Les filles arrive, Michel’s twin daughters. Eighteen, and beautiful as unfolding flowers. Although still adoring of their Papa, they are growing up, setting out on their own lives. Their talk is of their individual futures. Vanessa, with her long, auburn hair, her cinnamon-tanned skin and full, pouting lips, is intending to read modern languages at the Sorbonne in Paris while Clarisse, slender, soft-curled and poised, who appears to view the world from a more passive stance, is preparing to settle herself in my flat in London in readiness for a foundation course at one of the major art schools.
They swim, they read, they sunbathe, they natter together, they help with the table. Vanessa makes salads picked from the garden and her own style of potatoes, which are coated in our oil, baked with strong, hard cheeses and served up creamy and delicious. They take the scooter to buy the brioches, almond croissants and the sablés for breakfast or disappear down country lanes on outings of exploration, returning, with wild flowers, for meals or for dips in the pool. In so many ways they are independent; they are no longer children. Their lives are ahead of them. They do not notice my sadness and I say not a word. They enquire after my work and sometimes we discuss my projects but their energies are centred on their own lives. They are two regular teenagers; it is as it should be.
‘Are you at work on a novel?’ asks Vanessa.
The fact is I have no work. The material I was researching all those months back – for my book about this region of France, its changing history, its flora – has been relegated to a drawer, forgotten, abandoned. ‘Just an idea I had,’ I tell myself now. I still make the ritualistic trek to my den, padding along there every morning, sitting at my table, staring at my computer, or out at the awakening day, but it is habit more than a fervent need to write. I find myself sifting through papers, relocating one pile from here to there or simply gazing out of the window. Lost.
‘I am lost,’ I tell Michel. ‘Directionless.’
‘What about the new trees, our AOC, have you thought any further?’
I shake my head and shrug. I cannot throw myself into farm activities. In any case, there is little I can do to further our plans because it is August and the world of the south of France has closed down. Only the amenities for tourists are sparking. For the rest, it is holiday time. I flick through my bee tome, turning the pages, staring at diagrams, but I have lost heart in this project as well. The images remind me of spring and I cannot bear to think back to spring. But I know that I must attack something.
To offset apathy, and because the plants in the flowerbeds are all but strangled by weeds that shot up during the watering reign of M. Halaz I spend the days weeding. Reminded of water, I call René. We have heard nothing from him since before my departure. I leave a message with his wife, but he does not return the call. He is probably out fishing on his boat, and who can blame him? The weather is stunning. The sun shines hotly. The sky is cloudless. It is hyacinth blue and clear as a bell. Lazy summer. Yet, this time, it disappoints me that he lets us down.
I am engrossed in a tribe of wasps, trying to shoo them away – they have congregated round a freshly halved watermelon I left out in the summer kitchen because it won’t fit in the fridge – when we hear our unoiled gates creak open and the dogs begin to jump and bark. ‘Ah, this could be René,’ I call out, and hurry to greet him.
But no, it is Quashia. The return of Quashia!
His nonchalant stroll up the drive, a supermarket carrier bag in one hand, bearing a gift of sorts, I am sure, as though he were arriving back from lunch, is greeted by whoops of joy and much embracing.
‘Welcome! Welcome!’
The wedding ceremonies were a huge success. Over a glass of mineral water in the shade of the Magnolia grandiflora, he acquaints us with the details of the celebrations, which have cost him every franc he had saved. He has brought us video cassettes of the occasion. Eight hours’ screen time.
‘Eight hours!’
‘Well, it lasted for weeks,’ he laughs. The feasting of this family, that clan, the neighbours; the relocating of the bride; the preparation of the food. ‘Here.’ He hands over the plastic bag that contains the tapes. ‘See for yourselves.’
Michel assures him that we look forward to it, and I smile to myself, knowing that it will be me who sits through those home-recorded festivities.
‘I hope you negotiated a good price for the bride,’ I tease.
‘I made a fair deal, but now I’m stony, stony broke.’ The glint in his eye tells me how pleased our Arab friend is to be back.
‘Any news from René?’
I shake my head and Quashia grins. ‘The invisible man!’ He looks about, appraising the garden. ‘I hear it hasn’t rained here in months, but Halaz has done his bit, I see.’
‘Yes. I dread the water bill but …’
‘Got yourself a water diviner?’ he joshes.
‘René found someone, but …’
‘… you haven’t heard from René. What’s happening about a new watering system then?’ he asks.
‘Nothing.’ I don’t share my doubts about planting the new trees.
‘Well, let’s get to it. We need to get that second basin up and running.’
He rises, rolling up his sleeves. He never wastes a second.
And perhaps, now that he is here, we will get to work.
Michel and Quashia wait while I change into shoes that can negotiate the hill and then, together, we climb up to the basin.
‘The front wall must be repaired first. No point in touching the container yet.’
Michel nods. ‘Correct. But it’s a drystone wall and carrying too much weight. Yes, it must be rebuilt, but also reinforced. It has to be securely shored up or the stones will come loose again and it will disintegrate as soon as any stress or weight is laid on it. Once the wall has been secured, the base of the basin needs to have new foundations.’
Quashia frowns. ‘I can join every hose we own and create a water supply from one of the higher taps. We probably have just about enough metreage to reach this spot, but how can we transport sand and cement up here? There’s no proper track. If the builders’ merchants dump everything in the parking, as they usually do, I’ll have to transport it by wheelbarrow and I’ll be at it till Christmas!’
