Published 2024

Copyright © Peter Fraenkel

First Edition

The author asserts a moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

 LOUIS.

They crowded in after the coffin and were astonished to see each other. Madame Parlange was there. Everyone knew that he had once thrown a bowl of hot soup at her – soup she had brought him out of the kindness of her heart. Madame Couderc was there. She hadn’t spoken to him for years – not since he had kicked her dog so hard that he had broken its leg. So was his brother Roger, who had told everyone in the Café that Louis had a vicious character – simply vicious – nothing else could explain his behaviour. “Patate” was there: he had often been chased from the dead man’s house, pursued by curses, yet he had come back the following day smiling timidly. Even Madame Maronne, who had rejected his clumsy advances many years earlier, had come. And young Paul Parlange – who had phoned the gendarmes saying that a sharp-shooter rifle in Louis’ hands was a danger to the entire neighbourhood. They had all made their way down from Le Peuch, the mountain village where he had lived out his life.

There were people from the bourg, too: even old M. Vigoroux, the church warden. “A truly Christian act,” said Mme. Couderc, nodding to him. She remembered that Louis had once threatened the old man with his rifle when he had come to ask for a contribution to the church.

The priest hastened through the ceremony speedily and mechanically: A full mass. When the chalice was raised there was some guffawing at the back. Mme. Couderc, who was one of the devout, looked back angrily. Had she heard the joke, she would have been even angrier: One of Louis’s old mates had whispered: “First time I’ve ever known him miss a drink!” And his neighbour had whispered back: “Wait for the knock.” But the coffin remained silent.

The priest announced that his relatives were inviting the congregation to accompany the coffin to the cemetery. That was not usual, but most of them followed, walking the half­ mile behind the hearse.

“He was a first-class mason”, said his former employer, the same one who had fired him 15 years earlier. “But, you know …”.

“One of the brightest lads at school” said old Theodule, his schoolmaster, “We had great hopes for him once.  I’ve often wondered …”

“The village will be dull without him,” said Madame Parlange. To herself she added: “But more peaceful.”

“Everybody knew how it would end,” said Mme. Couderc, “But not how soon.” To herself she thought: the sooner the better.

Each threw his shovelful of earth into the grave. The thud on the coffin-lid reminded Patate of the funeral of his parents, and that always made him weep. Long gone! There were not many left now at Le Peuch. Half the houses were empty. And among the survivors he was the oldest. It wouldn’t be long for him either. One more door would close, and probably his cottage would fall apart, little by little – like so many others. He turned away, wiped his eyes with his large black beret, and left the cemetery. “Poor Louis,” he murmured as he made his way up. “So young, too.”

It was six kilometres from the bourg to the little mountain village of Le Peuch. Normally he avoided having to do it on foot – he suffered from corns. But not today: Old Pépé Peyrols offered him a lift. Patate felt honoured: the Peyrols were the biggest farmers in the village and old Pépé usually had little patience with him. Patate thought for a moment, then shook his head.

“No,” he said, wiping his eyes on his beret. “No, thank you.” Not today. He’d rather walk.

It was a strenuous climb for an old man. He remembered occasions years earlier when he had walked it with Louis and Roger, coming back from a cattle fair. That must have been the year before those two had bought motorbikes. The road wound steeply through the dark forest. He had been glad of their company in that frightening place.

That day he had heard howling in the distance. “Wolves!” he had said. “Wolves – that’s what they sound like.”

The two brothers had laughed. Didn’t he realise the last wolves had been killed …. when? … well before the First World War anyway? So how would he know what wolves sounded like?

“I’ve heard them on the television,” he had said. “I’m telling you: Some wolves escaped from a zoo.”

“That was a dog,” Louis had said, “a dog down in the bourg. You know how they howl when they hear the church bells.”

He had not been convinced. The man on the television had explained that wolves were cunning and good at hiding. So, it would be easy for them to hide in the forest. There were so few people around these days. So few! Who would spot them?

Well, that was a long time ago. But even today he felt relieved when he came out of the forest into the well-lit pastures of the plateau. Gentiane grew there, bright yellow in the sun. He liked that. The road ran along the edge of the plateau, and one got long views down to the valley. Below him, circling slowly and with no apparent effort, was a bird of prey. Probably a buzzard but he could not make it out. His eyes were no longer very good. He remembered that in the old days when his eyes had been sharp, he had been able to watch minute figures down in the bourg working their vegetable gardens, or even – he chuckled – pulling up their trousers as they came out of their latrines. He passed several isolated farms. Dogs ran out and barked at him. He passed the corner café, La Maison des Am, all closed and shuttered. La patronne was not yet back from the funeral. He turned into the lane that led home, to the little village of Le Peuch – “The Peak” in the old Auvergnat tongue (the near–forgotten ancient Occitane language of the hearth). A stranger had once asked him why it was called ‘The Peak’ when there were much higher mountains beyond. He’d had to admit that he’d never thought about it. Next day he had gone to ask Louis. Louis was bound to know. He was clever.

“I guess it’s because we’re the highest village round about here,” Louis had said. “Perhaps because we’re the tops. or,” he had added with his strange, twisted smile, “we were – once upon a time.”

Patate smiled to himself. Beyond Le Peuch, he would see small dots – he knew they must be cows grazing on the upland meadows. And beyond that rose the high mountains. He had heard someone at the funeral say there was still snow in the crevasses on the Puy St. Joséph. His own eyes, alas, were too old to see it.

Certainly, it had been a cold year.

Louis had been sunning himself in the evening light. He stubbed out his Gitane and stuck the stump behind his ear. His fingers drummed on the leaking old pot beside him. He had tried to repair it, but the damn thing still leaked. Ruined, like his old motorbike in the lean-to. Ruined, like the rusty wreck of a car his brother had bought many years earlier and had never succeeded in coaxing into life. Ruined, like the shutters on his bedroom that hung from a single hinge. Like the roof that leaked. Of course, he could fix them, but he didn’t feel like it. Not today. One of these days, when he was feeling stronger, he’d climb up. Of course, he could do it. Hadn’t he fixed the TV aerial last year … or was it the year before? A damn waste of time it had been, too. There was nothing on the box. Never was. Not yesterday. Not today. Just kids’ stuff – or dolly-birds that excited no one but old Patate.

The countryside was fresh. Droplets of rain were glistening in the sun. It had rained last night and much of the morning. Trees were in bud and the grass was pushing up vigorously, as were the wildflowers. But he had no eye for new growth. Flowers? Good food for the cows. His eyes fastened on the skeleton of the ruin that blocked his view down towards the valley. La Poulotte’s old house. First the thatch had rotted, then the roof trusses, finally the heavy oak beams. He had watched it go slowly over the years. Then one stormy night, a few winters ago, the gable wall had blown down. The ruin now stood there, gaunt, and ugly. How many years? He relit his stub and tried to work out when La Poulotte had died. He’d been a lad just out of short pants.

Poor old bitch. She’d slaved all her life, raising a pig or two, some goats. She’d hoed her vegetable plot and weeded. But if the rains were bad, the old woman had gone hungry. It hadn’t helped her that she’d spent long hours on her knees praying for a good crop.

It was the commune that had eventually brought piped water up – not God. But that blessing had come long after La Poulotte had snuffed it.

His eye caught a shape sticking out of the soil below the ruin. He gazed at it for a while. A rusty piece of cast iron, oddly shaped: something that last night’s rains had uncovered. He strolled over and tugged – and recognised at once what it was: One of the feet of the old woman’s cooking-pot. How could he ever forget? It was he who had broken it, or, to be precise, his dog. How the old woman had shrieked:

“Why don’t you keep that wretched beast of yours under control?” she had yelled. “Always galloping around, playing the fool, doing nothing useful. You’ll be a rotter, a rotter just like your father. What am I going to do now? How am I going to cook potatoes for my pig?”

Father had been angry when he told him: “Silly old bitch, every time she sells one of her pigs, she gives a whack to the church and the priest blesses her – with his mouth full. He’s sleek and fat and drinks fine wine that comes in bottles. And she? She’s a scrawny old hen and can’t even afford a cooking-pot. What does she get out of life? All she does is bitching on about other people; people who know how to enjoy a glass of wine!”

Later La Poulotte had called him over to her house. She had given him a biscuit and told him she was sorry – it wasn’t a good Christian thing to do, to abuse a father to his son. But she had meant it for his own good. After all, God had been good to him. He’d given him a clever brain. The teacher had told everybody. He, Louis, should try and grow up to be a sober and hard-working man and say his prayers regularly. If he did he would go far. She would pray for him.

What benefits had God showered upon the old bitch? Mind you, one of her prayers had certainly been answered, damn her. She’d be pleased if she could see him now: Three long years he had been totally and absolutely sober … miserably sober.

It was three years since his last spell of drying out. But what a jawing the doctor had given him. “Your liver is just about ruined. Ruined! If you go back on to the bottle, you’ll be a gonner in no time. How many of your family are already pushing up daisies, all because of the booze?”

