Nine

The Weather Is Here. Wish You Were Beautiful.

It is one of the few certainties in life: If you are fortunate enough to live in a lovely part of the world with a predictably excellent climate, guests will descend on you. Some will have been invited. Others will have invited themselves. They can be generous and entertaining, delighted with their surroundings, loudly appalled at the high prices they come across, keen to explore or content with a book by the pool, fascinated by the local inhabitants or irritated that they don’t speak English, ready at a moment’s notice to throw off their clothes and suck up the sun or to lurk in the shade and dodge the heat, amused by the Provençaux and their funny little ways or exasperated by those same funny little ways. In the course of many summers, we’ve seen them all.

The first signs of the guest season appear early in the year—often as early as January, when gray English weather, combined with the aftereffects of a surfeit of Christmas, make the thought of blue skies and sunshine irresistible. Our phone rings.

“Just thought I’d give you a call and see how you are. Surviving winter, I hope—it’s bloody awful here.” I look out of the window. The sky is, as usual, blue.

Now that the social niceties are over, the caller gets to the purpose of the call. “What are you up to this summer? Any plans for July?”

We don’t have plans for July. We never do. It’s too hot. We move slowly, eat the wonderful melons of the season for breakfast, enjoy long dinners outside in the cool of the evening, and stay at home. I pass this on.

“Oh, great. Because we’re going to be driving down to the coast for a couple of weeks in July, and we’d love to drop by and say hello.”

Experience has come to show us that “dropping by” is an elastic concept that can include as little as drinks and lunch or as much as a stay of several days. But back then we were still innocent in the ways of would-be guests. And the caller, if not exactly a close friend, is an acquaintance of some years’ standing. It is agreed that he will call again when he has a date.

The months pass by, and that January call is forgotten. But then the phone rings again.

“Hi! We’re just leaving Lyon. If the traffic’s not too bad, we could be with you by lunchtime. Is that okay?”

I check with the long-suffering and infinitely kindhearted Jennie, who nods her agreement. She has a more philosophical attitude toward guests than I do. She considers them a natural annual event, as much a part of summer as the heat. I once made the mistake of suggesting that you could say the same about mosquitoes. She didn’t find that funny.

Shortly after one o’clock, the guests arrive, filled with horror stories about the perils of sharing the autoroute with lunatic French drivers. They have been on the road since getting off the cross-Channel ferry at the crack of dawn, and they are hot. And they are thirsty. Boy, are they thirsty. And they are anxious to make a few calls home (these being the distant days before cell phones). By the time they have attended to a bottle of rosé and their phone calls and taken a swim and a shower, it’s almost four o’clock before we sit down to lunch.

Over coffee, we ask where they’re going and where they’re staying. The coast, they say, and they hope to find somewhere nice when they get there. They say they are “spur-of-the-moment” people.

You can guess the rest. We tell them that July is not the month for spurs of the moment. The coast is fully booked, and has been for months. Consternation sets in, and by now it’s five thirty. Inevitably, it’s agreed that they had better stay the night. One night stretches on to more nights. This, you might think, is an extreme example, but it has happened often enough to make us a little wary of spontaneous visits, although it’s only fair to say that we’ve enjoyed most of them.

In complete contrast, there are the highly organized guests who like to plan ahead. They do their homework, and their calls usually begin several weeks before they’re due to arrive, with detailed questions about the temperature, the program of local festivals, wardrobe hints, and the availability of remedies for upset stomachs. There are often thoughtful inquiries about what treats we would like them to bring over from England—tea, digestive biscuits, pork sausages, single-malt Scotch, a Harrods picnic hamper. These kind suggestions make us realize how thoroughly our tastes have changed after years of living in Provence, where a Harrods hamper is as rare as snow in August.

