I am alone in my book-lined den, enclosed within the century-old, metre-deep stone walls of our villa standing at the heart of our hillside olive farm. Above my head, a newly installed fan is gently spinning. Its breeze flutters the papers strewn across my desk while I continue to make notes: research for a new book.
Unfortunately, my work, though well-intentioned, is fainthearted. My concentration is erratic, my brain befuddled, my thoughts swimming all over the place. I rise and sit and rise again, toking on swigs of Badoit mineral water direct from the green plastic bottle, attempting to allay both nausea and the torpor that has taken hold of me. Why can my mind not settle? Why must it whizz off in incoherent directions? I smile at my foolish questions, knowing the answers; chuffed to bits.
Beyond my sheltered refuge, the sun is beating down out of a cloudless, forget-me-not-blue sky. It is May, the final weekend of the Cannes Film Festival, and the temperature is unseasonably hot. I rise once more, then, tossing Biro, notes, mineral water and intentions aside, I walk to the window, fling it wide open and loll listlessly against the casement, inhaling the scents of the season. Heavenly drafts from the flowering lavender bushes – such an intrinsically Provençal perfume – reach into me, clearing the heaviness in my head, alleviating the sickness in my stomach. We have planted dozens of these canescent shrubs up against drystone walls and along the borders of the tiled terraces where we spend so many hours of our days. Aside from the pleasure of its perfume, according to Frédéric at the garden centre, lavender is a wasp deterrent, but nothing, as far as I can see, not even meshed netting, seems to disenchant the carnivorous little blighters who gatecrash our meals and drill into our hams and cheeses, brazenly gorging themselves. Many of the lavenders are coated in a carpet of bees. These furry gatherers are dipping and rising as they pollinate, winging from one purple cluster to the next.
Our lavenders are of the Lavandula dentata variety, more commonly known as French lavender. It is drought-tolerant, has a longer blooming season and is the species most frequently found here along this Mediterranean coast.
I should be jotting this down, but I stay put.
I stick my head out into the afternoon and my ears are assaulted by the zirring and zinging of male cicadas busy with their friction-driven mating call. Stretching and straining beyond the casement, I lean to survey the land. The herbage has grown knee-high and is shot through with lofty, lipstick-red poppies. Come evening, I love to roam these grasses, these endless stretches of soft, breezy greens and audacious scarlets; to canter a passage through and feel their caress and tickle, their lick against my calves. The scene puts me in mind of a Gustav Klimt painting, Poppies Amongst the Poplars. Though of course, we have olives, not poplars.
Returning from our wedding six weeks ago, we roved the garden by starlight, wine glasses in hand, rediscovering our terrain, making love in the spring grass, recumbent on the earth; flushed embraces beneath sprays of apple blossom. Might that have been when …? I smile at the possibility.
Turning my head to the left, I sight our two cherry trees, groaning with shiny burgundy fruits, so ripe their skins are splitting. We should have harvested them a week ago but now it is almost too late; the fruits are falling or have been pecked at by my enemies: the magpies.
Nature at its diverse work of propagation. Yes, indeedy.
I reach for the bottle on my desk once more and knock back another mouthful of the mildly fizzy water, but the reeling sickness remains.
In between the late wistaria and the bougainvillaea seasons, perhaps beneath the apple trees, I have fallen pregnant. Six weeks is all I am gone, but the being inside me, not yet the size of a snail, has me in its grip. My body’s rhythms are being shunted about by its minuscule presence. Mostly, I feel drained and, like today, spaced out. I hide away in this writing room attempting to immerse myself in study but the days pass, I remain unfocused and my condition leaves me with zero tolerance for this unseasonably early heat.
But I am over the moon.
To date I have borne no children of my own. This little being will be my first. I have two stepdaughters, twin girls from Michel’s first marriage, Clarisse and Vanessa. They visit us regularly but they do not live with us. In any case, they are growing up fast and taking charge of their own lives. I am late to be starting a family and this pregnancy was not planned, but it has long been hoped for. I have miscarried more times than I care to remember.
The pregnancy test, which is three days old, remains in the bathroom. I have left it there, in its plastic casing, next to the soap dish on the side of the old porcelain bath that was in this long-abandoned house when we found it. When Michel comes home he will not be able to see the result of the test because its reading has faded, but I have kept it anyway. The soft pink which turns to blue in positive cases, such as mine, looks like nothing more than a used square of blotting paper. He will probably ask me why I still have it and I won’t be able to explain, except to say that I wanted to relive the wash of delight I felt when the discovery was actual.
I haven’t breathed a word to him yet, about having his baby, and I won’t until he arrives. I won’t blurt out such special news on the telephone. I won’t write it in an e-mail. I want to be there standing in front of him – the best seat in the house – to watch the smile break across his face. I want to share the joy of that first moment of knowledge, of all that this baby will mean to our lives. I feel jealously possessive about this moment to come. He arrives this evening and, impatient as I am, I am hanging on, savouring the scene, playing it out in my head, over and over again.