He has a point. We are practically at the furthest extreme of our land. There is no road up the rear of the hill and nothing except terraces in front. The tracks that cut through the terrace walls would have been carved out for the ease of beasts of burden, mules, nothing else.
We look around, reflecting on the problem.
‘How about a chain?’ suggests Michel eventually. I don’t think either of us understand immediately. ‘Let’s sit down and work out the quantities of sand and cement we’ll require, and then decide how many men could deliver it up here in, say, three days.’
Quashia gets the idea.
‘Do you think you could muster some of your cronies to work in this relentless weather?’
‘Two of my wife’s brothers are staying nearby. And there’s another fellow I know. He’s a good worker. It’s time those buggers sent a few francs back to their families. When shall we start?’
While Michel and Quashia clear the land surrounding the disused basin, I am dispatched to the builders’ merchants to place our order. It is deserted. I find both manager and drivers lounging about in the air-conditioned Portakabin, smoking, drinking coffee, bitching about life. As I enter they fall silent, eyeing me as though I have just trucked in from another planet. I smile, offering a breezy bonjour, and they return my greeting with grunts, wondering, with barely veiled amusement, what this foreign woman who busies herself with sacks of cement and always debates the price wants this time.
‘You can’t charge me five hundred francs for a delivery of sand! It’s out of the question,’ I argue.
Lucien, the site manager, who I occasionally run into at the gym, shrugs. ‘It’s two tons,’ he says. But eventually he proposes 250 francs.
I am convinced they add on a few hundred from the start, knowing that I will insist upon the same advantageous terms given to the professionals. We settle on 250 and he agrees to find a driver who will be able to deliver before the end of the week. I nod gratefully, perfectly aware that there is a quartet of drivers standing right behind me who are engaged in little aside from staring at my rear view in shorts.
* * *
I have given up on hanging out in my den, accomplishing nothing. Instead, for want of something productive to throw my energies into, I make an inventory of the garden, scribbling notes on my findings, listing plants, flowers, wildlife. Today, I am following the voracious antics of a praying mantis. I came across her yesterday when I was checking the progress of the grapes. There she was, holed up on the underside of one of the vine leaves. Extraordinarily, she has been there ever since, but her camouflage colouring is very effective and I had to hunt hard to find her again. Has she been taking it easy, caring for her digestion, after dining on her partner? I read that few male mantids are actually devoured by their women. The males seem to know the score and, once coitus has been achieved, they zip off out of the way, sharpish. This morning, I watched her trap and devour a tiny, jewel-skinned lizard. Quite shocking.
Before lunch and his siesta, after he has seen to the watering, Quashia goes in search of his three assistants. Two are as ancient and wrinkled as he, but the third is tall, handsome, young. His heavy boots and sloppy clothes aside, his looks and bearing would cast him as an Arabian prince. They sit with Michel at the round table up behind one of Quashia’s newly renovated walls and the negotiations begin. Men’s business.
The girls show signs of growing restless. I think they are uncomfortable lying by the pool with such visitors about. They propose an outing, but we are all agreed that it would be too crowded, too stultifying to visit the coast. In any case, Serge is due to arrive any day now. At long last he has accepted Michel’s invitation.
Later, when the business in hand has been settled – the materials are arriving tomorrow and the men will set to work the day after – Michel suggests an adventurous alternative. Tomorrow we will take a little trip inland, towards the mountainous region of the Haut-Pays Niçoise, to visit the Gorge du Loup, where we can swim and picnic in relative tranquillity. Serge is travelling alone by car from Paris and, to make his journey marginally shorter, Michel organises a sundown rendezvous in the town of Tourrette-sur-Loup, the gateway to the gorge.
Tourrette-sur-Loup, constructed out of the mountain face, is known locally as ‘the town of violets’ because those purple-blossomed flowers grow wild there and felt-carpet the olive groves in springtime.
The next morning we leave Quashia to organise the truckloads of materials and set off after breakfast, juddering along in the smoking Merc, which reminds me that I should phone the garage and enquire after mine. But then again, it is August, and I don’t much care to think about that car.
En route we make a swift alpine detour to a farm nestling in several thousand hectares of herb-scented pastureland. Its nearest neighbour is a pretty mountain hamlet. The farm is owned and managed by a handsome young goat farmer and cheesemaker we met a little over a year ago, at a Provençal honey festival in Mouans Sartoux. Although that village is not a million miles from our home, on that particular late-spring Sunday we felt like aliens because the locals were conversing in Provençal. The fishermen we observed near Hyères jumped between the two languages, but at the honey fair, French was shunned altogether. There are many faces to Provence, and its history is rich, diverse and embedded in our daily lives, but until that Sunday I had not been aware that Provençal was a spoken language.
Marcel, the goat farmer, is an esteemed figure in these parts because he is a published poet who writes in Prouvençau, but we are not making this stopover to partake of his poetry. It is his goat’s cheese, probably the most delicious we have ever tasted, that we are after. Among his specialities is Banon, a fresh, light chèvre sprinkled with nuts and then wrapped in a chestnut leaf. Banon is a region in the Haute-Alpes, and by rights the name belongs to cheeses that hail from those pastures, but even if his goats are not reared in Banon, his cheese is an epicurean delight and well worth making the journey for.
Marcel is the proud owner of eighty-five nannies and three dark-coated billies. The nannies produce the newborn kids in early spring, at the end of February or early March, and are milked daily from two weeks after giving birth right through to September, which explains why you cannot find fresher cheese than right here at this farm. From late September until early October, the goats are put to mate.
