Part One: Nick
Every year it never fails to surprise and comfort me.
It’s how the effect of the warm sun beating down on you can make you forget life’s little problems. Sitting here in the garden, my own garden, surrounded by brightly coloured azaleas and rhododendrons, with that always-welcome smell of a very early jasmine in the air, allows your worries and fears to sink into insignificance.
But only for a while.
The spring has always been my favourite time of year, probably for the promise it holds for the coming months. I know then that the summer is merely a breath away when lifestyles and attitudes change and the inhibitions of winter are folded away like old clothes. It’s that crucial time of year when one is surrounded by a myriad of fresh new colours and tanned faces. When conversation, laughter and young wine erupt like a dormant and stopped fountain that’s been corked for far too long.
Do you see what I mean?
The warmer weather suddenly makes even the language I use more lyrical, encapsulating and decadent.
It’s the sunshine and light which make all the difference here – they were, after all, the main reasons we chose to live in the south-west corner of France. We had all loved French culture and (most importantly) French cuisine. At the beginning I was rather apprehensive about packing my bags and family and buying what started out to be a holiday home across the Channel. But then everything about our “normal” lives had changed so the move then became no big deal. It’s times like this, though, sitting in the garden and just being at peace with the whole world, that make it all worthwhile and dispel those little niggling doubts that perhaps it was all a big mistake.
When I return to England, people interested in moving or buying a second home abroad often ask me for advice. Whether or not it was easy to move lock, stock and barrel across La Manche and is property really that cheap and how much do I pay for wine? I often reply that it’s a dreadful place to live, that jobs are hard to come by and it’s only cheap because the place is falling to bits, the French can’t be bothered with it and getting people to work for you is a nightmare. I tell them that most of the wine is third rate because Marks and Spencer’s and Waitrose have bought all the best stock and that the French are the hardest people to live with. I attempt to baffle them with the restrictions laid down by the European Parliament and tell them if they believe the Common Market has made things difficult in the UK then it’s about one hundred times worse across the Channel.
And why shouldn’t I?
Here, then, just outside Perpignan, in the shadow of the Pyrenees and only a few minutes’ drive to some of Europe’s best beaches and the smoothest skiing, I’ve found my little piece of heaven. The last thing I want is this beautiful and unspoiled region to be full of ex-pats and Germans buying property on every corner and propping up every bar and taking over restaurants, as they have done in Brittany.
“If you want my advice,” I sincerely point out, “learn by my mistakes and if you must live in France then choose Brittany or Peter Mayle country in Provence, as they have more to offer.”
I wonder how many innocents over the years I have deterred from living here in the Lanquedoc-Rousillon region.
When we bought the old mill house it had already been derelict for about fifteen years that we knew about, and none of us had any idea how much work would be involved in restoring it. The neglected plot was such a wreck when we first drove up, and we frankly had no idea of what type of building it was – had it not said on the agent’s details that it was a mill then it would have remained a mystery. It was initially romantic of course. It always is when you view a property. The potential always stands out and your imagination runs riot. But, then, that’s the easy part. After all, very little physical energy is used sitting out on a terrace that has not yet been built or sipping crisp, dry wine under a warm sun. Our estimates of time involved in creating rather than uncovering our dream home ranged from three to six months. But then we were naive and that was English time. It’s turned out to be a good few years and still we haven’t got around to fixing up a couple of the smaller outbuildings. But I am now happy to accept Sally’s view that some buildings should remain lifeless shells as a tribute to the past.
Good old Sally – always full of bright ideas.
We did get our priorities right with the garden, though, and it was the first area we started working on. In my experience most English people tend to fix the house up first and then after about a year they start to pay attention to the garden. We did it the other way around, though. It was the reason for living part of the year in a better climate and we had hoped that a great deal of our time was going to be spent outside so it felt more important. Besides we knew nothing about plastering, damp-coursing, septic tanks or woodworm so the garden was relatively easy for city dwellers like us.
And the rewards of doing the garden first have now paid off.
I’m sitting here at an old wicker table we found and rescued from one of the barns, sipping Normandy cider with the daily newspapers in English and French spread out before me and contemplating whether or not today, this beautiful fresh April day, is a day for working or relaxation. The sky really is a crystal blue and the gentle breeze is stopping the sun from making me too uncomfortable. I think I’ll have another glass and sit here a little longer. After all, next week Eamon and I will be working on the next issue of the magazine so I’ll need to recharge my batteries. Besides it’s all written down on the notepad in the back of my brain and the laptop he insisted I learnt how to handle. I do have a tablet and an android device to make notes with but the keyboards tend to be too small for my fingers so I like to rely on my brain. Needless to say, I forget most things but have been known to remember important points at the last minute.