In the meantime, when I am not horizontal on the bed, victim to physiological changes, my days are taken up with research for my new book as well as with our projects here on the farm. We are still grappling with the unfathomable bureaucracies involved in gaining the coveted AOC – the Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, the highest accolade given for fine quality produce – in our case, our excellent olive oil; the green-gold olive oil that we press from the drupes of our venerable cailletier olive trees. Olives of Nice, the fruit is known as locally, harvested from the variety that prospers along this stretch of Mediterranean coast. We had hoped for a letter on our return, but still nothing. Michel is chasing.
Quashia, our loyal Arab gardener, is building us a fine new woodshed constructed from honey-toned stones and locally fired terracotta tiles. I hear him shovelling and hammering as I write. We could not run this place without him. Due to our frequent absences, he has taken charge of the vegetable garden and planted it up for us. The only snag is that he has failed to create variation and our beds are now swamped with big-leafed, yellow-flowering zucchini that have grown into monstrous-sized marrows, great green appendages that won’t fit into the fridge, and tomatoes, the vines of which are bending and breaking under the weight of the pappy red fruits – more than we could ever eat or cook with.
And I, when I am not scribbling, am locked away indoors studying the nuts and bolts of beekeeping. We have decided to find ourselves an apiarist who might be interested in placing half a dozen of his hives on our hills and sharing the honey harvests with us. Michel wants us to strike up an arrangement with a local bee farmer along similar lines to the relationship we have built up with René, our olive-tree guru. René assists us with the pruning of the trees and the gathering and pressing of our fruit and in return he keeps two thirds of our olive produce. We were lucky to find him. Our little farm, this most unexpected enterprise of ours, has got off to a fortunate start. Quite by chance we have fallen upon a plot of land that yields first-class olive oil. But we have much to learn, a long way to go, if we are to honour the AOC we have our hearts set on and gain a deeper understanding of the Provençal way of life.
I know nothing whatsoever about beekeeping, or apiculture, and in order that I do not present myself as completely ignorant in this complex business, I have bought myself a textbook, a hefty tome in French, that claims to tell me everything I will need to know about hive construction, the rearing of the queen, extraction of honey and royal jelly, the nutritional value of pollen for humans, manners, the social activities of worker bees and the husbanding of the whole. These stripy little insects are arthropods, as are butterflies: species with bilaterally symmetrical bodies divided into segments. Fascinating reading, but it grows exhausting during my bouts of morning sickness, which last well into the afternoons. They will pass, I know, and are a small price to pay for the joy of the child to come. Still, I am unaccustomed to lethargy and thankful it won’t endure for months.
When I arrive at the airport to collect Michel I see that his Paris flight has been delayed and is not scheduled to land for another hour. Instead of hanging about the crowded, Friday-evening concourse, where the noise, cigarette smoke and film-festival hullaballoo will put me in a grumpy humour, I decide to drive to Nice where I can while away the time at a beachside café, watching the sea and quietly studying my Beginner’s Guide to Beekeeping.
Sitting alone outside the café-bar in the soft evening light, engrossed in my manual, I am only vaguely aware of the arrival of a moustached man who settles himself and his newspaper at the small round table right alongside mine until he shouts loudly to the waiter – ‘Henri!’ – and lights up a Gauloise. The waiter brings the man a pastis and they chat animatedly together. His exhalations of smoke drift my way and draw my attention. I feel a sweep of nausea wash over me and decide to move, but before I can scoop up notepad, pen, book and bag, my neighbour – a middle-aged, leather-skinned, fubsy Mediterranean with the florid complexion of one who lives out of doors, victim to winds and sun – makes a totally bizarre comment which stops me in my tracks. ‘Have you seen them dancing?’ is what he asks.
I assume that he must still be talking to the waiter, and glance behind me to see if Henri is standing close by. This provokes my neighbour, who grows noticeably hot under the collar and begins waving his hand at me. Before I know what’s happening, he is leaning over my table and rapping his finger (one of the two holding the burning cigarette) hard against my manual.
‘The bees, madame,’ he says. ‘The dance of the bees.’ He repeats his words in an emphatic way, as though he considers me deaf or simple. ‘Danced till they were stunned. So, you’re wasting your time.’
‘Excusez-moi?’
With a bulging-eyed nod, he raises both hands, fingers heavenwards, ‘You won’t find such matters in books. Books won’t give you the truth!’ And with that he downs the remaining swig of his pastis, tosses a few coins on his table, calls bonne soirée to Henri, picks up his Nice Matin and struts off.
I am left feeling both irritated by this bumptious individual and curious, and as soon as he is out of sight I riffle through the pages and then flick back to the index in search of a chapter or heading on Dancing Bees. There is no mention of any such activity. Stupid of me to have bothered to look. I dismiss his comment, laughing at myself for having paid him any attention at all.
