My Grape Escape Read online

  Published by Grape Books

  Copyright 2013 Laura Bradbury

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For more information contact Grape Books, 523 Oliver Street, Victoria British Columbia V8S 4W2, Canada.

  ISBN: 978-0-9921583-1-6

  Visit: www. laurabradbury. com

  À mon pirate et mes trois princesses, avec tout mon amour.

  Prologue

  Seconds after the little stone farmhouse - now officially ours - came into view my husband spoke. “Do you still refuse to believe in the Virgin Mary?”

  I pressed my forehead against the rain-splattered window of the Citroën and took a closer look. The hollyhocks that had been in full bloom on the day of the sale were a distant memory and dark stains of humidity crept up the stucco. My hand found Franck’s fingers. A section of the drainpipe had come loose - or maybe had been loose all along and we just hadn’t noticed during the indigo days of summer. Water gushed down the corner of the house.

  “So do you?” Franck nodded towards the village’s 12th century church across the street which housed a 16th century wood statue of this much revered lady. The Virgin of Magny-les-Villers was hardly as well known as the Virgin of Lourdes but it was rumoured among the villagers that she performed miracles all the same.

  “I spent the last two years at Oxford being trained as a lawyer not a mystic,” I replied. “Remember?”

  “I remember.” Franck’s lips pressed together the way they did every time we discussed my law degree but his thumb caressed my palm. “Perhaps you would have been better off learning how to pray.”

  The car splashed through puddles the size of small lakes as we wound out of the village – our village now – of Magny-les-Villers and drove down the dip towards Villers-la-Faye. My plans didn’t appear in quite the same idyllic light here in Burgundy as they did a continent and an ocean away in Vancouver.

  “I can differentiate between a joint tenant and tenants in common and describe the mechanics of a discretionary trust.”

  “How exactly is that going to help us fix the stone steps?” He squeezed my hand. “Non. I need to teach you how to pray.”

  Pray? With the exception of that moment of insanity six months earlier that had propelled us down this uncharted road, I had been brought up to believe in strategy and hard work. I did not, like my husband and many of his fellow Burgundians, eschew logic in favour of miracles performed by ancient wooden statues.

  “I don’t need to become a Catholic,” I said. “We just need to get organized and -”

  “You saw the same thing I did out of the car window, didn’t you?”

  “You mean our house?”

  “Oui. ”

  “Of course I did, but as I said, it will only take - ”

  “Divine intervention. That’s the only way we’re going to get that house ready by May.”

  I sank deeper in my seat. Granted, it was the dead of winter and we had exactly four months and ten days to prepare our house before the first group of holidaymakers arrived. We had a budget that covered around twenty per cent of the needed renovations with virtually no wiggle room for surprises. Franck had argued time and time again that, while houses like ours built in 1789 could never guarantee running water or even a single ninety degree angle, one thing they did guarantee was surprises. He hadn’t been alluding to Roman coins hidden under the stairs but rather rotting walls and leaking septic tanks.

  I pressed my forehead against the window again. The vines alongside the road were bare; only a scattering of workers hunched over them in vast rubber capes, miserable in the sheeting rain. We had a predicament. Worse yet, I knew it was entirely my fault.

  “Talk to me about miracles,” I said finally.

  Chapter 1

  Six months earlier I had hopped off the London train and landed on the platform in Beaune. We thought we’d be in Burgundy for a brief rest with Franck’s family, a time for me to recover from the stress of my final law exams at Oxford.

  Franck insisted I wait and let him deal with the luggage. The air smelled of wheat fields warmed by the sun and I felt my nerves untangle the tiniest bit. Franck shook his black hair from his eyes as he effortlessly heaved my eight suitcases down to the platform. I secretly marveled that I was actually married to this dashing Frenchman.

  He waved at someone behind me and I turned to see his father André blanch as he caught sight of our fortification of luggage. Franck gave him a quick kiss on each cheek and then sped off in search of a much-needed cart or three. I considered justifying the number of suitcases but, though my French was excellent, I knew that when it came right down to it a reasonable explanation did not exist.

  Franck and I had married in a miniscule Roman church in Burgundy the summer before; I was now officially André’s daughter-in-law, but I knew I was still an unnerving presence for my quiet-spoken beau-père. There were too many things about me that smacked of my North American-ness: my need for long showers, lengthy phone conversations with my family back home, and, of course, travelling with ten times more stuff than a person actually required.

  Despite any misgivings, André kissed me on each cheek and waited by my side, studiously avoiding any mention of my suitcases. Instead, he queried about the weather in Oxford and my recently passed exams.

  Finally Franck reappeared, sans cart.

  He clicked his tongue. “They’ve all been stolen.”

  I never had been able to comprehend the French compulsion to steal strange objects such as luggage carts and toilet seats just for the pure anarchist joy of thieving.

  “We will just have to carry them ourselves,” Franck said.

  The final vestige of colour leeched from André’s cheeks.

  André watched in horror and I in awe as Franck, in an epic display of muscles and determination, attempted to shoehorn our luggage into André’s compact Citroën.

