I should have known the satnav was plotting against me the moment it pronounced "Roisel" with the confidence of a man who's never left Slough. Three hours from Calais, my partner dozing beside me with a bag of wine gums melting in her lap, and suddenly we're threading through some back lane that looked like it was last surfaced for Napoleon's lot. The mishap came at a roundabout outside Amiens where I took what I thought was the scenic route and ended up in a field. Not a charming rustic field with poppies and a sense of discovery. A field field. Mud, beet crop, and one very unimpressed horse who watched me execute a twelve-point turn with the sort of judgment I usually reserve for people who put milk in first.

By the time we found the actual property, a handsome stone farmhouse with that satisfyingly solid look French builders seem to manage without trying, I was in that peculiar state of British travel fatigue where you're simultaneously furious and absurdly grateful. Madame Lefranc was waiting on the doorstep, which I hadn't expected. The booking said key safe, but there she was, seventy-ish, wearing a cardigan that had seen better decades and an expression that suggested she'd been watching my approach through the hedge for twenty minutes.

"Your husband drives like my nephew," she said, before I'd even introduced myself. Not a question. A diagnosis.

I explained, with my school French creaking like a rusty gate, about the field. She waved it away. "Everyone does this. The English, the Dutch, once a Belgian who cried." She said this last word with such satisfaction that I found myself wanting to know more about the Belgian. She led us through the house, pointing out the boiler with the resignation of someone who has explained British incompetence with central heating too many times, and mentioned in passing that her nephew was currently in Marseille "avoiding his responsibilities."

The neighbour appeared over the fence as we were unloading the car. Monsieur Delacroix, introduced by Madame Lefranc with the phrase "he knows everything but says nothing," which turned out to be roughly accurate. He was pruning something with secateurs that looked older than me, and he offered, without looking up, that the baker in Roisel proper "has good bread Tuesdays, indifferent bread Thursdays, and on Saturday he is closed because God and his wife require rest." This seemed to cover all necessary information about local commerce.

Madame Lefranc stayed for a cup of tea, which she regarded with the suspicion it probably deserved given I'd made it with water that hadn't quite boiled. She told us about the house, how her grandparents had farmed the land, how her brother wanted to sell it to someone from Paris who would paint it grey. "Grey!" she said, with the same force other people might use for murder. She made it sound like a moral failing, which perhaps it is.

What struck me, sitting in that kitchen with its slightly sticky table and view of a garden that was mostly nettles with ambition, was how immediately we'd become part of a conversation that had been running for years. The nephew in Marseille, the baker's schedule, the grey paint threat. We weren't tourists exactly. We were temporary characters in a village drama that would continue whether we were there or not.

Madame Lefranc left eventually, after extracting a promise that we would tell her if the toilet made "the noise" again. Monsieur Delacroix had vanished at some point, his secateurs the only evidence he'd been there at all. My partner and I sat with our inadequate tea and looked at each other with that particular holiday expression that mixes exhaustion with the dawning sense that something has gone unexpectedly right.

The satnav, I should mention, I threw in a drawer. Some things, I decided, you navigate by character and accident. The field, the horse, the woman on the doorstep with her cardigan and her judgments. That was the real route in. Everything else was just roads.