Once we are back at the house, Michel busies himself in the kitchen chopping the parsley, chives and basil I have collected from our maturing herb beds. During these last days I have been planting baby lollo rosso salads and arugula, which have shot up so fast that I am able to harvest some of the tender young leaves for supper. We are having loup, sea bass, which I have marinated in five tablespoons of Bourgogne Aligoté white wine, generous dribbles of olive oil, pepper, ground sea salt, sprays of fennel, a sprig or two of celery and slubs of freshly picked lemon, ready to bake in tinfoil on a bed of sliced onions and tomatoes – our own, of course.
I prepared everything earlier so that we would have little to do this evening. The plane’s delay has meant that we are eating late, but the temperature is heavenly and we can dine by candlelight beneath the stars.
I have said nothing yet to Michel about my news. Still savouring the moment. While the oven is heating I walk round to the big old fridge we bought second hand and have installed in the garage by the stables, where we store our wine and keep our washing machine, and draw out a bottle of champagne. Once I have uncorked it and placed it in a cooler, I take it, with two long-stemmed flutes, to our wooden table to await Michel, and set it down next to a plate of small, round toasts generously spread with a creamy and very garlicky crème d’anchoïade, anchovy paste, which is made locally and which I buy at the épicerie in the village.
The cicadas have given up for the day, but the dogs have awoken, no longer beaten by the heat. They smell dinner and have begun pacing the terraces, marking time until we sit down to eat, at which point they will settle under the table in the hope of being thrown the odd morsel, even though they know I refuse to indulge them in this. Presently they are barking, demarcating their territory, warning off intruders, most especially the wild boars, those great hulking beasts who scour our hill in search of roots and acorns.
One evening, during our very first summer here, while I was alone – Michel had returned to Paris – occupied in the garden, watering the first of the plants we had purchased, geraniums, a passiflora, some herbs, I was frightened by strange gruntings and heavy breathing. I turned my head fearing a burglar, but found myself staring at a huge, hirsute wild boar. She was a female, the more dangerous of the species, foraging for food. An awesome sight, she stood her ground, eyes fixed on me, until I crept stealthily but determinedly away.
Although we are aware that they have not abandoned these ten acres of ours, since that evening there have been no more close encounters with these strapping pigs. We assumed the dogs were successfully keeping them at bay until we began to notice damage to our renovated drystone walls. This is usually a clue that les sangliers are about. They leap and stamp from one terrace to the next, displacing the stones which, as they loosen, sink into piles of rubble. Months of Quashia’s work destroyed with the careless kick of a hefty hoof.
They enter our holding from the rear of the hill, approaching us from its summit – up there, we are not fenced in – and, as they gain courage or grow hungrier, they shuffle ever closer to the house. A few nights back, Quashia spotted a family of four stalking the land, tearing up the grass.
‘Are we celebrating?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I see champagne.’
Lost in my boar concerns, I had briefly forgotten. Michel is at my side now. He sits at the table, looking at me quizzically, then leans forward, lifts the bottle from the cooler and begins to pour. He hands me my glass and raises his. ‘Santé,’ he says.
I lift my flute and gently trace it against his. ‘Santé. Here’s to us and – our baby.’
My eyes prick with moist emotion and I rub at them, attempting not to be a softy.
Michel is on his feet and draws me to mine. ‘Chérie! Félicitations!’ Arms around my waist, he seeks my lips. ‘Je t’aime,’ he whispers, holding me tight. ‘That’s wonderful news. The best.’
Later, when the bottle is empty and we are laughing senselessly with joy and a surfeit of champagne, the scent of burning from the upstairs kitchen arrests us and reminds us that our delicious sea bass is still in the oven. I rise to hurry up the newly tiled steps that skirt the side of the house to retrieve our supper but Michel presses me back. ‘No, you don’t. No overexertion.’ And off he goes, returning a few minutes later with the barely recognisable remains of our fish, charcoaled and bubbling inside the scalded tinfoil.
It is half-past ten on Saturday morning. The sun is already high and the temperature is mounting. I am crouched on the ground observing a minnow mayfly resting on the stone surround of the pond. René was meant to be coming by at half-past eight. We had arranged with him that he would accompany us to the farm of an apiculteur, ‘the best beekeeper in all Provence’, who happens to be a dear friend of his. ‘I’ve known him since we were lads.’ But not for the first time there is no sign of our silver-haired olive master and no news, either. I go inside and ring his mobile, but it is on answer machine so I don’t bother to leave a message. Instead I take the opportunity presented by his tardiness to prepare myself grilled tomatoes on toast as a second breakfast, which I tuck into out on the terrace.
‘What are we doing about this beekeeper, then?’ Michel refills our coffee cups. ‘I’ve never seen you eat that before,’ he adds.