On one of my previous trips to this hilly hinterland creamery, Marcel explained to me, and I ask him to repeat it now for the girls, that Provençal was one of the languages of Occitan, the traditional language of southern France. It is a dialect of the langue d’oc, or Langedocien, which literally means the ‘tongue of the Occitan’. Its roots are closer to Spanish, or Catalan, which is prized as a sister language by Provençal speakers, than to French, which has a Latin root. Once upon a time, Prouvençau was widely accepted as the literary language of all France and northern Spain.
Mediaeval troubadours and poets wrote poems and songs in Prouvençau and sang or recited them to their fair ladies, the mistresses of the courts. ‘Their sentiments were of an altruistic nature, which is to say that they sang or recited the idylls of pure love, homages to the women of their dreams, rather than clamoured to consummate the physical passions, the carnal aspects of their desires. They were not looking to conjoin with their loves; it was more to celebrate them in words and music and offer the works as gifts to the heavenly creature of their choosing,’ expounds Marcel.
‘Might it be from this tradition that we find the root of the verb “to court”, to try to win the hand of, the favours of?’ I ask him.
He shrugs in the way so common down here. ‘Hélas, in 1539,’ he continues, ‘a statute known as the Villers-Cotterêts approved French, rather than Provençal, as the official administrative language in Provence. After that, over the centuries, Provençal fell into disuse. It threatened to become a dead language, but we are campaigning … Eh, bien.’ He falls silent, his expression hangdog, as though the loss were a personal affront to him and his heritage. And I can well believe that it is.
I cast a curious eye towards the girls, who are gazing at him, listening intently, with shining expressions. Perhaps they are smitten not only by young Marcel’s romanticism and his swarthy good looks but by his dark velvet voice. If so, I can’t say I blame them.
‘I wonder if you would like to add your names to our collective?’ He is addressing the girls, handing each of them a form which contains a bulletin for new adherents to fill in. I have already sent one off on behalf of Michel and myself.
‘Un mouvamen souciau en marcho!’ it announces in this ancient tongue. ‘The rest,’ he points out, ‘is written in both languages. As you can see, the form states clearly that we are neither a political party nor a sect. We are an independent body fighting hard for the recognition of our mother tongue. We want it taught in schools and spoken in our day-to-day lives. It is a quintessential part of our culture.’
The girls read the forms while I decide upon several small circular cheeses encrusted with herbs or peppers and Marcel wraps them for us. Through the window I glimpse Michel waiting by the car. He wanders over towards a small herd of goats. I smile, divining his thoughts.
‘Were you able to find a use for all your tomatoes?’ Marcel asks me.
I turn back, confused.
‘Was the recipe I gave you helpful?’
And then I remember that I have forgotten to thank him. He advised me to halve our harvested tomatoes, lay them out on our flat roof to dry in the sun, and then add them to his very delicious chèvre à l’huile. The last time I visited him must have been three months back, during our tomato surfeit, after René suggested the idea to me. I nod brusquely, shying away from the memory.
Elegantly parcelled cheeses in hand, we wave our au revoirs – Marcel invites us to return later, if we fancy, to lend a hand with la traite, the evening milking – and set off, but not before Michel has reminded us that to accompany our mouthwatering fromages we will need yards of fresh, soft bread. ‘Eyes peeled for a good baker, please. You know, chérie, I still think we should buy a goat of our own,’ he says. ‘Look at them.’
‘What if they eat our olives?’ I counter, but I suspect that, in the fullness of time, my objection will be overcome.
A kilometre or so along the way, as we approach the outskirts of the mediaeval city of Tourrette-sur-Loup, we make another stop for the required baguettes. This boulangerie, like so many here, is also a local pâtisserie, and the fresh fruit tartlets on display look too tempting to ignore. We choose two: a lemon and almond and a pear and apricot, and I ask the woman to wrap a couple of their onion tarts while she’s about it.
‘Mmm, what’s that smell?’ I have been seduced by something flavourful that I can’t quite identify, sweet yet nuttyish, wafting from the rear of the building. The homely baker’s wife grins, picks up a tray and flourishes the house speciality. ‘Pâte de guimauve, fait à la maison!’ she cackles.
Home-made marshmallows. I have never seen them on sale before. At least, not direct from the oven like these. We buy a greedy man’s portion, white and pink and soft as downy pillows. Our good lady weighs them up and off we go, leaving the shop laden with goodies – I feel the seeping warmth from the bread and the bagfuls of sweetmeats clutched against my chest – and I am suddenly reminded of my late father visiting us here, and what delight he found in the artistry of Provençal bakers and cakemakers.
Before too long, we are parking the car in the village of Pont-du-Loup. We unpack our shopping, our home-made picnic and our swimming gear, and embark on our hike. Passing a small maison de confiserie bearing the name of a well-established French confectionery house, we resist the temptation to step inside. Here, in the foothills of the lower Alp region, a few modest farmhouses cling to the twin hillsides that converge at the foot of this canyon. We move into single file and prepare to penetrate the uninhabited interior.
This cleft, riven into two gigantic faces of salmon-beige rock, which, even in this dry season, has a substantial river running right through it, is a majestic sight. Gone is the lush, subtropical beauty of the coast. This is an altogether more awesome landscape.
‘Any idea why the river is named Loup?’ I yell to Michel, who has taken the lead. He shakes his head.