The house is just a twenty-minute drive from where Eamon works, L’Institute des Langues du Monde in the centre of Perpignan. He’s a teacher of English as a second language and, according to his students, the best. It was his job and the early eighties that brought us here. It was then that the British and Germans had only just discovered how cheap property was in France. For about a quarter of the price of a reasonable house in the UK you could buy a mansion in the French countryside. All run-down of course but, with a little imagination, some hard work and a basic understanding of French bureaucracy you could end up with a stunning house in beautiful and unspoiled country. The upkeep and the bottomless pit of money you needed to keep it going were just a silly notion and really nothing whatsoever to do with us. At the time we moved here I worked for an English estate agent and though the commission was not really enough to make a living, I built up a good working relationship with a number of the local tradesmen. Eamon’s earnings were very good for the area but I’ve never been the type of person to sit around all day and do very little. He suggested that I give up work as he was earning enough to keep both of us but that was not for me. For years I had harboured thoughts of becoming a police officer and that desire to join the force became a bit of a continuous theme in my life; I still believe that one day it will happen.
Before long, and with my French getting better every day, I became project manager for many of the British who bought second homes in the region.
There was a great buzz then surrounding the whole of the property scene in France and there really were some fantastic bargains that offered genuine opportunities for buying into an alternative lifestyle. They Brits surprised me when they turned up not even knowing how to ask for a beer – well perhaps just a beer – and simply expected the local Maries to speak English. But that was to my advantage and I suddenly found myself going from wondering what to do all day to finding myself very much in demand. The downfall, however, was that the mill was put on the back-burner for a few years, but I was able to learn my trade at the expense of others so that when I did eventually get around to doing our own home I already had the advantage of dealing with French property and building regulations, which I would advise anyone to steer
clear of.
But the idea of starting an English and German magazine for the new influx of home-owners surprised all of us with its popularity. We didn’t have the benefit of the internet then so hours had to be spent proofreading and cutting and pasting in every sense of the words. I have to say, though, that it was not all down to me. I had the best illustrator and artist on hand and absolutely free of charge – well, my daughter Sally could hardly charge me for her work and nor could my lover for his translating skills. Obviously it was going to succeed. There was such a demand for the communication skills then, and the French are a rather nepotistic bunch, so I already had the upper hand.
Sally really was a great help when we set the magazine up. She has a magic eye for detail and colour, and did some really fabulous illustrations, which I have to admit I have shamefully reaped the rewards for. But she is my daughter and one day what’s mine and Eamon’s will be hers.
Okay, so it makes me seem insincere and selfish but I do consider myself to be very lucky indeed and it’s a long way from when we lived in London and I worked for one of the large clearing banks. Life was so very different then – I sometimes wonder whether or not it was just a dream. Or worse, that one day I’ll wake up and find that this is the dream. I really do not want to and probably could not cope again with the frustration and degradation of driving through crowded, dirty streets. I still love London and enjoy the architecture and the arts and the history. But there are just too many people now – much more than a few years ago – and I find it a total obstacle course simply walking along the pavement.
But for the moment I am in France and all is well. It’s eighteen years since Eamon and I began to share home, life and love together, and our beautiful daughter is Sally.
I refer to her as our daughter – not through any genetic miracle or a complicated arrangement with a surrogate mother. She is my flesh and blood but over the years Eamon has proved himself to be the perfect parent and we constantly correct people if they refer to us as Sally’s father and his friend. Eamon is as proud of her as I am.
She’s now twenty-two years old and at university in La Rochelle on the beautiful east coast and training to be an art teacher. Eamon and I were aware she was gifted at drawing and painting when she was eight years old and we encouraged her as much as possible. We were not the type of parents who would force a child into doing something they did not want or mould them into someone they had not decided to be for themselves. An easy and common mistake to make which I believe many parents make. We still have many of the paintings and drawings dotted about the house she did as a child. We refer to them as our insurance and pension that will look after us in our twilight years. Many boozy evenings have been spent telling her what must be done with the vast fortune the paintings will fetch and how Eamon and I will need to be looked after, preferably by an expensive and handsome male nurse. Sally would have to recite the instructions in both French and English so there could be no mistake. She would often have a friend with her and I think some of them were unsure as to whether or not we really meant it or we were just nuts. The sight of two fully grown gay men, a little plastered and making fools of themselves, was possibly a worrying sight for some of them.
We always looked forward to those evenings.
I think it’s the cheaper wine and cheeses which caused many of these slightly embarrassing evenings.
Every few months we return to England to see the respective families but mainly to freshen up Maggie’s grave.