And he’d promised faithfully that he’d stick to orangeade…. as he had promised the time before. But this time he had – for three long and miserable years – as sober as La Poulotte would have wished. Never any fun. Never any singing. Not even any fucking.

He set out for his evening walk. Three long years, every evening, he had strolled along the same way: along the narrow lane that twisted through the village, past the old bake house, now roofless, up to Pépé Peyrols’ old house – the highest in the village. From there one had a good view of the high mountains – the whole chain of them – the Puy St. Joséph rising sharp and angular above the rest. There he sat on a wall, as he did every evening unless it rained, and smoked a cigarette. He watched the clouds moving around the Puy. From that he could predict the next day’s weather. It was said in Le Peuch that he was more accurate than those meteo fellows on the television. Then he strolled back announcing his forecast to any who were still outside their houses or in their kitchen gardens.

Le Peuch was not one of the villages starred as “picturesque” in the leaflet published by the tourist board. It had only the briefest mention: “clinging to the edge of the plateau: fine views of the high mountains”.

The houses were grey, utilitarian, square and symmetrical: a door in the centre and windows on either side – as in a child’s drawing. The roofs often had one or two mansard windows and were steeply sloped to throw off the snow. Only one village house had had money “wasted” (the villagers thought). It had been built in the 1880’s by a local who had made money hawking cloth around Spain. As proof of his wealth, he had erected a round tower which contained a circular staircase. It was topped by a weathercock. Other houses were as functional as the barns that were attached to them. Once upon a time both barns and houses had been covered in thatch. Had the thatch been retained the village might, perhaps, have qualified as picturesque. But the barns were now roofed with rusting corrugated iron and the houses with black slate or flat red tile. The commune had passed a rule against red tiles. Because, said the mayor, they clashed with the dark-grey stone of the houses. But it was too late. Many of the poorer houses, like Louis’, already had red roofs.

“Interfering busybodies,” Louis had said.

His path took him past the old school-house – unused for many years now. Yes, it was nearly 40 years since he had last sat on those hard benches. His sharpest memory of those years was of the cold in that bleak room. In winter each child had to bring a log once a week to feed the stove. But the schoolroom never seemed to heat up.

“You know why it’s so cold?” their teacher, old Theodule, would ask. They had heard his discourse on the subject many times before, but always faked an interest to encourage him. If they played their cards right it got them out of work for a good half-hour while the man ranted on.

“Why it’s so cold? Because some idiot architect in Paris designed the schoolhouse: Type 1b.  Now if that architect had learnt from our Auvergnat ancestors you’d be snug and comfortable… and your parents could save on firewood. Look at your own homes: how they hug the ground. Each is planted with care and experience. Take yours, Louis: a blind wall towards the prevailing winds. No windows on that side. And isn’t every house in Le Peuch like that – except our schoolhouse. And yours, Parlange? The windows and the door face the sun – to let the warmth in, same as every other house … except the schoolhouse. Open your eyes and see: wherever there’s a slope or a hollow the house cowers behind it to keep out of the wind. What happens when you get to the top of the hill – to the Peyrols house? So there’s no more slope to hide behind? So what did our ancestors do?”

At this point it was expected that one of the children would reply: “They planted trees.”

“That’s it. Where there isn’t a natural windbreak, they planted trees. And note one other thing: every house is set running down-slope. Why so? Because then the rainwater can run off quickly. Except, of course. And they had all sung out in unison: “The schoolhouse.”

“That’s right. Our façade fronts towards the road and flagpole. Here we stand, tall and symmetrical like an army on parade. And so – we stop the water trying to run down the hill. Yes, you boys dug trenches last year, but it still takes time for the water to run off. That’s why you get your feet wet coming to school.

“And you know – the identical schoolhouse has been put up from Alsace to the Midi… whatever the site, whatever the climate. But that’s Paris for you! Now your ancestors and mine were a lot smarter”.

Louis chuckled. How often had he heard the old man go through that routine? He’d been right, of course. And he, Louis, had often cited him when he’d become a mason.

If the pupils used their wits and posed the right question at the right moment (especially after lunch) Old Theodule might trail off on another of his hobbyhorses. Then they would get out of doing grammar (or whatever) while he lectured them, perhaps on the advantages of thatch over modem roofing materials. Sometimes he could even be persuaded to go on about the fertility provided by defecating in the fields rather than into fancy modern water closets. This always made the girls blush which amused the boys.

Years later he had heard that Le Peuch had been something of a punishment posting for his teacher. In his previous post he had been found too tolerant towards pupils chatting in Auvergnat in the playground. Teachers were expected to enforce the use of French strictly. Louis remembered that Theodule had, occasionally, even cited Auvergnat proverbs in class: ‘For paying and for dying it’s always too early’; or ‘Pretty girl doesn’t fill the barn’; or even – ‘Better to fart in company than to snuff it alone’. At the time neither Louis nor the other pupils had known that the use of what most called the ‘patois’ was frowned upon.

But he remembered one occasion when a pupil had dared to use the term ‘patois’. All of Old Theodule’s wrath had been turned upon him: “It is not a patois. It is the language of the troubadours, the language of courtly poetry, the language of a great civilisation….. a civilisation destroyed by barbarians from the North.” And then, realising he had perhaps gone too far, he had rapidly reverted to mental arithmetic.

Old Theodule was still alive. He had met him down in the bourg some weeks ago: very arthritic and deaf, but still very much the schoolmaster. “Keeping off the bottle, Louis, I hope?” he had said.

“Yes, sir!”

Too damned true. He drank orangeade! He went into the house to fetch a bottle. Three years of orangeade! “Piss”, he grumbled as he took a gulp. Just then he saw a dung-beetle cross the court-yard, 20 feet away. He flung the half-full bottle with all his force – and crushed the beetle.

“What a shot!”  Yes, there had been a time when he’d been the best shot in the village with a rifle – before his hands had started to shake. He had bought a fine sharp­shooter’s rifle. Many a hare had ended in his cooking-pot. But not in recent years. He’d flung many bottles, too, at beetles and lizards and even once at a snake, but he’d usually missed. But not today. Wasn’t that a sign? A sign that his hand was steady again; his health restored … a sign that three years of orangeade was enough.

His father had enjoyed life. He’d sung. Each pay-day he’d ordered a barrel of wine and had invited in his mates. Together they’d sung the songs of the Auvergne in the ancient language. Yes – La Poulotte had complained about the racket they were making at night. They’d retaliated by making up songs about her and others in the village or about the fat curé down in the bourg. That always infuriated her.

After his mother had died, his father had spent many a night with the widow up the hill and had never apologized nor looked embarrassed. And the old man had died happy: he had fallen off a tree which he’d been trying to lop. They said he shouldn’t have climbed after drinking. But wasn’t it better to fall to one’s death singing? Better than dragging on in life like this: sitting on a stone bench, alone, and sipping piss. And all the while his mates were at the Café, up at the crossroads, enjoying a bottle of red. Even his brother, dumb bastard, was enjoying life. Enough was enough!

Damn the doctors! What had he been doing these three years? Sitting in the sun, scratching his balls, teasing the cat, sometimes poaching fish. Not much else. Occasionally he’d taken out his guitar, but it wasn’t much fun singing all by himself. Most of his mates had stopped coming to see him. They complained he was morose. There was only Patate and he, of course, was a bit missing. More than a bit! That’s why everyone called him “Patate” – the clot. People had long forgotten his real name. When a new postman had asked for M. Vidal, he, Louis, had been puzzled for a moment. Nowadays they put it about that Patate was so dumb because he’d been kicked in the head by a cow. But he, Louis, remembered clearly enough: Patate hadn’t been very bright even before the accident. Why, he’d never even grasped the rules of boules!

Yes, he, Louis, still hunted a little – though he didn’t ever bother to get a license these days. One had to dodge the flics – but with only Patate as his look-out that wasn’t so easy. Still – why bother with a license? He didn’t often hit anything.

What a life! Worst of all, there wasn’t even a woman to lay. They’d all gone off to town. All except one, and Roger was having it off with her. Roger, this oaf of a brother of his.

But enough was enough. He took his straw hat from the hook, came back to the mirror and set it jauntily on its side like he used to do as a youngster. There’s life in the old dog yet! They’d see. Perhaps he had better shave. Not a bad looking face, he thought: clever. His old boss used to say, ‘a cunning face’. Well, he was a lot smarter than the old man realised…. and he had a bankbook to prove it. Hair was a bit unruly these days and greying. And the face wasn’t as round as it had been. A bit pinched. But then, he’d had a lot of illness.

When he had finished shaving, he trimmed his little moustache carefully. “You’d think I was going courting!” He seized his walking stick and strode uphill to the Café at the cross­ roads.

