I stand in the supermarket chiller aisle staring at the packages of pork shoulder on special offer, weighing up their cost per kilo, wondering how far the meat will go to feed ten people.
In my old life I never thought about the cost per kilo for anything. I would buy what my family needed, what we wanted. Ducking out of the line of traffic on my way home from work, leaving the run of headlights for the supermarket car park, rushing through the aisles with my basket, picking up items forgotten in the weekly shop, before collecting the children from school clubs.
Back then there was the reliability of two pay checks landing in the bank each month. Topping up the account, covering the essentials and the extravagances. Now though I force my brain to divide cost by weight, picking up and putting down packages as I work out how I can feed us all while the money in the bank trickles slowly into septic tanks, electrical wires and crumbling walls.
We arrived in France with more money in our accounts than we’d ever had in our lives, imagining in our naivety that the profits from the sale of our house in England would take us deep into the renovations of the château, which looked, from our brief visits, to be in fairly good condition.
We had been sensible, I had negotiated to keep part of my job writing for women’s magazines. I could write from the kitchen table, meeting my deadlines and bringing in some money to help bolster the renovation pot. Tim and our friends Dale and Claire would work on the renovations full-time, while I juggled writing articles, keeping everyone fed and helping out with the building work when I could.
But it wasn’t working. The money in the bank was disappearing quickly, my income covering less than half of what we needed to feed the six of us and pay the most basic of bills to keep the house ticking over.
I carefully and quietly began to count the pennies, searching out recipes that would make the food bills cheaper. Big pots of smokey, spicy bean stew served with a fresh 90c baguette, bolognese bulked out with a can of lentils to make it go further, leftovers served up for lunch instead of chunks of expensive cheese, minestrone style soups full of beans and pasta to fill us up, the uneaten rice from dinner time mixed with milk, a little sugar and some vanilla for pudding.
I didn’t want anyone to feel hard done by after a busy day of work in the dust and dirt. The winter months were especially difficult. It was cold and damp inside and out. Only the kitchen was vaguely warm. Tim, Claire and Dale would pile on layers and work outside or in the coldest climbs of the house, while I would hunch over my keyboard, wrapped in thick cardigans and bobble hats writing articles and editing copy. My fingers stiffening with the cold as I typed.
I would feed the old log burner with wood, coaxing the smoulder and smoke into flames, rubbing life back into my hands. The others would come in for lunch, enjoying the relative warmth, filling up on soup and a little cheese and bread. Enough I hoped to keep them going until dinner time.
An almost constant stream of guests made things even tighter. Our friends all desperate to visit, swept up in the dream of our adventure, keen to see the state of the house before the renovations got too far along. They came for the romance of the crumbling château in the woods, though some were more keen than others about embracing the single functioning loo, the rattling pipes and in winter, the bitter cold.
We were desperate to see them too, missing home as we were at times, eager for the comfort of good friends. But often four more mouths to feed for three meals a day for a week at a time was a cost that was hard to swallow.
Tim and I argued bitterly about how to manage it all. He hated to say no to anyone, even random work associates that I’d never met. So we would play host to them and their families. I would spend days preparing un-renovated rooms, sweeping up work dust, clearing materials from one room to another, trying to make the bedrooms feel warm and cosy, washing and ironing sheets, apologising for the terribly unromantic plumbing to folks who were dreaming about a different sort of rustic when they came to stay.
We tried to explain that hot water was limited. That electric heaters could take the edge off the cold, but were expensive to run for a long time. But until you live it, you don’t appreciate the cost of things you take for granted in a normal life. I would sneak down cold corridors closing doors and turning off heaters left on in empty rooms. I would get up early for the briefest of showers to leave enough hot water for our guests, only for their teenage daughters to drain the tank in one hair wash.
We didn’t want to stop people from coming, but the cost of it was becoming unmanageable. A trip to the bakery in the morning for bread and croissants would cost almost €30. A simple lunch of bread and cheese for 10, even more. Our guests would offer to take us out for lunch or dinner as a thank you for their stay, but it always felt awkward for Dale and Claire to be left at home. And that one meal out didn’t help to balance the books.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Between to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.