French Leave Page 3

  As for that community centre nearby … it wasn’t that near, was it? The Saturday-night parties wouldn’t be audible, would they? Of course not! The French are so quiet, their idea of a party would be the Irish idea of a nap.

  Then, of course, there was that nuclear power station. Ten kilometres away, but, still, not exactly a selling point. I reminded myself firmly of a friend’s comment: ‘But if it blows, you won’t know anything about it! You’ll be gone. Normandy will be gone. Most of Kent, Sussex, Brittany, Picardy and probably all of Belgium will be gone – so, don’t worry about it!’

  All right, then. I wouldn’t worry about it. Especially as I had yet to learn that Normandy does worry about it, issuing iodine pastilles to all the local residents so that they don’t choke on their tongues when – er, if – it does finally implode.

  Which only left the gas tank, buried in the back garden. This was definitely ringing alarm bells. Over the years, the news from France had been frequently punctuated by gas explosions. Boum! A Lille apartment block! Boum! A Burgundy bank! Boum! A Biarritz hospital! Whatever official was in charge of explosions seemed to rotate them democratically around the country, albeit sadly failing to achieve the one everyone actually longed for … boum! A Paris tax office!

  Would the next one have my name on it? Boum! A tiny Normandy hamlet? Foolhardy Irish optimist meets maker? Oh well, whatever would be, would be. After all, 9/11 demonstrated the folly of thinking oneself safe anywhere, even in steel-and-chrome, state-of-the-art Manhattan.

  Nibbling my knuckles, I thought and thought, staring over the lovely tranquil lake. The lovely deserted lake. Where was everybody? Did they know something I didn’t? For a nation credited with such a high sex drive, the French are not exactly thick on the ground. Maybe they were all crouching down in their basements, glued to the sudden news about the nuclear station? Serenely, a flotilla of ducks glided by as I pondered the dilemma and I gazed at them, wondering if maybe they could, uh, quack it?

  Eventually, through the silence, the sound of engines began to throb in my inner ear. I could all but hear the engines of that plane, revving for take-off, departing for Dublin without me. If I wasn’t on it, I might never get my redundancy, my ‘parole’. Buying a house is not normally something to be rushed, but it was crunch time. Taking a breath, taking the plunge, I dug out my mobile phone and punched the digits.

  ‘Pierre Yves? It’s me. Oh, you can tell? My accent? Well, I’ve reached a decision. I’m buying that house. Yes, now. I’ll be round to your office with the deposit in ten minutes.’

  Pierre Yves was the estate agent who’d shown me the house just before Natalie did. A stocky chap with fluent English and a rugby-player’s build, he was friendly, candid and locally respected by all accounts. Sheer luck had led me to him, and I liked him.

  He sounded puzzled. ‘But what about the surveyor? The attic floor?’

  ‘Pierre Yves, that surveyor was trying to do what so many men try to do to so many women – bamboozle me. He wanted me to build a house with the building company he works for. If there was really any problem with that attic, you’d know, wouldn’t you? The current owners would know. You would tell me, wouldn’t you, so that there would be no subsequent little legal problems?’

  That’ll flush him out, I thought, if he’s withholding any vital information. (This was in the days before disclosure legislation.) But he laughed.

  ‘Yes, I would! My good reputation is essential to my business. But I assure you, there is no need to worry. The attic conversion was done by a reputable local builder who guarantees it for ten years.’

  ‘Right. Then we have a deal. See you toot sweet.’

  At last, the search was over. I wafted into Pierre Yves’s office expecting to find him singing Douce France, maybe even waving a congratulatory bouquet of roses and a chilled bottle of champagne. Instead, a stack of papers sat on his desk. Not excessive, by French standards, not more than a couple of hundred. Let’s whizz through them then, before I miss that plane!

  ‘Alors, juste une petite signature.’ Beaming, he produced a pen and I got to work, swiftly grasping the situation. ‘Une petite signature’ is French for ‘This will take hours. This is designed to defeat foreigners, to send off all but the most resolutely masochistic, swearing never to darken French soil again’. Doggedly, I signed, and signed, and signed.

