A Year in Provence(56)

He tapped his order book. “I could open a factory—Germans, Parisians, Belgians. This year they all want the big round tables and these garden chairs.” He moved the chair next to him so that we could see the graceful arch of the legs. “The problem is that they think I can make everything in a couple of days, and as you know …” he left the sentence unfinished, and chewed reflectively on a mouthful of wine. A couple who had been circling the stand came up and asked about a campaign bed. Monsieur Aude opened his book and licked the point of his pencil, then looked up at them. “I have to tell you,” he said with a completely straight face, “that it might take two weeks.”

It was almost eleven by the time we started to eat, and well past midnight when we got home. The air was warm and heavy and abnormally still. It was a night for the pool, and we slipped into the water to float on our backs and look at the stars—the perfect end to a sweltering day. A long way off, from the direction of the Côte d’Azur, there was a mutter of thunder and the brief flicker of lightning, distant and ornamental, somebody else’s storm.

It reached Ménerbes in the dark and early hours of the morning, waking us with a clap that shook the windows and startled the dogs into a chorus of barking. For an hour or more it seemed to stay directly above the house, rolling and exploding and floodlighting the vineyard. And then it rained with the intensity of a burst dam, crashing on the roof and in the courtyard, dripping down the chimney and seeping under the front door. It stopped just after dawn and, as if nothing had happened, the sun came up as usual.

We had no electricity. A little later, when we tried to call the Electricité de France office, we found we had no phone line. When we walked around the house to see what the storm had destroyed we saw that half the drive had been washed into the road, leaving ruts as wide as tractor wheels and deep enough to be dangerous to any normal car. But there were two silver linings: It was a beautiful morning, and there were no workmen. They were undoubtedly too busy with their own leaks to worry about our central heating. We went for a walk in the forest, to see what the storm had done there.

It was dramatic, not because of any uprooted trees, but because of the effects of the deluge on earth that had been baked for weeks. Wraiths of steam rose among the trees, and with them a continuous hissing sound as the heat of the new day started to dry the undergrowth. We came back for a late breakfast filled with the optimism that sunshine and blue sky can inspire, and we were rewarded by a working phone, with Monsieur Fructus on the end of it. He had called to see if his insurance policy had suffered any damage.

We told him that the only casualty had been the drive.

“C’est bieng,” he said, “I have a client who has fifty centimeters of water in his kitchen. It sometimes happens. August is bizarre.”

He was right. It had been a strange month, and we were glad it was over so that life could return to the way it had been before, with empty roads and uncrowded restaurants and Menicucci back in long trousers.





OVERNIGHT, the population of the Lubéron dwindled. The résidences secondaries—some fine old houses among them—were locked and shuttered, their gateposts manacled with rusting lengths of chain. The houses would stay empty now until Christmas, so obviously, visibly empty that it was easy to understand why housebreaking in the Vaucluse had achieved the importance of a minor industry. Even the most poorly equipped and slow-moving of burglars could count on several undisturbed months in which to do his work, and in past years there had been some highly original thefts. Entire kitchens had been dismantled and taken away, old Roman roof tiles, an antique front door, a mature olive tree—it was as if a discerning burglar was setting up house with the choicest items he could find, selected with a connoisseur’s eye from a variety of properties. Maybe he was the villain who had taken our mailbox.

We began to see our local friends again as they emerged from the summer siege. Most of them were recovering from a surfeit of guests, and there was a certain awful similarity in the stories they told. Plumbing and money were the main topics, and it was astonishing how often the same phrases were used by mystified, apologetic, or tightfisted visitors. Unwittingly, they had compiled between them The Sayings of August.

“What do you mean, they don’t take credit cards? Everyone takes credit cards.”

“You’ve run out of vodka.”

“There’s a very peculiar smell in the bathroom.”

“Do you think you could take care of this? I’ve only got a five hundred-franc note.”