Grape Expectations (5 page)

The next day, warned by Myriam and Bernard, but undaunted, we tackled the practicalities of setting up our new life: getting an operational bank account; registering Sophia with a local
école maternelle
, the pre-primary school; buying supplies and purchasing the necessary furniture and equipment to survive at Haut Garrigue while we waited for our belongings to arrive. The heat was extreme. Sean found me sobbing in the supermarket car park. A few minutes at 44 degrees and I was in meltdown. Little wonder. Back home a heatwave was anything over 24 degrees.

  Ellie got her first tooth complete with vomiting and fevers. Our apartment didn't have a washing machine so Myriam offered me the use of theirs. In the evenings when the temperature eased we revelled in the warmth, sitting at our outdoor table eating picnics and waving at Bernard's ancient uncle feeding their sheep. Each day we got another brick of our new lives in place. On our moving-in day Myriam kindly offered to take Sophia, Ellie and me to our new home while Sean collected newly purchased furniture from Bergerac. We had formed a bond over the ten days, discovering that they had had a similar experience when Élodie was born to the one we had with Sophia. They were generous and big-hearted.

  Myriam loaded us up with gifts, hand-me-down toys for Sophia and bottles of fig jam. We arrived at Château Haut Garrigue and hauled our luggage inside.

  
'Bon courage,'
called Myriam as she left. I felt mine fail.

  The dark, shuttered house didn't feel like home. It felt empty and rundown. There was dirt everywhere. The shower hadn't been cleaned in decades. It had black fungus centimetres deep down the back corners and up the sides. Opening the shutters to let in the sun and air helped immediately. Ellie, settled in her bouncy chair, watched Sophia buzz around settling her baby dolls from Myriam into their new place.

  I started cleaning the kitchen. The sink had brown gunk ingrained into the supposedly stainless steel. After an hour the sink was stainless and I was feeling better. The view out of the kitchen window offered much needed succour, raised as it was above vineyards plunging down towards the Dordogne valley: a picture postcard of green vines, golden sunlight and a village in the distance with a classic French church spire and beautiful tones of local stone. Just as the dirt was starting to drag me down, my hero, Sean, looking like a happy cowboy in his leather Stetson, drove into the courtyard in a large truck hired for the half-day. We heaved our newly acquired double bed, fridge-freezer, washing machine and dishwasher inside and Sean left to return the truck. An hour later he was back installing the equipment.

  By the end of our first day we were exhausted but we had a makeshift table and chairs, beds made with fresh linen, cupboards clean enough for our new crockery and a working washing machine, dishwasher and fridge. Sophia fell asleep instantly but Ellie, despite my efforts with her new travel cot, would not settle. She had been sleeping in her bouncy chair instead of a cot since this life-changing purchase started. I moved her into the chair and her little leg started kicking, offering her the soothing bounce that helped ease the tumultuous change. Minutes later she was asleep.

  Relieved, Sean and I sat down and drank a toast to our new home with a bottle of our Château Haut Garrigue red. It tasted great. Thank God, since we'd bought 4,000 bottles of it with the property.

  We had done it. Tired as we were, we took a few moments to soak in the atmosphere of the 300-year-old room with its enormous beams and metre-thick walls, to appreciate the silence of our new surroundings, and to enjoy a selection of fine cheeses that were becoming a daily habit. Creamy Camembert, nutty Comté and salty Bleu d'Auvergne with slices of apple tasted like heaven. Through the window the light of the moon highlighted the contours of the vines, reminding us why we were here. An owl hooted in the barn across the courtyard. Our city life felt a world away, although it was only ten days since we left.

  I fell asleep as my head hit the pillow. At three that morning I woke to the lashing rain of a summer storm and found Sean running around the kitchen placing pots and potties in strategic places. Our one-day-old home was a leaking ship.

The next morning droppings in Ellie's pram confirmed a mouse infestation. We soon realised they were everywhere, eating our food and Ellie's milk-stained clothes in the washing bag. My days became consumed with the Mouse War. I opened the bin and they leapt out at me, bungee-jumping over the edge. They woke us at night. Each time a grey blur streaked across the floor I jumped three feet in the air and screamed. I couldn't bring myself to pick up a dead one let alone deal with a live one; so much for a less stressful life.

  At first we encouraged them to leave with expensive sonic devices. When it became clear that they would not take the hint we moved on to other methods. As the week progressed we deployed mousetraps, rat traps and mouse 'chocolate', a supposedly irresistible but lethal mouse snack, carefully placed behind skirting boards where we were sure that Sophia could not get them. In between trips to France Telecom to try to get our phone connected I bought all the mouse-killing devices I could find. My French was improving as fast as my blood pressure was rising. France Telecom wouldn't connect us because the previous owners didn't officially disconnect their phone line.

  As a counterbalance to these stresses of our new life I found chocolate in the supermarket which offered
une touche de
sérénité
, a touch of serenity. This dark chocolate, filled with bits of cherry, promised to aid the fight against daily stress thanks to high levels of magnesium. Two 100-gram slabs were all that was required for my daily dose.

  For more healthy fare I discovered the Gardonne market 4 kilometres away, its stalls groaning with vegetables and fruit, farm-raised chickens and more. I relished the seasonal produce, loading up on the bounty of late summer: punnets of plump tomatoes dressed with large sprigs of basil, myriad different lettuces from purple and smooth to bright green and frizzy, ruby plums and early apples. There was something therapeutic about shopping there, enjoying the banter between stallholders and the care they took with finding exactly what I was looking for.