  ‘And now, about the transfer.’

  Transfer? As in a Wayne Rooney, Manchester United sort of thing?

  ‘The money. The price of the house.’

  Oh. Yes, well, here’s a deposit. I’ll zap the rest over from Ireland as soon as I sort my redundancy deal and make arrangements with the bank.

  ‘Zap? Madame, are you sure you have entirely grasped the nature of this transaction?’

  He gazed at me imploringly, and for a terrible moment I faltered. Actually, Donald Duck might have a firmer grasp than I had on this transaction. This transition, which would turn me from a solvent, salaried worker bee into … what? If all went well with my redundancy deal, I would have a small financial cushion; if it didn’t, I would have a large problem. House sold in Ireland, house bought in France, no job, no money … uh, quite a problem, actually.

  Airily, I capped his pen. ‘Here we are. All signed, sealed and delivered. I’ll be back in May to sign the other couple of thousand documents. With truckloads of money, of course.’

  With a nonchalant grin, I was out the door and scorching away to the airport. Behind me, there followed some remark about how it was time to call in the notaire. I am ashamed to say that I had only the haziest idea of what a notaire might be. All I knew, with a rush of adrenalin, was that France was going to happen, and it was going to be terrific.

  Or as the French say, terrible.

  ‘The middle of French nowhere? Not Paris or Cannes or Biarritz? Just some godforsaken little hamlet? Are you mad?’

  Apparently. But then, who is to define madness? Some people spend thousands on a suit or a home cinema and consider themselves perfectly sane. Some people blow themselves up for the sake of their god. Some people drape their dogs in diamonds (true story, Paris, March 2008) without attracting the attention of the chaps in white coats. Some little lad with a big ego decides to invade Russia or attack New York, and millions of his compatriots think, hey, yeah, great idea! Some parents punish their children for telling the truth. People do all sorts of crazy things, or things which appear crazy to onlookers. They have their reasons, and who has a map of their minds or hearts? Moving to France barely scores at all on the scale of insanity, and for me, it was simply the right move at the right time. Reminding myself of the many reasons why I was doing this, I calmed down back in demented Dublin.

  No more office politics. No more budget cuts. No more gridlock. No more bikers’ helmets through windscreens. No more senseless shopping for toys I already had. No more endless discussions of property prices. No more getting up on wet, dark mornings to do somebody else’s often incomprehensible bidding. No more radio headlines announcing that a man was kneecapped in Belfast last night. No more tribunals trawling through the murky dealings of disgraced politicians, at vast expense to the taxpayer. No more priests up on paedophilia charges. No more women missing, presumed murdered. No more shuddering on icy beaches in July. No more tacky ‘reality’ TV. Or a lot less of all these things, at any rate.

  Hurray! In Ireland, for me if not for everyone, there was an increasing feeling of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The pace of life was hurtling forward way too fast: children as young as ten were being expelled from school for sexually harassing their teachers, while children even younger were being bullied into nervous breakdowns if their clothes or mobile phone bore a brand name not approved by their peers. Yet the motto seemed to be ‘Don’t rock the boat’, as if Ireland were a raft cresting a tidal wave. Sometimes it felt almost like a conspiracy of silence, a tacit pact that ‘Ireland is a great little country and we won’t hear a word to the contrary, whether it’s true or not�
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  But the truth was that Ireland was becoming a suburb of Hollywood, shrieking for attention, cutting some very dodgy deals, living on a knife-edge and suffering, collectively, from massive sleep deficit. None of it bore any resemblance to the Ireland I’d grown up in, and the country’s strident new incarnation left me feeling like a fish out of water. The pressure to admire the emperor’s new clothes was enormous, but I just couldn’t do it.

  Would France be better? Calmer, saner? It, too, was in flux at the beginning of the century, its pretty face showing some slight signs of strain. But I’d always felt that it was more than just a pretty face. I wasn’t naive: naturally, France had its problems, but they seemed less acute, its attitude more adult, than that of brash, born-again Ireland. Per capita, the crime rate was much lower. Moving there wasn’t a whim: I spoke the language reasonably well, loved the culture, the climate, the strong sense of identity, the still-slow pace of life. In France, you could park on the street, leaving the car unlocked while you popped into the pâtisserie for your croissant – no meter, no ticket, no hassle.

