Max turned again to Christie. “The complications have just got more complicated. I think I’d better tell you the details afterwards.”

Christie rolled her eyes and took out her cigarettes.

Bosc looked from one to the other, not knowing which of them would end up as his client. He hoped it was the one who spoke French. On the other hand, the girl was very pretty. Also, as the young man had told him, American, and therefore extremely rich. He decided to offer them a constructive piece of advice. “To safeguard your positions,” he said, “it would be prudent if both parties were to maintain a physical presence in the property while the matter is being resolved. Absence could possibly be interpreted as giving up legal rights. French law can sometimes play these tricks.”

Max was silent for a moment as the words sank in. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “What I think you’re saying is that we’re going to have to live together. Is that right?”

The lawyer nodded. “Under the same roof, yes. But not in the romantic sense. Unless, of course…” He looked from Max to Christie, signaling all kinds of delightful possibilities with his eyebrows.

“What?” asked Christie.

“Later,” said Max.

The meeting ended with Bosc promising to institute inquiries. But, as he told Max, these would take time. They would have to be patient. He saw them to the front door and stood watching as they went out into the sunlit square, mentally rubbing his hands at the prospect of fat fees to come.

Christie blew out a long, loud gust of air. “OK. Is that all settled?”

“Not exactly. I think a beer would help me explain. You’re not too fond of lawyers, are you?”

“I used to live with one.”

They walked in silence down the rue de Nazareth to the Cours Mirabeau, and took the last empty table on the terrace of the Deux Garçons. Christie looked around at the crowd, most of them studying maps and guidebooks, many of them in the American vacationers’ uniform of baseball caps, baggy multipocketed shorts, and sandals made from strips of black industrial webbing. She turned back to Max with a grin. “Where’s the guy with the beret and the accordion?”

The waiter, impassive and bored, put two beers on their table and waited to be paid, his eyes focused on something far away, perhaps his retirement. He glanced down to assess the size of his tip, acknowledged it with an almost imperceptible tilt of the head, and moved off on feet as flat as the crêpes being eaten at the next table.

Max began his explanation, but he could sense that it was a struggle for Christie to stay interested in precedents and judicial consultations, and when he came to disinterment and DNA tests, she shuddered and shook her head.

“Look,” said Max, “I’m just telling you what he said.” Before he could continue, Christie put up a hand to stop him.

“Right at the end,” she said, “when he was looking at both of us, all that stuff with the eyebrows, what was that all about?”

“Good question. I was coming to that. Well, what he was suggesting-no, what he was advising, only as a legal thing, you understand-was that you should, as he put it, ‘maintain a presence.’ ”

“Maintain a presence?”

“Yes. In the house.”

“With you?”

“Well, yes. I mean, I’d be there, obviously. Maintaining a presence as well. Just until this is all sorted out.”

“Max, I only met you this morning. I don’t know you. And now you’re suggesting I come and live with you?”

She looked comically earnest, her blue eyes wide with concern, a young American woman face to face for the first time with European turpitude. Max gave up trying to take the situation seriously. It was too bizarre.

“It’s a big house,” he said. “We could have three bedrooms each.”

Eleven

“Ah,” said Madame Passepartout, “it is as I thought. The young Américaine is moving in.” She watched approvingly as Max struggled to maneuver Christie’s bag, an enormous sausage-shaped canvas holdall, through the front door. “Everything is ready, Monsieur Max,” adding, with a smirk, “I’ve put flowers in your bedroom and changed the sheets. I’m sure you’ll both be very comfortable.”

Max dropped the bag on the floor. “No, madame. No. You don’t understand. She’s staying here, but not with me. Well, with me, but not in the same bedroom.”

Madame Passepartout received this news with a look of astonishment, as though the idea of two healthy and unattached young people choosing not to share a bed was odd, even unnatural. She cocked her head and put her hands on her hips. “Ah bon? And why not?”

“I’ll explain later.” Turning to Christie, Max nodded toward the stairs and heaved the bag onto his shoulder. “Let’s get you settled in.”

They made a tour of the upstairs rooms, with Madame Passepartout flinging open shutters and flicking any surface she suspected of harboring dust, pointing out the views through the tall windows and muttering, not quite under her breath, about the waste of Max’s perfectly good bedroom. Christie looked with apprehension at the sagging beds, the ancient, lopsided armoires, the uneven tiled floors. Apprehension turned to disbelief when they came to one bathroom even more medieval than the others, with a shower attachment linked to the tub by twisted coils of cracked and faded pink rubber tubing. She shook her head slowly. “Far out,” she said. “Incredible.”

“Not exactly the Ritz, I know,” said Max. “But bags of charm. You won’t find anything like this in the States.” He perched on the lavatory seat and stretched both arms out toward the window. “I mean, you could spend many happy hours here. The view’s fantastic.”

A half smile couldn’t conceal Christie’s obvious dismay, just this side of horror, and Max tried to imagine the palatial sanitary arrangements she must have been accustomed to in California. Hygiene, as he knew, was one of the minor religions of America. He took pity on her. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you have my room and bathroom, and I’ll go somewhere else?”

And so it was decided. Leaving Christie to unpack, Max and Madame Passepartout went downstairs to the kitchen, Max to seek comfort in a glass of wine, Madame Passepartout to seek enlightenment.

“But why not?” she asked again. “It is the best room. The bed is large enough for two. You could be together. Très cosy.”

“We’ve only just met.”

“So? You’ll get to know each other.”

“She’s my cousin. At least, I think she’s my cousin.”

Madame Passepartout dismissed that trifling accident of birth with a wave of the hand. “Half the aristocrats in France have liaisons with their cousins.” She poked Max in the chest for emphasis. “And many of the peasants. Why, even here in the village, it is well known that…”

Max cut her off in mid-revelation. “Look, the truth of it is…”

“Ah. The truth.”

“… the truth of it is that I’ve never really fancied blondes. I prefer brunettes. Always have.”

“C’est vrai?”

“Absolutely.”

Madame Passepartout couldn’t help a hand going up to touch her acceptably brunette hair, even as she shrugged. She had proposed what she considered to be a sensible and convenient arrangement-a potentially very pleasurable arrangement-and it had been declined for no other reason, as far as she could see, than the girl having been born a blonde. Absurd. How strange men were, English men in particular. She wished Max an agreeable evening and went off to discuss him and his foibles at length with her sister, Madame Roussel.

Max waited until her car had disappeared up the drive before taking a bottle of rosé and two glasses out into the courtyard. He put the bottle under the flow of the fountain to keep a chill on the wine, and fetched two tattered wicker chairs from the barn, putting them beside the bassin so that they faced the sunset. He was, he thought, performing all the duties of a considerate host. But as he sat down to review the events of the day, he couldn’t ignore the thought that his days as a host might be numbered. Was the house really his, or would some arcane wrinkle in a law established centuries ago by Napoleon decide otherwise? Had he been stupid to bring up the problem in the first place? Possibly. But he liked to think of himself as a man with one or two basic principles, and a voice from the grave came back to remind him of something that Uncle Henry had often told him: a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money. Not only money, in this case, but a new life.