Maggie, my precious, darling Maggie was my wife and Sally’s natural mother. She still is my wife and always will be but she died when Sally was only two years old. My biggest regret is that Sally never knew her mother though we have spent many, many hours talking about her. I think there can be nothing about Maggie that Sally does not know. But I still wish that she was available, not only now but particularly when Sally became a teenager and all the problems that brought.
Maggie was my childhood sweetheart – an old-fashioned saying I like to use and find really rather warming. We’d known each other since we were twelve years old and from the first day at secondary school. I was in love with her from the moment I saw her in the corridor of Blue House, our home school team. To me she was a woman at that age and my heart started skipping beats from the moment she walked into the classroom. She appeared much more mature than the other girls though we didn’t really get to know each other well until we were thirteen. Our non-descript uniform looked stunning on her – always sharp and well fitted. She had dark, curly hair which sat neatly on her shoulders and a few little freckles that were quite dark and appealing. All I wanted to do was look at her all day but I couldn’t – my classmates would have seen me as a sad loser, nutter, screwball, wanker or tosser, so I pretended to ignore her presence.
To her, I was just a spotty, snotty-nosed little boy just into long trousers, and, though I was a full eight months older than her, I often acted as if I was just eight years old. It wasn’t really surprising that she thought of me that way as I gave her every reason to. On one occasion in a biology class, we covered menstruation. Not a good topic for a class of nine girls and fourteen boys who had just discovered puberty. I sat at the back of the class with some friends and we were splitting our sides at some of the things the teacher was saying. It was when the word “period” was mentioned that the uproar started and from then on everything else that was said was meant for our sole amusement and laughter. After the class, Maggie and some of her friends confronted us boys in the corridor and informed us that we were juvenile, delinquent shits and it was time we grew up.
That was a major turning point in my life. I was devastated that the icon of my dreams, the woman that the word love was invented for, thought of me as another mindless moron in a boys’ playgroup. I felt torn, abandoned, my life in ruins. At that moment I needed to throw my arms around her and declare my undying love.
But I didn’t.
I greeted her outburst with lavatorial abuse like the other boys but, inside, I died. She was right of course and it was after that incident that I decided I needed to grow up and act like the fully mature thirteen year old that, not in a million years, could I ever have been. But I was one of the first boys in my group to start growing hair around my genitals so I considered myself destined to come of age much sooner than the others. A clear message from the gods, no doubt.
With my new-found maturity Maggie and I ended up playing the lead roles in our school play and it was soon after that we started dating, if that is a term you can use for two thirteen year olds. I had the usual feelings for her – wanting to cup her breasts, fondle her thighs and rub the inside of her legs, though she never seemed to be interested in doing the same for me. Still, we fiddled about with each other at the back of cinemas, snogged, French kissed, drank cider, etc. And the fights and the rows? My God, they were intense and earth shattering. “But exactly how much do you love me?” and always “I saw you looking at her like that.” We never did get to the bottom of exactly what “that” really was. She could never grasp that I had to maintain a reputation with my peers.
We staggered through our teens from crisis to crisis but we discovered the New Seekers and then found a new vocation. They were quickly to become our idols – we followed them everywhere, had all their records, knew every word of every one of their songs and began to dress like them. It somehow seemed to stop us arguing. We just wanted to teach the world to sing.
It was immaturity that made us get married at nineteen and it somehow just seemed inevitable. Our respective parents had, by that time, become accustomed to each other and, for the most part, got along well. They did not live near each other or socialise but they met occasionally at a school function or spoke on the phone. That was before we announced we were to be wed and it was then that the feuds started. It was perfectly acceptable for me to have a teenage relationship with their only daughter. But I was not a possible candidate for a future son-in-law even though I did manage to get a jo
b in a bank with a great deal of potential. Maggie’s mother was a typing-pool supervisor and her father a shipping manager for an export firm. They also owned their own house and that immediately set the cat among the pigeons with my family as anyone who owned their house was obviously posh and we could never be in their league.
As for my family, Maggie was not good enough and her family clearly had misguided political views as well as the posh gene. I lived in a council house and had two sisters and two brothers. My parents were confirmed Catholic hypocrites who drank out of Party Seven cans and cheap sherry bottles. They smoked Embassy Number Six or Number Ten cigarettes and collected Green Shield Stamps. All the neighbours around us owned their own houses and our front garden was full of cast-off bikes and pushchairs so we were clearly the family from hell. We were seen as quite undesirable and unlikely to amount to much. We also had that dreadful affliction that the family originally came from Ireland so there was no hope.