  No income, either. No friends, bar my old college friend Sheila, long married to a French dentist. No pension, no security, no shoulder to cry on if things went wrong. No public transport, should I break a leg and be unable to drive out in the sticks. No laughs or craic, none of the irreverence that still sometimes made Ireland fun to live in. If the French have a fault, it is that they are mostly polite, earnest and quiet, with a slightly anxious streak. (Apart from Parisiens, who, as any French farmer will tell you, are the spawn of Satan.)

  Nations do not adapt to newcomers. Newcomers, if they wish to join in, must adapt to them. With something of a clang, it struck me that I was about to join an ethnic minority. Without even the support of the Irish community, because I didn’t intend to live in a ghetto, harking back to ‘the old country’, referring to Ireland as ‘home’, pining for a place that no longer existed. What, moi? Ha! I would become more French than the French, slugging black coffee and red wine, humming Brel under my garlic-scented breath. After all, I wasn’t being deported. I was choosing France, an oasis of civilisation, the favourite refuge of painters and philosophers and anyone else weary of the madding crowd.

  Long before Ireland started becoming rich, getting into debt and into trouble, Yeats wrote that ‘romantic Ireland’s dead and gone/ It’s with O’Leary in the grave’. Now, it was time to find out how France was holding up. Would it still be romantic? Would Serge still sing for me? I wasn’t wearing rose-tinted glasses, wasn’t chasing rainbows or any other chimera; all I wanted was peace and quiet, and some kind of authenticity. It was time to get a life – a real one, stripped of varnish.

  Could that be possible, a mere six hundred kilometres away from the country formerly known as ‘home’?

  What do people wish they’d known when buying a house in France? As anywhere, it’s a case of caveat emptor. Make a mistake and it can ruin your life. Employing a surveyor is vital, to the point of flying over a trusted one from home if necessary. My French surveyor never mentioned local soil subsistence, which so far has only cracked a few pavements but is rumoured to be a potentially significant long-term problem. Even after researching the project for a year on the internet, I didn’t know about the two local taxes, foncière and habitation (the equivalent of rates and poll tax), which can add up to a pretty penny. If you’re buying anywhere near water, think floods and mosquitoes. If you’re buying anything that’s more than ten years old, think insulating, rewiring and radical redecorating. When it comes to price, ask your notaire for the cost of the house per square metre: nobody sticks to the exact centime, but it will give you an idea of the going rate. And yes, haggle. All the locals do, and the 10 percent you stand to save could cover legal fees. My estate agent Pierre Yves was horrified to hear that I’d paid my vendors €500 for their ride-on lawnmower: ‘You should have said! I’d have bartered it into the price of the house!’

  If you’re brave and are building a new house, bear in mind that you’re not allowed put in windows overlooking anyone else’s property. If you opt for an apartment complex, remember the substantial management charges. In all cases, draw up a list of the ten things you want most in your house and area, aiming to score at least eight of them. After you move in, allow a full year, experiencing all four seasons before making any further major decisions. France isn’t a puppy, to be abandoned the moment it barks or misbehaves; you have to give it a chance, get to know it and learn to handle it.

  But if you see a cute hand-carved sign saying route du sucre, run for your life.

  There is such a sign near my house. How sweet, I thought, to live on the ‘sugar road’. I had no idea that what it would actually mean was hundreds of sugar-beet lorries trundling to the refinery, bang-thump-clatter, whole convoys of them starting at four in the morning, every day from Hallowe’en to Christmas.

  You get used to it, of course. But not overnight. Even for the most committed francophile, living in France is an acquired art. It takes time, determination, and something our instant-gratification society has all but forgotten: patience.

  No, indeed. The surveyor never mentioned that.

  3.

  Breaking Up is Hard to Do

  ‘No,’ said the union rep firmly, ‘we can’t let you go. Sorry. Not unless management agrees to replace you, which they are refusing to do. It’s our job to keep staff numbers up. So you’ll have to cancel France and stay here. Shame, but c’est la vie.’