Loup means wolf. No doubt in former days wolves travelling in hungry packs hunted these mountains; it could be the origin of the name.
The dust track at the river’s edge, la rive, is narrow and winding. Mountain streams puddle the path. If there is underground water to be prospected from our rocky smallholding, it would be fed by one of a million of these mountain runlets. Which reminds me that I must, somehow, track down René. It only now occurs to me that I have no idea where he lives; all we have are telephone numbers.
In winter this track would be mulched in rust-coloured oak leaves, sodden with water and black sinking mud, but this is the rainless season. Today, the only hindrances to our procession are the broken branches we encounter, snapped off somewhere way on high, or monumental felled trunks which block the route like feudal drawbridges, but we scramble over or circumvent them without difficulty, passing our bags from one to the other.
I feel sure there are raptors nesting or hunting here, but, craning my neck, even squinting, I see only drifting smudges. Any bird soaring above is too remote for me to identify. The sky, a visible curvy mass between the two rims of the canyon, looks to me like an inflated blue mouth. Warholesque. Butterflies on either side of the steep banks flit from one perched plant to the next and I attempt to identify both flora and fauna, mostly unsuccessfully. But this territory is untampered with; whatever grows here is native. Species that have survived for millennia.
* * *
La garrigue Méditerranéenne. Numerous plants compose the garrigue. Dog rose, tamarisk, blackberry bramble, rock rose, holly, myrtle, rosemary, ivy … others I cannot recall now. Our marching is hot going. It is a thirst-inducing, dusty activity. Even with the river pounding tantalisingly close and an abundance of verdant vegetation brushing against our sweating flesh, the enclosed space feels dense and airless. We climb up, we climb down, we swing left, we swing right, and each progression seems to take us further from the riverbed. Midges swarm like bolts of mesh netting and irritate.
‘Look down there!’ calls Clarisse.
Thirty metres beneath us is a sparkling rock pool. A perfect invitation to picnic and swim.
‘But how can we reach it? The descent looks dicey.’
‘Shall we try?’
The girls turn to Papa – always to Papa – who decides that it is more prudent to continue. ‘There’ll be a well-trodden access soon and from there we’ll approach with safety. If not, we’ll find another pool. There are several further along. Don’t worry.’
No one doubts the wisdom of his words, and so on we step. The day is reaching its zenith and I am beginning to feel faint, woozy with heat and lack of oxygen, but I am keen not to create a fuss, particularly in the light of recent events, and so I fall back, discreetly taking up the rear position.
We travel on for half a kilometre, more or less, before reaching an iron bridge, painted green – almost the same brilliant hue as the praying mantis I have been observing. It transports us over to the far bank and to the left, which means that we have swung back on ourselves and, before long, we find a narrow conduit that delivers us to the very same splendid rock pool Clarisse spotted a while back. From this angle, the descent is perfectly accessible and without danger. Our footsteps crackle and crunch on dozens of tiny twigs.
‘Wow!’
‘How lovely!’
And it is: a lush and stony oasis. A lonely, hidden place.
Luckily for us, the pool is bordered by substantial balloon-shaped boulders where we throw our bags in the shade of half a dozen leaning holm-oaks – these native evergreens grow everywhere in this region – seeded tight up against one another.
We tear off our clothes and fall into the water. It gurgles and bubbles and takes our breath away as we scream loudly and immerse our sticky bodies, splashing to and fro. The water is fabulous. Vanessa skids her hands across the crystal surface of the pool and a white spume rises, soaking Michel’s face.
‘Hey!’ he cries. And then both girls take up the game. I hear the call of ‘Papa! Papa!’ echo round the gorge until Papa dives out of range like a seal hunting fish.
Afterwards, we rub ourselves and one another furiously and fast and then lay out the towels to dry on the boulders. The girls go off to explore the rocky clefts and two rather litter-ridden caves we passed back by a waterfall beyond the green bridge, leaving us alone with river and sun.
‘Watch your step,’ Papa calls after them, but they don’t turn back. They are not listening. Arms linked, then hand in hand, long-legged beauties, hurrying away to share secrets, to lose themselves in rocks and thickets and be grown-up girls together. I watch them until they are out of sight, and then, a moment or two later, I unfold a rush mat in readiness for our picnic. Still thinking of the girls I lie back, supine and glistening wet, against the darkly freckled, porous rock. A tear threatens.
I feel the brush of Michel’s damp hand against my haunch, not a sexual caress so much as a supportive one, reassuring and reminding me that here at my side is companionship and love.
And how would I manage without it?
The roaring river cools us with its spray while the vegetation growing out of the rock face is our organic, filigreed parasol. We bask and dry in the dappled heat like lizards on the voluptuous curves of the boulders until a couple of mosquitos appear from out of the undergrowth, approaching from dark, fetid everywheres to bother us. The location is deceptive. You don’t expect to find them here but they zirr and dive-bomb, hoping to feed off our blood. I sit up and reach for a bottle of mineral water, flicking my wrist crossly at one of the intruders.
Michel breaks off an oak branch and fans it over me like a switch. ‘Are you having a nice day?’ he enquires, having surely picked up on my evolving mood.
I stare at the river, the thundersome rush of the river, roaring furiously by. We have to shout to be heard above the din of the fast-flowing crystalline water, but before I can answer, while I am formulating thoughts, we are disturbed by the unexpected ring of his mobile phone breaking into this intimacy.
