I see him approach, wheeling a trolley full of luggage, eyes cast to left and right, searching for me as the doors swing automatically apart.
‘Michel!’ I wave vigorously and, in among the early-morning coasties in shorts and well-polished suntans, he spies me and smiles broadly. I never grow blasé about this moment, this first sighting of him after a long absence. My stomach flips like a girl’s as I hurry through the press of people. He looks zonked. That first embrace. He hugs me tight, so tightly I think I might faint. His lips brush my hair. I hear him exhale as though landing – here, where we belong – then, locked together, we make our way, bumping against one another, out of the arrivals hall.
Having someone there to care makes all the difference. It feeds the spirit. We tend one another. He has been travelling for twenty-eight hours non-stop, those long legs crammed into spaces they were not born for. He needs a shower, or a swim, but first a decent cup of French coffee, and then, afterwards, we breakfast on the terrace: yoghurt and strawberries and slices of honeydew melon and six cereales bread, spread with marmalade made from our own oranges.
‘You are wearing the necklace.’
‘I haven’t taken it off, except to film. It’s beautiful. Thank you.’
‘No more travelling,’ he says. ‘We are neither of us going anywhere for at least a month.’
His hand on my hip, slipped around my waist, I feel reassured. There is time and there is reason to heal.
Days of intimacy. Talking, listening. I talk, Michel listens.
‘I’m afraid,’ I tell him. ‘And I feel a failure.’
He hammers hooks into the trunks of a great oak and an ancient olive and hitches up the hammock in the leafy shade. We bury ourselves in it, wrap it about us, a vibrantly coloured cocoon, rocking together, cradled out of the heat.
‘What name did you choose?’ I whisper eventually.
‘Chérie, please, try not to hurt yourself like this.’
‘No, that’s not what I’m doing. I’d like to humanise her. It will help me, if you don’t mind. If it doesn’t hurt you.’
He reflects upon this and then wraps himself tighter about me. I feel his breath against my cheek, the familiarity of his intimacy. One word, he whispers in my ear, and then, in the space of a single exhalation, it has disappeared, spirited away by the breeze in the overhead branches.
‘Yes, I like that.’ I smile, fastening on it. ‘Can you guess what I chose? Well, I didn’t choose, exactly. She did, I think. She became the name. Shall I tell you?’ I insist.
‘If you want to.’
‘Carrot.’
He frowns, puzzled, I am sure, by the unlikely tag.
‘Don’t laugh.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Nothing else seemed to fit. I doubt that she would have been born with red hair or any of the characteristics we might associate with such a nickname. She would probably have been blessed with our olive skin and long unkempt curls. But the name persisted. I tried to shoo it away until, finally, I acknowledged it, welcomed her thus and we began to communicate with one another using it. Carrot.’
I turn towards him, his face in the dappled shadows. He seems to understand, or accepts my madness, at least.
Mornings, rediscovering one another. For ever touching. Growing reaccustomed to the silky or rough feel of one another. To the partnership of love. His medicine: ‘strokings’. Hours, he spends, stroking me. Every part of me: cracks, crevices, curves, soothing away my pain. Evenings to ourselves. Sitting in rickety wooden chairs, silently, side by side, watching the sun go down. Waiting for night to fall. Nights in white linen. Pushing out the night boat, drowning in love. Les nuits blanches.
There are the occasions, though, when I wake towards dawn in a sweat, crazed, hair in a tangle, haunted by nightmares, and find him, like a Chinese puzzle, entwined about me. Limbs slipped into limbs. His breath on my shoulder. ‘Calme-toi, chérie. Come here, cuddle up close.’ Tight against one another like spoons in a canteen of cutlery. Spooning, breathing in unison, I quieten.
And, later, after repose, eyes opening to discover another, baking new day. Glad to be alive. The morning sky the blue of tit’s wings, bleuté. Yes, the days are as lovely as a story.
Into one of these baking days, these days of ‘stroking’, comes a letter from ONIOL. I stare at the envelope. ONIOL. Planting olive trees. It reminds me of spring, of our plans for the farm. Of our trip to Marseille. When I was pregnant. The letter lists the approved nurseries for the purchase of olive trees. Nearest to us is one deep in the heart of the Var, behind Hyères, in the arrière-pays, La Londe les Maures.
‘Before the girls arrive,’ Michel suggests, ‘we should go and take a look.’
‘I’d rather not,’ I answer.
This baffles him. ‘Why not? We can make a day of it, stop somewhere for lunch, find a domaine vineyard and stock up on rosé.’
‘I don’t want to plant the extra trees.’
He says nothing. Silenced by surprise, wary of where this is leading. And then, eventually, ‘We need the extension, chérie, if we are to be offered our AOC. They won’t accept us as serious oléiculteurs without the required minimum of trees.’
