A Year In Provence

June

THE LOCAL advertising industry was in bloom. Any car parked near a market for longer than five minutes became a target for roving Provençal media executives, who swooped from windscreen to windscreen stuffing small, excitable posters under the wipers. We were constantly returning to our car to find it flapping with messages-breathless news of forthcoming attractions, unmissable opportunities, edible bargains, and exotic services.

There was an accordion contest in Cavaillon, with the added delights of "Les Lovely Girls Adorablement Déshabillées (12 Tableaux)" to entertain us in between numbers. A supermarket was launching Operation Porc, which promised every conceivable part of a pig's anatomy at prices so low that we would rub our eyes in disbelief. There were boules tournaments and bals dansants, bicycle races and dog shows, mobile discotheques complete with disc jockeys, firework displays, and organ recitals. There was Madame Florian, clairvoyant and alchemist, who was so confident of her supernatural powers that she provided a guarantee of satisfaction with every séance. There were the working girls-from Eve, who described herself as a delicious creature available for saucy rendezvous, to Mademoiselle Roz, who could realize all our fantasies over the telephone, a service that she proudly announced had been banned in Marseilles. And there was, one day, a desperate and hastily written note asking not for our money but for our blood.

The smudged photocopy told the story of a small boy who was waiting to go to America for a major operation, and who needed constant transfusions to keep him alive until the hospital could accept him. "Venez nombreux et vite," said the note. The blood unit would be at the village hall in Gordes at eight the next morning.

When we arrived at 8:30 the hall was already crowded. A dozen beds were arranged along the wall, all occupied, and from the row of upturned feet we could see that a good cross-section of the local population had turned out, easily identified by their footwear: sandals and espadrilles for the shopkeepers, high heels for the young matrons, canvas ankle boots for the peasants, and carpet slippers for their wives. The elder women kept a firm grip on their shopping baskets with one hand while they clenched and unclenched the other fist to speed the flow of blood into the plastic bags, and there was considerable debate about whose contribution was the darkest, richest, and most nourishing.

We lined up for a blood test behind a thick-set old man with a florid nose, a frayed cap, and overalls, who watched with amusement as the nurse made unsuccessful attempts to prick the toughened skin of his thumb.

"Do you want me to fetch the butcher?" he asked. She jabbed once more, harder. "Merde." A swelling drop of blood appeared, and the nurse transferred it neatly into a small tube, added some liquid, and shook the mixture vigorously. She looked up from the tube with a disapproving expression.

"How did you come here?" she asked the old man.

He stopped sucking his thumb. "Bicycle," he said, "all the way from Les Imberts."

The nurse sniffed. "It astonishes me that you didn't fall off." She looked at the tube again. "You're technically drunk."

"Impossible," said the old man. "I may have had a little red wine with breakfast, comme d'habitude, but that's nothing. And furthermore," he said, wagging his bloodstained thumb under her nose, "a measure of alcohol enriches the corpuscles."

The nurse was not convinced. She sent the old man away to have a second breakfast, this time with coffee, and told him to come back at the end of the morning. He lumbered off grumbling, holding the wounded thumb before him like a flag of battle.

We were pricked, pronounced sober, and shown to our beds. Our veins were plumbed into the plastic bags. We clenched and unclenched dutifully. The hall was noisy and good-humored, and people who would normally pass one another on the street without acknowledgment were suddenly friendly, in the way that often happens when strangers are united in their performance of a good deed. Or it might have had something to do with the bar at the end of the room.

In England, the reward for a bagful of blood is a cup of tea and a biscuit. But here, after being disconnected from our tubes, we were shown to a long table manned by volunteer waiters. What would we like? Coffee, chocolate, croissants, brioches, sandwiches of ham or garlic sausage, mugs of red or rosé wine? Eat up! Drink up! Replace those corpuscles! The stomach must be served! A young male nurse was hard at work with a corkscrew, and the supervising doctor in his long white coat wished us all bon appétit. If the steadily growing pile of empty bottles behind the bar was anything to go by, the appeal for blood was an undoubted success, both clinically and socially.