‘Why did you bring that thing with you?’ I demand irritably.
‘In case it’s Serge.’
It is. He has had an accident. He is unharmed, but his car is a write-off. Michel shoots questions, establishes location details, then digs for our car keys and bends to give me a quick kiss. Before he sets off on this rescue mission, we arrange that I will wait for him here with the girls or, if it gets too late, at the café we spotted in Pont-du-Loup close by the mouth of the canyon.
When he has gone, to relax and keep troubling doubts at bay, I plunge myself back into the water. Returning to my rock, I begin to lay out our picnic. Plastic tumblers, even for wine – glasses here may cause accidents – and then the cheeses from Marcel’s farm, our fresh bread, the marshmallows and various hams. I cover the whole with napkins to protect against creepy-crawlies and await the girls’ ravenous return. Once this has been accomplished I settle with a book, only to be interrupted by something wet pelting the back of my neck. I think it must be a bird and lift my head. The next raindrop splats on my cheek. It is pursued in quick succession by several more, all as large as saucers. Drops are plopping heavily against the overhead trees – I love the sound – while the river in front of me begins to furrow and spin and groove with the force of the rain now sheeting down.
Glancing skywards again, I see chutes of rain descending out of louring black clouds. This is no quick summer shower. Hurriedly, I begin to pack away all that I have painstakingly spread out.
‘Vanessa! Clarisse!’ My cries echo back to me, but there is no other response. The mountain water cascades forth, thundering by like a high-speed train. Oblivious, on its sonorous journey to the coast, of the potential separation of a trio of women. The roaring, yowling wolf. We don’t want to get trapped here. I pull on my shorts, gather up the bags, too numerous for me to carry alone, and look about for shelter. Could I make it to the caves? I doubt it. Not with this load. I am already soaked, sopping, streaming. I haul the bags back against the cliff face and shelter beneath the trees. It is surprisingly dry. The ground at my feet remains dusty, untouched by a single raindrop. Water gutters all around me but I am safe; huddled, shivering, but refuged.
Peering out into the rain, my thoughts turn to the book I had intended to write this year. Listening to René and his tales of days gone by had set me thinking of the wonders of the old order of Provence alongside the new Côte d’Azur. Crouched here on my hams, I could be a cavewoman. Time has slipped away. Nothing where I am has changed in a million years. I should get back to my book; find something. Or the sense of failure will bring me down.
A clap of thunder is followed by a rustling sound and then cries and, from out of a curtain of heavy, wet leaves and sheeting rain, the girls come bounding towards me. Young gazelles, unicorns to the rescue. T-shirts over their heads; helmets of sodden cotton. They are laughing, wide smiles, healthy teeth, exuberant with life and the thrill of this mini-adventure.
‘We got lost!’
‘Où est Papa?’
‘Serge telephoned.’ And I recount the events.
‘We should get out of here!’
‘Let’s go!’ yells Vanessa. They swoop up belongings and hare on ahead. I look back, squinting, checking our spot.
‘The marshmallows! I forgot the marshmallows.’
There they are, stuck like rotting mushrooms on the streaming mottled boulder, waterlogged and drowning in the summer downpour.
‘Tant pis!’
‘Trop tard!’
By the time we belt into the smoky café – a squelching, giggling hysterical entry – we are drowned rats. ‘Chocolat chaud! Chocolat chaud!’ we are screaming.
Large cups of hot chocolate and pizzas with saucissons and local free-range eggs are ordered and while we await these, we rub each other’s hair with the dryish towels providently stuffed and zipped away inside one of the backpacks. Men, propped against the bar drinking and smoking, stare at us, eyeing the girls.
Surely they take me for their mother.
For hours we sit there, reading, watching the rain, which eventually gives way to a street potted with shining puddles and a cloudy blue sky. Coachloads of tourists come and go, tramping the village’s sole thoroughfare, chomping on sweets purchased at the confiserie. I observe it all – this unscheduled mountain day – through the window, including the girls’ reflections, all the while asking myself, what if there were no Michel? What would remain between myself and these two vibrant creatures, reading and nattering at my side, guzzling Coke and ordering yet more hot chocolate?
I recall occasions during my troubled teenage years when I was dragged off to partake of disagreeable lunches with one or other of my father’s mistresses. I measured them, those unctuous women, none of whom possessed the beauty of my own mother. I mistrusted those who went to great lengths to curry favour with me. And I disliked with an even greater fervour those who ignored me, purring and pouting at Daddy as though I didn’t exist.
Who is the intruder in this threesome? I used to ponder.
Still, I am the wife of these girls’ father, not his mistress. There is a difference, isn’t there? Even so …
And finally, late in the afternoon, after we have positively gorged ourselves on cakes and pizzas and hot chocolate, Michel and Serge turn up and we make for home.
When we arrive, we find hillocks of soaked sand in the driveway. Fortunately, Quashia has had the foresight to store the dozens of bags of cement in one of the stables.
Life turns between repose and activity. All around us the Arabs are transporting building materials, shifting wheelbarrows, laying planks up and across the hill while the rest of us are centred round the pool. Michel and I flit between one and the other. I to supply gallons of drinking water, Michel to survey the work process, though Quashia has the chain under control.
Serge is staying on with us. Such a gentle, introspective man who sits alone for hours in a deckchair in the garden. He sketches, mostly.
