Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
opticians. It is kept scrupulously clean, vast amounts of money are thrown at floral displays
and again, as with all French towns, parking is free.
'Seriously, Natalie, come and look! Look at what we could afford over here. We could buy a
village!' OK, that was something of an exaggeration, but at the time the pound was massively
strong against the euro and I was just making a point. Natalie carried on walking. The plan
had always been that we would retire here, settle down later in life and just soak up the pas-
toral tranquillity of the Loire Valley; I would write light, undemanding comic novels and
Natalie would tend to her horses. It was a pipe dream; an ambition, but one that seems so far
off when you're in your early thirties that you may as well lay claim to a rural idyll on Mars
and set about designing your own personal spaceship. Natalie sensibly kept walking.
'Come on,' she said over her shoulder, 'we'll be late for lunch.' I picked up the magazine
from the rack outside the agency and ran off after her.
The hazy afternoon sun beat down as Natalie and I, along with her parents and her French
grandparents, sat around lazily in the small garden. Samuel was asleep indoors, so the rest
of us were taking advantage of the chance to rest; the only noises were the bees on the deep
mauve hibiscus and the crickets in the next-door field. I could contain myself no longer.
'I think we should move here,' I said, breaking the silence as we lay in the garden.
'Yes,' Natalie replied, 'it would be lovely, it—'
'Now. I think we should move here now.' I sat upright as if to indicate that this wasn't some
idle thought or that the lunchtime rosé had taken a mischievous hold.
'What did he say?' asked Natalie's grandmother.
'He wants to move here,' Brian, Natalie's dad, translated. Whereupon her grandmother just
rolled her eyes and tutted.
It wasn't that I didn't get on with Natalie's grandparents, but the language difference was
a big barrier for all of us, and they could never properly hide the disappointment that their
eldest granddaughter hadn't married a Frenchman. That she'd married an Englishman was
just about tolerable, but one that dressed as some kind of anachronistic dandy was a constant
source of bewilderment for them. I wasn't going to drop the subject.
'Give me one good reason why we shouldn't?' I was asking Natalie specifically, but throwing
it open to the group.
'You don't speak the language,' said Brian.
'Natalie is fluent and I can learn,' I countered.
'What about Samuel's school?' asked Danielle, though I could see her heart wasn't in the ob-
jection.
'He's just started nursery, it's hardly an issue,' I replied.
'What would Natalie do for a living then?' Danielle continued. Natalie had gone back to
work part-time as a recruitment consultant in Crawley and wasn't enjoying it. Though she
