A Year In Provence Read online

  And then there was an English voice, a man we remembered meeting in London. He had seemed pleasant, but we hardly knew him. This was about to change, because he and his wife were going to drop in. He didn't say when, and he didn't leave a number. Probably, in the way of the itinerant English, they would turn up one day just before lunch. But we'd had a quiet month so far, with few guests and fewer builders, and we were ready for a little company.

  They arrived at dusk, as we were sitting down to dinner in the courtyard-Ted and Susan, wreathed in apologies and loud in their enthusiasm for Provence, which they had never seen before, and for our house, our dogs, us, everything. It was all, so they said several times in the first few minutes, super. Their breathless jollity was disarming. They talked in tandem, a seamless dialogue which neither required nor allowed any contribution from us.

  "Have we come at a bad time? Typical of us, I'm afraid."

  "Absolutely typical. You must loathe people dropping in like this. A glass of wine would be lovely."

  "Darling, look at the pool. Isn't it pretty."

  "Did you know the post office in Ménerbes has a little map showing how to find you? Les Anglais, they call you, and they fish out this map from under the counter."

  "We'd have been here earlier, except that we bumped into this sweet old man in the village…"

  "… well, his car, actually…"

  "Yes, his car, but he was sweet about it, darling, wasn't he, and it wasn't really a shunt, more a scrape."

  "So we took him into the café and bought him a drink…"

  "Quite a few drinks, wasn't it, darling?"

  "And some for those funny friends of his."

  "Anyway, we're here now, and I must say it's absolutely lovely."

  "And so kind of you to put up with us barging in on you like this."

  They paused to drink some wine and catch their breath, looking around and making small humming noises of approval. My wife, acutely conscious of the slightest symptoms of undernourishment, noticed that Ted was eyeing our dinner, which was still untouched on the table. She asked if they would like to eat with us.

  "Only if it's absolutely no trouble-just a crust and a scrap of cheese and maybe one more glass of wine."

  Ted and Susan sat down, still chattering, and we brought out sausage, cheeses, salad, and some slices of the cold vegetable omelette called crespaou with warm, fresh tomato sauce. It was received with such rapture that I wondered how long it had been since their last meal, and what arrangements they had made for their next one.

  "Where are you staying while you're down here?"

  Ted filled his glass. Well, nothing had actually been booked-"Typical of us, absolutely typical"-but a little auberge, they thought, somewhere clean and simple and not too far away because they'd adore to see the house in the daytime if we could bear it. There must be half a dozen small hotels we could recommend.

  There were, but it was past ten, getting close to bedtime in Provence, and not the moment to be banging on shuttered windows and locked doors and dodging the attentions of hotel guard dogs. Ted and Susan had better stay the night and find somewhere in the morning. They looked at each other, and began a duet of gratitude that lasted until their bags had been taken upstairs. They cooed a final good night from the guest-room window, and we could still hear them chirruping as we went off to bed. They were like two excited children, and we thought it would be fun to have them stay for a few days.

  The barking of the dogs woke us just after three. They were intrigued by noises coming from the guest room, heads cocked at the sound of someone being comprehensively sick, interspersed with groans and the splash of running water.

  I always find it difficult to know how best to respond to other people's ailments. I prefer to be left alone when I'm ill, remembering what an uncle had told me long ago. "Puke in private, dear boy," he had said. "Nobody else is interested in seeing what you ate." But there are other sufferers who are comforted by the sympathy of an audience.

  The noises persisted, and I called upstairs to ask if there was anything we could do. Ted's worried face appeared around the door. Susan had eaten something. Poor old thing had a delicate stomach. All this excitement. There was nothing to be done except to let nature take its course, which it then loudly did again. We retreated to bed.