Some time later, we received through the post our copy of Le Globule, the official magazine for the blood donors. Hundreds of liters had been collected that morning in Gordes, but the other statistic that interested me-the number of liters that had been drunk-was nowhere to be found, a tribute to medical discretion.

OUR FRIEND the London lawyer, a man steeped in English reserve, was watching what he called the antics of the frogs from the Fin de Siècle café in Cavaillon. It was market day, and the pavement was a human traffic jam, slow moving, jostling and chaotic.

"Look over there," he said, as a car stopped in the middle of the street while the driver got out to embrace an acquaintance, "they're always mauling each other. See that? Men kissing. Damned unhealthy, if you ask me." He snorted into his beer, his sense of propriety outraged by such deviant behavior, so alien to the respectable Anglo-Saxon.

It had taken me some months to get used to the Provençal delight in physical contact. Like anyone brought up in England, I had absorbed certain social mannerisms. I had learned to keep my distance, to offer a nod instead of a handshake, to ration kissing to female relatives and to confine any public demonstrations of affection to dogs. To be engulfed by a Provençal welcome, as thorough and searching as being frisked by airport security guards, was, at first, a startling experience. Now I enjoyed it, and I was fascinated by the niceties of the social ritual, and the sign language which is an essential part of any Provençal encounter.

When two unencumbered men meet, the least there will be is the conventional handshake. If the hands are full, you will be offered a little finger to shake. If the hands are wet or dirty, you will be offered a forearm or an elbow. Riding a bicycle or driving a car does not excuse you from the obligation to toucher les cinq sardines, and so you will see perilous contortions being performed on busy streets as hands grope through car windows and across handlebars to find each other. And this is only at the first and most restrained level of acquaintance. A closer relationship requires more demonstrative acknowledgment.

As our lawyer friend had noticed, men kiss other men. They squeeze shoulders, slap backs, pummel kidneys, pinch cheeks. When a Provençal man is truly pleased to see you, there is a real possibility of coming away from his clutches with superficial bruising.

The risk of bodily damage is less where women are concerned, but an amateur can easily make a social blunder if he miscalculates the required number of kisses. In my early days of See also discovery, I would plant a single kiss, only to find that the other cheek was being proffered as I was drawing back. Only snobs kiss once, I was told, or those unfortunates who suffer from congenital froideur. I then saw what I assumed to be the correct procedure-the triple kiss, left-right-left, so I tried it on a Parisian friend. Wrong again. She told me that triple-kissing was a low Provençal habit, and that two kisses were enough among civilized people. The next time I saw my neighbor's wife, I kissed her twice. "Non," she said, "trois fois."

I now pay close attention to the movement of the female head. If it stops swiveling after two kisses, I am almost sure I've filled my quota, but I stay poised for a third lunge just in case the head should keep moving.

It's a different but equally tricky problem for my wife, who is on the receiving end and has to estimate the number of times she needs to swivel, or indeed if she needs to swivel at all. One morning she heard a bellow in the street, and turned to see Ramon the plasterer advancing on her. He stopped, and wiped his hands ostentatiously on his trousers. My wife anticipated a handshake, and held out her hand. Ramon brushed it aside and kissed her three times with great gusto. You never can tell.

Once the initial greeting is over, conversation can begin. Shopping baskets and packages are put down, dogs are tied to café tables, bicycles and tools are leaned up against the nearest wall. This is necessary, because for any serious and satisfactory discussion both hands must be free to provide visual punctuation, to terminate dangling sentences, to add emphasis, or simply to decorate speech which, as it is merely a matter of moving the mouth, is not on its own sufficiently physical for the Provençal. So the hands and the eternally eloquent shoulders are vital to a quiet exchange of views, and in fact it is often possible to follow the gist of a Provençal conversation from a distance, without hearing the words, just by watching expressions and the movements of bodies and hands.