However, and as in all the best love stories, their views were ignored and we were married in a registry office in Richmond. They disapproved and pointed out how we were being selfish and thinking of nobody but ourselves. Wasn’t that the whole idea? My father suggested about a hundred times that we were only doing it because Maggie was pregnant, which certainly was not the case. They dug their heels in and swore they would not attend the ceremony but appeared on the day in all the glitz and shoulder pads they could muster or hire and pretended to be happy. Maggie and I had asked a school friend if we could hire the function room above her father’s pub. They agreed and let us have it for free as a wedding gift. The respective families were then asked to contribute the same amount to the festivities, which they did but you would not have thought so with the underlying bitchiness. With the families split down the room, Maggie and I sat in the middle and played the role of arbitrator for each camp. We enjoyed it though – and even though some would say there were too many New Seekers’ records, we simply didn’t care.
Luck was on our side then.
We moved into a larger than average flat in Stoke Newington, which had three bedrooms, a huge high-ceilinged living room which led into a galley kitchen, and a garden. It was the basement and ground floor of a large Victorian house close to Clissold Park and much bigger than we needed. The rent was ridiculously cheap and owned by the old woman that lived above us. Mrs Brown was rather eccentric and turned out to be a bit of an alcoholic. We never understood why she had not taken the ground floor for herself but said she needed the exercise of walking up and down the stairs. She always seemed to have a glass of Guinness on the go. She also had a cat called Mingo and constantly referred to her as the pussy, so the Mrs Slocombe jokes became well worn. She was lovely and genuine and a perfect landlady who really only wanted us there for company and to stop her very eighties and Filofax-wielding daughter from getting her hands on the house. We got along with Mrs Brown very well.
Soon after we married the bank moved me to their foreign exchange department and began grooming me for better things, though it was not reflected in the salary, which was reasonable but not excessive. Maggie was working as a laboratory technician for the health service and though both of us were not earning a fortune, her careful budgeting ensured we did not get into any debt. We had a good social life and a wide circle of friends, most of whom were single.
Our daughter Sally was born eighteen months after we married. The respective parents were delighted. She was to be the only grandchild on Maggie’s side and the first of many on mine, thanks to the gallant efforts of my brothers and sisters. Like most couples we had not intended to have children so soon but it happened and there she was.
We were so proud.
They were happy days and often quite a struggle financially, as we soon learnt that babies are everything except cheap. Maggie and I had the usual ups and downs as do all relationships and though we argued over just about everything, the one thing we never argued over was sex. She could take it or leave it and it never seemed to give her the type of pleasure it appeared to give some of her friends. She found the rituals a little tiresome but enjoyed the closeness of two bodies lying next to each other. I also was not too concerned about the sex and when I look back now and analyse it to any extent I think I may have been missing something in the physiological department but was not sure what it was. I think I may have simply put it down to lack of experience.
When I was sixteen years old and during one of the many, many incidents of “trial separation” that seemed to resolve the various rows, I went to visit my uncle in the West Country. On my way back I had a brief sexual encounter with a twenty-two-year-old student named Matthew. He picked me up while I was hitch-hiking and I (innocently) thought he was just a nice, friendly guy. He took me to his flat in Muswell Hill where we had sex together, though I use that term rather loosely. It was different, exciting and a little dangerous and “on the edge”, as I thought of it, but not really what I wanted. The episode was quite harmless and only really consisted of some mutual masturbation which I had either done on my own or while watching a porn film with a friend. I didn’t feel guilty and I think it was because there was no kissing involved. Had there been then I don’t think I would have been mature enough to handle it because the subject of sexuality would have had to be considered and that was where I certainly was not.
I told Maggie about the incident after we had got back together again for the umpteenth time. She was surprised at first, rather than shocked, and even a little jealous. We talked about it in depth after a bottle of Chianti and she then confessed that she had a fantasy of being swept off her feet by Mrs Russell, our gym teacher, and would not have considered it twice. Of course she swore me to secrecy and we never mentioned the episodes again.
Looking back I think Maggie and I had a very mature attitude to sex and I suspect it all stemmed from the fact that at school we had spent a few months working on a special project about the persecution of Jews, homosexuals and other minorities during the Second World War. We both agreed that persecution and discrimination could not be tolerated in any community and those views turned us into perfect socialists, though our morals were often ditched when it came to dealing with the local authorities and how they were spending our money.
But, my dear reader, I’m rambling on now. It’s the effect of the early sun and I do have an important and frightening story to tell which is not glamorous and shows just how quickly your life can be turned upside down. It shows how one day, without knowing it, you step out of your ordered, organised and predictable lives and find yourself in one of those very dark places. We all occupy different worlds and, generally, or for the most part, we get along and go about our business. But sometimes those worlds collide, as in my case, and I went from a middle-class bank worker in North London with a young child to a world of pornography, drugs, embezzlement, violence and (sadly) murder. Even now I find it hard to believe – was it really part of my life?
I’ll just pour another glass of cider and move into the shade.