by Nina George
September bathed their calm, intense period of getting-to-love-each-other in a spectrum of tones from yellow to mauve and gold to violet. The bougainvilleas, the rough sea, the painted houses by the harbour that oozed pride and history, the crunchy golden gravel of the boules area: this was the landscape in which their affection, friendship and deep understanding of each other could thrive.
And they always took it slowly with each other.
The more important a thing is, the slower it should be done, Jean would often think as they began to caress each other. They kissed lingeringly, undressed slowly and left themselves time to stretch out, and even more time to flow together. This careful, focused concentration on the other called forth an especially intense physical, spiritual and emotional passion from their bodies, a feeling of being touched all over.
Each time he slept with Catherine, Jean Perdu drew closer to the stream of life again. He had spent twenty years on the far bank of that river, avoiding colours and caresses, scents and music – fossilised, alone and defiantly withdrawn.
And now … he was swimming again.
Jean was a man revived because he was in love. He knew a hundred new little things about this woman. For instance, that when Catherine woke in the morning she was still half caught up in her dreams. Occasionally she would flounder in the fog of the blues; what she had seen in the shadows of the night would make her irritable or ashamed or irksome or gloomy for hours on end. This was her daily struggle through the in-between world. Jean discovered that he could chase away the dream-ghosts by brewing Catherine a cup of hot coffee and guiding her down to the sea to drink it.
‘Because of your love I’m learning to love myself too,’ she said one morning when the sea was still a sleepy shade of grey-blue. ‘I have always taken what life has offered me … but I’ve never offered myself anything. I was never any good at looking after myself.’ As he pulled her tenderly to him, Jean thought that he felt the same: he was only capable of loving himself because Catherine loved him.
Then came the night when she held him close as a second great wave of anger smashed over him. This time it was anger at himself. He showered insults on himself, crudely and desperately, with the wrath of a man who realises, with terrifying clarity, that he has irrevocably wasted a part of his life, and the time remaining is all too short. Catherine didn’t stop him, she didn’t mollify him, she didn’t turn away.
Then peace flooded through him. Because that short time would still be enough. Because a few days could contain a lifetime.
Now to Bonnieux, the site of his distant past, a past that was still embedded deep within Jean, though it was no longer the only room in his emotional household. At last he had a present with which to counter it.
That’s why it feels easier to return, thought Jean, as Catherine and he took the narrow, rocky pass from Lourmarin – in Perdu’s opinion, this town was like a leech, sucking the blood of tourists – to Bonnieux. They overtook cyclists as they drove, and heard the crack of hunters’ guns in the craggy mountains. The occasional near-leafless tree cast a tattered shadow; otherwise the sun bleached out every colour. After the relentless motion of the sea, the inert bulk of the Luberon mountains made a stark, inhospitable impression on Jean. He was looking forward to seeing Max. Really looking forward to it. Max had booked them a big room under the roof in Madame Bonnet’s ivy-clad home, formerly a Resistance hideout.
When Catherine and Jean had put their luggage in their room, Max came over and led them to his dovecote. He had prepared a refreshing picnic of wine, fruit, ham and baguette on the broad wall by the fountain. It was the season for truffles and literature. The countryside was redolent of wild herbs, and glowed in autumnal rust reds and wine yellows.
Max was brown, Jean thought. Brown and looking much more of a man.
After two and a half months alone in the Luberon, he seemed at home, as if he had always been a southerner at heart. But Jean thought he also seemed very tired.
‘Who sleeps when the earth is dancing?’ Max mumbled cryptically when Jean brought it up.
Max told him that Madame had hired him without further ado as a ‘general dogsbody’ during his ‘sickness’. She and her husband, Gérard, were over sixty, and the property, with its three holiday houses and flats, was too big for them to contemplate growing old there on their own. They grew vegetables, fruit and a few vines; Max lent them a hand in return for board and lodging. His dovecote was piled high with notes, stories and drafts. He wrote at night and in the morning until noon. From late afternoon onward he helped out around the bounteous estate, doing anything that Gérard asked him to do: cutting vines, weeding, picking fruit; mending roofs; sowing and harvesting; loading the delivery van and driving to market with Gérard; looking for mottled mushrooms; cleaning truffles; shaking fig trees; pruning cypresses into the shape of standing stones; cleaning the pools; and fetching bread for the bed-and-breakfast guests.
‘I’ve learned to drive a tractor too and I can recognise the call of every toad in the pool,’ he announced to Jean with a self-deprecating grin.
The sun, the winds and shuffling around on his knees over the Provence soil had changed Max’s youthful city face into that of a man.
‘Sickness?’ Jean enquired as Max, having finished his account, poured them glasses of white Ventoux wine. ‘What sickness? You didn’t mention that in your letters.’
Max turned red beneath his tan and became a little fidgety.