‘I know, weird, but I really fancied it. There are a couple of other names on my list. The first is M. Manneron. He has a stall at the Forville market in Cannes. I met his daughter there when I was buying our poor sea bass. The other I contacted after reading his details on the label of a honey jar. They both live further afield than René’s pal, but we could go anyway, make a day of it.’
Both beekeepers are expecting us, but both live in the distant hills, one inland towards the mountains and the other in the Var. Michel thinks that we may have left our outing a little too late in the day. It will be a long and sticky journey in his ancient, non-air-conditioned Mercedes, we have tickets to see a film at the festival later and he is concerned that I should not wear myself out. We argue the point in an amiable way, because I am determined not to allow a little nausea to spoil our plans for the day or stand between us and our modest farming ambitions. In any case, I have been looking forward to the outing while poring over my bee tome.
‘Think of it, Michel, beehives standing in rows the length of the terraces.’
‘Steady on, we’re only talking five or six hives.’ He laughs, picking up the phone, still expressing misgivings about the taxing nature of such an upland reconnaissance in my condition.
The first apiarist informs him that he cannot wait in. ‘Je suis très occupé,’ M. Le Beekeeper advises us, and goes on to voice the view that we live too far; the journey would be unprofitable unless he were to install a minimum of seventy hives. Undeterred, Michel replaces the receiver and rings M. Manneron, who is less dismissive and assures us that he will be waiting for us.
‘If you’re not feeling up to it, we can postpone this,’ Michel reasserts, but I shake my head.
Within the hour, we are heading off in the direction of Digne-les-Bains, leaving the Alpes Maritimes behind us, taking the Route Napoléon, where the roadsides are buttoned with summery white and yellow wild flowers, heading towards the Alpes de Haute-Provence.
Once we are through the chaos of modern day Grasse, with its commercialised perfumeries and overconstructed high-rises housing most of the region’s bureaucracy, the traffic begins to thin out. At 600 metres we pass glowing, bald-pated men dressed in shorts, walking purposefully. Here, in the environs of Grasse, there are dozens of maisons de retraites. Even today it remains a fashionable place for the French to retire to, and many of the ornate belle époque buildings have been converted into luxurious nursing homes or apartments, standing high on the hillsides looking out towards the distant sea.
Succulents grow everywhere out of the rocks, their sharply needled fronds reaching heavenwards like wailing women or the tentacles of giant octopuses. It was the British who brought succulents to this side of the world, transporting them from their distant colony of Australia. Also from Australia came eucalyptus trees. Their heavenly perfume always reminds me of home, because it is the first to greet you when you exit the arrivals hall at Nice airport and walk towards the parking.
Alice de Rothschild had a vast and very fabulous garden here in Grasse at her austere Villa Victoria (now converted into flats) to which Queen Victoria paid a visit in 1891. As was the custom with all Mme Rothschild’s celebrated visitors, Her Royal British Majesty came bearing a gift of a tree which she was invited to plant in the grounds herself. Unfortunately, in the execution of her task, our Queen, who never tripped lightly on her feet, trampled all over one of the flowerbeds, destroying several rare plants in the process. Madame de Rothschild sent her instantly packing.
‘I like the idea of inviting guests to plant a tree,’ I say.
Continuing our climb inland in this solid yet ancient car, we reach the mountains, the most southerly of the Alps. Here the views plummet into lush, emerald-green valleys and sometimes, through a break in the ranges, we catch the sparkling blue of our own doorstep Mediterranean. The vegetation is not yet alpine; there are still the occasional reminders of hot lands. No palms at this altitude, but tall, willowy eucalypts perfume the air. Cork oak, chêne liège, is growing profusely everywhere – an indigenous tree to this region – but there are no more olive trees to be seen. We are saying a temporary au revoir to the land of baking sun and beloved oliviers, leaving them behind as we ascend towards a cooler clime. Herbs spice the wind. We turn a corner, a delicious scent hits our nostrils. Juniper. It grows wild up here in the scrub. As does the aromatic broom, with its tightly clustered butter-yellow blossoms, now in full flower. The altitude begins to slacken the heat. I breathe deeply, more easily. This old car burns oil, exhaling clouds of navy fumes which make me dizzy, so I am grateful for this milder climate. It clears my head, offers comfort to the journey.
Eight hundred metres. The landscape is changing. The dense, chocolate-red earth, so evident at sea-level along the Esterelle coast, is in sharp contrast to the stark white stone at this elevation. Clefted white rocks loom all about us, runnelled with tracks which resemble fingernail scratches across naked flesh. Small furry blue flowers at the road’s edge. Forests of pines, not the generous-branched pin parasol which so elegantly shades the coastal diners, but the pointy-tipped Christmas ones that put me in mind of rows of paintbrushes. Even the buildings up here have an alpine look to them. Wooden homes with slanted roofs that resemble Swiss wall clocks. I half expect little hand-carved people to pop out, twirl and disappear again. Their shutters are solid, workaday wood. None are painted the electric colours ours are; here they are varnished to protect against the fierce climatic changes. The artists’ hues for which the Côte d’Azur is so renowned have been bleached out at this altitude, all but erased. We are travelling through a world of dun brown, white stone, deep conifer evergreens, softwood forestry tones, with dashes of russet. It is a less audacious, less vibrant palette. Bare nature, no livestock. Little activity.
