As it turned out, the omelette was excellent, plump and runny, the salad fresh and well dressed, and the pichet of pink wine cool and crisp. From his seat outside the café, Max had a clear view of the celebration that was taking place across the square.
The provincial French at play are often a surprise to visitors who have been brought up with the myth that Parisians, with their reserve and their chilly good manners, are representative of the way the rest of France behaves. The crowd on Fanny’s terrace was mostly young, with a scattering of children and older adults-all of them, from the sound of it, well supplied with wine. Bursts of laughter came rolling across the square, as did fragments of speeches, complete with interruptions and applause, and a quavering rendition of “ La Vie en Rose.” This started as a solo by an elderly man, standing with one hand on the shoulder of the bride and the other conducting the other guests, as they joined in, with a glass of champagne.
Max sat over an espresso and a Calvados, a sense of well-being spreading through him like a soothing drug. He hadn’t yet had a chance to feel lonely; that would probably come in time. But for the moment, with the sun high in a blue sky, a full stomach, and the thought of tomorrow’s excursion with Nathalie Auzet, he was at peace with the world. He tilted his face up to the sun, closed his eyes against the glare, and gave in to the impulse to doze.
He was shocked into consciousness by a pandemonium of car horns. The square had filled up with cars, each decorated for the occasion, according to tradition. Strips of chiffon, white, blue, or pink, were tied to radio antennae, wing mirrors, or, in one case, the driver’s sunglasses, and the obligatory sound effects had turned the peace of the afternoon into bedlam. After a triumphal tour of the square, the blaring cavalcade swept off for what promised to be an ear-splitting start to the honeymoon.
Max rubbed his eyes, and felt a slight tenderness on his eyelids where they had caught the sun. Silence and emptiness were returning to the square as the village closed its shutters and prepared to take its siesta.
When he got back to the house, it was to find that Madame Passepartout and her vacuum cleaner were in full cry. He left her to it and spent the rest of the afternoon in the barns, trying to restore a semblance of order to the chaos of fertilizer sacks, oil drums, and old tractor tires that littered the beaten mud floor. It was heavy, dirty work, and by seven o’clock he was more tired than he’d been in years, his muscles aching pleasantly from the exercise. He took a glass of wine and sat on the parapet of the bassin, watching the sun dip slowly toward the western horizon as it turned the sky into a lurid bonfire of pink and lavender.
Too weary even to consider eating, he took a long hot bath, and then dropped almost instantly into the welcome oblivion of sleep.
Eight
Sunday morning felt different from weekday mornings; even quieter than normal, as though the countryside itself were taking the day off. Max hadn’t seen a living soul during his run. There were no cars on the roads, no tractors on the horizon, no figures in the vines, just perfect stillness, bathed in sunshine, wherever he looked. And today, there was no chance of that peace being shattered by a domestic symphony conducted by Madame Passepartout.
He opened one of the kitchen windows, dislodging an indignant pigeon, and heard the distant tolling of the church bell summoning the villagers to mass, an interlude of piety before the indulgence of Sunday lunch. He remembered once reading an article claiming that members of the Catholic faith ate better and more copiously than Protestants, the reason being that they could confess to any sins of gluttony committed at the table and so absolve themselves of any guilt. Looking inside the refrigerator, he found little to lead him into temptation, and had to make do with a bowl of café crème.
The kitchen smelled of Madame Passepartout’s attentions, of cleanliness and wax polish and lavender essence. She had restored the surface of the old wooden table to a healthy gleam, and had placed in the middle of it a bowl of dusky pink roses cut from the bush in the courtyard. Next week, Max thought, he must talk to her about wages. Whatever she asked would be worth it, if only for the pleasure of having coffee every morning in such polished and fragrant surroundings.
Max himself was polished and fragrant in preparation for his outing with Nathalie Auzet. He had shaved with extra care, and dressed in dark blue cotton trousers and an old but still presentable silk shirt that a girlfriend of long ago had given him one Christmas. On his way to the front door, he caught sight of himself in the hall mirror, and saw that his London pallor had been replaced by the beginnings of a tan-a café tan, confined to his face and forearms, but a start. He left the key under the pot of geraniums and drove off, whistling.
Nathalie’s house was a commuter’s joy, only two doors up the street from her office. A glossy black Peugeot 305 convertible, top down, was parked outside, and the door to the house was ajar. Whatever journalists wrote with such horrified relish in the newspapers about rising crime statistics obviously didn’t yet apply to Saint-Pons.
Max raised the heavy bronze knocker and gave two tentative taps.
“Oui?” The voice came from the top of the house, cutting through the buzz of a hair dryer.
“Nathalie, it’s me. Max.”
“Are you always early?”
“I promised my mother never to be late for meetings with notaires, specially when they drive convertibles.”
The hair dryer stopped. “Come in. I’ll be down in a minute.”
Max went through a tiny hall and into an L-shaped room, the sitting area divided from the kitchen by an old zinc-topped bar. A leather chesterfield, with a silk shawl thrown over the back, and two club chairs were arranged around a coffee table piled with books, and a handsome oriental carpet, its colors muted with age to a soft glow, covered the tiled floor. A large nineteenth-century Provençal mirror, in a massive frame of gilded gesso, hung above the fireplace, reflecting a vase of lilies on the mantelpiece. A group of Lartigue photographs-all of them signed, Max noticed-decorated one wall. Everything spoke of quiet good taste and no shortage of money.
Perched on the edge of the chesterfield, Max inspected the books on the coffee table. They were mostly on art or photography, from Caillebotte and Botero to Atget and Erwitt, although one pile seemed to be devoted to wine-volumes on Yquem, on Burgundy, on the legendary champagnes. And on top of the pile, there was an old copy of The Great Wine Chateaux of Bordeaux.
Max picked up the book, a little foxed but still handsome, and started to leaf through the pages. If it were still in print, he thought, he’d get a copy for Charlie, a man who would appreciate the mixture of fine wines and what he would call highly desirable real estate. Remembering the glorious bottle they had shared in London, Max turned to the index to look up Chateau Léoville Barton.
As the pages fluttered open, a bookmark fell to the floor. Max picked it up and saw that it was a wine label; a wine among hundreds of others that he’d never heard of, but he liked the simplicity of the label’s design and the thick cream stock on which it was printed. It was discreet and clean without being too modern, exactly the kind of label he would choose for his own wine, if he could ever get anything drinkable out of the vineyard. He put it back as he heard Nathalie coming down the stairs, replaced the book, and stood up to greet her.