Sold

Only when we had accepted our new job and resigned from our old, did we begin to absorb the reality of our decision. Nicky hardly slept for the first two weeks; first from excitement, then from fear. Shortly before we were offered the job in Haiti, she had learned that she had a benign tumour that was growing and needed to come out. Nicky is not good with general anaesthetic. The first time she was wheeled into an operating theatre, she had a look on her face that I’ve only seen on one other occasion: it was the same look I’d seen on my father’s face the last time I saw him. Somehow, he knew he’d never see me again. Nicky’s surgery went well, but she was on light duty for six weeks afterwards.

Mercifully, it took only three weeks to sell the house. During that time, it transformed from a home into a show house, ready at a moment’s notice to welcome a prospective buyer. Living in a house that has nothing out of place, with all the surfaces (including the desk in my study) neat and uncluttered, is not something I want to do again. But Nicky’s attention to detail and Precious (our housekeeper’s) diligence worked. Prospective buyers fell in love with our house and before long we had accepted an offer. Then began the task of sorting through two lifetimes worth of possessions and deciding what not to keep.

I am a hoarder by nature, keeping any little thing that might one day be useful. Getting rid of most of it proved a challenge. Nicky is much more practical about material things. Her standard question became, “Have you used it in the last six months?” If the answer was “No,” the offending item was added to the growing pile of items to be sold, given away or discarded.

Slowly the house began to empty; the books went first. A house without books is a desolate place; but the sight of empty bookshelves helped a little towards breaking our connection with our home.

Nicky’s car, Florence, was delivered to her new home; mine was sold to a friend. Bank accounts were streamlined, debit orders and subscriptions cancelled, visas obtained, vaccinations administered, boxes packed, Land Rover loads full of stuff moved into storage and currency was ordered. Meanwhile, Nicky was nearly recovered and Precious and I were knackered.

But it was only when the sign outside the house changed from ‘For Sale’ to ‘Sold,’ that the enormity of it all finally hit us. We were living in someone else’s dream house. We told ourselves that it wasn’t the same without the dogs, that we would find another house somewhere in France and make it our own. It was a refrain that we would often repeat, like the chorus of a lament.

In the days before our departure, we had to prepare for, and pass, a flight test on an aircraft that we hadn’t flown much in the previous twelve years, find the time to say goodbye to our friends and organise all the last little things that, no matter how hard one tries, are never completely organised.

On the last day of the month we closed our suitcases, threw the final orphaned odds and sods into a plastic bag to be stored with understanding friends, said a tearful goodbye to Precious, who was off to her new job, and drove to the airport for the long flight to New York and on to Port-au-Prince.

In all the commotion, it hadn’t passed our attention that something called Matthew was brewing in the Caribbean, but we hadn’t had much time to digest its implication.