Occasionally, I see Clarisse crouch at his side on the warm terracotta tiles engaging him in easy conversation about his work. Otherwise he says little, even at mealtimes. I find myself watching him, slyly monitoring him, with awe and curiosity. Like a dog on the scent I keep tabs on him. He seems so unsuited to the practical demands of everyday life that I fear for his future. How will he cope alone? What has he learned about grief, about how to accommodate it, that I can steal from him? I empathise with his desolation. It mirrors my own. He shelters his pain with such dignity, losing himself within the fabulous worlds of his animation storyboards.
He works.
Is the grief of a male different from that of a female? I would like to ask him, but I don’t.
I observe him beneath our cream-white parasol, sketching a translucent-blue dragonfly hovering by the pool. And the next day he has created a character: an iridescent, queen-like nymph with a humanised face and the svelteness of the dragonfly. Out of this world.
I should be working too. When summer is over, I tell myself, when everyone has left, then I’ll begin again. Dig out my notes. But the very idea of summer being over, of the emptiness it will bring, fills me with terror.
A letter arrives from London, from Richard, my specialist. It reaffirms our conversation in his office. The various tests and scans I have undergone confirm that, though there appears to be no precise physical damage, to carry a child the full term is not possible. I stare at the page, clutching on to it. There is good news, though. In every other sense, I am healthy. All the scans are clear. He rounds off the missive by suggesting that whenever I am ready I should telephone, make another appointment to see him, ‘for a chat’. I fold up the letter and secrete it beneath my computer in my den. A lifeline deep within me, centuries old, millennia old, has been severed. Atavistic rights I took to be my God-given entitlement have been withdrawn, snatched away from me, leaving me, in a world bred to propagate, as what?
Standing out in the heat on the upper terrace, I watch the girls and Serge lazing round the pool, see their obvious contentment as they sketch, swim, dangle their toes into the cool water, do nothing more strenuous than basking in their day, and I creep back inside, close up the shutters to block out the tireless light, the singsong cries of the Arabs at work and the trance-inducing heat. I burrow deep beneath the duvet, burying myself in a cave of darkness, beating back despair. Lying in the bed alone, hot tears roll silently down my cheeks. And when Michel comes looking for me, I pretend to be asleep.
He is returning from a trip to the garden centre, where he has bought me nénuphars, waterlilies, for the pond. He ‘wakes’ me, takes me by the hand and together we settle them in the deep green water. Six white blossoms floating like miniature sails. The foot-long carp dart in and around them. They are exquisite. Several blue dragonflies arrive. Darners, I think these are – the females are less brightly coloured than the males. They congregate there, hovering, or anchored to the petals where their tails lift and fall like teeny silver pumps. An expression of their contentment?
In the evening he leads me back to the pond. ‘Come and look.’ There, clipped to the creamy rim of one of the nénuphars, we discover two slender, graceful insects.
‘Narrow-winged damselflies,’ smiles Michel, who has looked them up in one of my nature books.
I smile too, aware to what lengths he has gone, but his attentions serve only to exacerbate my sense of inadequacy. I had not bargained on this inner turmoil, had not expected to be so poleaxed by mourning, to be thrown into such isolation by it.
In the not too distant future, we will be the proud owners of a second water basin, but from where will we fill it? We could reroute our exterior pipes, or create an extension branch from the piping fed by the Lyonnaise des Eaux’s central reserve, which travels up from our pumphouse, but that will prove to be extremely expensive. I telephone M. Di Luzio, our plumber, from whom we haven’t heard a word since the film festival. We need a quote for laying the extra lengths of pipe. But his message tells me yet again that he is away. Yes, it’s holiday time. I attempt to find René once more to find out what news there is, if any, of his celebrated colleague, the water diviner.
‘Well, I can’t ask him to visit you now.’
‘Why, because it’s August?’
‘No. He’s driving north for the eclipse.’
Ah yes, I was forgetting that any day now the earth is to be totally eclipsed by the sun.
‘I’ll call you at the weekend,’ he promises, ‘when it’s all over.’ And we leave it like that.
Everyone, everywhere is being whipped into eclipse fever. Even our trio of Arabs and Quashia declare it a holiday. Each night on the news, each day in the newspapers, we hear of the route of the eclipse, which will sweep a diagonal swatch across our eastern hemisphere, namely – as far as the French are concerned – across northern France.
Provence does not figure in what is known as the ‘totality zone’; we are too far south for ‘maximum coverage’. But it is predicted that we should have between ninety-six and ninety-seven degrees coverage. This offers shops and local radio and television stations an opportunity to take full commercial advantage.
Michel sends me to the village to deposit a roll of film for developing and to fetch eye-protection masks, special eclipse glasses, so that we can stare at the sun without danger. I trudge from shop to shop but all the commerçants have sold out. ‘Plus,’ they tell me, but assure me that another delivery is expected in the morning.
The following morning I duly return, a few hours before the predicted eclipse. I collect Michel’s developed photographs, but have no luck with the dratted glasses. The shopkeepers shrug when I ask what alternatives they can suggest. ‘Don’t look,’ is the best they propose.
Back at the farm everyone is disappointed. We have one pair between us – Vanessa bought a pair in Cannes – which we will share. We will station ourselves outside anyway and take it in turns to wear the special lenses. I suspect that the temptation to look heavenwards will be irresistible.
‘Can the glare really blind us?’ asks Clarisse.
‘Better not risk it,’ cautions her father.