“Louis” they turned to welcome him, “Louis! You’ve come for an orangeade?” “Fuck orangeade,” he shouted. “A double rum.”

They stood him a round and then another. “Well, you know,” he declaimed, “the quack said ‘no more of your rot-gut wine’.” So I said: “Doctor, what if I splurge on vintage Bordeaux, like you?” But the old bastard wouldn’t buy that one. “No. I told you that drink would be the death of you.” That’s what he said. “But I’m fine. My hand is as steady as ever it was. And I can tell you – a life of orangeade – that’s not a life.” They nodded.

“Mireille, a round of rum for everybody, if you please!” “This round is on me”, said Mireille from behind the counter.

That’s a good pub-keeper who’ll agree to stand you a round. They’re rare these days. Especially women. Not bad-looking either, though a bit shagged. Slim body. Long legs. But the face – well, she must be over 40, and they say she’s had a rackety life. What did she work at in Paris all those years? Fine thighs under those tight jeans of hers and those high boots. They say she can drink like a man, too. But – she had welcomed him like a long­lost brother when he’d shown up. Brother? What would a smart girl like her be doing sleeping with a crude oaf like Roger? Strong, maybe, but so stupid: a guy who worked year in, year out … for nothing! Who’d ever heard of such stupidity?

“The round after this is definitely on me. I don’t want you guys to think I can’t afford it, just because I haven’t held down a job these fifteen years. Me, I’m no fool. And don’t think I am. Not like some people. I get my fistful. Yes I do. And who’s giving it to me? Uncle Mitterand. You guys think the government has got us little fellows screwed? You do? But I tell you: Only if you let them. Not if you use your brains.”

He re-enacted for them how he’d persuaded the doctor and a whole lot of guys in collar and tie that he was no longer able to work. “Can’t lift one of those heavy mallets. All my strength has gone. Milking? I’ve tried it, but my hands shake. I can’t fit the milking cups to their teats. I’ve tried it again and again.”

And they’d believed him, the idiots. The doctor had written out a fancy certificate, and they’d stamped it, and from then onwards he was getting cash from Uncle Mitterand – for life.

“But, you know, in the beginning I couldn’t believe my luck – not until I collected my first lot. Then I went straight from the post office to the boozer.”

“I bet you celebrated!” said one of mates.

“You were always a clever lad at school,” said another. “I remember, one day the teacher wouldn’t believe that you’d done the homework by yourself.”

“That’s right. He made us draw a map of the world for homework and put in where things came from – rice and bananas and aluminium and monkeys and things – and when I brought mine back, he said I must have cribbed it from a book. I was ever so angry and upset and I got my father go and tell teacher that we didn’t have an atlas in the house. Nor any other book, as a matter of fact. It was all my own work.”

“Well, perhaps I can understand the teacher. He thought we were all clots in my family.” And Louis glanced across to Mireille, but she was absorbed in opening a bottle and pretended not to have heard.

“They called you the fox,” said one of the company, “clever … and full of mischief.”

“I can never forget how you got your own back on old man Escure.”

Louis chuckled: “Yes. The bastard had denounced me to my father for stealing eggs. The bloody liar! I don’t even like eggs. But once, just once, I helped young Parlange nick a few. Still – my father gave me a whipping. So, I was damned well going to get my own back on old Escure. They don’t call me the fox for nothing: I waited a week, maybe two. Then one evening when he was in his barn, I think one of his cows was in labour, I sneaked up and snapped the padlocks. First on the upper door, then on the lower! Now he couldn’t get out. They were good solid doors too, both of them. It must have been well after midnight that his wife discovered that her old man wasn’t snoring by her side. She went out into the dark to look for him. He was squatting in the dark, cold and cursing. His lamp had run out of oil.” Louis chuckled.

“No wonder they called you the fox.”

“And your brother the bear,” added another.

“That’s right: the fox and the bear.” And he turned to Mireille: “So how’s the bear’s cooking? Can they stomach it?”

“It’s very good,” she smiled disarmingly. “There were some truckdrivers here yesterday who said it was even better than at Les Mouflons.”

“Well, I’m glad he is of some use …at least to you.”

“You were a good bricklayer,” said one of the mates, sensing tension that needed to be diffused. Everyone knew Louis’ temper. “They say you could decipher all those architects’ drawings.”

“Which was more than my boss could do. He used to say ‘Louis, for God’s sake, where do we have to put this bloody beam?’ He wasn’t a bad fellow, my boss, even though he did fire me in the end.”

“Perhaps he didn’t find you …. entirely reliable?” said one of the mates, winking.

“That’s it. Precisely. But a man can’t let work interfere with his drinking, can he? That’s what I told him. But he said: ‘One of these days you’ll fall off the scaffolding and break your neck, just like your old man did. And then they’ll hold me responsible.’

“They probably would have, too, because I don’t think he’d insured me properly. Still – he wasn’t a bad guy, really.”

“You played the guitar in those days. Have you still got it? Why don’t you bring it up one day and give us a song?”

“Bugger off, Patate,” Louis shouted, blinking in the fierce morning light. “I’ve heard quite enough about your bloody corns.” And Patate shrugged sadly, mumbled something about them really hurting, and slowly retreated backwards, watching Louis in case he threw something – a stone or even a bottle.

Ridiculous fellow, Patate, with his red sticky-out ears and his bow legs and his silly grin when he talked about his favourite subject: the half-naked girls he saw on late night television.

Louis felt rotten. Sawdust in the mouth. Head throbbing. If there were a God, surely he would have arranged things better: Why can’t a man enjoy a drink without his liver acting up next morning?

There was only one cure: a hair of the dog. He made sure that Patate was out of sight, then strolled down to the little cluster of trees below the house. He fished among the nettles, cursing a God who made stinging nettles as well as hangovers, and pulled out a bottle. Empty. Then another. The third one was full, a bottle of rum. No, not rum. He fished some more and brought out a bottle of Pastis. Better for the morning.

“That’s all he comes here for, that Patate,” he grumbled,” a free drink.” He chose to forget that for three long years, his three dry years, Patate had come to see him almost every day, and had infuriated him every time.

He came to ask Louis to read him everything the postman had brought – even advertising circulars – and never learnt to distinguish between them and real letters. Sometimes he came to beg him to come over to his house to replace an empty butane cylinder. He’d never learnt how to do it. Oh yes, there was a complication: the cylinders had a left thread. But if he, Louis, refused, Patate would come back the following day and wail that he hadn’t had a cooked meal.

His only regular companion – the village idiot! Could he have imagined that when he was a youngster.

He remembered sitting under the same old lime tree as a lad, dreaming of the things he was going to do when he was a grown-up. He had a right to dream: The schoolmaster had told everyone that he was the bright lad of the village. He was the one who had the ability to pull out of the rut. Even as a schoolboy he had understood that there was no future for a landless day-labourer. Machines were taking over the rough work – the work that had provided a meagre living for his father, his uncle and many others. He was going to learn the skills that the new age needed.

The tree had certainly grown in those forty years. There were nails in it, above the level of his head – almost buried in the bark. His elder brother had hammered them in. Andre must have been about 14 at the time and he himself ten. Andre was long dead. Dead of the booze. The tree had outlived his brother, as it would probably outlive both him and Roger. There must be more nails higher up. They had hammered them in as footholds to climb into the high branches. From there they could get views of the distant snow-covered peaks. ‘The cold volcanoes’, as their teacher had called them – extinct for millions of years.

He and his best friend, Daniel, had often climbed up the tree to chat undisturbed or to avoid his father when he was in one of his moods. Or to munch, unobserved, the walnuts they had nicked from old Escure’s tree.

Daniel, too, had been dead for many years – killed in Algeria. He, too, had been an ambitious lad and good at school. His ambition had been to be a teacher. Some beure sharpshooter’s bullet had put an end to that. Together they had often climbed into the tree and had talked about their ambitions or, to be more truthful, about the girls they hoped to lay.

As they grew older Daniel and he had gone to dances together – until Daniel was called up. After that he’d gone alone, many a Saturday night. Not that he was ever much good as a dancer, but the girls didn’t seem to mind. He was starting to earn well as a bricklayer, and he was generous. They liked that. He’d bought a powerful motorbike, and they liked riding pillion and putting their arms round his waist. Stupid cows, most of them. Good for only one thing. Yes, he got his fair share of that – in those days. But the girls had gone off to town, one after the other, mostly to work in factories – until some mechanic or sweeper got them pregnant and married them. Or not, as the case might be. Years later he had met one or two when they came to visit their parents, or to bury them: They were growing fat and had grumbled about the cramped flats in which they had to bring up squalling brats.

Only one of the whole lot had been different: Jeannine. She’d been quite keen on him. And he on her

In his mind he associated her with the scent of pines. They had made love in the dark forest, on soft pine needles. And afterwards they had lain looking up at the stars, spotting meteors. Or were they satellites – satellites sent up to spy upon the world?