  Fortunately the two girls were taking the mice and the move in their stride and I wasn't even sharing my cherry delight with them. Sophia started school two days after we moved in. She walked confidently into the classroom, delighted to find her name above a coat hook especially for her. Despite speaking no French she settled in remarkably smoothly. The smooth entry was not to last. On the fourth day, as we arrived at school, she started sobbing inconsolably but bravely went into the classroom despite tears pouring down her little cheeks. I choked back my tears as I got back into the car, anxious not to upset Ellie who was strapped into her car seat in the back. Sophia was a courageous little character. Given the start she had it was no wonder.

  That night, worrying about her having too much change to cope with at such a young age, I overdosed on stress-buster chocolate. Still bleary-eyed from my bad night, I took her to school the next day expecting another difficult morning. As we arrived, a brave voice in the back of the car declared, 'I am not going to cry today.'

  Sophia was handling a new country, new language and school for the first time in her life while I wasn't coping with a mouldy shower, mice and a leaking roof. At least the roof was about to be fixed.

  
'Quelle vue,'
(What a view) said the roofer, looking over the terrace that wrapped around most of the house. The late summer sun glowed down on the hillside, highlighting the contours of the vine rows. The Dordogne River, meandering towards Bordeaux, twinkled in the distance.

  He climbed the ladder and ranged across the roof like a mountain goat while we waited anxiously below. After pushing a few tiles into position he leapt expertly off the ladder.

  'It's fixed. You need to realign the tiles when they get out of line.' He quickly showed Sean how to do it and wouldn't take any payment. 'It will need to be completely renovated in time. You can probably get away with it like this for another couple of years,' he added as he left.

  It was a gesture of unexpected generosity that left me grateful and humble but I couldn't help my mind racing ahead to consider the costs required in a year or two. Through my roof-budgeting haze I heard Sophia shouting, 'Ellie's got that! Ellie's got that!' I ran to find Ellie chewing on the toilet-cleaning brush. I was failing as a mother. I couldn't find my way to the supermarket without getting lost, opening a tin of paint was a serious challenge and I missed my work and my friends. I said a prayer asking God to protect Ellie from the germs of the toilet bowl, moved the toilet brush out of her reach and told myself to get a grip.

  Some small but significant successes helped me do that. Two weeks of constant harassing brought France Telecom to their senses and they agreed to connect our phone line based on a certificate of residence provided by our mayor. Having a telephone and access to the Internet was like stepping out of the dark ages.

  The mice were proving more stubborn. I was on the brink of moving out when they met their match. The local one-man hardware store sold the world's most sensitive mousetraps. At 95 cents each they were the cheapest remedy so far and they took the entire hoard of rodents down. Sean was my hero. He valiantly removed the dead bodies as they succumbed, mouse by mouse. I almost missed them once they were gone. With these time-consuming challenges solved we turned our attention to the renovations and the farm.

I wanted the glamorous part of owning a vineyard, not the hard work. Sean was to do the vineyard work and I would look after the kids, do light renovation and eventually the marketing. At the time there was little that could be called glamorous in what we had purchased save perhaps the view.

  What we had bought was a large old house that had originally been two houses, numerous ragged outbuildings including the fermentation winery or
pressoir
, the storage winery and a very large barn, and a chunk of about 30 acres of surrounding land of which 25 acres were vineyards in different stages of disrepair. One small part of the house was liveable: a large bedroom where we had installed our entire family, a kitchen where we had a makeshift set-up that included our new equipment and a very old hob, and a large bathroom that once thoroughly cleaned was passable but miles from glamorous. Looking after a very young family in a kitchen that rated just above camping was a full-time job. The gas hob had two working plates and we had no oven. We were scared stiff of spending any more money.

  The winery and its renovation were on the long finger – we might have to put them off for a while. It would be a year before we turned our attention to our first harvest and it seemed far, far away. Just coping with daily life in this new environment was enough; my mind could not take in the idea of making our own wine.

  Decades of garbage had to be removed from Château Haut Garrigue: fridges and ovens that didn't work, beds that hadn't been used in generations and mounds of unidentifiable detritus. Soon the dreadlocked young man at the dump was greeting me like a friend.

  We lived in one large room together while we worked on our first project – a bedroom for the girls. It was lightweight renovation, decorative rather than structural, and meant we would at last get a bit of parental privacy. It had a dirty neon light and walls covered with brown, flowery wallpaper that was peeling badly and stained dark yellow with nicotine. The window in the corner was black with mould. Below it were several fist-size holes that had been the main entrance for our late friends, the mice. The concrete floor was covered with filthy linoleum curling up at the edges like old tobacco. The door had several large vertical cracks running down the upper half and didn't close. We started by removing the linoleum. Once we had cleared the room I tackled the wallpaper while Sean took on the window. I steamed and scraped until my arms ached. Drops of boiling water, molten nicotine and soggy paper fell incessantly onto my arms and hair. I geared up in waterproofs with goggles and hood regardless of the heat. The wallpaper was beyond tenacious. An Internet search affirmed that what we had was not normal. Clearly something more serious than standard wallpaper glue had been used to attach it.