IT WAS EARLY evening. The sun was still out and glinting off the low rooftops of Ars.
Florence and I were strolling hand-in-hand along a flowery lane that was just yards from the town centre but silent and deserted. High garden walls were draped with creeping clematis and plants that I didn’t know the names of. Fig and apple trees hung out into the lane.
Florence was giving me a French architecture lesson.
‘You see? Bright-green paint looks good here, doesn’t it?’ She tapped on the glossy window shutters of a newly renovated house.
‘Yes, it kind of livens up the grey of the stone.’
‘Hmm, but is very nouveau. And that one, oh!’ She pointed across the street. ‘White shutters are totally ignorant. Did they not want to pay for coloured paint? Do they think they are in Paris? These are much better.’ She paused to pick a tiny flake of dull green paint off an ancient, peeling shutter. ‘This green is acceptable, as long as it’s faded like this. But none of these are really the correct colour.’
‘No?’
‘No, no one in this street has it. The correct colour is the one my father has used. That grey-blue, that is the real colour for windows and doors on the île de Ré.’
‘And people really care about this stuff?’
‘Oh, yes, come and look at some people.’
Time for a bit of sociology.
The main drag from the town centre to the marina was busy with cars, bikes and pedestrians. It was a one-way street, but cyclists were ignoring the traffic signs and going against the flow. Again, just like Paris.
We stopped on a street corner and Florence pointed out a man to me. A tall guy, about fifty, unshaven, slightly unkempt, with an air of salt incrustation, was wandering along like a round-the-world yachtsman who’s mislaid his catamaran.
‘I will bet you that his shutters are exactly the right colour.’
‘Is he a fisherman?’ I asked.
‘Huh, no. He is almost certainly from Paris, or maybe La Rochelle. A summer resident. Look at his watch, his shoes, the sunglasses hanging around his neck. You see, he shows discreet signs of wealth so no one thinks he really is a drunken old shrimp fisherman. But when he goes to the market, he will talk to the fishmonger as if they had caught the fish together. It is all snobbery. And look at this guy.’
A handsome teenager was riding past on a rickety old bike. His loose white shirt and old Levis were creased and stained, making him look as if he’d spent the last six months living on the beach, rolling up at night in blankets of dried seaweed.
‘Rich kid,’ Florence snorted. ‘He will have a rusty car, too, probably even a rusty surfboard.’
There were so many levels of inverted snobbery going on that I started to get dizzy. Here was Florence, a Parisian who looked down on people because their bikes and window shutters were too nouveau riche, looking down on people because they were doing exactly the same thing as her. Why didn’t she just give up and get herself a decent bike?
Though there was nothing rusty and rickety about Florence this evening. She’d left her old bike at home and was looking stunning, her golden skin oiled and aromatic, with a Lycra top and white trousers that left no one within fifty yards in any doubt that she was sporting top-class lingerie. Her bra straps were out, and the T of her thong arched up out of her waistband as if it was trying to tell the trousers to get the hell out of there. Her hair was loose and brushing the curve of her naked shoulders, her navel was at its most navelsome, the tiny bulge of her lower belly was achingly kissable.
We had an apéro at a café in the church square, then headed towards the quay. I clutched Florence’s hand, mainly so that no one would try to kidnap her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘you are just accompanying me. When you go to dinner, you do not try to look like a fisherman any more. You must display me, show me as if I was the first prize in the game show of life. The Kama Sutra game show. You have won me, and at the end of the evening you will be taking me home and enjoying every possible pleasure of my body.’
‘Well that’s true, isn’t it?’ I hoped.
‘Probably. But you do not look proud enough of this fact.’
‘OK.’ I didn’t really know what the correct protocol was for displaying your girlfriend like a sex toy, but Florence seemed to be happy with the way that I placed one arm on her waist and held her hand in the other, as if accompanying her in a Jane Austen-type dance.
At first sight, the restaurant was a bit disappointing for two people who’d just won the Kama Sutra game show. It was a large, pale-blue shed next to a semi-abandoned garage that had an old mechanical rake dumped on its forecourt, presumably some kind of salt-gathering implement.
The interior was a combination of white wood, fishing nets and dried flowers that would normally have sent me running to fetch the style police. Even so, three groups of casually chic diners were already queuing just inside the entrance, trying to get a table. A beautiful young waitress with a pierced belly button was frowning a refusal.
We’d reserved, though, and she took us out into the garden, to a small table set against an olive tree. If we’d had a jar of brine with us, and a few months to spare, we could have pickled our own apéritif nibbles while we waited to order.
Another young girl, a friendly but witheringly cool brunette, came out with a menu written on a blackboard. She perched it on a chair next to our table and left us to cogitate. As she turned away she revealed a plunging backline and a snake tattoo that spiralled up from her skirt. If the food was as tasty as the staff, we were in for a treat.
A man at a nearby table stopped the waitress as she walked by. He was a slightly younger version of the rich-but-lost fisherman we’d seen earlier, dressed up in a Lacoste pullover and polo shirt.
‘We’ll have a bottle of our usual wine,’ he said.
‘Which is?’ the girl drawled. Ouch.
Dinner was tasty as well as tasteful. We each had a whole roasted sea bass, or bar de ligne, the ‘de ligne’ meaning that it had been caught with hook and line and not in a drift net. This place was popular because it was good, I realized, not just because someone had decided that it was fashionable.
But Florence managed to spoil my dessert (a strangely named but delicious ‘soupe de pêches’ – cold ‘peach soup’) by telling me that ‘Papa’ was arriving next day.
‘Here?’ I asked.
‘Yes, here. It is his house.’
Though it had been more fun while it was just our house. And it meant that we’d have to go round changing the sheets on the extra beds we’d rumpled.
‘He says he’s very impatient to meet you,’ she said.
‘Oh yes?’ Call me a coward, but I wasn’t particularly impatient to meet the guy whose car I’d helped to crash.