He had dreamt of settling down with her and saving to build a house and to raise a family with her. But he’d never proposed to her. He was expecting to be called up for military service. After he’d done his service, he would propose to her.

In the meantime, he dreamt dreams he failed to share: With their own kitchen garden and some fruit trees they would be able to save money and extend the house as children arrived. In his mind’s eye he’d designed the house, working out what he could do for himself and what he would have to leave to the plumber and the electrician. They’d make him special prices, of course, because he’d do the same for them when they needed him. After all, everyone agreed he was an excellent mason. Not like some, nowadays, who could only build with prefabricated concrete blocks, straight and square. Easy. He, however, could work with real stone, in the Auvergnat style. Rich people, who could indulge their fancies, liked to build in the traditional way. There was good money for any mason who still had the skills.

Yes, he had dreamt he would own a proper house and garden. He wasn’t going to raise his family in a hovel like – like this: this house that his parents had rented and where he and Roger were still living: one dark kitchen-common-room on the ground floor. Nothing more. And, in the hayloft above, some rough wooden partitions that divided it into bedrooms: one for the four boys, the other for their sister. That’s all there was to it – except the cellar where they kept their potatoes and a barrel of wine. Until a few years earlier, the place didn’t even have running water. Now there was a tap – one single cold-water tap – in the kitchen. No W.C. – only a pit-latrine at the bottom of the garden. The kitchen hadn’t been painted since shortly before his father’s death. It was now dark grey with many years of smoke and the one window let in little light. One had to keep the door open to read the paper or sit outside. Yes – they had a gas cooker now, with a butane cylinder, and next to it a second, wood-fired cooker for use in winter. It helped to heat the house. His poor mother had had to do all her cooking over the open fire in the ‘cantou’. She’d also had to draw water from the well and carry it up every day of her life – until the week before she died. She had died in the bed that used to stand in a corner of the kitchen. His parents had always slept there with the newest infant by their side.

He had certainly not intended to raise a family in such a hovel.

Neither his father nor his grandfathers had ever had any land, nor owned a house. The only things they could call their own had been a few chickens, a pig, and their tools: scythes, sledgehammers, spades, pitchforks. All had been day-labourers. But he had been determined that he would pull out of this existence: his life would be different. Anyone with any sense could see that before long there would be no more work for day-labourers, even though Roger was too dumb to see it. Machines were taking over all the harder tasks. He himself had toyed with the idea of training as a tractor mechanic, but in the end, when he was offered an apprenticeship as a mason-bricklayer, he had accepted. He’d learnt on the job, but he had also got hold of books and had studied. He had learnt how to read plans, and how to lay out foundations. Before long he was earning more in a week than his father earned in a month.

He had long had his eye on a plot of land for his own house with space for a vegetable garden and enough to spare for a plantation of pine trees. They’d be ready to sell to the sawmills around the time when his children would themselves want to build houses.

Perhaps he’d been dreaming too long instead of getting on with proposing marriage to Jeannine.

He had expected to be called up and thought he had better leave it until he came back. Then, to his own surprise he had managed to get out of military service: flat feet and bad eyesight! The flat feet were an unexpected bonus. He had never realised there was anything wrong with his feet. But eyesight? Well, he was no fool. He had deliberately misread the letters on their chart: U for V; C for G. He had heard too much about the discomforts of service in the jungles of Indochina!

But Jeannine must have been tired of waiting for him to make up his mind. One day she had announced that she, too, was going off to the city. She would get a job as a cashier in a shop, like her best friend. After all, she was good at mental arithmetic. If he was still interested in seeing her, he could come to town too. There were always jobs for skilled men. She was tired of hanging around her parents’ place – another smoke-darkened village hovel. She was tired of drawing water from a well for her washing, very tired of carrying in firewood and of stirring pots in the fireplace. The commune had admitted that once the municipal elections were over – it would take at least another three years before they could bring piped water to her village. That was the last straw, really it was. Her girl­friend who had gone to town now had a flat like the ones in the magazines: with a hot shower and central heating and an electric cooker and pretty flowered wallpaper.

He had gone to visit her once, unannounced, in a concrete cage on the sixth floor which she shared with her girlfriend. She had been surprised. He thought she was pleased to see him, but he was not quite certain.

But what a place to live! The two girls had a small balcony, but that had washing strung over it, so that you couldn’t see the sky. The lift made a noise, and you could hear the neighbour’s television. He suggested a stroll – for a private chat. But it had been hellish difficult to talk because of the noise of the cars and the buses and the brats playing football. Nobody you met in the street greeted you. Nobody knew who you were.

She told him that the supermarket where she worked, restocking shelves, was being enlarged. She had talked about him to the foreman in charge of the work. Did they need bricklayer-masons? Perhaps, he had said. But her friend would have to come and do a test-shift: how many bricks could he lay in a working day – and how straight did he lay them?

Louis had been indignant: “I’m not a snotty apprentice! I’m a master mason.””

Well, that wasn’t quite all: he had gone on the spur of the moment and had arrived unannounced. She had appeared taken aback. Why hadn’t he warned her? She wasn’t free that night. The supermarket had asked her to work overtime – it was the annual stocktaking. And her flatmate as well. He could see that she was lying: She was going out with someone else.

The two girls shared the one and only bedroom, so for him they had prepared the couch in the sitting-room. Couldn’t the flatmate have slept on the couch so that he could be with Jeannine? But no. He lay awake miserably after the television signed off, waiting for the girls to come back. Whom was she seeing? How serious was it? Was she in bed with the other fellow right now? Was he better looking? More successful? A better lover?

The couch was fiendishly uncomfortable.

He remembered another miserable night, long years before. His grandparents had made him sleep in their hayloft. He had been sent away from home because his mother was expecting Roger. He had been very lonely and very miserable, and the hay had hurt his back, like the broken springs in Jeannine’s couch.

Sometime around two he must have fallen asleep. The girls were still not back. But over breakfast next morning they claimed they had come back “shortly after midnight… you were fast asleep.” They were lying. And they knew he knew.

Jeannine arranged that they would go out to a restaurant that evening, perhaps even to dance, but once the girls had gone to work he had rolled up his clothes, put them back into his bag, and walked to the bus station. There he had sat and smoked until noon, then caught the first coach back home.

And that was the end of that.

Years later he still went over, in his mind, the events of those two days. Had he chickened out – accepted defeat without a struggle, given up both the girl and the chance of a job for fear of competition? Should he have migrated to the city like most of the ambitious young men? Why hadn’t he? Had he lacked the self-confidence to face life in a town where everyone was chasing, hurrying, hustling? If he had moved, where would he be today? Trapped, probably, in one of those concrete boxes, living like a battery hen, staring out of the window at others staring back out of identical windows? Yes, it would have been good to have a woman. But would it have been such a joy to have nappies drying on a cramped balcony and the wail of infants drowning out even the racket of the city? Well, that had been a long time ago. What was done was done. He had been lonely after he came back. No more plans for the future. No more dreams. He had stopped going to dances: Nobody there but silly bitches, and not many of those. Even the dances became rarer as the girls went off to town. More of the men stayed. Was it because they were less capable, or less courageous or simply because farming provided more jobs for men?

They met after work in the cafés, chatting to no particular purpose.  He got very bored with their saying the same thing time and time again. Every evening they complained about the countryside becoming deserted; the girls fleeing to the towns; wages being low. They were not very bright nor entertaining: day-labourers, odd-job men, road­builders: men he had despised in the past. They did not even realise how aimlessly they lived, and how pointless their chatter. They drank, and he drank with them. What else was there to do?

In the first years they had deferred to him and shown him a certain respect: a skilled craftsman, a man who read newspapers and could explain what was going on in the world. They had consulted him on their problems and had listened to his advice. But somehow the respect had worn away over the years. Perhaps it had started after Roger came back from Algeria. He was changed, somehow.

The mates said “He went away a child and came back a man.” But that’s what they said about everybody who had done his military service – “It does wonders for them!” It wasn’t true. It meant exactly nothing.

Roger had come back embittered: he sometimes flared up and lost his temper when one did not expect it. He no longer appeared to respect his older brother.

Perhaps he, Louis, should not have expected that a 20-year old would look up to him as he had done at 17 or 18. Roger had become cynical about people with education, about army officers, about politicians.

He even mocked Louis’ lack of muscle when he had to ask for help to move a stone bench. He’d called him a dwarf. That had led to one of their first rows.

Louis had walked out and got drunk with the boys. That evening was particularly boring. The others pestered Louis to bring his guitar to liven up the evenings. He promised he would, one of these days.

All that was a long time ago.

The guitar? Could he still play it? It was hanging there over his bed. Two of the strings were broken. He remembered that he had always kept spares in the case.

The cottage, with its soot-blackened walls and beams was too dark to restring the instrument. “It’s like a cave in here,” the postman had said, more than once. “Why don’t you paint the walls?” He had said that he would, one of these days. But he never did.

