—maybe the last vestiges of jet lag, but more likely a reaction to being shafted. She gripped the counter. “Can I at least have my security deposit back?”
“No,” said Rémy, examining her perfect nail polish job, “I think perhaps I will hold onto it a little while longer, until this matter resolves itself.”
Marlow glared at Rémy, grabbed the paper, and walked out the door.
Guillaume had just parked in the Nenier parking lot when Marlow came down the Mirabelle stairs.
“Ah non, am I late?” he asked.
“Rémy was early.” She tried to breathe in the pastoral beauty below, the quaint medieval village above, and the swoonworthy French prince before her, but it was useless. “I’m in trouble.”
“The meeting did not go well?”
“That’s an understatement. I claimed the house to avoid losing my thirty thousand-euro security deposit but turns out I can’t leave it vacant for over seven weeks or there’s a ten thousand-euro penalty!
If I leave now, I’ll be breaking that rule.
And there are other conditions which activate a penalty, too.
I could put the house up for sale in September, but it hasn’t been bought by anyone else in the state it’s in so far. Who’s to say it would sell?”
“So what do you think?”
Marlow had a weak track record with big decisions—not including having Sabine.
That had been the best decision ever. Once, when she’d complained to Gustavo about not having made her feature, he’d challenged her to take festival equipment home over the weekend and shoot a scene.
A location. Some B roll. Anything. And she hadn’t.
She’d just stared out the window all weekend, feeling terrible.
Staring out the window now wasn’t an option.
“I think I have to ask for the summer off. I’m technically contract, but I’ve worked at the festival for years.
It’ll probably torpedo my efforts to get my boss’s old job—I’m waiting on the interview as we speak—and Oscar will likely flip—and I have no idea how I’ll afford to stay—and there are a billion things to do before Sabine starts university in the fall—but fixing up Maison Perdue means I might, just might, be able to resell it in the fall. So I have to try.”
“I agree with this plan,” said Guillaume.
“You do?”
“In my business, with a new idea, we do the Five Factor Test. We look at time, cost, professional impact, monetary impact, and personal impact. We consult our vision statement and goal setting. And only when we have thought through all these things do we make a decision.”
“The Five Factor Test? I’m lucky if I’m even one step ahead of whatever I’m doing.”
“That may be,” he said. “But of everyone in the world, you are the expert of you.”
No one had ever said that to her before, and certainly not in a to-die-for French accent. She squinted at him. The sunlight framed his profile just so.
“Shall we walk?” he asked. “We can talk about this. Perhaps it would help.”
They walked through the streets of Nenier. “Let’s try this exercise,” said Guillaume. “One: there is time to consider. You mention you are on contract, not full-time. I suspect, then, you are not paid for this time off?”
Marlow shook her head. “That’s what applying for Oscar’s job is about.”
“So time will be a factor,” said Guillaume. “Two: cost. You have already paid for your accommodations here, such as they are. And please know that you can absolutely stay at my house if that is more comfortable … which I suspect it might be.”
“That is a lovely offer,” said Marlow, “but if we can get the electricity going and the water running, I think Sabine and I could maybe stay in Mirabelle.” She didn’t want to impose on him, and she couldn’t afford a hotel all summer, that was for sure.
“Of course, staying in your house would be best,” said Guillaume, “although you are always welcome if there are emergencies, or you cannot stand the house one more minute. As for professional impact, what will this do to your relationship with your boss?”
“It won’t be good. He gets me to do his work, he’s a self-involved ass, he’s a sycophant, and for the most part he doesn’t like me, which offends me even if I don’t like him either. So, basically, things couldn’t get much worse.”
Was all that true? She hadn’t done a mile-high evaluation of her job in a long time. To be fair, it wasn’t terrible. It was just mediocre. And wasn’t that what Noah had been getting on her case about? How she’d settled into mediocrity, and she wasn’t even forty?
“Do you like it at your office?”
“Ish,” she said, standing on her tiptoes to look over a gate into someone’s little garden.
“What is this ‘ish’?”
“It means sort of. I don’t love it or hate it. I hope to move up sometime soon.”
“Will staying here this summer ruin your chances to do that?” he asked.
“A hundred percent. Oscar will never give me a recommendation if I do that. It’s a definite Emperor with No Clothes situation. I’ve been covering for him for years now. He wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“No wonder he’d be upset,” said Guillaume.
“Yes. I did not plan this well. In fact, I didn’t plan it at all.”
“So you cannot abandon your job, or you’ll be fired. You cannot go back to Canada and abandon the house and return in September, or you’ll be fined. What is the third way?”
“Do both?”
“Exactly.”
“I could pitch working remotely, you mean. Work on the house in the mornings, and work for the festival in the afternoons. Only, Mirabelle has no internet.”
“Work at my house.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why not? Come and go as you please. Just think about it while we finish our exercise. So, professional impact is serious, but we might have an option. As for monetary impact, what will this do to your finances? If it’s not too rude to ask.”
“I can’t afford to keep the house and be here every seven weeks. Can you imagine the flights? And if I fix it up to resell in the fall, I have to pay for renovations. I already have the thirty thousand-euro security deposit on my credit card. I don’t have a lot of room left.”
“So only do surface things,” he said. “Clean, paint, make it nice to resell, but no moving walls. France has arcane building rules anyway, which change from département to département. After all, you only need to make more than one euro to be in profit. And doing just enough will give you time to enjoy being in France.”
He made it sound doable. She eyed the boulangerie’s window on which was written: pains spéciaux, glaces, viennoiseries.
“And lastly, personal impact,” he said. “How will this affect you personally? You don’t have to say these things out loud. Your life is your own.”
Another thing her family would never have said. For them it was most often, think how your decisions affect your daughter. Your stagnant career. Your anemic pocketbook. Us (especially us).
“I don’t want to derail Sabine,” she said as they turned around and headed back up the hill.
“I want her to choose her university and be on her way. And my brother—we’re close.
He struggles with depression. I don’t want him to feel abandoned if I’m here the whole summer.
” She shot Guillaume a glance. “I don’t want him to seem tragic—he’s not.
It’s just—we have complicated parents, and he’s living with them at the moment. But he’ll do fine.” She hoped.
“So, given all we’ve discussed, what do you think?”
“I think … I’ll work a bit more at the house, then send my boss an email.”
She was terrified but maybe, this time, she did not have to be a woodchuck chucking wood. Maybe, for once, she was taking care of herself.
Sabine floated up the stairs to Mirabelle. After the slog of high school, she could now say she’d done one frivolous, impetuous thing and kissed a boy. Come Sunday, she and her mum would be gone, and she’d never have to see Aubin again.
She found Marlow in the tiny courtyard, picking up the broken shutters from outside the Maison Perdue kitchen window. She pitched in and helped carry them to the shed.
“How was sightseeing with Aubin?”
“Fine,” said Sabine.
“Just fine?”
“Yep. Nice, actually. I told him I’d check in with you. He’ll pick us up in an hour.” She found herself wanting that. To be beside him again. Weird.