Swinging the lacets, the hairpin bends, we begin to encounter another breed of tourist: the cyclist with his trim, busy buttocks in brilliant blue Spandex body and hard hat, pedalling for all he is worth.
And turning my attention to the left side of the road, I spot a sign with an engraving of an eagle and the letter ‘N’ beneath it. ‘La Route Napoléon.’ ‘We are following the tracks of Napoléon Bonaparte, Emperor Napoléon I.’ As I speak the land takes up the eulogy. Everywhere we see Café Napoléon, Camping Napoléon, Parking Napoléon.
On 1 March 1815, having fled incarceration on the island of Elba, Napoléon landed at Golfe Juan – his escape had been financed by his doting sister, Pauline, who, the year before, had sold her jewellery in Nice and, as he was escorted through St Raphaël, a heavily guarded prisoner en route for Elba, she had slipped him the cash needed ‘to make flight possible’. Today Golfe Juan is a buzzing resort, sandwiched with beachside cafés, boutiques and clubs thumping with the beat of popular music; a playground for the young and trendy. But when Napoléon set foot on that shore with his 1,200-strong army, it was a humble fishing village. From there he marched on Cannes, conquered it, and the very next day began his trek northwards.
Keen to avoid the Rhône Valley, where he knew he would be greeted with hostility, he chose this mountain way, the route to Sisteron, which today is more famous for its deliciously tender lamb. By the time he arrived in Grenoble, throngs of people had amassed and were waiting for him. He marched into their city to the resounding cries of: ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Like the soaring eagle on his insignia, he must have felt invincible. His triumphal return to Paris, the seat of his omnipotency, must have seemed reassuringly secure.
Roadside shacks are in evidence now, selling kilo pots of honey, predominantly lavender. And lavender bouquets advertised at two for 10 francs. Signs tell us that we are at ‘La Source Parfumée’. Rather splendid, I remark, to know that one is living at the source of a perfumed world. It cries out to be the setting for a fairytale.
We pass though a hamlet with a garage offering all manner of repair work yet chock-a-block with rusting husks of vehicles, a spattering of houses and a trim whitewashed auberge decorated with a faded hand-painted advertisement. It reminds me of those Dubonnet commercials I used to see on television when I was a small girl and the perfect universe they depicted: tranquil summer lanes in the heart of the French countryside. In my own childhood I rarely knew that warmth, that peace and sunshine of mind and I have sometimes asked myself whether, somewhere deep within, I wasn’t seduced by those commercials. In my search for happiness have I sought a world where jolly French workmen in jaunty automobiles motor about with not a care in the world? The auberge we are approaching displays a less genial image, however. It is a larger-than-life silhouette of tricorned head and shoulders. A haunting, black shadowy figure stencilled against a white wall. We draw close and I see that the advertisement is for cognac: Cognac Napoléon, of course. A small man enlarged to many times his own dimensions.
I think of product placement and the fortunes certain stars are paid for lending their names to merchandise. ‘I wonder what our Corsican hero would have been paid today for all this,’ I laugh. ‘He’s a bankable icon, that’s for sure. And there’s no copyright to stop anyone from reproducing his image.’
As we pass through Castellane, heaving with tourists and the only traffic jams we encounter throughout our journey, we see signs everywhere for the Grand Canyon du Verdon – the largest gorge in Europe – which I have never visited. But no time for that today.
I return to the purpose of our outing – honey – and share with Michel what I have been studying. ‘Apis, a genre of bee that collects pollen for honey-making – not all do – has been around for somewhere between ten to twenty million years. Incredible, eh? It seems that bees and honey have been on this planet longer than man as we know him. Homo erectus dates from the Newer Pliocene period. The earliest bee fossils found date back to the Miocene period. There is a fossil in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington which is nine million years old. Man was already consuming honey somewhere between three to eight thousand years before Christ. An ancient industry, on a par with olive farming.’
I fall silent, stunned by the beauty of the nature around us.
Winding through one of the mountain passes, les cols, a coach approaches, driving fast, blasting its horn like a demented beast. The sound alone might sweep you away, send you spinning into the ravine that plummets more than a thousand feet beneath us. The rush and drama of the coach whistling through the mountain pass has sent a flock of birds scattering, screaming, regrouping and sweeping in and out of the clefts and crevices of the carved limestone alongside us. Are they swifts? Yes, alpine swifts, with white underbellies. In winter these cols must surely be impassable.
Our journey takes us through a lush valley where we drive in and out of a pretty and inviting town, Barêmme. A fertile oasis where Napoléon spent the night of 3 March 1815. We pass fields of apricot trees, cherry, bamboo.
