A Good Year (16 page)

Madame Passepartout came out of the scullery and studied the couple, still silent, still smiling. Clearly pleased at what she saw, she tiptoed over to where Max was uncorking the bottle. “Monsieur Max,” she said, in the muffled boom that for her passed as a conspiratorial whisper, “perhaps they would like to have lunch alone.”

“What? Nonsense. I haven’t seen Charlie for ages. We’ve got lots of catching up to do.”

A sniff from Madame Passepartout. It took a woman to recognize these things.

It had been Max’s intention to spend lunch going over the business of Roussel’s wine in greater detail, but he was instead treated to an example of Charlie’s sales technique—selling himself, of course, but under the guise of promoting the charms of London compared with Venice or Paris. “Did you know,” he was saying to Christie, “that at this time of year there are more tourists than pigeons in Venice? True as I sit here. Also, one false step and you’re in a canal, being run over by gondolas. Damned dangerous place. As for Paris, well, the whole city is closed for the summer; you’d be lucky to find the subway open. The Parisians are all down here on the coast, or in one of their little spas, bathing their livers in fizzy water. Now, London has it all: the theater, clubs, pubs, shops, restaurants, Beefeaters, Buckingham Palace, Notting Hill—think of the postcards you could send home—a climate that is absolutely guaranteed to do wonders for the female complexion, taxi drivers who speak English . . . well, of course, everybody speaks English.”

“Wow,” said Christie. “Fancy that.” She reached across the table and rescued Charlie’s napkin from his salad, tucking it back in the top of his shirt.

“Seriously, that’s a big advantage, particularly the first time you visit a place. And the other big advantage is that you have a contact who knows London inside out, and who’d be delighted to show you around.” He leaned back in his chair and tapped his chest. “
Moi.
And I have a spare room.”

Charlie was for once managing to keep his eyebrows under control, and his expression innocent. Watching the two of them smiling at one another, Max felt it was as though he weren’t there. He also thought that the spare room would probably stay empty. He broke the silence with a loud sigh of mock relief. “Well,” he said, “that’s a load off my mind. Now that you two have settled your travel arrangements, do you think we could talk about the wine?”

Max went through it all again, and came to the same conclusion: They could confront Nathalie Auzet and try to extract a confession from her, which Max thought was unlikely and Christie dismissed as an impossibility. Or they could wait for the mystery truck to come back in September.

“Then what?” asked Charlie. “Ask them nicely where they were taking the wine? Tell them to hang on while you call the police?” He shook his head. “And another thing: how do you know Roussel hasn’t already told Nathalie Auzet that the game’s up?”

Max had to admit that was possible. “He told me he wouldn’t say a word, but I suppose we can’t be sure of that.”

Christie was frowning at the empty wine bottle on the table in front of her. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Max, didn’t you say you’d seen something at Nathalie Auzet’s house? Some kind of label?”

Max nodded. “You’re quite right. I remember making a note of it, but God knows where I put it.” He stood up. “Why don’t you show Charlie round while I go and have a look.”

Madame Passepartout had abandoned her observation post at the kitchen window to come out and clear the table, and she watched with an approving eye as Christie and Charlie left the courtyard, their heads close together in conversation. “It is as I thought,” she said with great satisfaction.
“Un coup de foudre.”

Max spent a frustrating hour going through the pockets of all his clothes and the various piles of lists and papers that he had stuffed into the chest of drawers and in the back of the armoire. Eventually, he found what he was looking for, scrawled on the back of his English checkbook. It was no more illuminating now than it had been when he’d written it down.

He went downstairs to find Charlie returned from his tour of the property in a high state of excitement. “It’s sensational,” he said to Max, “all you need to do is a bit of work on the house—and put in a pool; must have a pool—and you’d be sitting on seven figures. That’s sterling, of course.” He looked around, a real estate agent’s gleam in his eye. “You’re protected at the back by the mountain, and there’s a cushion of land surrounding the house, so there’s no problem with neighbors. Why, if you . . .”

Max held up a hand. “Charlie, before you get carried away and put in a helicopter pad, take a look at this. Does it mean anything to you?”

Charlie looked up from the checkbook, tapping it against his free hand. “It rings a bell,” he said, “but I can’t be sure.” He looked at his watch. “London’s an hour behind, isn’t it? Billy would know. Let me see if I can catch him.”

Christie watched him go into the house, with the smile that had scarcely left her face since she’d met him.

“I’m glad you two have hit it off,” said Max. “I’ve known Charlie for twenty years. We were at school together. He’s one of the best.”

“He’s awfully cute,” said Christie. “Is he always like this?”