He took the guitar outside into the light. He sat below the old tree in the back seat of the old car. There was firewood stacked all around it, drying. Roger had bought that car many years ago. He had tried to repair it. Friends had come to offer advice, but none ever managed to get it moving. It had been rusting away for many years. Roger had eventually sold the tyres. The springs were pushing through the upholstery of the front seats, but the back ones were comfortable.

Louis struggled with the guitar for a good hour. Eventually he had it restrung and more or less in tune. He struck up an old song his father used to sing with his friends – all about a lecherous priest. The instrument did not seem to respond as it once did. He knew he was not playing well. As for singing – even in the good old days he had never had a good voice. But what the hell? He had enjoyed himself.

“She came to him for confession,

‘Oh father, hear my sin,’

he made the sign of the crucifix

and tickled her under the chin.”

“She came to him for confession,

‘Oh father, hear my cry,’

he made the sign of the crucifix

and touched her on the thigh …”

Madame Parlange came past, laughed and called down to him: “Don’t let Madame Couderc hear you. She’ll clobber you with her rolling-pin.”

He laughed: “That toad in holy water? Let her come. And let her bring the pope too!”

A moment later he stopped: Sadly, he would never be the life and soul of the boozers. He sat staring at La Poulotte’s ruin. It shaded him from the bright sunlight. Nettles were growing inside the ruin. They almost hid some firewood that his brother had stacked, ready cut, within the remains of the walls. Nettles also hid the bottles Louis had concealed in the little forest below. His brother wouldn’t find them. Nor Patate. Firewood! That’s all Roger had received for last year’s work for the Peyrols … firewood and food and drink. What a fool! And Roger still got up at dawn every morning to help milk their cows. These days Roger wasn’t even staying up at the Peyrols for his meals. He was always at the café – hanging around Mireille … even cooking for her customers. In return for what? Bed and board?

Roger rarely came home nowadays. There was nobody to keep the nettles down, nor to weed the kitchen garden. Was Roger going to leave it all to him, his invalid brother? The kitchen-garden, too?

Well, he’d show him. Perhaps Roger thought that he’d come crawling back, perhaps even apologise for that last row? Not bloody likely. He was not helpless yet.

He went into the house, took another gulp of Pastis, brought out the long handled axe, sharpened it with a few strokes on the stone, took a deep breath and set to work, splitting logs with well-aimed strokes. He grunted as he struck. Sweat was running into his eyes. Sweat was running down his neck. He was sweating out his hangover. No, he wasn’t helpless. Not at all – he didn’t need nursing. He was Louis.

Next morning Patate was knocking at his door. Again? Louis decided to ignore him. He stayed in bed. The knocking went on. Damn it, can’t a man sleep in peace?

“Louis,” the voice wailed, “open the door.  I’ve got something to tell you”.

“He’s as bad as the cats when they haven’t been fed. But he’ll go away if I ignore him”.

This morning, however, Patate was more insistent than usual. Louis could hear him going round the back and rattling the shutters.

“Louis, wake up. I know you’re in there. I can see you.”

Damn it, he had been meaning to replace that rotten plank in the shutter. “I can see you. I can see you.” the senile voice kept repeating.

“Bugger off, Patate. Bugger off and leave me in peace”.

“No, really, Louis. I’ve got something to tell you, something exciting …”

“You’ve won a million francs again?” Louis sniggered.

He was remembering the day Patate had knocked at his shutters, almost incomprehensible with excitement. His French had totally deserted him: he was speaking in Auvergnat, the language of his parents. Patate had deciphered the first few lines of a letter saying that he, Monsieur Vidal, personally, had been selected to receive a prize that could amount to some millions … provided he would subscribe to an encyclopaedia extending to twenty volumes or so.

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“Well, come back in an hour. I want to sleep a some more.”

He heard the footsteps receding, but it was barely three-quarters of an hour before Patate was back.

“Why do you howl outside my window at dawn? Are you so desperate for a drink?”

Patate defended himself indignantly. He had a bottle of rum of his own and a crate of wine. What’s more it was nearly midday. He had some important news to communicate. And he giggled and licked his lips to suggest that the news was salacious. Louis was unimpressed. Many a morning Patate had regaled him with tales of near-naked girls on TV the night before. Oh, what breasts they had! Louis was convinced that Patate had never got near a real woman. Who would have taken up with this idiot? But in his seventieth year, Patate had little conversation that did not come back to the dolly-girls, the ones on TV and, more particularly, the summer visitors from Paris who sometimes sunbathed in bikinis in rented cottages in the vicinity. Despite his corns he walked long distances to spy on them. Last year he had told all who were willing to listen that one of the girls had even sunbathed topless! Patate had spent hours staring at her from behind a hedge until she’d threatened to call the police.

Patate was insistent this morning: “I went up to the Café last night for some cigarettes. It was closed.”

“So – what’s new?  Mireille doesn’t open if she doesn’t feel like it.” “Or…” Patate giggled “…if she feels like something else? Well, you see, I really needed a smoke last night. I needed it badly. So I went round the back. I meant to knock at the shutters. But I didn’t … because, you see, I heard them: Mireille and your brother.

They were at it. Jesus Christ, your brother was giving it to her. You should have heard her moaning…”

Louis was embarrassed: “Fuck off, you old Peeping Tom. And stop peering through my shutters. You never know what you might see … “.

“You?” Patate giggled which showed up the gaps in his teeth. “You haven’t had it in years. Not like your brother!”

And there was both admiration and envy in his voice.

“You dirty old goat, sneaking around people’s bedrooms, listening for creaking springs. Bugger off, I tell you. You’ve probably never had it yourself…. unless it was with a cow.”

Patate withdrew, offended, but walking backwards. He knew that in this evil mood Louis might throw something at him, even a full bottle. He knew the sound of that voice when in a destructive mood. It was in a state like this that he had once kicked a dog to death, well, very nearly.

Patate’s important news had fallen flat. Or so he thought.

Louis made himself some breakfast. The bread was stale. He had missed the baker’s van that morning. Into his coffee he poured a stiff rum and went to sit on the stone bench outside the house. So what did he care what his brother and Mireille got up to? It was no concern of his, none at all, if Roger went running after retired trollops. On the other hand, it was his concern if Roger didn’t do his share around the house, or the garden.

Not long after Roger himself strolled in. “Morning,” he called cheerily, “just come to get another pair of trousers. Mireille is going to mend this one for me.”

“Vegetable patch needs weeding,” said Louis, and his bloodshot eyes narrowed as they did whenever he was angry.

“Then weed it yourself,” said Roger, “you’re quite well enough.” “It’s your job!”.

And the row flared.

Louis reminded his brother that he had always paid the rent for the house.

In return, said Roger, he had brought in the firewood.

“Yeah, that’s all you earned last year – firewood,” said Louis contemptuously. “And chopping it has been your job, always has been, like the vegetable garden.” That was little enough, surely, when he, Louis, bought in all the bread and all the groceries.  He, Louis, had money. He wasn’t a clot.

Roger sat down on the log that served for chopping wood. “Brother,” he said, “Let’s try and be reasonable about this. When you came out of hospital, three years ago, you were weak. You were so weak you couldn’t lift a spade. So I said I’d look after you – but only provided you kept off the booze, like the doctor told you. Well, you’re strong enough to do your own gardening now, and have been for quite a while. It would be good for you, too. I’ve been waiting to tell you. But I didn’t do it… so long as you were off the bottle. But now that you’re back on… I don’t see why the hell I should slave for you.”

Louis shouted that his brother had been sponging on him all those years. Who bought the tinned food, the bread, even the cigarettes and matches? And what about the butane cylinders for the gas stove? They’d gone up in price, too, because of the bloody Arabs. And he, Louis, was paying it all.

“But no more. Get out! You’re not going to get another sou out of me. Go and sponge on your trollop up at the Café.”

This infuriated Roger. He towered over Louis and threatened him with his fist. “You’re going to throw me out – you? You little runt, you dwarf? You and whose army?”

That was bound to enrage Louis: all his childhood he had suffered from being the only ‘shorty’ in a family of giants. He made a sudden dive for the old grandfather clock. It had stopped years ago, but inside he had hidden his hunting rifle after his license had lapsed. With a quick movement he loaded. “Now get out before I blow your brains out.” They glared at each other for a few moments. “…. if you have any brains to blow out.”

“Right,” said Roger, “I’m through with you – for good.” And he walked out of the cottage they had shared all the years since their parents had died. Louis followed him, breathing heavily, then fired a shot into the ground just behind Roger.

Patate happened to be strolling past – later he claimed he had been waiting for the bread van. Probably he had been hanging around, being nosey. He saw the dust flying up where the bullet hit the ground and fled as fast as his corns would allow. Later, he limped excitedly around the village and told anyone willing to listen that Louis had tried to kill his brother, his own brother!