  Our intense and tenacious courtship should have tipped me off to my husband’s inability to accept the word “impossible”. We met on a blind date during the year I spent exploring the cafés of Beaune as a high school exchange student. He was four years older than I, a graduate of the Sorbonne, with flashing hazel eyes. I was the girl who had a surfeit of male friends but rarely an actual boyfriend. All at once a fairy tale romance became a defining part of my life.

  This filled me with as much unease as it did wonder. I worried that any day fate would determine there had been a celestial mix-up. I hadn’t earned Franck, particularly not during the past two years; I was the type of person who had to earn things.

  “Et voilà!” Franck wedged the final suitcase in and stood back to admire his handiwork.

  André ushered us into the car and we began to drive up towards the bright green vineyards of Franck’s beloved Hautes-Côtes. I perched in the back on top of two suitcases, my head brushing the roof of the car. Franck rolled down the window to better breathe in his return home.

  I had fallen madly in love with him from the moment he gave me the traditional bises on each cheek on the night we first met. I still loved him as much as I always had but I had spent my two years at Oxford buried under case books in the Bodleian Law Library while Franck zoomed back and forth to Paris on the Eurostar, taking society photos for the Moët et Chandon champagne company in Paris. We kept telling each other that we would have time to reconnect as soon as I walked out of my last final exam with the traditional red carnation in my buttonhole.

  That moment had now come and gone.

  Two days after we arrived, I was curled up in a ball on the bed in F
ranck’s old bedroom, tucked away under the roof tiles and massive oak beams of chez Germain, his parents’ stone house. Through the skylight above me a cloud shaped like an axe drifted by in an otherwise cornflower blue June sky.

  We had been eating a delicious lunch of poulet au madère under the wisteria in the courtyard when my throat suddenly closed up. I had escaped from everyone at the lunch table so that I could be alone. I muttered something about stomach flu, staggered upstairs and collapsed on Franck’s bed.

  This wasn’t my first panic attack - unfortunately. They had started a few weeks after I had begun my classes at Oxford. My grip on Franck’s checked blue duvet tightened.

  I had lain on this bed with Franck before, about two months after we first met. Our clothes had been more off than on when a whooshing noise above distracted me from our after lunch sieste. Franck was still preoccupied but I nudged him until he finally looked up. Then the pane of his skylight was obscured by scarlet fabric and we sat up, what little duvet we had over us falling away. The swath of red gave way to the faces of six hot-air balloon passengers out for a float over Burgundy’s vineyards. They peered down at us through the skylight. Franck and I dived under the duvet and laughed until we couldn’t breathe anymore.

  That girl felt like someone I had not ever met before.

  Now every muscle and tendon in my body reverberated from the effort of not giving in to the encroaching fear.

  A cloud the shape of a staircase floated past. I had no choice but to keep going. I had to get into the Master’s program at Oxford and then become a solicitor in London. Up. Up. Up. That had always been my life plan. My panic attacks couldn’t be caused by anything exterior, I was certain. The strategy for my life remained perfectly sound - wealthy and successful London lawyers didn’t have panic attacks. If I climbed the ladder of success high enough I would be safe, like in a childhood game of tag.

  Franck’s head ducked under the huge beam that framed the small passageway to his room. He came over and sat beside my curled form on the bed.

  “Attaque de panique?” he asked and smoothed my hair away from my forehead.

  I nodded, not wanting to burden him with my irrational terrors but at the same time feeling soothed by his presence.

  “I thought they would go away when your exams were finished. ” His fingers traced the lines of my jaw and circled around my left ear.

  “So did I.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come down? There is Époisses on the cheese platter. ”

  I lifted up my head slightly and rested it on his thigh. The waves of anxiety receded and my stubbornness surged in to take its place. I couldn’t…I wouldn’t let it win.

  “What will I tell your family?”

  “You don’t need to tell them anything. In France it isn’t unusual to leave the table because of a malaise and then come back. ”

  “Really?”

  He shook his head, pulled me up and gave me a kiss. “Did I ever tell you the story of my mother’s cousin Suzette who had to be carried off in a stretcher because of heart problems during an epic meal at her house?”

  I laughed. “Seriously? Was she OK?”

  “Not only was she OK, she made it back in time for the choux à la crème for dessert. ”

  Chapter 2

  It was ten days later when, hand in hand, Franck and I walked through the frosty vineyards to meet our new nephew.

  I couldn’t believe that Franck’s younger sister Stéphanie was actually a mother. She was only my age, twenty-five. Until then I had been the one to sally forth into new experiences: university in Montréal, volunteering in Nepal, law school at Oxford. But she had trumped me with this motherhood thing.

  Stéphanie was one of the first people I met in France; she had orchestrated that initial blind date between Franck and I. She’d been telling me for months that I needed to meet her older brother, but I kept protesting that I was seeing someone else. This “someone else” was actually a guy I made out with furtively at every opportunity even though he didn’t want us to be publicly known as boyfriend and girlfriend. Still, I had my pride, dammit. Only desperate people agreed to be set up on blind dates.