‘We don’t need an olive-oil award. We’re happy this way.’ I feel the catch in my throat. ‘What I mean is, I don’t want to get lost in … Let’s just accept everything the way that it is.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t think I can … I can’t cope.’
I gather up our breakfast plates, rise to move inside. He takes my arm. His blue eyes bore into me. Crinkled features burned by sun.
‘Of course you can. There’s no question about it. But I don’t want to force this decision on you. Still, I see no reason why we shouldn’t make the trip A leisurely olive-tree recce, and afterwards, we can find a hotel on the beach. We could stay overnight. The girls will be arriving soon, and I have spoken to Serge again about paying us a visit and I think the idea is beginning to appeal to him. So let’s visit the nursery, see what we think and make our decisions later.’
‘Do you think that old car will stand the journey?’
‘It’s doing better than yours.’
I smile. So does he.
‘That’s settled, then.’
We set off the next day at the crack of dawn, because that is what Michel likes to do. We take the inland road, avoiding the autoroute and the south-seeking tourists. Oleander blossoms, vivid colours everywhere and sweeping hillsides furnished in green by the herby brush of the familiar maquis. Passing through leafy lanes of chestnuts, with olive fields beyond, moving westwards until we reach the Var wine districts. To left and right climb the cambered hills, green with vines, their dark grapes ripening like pendulous udders awaiting milking.
As morning hails us, so too do the mountains of Maures, almost as if from nowhere; there, rising up in front of us. Lilac and rust in the early light. The wooded summits of the Massif des Maures.
‘Oh, my God!’ I exclaim, taken aback by the beauty, the stillness, the sheer mountainness rising up out of a burnished landscape. ‘It reminds me of Ayers Rock. I don’t know why.’
‘High, empty sky. Hot, flat land, that’s why.’
‘The name Maures comes from the Provençal word maouro, meaning dark.’
We snake left, following the trace of the road, hugging the curve of the mountain base – no access blasted through its centre – and head for the coast.
‘I think breakfast at the beach. What do you say?’
We hit the water west of the city of Hyères and negotiate our way to a very pretty fishing port. The world has woken up. Cars are zipping to and fro, hooting and screeching. Urban sounds. I smell coffee and bakery flavours. My stomach rumbles, and I grin.
‘Hyères. A designated stopover for pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. A favourite spa for the British upper classes in the eighteenth century. Tolstoy lived here, and then, later, towards the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson. He said it was the only peace he ever knew. He wrote the opening chapters of Kidnapped here.’
At the quayside, we settle at a café-restaurant, order peasant-sized cups of frothy coffee and guzzle on them greedily while giving ourselves over to the cinema of the early-morning seaport, which is already in full swing, busy about its business.
From where we are seated, we are well placed to study the world of the fishermen. Several fishing vessels are in dock. Others are arriving, men disembarking. A handful are kneeling or bending over nets on a narrow jetty jutting from the quayside, occupied with the unloading of their overnight catch. I am curious to know what they are spilling out of those bulging nets.
‘I could sit here all day,’ I murmur, but no sooner have the words been uttered than a white van draws to a halt directly in front of us, blocking out both the early-morning warmth of the sun and our view.
From the driver’s side, out steps a small, plump man, whistling, in dusty white overalls and wellingtons. He thumps the side of the vehicle, walks to the rear, opens up both doors and a gangling, spotted youth clutching armfuls of baguettes descends. This callow assistant has an old-fashioned baker’s hat set askew on his head, lying flat like a raw mushroom. The baker waves to the bald-headed patron of our café, who is leaning against a sliding glass door enjoying a cigarette in the sunshine.
‘Don’t worry, they’ll be gone in a second,’ says Michel.
But no. Between them they deliver what must be at least a hundred baguettes. One load after another of warm loaves direct from the oven slung in sacks over their shoulders. How can one establishment possibly require so much bread? Finally they rev up and set off to make other deliveries elsewhere along the summer coastline.
The briny sea hits my senses, as does the unmistakable and overwhelming smell of freshly caught fish.
‘What’s their catch?’ I ask.
‘Mackerel, I should think,’ suggests Michel. ‘Or maybe it’s sea bass.’
Ah, the delicious Mediterranean white-fleshed fish loup de mer. ‘If it is, we’re taking some back with us,’ I smile. It is one of my favourite meals. A fleeting memory of our burned one catches me out; I choose not to mention it. ‘In these waters they could have been lucky and found crab, non?’ Soupe de Pélous, the Niçois name for a truly delicious broth made from locally caught crabs.
‘I don’t think so.’
Michel is right. I can make out the flapping tails of fish gasping for oxygen, expiring on the quay.