“Cute?” Max grinned at her. “I don’t know about that, but he never changes—it’s one of the reasons I like him so much. You’ll have a lot of fun in London.”

At Christie’s urging, Max began to tell her about the London he thought she should see, from the Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery to Harvey Nichols and the Portobello Road market, adding a few things she should avoid like the plague: plastic pubs, Piccadilly on Saturday night, anything masquerading as doner kebab. He was moving on to the sometimes bizarre attractions of Soho when Charlie returned, shaking his head.

“No joy, I’m afraid. His secretary said he’s off playing golf with God—I think that’s the unofficial name for the wine buyer from the Connaught. Anyway, he’ll be back in the office tomorrow.” He tossed the checkbook back to Max. “Now then, about tonight. I don’t want to look like the visitor from outer space. What are we all wearing? I want to blend in.”

Max looked at him: rumpled winter-weight flannels, black city shoes, a blue-and-white-striped Jermyn Street shirt open at the neck, a broad, ruddy face; resolutely, eternally, unmistakably English. Even his hair was English. “You didn’t bring a beret, did you? That might help.”

Seventeen

In the course of an exploration that had taken him into the far reaches of the cellar, Max had come across a bottle of rather old, very fine champagne, and had kept it aside to celebrate Charlie’s arrival. He was now dusting off the bottle before putting it, for want of anything better, into one of Madame Passepartout’s plastic buckets, which he had filled with ice cubes. The contrast between the homely blue of the bucket and the dark, sober elegance of the bottle fell a little short of perfection, but at least the wine would be chilled. He settled the bottle into its nest of ice and twirled the long, slender neck between his hands.

Although he had a great deal to learn and a long way to go, he was discovering how much he enjoyed the many small pleasures associated with wine and its various rituals—pleasures that he had never had time to appreciate during his life in London. There, wine had simply been good or disappointing, cheap or expensive, without any particular history, something that was served up in bars and restaurants with anonymous efficiency. Here it would be different. Here he would be involved in the entire process, from grape to bottle, and he looked forward to it with very keen anticipation. Wine would be his work. And as Charlie was fond of saying every time he buried his nose in a glass, there could be no more noble calling.

“Well?” said Charlie. “What do you think?” He had come out of the front door and was standing in the courtyard, arms spread wide, waiting for comments. His hair was still wet from the shower, brushed straight back, and he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, decorated with bright green marijuana plants, outside a pair of white cotton trousers. “I picked this up last year in Martinique,” he said, smoothing down the collar, “from a guy on the beach. It’s called a spliff shirt.
Très cool,
he said—at least, I think that’s what he said.”

“Cool’s the word, Charlie,” said Max. “No doubt about it. And you can roll it up and smoke it, too. What a shirt.”

Max returned his attentions to the bottle, twisting off the wire around the neck and easing the cork up a fraction. Keeping his hand over it, he could feel it pressing up against his palm, almost as though it were alive and trying to escape. Little by little, he allowed it to push upward, until it came out of the bottle with no more than a muffled, bubbly sigh.

Charlie had been watching, nodding with approval. “That’s the way to do it,” he said. “I can’t stand people who wave the bottle around and pop the cork like a bloody Scud missile. Terrible waste of champagne. What have you got there, anyway?”

Max pulled the beaded bottle from the bucket. “An ’83 Krug. I found it hidden away in a corner—Uncle Henry must have forgotten about it.”

“Good for him.” Max poured the wine, releasing its delicate, slightly toasty bouquet. Charlie inhaled deeply, with closed eyes, then held the glass up to his ear. “It’s the only wine in the world you can hear,” he said. “The music of the grape. Cheers.”

They sipped for a moment in silence, the rush of bubbles prickling their tongues. “Seriously,” said Charlie, “you think the shirt’s OK? Nonchalant but not too loud—that’s what we’re after. Casual elegance, Cary Grant on his day off, that sort of thing.”

Max nodded toward the front door. “Here’s your date. Ask her.”

Christie was wearing the same black dress—pressed to perfection by Madame Passepartout—that she had worn to the Roussel dinner, and the same exhilarating scarlet high heels, this time with matching scarlet toenails peeping through the cutout at the front of each shoe. Charlie let out a long, appreciative whistle.

Christie bobbed her head in acknowledgment. “Like the shirt, Charlie,” she said. “Very cool.”

Max handed her a glass of champagne. “A toast,” he said. “Here’s to the man who made this possible: Uncle Henry, God bless him.” Their glasses raised, the three of them looked at one other—smiling, each with private and delightful expectations of the evening to come.

