She grinned. ‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the keys. ‘If it’s OK though, I think I’d like to have a look by myself. ‘Um… par moi-même.’
He nodded, understanding. ‘But if you are sure,’ he said. ‘And I am sorry for le jardin. It is not in a good state, eh? But the plants they grow too fast en été, um, in le summer. And the ’ouse, it has been on sales for many years. I forget for a month or more and poof! Le jardin devient une forêt!’
‘Yes, j’imagine,’ she said, worried at the fact that apparently, there had been no other interest in the property. Which didn’t bode well. But then, renovation projects weren’t for everyone, she reassured herself.
‘But, I can ’elp, yes?’ he continued. ‘My friend, he is a farmer. He can come wiv eez tondeuse – the machine for le grass cutting, yes? He will come and you will ’ave no more jungle, huh?’ He smiled, mimicking someone chopping down excess foliage with a scythe. Or at least, that’s what she decided he was doing, after feeling slightly confused at his dance-like movements.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘De rien, it iz nothing,’ he said, with yet another upward lift of his shoulders. ‘It is normale. I weel speak to ’im today and tell you when he come.’
‘Thank you. And I can pay, of course. I have… it’s no problem.’
He shook his head. ‘No, it is good.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘And don’t worry. It iz a good house, yes? It was my grandmother’s.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry, I…’
‘No, she is still ’ere,’ he said. ‘She is not died. Just… she go to an ’ome.’
‘Right.’
‘And it iz not… this was ’er second property,’ he clarified. ‘She live in Toulouse, but when she come to see uz, she stay in de house.’
‘Ah, right.’
‘She does not come for many, many years now. Her ’ealth is not good. So, the ’ouse… it is crying… It – how you say – needs some ’elp to be better? And then since three years she ask me to sell it for ’er. But it is not easy. Then I try l’internet and ’ere you are. Someone to give the ’ouse a new life, eh? I tell my grandmother and she iz very ’appy.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’
He nodded at her. ‘I ’ope you will like it,’ he said. ‘It is not perfect, huh? But the price, it is good.’
‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Yes, very good.’
‘I will go to work now, but if you need… my number iz ’ere.’ He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and scribbled down a mobile number. ‘You call, yes? If there is a un problème?’ That smile again.
‘Merci, oui,’ she replied, then carefully added: ‘Si j’ai une problème…’ If I have a problem.
‘Un problème,’ he corrected. ‘Problems, they are male, yes?’
She smiled. ‘OK.’ At least, she thought, the French had got that one right.
‘And les solutions, in French they are female,’ he said, smiling.
She laughed. ‘Well, not always,’ she said.
They stood for a minute in companionable silence, which suddenly became awkward. She jangled the keys purposefully. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I’d better be… you know.’
‘OK, Madame Buttercup.’
‘It’s Lily.’
‘OK, Lilee. I weel see you later. And call me, yes? For any problèmes you need?’
‘I will.’
It took twenty-five minutes and two wrong turns to find her way to Broussas again. Once in the small hamlet, she quickly found the house that she’d just deposited her redundancy money on. She’d have to clear her savings account to cover the rest of the cost; the remainder of the small inheritance her mum had left when she’d passed. ‘Well, I hope it’s going to be money well spent, Mum,’ she said quietly as she pulled up in front of the house and looked again at its overgrown garden.
Not for the first time in the eight years since her mum had died, she wished she could pick up the phone and get some advice. Mum wouldn’t have had much to say about France – she’d been a homebody like Ben and had never felt the urge to up sticks and move somewhere completely different. But she would have known what to say in the moment, how to bring Lily’s determination to the fore.
She thought about calling David – but a quick check of her watch and a mental calculation put paid to that idea. It would be early evening in Australia and her brother would be busy putting the twins to bed. They rarely called each other; she didn’t have the right to ring for advice out of the blue during the busiest time of his day.
And, of course, she no longer had Ben to talk to.
She sat for a moment, looking through the windscreen at the pair of stone cottages. The day had become unseasonably cloudy, and the location looked less appealing under shadow. She wondered, suddenly, what it would be like in November, and January. She’d only ever really pictured it in the summer.
But, she thought, unclicking her seat belt, sitting here feeling sorry for herself was not going to help matters. This – or a version of it at least – had been her dream for over half her life. She owed it to herself to see it through for better or worse.
She climbed out of the driver’s seat, clutching the set of keys – there were about twenty of them, all different sizes and she wondered whether they were all still relevant. Or whether, in fact, Frédérique had given her the wrong set and this ridiculous bunch fitted the locks at the local church or town hall or something.
She brandished them before her as she tackled the overgrown path – slightly easier this time after the partial gaps cleared by her venturing down there yesterday. Still, she ended up with more than her fair share of stings and leaf stain by the time she reached the front door. Her front door.
Then, swallowing hard, she put the key in the lock.
Five minutes later, she was still at the front door, sweating and swearing as she rotated the set of keys again and selected another candidate. ‘Come on,’ she said, shoving it into the lock; more like the lock on a prison door than a house, she thought. But finally, it slid into place and turned and suddenly she was able to push the heavy wooden door forward and step into the house for the very first time.
Ten minutes later, she was leaning against a wooden dresser in the kitchen, phone clamped to her ear.
‘How’s it going?’ Emily said, cutting to the chase.
‘I’m not sure, actually,’ she said, her voice thick with tears once again. The phone felt sticky against her hot face.
‘What’s up, Lily? Has something happened?’
‘It’s… well, I’ve signed for the house,’ she said with an enormous sniff. ‘Paid the deposit and everything.’
‘Right?’
‘And now… I mean, I’m in it for the first time… and…’
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh, nothing. Well, everything. I don’t know… des problèmes…’ she said.
‘Lily, you’re not making sense,’ said her friend. ‘What’s the matter?’
She explained to Emily how she’d walked through the house noticing dangling wires and peeling wallpaper, smelling the damp and neglect and forlorn emptiness. How the parquet floors that had shimmered in the online photographs were scuffed and in need of polishing when inspected close up. How the kitchen simply consisted of a dresser and an enormous porcelain sink that was chipped and contained a pool of rust-coloured water. How she hadn’t been able to set foot in the back garden for fear of getting lost in the tangle of brambles and weeds. ‘Some of them are about six foot tall,’ she said. ‘How am I meant to even begin to tackle that?’
Upstairs, she’d found one old, tired metal bedstead that looked like an ancient (possibly haunted) relic, and three empty rooms, each of which needed more than a little TLC to make them passable. The windows were old, and several panels were damaged or cracked.
‘So it’s a shithole?’ Emily said. ‘You’ve bought a dud, is that it? Because I’m sure we can… there must be recourse, even if you have paid a deposit… there must…’
‘No, it’s not that,’ she said. Because despite the musty wallpaper and dangling wires and curiously plumbed in toilet, the cracked windowpanes, missing roof tiles, scuffed wooden floors and pretty much absent kitchen, she was utterly in love with the place – or the place it could be, given a little time, money and elbow grease. She’d expected renovations, plumbing issues, faulty shutters. And she was able to look through these problems, to see the house underneath that could be stripped and repaired and polished and refitted and brought back to life.
It was all doable.
‘Actually, it’s beautiful… I mean, it’s not a ch?teau, and it’s certainly only just habitable, if that, at the moment,’ she said. ‘But I’m not completely insane…’
‘Well, that’s debatable.’
‘Hey! Well, I’m not. I’m not crazy enough to believe that you can snap up a house for forty k and discover it’s a fully renovated dream home. I’ve bought a shell. But it’s a good shell. I mean, there are parquet floors. Real parquet floors, Emily!’