  The thunder of falling masonry started shortly after seven. Didier had arrived as promised, and was limbering up with a sawed-off sledgehammer and an iron spike while his assistants tossed sacks of cement around and bullied the concrete mixer into life. Our invalid felt her way slowly down the stairs, clutching her brow against the din and the bright sunlight, but insisting that she was well enough for breakfast. She was wrong, and had to leave the table hurriedly to return to the bathroom. It was a perfect morning with no wind, no clouds, and a sky of true blue. We spent it finding a doctor who would come to the house, and then went shopping for suppositories in the pharmacy.

  Over the next four or five days, we came to know the chemist well. The unlucky Susan and her stomach were at war. Garlic made her bilious. The local milk, admittedly rather curious stuff, put her bowels in an uproar. The oil, the butter, the water, the wine-nothing agreed with her, and twenty minutes in the sun turned her into a walking blister. She was allergic to the south.

  It's not uncommon. Provence is such a shock to the northern system; everything is full-blooded. Temperatures are extreme, ranging from over a hundred degrees down to minus twenty. Rain, when it comes, falls with such abandon that it washes roads away and closes the autoroute. The Mistral is a brutal, exhausting wind, bitter in winter and harsh and dry in summer. The food is full of strong, earthy flavors that can overwhelm a digestion used to a less assertive diet. The wine is young and deceptive, easy to drink but sometimes higher in alcoholic content than older wines that are treated with more caution. The combined effects of the food and climate, so different from England, take time to get used to. There is nothing bland about Provence, and it can poleaxe people as it had poleaxed Susan. She and Ted left us to convalesce in more temperate surroundings.

  Their visit made us realize how fortunate we were to have the constitutions of goats and skins that accepted the sun. The routine of our days had changed, and we were living outdoors. Getting dressed took thirty seconds. There were fresh figs and melons for breakfast, and errands were done early, before the warmth of the sun turned to heat in mid-morning. The flagstones around the pool were hot to the touch, the water still cool enough to bring us up from the first dive with a gasp. We slipped into the habit of that sensible Mediterranean indulgence, the siesta.

  The wearing of socks was a distant memory. My watch stayed in a drawer, and I found that I could more or less tell the time by the position of the shadows in the courtyard, although I seldom knew what the date was. It didn't seem important. I was turning into a contented vegetable, maintaining sporadic contact with real life through telephone conversations with people in faraway offices. They always asked wistfully what the weather was like, and were not pleased with the answer. They consoled themselves by warning me about skin cancer and the addling effect of sun on the brain. I didn't argue with them; they were probably right. But addled, wrinkled, and potentially cancerous as I might have been, I had never felt better.

  The masons were working stripped to the waist, enjoying the weather as much as we were. Their main concession to the heat was a slightly extended lunch break, which was monitored to the minute by our dogs. At the first sound of hampers being opened and plates and cutlery coming out, they would cross the courtyard at a dead run and take their places by the table, something they never did with us. Patient and unblinking, they would watch every mouthful with underprivileged expressions. Invariably, it worked. At the end of lunch they would skulk back to their lairs under the rosemary hedge, their cheeks bulging guiltily with Camembert or cous-cous. Didier claimed that it fell off the table.

  Work on the house was going according to schedule-that is, each room was taking three months
from the day the masons moved in to the day that we could move in. And we had the prospect of Menicucci and his radiators to look forward to in August. In another place, in less perfect weather, it would have been depressing, but not here. The sun was a great tranquilizer, and time passed in a haze of well-being; long, slow, almost torpid days when it was so enjoyable to be alive that nothing else mattered. We had been told that the weather often continued like this until the end of October. We had also been told that July and August were the two months when sensible residents left Provence for somewhere quieter and less crowded, like Paris. Not us.