  Stéphanie plunged ahead regardless of my protests and organized a soirée at a local discothèque with her brother, our mutual friend Sandrine, and one or two other friends from their village. I almost didn’t show up at the appointed time on the main street of Nuits-Saint-Georges. The day before, I had come down with a sore throat and a runny nose. Seducing a total stranger was not high on my list of priorities.

  Stéphanie leapt out of the car with her habitual verve, cigarette in hand. When she swung her shiny black hair out of her face and kissed me, I couldn’t mistake the mischievous expression on her face.

  Franck followed closely on her heels. His cheeky smile struck me first. He seemed to know that I would have preferred to stay at home (at that time I was living with a host family right beside the church in Nuits-Saint-Georges) but he was having none of such spiritless behaviour. He hadn’t uttered a word, yet his eyes gleamed with a dare to join them.

  I gave him the traditional bises on each cheek. He was cleanly shaven and his olive skin smelled vaguely of apples and wood chips. I hadn’t expected Stéphanie’s brother to be so handsome. Devilishly handsome. The cliché popped into my head out of nowhere, but I had to admit that with his lean muscles, chiselled facial bones and those flashing, almond shaped eyes it was accurate. My pride bolstered me up even as my heart sank. Men like Franck were invariably bad news.

  I stepped back and cocked an appraising eyebrow. “I’ve heard a lot about you,” I said.

  Franck’s brows flew up for a split, but gratifying, second. He laughed. “Bon. I guess I have a lot to live up to.”

  “I guess you do.”

  Franck took my hand and pulled me down into the backseat of the car beside him.

  We had all changed in the past eight years. Stéphanie had dropped her prodigious smoking habit and her wild ways and was now the mother of a little boy named Tom. As for that daring girl I had been, I missed her.

  Tom’s birth had been rough - a protracted labour followed by an emergency C-section. Stéphanie and Tom had just been released from the hospital that very morning. I still found it odd to be descending on new parents for a drink, but Franck insisted that it was an absolute obligation to “arroser la naissance du petit” with a kir.

  “Stéph must be exhausted,” I said as we passed a tiny chapel housing only a statue of the Virgin Mary strategically positioned in the vineyards mid-way between the two villages of Magny-les-Villers and Villers-la-Faye. “Surely they just want some privacy?”

  Franck cast me an odd look that made me realize, even before he spoke, that my view was the polar opposite of how a Burgundian would think.

  “It’s good luck to drink to the baby’s health. They would be disappointed if nobody showed up.” Franck’s index finger twitched on his right hand – his smoking hand. He’d given up his daily package of cigarettes ten months ago but I could always tell from that finger twitch when a craving struck. “When we have kids we’ll probably be in England, so you won’t have to worry that everyone will reciprocate.”

  He didn’t quite manage to hide the longing in his voice. Children. Franck was ready for them and had been for at least two years. I wanted them too - eventually - but I still had so much climbing to do before we embarked on that journey.

  We walked up the gravel path to Stéphanie and Thierry’s house. The steeple of Magny-les-Villers’ church was painted silver with frost. Its bell reverberated four times as it rang the hour. The more delicate bell of the village hall echoed it a minute later.

  Stéphanie opened their front door. Her green eyes sported dark circles and her hair hung limp down her back, but a deep sense of contentment glowed underneath the fatigue. A wave of jealousy washed over me. I longed for the bliss she was feeling – the bliss I thought I had earned by finishing my final exams.

  I kiss
ed both her and Thierry, stuttered out my felicitations, then quickly took a spot on a floor cushion in front of the roaring fireplace.

  Thierry, his face red with a mixture of pride and the drinks with the numerous visitors who had apparently beaten us to the punch, poured us all a celebratory kir. Stéphanie brought Tom over and settled in on the couch near us by the fire to nurse him, promising we could hold and admire him after he had been fed. Thierry hopped up to stoke the fire so neither of them would be cold and Stéphanie laughed at his fussing. My own life, steeped in the stress of grades and academia, seemed so sterile in comparison.

  I looked up to see Stéphanie thrusting Tom into my arms. She didn’t notice how badly my hands were shaking. I clutched my nephew against my chest, certain that I was going to drop him otherwise. He lay there like a limpet, undisturbed by the confusion roaring underneath my breastbone. His clearly etched half-moon brows were the same colour as his thatch of black hair.

  “It suits you to have a baby in your arms!” Stéphanie said. “When are you going to give him a cousin?” She planted a kiss on Thierry’s mouth. Tom began to squirm and chirp like a discontented bird.

  Stéphanie leaned over me and plucked him out of my arms. “Are you hungry again petit monstre?” I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed his warmth and weight against me until it was gone. Without Tom to distract me, the panic began to crush me beneath its heel again. Now that all the hard work of my law degree was completed, where was my contentment?

  The next morning I didn’t wake up with the sudden courage to veer off the planned course of my life. By the time I went to sleep that night, however, I was – much to my surprise - forty thousand dollars richer.

  It all began with a phone call to my parents. I wasn’t even calling about money. I was calling because I thought I was going crazy.