The reclusive magnate himself greeted me, and pounced on the truffles. He passed one of the linen bags around among his dinner guests, some of whom were not at all sure what they were sniffing, and then summoned from the kitchen his domestic commander-in-chief, a Scotsman of such statuesque demeanor that I always think of him as a General-Domo.
“I think we need to deal with these at once, Vaughan,” said Frank.
Vaughan raised his eyebrows and sniffed delicately. He knew what they were.
“Ah,” he said, “the bonny truffle. This will do very well with the foie gras tomorrow.”
Monsieur X would have approved.
It was strange to be in London again after an absence of nearly two years. I felt out of place and foreign, and I was surprised at how much I had changed. Or maybe it was London. There was endless talk about money, property prices, the stock market, and corporate acrobatics of one sort or another. The weather, once a traditional English complaint, was never mentioned, which was just as well. That at least hadn’t changed, and the days passed in a blur of grey drizzle, with people on the streets hunched up against the continuous dripping from above. Traffic barely moved, but most drivers didn’t seem to notice; they were busy talking, presumably about money and property prices, on their car phones. I missed the light and the space and the huge open skies of Provence, and I realized that I would never willingly come back to live in a city again.
On the way out to the airport, the cab driver asked where I was going, and when I told him, he nodded knowingly.
“I was down there once,” he said. “Fréjus, it was, in the caravan. Bloody expensive.”
He charged me £25 for the ride, wished me a happy holiday, and warned me about the drinking water that had been his downfall in Fréjus. Three days on the khazi, he said. The wife had been well pleased.
I flew out of winter and into spring, and went through the informalities of arriving at Marignane, which I never understand. Marseille is reputed to be the center of half the drug business in Europe, and yet passengers carrying hand baggage stuffed with hashish, cocaine, heroin, English cheddar, or any other form of contraband can walk out of the airport without going through customs. It was, like the weather, a complete contrast to Heathrow.
Monsieur X was pleased to hear how welcome his two kilos had been.
“He is an amateur, your friend? A true lover of truffles?”
Yes he is, I said, but some of his friends were not too sure about the smell.
I could almost hear him shrug over the phone. It is a little special. Not everyone likes it. Tant mieux for those who do. He laughed, and his voice became confidential.
“I have something to show you,” he said. “A film I made. We could drink some marc and watch it if you like.”
When I finally found his house, the Alsatian greeted me like a long-lost bone, and Monsieur X called him off, hissing at him in the way that I had heard hunters use in the forest.
“He’s just playful,” he said. I’d heard that before too.
I followed him indoors to the cool, truffle-scented kitchen, and he poured marc into two thick tumblers. I must call him Alain, he said, pronouncing it with a good Provencal twang: Alang. We went into the sitting room, where the shutters had been closed against the sunlight, and he squatted in front of the television set to put a cassette into the video machine.
“Voilà,” said Alain. “It is not Truffaut, but I have a friend with a camera. Now I want to make another one, but more professionnel.”
The theme music from Jean de Florette started, and an image came up on the screen: Alain, seen from the back, and two dogs walking up a rocky hill, Mont Ventoux and its white crest in the far background. A title appeared—Rabasses de Ma Colline—and Alain explained that rabasses was the Provençal word for truffles.
Despite the slightly shaky hand of the camera operator and a certain abruptness in the editing, it was fascinating. It showed the dogs scenting tentatively, then scrabbling, then digging hard until Alain nudged them aside and, with enormous care, felt under the loosened soil. Every time he came up with a truffle, the dogs were rewarded with a biscuit or a scrap of sausage and the camera would zoom jerkily in to a close-up of an earth-covered hand holding an earth-covered lump. There was no recorded commentary, but Alain talked over the pictures.
“She works well, the little one,” he said, as the picture showed a small, nondescript dog studying the base of a truffle oak, “but she’s getting old.” She began to dig, and Alain came into the shot. There was a close-up of a muddy nose, and Alain’s hands pushing the dog’s head away. His fingers probed the earth, picking out stones, scooping patiently until he had made a hole about six inches deep.