The level in the bottle and the setting sun dropped at an approximately equal pace, and it was dusk—a soft and rosy dusk—by the time the three of them reached the village. The square was crowded, a cheerful hum of greeting and conversation mingling with the music coming from the loudspeakers. Extra tables had been set out on the café terrace, and the accordion band, four impressively mustached gentlemen in their best black trousers, embroidered waistcoats, and white shirts, were drinking a pre-performance pastis. Children chased each other around, and sometimes through, the forest of adult legs. Dogs loitered, more in hope than expectation, beside the long open barbecue where a
méchoui
of spit-roasted lamb and
merguez
sausages the color of dried blood were sizzling above the coals, watched over by the chef from Chez Fanny.

Max made his way through the crowd to the makeshift bar where Fanny herself, protected from collarbone to knee by a demure apron, was pouring glasses of the
vin d’honneur
with a liberal hand. “This is a bit of a change for you,” he said, pointing to the apron.

Without speaking, Fanny performed a slow turn and looked at him over one shoulder, her eyebrows raised. Beneath the apron was an almost backless wisp of lavender-colored silk, with little more than a suggestion of a skirt below. “Better?” she said.

Max swallowed hard and ordered three glasses of wine. “I hope you’re not going to be stuck behind the bar all evening,” he said. “A girl’s got to eat. Can I save you a place?”

“Eh, Fanny! The drinks are flowing like glue.” Guichard the postman and his wife, both heavily scented, had pushed up to the bar and were panting for refreshment. “
Bonsoir,
Monsieur Skinner. Are we going to see an Englishman dance tonight?”

Max picked up the glasses and went off, encouraged by a parting wink from Fanny, to find Christie and Charlie, who had been watching him from a table in front of the café.

“What’s so funny?” Max said, looking from one smirking face to the other.

“Nothing,” said Charlie. “Nothing at all.”

“They’ve been circling each other for days,” said Christie. “You should watch out, Max. I think she’s decided to go for it tonight.”

“You two,” said Max, shaking his head. “Vulgar speculation. I was merely being polite to a charming young lady who, I might say . . .”

“. . . is wearing a dress the size of a handkerchief,” Charlie added. “I think Christie’s right.”

They sipped their wine—which Charlie pronounced to be young and playful, but essentially good-hearted—while they watched the parade passing in front of them. The evening had attracted people from surrounding villages as well as some other, more distant foreigners: Germans the color of polished mahogany, their speech sounding harsh and guttural against the background of softer, more mellifluous French; the American cyclists they had seen in the market, now dressed like wealthy teenagers in that particular kind of cotton that never seems to wrinkle, with silver-tipped belts, pristine pneumatic sneakers, and, of course, baseball caps with sporting or military motifs; a group of Gypsies, lean and swarthy and all in black, slithering through the crowd like sharks among a shoal of tropical fish; a sprinkling of Parisians, pastel cashmere sweaters draped over their shoulders to ward off the eighty-degree evening chill. But, as Christie remarked, there didn’t seem to be any English.

“Ah,” said Max, with the knowledgeable air of an old local inhabitant of ten days’ standing, “they’re mostly on the other side of the Luberon—Gordes, Ménerbes, Bonnieux, the golden triangle. I’m told it’s a lot more social over there than it is here,
soirées
every
soir.
Right up your street actually, Charlie. Apparently they love talking about property prices.”

A few tables away, the accordion band, fortified by a final pastis, had gathered up their instruments and were now filing onto the stage. The rap singer being broadcast over the loudspeakers was cut off in mid-expletive, and the space in front of the stage began to clear. Over behind the bar, Fanny had removed her apron and was slipping it over the head of the relief bartender, an ancient, diminutive man who stood motionless, hypnotized by the proximity of the
décolleté
being presented to him at nose level.

Charlie gave Max a nudge. “Better get in quick before young Lochinvar over there asks her to dance,” he said as he and Christie stood up. “We’ll go and find a table.”

But getting Fanny to the table was a slow, convivial process, marked by frequent stops while she embraced friends and clients of the restaurant, watched by wary and sometimes not wholly approving wifely eyes. Fanny in the restaurant, taken up with all her duties, was somehow safe—charming and highly decorative, but safe. Fanny freed from her professional responsibilities, in a dress that could make even the best behaved husband think of a weekend in Paris, was not a sight any wife would welcome, especially during an evening of wine, music, and dancing. Max felt he had done well to cover the distance between bar and table—no more than fifty yards—in ten minutes.

Christie and Charlie had secured four places and a liter jug of wine at one end of a long table facing the stage. Charlie was at his most gallant when introduced to Fanny, springing to his feet, bowing over her hand, and murmuring enchanto, enchanto, with even more than usual enthusiasm. But this was unfortunately lost beneath the riffs and flourishes of the accordion band tuning up, and it wasn’t until she asked how long he was staying in Saint-Pons that his language problem became evident.