Now, the fishermen have emptied their nets and are attempting to sell their wares. They call loudly in deep-throated, resonant voices, a singsong language I cannot figure out. I hear French, but another, too. Sentences roll out that are incomprehensible to me.
‘What are they speaking?’
The language they are talking is Provençal: a foreign tongue to us but, bizarrely, its rhythms are familiar, flirting with revelation until then the sense slips infuriatingly away.
While some of the fishermen start trading, others settle at the narrow wharfside and begin the business of gathering up the nets to dry them or stitch and mend them in the sunshine. Their deftness of hand, their dexterity thrills me. These are burly men with hairy, muscular arms and thick workaday fingers, kneeling on the quay in high rubber boots, wrists turning like dancers. They laugh broadly, with hearty gusto. Vigorously handsome, black-haired men. Lovers, husbands, fathers, hunters of the sea.
People approach to buy the fresh spoils. A few arrivals are tourists, Belgians or Dutch perhaps: broad-beamed, unhurried bodies, solid shoes, light complexions burned pink. They talk with the animated fishermen, choosing carefully, lifting one wriggling sea creature after another, dropping it back on to the slithery heap, digging for another. The hirsute seamen, who have not slept all night, watch on, advising patiently, laughing and joking with their clientele. It is all part of an ancient ritual here on the Côte d’Azur: choosing one’s own produce; picking or rejecting each item with due consideration; discussing its quality at length. The serious business of food, of eating, of nurturing the body.
Replete from our several generous cups of café au lait and our fresh tartines, spread thickly with fig and peach confitures and a dark coppery-coloured marmalade that is so delicious it could only be equalled by ours, home-made by René, we want to linger a while longer watching the ruddy-faced fishermen, but we must be on our way. And so, eventually, we leave coins on the table and set off along the waterfront, which reeks of the recently landed fish and of diesel, past the wooden fishing boats bobbing in the deep-green water slicked with a rainbow coating of oil, and return to the road that takes us back inland.
Behind Hyères, bulldozed landscape. Industrial zones. Advertising hoardings. Signposts everywhere, all pointing to the airport. We get lost, snarled up in clutches of fuming traffic. Rush hour. Stressed faces, smokers, mobile-phone users driving like sharp card-dealers.
‘Let’s get out of here.’ Michel swings the old Merc over to the left and, as soon as he can, does a U-turn. On we go for miles, trying to find our way, moving out of the city’s breezeblocked suburbia into the countryside. Hot dusty roads, straight Roman roads flanked by keenly pruned plane trees. Empty but for one rusting white Citroën rising up out of the distant heat shimmer, transporting a band of farm hands to the vineyards.
‘Le platane. Plane tree. Its first mention in Greek literature was in the Iliad and then, a little later, in the Odyssey,’ I murmur.
‘What is happening with your book?’
I shrug, and turn my face to the window.
‘Why don’t you take another look at it?’
‘Not now.’
Michel does not persist. We reach a roundabout. I lean from the window and catch sight of, nestling behind overgrown foliage, a handwritten sign directing us to the nursery. Two or three kilometres further along, we see it up ahead: a disappointing hypermarché of a place. Turning left off the road, we park on the gravelled courtyard and Michel hurries to enquire at one of the cash desks.
‘The olive trees are not here. Follow the lane. You’ll need to take your car.’
Rolling slowly along a pebbled path, past row upon row of fruiting trees – I have never seen so many trees – we come upon a wooden shed with a handful of cars outside. This is the office.
A young man steps forward to greet us; he has been expecting us. He smiles warmly, shaking our hands, the epitome of wholesomeness.
‘I’ll take you to the oliviers,’ he says.
He reverses his four-wheel-drive out of the shade and we climb aboard and hit the road again. Down lanes, past entrances to vineyard domaines with signs offering dégustations, where, hidden beyond winding, vegetal tracks, can be glimpsed gracious bastides. Michel asks the young man if he can recommend one or two modest labels. He suggests two local wineries and then moves right back to the business in hand: olive trees.
‘Of course, you are fortunate. Where you are situated, you have the cailletier, the famous Nice olive. It makes excellent oil. Here, in this region, no particular variety is cultivated. Here is a bit of a hodgepodge, which is why the area is not eligible for AOC status. The conditions, the soil, where you are, are ideal.’
Moments later, we swing off the lane into what, once upon a time, must have been agricultural land but is today the property of the nursery. A vast acreage dedicated exclusively to the propagation of olive trees. In every direction, as far as the eye can see, olive trees.
I step from the car into a silver ocean of foliage. Beyond are mountains and lavender sky.
‘We have thirty-six varieties on offer here. Three sizes: three-year-olds, six or nine.’
Michel and I look about us in wonder.
