After half an hour when Roslyn, the cleaner who can't clean, still hadn't turned up, I contemplated the awful possibility of doing my own ironing.
My ironing is like my cooking. Hit and miss with often quite extraordinarily strange results and only to be undertaken in extreme circumstances.
Fortunately, she arrived soon after, with a lengthy apology involving her son, his school, his bitch of a form teacher. She smoked three of my fags and drank a cup of coffee before she could face a duster.
Twenty minutes of crashing and bashing later, her mobile rang and between the "Non. Non. Mon Dieu. Je viens," she signalled she was leaving.
One of her clients, an 84 year old semi-demented former farmer, had fallen in his bedroom in a nearby village. His frail wife and a neighbour couldn't pull him up – he's a big man.
Roslyn is a big woman. Her greeting and parting "bisous" are accompanied by a hug that leaves me dangling two feet off the tiles and fearing for my ribs.
She left to sweep him off the floor and probably carry him back to bed. Her heart is as big as her arm span.
On her return, by now hyped beyond any hope of much attempted cleaning, she told me that she'd found him stranded, giggling away at the folly of it all.
His dementia is, mercifully, a gentle, strangely joyful one as far as his family can know.
All hope now gone of her re-arranging the dust in her artful manner, I pointed her towards the ironing and settled in for the remaining hour of a virtual monologue of fast, often ferocious French.
As I've told you, speaking/understanding another language is as hit and miss as my ironing and cooking. Some days it's a struggle to get beyond "bonjour". Others see me soar in a linguistic ballet; no mental translation required as accent and vocabulary roll out as effortlessly as my native tongue.
Today was such a day, or so I thought. The content of all she told me is not mine to tell. Even I can be discreet. When I choose.
But after she'd gone I found myself thinking over everything she'd said and wondering why, as I believed I'd understood her every word, I was replaying certain sentences in my mind.
For, somehow I was uneasy; aware that there were truths, or half-lies, I hadn't grasped or fully understood. Sentences demanding a query that perhaps she hoped I'd make.
It wasn't the French, and for once it wasn't the nuance.
Then, in a Eureka moment, I realised it was my intuition that had gone astray, and that was immensely disturbing.
I pride myself on my intuition; yes, undoubtedly arrogantly, believe in my ability to see beyond words and postures and sense the truth or vulnerability beyond the screen.
My professional talent of finding the Achilles heel. My metier – my work.
Having always accepted that it was a heightened ability to "body-read"; to decipher the ticks and slight movements denoting evasion or discomfort; it has come as a revelation to realise it is far more than that.
Language: choice, use, cadence of words is as much the key to tracking the ripples of a truth or a lie as is an eye-slide to the left.
And unless it is startlingly obvious, it is something – no matter how fluent I may become – that I will never master in another language.
Pondering this theory, having bugger all else to do, I happened upon a blog I bookmarked early on arrival here.
Written by a young Irishwoman who has lived 11 years in the south of France and is bringing up two children, it is an articulate, amusing, warts-and-all view of her life. A seemingly lovely, lovely life played out in sunshine and, occasionally, a touch of shade.
Even in the dark moments, one knew she had embraced and was an integral part of her town; accepted and accepting; enjoying her bilingual children's life and her own pleasure in their diversity. She was a true European.
So it came as a great shock when she revealed that she, her husband and children were returning to Ireland; to a wet, cold land far away from all that had entranced her.
In a sparse few words she questions their decision and wonders, as her family and friends do, if they are stark, raving mad.
But then she adds: "Then, I step outside of my bubble and I know I've made the right decision. The French are just not like us. They don't get us and we don't get them. I just can't see us growing old here. I want our children to be Irish and I want to feel like a part of the fabric of society."
If she, with all that she's been in France, has come to that conclusion, then what hope for the rest of us?
Can we be truly European? Are we forever trapped by our own background?
I didn't "get" the Scots when I first moved to Scotland. It took many years before I finally did.
I know I'm the richer for it. But I am still the sum of many parts.
cookfidelma@hotmail.com
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