Jessye Norman is due to give an eclipse concert at the magnificent gothic cathedral of Reims. Reims, the capital of the Champagne district in northern-eastern France is, today, the centre of the ‘totality zone’. In 1429, the newly victorious French Dauphin entered that cathedral to be crowned Charles VII of France, thus becoming the first of a long line of French kings to celebrate their coronations there. At Charles’s side was his companion in battle, the eighteen-year-old Joan of Arc. The Maid of Orléans was the same age then as Michel’s daughters are today.
Michel switches on both televisions to full volume, opens the French windows in our bedroom on the east side of the house and dusts down our ancient transistor radio. We troop outside: Serge, the girls, Vanessa already sporting her glasses, tripping and giggling on the steps, Michel with cumbersome radio in hand and me at the rear, flanked by the dogs. The morning news has warned that all domestic animals should be kept inside but we have decided, because we are not in the totality zone, that there is no serious threat. Our furry faithfuls will be less perturbed in our company than locked up in the house.
We settle ourselves over near the washing line. Not having bothered to bring chairs, we perch on the drystone wall or squat on the sun-baked grass. Michel is kneeling, trying to stand the radio upright. He is fiddling with the tuning knobs, twisting and turning, searching for the station, while the ancient ghettoblaster hisses and whistles like a drowning kettle.
And then, miraculously, there is music: a blast of ebony notes. Jessye’s opulent voice belts forth ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’, but this is not the tinny reproduction we had expected from our radio. It is a sublime, surround-sound performance assailing us from every direction. Other homes across the hillsides must have come up with the same idea, for the soprano’s supersonic voices are airborne; a fleet of aluminium ribbons soaring beyond the hilltops. We are, all of us, silenced and amazed.
‘J’ai commencé d’utiliser le noir pur comme une couleur de lumière et non comme une couleur d’obscurité,’ wrote Henri Matisse.
I have begun to use pure black as a colour of light and not as a colour of darkness.
Bathed in sound from the concert, I attempt to penetrate Matisse’s vision. Am I not witnessing the living expression of it? I turn to share this but the others are now engaged in an astronomical debate. All except Serge, who is staring at his feet. He would be fascinated by Matisse’s observations, I feel sure, but watching him, I defer, choosing to leave him with the privacy of thought. What memories are haunting him? I wonder. Is he floundering like me, rooting about, trying to reconstruct meaning?
‘No, it was Copernicus, not Galileo! Galileo came later.’ I hear Vanessa, charged by her young-blooded certainty. Such certainty. ‘Copernicus was the first to understand that the earth orbited the sun and not the other way around.’
‘That’s right, of course,’ confirms Papa.
I read that after England’s last total eclipse, on 29 June 1927, Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead.’
No colour. I try to picture that. The earth dead. Extinction. As I close my eyes to spear her image, I realise that the temperature is dropping. I feel chilly. And there is no birdsong. No songs of nature at all. The exquisite music, yes, and the conversation alongside me. I open my eyes. My skin has goosepimpled. The dogs at my feet are silent and uncharacteristically still. Lucky’s ears are standing to attention; she is alert in the way she is when she sniffs intruders or trouble. The other two, Ella and Bassett, are prostrate at my feet, snouts buried beneath paws.
The universe is rotating, turning the clock to another setting. I see shadows lengthening across the earth, distorted elongations of the cherry and olive trees reaching across the groves, creeping towards us like spirits stealing forth. I behold shadows where there have never been shadows before. It is eerie, quite spooky. Souls of the departed tiptoeing out to play. I shiver, casting off this image quickly.
Although the day is growing dimmer it remains bizarrely clear, sharp. Neither dusk nor dawn, day nor night. Rather, a flash of lightning frozen in time. On the terrace beneath us the cacti resemble giant-eared cartoon figures. I hear voices rising from afar, the rattle of shouted conversations, nervous-edged cries in the valley as the world slides into darker mode; a limboland of quasi-crepuscular noon. The heavens are retreating, as though the gods were switching off our universe, drawing the celestial curtains once and for all. For a moment I feel nauseous. I experience a profound sense of panic. I glance about me, taking in the family gathered here, the people I love. Each momentarily silent, lost in his or her own contemplations; awestruck, perhaps, or pondering similarly gloomy demises to this unnatural day.
Michel picks up his explanation of the death of megastars, describing white dwarfs and what causes them. How long does a star live? I ask myself. And then, bizarrely, I hear Vanessa raise the same question and Michel’s response: ‘The bigger the star, the quicker it dies.’
‘Compared to the sun, how much bigger are these stars?’ It is Vanessa once again.
‘Varying sizes, but scientists are not able to measure precisely. Twenty times bigger, I don’t know. But when they implode they form the most mysterious phenomenon in the whole cosmos. I’m sure you know it, Vanessa?’
She shakes her head.
‘The black hole.’
The black hole. Yes, I know it. I’ve been there. I lift my eyes to stare at the sun, to challenge that black enemy. Throwing my head recklessly back, gazing impudently upwards, knowing I shouldn’t, but what the hell; inexorably drawn to the phenomenon occurring billions of light years above. The glare is blinding; it shocks. A sheet flaps lightly on the washing line. It catches my attention and its snowy-white ordinariness drags me to my senses.
‘What are you doing? Chérie!’
I close my eyes tight before the light brands my retina. I see silver and black rings, crescents, circles, cuticles, wafers of luminosity; my sight has been dazzled, momentarily zapped.
Michel reaches towards me, his hand grabs my wrist. ‘Chérie, please take care.’
