Max had started to study the framed menu that was nailed to the trunk of a plane tree.
“Bonsoir, monsieur.”
Max looked up. “Hi. Oh, sorry. Bonsoir, madame.”
“Mademoiselle.”
“Of course. Excuse me.” For a few seconds they looked at one another in silence, both smiling. An observer would have guessed that they liked what they saw. “Am I too early?”
No, monsieur wasn’t too early. He had come just before the rush. Fanny placed him at a table on the small terrace, brought him a glass of wine and a saucer of sleek black olives, and left him with the menu. It was short, but filled with the kind of dishes Max liked: a choice of deep-fried sliced zucchini, vegetable terrine or a pâté to start; bavette aux échalotes, roasted cod, or brochette de poulet as a main course; cheeses, and those two reliable old standbys, tarte aux pommes and crème brûlée, for dessert. Simple food of the kind that attracted customers rather than Michelin stars.
Max made his choice and settled back in his chair, his feelings a mixture of contentment and anticipation as he watched Fanny embracing a group of four that had just arrived. Somewhere in her family, he thought, there must have been some North African blood. It would explain her coffee-colored skin, her mop of black curls, and her dark eyes. She was wearing a sleeveless, close-fitting top that accentuated the slender column of her neck and the curve of a jaunty bosom. From the waist down, she was wearing jeans and espadrilles. Max wondered if her legs were as long and well shaped as the rest of her.
She caught him looking at her, and came over to his table, smiling. “Alors, vous avez choisi?” She sat down opposite him, pad and pencil at the ready, and leaned forward to take his order.
With some difficulty, Max kept his eyes on the menu, to prevent them from their natural inclination to stray, and ordered zucchini, the steak, and a carafe of red wine.
Fanny noted down the order. “Is there anything else you’d like?”
Max looked at her for a long moment, his eyebrows raised and his imagination churning.
“Pommes frites? Gratin? Salade?”
Later, sitting over a Calvados and a second cup of coffee, Max reviewed the first day of his new life. With the optimism induced by a good dinner and the soft warmth of the evening breeze, he could see that his initial disappointment over the wine was nothing. That, according to Charlie, could be fixed; as for Roussel, he would probably require some diplomatic handling, and Max would have to tread gently. But the other discoveries of the day were all encouraging-a potentially wonderful house, a delightful village, and two of the prettiest women he’d met for months. And perhaps more important, there were the first stirrings of a sense that he could happily fit in down here in Provence. Another of Uncle Henry’s nuggets of advice to the young came drifting back into his mind from years ago: There is nowhere else in the world where you can keep busy doing so little and enjoying it so much. One day you’ll understand.
He paid the bill and overtipped. The restaurant was still busy, but Fanny found time to come over to wish him good night with a kiss on each cheek. She smelled like every young man’s dream.
“A bientôt?” she said.
Max smiled and nodded. “Try to keep me away.”
Five
God’s alarm clock, the sun, came streaming through the bedroom window and woke Max after the best night’s sleep he’d had in years, even though sleep had not come instantly. In London, there had always been the lullaby of distant traffic, and a glow in the sky from the city’s lights. In the country, there was total silence, and the darkness was thick and absolute. It would take some getting used to. Now, half-conscious and at first not sure where he was, he opened his eyes and looked up at the plaster and beam ceiling. Three pigeons were conducting an interminable conversation on the window ledge. The air was already warm. Glancing at his watch, he could hardly believe he’d slept so late. He decided to celebrate his first morning in Provence with a run in the sun.
Although many foreign habits, such as tennis, were now familiar to the inhabitants of Saint-Pons, the sight of a runner was still enough to cause a flicker of interest among the men who spent their lives in the vines. A small group of them, trimming off overgrown shoots, paused to watch as Max ran by. To them, voluntary physical exercise in the midmorning heat was an incomprehensible form of self-torture. They shook their heads and bent their backs and resumed their trimming.
It seemed to Max that he was running more easily than he had ever done in Hyde Park; probably, he thought, because he was breathing sweet air instead of the fumes from a million exhaust pipes. He lengthened his stride, feeling the sweat run down his chest, and moved onto the shoulder of the road as he heard a car coming up behind him.
The car slowed down to keep pace with him. Glancing over, he saw Fanny’s curly head and wide smile. She overtook him, then stopped and pushed open the passenger door.
“Mais vous êtes fou,” she said, and cocked an approving eye at his legs. “Come. Let me take you into the village. You look as if you need a beer.”
Max thanked her but shook his head, not without some reluctance. “This is what I do to get rid of the Calvados. You know what the English are like. We love to suffer.”
Fanny considered this national peculiarity for a moment, then shrugged and drove off, watching the running figure grow smaller in the rearview mirror. What an odd lot they were, English men; uncomfortable with women, most of them. But that was hardly surprising when one considered their education. The public school system had once been explained to her-all boys together, cold baths, and not a female in sight. What a way to start your life. She wondered if Max would settle in his uncle’s house, and found herself hoping he would. The selection of unattached young men in Saint-Pons was severely limited.
After the third mile, Max was beginning to regret that he’d turned down her offer. The sun seemed to be focused on the top of his head, and the air was still, with no breeze to relieve the heat. By the time he got back to the house he was melting, his shorts and T-shirt black with sweat, his legs like jelly as he climbed the stairs to the bathroom.
The shower was a classic example of late-twentieth-century French plumbing, a monument to inconvenience, no more than a vestigial afterthought attached to the bath taps by a rubber umbilical cord. It was a handheld model, thus leaving only one hand free for the soap and its application to various parts of the body. To work up a satisfactory two-handed lather, the shower had to be placed, writhing and squirting, in the bottom of the bath, and then retrieved for the rinsing process, one body part at a time. In London, it had been a simple matter of standing under a torrent; here, it was an exercise that would tax the ingenuity of a contortionist.
Max stepped out gingerly onto the flooded tile floor and dripped dry while he was shaving. Among the Band-Aids and aspirin in the medicine cabinet above the basin, he found a small flask, still half-full of Uncle Henry’s eau de cologne. It was a relic from the old Turkish baths in Mayfair, with a label like an ornate banknote and a scent that made Max think of silk dressing gowns. He splashed some on, combed his hair, and went to choose something suitable to wear for lunch with Maître Auzet.
She had suggested, for the sake of discretion, a restaurant in the countryside, a few miles away from the prying eyes and wagging tongues of Saint-Pons. Max found it without difficulty, rural France often being more generously supplied with restaurant signs than road signs, and arrived a few minutes early.