‘The sickness a man catches when he’s deeply in love,’ he confessed. ‘Sleeping badly, nightmares, not being able to think straight. Not being able to read or write or eat. Brigitte and Gérard obviously couldn’t stand by any longer so they prescribed me some activities to stop my mind from going to pot. That’s why I’m working for them: it helps me too. We don’t mention money, and that suits me just fine.’
‘The woman on the red tractor?’ Jean asked.
Max nodded, then took a deep breath as though he were building up to an announcement.
‘That’s right. The woman on the red tractor. That’s a good cue, because there’s something about her I have to te—’
‘The mistral’s coming!’ Madame Bonnet called to them anxiously, interrupting Max’s confession. In shorts and a man’s shirt as always, and carrying a basket of fruit, the small, wiry woman came towards them and pointed to the spinning windmills planted in the ground beside a lavender bed. For now it was merely a breeze tugging at the stems, but the sky was bright and the colour of deep-blue ink. The clouds had been swept away, and the horizon appeared to have closed in on them. Mount Ventoux and the Cévennes stood out, sharp and clear – a typical sign that the strong northwesterly wind was rising.
They greeted each other, then Brigitte enquired, ‘Do you know about the effects of the mistral?’
Catherine, Jean and Max looked at each other in bemusement.
‘We call it maestrale, the ruler. Or vent du fada, the wind that drives you mad. Our houses keep a low profile’ – she gestured to the layout of her buildings, their shorter sides facing the prevailing wind – ‘so that it won’t take any notice of them. The weather doesn’t just turn cooler; it makes every noise louder, and every movement harder. It’ll drive us all crazy for a few days, so it’d be better not to discuss anything too important – you’ll only argue.’
‘What?’ Max said quietly.
Madame Bonnet looked at him with a kindly smile on her nut-brown face.
‘Oh yes. The vent du fada makes you feel as crazy and stupid and edgy as when you’re unsure if your love will be reciprocated. But when it’s over, all the cobwebs have been blown away – from the countryside and from your head. Everything’s spick-and-span again, and we can start life afresh.’
She took her leave, saying, ‘I’ll roll up the parasols and tie down the chairs.’ Jean turned back to Max and asked, ‘What were you about to say before?’
‘Um … I’ve forgotten,’ Max said quickly. ‘Are you hungry?’
The
y spent the evening at a tiny restaurant in Bonnieux called Un Petit Coin de Cuisine, which had a wonderful view of the valley and of a red-and-gold sunset that gave way to a clear night sky strewn with stars glistening like ice. Tom, the cheerful waiter, served them Provençal pizza on wooden boards, and lamb stew. There, at the wobbly red table in the cosy, stone-vaulted room, Catherine added a new and positive element to the chemical bond between Jean and Max. Her presence spread harmony and warmth. Catherine had a way of looking at people as though she took every word they said seriously. Max told her about himself, about his childhood and unrequited crushes on girls, and how he came to be on the run from noise, which was something he had never told Jean – or, presumably, any other man.
While they were deep in conversation, Jean was able to slip away into his own thoughts. The cemetery lay barely a hundred metres above him on the hill, next to the church; they were separated by only a few thousand tonnes of stone and timidity.
It was only as they started down into the valley through the noticeably stronger wind that Jean wondered whether Max had been saying so much about his childhood to conceal the fact that he didn’t wish to say any more about the tractor girl.
Max escorted them to their room.
‘You go ahead,’ Jean said to Catherine.
Max and he were standing together in the shadows between the main house and the barn. The wind hummed and wailed softly but constantly around the corners.
‘Come on, Max. What did you want to tell me?’ Jean asked him cautiously.
Jordan was silent.
‘Don’t we want to wait until the wind’s dropped?’ he said at last.
‘Is it that bad?’
‘Bad enough for me to wait till you got here before telling you. But not … fatal. I hope.’
‘Tell me, Max, tell me, otherwise my imagination will get the better of me. Please.’
I’ll imagine, for instance, that Manon is still alive and was merely playing a trick on me.
Max nodded. The mistral hummed.
‘Manon’s husband, Luc Basset, married again three years after Manon’s death. Mila, a well-known local chef,’ Max began. ‘Manon’s father gave him the vineyard as a wedding present. They produce white and red wines. They’re … very popular. So is Mila’s restaurant.’
Jean Perdu felt a sharp pang of jealousy.
Together Luc and Mila had a vineyard, an estate, a popular restaurant, maybe a garden. They had sunny, flower-filled Provence, and someone to whom they could confide all their concerns; Luc’s luck had simply repeated itself. Or maybe not simply, but at that moment Jean couldn’t muster the will to form a more balanced opinion.
‘How lovely,’ he muttered, more sarcastically than he meant to.