Bamboo. I had thought that the origins of bamboo were in China, but I have read that its early history includes India, America, even Africa. In the Mediterranean, the Romans cultivated it as a decoration. Indian bamboo, which grows to great heights, encircled many of their temples. There are over 200 different species. Its cane was believed to carry the magic of the Orient within it.
The fruit trees prompt thoughts of lunch; I am hungry again. Michel suggests that we eat after our rendezvous with Manneron. ‘I’m sure we can find a mountaintop restaurant in Mézel serving delicious local produce. What do you fancy?’
I consider his question as a steam train comes puffing along a track that flanks the road. Written the length of its three carriages is ‘Nice à Digne’.
‘Something with tomatoes,’ I answer.
There are maybe a dozen passengers aboard, all peering from the windows. It resembles a blue and white Dinky toy, a lithe Thomas the Tank Engine from a world of children’s literature which precedes Harry Potter. We watch it rock and sway and then the signal goes down on the track in front of us and the train steams across the street.
The signalman’s house to the right is green and shiny, with a carapace of ivy. Cut into it are red oblong windowboxes crammed with scarlet geraniums and, in the garden, two crooked tables dressed in red checked cloths.
Matisse wrote: ‘Red becomes a sound like a note escaping from a musical instrument.’ When I look upon the ruddy richness of these flowers, I see what he was getting at. And our poppies in the garden; so hot is that colour, I hear the heroin-cracked voice of a jazz singer, scarlet lips flush against a silver mike, crooning the blues.
The signal goes up and on we go. Now the train is to our right until it disappears into a small tunnel, chuff-chuffing cheerfully out of sight.
We have reached 1,200 metres above sea-level and the outskirts of Mézel, where the air is heady, knife-sharp and spicy. It is fragranced with the scent of wild lavender, which cannot grow so easily closer to the coast: it needs an altitude of over 900 metres to survive.
The sky, the light, the land are a delicate chromatic tapestry; the chalky earth is as pale as faded butter or goat’s cheese, the sloping fields are a deep, inviting amethyst and the cloudless blue sky seems almost within reach. My head out of the window, hair blowing freely, I inhale the piquantly aromatic herbs, brush plants and trees known collectively as garrigue.
La garrigue Méditerranéenne includes a vast selection of wild and sweetly scented bushes and plants. What a paradise for bees …
As we close up the car to ask about Manneron and stretch our legs, I hear the echo of our footsteps on the dry, empty pavements. There is a hint of wind for which, after the length of the journey, we are very grateful. I crane my neck to release the stiffness and sight an eagle drifting effortlessly on the windslip.
‘L’aigle volera de clocher en clocher jusqu’aux tours de Notre-Dame,’ said Napoléon, the returning hero. The eagle will fly from belfry to belfry until it reaches the bell towers of Notre-Dame. Flushed with early success, his dreams must have soared with those overhead birds as he and his retinue marched northwards, cutting a celestial route through these Haute-Provence Alps. Above him, the lords of the domain, swooping, hunting, killing. He would have been watching those raptors, living in proximity with them, planning his campaigns, inhaling rushes of their potent power, hell-bent on his own resurrection.
Looking out across these mountains, where the natural peaks rise sharply skywards, not dissimilar to bell towers, I can picture where his image might have come from. Today, over a thousand birds of prey are executed every year by the power lines the EDF, the electricity board, have installed in these ranges. If their wingtips brush against two lines at once, they are electrocuted instantly. Others are wiped out by forest fires, pesticide and fertiliser poisonings or illegal hunting.
Napoléon would have had the opportunity to observe nests built in treetops on the cliff faces and to hear the broad, flapping wings of a variety of diurnal and nocturnal raptors hunting between one range, one peak, and the next. Instead of the sombrous tolling of church bells, he would have been listening to the eerie, resonant skirls of those mighty predators echoing through the stillness, cutting across brittle streams of light.
Nearly two centuries later, numerous birds of prey have become a rare sight. Bonelli’s eagle is now an endangered species. Probably no more than fifty pairs survive in France.
‘I think it’s a young Golden,’ murmurs Michel. I tilt my head and fasten my attention on the mighty bird. From this distance it does not look golden at all. Its underbelly is a dark, chocolatey brown.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘It has a golden head and nape. See how it glides, the “V” of its wings? See, it has white markings on its wings and tail.’
A tractor purrs by in the main street of Mézel and draws me back to earth, to this friendly little mountain town, where I notice chamomile growing in stone pots at the road’s edge. This is a very different Provence from our coastal strip. It is far removed from the glorious belle époque splendour and glitz of the Côte d’Azur. The tourists here are in handfuls; they pass in dribs and drabs or sit in the roadside cafés studying maps. Not the roasted packs shuffling about by the coast, stuck in traffic, gorging despondently on ice creams and cola, or the film festival crowds. Here they are fresh-faced and purposeful, walkers in sensible sandals and batik shorts, no-nonsense haircuts or hippy-long curls, swinging woven swagbags from their shoulders.
