Kat’s first stop is a farmhouse twenty minutes down the road from us.
‘This is Wendy,’ she says to the old man who comes out to greet us. ‘She’s moved into Le Château de Châtaignier.’
The man suddenly looks excited. ‘Oh, avec Julian!’ he shouts, before spouting off a mouthful of French. The only word I can understand is Julian’s name. He makes the motion of turning a key in a lock.
‘I only understand basic French,’ Kat says to me. ‘Something about someone locking someone out?’ She shrugs like she hasn’t got a clue what he’s going on about.
Oh great. This must be Julian’s new friend, the one who gave him the key.
‘Un homme bon,’ he cries, shaking his fist at me. ‘Charmant!’
I look at Kat helplessly.
‘A good man,’ she translates. ‘Charming.’
I roll my eyes. ‘Said by someone who must’ve spent all of twenty seconds with him. Any longer than that and I’m sure his opinion will change.’
The man starts babbling in French, looking annoyed with me.
‘He’s saying he loved your great-aunt,’ Kat says. ‘Something about her being proud of Julian having the chestnuts.’
‘She wasn’t my great-aunt, she’s was Julian’s, which just proves that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And I don’t know about chestnuts but there’s definitely something nuts about Julian.’
‘What’s he done to you?’ Kat says as we walk away. ‘Old Mr Adelais seemed very fond of him.’
‘Old Mr Adelais doesn’t have to live with him,’ I mutter. ‘It’s complicated. The château was supposed to be mine, but he’s muscled in with this bloody loophole and he thinks he owns the place. Which he kind of half does.’
‘I don’t know why you’re letting it bother you. Surely there’s enough space in that huge house for both of you? Personally, I’d be very happy to share a house with him for nothing but the view alone.’
Maybe she’s right. Forty rooms and fifteen acres. You could easily lose someone in all that space. I won’t even know he’s there. It’ll be fine. Even if I don’t manage to drive him out, he’s not going to spoil my time here. The place is so big you could have a family of sixteen in it and still need smoke signals to find each other.
The walk is slow because we constantly stop off at Kat’s morning regulars, always being met at the gate by eager villagers, waving money at Kat in exchange for the goodies on her cart. I watch her have stilted conversations with people in French, which mainly involve miming and some species of sign language. She introduces me each time, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s being said to me, so I just nod and smile, and say ‘oui’ a lot, even though I have no idea what they’re asking me, and Kat loses the conversations when they start speaking too fast. I could have told everyone that I enjoy grating cheese and wearing an alien cow on my head for all I know.
‘So, do you really make a living doing this?’ I ask, even though I can easily see her cart is nearly empty and there’s no sign we’re anywhere near the village yet.
‘Yep,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of old people around here who find the walk into town challenging or who only go in on market days. The bloke who owns the boulangerie in the village is a bit of a bugger, to be honest. He refuses to open early even though people want their bread in the mornings, but I can’t complain because he’s left a clear niche for me.’
‘I’m kind of a baker too. I mean, not professionally or anything, I just knock cakes together in my spare time, but I love it. I used to bake a lot with Eulalie, the woman who left us the château.’
‘What do you do for work?’
I’m embarrassed to mention my job to her. It doesn’t even seem like a proper job. ‘I’m a sampler in a supermarket. I hand out samples and try to make people buy whatever the store wants pushed on any particular day.’
‘Oh, I hate those people.’ She suddenly realises what she’s said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that.’
It makes me laugh. ‘It’s fine. I hate it too. It’s not what I intended to be doing with my life, but it’s a paying job, so why rock the boat?’
‘You’re talking to someone who relocated to France on a whim. I’m a big believer in boat rocking.’
‘Things go wrong when you start rocking boats.’
She waves an arm around her. ‘At least you sink in a beautiful place.’
She’s definitely right about that.
‘It must be amazing to cook in your château,’ Kat says. ‘I’ve stood at the gate loads of times and tried to imagine what the kitchen would be like. Is it huge?’
‘I don’t know, I haven’t found it yet.’
‘I bet it’s huge. You’ll have to give me a guided tour sometime. And bake me something in it. It’s such a beautiful old house. It probably infuses everything that’s made in there with decadent glamour.’
‘Well, Eulalie certainly seemed to think it was infused with something.’
By the time we reach the village, I understand why elderly folks around here aren’t keen to do it often. Even this early in the morning, the sun is hot enough that sweat is beading on my forehead and I’m desperate for a bottle of water. It’s not a hard trek, but it’s uphill towards the end, and the narrow lanes don’t get any wider or safer, although we don’t see any traffic other than a man on a horse.
There’s a little wooden sign up on a wall surrounding a house that reads ‘Bienvenue à Toussion’. It looks like it’s been burnt into the wood by someone with a magnifying glass in the sunlight. It’s the kind of sign you’d miss if you weren’t looking for it, and as I look at the village spread out in front of me, the same could be said about that. The pavementless tarmac gives way to cobbled streets lined with half-timbered houses, painted in a rainbow of pastel colours around their wooden beams. If the Easter Bunny existed, he would live here.
It’s a beautiful place, and I feel Kat watching me as I take it all in. ‘It grows on you,’ she says. ‘I worked in the middle of a shopping centre back home, every shop in one place. If you ever needed anything it was right there. I laughed at the idea of trying to live here, but you adapt.’
I can’t imagine ever adapting. You could fit the whole of this village into one boarded-up shop on my local high street.
The most noticeable thing is the silence. There’s no traffic, no beeping horns, no yelling. The only sound is a bee buzzing around a red flower in someone’s windowbox.
An old lady totters down her flower-edged garden path with a sprightly ‘bonjour!’ As she chooses one of Kat’s baguettes, I look around and see an old man watering flowers in his window. He waves and shouts a greeting.
If I had a book in my arms, I’d be walking around like Belle in the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast. There’s a calmness here, an atmosphere of the village that time forgot. And stepping back in time is exactly what it feels like. The pretty, wooden-framed houses are nothing like the dull, drab bricks in England. Each window has a windowbox underneath it, full of tumbling, colourful flowers, and although I can’t understand the names on the few shops I can see, it’s easy to tell they’re houses-turned-shops and their owners probably live above them.
‘The épicerie,’