  July

  MY FRIEND had rented a house in Ramatuelle, a few kilometers from Saint-Tropez. We wanted to see each other, despite a mutual reluctance to brave the bad-tempered congestion of high summer traffic. I lost the toss, and said I'd be there by lunchtime. After driving for half an hour I found myself in a different country, inhabited mostly by trailers. They were wallowing toward the sea in monstrous shoals, decked out with curtains of orange and brown and window stickers commemorating past migrations. Groups of them rested in the parking areas by the side of the autoroute, shimmering with heat. Their owners, ignoring the open countryside behind them, set up picnic tables and chairs with a close and uninterrupted view of the passing trucks, and within easy breathing distance of the diesel fumes. As I turned off the autoroute to go down to Sainte-Maxime, I could see more trailers stretching ahead in a bulbous, swaying convoy, and I gave up any thoughts of an early lunch. The final five kilometers of the journey took an hour and a half. Welcome to the Côte d'Azur.

  It used to be beautiful, and rare and expensive pockets of it still are. But compared with the peace and relative emptiness of the Lubéron it seemed like a madhouse, disfigured by overbuilding, overcrowding, and overselling: villa developments, steack pommes frites, inflatable rubber boats, genuine Provençal souvenirs made from olive wood, pizzas, water-skiing lessons, nightclubs, go-kart tracks-the posters were everywhere, offering everything.

  The people whose business it is to make a living from the Côte d'Azur have a limited season, and their eagerness to take your money before autumn comes and the demand for inflatable rubber boats stops is palpable and unpleasant. Waiters are impatient for their tips, shopkeepers snap at your heels so that you won't take too long to make up your mind, and then refuse to accept 200-franc notes because there are so many forgeries. A hostile cupidity hangs in the air, as noticeable as the smell of Ambre Solaire and garlic. Strangers are automatically classified as tourists and treated like nuisances, inspected with unfriendly eyes and tolerated for cash. According to the map, this was still Provence. It wasn't the Provence I knew.

  My friend's house was in the pine forests outside Ramatuelle, at the end of a long private track, completely detached from the lunacy three kilometers away on the coast. He was not surprised to hear that a two-hour drive had taken more than four hours. He told me that to be sure of a parking spot for dinner in Saint-Tropez it was best to be there by 7:30 in the morning, that going down to the beach was an exercise in frustration, and that the only guaranteed way to get to Nice airport in time to catch a plane was by helicopter.

  As I drove back home in the evening against the trailer tide, I wondered what it was about the Côte d'Azur that continued to attract such hordes every summer. From Marseilles to Monte Carlo, the roads were a nightmare and the seashore was covered with a living carpet of bodies broiling in the sun, flank to oily flank for mile after mile. Selfishly, I was glad they wanted to spend their holidays there rather than in the open spaces of the Lubéron, among more agreeable natives.

  Some natives, of course, were less agreeable than others, and I met one the next morning. Massot was en colère, kicking at the undergrowth in the small clearing near his house and chewing at his mustache in vexation.

  "You see this?" he said. "Those salauds. They come like thieves in the night and leave early in the morning. Saloperie everywhere." He showed me two empty sardine cans and a wine bottle which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that his archenemies, the German campers, had been trespassing in his private section of the national park. That in itself was bad enough, but the campers had treated his elaborate defense system with contempt, rolling back boulders to make a gap in the barricade and-sales voleurs!-stealing the notices that warned of the presence of vipers.

  Massot took off his jungle cap and rubbed the bald spot on the back of his head as he considered the enormity of the crime. He looked in the direction of his house, standing on tiptoe first on one side of the path, then on the other. He grunted.

  "It might work," he said, "but I'd have to cut down the trees."

  If he removed the small forest that stood between his house and the clearing, he would be able to see the headlights of any car coming down the track and loose off a couple of warning shots from his bedroom window. But, then again, those trees were extremely valuable, and added to the general desirability of the house he was trying to sell. No buyer had yet been found, but it was only a matter of time before somebody recognized it for the bargain it was. The trees had better stay. Massot thought again, and suddenly brightened up. Maybe the answer was pièges à feu. Yes, he liked that.