Beyond the town, crossing a rather unattractive bridge, we go in search of the Manneron holding. An umbrous-featured local points out the route. ‘But you can’t walk it,’ he warns. ‘It’s too far. It’s way up there,’ is the sole indication we are given.
Back in the car, we begin to scale a track, a sentier muletier, probably once trodden only by mules and les bouquetins, the splendidly horned goats that used to roam freely in these southern Alps but are never seen these days outside the national park. Slender-trunked trees rise up all around us. The higher we climb – and I thought we had reached the summit – the narrower and more perilous the path grows. The ground has turned to a shade of bleached nutmeg. There are numerous butterflies: minuscule citrony ones and larger, darker fellows and then another, a rich, creamy butterscotch. I am sorry to say that I cannot identify any of them, though the small ones could be Clouded Yellows which are habitués at this altitude. I dare not look down; the verticality makes me giddy. So I zero in on what is aloft and catch sight of what looks like a village perché hidden high above the trees, squeezed between bouldered rock formations.
‘Look!’
I cannot believe the car will make it. It whines and wheezes as we snake our way round the mountain until eventually we reach the tiny hamlet, which bears no sign to tell us its name. We pass a man and boy leaning together against the wall of a house. They stare at us as though we have come from outer space, intruders to these dizzying heights. We park in a square, the only square, at the end of the road. Literally. The only way out of here is retreat. We must have climbed a hundred metres since leaving Mézel. The view is stupendous. One lone man is tinkering with his car, which has a Paris registration plate. I ask directions to a café or bar. He laughs. ‘There’s no bar here. There’s nothing. Eight houses. Not even a baker. If you want bread you must return to the town.’
Does he know where we can find the beekeeper, M. Manneron?
He shakes his head. ‘I’m en vacances, sorry,’ and off he goes, up a narrow cobbled lane, the only lane, to one of the other five properties – we have already passed three that look out over the view. I glance at my watch. It is minutes after midday and I hear the echoing clatter of plates and the chime of voices behind semi-closed shutters. It is baking hot and there is the familiar zirring of cicadas which I haven’t been aware of since leaving the coast.
A dog barks, and then another. Within seconds a cacophony of howls and barkings has broken out. We sight one rather dusty-looking hound chained in the square behind several rusting, wheelless trucks and then a second further over in a pit of earth. Both are dun-brown. Why would anyone need a guard dog here? What’s to steal? Who is there to steal it? Beyond the yowling mutts is a small walled cemetery. We take a look. Neat graves adorned with plastic flowers. The family of—. Sadly missed mother of—. Shiny enamelled photos, oval-shaped like cameo brooches; pre-war portraits of severe-looking men and women in starched collars and swept-back hair. I am suddenly fascinated by the history of this place. Who left? Who stayed? Who married whom? Every villager turning out for a birth, a marriage, a burial. Who went to war, who came back? To live so intimately with one’s neighbours. No secrets. Or might the entire hamlet harbour a dark secret? The Parisian tourist is calling to us. He has enquired after our apiarist and the news is that he doesn’t live here. He lives in Mézel.
‘But we have just come from there.’
‘No, his place is outside the town. There’s a hillside, an escarpment, where he has a holding with many hives.’ Yes, that sounds like him. We thank the young Parisian for his trouble and begin to stroll the few yards back to the car, making one more stop to take in the magnificence of the location and its utter isolation. It is then that I see the sign.
La Réserve Géologique de Haute-Provence est une Réserve Naturelle Nationale, spécialisé dans les Sciences de la Terre. Sa mission est de protéger le patrimonie géologique. De la fin de l’Ere primaire au Quarternaire, ce sont, trois cents millions d’années que roches et fossiles nous racontent.
Dans ce territoire de 145,000 hectares, immense musée en plein air, les géologues de la Réserve Géologique de Haute-Provence font revivre ces époques disparues.
… découvrir et d’aimer le monde des roches.
The notice is informing us that we are gazing upon 145,000 hectares of a natural, open-air museum. This is a geological reserve. We are standing smack in the centre of one of the oldest inhabited regions of the world, where the rocks are impregnated with fossils and prehistoric signs of life. For 300 million years these rocks, these mountains, have been telling their stories, or so claims the Haute-Provence Geological Reserve. History written in stones; in their wrinkles, folds and eruptions. Every curve, every hollow is a language in granite. Michel tells me that among the fossil deposits found in this vast region are hundreds of examples of ammonites as well as footprints of prehistoric birds. Footprints of prehistoric birds who circled these mountains, landed, fed, procreated here.
Hills, valleys, forests of green folding one into the next, far-off mountains, distant crickets, all beneath the crystal midday sky. It is as though time has stopped and we are gazing into the memory of an ancestral brain which is both stupendous and terrifying. The world revealed, omniscient, staring back at us across the ages. I feel my heartbeat quicken.