  Whaaat!? Stay here in this job, in this city, in this country, against my will? All because a union which had fought so hard to keep me out of my job twenty years before was now locking me into it? With difficulty, I resisted the urge to seize the fire extinguisher and do terminal damage to all concerned. After all, I could still leave. Simply walk away, without a penny.

  ‘Look. I am halfway through selling my Irish house and buying a French one. Deposits have been paid. If you don’t negotiate this redundancy deal, I … I … will do something irreparable!’

  Only at that moment did it sink in how very, very badly I wanted to move to France. How fed up I was of office politics, of wrangling over everything. Morale was miserable, and management was all but counting the paperclips. What had once been a fun, interesting job now felt like a prison sentence – a sentence with nearly twenty years to run.

  ‘Sorry, but negotiations have hit a wall. Stalemate. No go. Forget it.’

  Tottering home, I burst into floods of tears, ripped open a bottle of wine and drank the lot.

  Weeks of despair ensued, thumping of tables, kicking of walls, ranting and raving. And frantic, futile efforts to negotiate. All I wanted was whatever I was entitled to, but my entire future lay in the hands of people who weren’t interested, weren’t listening. It was like being held hostage. For the first time in my life, I found myself sobbing in a doctor’s surgery, begging a prescription for something to help with stress. A good, kind doctor of long experience, he said he had never in his career seen so many people so anxious to leave their jobs. It was an epidemic. ‘Some are having breakdowns. At least you don’t have children to worry about.’

  No, at least there was that. It’s much harder to quit your job and move to France on a fiver when little Annabelle is the linchpin of the school dancing team or your husband doesn’t feel he can commute from Normandy to Dublin every Monday.

  ‘Hang in,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s a long road that has no turning.’

  And then, one night a month later with France still suspended, a miracle happened. A colleague phoned.

  ‘You’ll never guess.’

  ‘What? Al-Qaeda has dropped a bomb on union HQ?’

  ‘Even better. Madame X has won her case.’

  Oh, wonderful! Madame X was a colleague who’d sued for constructive dismissal, alleging all kinds of harassment.

  ‘She’s been awarded a fortune in damages. And word is that management is now keen to get rid of any other mad cows – er, staff �
�� who might start plotting similar legal action.’

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Next morning, the phone rang again. Abruptly, I was invited to meet with the personnel manager. Brightly, he beamed.

  ‘So you see, we’ve sorted things with the union. You’re free to go. Sign this paperwork and you can have your redundancy cheque right away.’

  Two hours later, the bank was wiring all the money to Pierre Yves in Normandy. At last, the struggle was over.

  When you achieve something of this magnitude, the relief is indescribable. And yet, there is a bittersweet thread binding it all up. For me, it marked the end of two decades spent in a busy, dynamic, finally frustrating but frequently fascinating job. Most of those years had been good, some had been wonderful, the last few were wretched. There were friends and there were enemies; so many shared experiences, memories, panics, laughs, scoops, deadlines, midnight oil, ones-that-got-away … and now, finally, it was all over, the ties were cut and I had that falling-off-the-edge-of-a-cliff feeling, plunging into an entirely new life with no salary and no safety net should things go wrong.

  If you are thinking of quitting your job, do not discount this moment. Like divorce, it can be liberating, exhilarating and exceedingly traumatic.

  In a flurry, the packing was done. Friends rallied from right and left, doing so much so fast that no thanks seemed adequate. Just when I was about to leave the country it seemed to be suddenly reverting to the good, kind place it used to be, warm, helpful and generous. My lovely cousin Mary, devoting three days of her time to the packing project, finally popped a bottle of champagne and poured it into plastic cups, the kitchen being stripped of glasses.

  ‘Here’s to France, and your great new life there!’

  Yes. Uh, hopefully. Would it be wonderful? Or would it all be too much, too foreign, too difficult, too lonely? As a child who’d spent two years in hospital, I’d learned early to fend for myself, but … still. Suddenly France seemed very far away, almost menacingly foreign.