“Way too old,” he said.

“I said don’t tease. I’m twenty-five, for God’s sake.”

“Like I said, way too—”

She punched him on the shoulder again, but it was his good arm this time. He held up his hands in surrender. She gave an exaggerated sigh and they sat quietly awhile. There was a bird singing in one of the trees. The cyclists walked past, speaking German, and went out through the gate. Ned watched them unchain their bikes and pedal off.

Looking straight ahead, behind her shades, Melanie said, “I am five feet tall, you know. That makes just over a hundred and fifty damned centimetres. Which is short, any way you look at it. Do not make a joke, Ned.”

“No? I have at least three.”

“I know you do.”

He glanced at her. “It really bothers you?”

Still looking towards the pillars, she said, “Not always. Not even usually. I mean, there are worse problems in life. But it’s a pain. It’s hard to be taken seriously sometimes. Like I’m a hobbit with a Daytimer. Just…cute.”

He thought about it. “My dad takes you pretty seriously. I think Greg and Steve do. And I don’t think you’re cute, I think you’re an anal-retentive, micro-managing pain.”

She laughed this time. “Ah! Progress.”

“I mean, you researched jogging paths here, Melanie.”

She looked at him. “I like my job, Ned. A lot. I’m just trying to do it right.”

He sighed. “I know. Makes me feel babied, though.”

She shrugged. “Don’t. You aren’t a baby at all. I checked out music stores and jazz bars for Greg and found an indoor pool for Steve, you know.”

He thought about that. “I didn’t know, actually.”

“Think you’re the only man in my life here, sailor?”

His turn to laugh.

He would remember that exchange. Another moment from when he was still young. Melanie looked at her watch and tsked, and got up, collecting her gear. Ned went with her back to the main square. The famous church was there; a tour group was just entering. Melanie walked farther along to a side entrance that led to the cloister. Another cloister, Ned thought.

As they went in, through an arched, covered space, they saw a gendarme keeping people out so that his father could work. Melanie explained who they were; the policeman motioned them through. Ned let Melanie go ahead of him up a flight of steps.

He felt strange again suddenly. A disorienting intrusion of that other world he seemed to have accessed. Something was approaching, a vibration in the air almost. Presences. He could feel them. Not the man in the grey leather jacket, or the golden one from the tower. But whatever this was, it wasn’t far away. Or they weren’t.

He looked around him. He wasn’t sure why this place was shaping awareness in him, but on some other level he did know: layers and layers of the past were here. A past that seemed not to be entirely finished with.

Was it ever finished? he wondered.

They reached the top of the stairs and saw another arch, with a green space beyond, in shadow and light.

He wished his aunt were here. And at the same time he was uncomfortably aware that there was something he hadn’t told her last night before they parted at the laneway. And that it might be a mistake.

I’m going to cancel, anyway, he said to himself. It doesn’t matter.

“You and I are still at war,” Melanie said over her shoulder just before she walked into the cloister. “Don’t kid yourself. That ringtone doomed you, Ned.”

He couldn’t think of a funny reply in time.

He watched as she went towards where he could see his father and the others standing in a brilliant light. From the dim, vaulted cool of the archway Ned looked in at them. He saw his father moving quickly, talking quickly, stopping to frame a view with his hands, going a few steps over to gauge it elsewhere. He saw that the brown hair was greying more now, though not yet the notorious signature moustache.

One day, Ned understood, that hair would be grey, or thinning, or both, and his dad wouldn’t be wearing tight blue jeans and moving with such crisp, strong strides. Time would do what it did to people. Ned stayed where he was, looking at his father as from within a long tunnel.

Edward Marriner wore a green workshirt and his favourite tan vest with a dozen pockets. He had his sunglasses pushed up on top of his head. He was talking, gesturing, but Ned couldn’t hear what he was saying. He seemed far away. An effect of acoustics, of light and shade. It frightened him, this sudden feeling of distance, of being on the other side of some divide.

There was a full moon in his mind, high among stars in the midst of afternoon.

Childhood’s end.

CHAPTER VIII

Tere had been clouds throughout the night, hiding the moon much of the time, but the last day of April dawned windy and very clear.

A mistral was blowing, Veracook advised over morning croissants. They were sheltered here, tucked under the slope, but it would be fierce today up on Mont Ventoux, or in Avignon, or the hill villages like Les Baux or Gordes or Menerbes. Small children had been blown off cliffs, she said, shaking her head dolefully, when the mistral came down from the north.

That same wind was, however, a photographer’s dream of light. It scoured the sky of anything resembling haze or mist, leaving it hard, brilliant, precise: a backdrop that rendered wildflowers, monuments, medieval ruins, bending cypresses electric with intensity.

Edward Marriner had been here before in a mistral. He wasn’t about to try going up any cliffs with their gear, but he did change plans for the morning over his second cup of coffee.

Melanie scribbled fast notes and got busy on the telephone. Greg, designated driver, carried his mug into the dining room where the maps were spread on the table and bent over them, plotting routes. Steve started loading the van.

They were now going east, an hour or so, to some monastery called Thoronet. In this light, the stones of the abbey would almost come alive, Ned’s father told him. They were alone at the kitchen table.

“It’s ironic,” Edward Marriner said, “and it pleases me. There are a lot of things to like about the medieval Cistercian monks, and a few not to like. They started by opposing church wealth and ostentation, but they also detested learning, study, books themselves. And even worldly beauty. Bernard of Clairvaux, who shaped the order, would have hated the idea that people find their abbeys beautiful now. They weren’t supposed to be. That would have been a distraction.”

“From what?” Ned asked.

“God. Prayer. Silence and work in the most remote places they could find. They came down here for the solitude.”

“From where?”

“East of Paris, I think. Don’t quote me.”

Ned made a face. “As if. This isn’t an essay, Dad.”

Edward Marriner ignored that, sipped his coffee. “Thing is, Provence has always been seen as a kind of paradise, and that attracts people. For their own reasons.”

“The Greeks? Like he said yesterday at lunch?”

“Oliver? Yes. In a way, everyone who’s ever come here has been a stranger trying to make it theirs. There are footprints and bones all over. Some places are like that.”

“Isn’t everywhere like that?”

His father looked at him. “Maybe. Even Greenland and the Hebrides have been fought over, but it’s happened in some places more than others. This is one of those. Being desired can be a mixed blessing.” He grinned suddenly, as if he’d amused himself. “This morning, my son, in this light, I am going to make an old, cold abbey look so gorgeous the bones of Bernard of Clairvaux will spin in his grave, wherever it is.”

“Nice of you,” Ned said.

“Damn right. Want to come see?”

Ned realized, not for the first time, that his father loved what he did. For reasons he decided not to elaborate upon, he declined the invitation. He’d do some reading on the terrace, he said, music, a training run…he’d keep out of their hair and out of trouble. Might even work on one of his essays.