  I had heard about pièges à feu, and they sounded horrendous-concealed snares that exploded when they were disturbed, like miniature mines. The thought of fragments of German camper flying through the air was alarming to me, but clearly very amusing to Massot, who was pacing round the clearing saying boum! every three or four yards as he planned his mine field.

  Surely he wasn't serious, I said, and in any case I thought that pièges à feu were illegal. Massot stopped his explosions and tapped the side of his nose, sly and conspiratorial.

  "That may be true," he said, "but there's no law against notices." He grinned, and raised both arms above his head. "Boum!"

  Where were you twenty years ago, I thought, when they needed you on the Côte d'Azur?

  Perhaps Massot's antisocial instincts were being intensified by the heat. It was often in the nineties by mid-morning, and the sky turned from blue to a burnt white by noon. Without consciously thinking about it, we adjusted to the temperature by getting up earlier and using the cool part of the day to do anything energetic. Any sudden or industrious activity between midday and early evening was out of the question; like the dogs, we sought out the shade instead of the sun. Cracks appeared in the earth, and the grass gave up trying to grow. For long periods during the day the only sounds were those made by the cigales round the house, the bees in the lavender, and bodies toppling into the pool.

  I walked the dogs each morning between six and seven, and they discovered a new sport, more rewarding than chasing rabbits and squirrels. It had started when they came across what they thought was a large animal made of bright blue nylon. Circling it at a safe distance, they barked until it stirred and finally woke. A rumpled face appeared from one end, followed a few moments later by a hand offering a biscuit. From then on, the sight of a sleeping bag among the trees meant food. For the campers, it must have been disquieting to wake up and see two whiskery faces only inches away, but they were amiable enough about it once they had recovered from the shock.

  Strangely enough, Massot was half-right. They were mostly Germans, but not the indiscriminate rubbish-tippers that he complained about. These Germans left no trace; everything was bundled into giant backpacks before they shuffled off like two-legged snails into the heat of the day. In my short experience of litter in the Lubéron, the French themselves were the most likely offenders, but no Frenchman would accept that. At any time of the year, but particularly in the summer, it was well known that foreigners of one stripe or another were responsible for causing most of the problems in life.

  The Belgians, so it was said, were to blame for the majority of accidents because of their habit of driving in the middle of the road, forcing the famously prudent French driver into ditches to avoid being écrasé. The Swiss and the noncamping section of the German population we
re guilty of monopolizing hotels and restaurants and pushing up property prices. And the English-ah, the English. They were renowned for the frailty of their digestive systems and their preoccupation with drains and plumbing. "They have a talent for diarrhea," a French friend observed. "If an Englishman hasn't got it, he is looking for somewhere to have it."

  There is just enough of a hint of truth in these national insults to sustain their currency, and I was witness to an interlude in one of Cavaillon's busiest cafés that must have confirmed the French in their opinion of English sensitivities.

  A couple with their small son were having coffee, and the boy indicated his need to go to the lavatory. The father looked up from his two-day-old copy of the Daily Telegraph.

  "You'd better make sure it's all right," he said to the boy's mother. "Remember what happened in Calais?"

  The mother sighed, and made her way dutifully into the gloom at the rear of the café. When she reappeared it was at high speed, and she looked as if she had just eaten a lemon.

  "It's disgusting. Roger is not to go in there."

  Roger became immediately interested in exploring a forbidden lavatory.

  "I've got to go," he said, and played his trump card. "It's number two. I've got to go."

  "There isn't even a seat. It's just a hole."

  "I don't care. I've got to go."

  "You'll have to take him," said the mother. "I'm not going in there again."

  The father folded his newspaper and stood up, with young Roger tugging at his hand.

  "You'd better take the newspaper," said the mother.

  "I'll finish it when I get back."

  "There's no paper," she hissed.

  "Ah. Well, I'll try to save the crossword."

  The minutes passed, and I was wondering if I could ask the mother exactly what had happened in Calais, when there was a loud exclamation from the back of the café.