‘How many trees?’ asks Michel.
‘We aim to produce one hundred and eighty thousand a year.’
It is a mighty concept.
‘One of our goals is to create the future heritage of Provence. This tree, l’olivier, one might say, is the signature tune of Provence.’
I turn to him in surprise. Signature tune? Yes, I like that: to sing the ancient ways of Provence into the future.
‘Well, our order would be a modest one. Two hundred of the cailletiers. I think the six-year-olds would suit us. But my wife and I will obviously discuss it and confirm it with you in writing. Will you be needing a deposit, or—?’
‘Lord, no, there’s no hurry. You can settle the bill next year when we deliver them. If you decide to go ahead, that is, which I sincerely hope you will. There’s an old Provençal saying,’ he continues proudly. ‘“A hundred-year-old olive tree is still a baby.” Yes, its finest fruit seasons are still to come.’
‘It’s your day,’ Michel says to me when we are back in our car, having purchased two dozen bottles of rosé at one of the châteaux recommended by our nursery gardener, whose name we didn’t learn. ‘What would you like to do now?’
‘Swim. If we can find a quiet bay.’
‘We’ll find a spot.’
Wading deep into the yawning blue sea, our thighs are caressed by brown twiny leaves of seaweed which, I discover later, is not seaweed at all. It is an aquatic plant known as Posidonia oceanica. In Corsica it is a protected species because it is a vital source of oxygen and nutrition for Mediterranean marine fauna. Waves slap gently against our naked navels. Michel’s body is as brown as tobacco, as smooth as velvet. He throws himself carelessly into the warm water and swims fast. I follow, shouting and splashing after him. The exercise relaxes our tired limbs, aching from hours in the car. We float on our backs, staring up at the cloudless sky. It feels like a stolen day. The warmth of the sun beating down on us. Golden-hued. Almost sinful.
The wavy sand is packed with heat. Our bodies are packed with heat. We flake out on a dark, triangular rock which looks out across the semi-deserted beach to the flat blue water and beyond, to the Iles d’Or. Lapping waves and bird cries are our companions while the sun pours down upon flesh glistening with driplets of the sea and runnels of salty perspiration. I am lying on my stomach, deep in thought. Michel rolls towards me.
‘Quite a sight, those olive trees, eh?’
‘Yes. As is their philosophy. Remarkable. Still, we have all we need.’
He asks no questions, but leans into me and licks my shoulder, tasting the salt. Socks of damp sand cling to our sea-wet feet. A mauvy speckled lizard scurries by, pauses, stock-still, on the rock as though sensing our presence, flicks out its tongue and then disappears.
My fingertips have wrinkled in the water and turned a marbled, death-like white. It reminds me of my loss and I feel a wave of gloom wash through me. ‘Please, don’t let’s order more trees.’
Later, inland, travelling home beneath a dramatic evening sky, we spot hand-painted signs pinned to pine trees announcing a Guignol performance this very evening. I beg to go. Michel agrees, although he does not share my passion for Punch and Judy shows.
In a dusty plaza in a lonely rural village, it is a pitiable occasion. Half a dozen kids, a gang of local lads, are running to and fro, a couple of them in bare feet, shouting, mocking the show. The French word for brats is les mouflets, which aptly describes these kids. They are slinging pebbles at the puppets, jeering at the sad puppeteer.
I recount to Michel how, when I was a child of eight or nine, I worked as the puppeteer’s assistant for my father while he performed his weekend Punch and Judy shows. I can still see the battered navy case that housed the clothed wooden figures, and in which they were transported from gig to gig. I could recite every word of the dialogue in those days, from beginning to end. Even today I can recall chunks of it. How I used to love to peer out from the rear of the tent and watch the sea of entranced grown-ups and children, all sitting cross-legged on the grass, shouting words of warning to the characters:
‘Judy! Judy! Look behind you!’
‘Where?’
‘There!’
‘Here?’
‘Crocodile!’
‘Policeman!’
‘Ghost!’
I grow silent when reminded of my father, of the confused child I was, and of my own girl so recently lost. Michel guides me back to the present by asking me why I don’t begin to write again.
I have no enthusiasm for work; no confidence in it.
He lets the matter drop.
The story being enacted here is marginally different to the tale I remember from my childhood. It seems to have a more political bias to it, but it is hard to grasp precisely because les mouflets are still screaming and throwing sticks.
I turn my head this way and that, searching for someone to call them off. But all I see is a trio of old men with hand-carved canes, olivewood, perhaps, seated side by side at the square’s perimeter beneath a dusty olive tree. They stare into the middle distance, motionless, as though made of stone.
‘Well, I wouldn’t want to be the proud mother of any of this bunch,’ I whisper crossly.