Page 1 of Love In Provence
1
‘Putain!’ I hear the smash of glasses and the shout. I race through the swing doors from the kitchen into the little restaurant, leaving the bouillabaisse I’m preparing for today’s lunch service. The front door slams, creating a huge gust and a cacophony of crashing. Glasses on the tables topple and roll this way and that. More hit the floor.
‘Putain!’
‘Stephanie!’ I chide, with a smile in my voice. ‘You’re a mother of two now! Mind your language!’
‘Oui, Del.Je sais, je sais, I know!’ Stephanie replies crossly, as we run to the door, turn the worn brass handle and dash out onto the small terrace. Its red and white awning is flapping up and down in the wind, and the new sign for Henri’s bistro, over the door, is swinging enthusiastically on its hinges. It matches thefreshly painted gold writing on the window, ready for the summer visitors to the town, who are starting to arrive. June always sees visitor numbers pick up. They come for the sunshine and cicadas, the slower pace of life, the cobbled streets and the smell of Provence in the air as the lavender starts to bloom.
Stephanie rushes forward to gather up the glasses that tipped over on the tables, muttering more expletives. No matter how often I correct her bad language I don’t think it will ever change. For such a slight figure, she has a very commanding presence. It comes with a lift of her chin and a lioness’s passion to protect her young. Stephanie has had to learn the hard way in life. A single parent when I first met her, she did whatever it took to provide for her child, Tomas. Sometimes it’s easy to forget the road she’s travelled, and how far she’s come, when I see her now, running her own business, making the lavender bakes she sells at market and provides to cafés in the area. She has a smart new house where she lives with her husband, JB, and their now two children.
Stephanie is like family to me, as I am to her. We were there for each other when life hit rock bottom. It hasn’t been an easy road back up, but we made it together. I gave her somewhere to stay when she and Tomas needed it, and she taught me French. Together we grew the market stall, baking from the kitchen in my old farmhouse, Le Petit Mas de la Lavande. Sincethen she’s moved the business into a purpose-built unit, and I run the bistro in this little side-street off the main square. I’d say life is pretty much exactly where we want it to be. Except for the mistral wind we have in the South of France, which likes to shake things up every now and then. But I smile as a chair swings to and fro and falls over, sliding across the terrace. Nothing we can’t manage. I grab the handle to wind in the awning as it flaps up and down, threatening to take flight.
‘Merde! Merde!’ Stephanie expands her profanities as she gathers glasses to her chest, the little vases that were filled with dried lavender strands from last year’s harvest, and a red-and-white-check tablecloth doing its best to take off on the strong cold north-westerly wind.
‘It’s just a little mistral mischief,’ I say, turning the handle swiftly to get the awning wound in, telling Stephanie what she already knows. Then I’m helping to gather more fallen glasses and rescuing more tablecloths – even though they’re pinned down with ornate dragonfly weights at each corner. The little vases of lavender are tumbling about as the wind whips down the alleyway. I snatch up the rest and Stephanie adds them to the others she’s collected and runs inside, letting out the scent of the simmering bouillabaisse, steeped with saffron and fennel. It mingles with the aroma of pines and wild herbs, blown in onthe wind, the smell of Provence in summer, the smell of my home. I stack the metal chairs against the window as the wind roars up the narrow street past the restaurant, and bring in the rest of the tablecloths and condiments, rescued from the mistral, which steals hats from heads, ruins wedding days and turns life upside down.
A door slams upstairs in Henri’s apartment, which has been unused since he and my best friend Rhi got together and went travelling while time was still on their side. A shutter bangs against the stone wall. A dog barks in one of the nearby narrow streets that all lead to the square, just along the way from me. I lift my head to the wind and feel the memories it left that summer. I remember the havoc the mistral caused for me, turning my life on its head, the first time I encountered it, three years ago now.
2
It was moving day. We were leaving France, my then husband Ollie and I. Everything was packed and ready to go. I remember the removal people fighting against the wind to close the truck’s big doors and finally succeeding. And there it was, my life in a van, heading back to the UK, just six months after we’d made the big move to France. The wind laughed and howled, teased and tormented me. I felt it chill my bones, even though it was summer in the South of France. Ollie and I were going back to how we were – or not quite: this time we didn’t have a home to call our own. And the one thing really missing? The love we had once shared was now lost somewhere between the hospital appointments and failed IVF treatments. In moving to France we had tried to rebuild something that haddisappeared and couldn’t be retrieved through fresh baguettes and croissants for breakfast.
Once the adventure of the move had died down and everyday life kicked in, with the lack of internet connection, our poor French and worse DIY skills, what was left? It hadn’t been the sticking plaster on our dying relationship we’d hoped for. Instead the sticking plaster had had to be ripped off. It was the only way.
I decided not to leave. It wasn’t that our life in France didn’t work. It was our lifetogetherthat didn’t work, in France or in the UK. Call it mistral madness, but as I stood on the front steps of the farmhouse, the shutters slipping loose from their moorings, with Ralph, my dog, at my side, I knew I wouldn’t follow that truck ‘home’. It wasn’t my home. My home had been with Ollie, but that had gone. Our marriage was over. He knew it and I knew it. It was just that one of us had had to say and do something about it.