Max snorted. ‘What did you expect? That Luc would flagellate himself, never look at another woman and wait, on a diet of dry bread, shrivelled olives and garlic, for death to come?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You tell me,’ Max hissed back. ‘To each his own way of mourning. The wine man chose the “new wife” option. So what? Do we blame him? Should he have done … what you did?’
A blaze of indignation shot through Perdu.
‘I could punch you right now, Max.’
‘I know,’ Max replied. ‘But I also know that afterwards we’ll still be able to grow old together, you daft git.’
‘It’s the mistral,’ said Madame Bonnet, who had heard them arguing and crunched grimly past them across the gravel towards the main house.
‘Sorry,’ Jean muttered.
‘Me too. Damn wind.’
They fell silent again. The wind might have been merely a convenient excuse.
‘Are you still going to go and see Luc?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’ve been meaning to tell you something ever since you got here.’
And when Max revealed what had been making him feel so ill for the past few weeks, Jean was sure that he must have misheard him amid the buzzing and jeering of the wind. Yes, that must be it, because what he heard was so wonderful and yet so terrible that it could hardly be true.
42
Max served himself another helping of the aromatic scrambled eggs with truffle that Brigitte Bonnet had cooked them for breakfast. In keeping with Provençal tradition, she had placed nine fresh unbroken eggs in a Kilner jar with an early winter truffle for the eggs to absorb its fragrance. Only three days later did she carefully scramble the eggs and garnish them with a few wafer-thin slices of truffle. The taste was sensual, wild, almost earthy and meaty.
What a lavish last meal for a condemned man, it occurred to Jean. Today, he feared, would be the hardest and longest day of his life.
He ate as though he were praying. He didn’t speak; he relished everything with quiet concentration so as to have a reserve to fall back on in the coming hours.
Aside from the scrambled eggs there were two varieties of juicy Cavaillon melon, white and orange; full-flavoured coffee with steaming-hot, sugared milk in large flowery mugs; and homemade plum and lavender jam, freshly baked baguette and buttery croissants, which Max had fetched, as always, from Bonnieux on his wheezing scooter.
Jean looked up from his plate. Up there was Bonnieux’s old Romanesque church. Alongside it the cemetery wall, blazing hot in the sun’s rays. Stone crosses reared into the sky. He recalled the promise he had broken.
I’d like you to die before me.
Her body had embraced his as she gasped, ‘Promise! Promise me!’
He had promised.
Now he was sure: Manon had known then that he wouldn’t be able to keep his oath.
I don’t want you to have to walk to my grave on your own.
Now he would have to walk that path alone after all.
After breakfast, the three of them set out on their pilgrimage, through cypress groves and orchards, vegetable fields and vineyards.
After a quarter of an hour the Basset winery – a long, three-storey, soft-yellow manor house, flanked by tall, spreading chestnut trees, copper beeches and oaks – came glittering into view through the rows of vines.
Perdu gazed uneasily at the splendid building. The wind was teasing the bushes and trees.
Something stirred inside him. Not envy, not jealousy, not last night’s indignation. Rather …
It often turns out very differently to how you feared.
Warmth. Yes, he felt a detached warmth – towards the place and towards the people who had named their wine Manon and dedicated themselves to restoring their own happiness.
Max was smart enough to keep quiet that morning.
Jean reached for Catherine’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ he said. She understood what he meant.
There was a new hangar to the right of the winery – for trailers, large and small tractors, and for the special vineyard tractor, the one with the tall, narrow wheels.
Two legs in work overalls poked out from beneath one of the tractors, and some imaginative swearwords and the clink of tools could be heard spilling forth from under the machine.
‘Hi, Victoria!’ called Max, his voice a mixture of cheeriness and despondency.
‘Oh, Mister Napkin Man,’ a young female voice could be heard saying.
A second later the tractor girl rolled out from under the vehicle. She wiped an embarrassed hand over her expressive face, but only succeeded in making things worse by smudging the dirt and oil stains.
Jean had steeled himself, but still it was bad.
A twenty-year-old Manon stood before him. No make-up, her hair longer, her body more androgynous.
And of course she didn’t really resemble Manon; when Perdu looked closely at this captivating, athletic, self-assured girl, the picture went fuzzy. Nine times he didn’t see her, but the tenth time there was Manon, looking out of the unfamiliar young face.
Victoria’s entire attention was focused on Max as she ran her eyes over him from top to bottom, scrutinising his work shoes
, his threadbare trousers and his washed-out shirt. There was a hint of acknowledgment in her gaze. She nodded appreciatively.
‘You call Max “Napkin Man”?’ asked Catherine, hiding her amusement.
‘Yeah,’ said Vic. ‘That’s precisely the kind of guy he used to be. Used a napkin, took the metro instead of walking, had only seen dogs in special holdalls, and so on.’