THIRTY

They’d have to lift the stone and start again, the people at Sanson’s pompes funèbres told me. They’d want to redo the housing of the vault, and replace the rotten cement with black granite, didn’t I think, to match the stone? They showed me samples.

I could hear it echoing out of the Old Testament somewhere in Ben’s voice, a vatic statement perhaps from the lost Book of Julia: You have to raise the stone and start again.

We’d all driven into Pont l’Evêque after lunch, once we had satisfied ourselves that the plumbers had returned. My guests were going to shop in the mostly closed stores (Tuesday, the day after market day, remember?) or look around or collect schedules at the train station or stand gazing from a bridge into the Yvie, or the Calonne, or the Touques, or consider the (closed) public library (once the Hôtel Montpensier), a seventeenth-century solidity in brick and stone with a graceful double entrance staircase, the erstwhile proud home of the Fresnays, whose basement I happened to know smelled just like mine. I, meanwhile, would make some inquiries concerning repairs to funerary monuments.

The people at Sanson’s, being in the sympathy business, were more helpful and reassuring than M. Thouroude in the quincaillerie. But as I quickly understood, I was also shopping for something a good deal pricier than a chicken-wire fix to keep owls out of the chimney.

Nothing could be done, I learned, while the ground was wet, but meanwhile they could certainly look and let me have an estimation. Monsieur was leaving the country when?

A momentary spasm of rebellion struggled against the inanimate weight of all I was flirting with taking onto my shoulders. I could, if I played my cards right, get out from under it, take the train tomorrow, and have a day or two in Paris before my plane home. I could look at other people’s pictures, be cooked for by my friend Madeleine and talk about family, consider the world with Tom, listen to the entertaining fables my godson Gabriel was preparing for me, worry about nothing, wash my clothes—Merde, I thought (that much of my French, at least, returning), I’ve got all those sheets to deal with.

“Depending on the weather, and in principle, the day after tomorrow,” I said, and gave them my phone number in Mesnil. “Early in the morning.”

I found everyone in the cider and calvados store, which, since it was designed expressly for tourism, was obliged to be open. Ben, who knew wine, was bemused by this store’s specialization in the Norman vin du pays.

“They want you to wait until the calvados is twelve years old,” he said, studying a leaflet. Naturally the price increased with the age. The store offered dusty bottles, and dustier bottles, and newer ones that could be put away for future use; and sweet cider called Bréavoine made by the family of a former mayor of Mesnil; and pear cider; and pommeau, a mixture of calvados and cider consumed as an aperitif by persons who did not care that the drink, if not exactly dead, seemed to be living only by galvanic action. There were bottles of something in which the apple was present in its entirety. Growers surrounded the set fruit, at its beginning, with the bottle, which was then tied to the branch while the fruit grew. I liked to think of these trees covered with hanging bottles when the wind blew.

“The calvados we’ve been drinking from the Intermarché,” Teddy said, his Nordic height threatening the top shelves, “the one you’ve got that rabbit marinating in for tonight—what’s wrong with that? It’s only two years old. And as for cider, if we’re basically talking festered apple juice, what difference…”

The assistant, a young man with clean hands and an education, in white shirtsleeves and a tie, who had enough English to take umbrage at Teddy’s indifference to his specialization, approached and delivered himself (as if having memorized it in school) of a tract, anointing me as his interpreter: “Believe me, there are growths [crus] of cider as different from each other as growths of wine, and the cider of the Vallée d’Auge is especially appreciated. Already in the seventeenth century, were they not remarking a distinction among the ‘spicy’ [épicé], the ‘sweet’ [doux], le Vesque, and le Guillot Roger? Monsieur, you must understand, the kind of apple trees, the nature of the earth, the care applied to the collection of the fruit and to its crushing—all of these have an enormous influence.”

He trembled, rose up on his toes, and glowed crimson. Then he gesticulated frantically with both hands, as if he were conducting some independent-minded cygnets in Swan Lake who thought this was only a dress rehearsal.

“Doré, tirant légèrement sur le rose, le cidre doit pétiller sans mousser, et surtout être d’une parfaite limpidité” (“Golden, but tending slightly toward rose color, cider should effervesce without foaming, and be above all of a perfect clarity”), he pronounced (or quoted). “Le digne accompagnement d’un bon repas sera le cidre du pays, justement célèbre” (“A worthy accompaniment to a good meal will be the region’s cider, justly celebrated”).*

“In that case, we’ll take two bottles of the Bréavoine,” Ben said, “if you think it will go with rabbit.”

“You could do nothing better for your rabbit. This I swear.”