I stayed on the steps until the truck had gone, followed by a furious, uptight Ollie. As there wasn’t a stick of furniture left in the house, I slept the night in the bath, my bra holding together the shutters until the wind dropped, and had big daft Ralph as a blanket. When morning came, I pulled the bra from the shutters and pushed them open on a still day, the sky bright and blue, with barely a cloud. It was a new day. I had nothing. But it was a blank canvas to start again.
Ollie went back to the UK into the waiting arms ofthe lover he’d left behind, when he was trying to hide from what had really been going on: she was pregnant and ready to start a family with him. I grieved for my marriage and the child I would never have as I began to bake with Provençal lavender that had once grown in the fields of our … my farmhouse. I kept the house, he got everything else. It worked out for us both that way.
After he’d sent out my best friends to check that I hadn’t gone mad with the mistral (which they say can drive you mad) and finally realized we were better off apart, Ollie announced that his child was on the way, and I went on to … well, to become a partner in Henri’s bistro. Henri was one of the first people I was introduced to after I’d met Carine, the estate agent, and Fabien, who ran thebrocante, when I started trying to make a life for myself here. Henri was a big character, running his bistro, offering aplat du jourfor which locals flocked to his place at lunchtime. He ordered lavender bakes from me for the bistro when business was slow at my market stall, which gave me the start I needed. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person he helped: he looked out for people when they needed it most.
It was because of Henri that I’m working in the bistro and that I met Stephanie. Henri and Fabien have known each other since Fabien was a young man helping his grandfather at thebrocante. When hisgrandfather died and he took over the business, Henri became a father figure to him … and to me, to us all.
Stephanie was another he looked out for, making sure she had a hot meal whenever she needed it. After some persuasion, she finally moved onto the farm with me, escaping dreadful living conditions and a life of petty theft, with her young son Tomas. Stephanie began to work with me making lavender bakes and delivering them to Henri, then other restaurants. She sold them in the market, too.
We all helped Henri with his riverside project, delivering theplat du jourto the clearing there where people paid what they could afford, if anything, for a meal at the end of the day. Once Henri had had a heart attack, though, he knew it was time to take life a little easier. He and my friend Rhi went off travelling together, and I stepped into his shoes at the bistro, learning to make the dishes he cooked for his customers and the riverside project. I’d found my home in that little bistro kitchen. And I finally allowed myself to find love again, with a man ten years younger than me: Fabien. That mistral changed a lot three years ago.
Now I let the wind whip around me and think of how far we’ve all come in those three years and smile. Stephanie has had her second child and married her childhood sweetheart, JB, Tomas’s dad. We became a close little family, the children loving Fabien and calling him Papi. Stephanie is still running the lavenderbaking business, delivering to shops and restaurants and doing the weekly market. JB works with Fabien at thebrocante. And I’m here, at Henri’s, where I’ve never been happier, making the local dishes he taught me. I wrap my arms around myself against the wind and turn towards the restaurant door.
Stephanie is coming out with an empty basket, her ponytail dancing in the wind.
‘I’ve put the desserts in the chiller. I have some more deliveries to make.’ She nods to the van, parked by thebrocante. She’s holding two-year-old Louis’s hand, his white-blond hair whipped up by the wind, his arm covering his eyes against the dust. ‘I’ll be back to help with lunch service,’ she says, just as she does every day. Each morning until recently, Stephanie arrived at my farmhouse, Le Petit Mas de la Lavande, in her little van, painted with lavender flowers down the side, her branding for the lavender baking business. Before Louis was born she lived in the Romani caravan in the garden, which was an empty shell at the time. Just like the main house. She needed somewhere to stay and I needed to find my way through French life. I suppose we saved each other. Now she bakes early in the morning, in her purpose-built unit, makes her deliveries and comes to help me at the restaurant. I’m so proud of her.
‘À tout à l’heure,’ she says, guiding Louis along and holding her basket on her hip. With his eyes screwedshut, Louis stops, his hands to his face, refusing to move. He begins to cry.
‘Oh, Louis,doucement,’ I say, and step forward but tears are falling. I bend to pick him up. Stephanie wedges the basket back onto her hip – it was slipping off – and her bag onto her shoulder. It’s stuffed with everything a toddler needs to see him through the day. I may not have had children of my own, but I was there for Louis when he was a baby.
Louis curls into the crook of my neck and holds his fists to his eyes. No amount of cajoling will cheer him.
‘You could leave him with me,’ I say, ‘while you do your rounds.’
‘But you have work to do,’ she says. ‘Come on, Louis, we’re going in the van and you love the van.’
He shakes his head and kicks his feet. By the look of it, he’s not going anywhere until the mistral has passed.
‘Whoa!’ The familiar voice makes me smile and Fabien is jogging towards us from thebrocante. He slides his arm around my waist and kisses my cheek. ‘You left early this morning, before I had even woken.’