‘But Paris is a very old city and we were very young …’
Why, suddenly, do I recall and find myself mouthing these words of Ernest Hemingway’s from A Moveable Feast? I cannot say. Perhaps because this place is so very old and we, by comparison, are still young. Our future is undrawn. Our love is young; this baby within me certainly is. And in the earth’s stillness and age, its continuity, its witnessing of time, its wisdom, I sense a warning – the distant echo of an ancient haunting.
Hemingway was referring to the temptations outside his own marriage, an adulterous affair which damaged for ever love’s trust. In that sense our love remains shining and untested. But it is not invincible; what if it all goes wrong? What if I should lose this child, too? I slip my hand into Michel’s and he squeezes gently on it. A bird high above screeches. I turn my face up towards the light, scrunching my eyes to close out the noonday glare. The buzzard’s shadow crosses over me, darkening the day. My head begins to swim and nausea returns; the height grows vertiginous and I turn and walk silently to the car feeling as though I have travelled a great deal further than two hours’ distance from the coast, from our farm and from the happiness I seek to create.
As we return towards Mézel, Michel warns me that M. Manneron will probably consider our site too far for him. But still, he may have good advice for us. ‘You are not to be disappointed, chérie, if he refuses us. It is a great deal further and a more arduous drive than the map suggests.’
Manneron’s stock farm is situated in an isolated backwater in the Alpes de Haute-Provence, and although he and his family live en ville in Mézel, the beehives are some distance out of the town, and off the beaten track. When we eventually find the narrow, grass-rutted goat run that leads us to his holding, the beekeeper is leaning against the gate clutching his mobile phone – which is how we have finally tracked him down – waiting for us.
He greets us with a shy shaking of the hand. His pebbled glasses are so thick I am surprised he can support the weight of them. A taciturn individual who has been awarded the Red Medal, the highest honour in France, for the quality of his honey, he speaks impossibly softly in response to our questions and otherwise not at all. Accompanied by M. Manneron, who strides with the ease of a country-dweller, one who spends his days negotiating rugged terrain, we climb a steep incline and then follow him, in single file, along a trail crossing an escarpment. ‘Any special tips you might share with us on the husbandry of bees?’ asks Michel.
Manneron does not reply. I am uncertain whether he has heard. He pauses to catch his breath or to give us the opportunity to do so – Michel is discreetly watchful that the effort is not too much for me – and then we continue our ascent in silence. Now the path has widened and we are walking side by side. The view in every direction is simply magnificent. I glance furtively at this myopic man striding with his head bowed, deep in thought, and I am curious to know what is going through his mind. From here we descend the scar, moving into an alpine valley, a shallow plateau scooped out between two peaks, and keep moving through windblown grass until, eventually, we reach the hives, les ruches, which are laid out in two long rows. Large, white, square boxes standing on short wooden legs amid the tufty mountain grass. A quick calculation tells me there are approximately one hundred.
‘Where exactly are you based?’ he asks Michel, who pinpoints our location. Manneron nods, contemplating it.
‘I understood you had many more hives?’
‘Ah, yes, but they are not all here. These have been gathering lavender honey. I have others at work on the sapins. These little girls collected from the romarin before I brought them up here. And a good season they’ve had, too.’
‘So you move the hives to the flower sources?’
‘Transhumance. Most apiculteurs practise it.’
‘Have you heard of bees dancing?’ I ask awkwardly. ‘What I mean is … might there be a dance of the bees?’ I am not convinced that the activity exists but, if it does, Manneron strikes me as a man who might know of it, and I am keen to find out. Besides, the memory of that fellow at the beach café has stayed with me. Our beekeeper leans towards me, peering so close I feel as though I am wearing his glasses. ‘They have two routines, but it’s only the workers who dance,’ he confides.
‘Two?’
‘Yes, there’s the waggle and there’s the round. Each dance is a different configuration and communicates a different message. Sometimes, early in the mornings, I open up the hives and there they are, dancing away.’
I am amazed. ‘What’s it all about?’
‘A means of communication. A way of informing the foraging bees where they can find a good source of pollen, of notifying the others of a change of address, you might say – the repositioning of the hives. The language varies slightly between one geographic race of honeybees and another, and thus resembles birdsong and human languages in having local dialects. Looked at that way, you could say that my little girls dance in Provençal.’ He grins, pauses and frowns, as though trying to recollect something, and then smiles before continuing in a thickly accented English: ‘A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon; a swarm of bees in July is not worth a fly!’
‘Did you write that?’ I venture.
‘What? Mon Dieu, no. I think it’s a load of nonsense! Folklore. My wife found it on the internet this morning. Listen, I won’t be able to help you myself. Your farm is too far. Desolé, but I’ll lend a hand in finding you someone. You can count on that.’