That evening a gendarme came up from the bourg and confiscated Louis’ rifle. Who had told them? Louis threatened to strangle whoever had tipped off the flics, if ever he found out. It couldn’t have been Patate. He was certain of that. The old man was far too frightened of officials to seek any contact with them, even by phone. But if not Patate then who?

Next morning Patate arrived, smiling apologetically. He’d come to collect Roger’s clothes.

“Take the bloody lot,” Louis shouted. “I don’t want anything of his.”

Thereafter, Louis let the vegetable garden go to seed. He wasn’t going to eat potatoes that his brother had planted. In fact, Louis ate less and less and drank more and more.

Roger never saw his brother again – not until he found him laid out in his coffin.

The baker gossiped down in the bourg: all of last week Louis had slept through the visit of the bread van. The following Monday he had complained that the baker never hooted. So this morning he, the baker, had stopped the van right outside Louis’s cottage and had hooted for several minutes. Finally, he had knocked at the door – and had been sworn at for his troubles. “That’s the last time I try.”

The mobile grocer told similar tales. Louis seldom appeared, he bought little food but always begged him to bring up a few bottles of rum or pastis from the bourg. The grocer’s wife told the social worker who decided that Louis needed to be visited. She had paid regular weekly calls after his last spell of drying out, three years earlier, but had eventually taken him off her list since he seemed to keep off the bottle. Louis heard her motorbike chugging up the road from the bourg, locked himself in and pretended to be out. She left a note asking him to call on her next time he came down to the bourg to collect his money from the post office. This threw Louis into panic: “They’re going to withdraw my cash! I know. Just because I refuse the piss they want to make me drink. And they won’t let me hunt any more, now that they’ve taken my rifle. The grocer? He’s part of the plot. They want to force me to come down to the bourg to buy my booze. And then they’ll catch me and make me sign away my pension. And my bloody brother is part of the plot. He won’t look after our vegetable garden. He wants me to die so that he can inherit my lolly.” In fact, neither his brother nor anyone else knew that Louis possessed savings.

He sat on the stone bench outside his house and told his woes to those who passed.

There weren’t many.

Old Pépé Peyrols, however, driving past, saw him, reversed his car and hobbled down, bent over his stick. Louis rose from his seat. Pépé had, after all, been the biggest farmer in the area. He had employed Louis’ father, his uncle and his brother.

“What brings you here – Pépé?” He had been about to address the old man as “Patron” but changed his mind.

Louis looked at him doubtfully. His suspicions were not groundless. It had, in fact, been the social worker who had suggested that Pépé might call.

“He has nothing to do,” she had said, “He sits around and mopes – and so he drinks. Can’t you find him something to do?”

Pépé chatted for a while about the weather and the fishing and then about how well the foundations that Louis had laid for his shed many years earlier had lasted. “You do remember the stone barn behind the old house? I think my grandfather had it built. Well, the back wall is curving. It looks dangerous to me. Would you come up one day and give me your opinion?”

Louis did not reply. ‘The cunning old bastard,’ he thought to himself, ‘he’s already got Roger working for him for free and now he wants me too.’

Pépé misread Louis’ hesitation. “I’ll give you a lift up, if you don’t feel like walking. And if you think the wall needs rebuilding, would you be prepared to do it?”

“For free, I suppose?” said Louis with a twisted grin. “Of course not. I’ll pay the going rate.”

“Not possible. They’d withdraw my invalidity if they saw me working. I’m supposed to be unfit.”

“Who would see you? The barn is barely visible from the road and the back wall not at all.”

There was another long silence.

“I know what a good mason you are,” said the old man.

“I was,” said Louis, “but I don’t work anymore,” and he got up and walked into the cottage, leaving the old man sitting on the bench outside.

Pépé thought he might have gone for a cigarette, or a secret drink, but after he had been left alone for several minutes he walked into the house after Louis.

Louis was lying in bed, his head turned to the wall. He appeared not to have noticed the intruder.

Pépé shrugged his shoulder and turned to go. At a glance he had taken in the broken lock, the wardrobe propped up on a brick.

“Everything broken,” he said to himself as he struggled back to his car, “including the man.”

Next morning Madame Parlange came past, as she did each morning on her way to the spring. She always collected a large jug of water there, swearing it made better coffee than any tap water. Louis was on his bench again and hailed her. He told her old Pépé Peyrols was a villain who had tried to trap him into losing his invalidity pay. She listened and shook her head sadly. He had been at school with her sons. In those days he’d often come in to play and stayed for a meal. He’d been a bright lad, she remembered, and full of life. Strange, she had thought at the time, strange for such a drink-sodden household to produce such a lively lad. But that had been many years earlier.

That evening she made some onion soup. She was expecting visitors the following day. Then she remembered that when Louis had been a schoolboy and a frequent visitor, onion soup had been among his favourite dishes. She decided to bring him some. Why wait? She would go before it got dark. What he needed was good food. Many a drunkard could keep going, provided only that he ate properly. Louis looked as if he hadn’t eaten properly for days.

She had picked her time badly. He sat slumped at his table in near darkness, with a bottle in front of him. “What do you want?” he had demanded with a heavy tongue.

“I brought you some onion soup. It’ll do you a power of good.”

His eyes narrowed. “Onion soup? Who the hell wants onion soup? Why don’t you just bugger off. Get out, you old bitch. I know you: you just come to spy. You want to report on me to the social worker. I bet it was you who made the flics take away my rifle. I know you and I know all your brood. Your son wants me out of this house because he wants it for his stable-lad. I see all your little games. Get out, damn you!” He picked up her pot of hot soup and threw it at her. His aim was erratic and she dodged. It spilled over the doorstep and clattered down the steps. She made as hasty a withdrawal as a respectable widow woman could, calling back that he’d gone mad, totally mad. He should be locked away.

The following week the postman knocked. Louis tried to ignore him. He persevered. “Registered letter, M. Brun. I need a signature.”

In the end Louis staggered out and signed. The letter threw him into a panic. It was from the social worker. Since he had not called last time he was down at the post­ office, would he please call on her the following Friday morning without fail!

He sat huddled over his table with the remains of stale bread and his unwashed plate and glass. They were closing in on him. They were trying to stop his money. They were all together in a plot to deprive him of his living. The doctor, the social worker, Mme. Parlange, Pépé, even Patate, and of course the grocer who refused to bring him booze … all of them. He’d outwit them yet. But how? He’d think of something. He’d outwitted the Invalidity Commission just as he’d outwitted the Army Recruiting Commission long years before. Yes, he’d always been too clever for them. But how was he going to cope with this plot with no one on his side? He couldn’t think. His head was too heavy. What he needed was a drink. With a drink or two inside him, he’d show them what the fox was capable of. But he didn’t have the strength to traipse down to the bourg for a bottle. Besides, it was dangerous. Would he have to go to town? He stumbled into the shed – the thatch had long collapsed, but his motorbike was safe under a lean-to which he had constructed of poles and black plastic. The plastic was flapping in the wind. He would go to town and stock up. After all, he had money stashed away. He made an attempt to start the motorbike, then remembered that it hadn’t started for many months. What to do? He needed a drink, and he needed it badly.

Old man Lascombe? Of course! He’d walk up the hill to see the old bastard. If the man wouldn’t sell him any of his moonshine, he’d warn him: he’d be denounced to the police. That would bring him to heel. He’d had a row with the old man last year. That was after he’d accused him of watering his moonshine. But, damn it! Old Lascombe wasn’t a bad old bastard. He was sure to let him have a bottle or two and that would help him think. He’d outwit them all yet.

It was a hard trek up the hill and then along the edge of the plateau to the next village, and even harder to persuade the old man to sell him some of the strong stuff.

“I warn you: It’ll go hard with you, old man, if the flics discover your still – the one in your cellar.”

In the end he had got two bottles. And old man Lascombe, nervous about so unpredictable a neighbour, had even offered him a tot for the road.

Louis felt better. He stopped half-way down the hill, sat on a stone and drank some more. Yes, he’d outwit them yet; all those who were plotting against him. The postman, too. He was part of it. He, too, had been sent to spy on him. They all kept knocking at his door, pestering him, besieging him.

He got back to his cottage. But was he safe there? Wouldn’t they try and break in, seize him and drag him off to their detoxification centre? No, they mustn’t find him. He lit an old stable lantern and took himself and his bottle down to the little pine plantation below his house. The landlord had planted those pines many years ago, as an investment. It had been a pleasant little glade…in the days when Roger had kept the undergrowth down. Now it was overgrown with brambles and nettles, an almost impenetrable thicket. The brambles tore at his shirt. The nettles stung his arms. But he pushed his way through to the centre, where little grew under the trees because of the shade. Some of the pink light of evening penetrated through the tree trunks, but as he watched it faded and stars started to appear.

