Chapter 9
NINE
A NICE LITTLE LIFE
Wendy has a new routine, or rather two alternating routines.
Every morning, she rises, has breakfast in the glorious sunshine, and then hikes up to the radar where she snaps her daily photo.
Afterwards, she walks back home before, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, continuing as far as the bakery where she buys food for the next two days.
She’s careful to make sure she orders enough to justify a delivery but not so much that she ever has to skip one.
After all, it’s the delivery of these orders on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays that guarantee her French lessons.
The walking is making her feel fitter – she can sense it as she marches up the hill each day – and the French conversation sessions are definitely improving her language skills. She can negotiate most aspects of her bakery visit now without ever resorting to English.
It’s a little life – she’s aware that there’s nothing ground-breaking here – but it’s a nice life, too.
It feels good, it feels healthy, and learning something new is fun.
Mentally, she’s in the best place she’s known since she came here.
In fact, she feels so happy with her new routine that on some days she forgets entirely to hassle the car hire company.
As they have now assured her that the period during which she is car-less will be refunded, the whole situation feels like something of a win.
She really does like young Manon. There’s something about the fact that they have to talk to each other every other day which has led to the strange situation where she feels like Manon is one of the people she knows best on the planet.
She knows that Manon’s father is also a postman, for example, and that he makes a wicked cheese soufflé and has a new girlfriend called Louise, who is way too young for him.
She knows that Manon’s brother is a drug addict who favours ‘speedballs’ which are a potent mix of cocaine and heroin, and that Manon worries every time the phone rings with an unknown number that it’s a hospital phoning to tell her he’s dead.
She knows that Manon’s mother died years ago (though the cause seems to be a taboo subject) and that Manon loved her deeply and misses her so much that occasionally she finds herself crying about it even now.
Music-wise, Manon (surprisingly) favours retro Britpop seemingly because that’s what her mother liked to listen to, and she has revealed she has a girlfriend called Celine, who lives in Draguignan and who Manon is trying to encourage to brush her teeth more often!
By December Wendy reckons Manon knows her quite well, too, because Wendy has told her how it felt being pregnant, what it was like giving birth, and how she sometimes has hot flushes she fears are the beginning of the menopause.
It strikes Wendy, one evening after Manon has left, that in some ways they know each other better than she and Harry do these days. The thought is absurd, because, of course, she and Haz know each other in ways that she and Manon simply never could.
But it’s also true that she really does know things about Manon that she has never known about Harry, things she doesn’t even know about her kids.
She and Manon, for example, have spoken at length about their first sexual experiences, and these are conversations that she doesn’t think anyone really has with their husband, let alone their own children.
Could the answer to her relationship problems with Harry be nothing more, nothing less, than proper in-depth conversation?
Certainly, as far as she can see, most of the couples she knows would benefit far more from an hour a day talking to each other than the three hours of Netflix they’re getting by on.
On 4 December, Manon arrives far later than usual – just before 7 p.m. As it’s been dark for almost two hours, she finds Wendy firmly ensconced in aperitif time.
‘Vous arrivez plus tard, aujourd’hui,’ Wendy tells her, feeling proud of her perfectly constructed phrase even though she has had the last hour to think about it.
‘I know!’ Manon says. ‘I start work very late this morning. My brother. Big problems. Again!’ She proceeds to explain how her father phoned her first thing to tell her he’s thinking of paying for a private detox clinic for her brother.
The clinic being incredibly expensive, and her brother having already gone through three previous detox sessions only to start using almost the second he got out each time, the discussion had gone on for some time.
‘I start very late. So, I end very late,’ Manon explains.
‘And what did you decide?’ Wendy asks. ‘About your brother?’
Manon shrugs. ‘Oh, Papa will pay. He always pay,’ she says. ‘Because if he don’t pay…’
‘If he doesn’t pay,’ Wendy corrects.
‘Yeah, if he doesn’t pay, and Bruno is…’ she makes a brutal slashing gesture across her throat here, ‘then… whose fault can it be? The culpabilité… the guilt? for Papa will be terrible.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Wendy tells her, genuinely touched by the girl’s emotion every time she talks about her brother. ‘That must be very difficult for you all.’
‘It is,’ Manon says. ‘But it is a family problem, so we are used to this.’
‘But I’m glad you feel you can share it with me.’
Manon laughs. ‘I share everything with you. So you, now. What do you want to talk about, in French?’
‘Oh, gosh, I honestly have no idea today. Nothing happens in my life except seeing you and going to the bakery.’
