Blowing It Read Online Free PDF Page A

while the children shrieked and splashed happily in the pool. Sean would have to take weeks at a time away from work and relax properly rather than collapsing in an exhausted heap on the draughty terrace of their annual rented house in Rock. It was such a depressing feature of that Cornwall fortnight – the sight of so many tense holiday fathers, pacing the road outside the Mariners Bar, talking urgent share prices and legal waffle into their mobile phones while trying to marshal small children across the road carrying wetsuits and centreboards and dodging the 4x4s whizzing along to the car park. Awful. Exactly like the school run, only in Boden-wear and Birkenstocks rather than Joseph and L.K. Bennett.
    Clover had long ago set her heart on France and had it all mapped out in her head, right down to the lush taupe rough-plastered bathroom walls combined with sleek Starck 3 fittings. Sale time at Fired Earth had her hanging about in the Fulham Road shop, tempted to invest in a few dozen square metres of bargain terracotta for future flooring. And yet … recently the property pages had been featuring more and more adorable places in Italy, Portugal and Greece until she’d felt her dreams slip and alter. Today they were featuring Spain. It seemed you could still pick up an absolutely darling
finca
for practically next to nothing.
    It was now just possible Clover had selected the wrong language for Elsa to learn. She’d started her at the
Bébé France
classes the previous autumn because Mary-Jane at Toddle-Tots had gushed on and on about how wonderful it was, how fast they picked it up and how cute her Jakey had been the summer before, happily approaching the
patron
in the Provençal
boulangerie
and asking, with complete confidence and no hesitation at all (according to Mary-Jane), for a
pain au chocolat
. Well he would, wouldn’t he? Clover had bitten back the thought before it escaped out loud, the child spent every blissful summer holiday moment at Mary-Jane’s to-die-for pink-shuttered villa near Avignon. You’d think he’d be bloody well fluent. But with France not now necessarily her sure-fire choice, Clover was having second thoughts. Also Elsa would be learning French when she joined Sophia at St Hilary’s next year. She could, now, be sorting the basics of Spanish or Italian or possibly even Greek instead. Was it too late to change? Would Elsa become hopelessly confused or could four year olds absorb any number of vaguely similar European languages? It was a bit late to do much about Sophia. At seven she was now well grounded in schoolgirl French. If necessary they could find her an after-school tutor for whatever else she needed. Now, sitting in the kitchen of her Richmond Edwardian four-storey semi and sighing over photos of a happy ex-pat family lolling on hammocks in a shady Mallorcan courtyard tendrilled with vines, she wondered if becoming trilingual might yet be a realistic goal for Elsa, obviously bright as she was.
    Choices, choices, she sighed. Where to buy if not France? Everyone in Spain smiled, everyone in Italy hugged, everyone in France … she couldn’t think what the French did except shrug and say ‘
merde
’ a lot and hate the British. That wouldn’t be good, would it? Being loathed and resented in your chosen community? And there would have to
be
a community, beyond the high, pink, vine-clad walls of her lovely garden. The idea of being totally remote, even marooned among glorious fields of sunflowers and lavender, did not appeal at all. No. Clover wanted her girls to be able to frolic in the
plaza
/
piazza
/
place
of a steep medieval village, happily accepted among a laughing band of local infants. They would become brown and scuffed and tousle-haired and … bilingual. Such a head-start in life.
    It was important to share concerns like this with Sean. And Sunday morning (even this one, where they were soon to race around getting ready to go to the big parental lunch) was the only time