Jessye is now singing Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess as the darkening grows darker; a wink, centuries old, received as though in slow motion.
We are each marginally apart, in our space, transfixed, bewitched by music and the coupling of star and planet, this mysterious astral love song. Each of us, that is, except Clarisse, who suddenly rises and shifts places, settling herself at Serge’s side. I study her as she draws her knees tightly up against her daisy-stalk frame, wrapping arms round calves to keep warm and then, so imperceptibly, tilts herself in his direction.
I am stunned. I hadn’t read the special attachment between these two but now, in this ghost of a light, their future is chalked, pellucid-clear as though it had always been written.
Without ado, I spring up and hurry inside.
On the television, the news report from Reims is taking a dramatic tone: if the clouds don’t clear the eclipse will be obscured. An anchorman is counting down the minutes, the seconds. I think I hear that it is raining up there, but I am not listening, not paying attention. I cross through the living room and enter the haven of my den, where I switch on my computer and begin to bang at the keys.
Do I have the right to be jealous of C’s attentiveness to S? His loss is unquestionably worse than mine. I don’t OWN grief. Am I jealous of their youth without being aware of it? Do I begrudge them their beauty, their shiny futures; the possibilities they hold in their hands, their almost certain fecundity?
‘What are you doing?’
‘Scribbling.’
‘Yes, I see that. Won’t you come back outside and join us?’
I don’t answer. I can’t speak. This day, this darkness, this family gathering is almost too much to bear.
‘Please, talk to me,’ begs Michel. ‘What is the matter with you?’
‘It’s fine for you, you have children!’ I snap, not meaning to, not even knowing what carelessly thought-through thoughts I was about to utter.
‘It’s easy for you to say you don’t mind that we don’t have children, that if I can’t produce any …’ I falter. ‘That we are still a couple, no matter what. You have your family. Those girls are yours, yours, not ours. I am the one who …’ my voice breaks. I cannot continue. Overwhelmed by the affliction which aches like a deep, black chasm, I drop my head forward over my desk. My forehead brushes against the keyboard which instantaneously produces an alphabet of confusion on the screen. ‘I feel so many things. All of them negative. I feel inadequate, a failure,’ I mutter.
Michel remains a moment by the doorway, where no door exists now because he took it away to open up the space and create a more luminous living area. He looks on helplessly in my direction.
‘Shall we discuss this now, or …?’
I don’t respond because I don’t know what to say. I had never intended to embark on this, but now that I have I pinch at the corner of the envelope hidden beneath my Apple Mac and slip it out. Richard’s letter. Without a word, I hand it to Michel.
He takes it and reads it gravely. And then lifts his eyes to mine. ‘Come here.’
I remain where I am.
‘Papa! Papa! Viens! Vite!’ It’s Vanessa calling. He hesitates.
‘Please go, they’re waiting for you. They want to share this day with you.’
‘Viens, chérie, please.’ He holds out his arm. ‘Chérie, s’il te plaît.’
I flip a glance over to where he is waiting patiently for me and rise awkwardly, accepting his outstretched hand. He takes me in his arms and hugs me tight. ‘I know it might feel like the end of the world, particularly today, but it isn’t. We’ll get through this together,’ he whispers into my hair. ‘I am here for you. Je t’aime enormement.’
We step out into a world that has been transformed.
Everything is lit as though by floodlight, everywhere cloaked in silence: an enchanted stage. The gloaming hour before the appearance of the Fairy Queen. Heads are tilted heavenwards – it is safe to look now – entranced faces pearly-skinned, lustrous in a world that is perfectly still.
Two images come to my mind: the parable in the Bible of Lot and his wife looking backwards and being frozen into pillars of salt, and, in the teachings of Zen, the notion of being so at one with oneself, so in union with the universe, that you can hear a blade of grass growing.
The universe shifts yet another notch, such a great lumbersome clock, and the sun’s corona, that halo of oyster light made up of the superheated gases surrounding it, is glowing like a translucent wedding band. All five of us are transfixed by the aubergine heavens. We are in communion with the stars which, at the zenith of this supernatural, surreal day, are winking like expiring fireflies.
And all at once the spell is broken. It’s over. Daylight returns. It comes like an explosion of shattering glass as a flock of herring gulls appear from out of nowhere and screech angrily, raucously at the silence. Tearing into the sable darkness, they fly low, beating their wings, swooping and turning. They are disoriented, not knowing if it’s day or night.
‘Surely it must be night, for we have been in darkness,’ a cacophony of creatures cry out in unison. The world is raging with confusion. Crickets, birds burst into song; I hear the crowing of a distant cock which, bemused, probably thinks it’s daybreak, the braying of a far-off donkey, the cicadas zirring like there’s no tomorrow – and, perhaps, cowering between stalks and leaves, they had feared there would not be one ever again. Noah has unbattened the hatches, lowered the gangplank; time to fly free. We are standing in the midst of a new dawning, a newly lit afternoon. I exhale deeply, sensing ineffable relief. I had never before measured how profoundly the flora and fauna depend on this time-honoured structure of day and night, the customary rhythms of the universe, at least as much as we do. And within these routine yet mysterious daily rounds, this ebbing and flowing, this waning and waxing, there exists both loss and gain, suffering and joy, death and birth. And rebirth?
At our feet, from the radio, Jessye’s ivory-black voice belts forth, engendering faith. ‘Somewhere’, and then ‘Praise God and Dance’.