When our organized friends arrived, it was literally within minutes of when they said they would, and this punctuality set the tone for their stay. Their vacation was planned down to the last day, and on their first evening we heard all about it. A trip to Arles, to see a variety of marvels: the 100-foot-long Roman boat that was dredged up after spending two thousand years on the bed of the Rhône River, and which has been beautifully restored; a marble bust of Caesar, not surprisingly balding and wrinkled after his two thousand years underwater; the magnificent twenty-thousand-seat amphitheater, built in the year 90 as a setting for chariot races and gladiatorial contests, and now used for bullfights and concerts—the list went on and on.

After Arles, there was Cavaillon, for the fête du melon—banquets, parades, and the running of Camargue horses through the town with, naturellement, street-corner melon tastings. And, once the melon has settled down, a short evening drive over the Luberon to the Lourmarin music festival, a program of classical music, opera, and jazz, which runs all through the summer in the local fifteenth-century chateau.

This list, exhausting enough on its own, was far from complete. There were food festivals, wine festivals, the local weekly markets, the antiques colony and flea market at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, and a healthy selection of restaurants. If our friends achieved half of what they had in mind, they were going to need a vacation afterward. Off they would go early each morning, returning home in the evening bursting with reports of what they had seen. They were, in many ways, ideal guests. They loved Provence. They entertained themselves, and later, with their descriptions of the day’s discoveries, they entertained us. We look forward to having them back again.

It would be wrong to suggest that everyone has such a positive view of their time here. Critics and their criticisms have their moments, too, as can be seen from our list of the top ten guest gripes:

1. “It’s so hot.”

2. “Do the crickets always make so much noise at night? Or is it those damned frogs?”

3. “I think someone’s put garlic in the marmalade.”

4. “I can’t get over how much people drink here. Do all the guys have beer for breakfast?”

5. “Why does everybody speak so fast?”

6. “The milk tastes funny.”

7. “Why do those hunters have to start shooting so early on Sunday mornings?”

8. “Do they have to park their cars on the sidewalk?”

9. “Dogs in restaurants! Don’t they know that’s a health hazard?”

10. “It’s so hot.”

And yet, despite all this, these gluttons for punishment are planning to come back next year.

It usually takes only one visit during the high season to persuade our guests that their timing could perhaps be improved. Quite apart from the heat, July and August have suffered from years of overpopularity. These are the months when the French en masse are on vacation, and each year it seems that most of them have chosen the South of France. The crowds start in Paris and the north. They pile into their cars and converge on the southbound autoroutes, where multi-mile traffic jams and irate drivers are the rule rather than the exception. Eventually, they arrive, fractious, exhausted, and desperate for peace.

This is not always easy to find. Villages that for ten months a year are known for their sleepy charm have been transformed. The streets are jammed. People squabble over seats at café tables. Restaurants struggle to accommodate the midday rush, and the increased risk of being trodden on makes the village cats look for relief by crouching underneath parked cars.

For two-legged villagers, summer crowds can provide generous compensations. During these two hectic months, cafés, restaurants, and boutiques make their profits for the year. Landlords increase their rents. There is standing-room-only in the village pharmacy, with queues lining up in search of remedies for too much sun, too much food, and too much alcohol. The local artist sells his entire production of sketches and paintings in a couple of weeks. Wherever you look, business is booming.

Then comes the last weekend of August, and the sudden, almost instant change back to normality. The tourists have gone. The village breathes a sigh of relief, and sleepy charm returns. Villagers can once again stop to gossip in the main street without being run over by someone taking a selfie.

For us, September is the best month of the year. The temperature drops to a more comfortable level, although it’s still warm enough to swim, and to eat outside in the evening. There’s always a table free on the café terrace, or in our favorite restaurant. And Mother Nature, who has been busy all summer, is at her prolific best. The markets are overflowing with fruits and vegetables and lettuces that have been gathered early that morning. There are promising signs of activity in the vines. Normally, there will be a few welcome days of rain, to settle the dust and brighten up the green of the hillsides. In some ways, it feels like a second spring.

How lucky we are.