There is a well-defined silent vocabulary, starting with the hand waggle which had been introduced to us by our builders. They used it only as a disclaimer whenever talking about time or cost, but it is a gesture of almost infinite flexibility. It can describe the state of your health, how you're getting on with your mother-in-law, the progress of your business, your assessment of a restaurant, or your predictions about this year's melon crop. When it is a subject of minor importance, the waggle is perfunctory, and is accompanied by a dismissive raising of the eyebrows. More serious matters-politics, the delicate condition of one's liver, the prospects for a local rider in the Tour de France-are addressed with greater intensity. The waggle is in slow motion, with the upper part of the body swaying slightly as the hand rocks, a frown of concentration on the face.

The instrument of warning and argument is the index finger, in one of its three operational positions. Thrust up, rigid and unmoving, beneath your conversational partner's nose, it signals caution-watch out, attention, all is not what it seems. Held just below face level and shaken rapidly from side to side like an agitated metronome, it indicates that the other person is woefully ill informed and totally wrong in what he has just said. The correct opinion is then delivered, and the finger changes from its sideways motion into a series of jabs and prods, either tapping the chest if the unenlightened one is a man or remaining a few discreet centimeters from the bosom in the case of a woman.

Describing a sudden departure needs two hands: the left, fingers held straight, moves upwards from waist level to smack into the palm of the right hand moving downward-a restricted version of the popular and extremely vulgar bicep crunch. (Seen at its best during midsummer traffic jams, when disputing drivers will leave their cars to allow themselves the freedom of movement necessary for a left-arm uppercut stopped short by the right hand clamping on the bicep.)

At the end of the conversation, there is the promise to stay in touch. The middle three fingers are folded into the palm and the hand is held up to an ear, with the extended thumb and little finger imitating the shape of a telephone. Finally, there is a parting handshake. Packages, dogs, and bicycles are gathered up until the whole process starts all over again fifty yards down the street. It's hardly surprising that aerobics never became popular in Provence. People get quite enough physical exercise in the course of a ten-minute chat.

These and other everyday amusements of life in nearby towns and villages were not doing much for our spirit of exploration and adventure. With so many distractions on our doorstep, we were neglecting the more famous parts of Provence, or so we were told by our friends in London. In the knowledgeable and irritating manner of seasoned armchair travelers, they kept pointing out how conveniently placed we were for Nîmes and Aries and Avignon, for the flamingoes of the Camargue and the bouillabaisse of Marseilles. They seemed surprised and mildly disapproving when we admitted that we stayed close to home, not believing our excuses that we could never find the time to go anywhere, never felt a compulsion to go church crawling or monument spotting, didn't want to be tourists. There was one exception to this rooted existence, and one excursion that we were always happy to make. We both loved Aix.

The corkscrew road we take through the mountains is too narrow for trucks and too serpentine for anyone in a hurry. Apart from a single farm building with its ragged herd of goats, there is nothing to see except steep and empty landscapes of gray rock and green scrub oak, polished into high definition by the extraordinary clarity of the light. The road slopes down through the foothills on the south side of the Lubéron before joining up with the amateur Grand Prix that takes place every day on the RN7, the Nationale Sept that has eliminated more motorists over the years than is comfortable to think about as one waits for a gap in the traffic.

The road leads into Aix at the end of the most handsome main street in France. The Cours Mirabeau is beautiful at any time of the year, but at its best between spring and autumn, when the plane trees form a pale green tunnel five hundred yards long. The diffused sunlight, the four fountains along the center of the Cours' length, the perfect proportions which follow da Vinci's rule to "let the street be as wide as the height of the houses"-the arrangement of space and trees and architecture is so pleasing that you hardly notice the cars.

Over the years, a nice geographical distinction has evolved between work and more frivolous activities. On the shady side of the street, appropriately, are the banks and insurance companies and property agents and lawyers. On the sunny side are the cafés.