‘In French,’ Manon insists.
‘Vraiment, je ne sais pas,’ Wendy says.
‘Vous parlez de quoi d’habitude, en Angleterre ?’
‘What do the English talk about?’
‘Oui. Si vous voulez…’
‘The weather mainly,’ Wendy says. ‘Le météo.’
‘La météo !’ Manon corrects. ‘The weather is a girl. This is probably why she is so unpredictable! Est-ce que vous avez vu qu’il va neiger en fin de semaine ?’
‘Neiger ?’ Wendy repeats. ‘It’s going to snow?’
‘Oui. Beaucoup.’
‘Oh my God!’ Wendy says, her eyes widening. ‘When?’
‘En francais !’
Wendy laughs. ‘Oh, mon Dieu !’ she says, laughing at how much funnier it sounds in French. ‘Quand ?’
‘You see,’ Manon says. ‘You can when you try.’
Slowly, clumsily, they manage to have Wendy’s first ever in-depth conversation about the weather in French, during which she learns that heavy snow is forecast for the end of the week along with freezing temperatures.
Apparently, French forecasters don’t predict the actual depth of the snowfall, but there will be a lot, Manon insists.
Three or four days of snowfall, at the very least.
Wendy should get plenty of food and wood in, Manon tells her.
And she should probably see if she can get her car back before the bad weather hits.
It all sounds a bit worrying, especially considering the chaos the last snowfall caused, yet she feels far more excited than scared.
Isn’t this why one rents a remote mountain cabin, after all?
As Manon is leaving, she calls for Wendy to join her behind the house and points to a pile of bottle-filled crates. ‘Do you want me to take these, before the snow?’ she asks.
‘Oh, to the bottle bank?’ Wendy asks. ‘Yes, please! That would be great. It’s so far from here that without a car, I just haven’t been able to do it.’
But as they load the crates one by one into Manon’s little Panda, Wendy starts to feel embarrassed and then – when they have to fold the rear seats down – mortified by the sheer volume of empties.
Though some of these are jars that once contained jam or coffee or pasta sauce, the vast majority are indisputably empty wine bottles.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she says repeatedly as they load the car. ‘Do you want me to come with you to put them in the bottle bank?’
‘No,’ Manon says, with a sigh. ‘It’s fine.’ But Wendy sees a cloud crossing Manon’s features, and for the first time since Wendy has known her, she doesn’t look fine at all.
‘I am used to this,’ Manon tells her as they load the final crate into the car and slam the hatch. ‘I do it for my brother all the time. And before that I do it for my mother. Like I say, is a family problem.’
Todd: Hello? Mum?
Wendy: Hello, my lovely boy.
T: Eek, you sounded a bit Welsh there. Is everything all right?
W: Um, yes, sweetheart. Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?
T: Oh, OK. Just… you know… For some reason I thought it was Dad.
W: You thought I was Dad? Doesn’t my number—
T: No, I thought you were phoning because something had happened to Dad. You don’t tend to phone out of the blue.
W: Sometimes I do. I may not have done so for a while, I suppose, but…
T: Fine. Whatever. Anyway, I’m glad. I was worried there for a moment. So how are things in France? I take it you’re still there?
W: Yes. And it’s lovely, thanks. We’re getting ready for heavy snowfall, actually. So that’s exciting.
T: Snow, huh? Will you be able to ski?
W: Ha! You know I can’t ski, honey.
T: True. Shame, though. Anyway, it’s wet and miserable here. So you’re not missing much.
W: Your father said it’s been lovely.
T: Oh, you two are talking, are you? Good. And, yeah, it was lovely until Sunday. But now it’s chucking it down so we’re holed up bingeing on The Boys. Have you seen it? It’s excellent. Violent, but excellent.
W: No, I can’t say I have. And when you say we… we’re holed up…?
T: Oh, just me, my flatmate Matti, and Amanda, of course.
W: Amanda… Is she your girlfriend?
T: Yep.
W: Is this the same one as in the um… Christmas photo? The one where you were all eating cake?
T: Yes, Mum, it’s the same one.
W: I didn’t mean anything, Todd. I’ve never met her, that’s all.
T: Well, you will one day. And you’ll like her. She’s gorgeous.
W: Good, well, I look forward to it.
T: Are you …? Um… Are you, um, coming back for any, you know, visits? Or are you staying out there until May or whenever?
W: April. I’m out here till April.
T: Right. Yeah, I knew that. Course I did.