Here there was peace, at last: he could hear only the distant music of cow­bells and once, the howling of a dog. “That’ll have old Patate scared,” he chuckled. “Wolves!”. Later, he saw a shooting star, or was it a satellite? Could there really be a man up there circling the earth – far from all its troubles – seeing men below but unseen himself?

He lay down on the pine needles to think. And to drink. He, too, could see but not be seen. He found he could look through the brambles and see the headlights of cars passing on the road yet remain unseen. The fox’s lair! He grinned. He had seen a vixen and her cubs in this forest, some years earlier. Beautiful beasts, but the landlord had killed them because they stole the neighbours’ chickens.

He felt safe.  He lay back and took a long swig from the bottle.

Patate found him there, in a coma, late the next day. He’d heard a low moaning coming from the thicket. Louis’ face was swollen to two times its normal size, or so Patate said. He couldn’t manage to wake him up. He rushed up to call Mme. Parlange, but he had the greatest difficulty in making her understand.  When excited he lapsed into Auvergnat. In the end she managed to make him out: Louis was dead, he stuttered. Dead. She followed him and pushed her way into the thicket, tearing her apron and her blouse. She, too, could not rouse Louis and went back to phone for an ambulance. The ambulancemen swore as their clothes caught in the brambles. They had to borrow a machete and hack a path before they could manoeuvre a stretcher in. The duty doctor at the hospital said that Louis’s liver had given out. He never regained consciousness. He died two days later.

“What a waste,” said Mme. Parlange. “He was a bright lad. We had great hopes for him.” She wondered what would happen to his cottage now. It might indeed suit her son’s new stable lad.

When Mme. Couderc heard the news, she made the sign of the cross, as if to forgive him all his sins. Or perhaps she was begging for forgiveness for her own. She had long wished him out of the way. Aloud, she said: “Poor Louis. Poor Louis. He’ll not have toothache anymore.”

ROGER.

Roger cleaned the sparkplug carefully, waved it in the air to dry off the petrol, held it up to the light, then screwed it back into the motorbike. As he did so, he explained its function to Gaston. Gaston listened politely, although he had heard it all before. “Now it’ll start. You’ll see. No more trouble.”

It didn’t. They tried again: once, twice, three times. “Try running downhill with it,” Roger suggested. But that did not work either.

“Well, let’s try and clean the carburettor then,” said Roger.

“No, no, no”, the youngster protested. Roger had spent enough of his time trying to help. His entire lunch-hour had been spent working on Gaston’s motorcycle. He really should go and eat now. Perhaps he, Gaston, would come back in the evening, if by then he hadn’t managed to start the machine by himself.

Gaston had realised by now that Roger was not as skilled a mechanic as he had led the neighbourhood youngsters to believe. If he took the carburettor apart, would he be able to reassemble it? If it were a question of splitting logs or hammering in fence posts or heaving fallen rocks back into dry stone walls, there were few who could match Roger. Gaston knew that. But carburettors called for different qualities. Gaston thanked him warmly and pushed the bike down–hill. Roger waved cheerily and withdrew into the house, brushing against an old threshing machine that took up much of the room.

“You got it going – of course?” the Peyrols brothers asked, grinning knowingly.

“You know very well I didn’t,” Roger replied. “Stop teasing your elders, you young scoundrels and pass me the bottle.”

The two youngsters laughed. They were seated on a bench by the old table near the fireplace. That was virtually all the furniture left in the old family residence of the Peyrols. That and a gas cooker. The remaining furniture had been moved, many years earlier, to that far grander residence which Old Pépé had bought down in the bourg. Pépé, the boys’ grandfather, had decided that Le Peuch was a fine place to graze his herds, but the bourg was where he wanted to live: the place where there was a church, some grocers, a doctor, a baker, a butcher … and, of course, the cemetery. The bourg had such conveniences as piped water. And in those days Pépé never thought he would live to see water piped to remote mountain villages.

The Peyrols house was the highest in Le Peuch. That gave it fine views over the rest of the village and beyond. Sitting on the stone bench in front of the house one could look all the way down to the valley as well as up towards the high mountains in the north. But water, in those days, came from a spring near the bottom of the village, below the old schoolhouse. The boys had often heard Pépé tell how hard it had been for their grandmother to carry water up the steep, rocky path.

Nowadays, the family only used the old house to store farm equipment and to take their midday meals. Occasionally it also served to shelter them during a downpour, but the roof leaked and you had to pick your spot, depending on the direction of the wind.

The lads moved to make room for Roger and served the food they had kept warm for him. They handed him a bottle of red wine: 13%. He filled his glass and set to his meal with gusto. A day of digging drainage channels made one hungry. There was vegetable soup followed by stew with potatoes and green beans with garlic butter.

“Good,” said Roger between mouthfuls. “Almost as good as if I’d cooked it myself.”

“There’s blackberry tart to follow.”

“What, no cheese?”

“There may be a sliver.” This was a daily exchange. They opened the deep drawer at the end of the table and pulled out a cheese as large as his beret. He laughed.

“Blackberry tart is delicious,” said Roger, cutting himself a second slice. “You made it?”

“Mother did. And she said: ‘Don’t gobble it up before you get to the farm. Make sure Roger gets his share.”‘

“Ah, Blanche looks after all of us,” said Roger and poured himself another glass. He offered cigarettes around. They smoked contentedly.

“After a meal like this, I feel like taking a nap under the lime tree,” said Nicholas, the older of the Peyrols boys.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Roger. “The hay must be turned. We’ve got to get it under cover. The wind is coming from the south-west.”

He got up: a hulk of a man who towered over the two youngsters. The bear, they called him. He was 20 years their senior, and they treated him with jocular deference: “Yes, boss…. coming, boss.”

Roger had been one of their father’s farmhands, and their favourite. It was he who had taught them how to make catapults when they were small; he who had taken them on fish poaching expeditions when they had reached the age of discretion. But when their father had disappeared, leaving two boys, aged 19 and 21 and a grandfather, nearing 80, with a large and near-bankrupt farm, Roger had shown up and insisted on helping, even though he’d been fired along with the other farmhands a week earlier.

Accounts were taken over by old Pépé. Interest payments, loan repayments, taxes, value added tax, claims for subventions – all that was beyond Roger. But when a cow had a difficult labour, Roger knew what to do: he would spend the whole night in the stable, coaxing out the calf. He knew how to dig trenches to improve the drainage of waterlogged fields; to split trees to make fencing posts. He knew which winds to fear. In times of drought, he knew how to lop trees to feed the hungry beasts on leaves. He also said he could repair tractors, but the boys soon found that he claimed more than he could perform. They knew as much about mechanics as he did, and before long they knew a lot more.

For three years now he had helped them. They had protested that they could not afford to employ him. The major share of the farm had been taken over by a finance company. They could barely keep up with payments due. Roger had waved all that aside.

“One day, things will look up. Then you can pay me. In the meantime, I’ll share your meals. You can afford that?”

In fact, they could do a little better. They raised a pig for him each summer, together with their own. When they cut down trees, they only kept a small quantity for their own fire. The bulk they delivered to Roger. He stacked it in piles outside his cottage: wet wood for drying on one pile. Dry wood, cut and split in two piles: one for short lengths for cookers, the other for longer lengths for the open “cantou” fireplaces. He made a little money for himself selling the ready-cut. Whenever he had a buyer the Peyrols provided the tractor and trailer for delivery.

Roger, in turn, often brought the Peyrols vegetables from his garden and occasionally a hare he had shot or a fish he had caught.

At dawn every morning, on their way up the steep winding road from the bourg to their farm, they stopped their battered deux-cheveaux outside his cottage and hooted. Sometimes he was difficult to rouse. That meant he had been drinking more than usual the night before. Then they had to go and knock at his shutters. His brother Louis would shout and swear at them and tell them to stop their bloody racket, but when Roger emerged with his shambling walk – tall, powerfully built, with a look always somehow surprised, he greeted them cheerfully. Even his frequent hangovers did not greatly affect his cheerfulness. After a first glass of wine and a piece of bread, he set to work with the milking machines, calling to the cows in a gentle singsong.

Occasionally, when there was little work on the farm, he would go off after the early-morning milking and do odd jobs for others – jobs which brought in some money: sometimes scything the edges of roads for the commune, sometimes cutting a tree or chopping firewood for a widow, sometimes, in spring, repairing fences or cleaning out stables for farmers in the neighbourhood.

For all this he insisted on being paid at the rate for a skilled farm worker. He did not want his unpaid work for the Peyrols to be taken as a precedent or as an excuse for paying him as an unskilled labourer. His brother Louis was a skilled mason. Right, he too had his skill.

Over this, he almost came to blows with Madame Apcher. She was a well-to-do widow who lived in the next village. She had asked him to chop her firewood for the winter. When it came to paying him she offered the rate for an unskilled labourer. “Chopping firewood isn’t skilled work,” she said. “I’ve never paid any more.”