I have liked almost every café that I have ever been to in France, even the ratty little ones in tiny villages where the flies are more plentiful than customers, but I have a soft spot for the sprawling cafés of the Cours Mirabeau, and the softest spot of all for the Deux Garçons. Successive generations of proprietors have put their profits under the mattress and resisted all thoughts of redecoration, which in France usually ends in a welter of plastic and awkward lighting, and the interior looks much the same as it must have looked fifty years ago.

The ceiling is high, and toasted to a caramel color by the smoke from a million cigarettes. The bar is burnished copper, the tables and chairs gleam with the patina bestowed by countless bottoms and elbows, and the waiters have aprons and flat feet, as all proper waiters should. It is dim and cool, a place for reflection and a quiet drink. And then there is the terrace, where the show takes place.

Aix is a university town, and there is clearly something in the curriculum that attracts pretty students. The terrace of the Deux Garçons is always full of them, and it is my theory that they are there for education rather than refreshment. They are taking a degree course in café deportment, with a syllabus divided into four parts.

One: The Arrival

One must always arrive as conspicuously as possible, preferably on the back of a crimson Kawasaki 750 motorcycle driven by a young man in head-to-toe black leather and three-day stubble. It is not done to stand on the pavement and wave him good-bye as he booms off down the Cours to visit his hairdresser. That is for gauche little girls from the Auvergne. The sophisticated student is too busy for sentiment. She is concentrating on the next stage.

Two: The Entrance

Sunglasses must be kept on until an acquaintance is identified at one of the tables, but one must not appear to be looking for company. Instead, the impression should be that one is heading into the café to make a phone call to one's titled Italian admirer, when-quelle surprise!-one sees a friend. The sunglasses can then be removed and the hair tossed while one is persuaded to sit down.

Three: Ritual Kissing

Everyone at the table must be kissed at least twice, often three times, and in special cases four times. Those being kissed should remain seated, allowing the new arrival to bend and swoop around the table, tossing her hair, getting in the way of the waiters, and generally making her presence felt.

Four: Table Manners

Once seated, sunglasses should be put back on to permit the discreet study of one's own reflection in the café windows-not for reasons of narcissism, but to check important details of technique: the way one lights a cigarette, or sucks the straw in a Perrier menthe, or nibbles daintily on a sugar lump. If these are satisfactory, the glasses can be adjusted downward so that they rest charmingly on the end of the nose, and attention can be given to the other occupants of the table.

This performance continues from mid-morning until early evening, and never fails to entertain me. I imagine there must be the occasional break for academic work in between these hectic periods of social study, but I have never seen a textbook darken the café tables, nor heard any discussion of higher calculus or political science. The students are totally absorbed in showing form, and the Cours Mirabeau is all the more decorative as a result.

It would be no hardship to spend most of the day café hopping, but as our trips to Aix are infrequent we feel a pleasant obligation to squeeze in as much as possible during the morning-to pick up a bottle of eau-de-vie from the man in the rue d'Italie and some cheeses from Monsieur Paul in the rue des Marseillais, to see what new nonsense is in the windows of the boutiques which are crammed, chic by jowl, next to older and less transient establishments in the narrow streets behind the Cours, to join the crowds in the flower market, to take another look at the tiny, beautiful place d'Albertas, with its cobbles and its fountain, and to make sure that we arrive in the rue Frédéric Mistral while there are still seats to be had at Chez Gu.

There are larger, more decorative, and more gastronomically distinguished restaurants in Aix, but ever since we ducked into Gu one rainy day we have kept coming back. Gu himself presides over the room-a genial, noisy man with the widest, jauntiest, most luxuriant and ambitious mustache I have ever seen, permanently fighting gravity and the razor in its attempts to make contact with Gu's eyebrows. His son takes the orders and an unseen woman with a redoubtable voice-Madame Gu, perhaps-is audibly in charge of the kitchen. The customers are made up of local businessmen, the girls from Agnes B. round the corner, smart women with their shopping bags and dachshunds, and the occasional furtive and transparently illicit couple murmuring intently and ignoring their aioli. The wine is served in jugs, a good three-course meal costs 80 francs, and all the tables are taken by 12:30 every day.