Fanny turned to Max. “He has no French, your friend?”

“About four words. I’m the official interpreter for this evening.”

And interpret he did, passing on Fanny’s comments about the villagers taking their places at nearby tables, a kind of informal who’s who of Saint-Pons. “Over there is Borel, the mayor since twenty years, a sweet man, a widower. He has ambitions toward the widow Gonnet—there she is at the next table—who works at the Bureau de Poste, but he is
très timide,
a man of great shyness. Perhaps the music will encourage him. Now, at the far end of our table is Arlette from the
épicerie,
and her husband. As you can see, she is very large, and he is very small. It is said that she beats him.” Fanny giggled, and paused to sip her wine. Max inhaled her scent, and controlled an impulse to brush back her hair and kiss the nape of her neck.

“Those two don’t look like locals,” he said, nodding toward an expensively dressed couple who were standing off to one side, heads tilted back, looking down their noses at the crowd.

Fanny sniffed. “The Villeneuve-Loubets, very
prétentieux.
They have a house in the 16th in Paris and an estate not far from Aix. She says she is descended in a direct line from Louis XIV, which I can believe. She looks exactly like him.” Another giggle. “They’re friends of Nathalie Auzet. They deserve each other.”

“I take it you’re not too fond of Nathalie.”

Fanny looked at Max and tilted a bare brown shoulder toward him in a half shrug. “Let’s just say we have different interests.”

Max was wondering if Nathalie would put in an appearance when a heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder. He turned to see Roussel in his Yves Montand outfit, and Ludivine, resplendent in deep purple. Fanny clearly liked both of them, and when they moved on to find their places, she said to Max, “There is a good man. He was very kind to me when I was starting the restaurant, and he did his best to take care of your uncle . . . oh
merde.
Here comes the octopus.”

Max looked up to see a thickset man in early middle age bearing down on the table, the beginnings of a leer on his florid face. “That’s Gaston—he supplies meat to the restaurant,” said Fanny. “A beast, but his meat is always good. I’m going to have to dance with him.”

“Bonsoir ma jolie!”
The man stopped in front of the table, ignoring Max, twirling one finger in a circle and swaying his ample hips. “They’re playing a
paso doble
just for us.”

With a transparently false smile and an apologetic squeeze of Max’s shoulder, Fanny allowed herself to be led onto the floor, with some quite unnecessary assistance from Gaston’s hand in the small of her bare back.

Christie noticed Max’s disconsolate face. “If that’s the competition,” she said, patting his arm, “I don’t think you have much to worry about. Listen, is it OK if we leave you? Charlie says he’s the Nureyev of the
paso doble.
”

Max was doing his best not to watch Gaston’s wandering hands when he heard a familiar screech, and Madame Passepartout, spectacular in a dress of lemon yellow with peppermint-green feather earrings, appeared at his side. “You cannot sit alone, Monsieur Max. You must dance.
We
must dance.” Max glanced around in desperation, but there was no escape. And so, feeling some of the reluctance that Fanny must have felt, he took to the floor with his bird of paradise.

Reluctance was soon forgotten. She danced wonderfully well, light and precise in her steps, adapting herself to his mistakes, leading when he lost his way, whirling him around when whirling was called for, and generally making him feel like a much better dancer than he actually was. After the first few minutes, he was sufficiently as one with Madame Passepartout to relax and take some interest in the other dancers on the floor. And here, a wide and not always orthodox selection of styles could be seen.

The youngest dancer of all, a little girl of perhaps seven with coal-black ringlets, was learning the steps the old-fashioned way, by standing on the feet of her grandfather and clutching him round one thigh to avoid falling off in mid-
paso.
As the old man shuffled, he kept one hand on her shoulder while the other held a glass of wine. Beyond him, Max could see Fanny, her body arched backward in an effort to keep Gaston at bay. When she saw Max, she rolled her eyes to heaven, and gritted her teeth. Gaston took this as a smile of pleasure; his leer broadened.

The Roussels, in complete contrast, were showing the village how the
paso doble
should be danced: bodies close, backs straight, shoulders square, little fingers cocked. At each change of direction, both heads would snap around at precisely the same instant, as though they were being jerked by an invisible cord, and Ludivine would mark the turn with a backward flick of her heel. Max pointed them out to Madame Passepartout, no mean flicker of a heel herself, and she nodded. “In their youth they won medals,” she said. “Pay attention to your feet, Monsieur Max—on the balls, on the balls.”