As usual, our good intentions to have a quick and restrained lunch disappear with the first jug of wine, and, as usual, we justify our self-indulgence by telling each other that today is a holiday. We don't have businesses to get back to or diaries full of appointments, and our enjoyment is heightened, in a shamefully unworthy way, by the knowledge that the people around us will be back at their desks while we are still sitting over a second cup of coffee and deciding what to do next. There is more of Aix to see, but lunch dulls the appetite for sightseeing, and our bag of cheeses would take a smelly revenge on the way home if they were jostled through the heat of the afternoon. There is a vineyard outside Aix that I have been meaning to visit. Or there is a curiosity that we noticed on the way into town, a kind of medieval junkyard, littered with massive relics and wounded garden statuary. There, surely, we will find the old stone garden bench we've been looking for, and they'll probably pay us to take it away.

Matériaux d'Antan takes up a plot the size of an important cemetery by the side of the RN7. Unusually, in a country so determined to safeguard its possessions from robbers that it has the highest padlock population in Europe, the site was completely open to the road: no fences, no threatening notices, no greasy Alsatians on chains, and no sign of any proprietor. How trusting, we thought as we parked, to conduct a business without any obvious means of protecting the stock. And then we realized why the owner could afford to be so relaxed about security; nothing on display could have weighed less than five tons. It would have taken ten men and a hydraulic winch to lift anything, and a car transporter to take it away.

If we had been planning to build a replica of Versailles we could have done all our shopping there in one afternoon. A full-size bath, cut from a single slab of marble? Over in the corner, with brambles growing through the plug hole. A staircase for the entrance hall? There were three, of varying lengths, gracefully curved arrangements of worn stone steps, each step as large as a dining table. Great snakes of iron balustrading lay next to them, with or without the finishing touches of giant pineapples. There were entire balconies complete with gargoyles, marble cherubs the size of stout adults, who seemed to be suffering from mumps, terra-cotta amphorae eight feet long, lying in a drunken muddle on their sides, mill wheels, columns, architraves, and plinths. Everything one could imagine in stone, except a plain bench.

"Bonjour." A young man appeared from behind a scaled-up version of the Winged Victory of Samothrace and asked if he could help us. A bench? He hooked his index finger over the bridge of his nose while he thought, then shook his head apologetically. Benches were not his specialty. However, he did have an exquisite eighteenth-century gazebo in wrought iron, or, if we had a sufficiently large garden, there was a fine mock-Roman triumphal arch he could show us, ten meters high and wide enough for two chariots abreast. Such pieces were rare, he said. For a moment, we were tempted by the thought of Faustin driving his tractor through a triumphal arch on his way to the vineyard, a wreath of olive leaves around his straw trilby, but my wife could see the impracticalities of a 250-ton impulse purchase. We left the young man with promises to come back if we ever bought a château.

The answering machine welcomed us home, winking its little red eye to show that people had been talking to it. There were three messages.

A Frenchman whose voice I didn't recognize conducted a suspicious, one-sided conversation, refusing to accept the fact that he was talking to a machine. Our message, asking callers to leave a number where they could be reached, set him off. Why must I give you my number when I am already talking to you? He waited for a reply, breathing heavily. Who is there? Why do you not answer? More heavy breathing. Allô? Allô? Merde. Allô? His allotted span on the tape ran out while he was in mid-grumble, and we never heard from him again.

Didier, brisk and businesslike, informed us that he and his team were ready to resume work, and would be attacking two rooms at the bottom of the house. Normalement, they would certainly arrive tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. And how many puppies did we want? Pénélope had fallen pregnant to a hairy stranger in Goult.

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.