He refused to accept her money. She threw it down on the table and, in Roger’s presence, phoned the mayor. She explained what they were arguing about and said she would abide by his decision. The mayor said she was right – chopping wood did not rate as skilled farm work.

Roger shouted that everyone knew he had always been rated as skilled. That meant he was paid at the higher rate, whatever job he did. It was always the richest who were the meanest.

He walked out without taking the money, then stopped at the door, turned back and gathered it up and put it in his pocket.

“But – I’ll tell everyone that you’re a mean and grasping bitch. I’ll see to it that no one else works for you….”

It was not a very real threat. There were too many unemployed.

The following night, however, two geese that Madame Apcher had been fattening for Xmas disappeared. There was a trail of blood and of feathers.

“That damned fox,” said her neighbour. She knew better. But as for proof? She could never prove anything.

When the matter came up for discussion at La Maison des Am – everybody had heard about the predatory fox – Roger grinned. All he would say was:

“Strange coincidence, that. Two geese cost about the same as the old bitch owes me.”

“Divine justice?” said one of the mates with a wink. “Must be. Yes. Divine justice.”

One day young Paul Parlange watched him splitting firewood for his mother, the widow Parlange. One powerful blow with the sledgehammer, with an iron peg placed on the log, split each cleanly. Many another would have taken two or three blows. Not Roger.

“Listen, Roger” said Paul, “I’ve just agreed to take a lease on the Lower Chauvet farm, so I can raise 15 extra beasts: more than Marie-Louise and I can handle by ourselves. Will you come and work for us?”

Roger said: “I’d like to, but they need me up the hill.” “But do they?  Pépé Peyrols tells me they are thinking of reducing the dairy herd and going over to meat production. There’ll be less work.”

“They’ve been talking about it, but the boys aren’t keen. Anyway, I’ll go and discuss it with them.”

There had been yet another row with his brother Louis a few days earlier. Louis had accused him, for the umpteenth time, of sponging on him. Perhaps, thought Roger, if he took on a job that was paid, his brother would get off his back. Perhaps it would put a stop to that infernal nagging.

The following week Roger started work for the Parlanges, but only after the early morning milking at the top of the hill. He and Paul erected a fence along the border of the Lower Chauvet farm and the Upper. The work was agreeable enough. Paul, well-organised as always, had prepared the posts and stacked them where they would be required. The barbed wire was delivered the following day. Sand, cement, gravel were available to set the posts. Paul had graduated from agricultural college. He had certainly been taught how to lay out and plan his work.

Breakfast with the Parlanges was serious business. Coffee, bread and jam. Coffee? Roger always breakfasted with a glass of wine.

Conversation between Paul and Marie-Louise was sparse and precise: what work had to be done that day; what supplies ordered; prices; costs; sometimes the children’s homework was inspected before the school bus collected them to take them downhill to the school in the bourg.

The midday meal was well-cooked, copious and consumed in near silence. There was no joking; no gossiping; no talking about the old days.

“You know,” said Roger on the second day, “A man can’t eat without something to wash down his meal.”

“There’s water in the jug,” Marie-Louise said. “Or would you prefer some wine?” And when he said that he would, yes, indeed, he would, she poured him half a glass.

After the third day, he told Paul and Marie-Louise that if ever they needed his help in an emergency, they could always call on him. He knew they were good, honest people, but, truth be told, they were too sober for him. Far too sober. From the money they paid him for his three days’ work, he ordered a barrel of wine. He invited in his friends and entertained them with grossly exaggerated tales of the austerity and sobriety of the household from which he had escaped.

Next morning, over breakfast at the top of the hill, with the Peyrols he explained: “The ambiance wasn’t right for me down there.”

Pépé Peyrols, the grandfather, came up most days, sometimes for a chat, sometimes to bring up food that Blanche, his daughter-in-law, had prepared “for the boys”.

Despite his 80 or so years, he still drove himself, though erratically. Everyone in the bourg and the surrounding villages knew his little white car and gave it a wide berth. On the narrow road up to Le Peuch they could see him coming when he was still several hairpin bends below – or above – and promptly stopped at a passing place. It was not a question of respect for his age, so much as fear for their shiny new cars.

He drove more easily than he walked. Stopping in the forecourt of the cottage, he struggled slowly and painfully, bent over his stick, to reach the bench by the door. If Roger was around he always rushed out to give the old man a hand.

But the old man’s mind was sharp and his advice was shrewd. He suggested which field they might graze next; whether or not to hasten the hay-making; when to sell the surplus calves. But repeatedly he came back to a matter the family had long been pondering: whether to stick to the dairy herd or change to beef cattle.

“Times have changed,” he said. “There’s a butter surplus. Or so they tell us on the television. That can’t be good for prices, not in the long run. One of these days they’ll be lowering prices. Yes, yes, yes, despite what the politicians say before elections. And if they do, how are we going to pay the company? I keep wondering whether you wouldn’t do better with meat.”

“But this land is perfect for dairy herds. Everybody says so” the boys argued. “This region has always produced cheese and butter.”

“Not so,” said the old man. “When I inherited this farm – over 50 years ago – we grew wheat on the lower field and a bit of rye over the hill. Pigs. Chickens. We were into mixed farming in those days. We produced quite a lot of cereal, too. Fourteen men worked for me in those days. But you know all this, Roger. Your father worked here and your uncle too. We scythed the hay by hand in those days, and the cereals too. But we couldn’t compete: not with the farmers in the north on the flat lands. Not with their combine harvesters. So what did we do? We changed: We concentrated on dairy herds. In those days we were flexible. We watched the market. And – we made money. We did very well until your father…. Well, never mind.”

“Next year there may be a glut of meat,” his grandsons argued. “You can’t breed a different herd at short notice.” So a decision was postponed. Once again. And they carried on as before.

The old man’s advice was, on occasion, spiced with a hint of criticism, but he took care never to make it too virulent.

Roger and the grandsons loved the old man. Everyone did these days. That had not always been so. But age – and the blows that fate had struck him – had mellowed Pépé. As a young and thrusting farmer, his farmhands had gone in terror of him and of his temper; and his neighbours had been fiercely jealous of his success. He had doubled the size of his own father’s property, had increased the herd and had improved the grassland.

But all that was a long time ago.

The next time he came up to the hill-top house he sat with them, smoking. But it was apparent he had something else on his mind. At last it came out: “Roger, I have been thinking about you. You know, I can never thank you enough for what you have done for the boys over these years.”

Roger waved it aside, embarrassed.

“But you know, a man must think about his own interests. You understand our position. Unfortunately, we can’t pay you a wage. And you don’t get unemployment money anymore. You should be thinking about getting yourself a proper job.”

“That’s not so easy in these parts,” said Roger. “Unless you want me to drink flat water at Paul Parlange’s, perhaps with fruit-flavouring – on feast-days!” And he laughed.

They all laughed. The grandsons withdrew when they realised that old Pépé was having his long-prepared heart-to-heart with Roger.

“Anyway, what do I need money for?” Roger continued, “I’ve got everything I need.

I’ve got a garden that feeds both me, and my brother. That is when I’m not eating with you. We’ve got rabbits, and there’s the pig. I go fishing. And I earn enough with odd jobs to buy the occasional barrel of wine and my cigarettes. I don’t need anything else.”

“You’ve got to buy clothes.”

Roger chuckled: “I don’t. You know I’ve got enough trousers to last me another 20 years.”

He had. In his last months in Algeria he had seen to that. He had often boasted about it. He’d been the regimental cook, and he had a key to the food store and the wine cellar. These were not just the stores for the lower ranks but also for the officers’ mess. One day, as the whole Algerian business was unravelling, the quartermaster had come to him and proposed a deal: In exchange for a few cases of good wine, filched from the stores, the quartermaster would give him a dozen pairs of army fatigues and boots. He had agreed. Well,

why not? The quartermaster sold the wine to rich Algerians in Oran. That man! He sold everything he could lay his hands on: car tyres, gear-boxes, boots, perhaps even machineguns. In those last days of Algerie Français anything was possible. No officer had time for stock-control. They were still busy bawling that Algeria was French and would remain French for all eternity. More fools, they. And just before the great scuttle, what remained of the stores had been burnt – burnt to stop it falling into the hands of the F.L.N.

The waste! The wicked waste! A good thing he, Roger, had saved at least a few good pairs of boots and trousers – entirely new – from the hands of those lunatics. Oh, yes, the soldiers’ luggage had been searched as they boarded the ships and again when they landed at Marseilles. But what the military police had been looking for was arms. Those could have been used to stir up trouble in France … or sold to gangsters. Roger himself had taken no risks. “I’m not stupid, you know”. He’d sent his parcels of clothes to France by regular post several weeks before. Yes, that’s why he could clothe himself for free for years to come.

“And your subs?”

“Don’t lose any sleep over that: I’ve paid ever since I was a kid of 15. And my army service counts double. Anything extra I pay now will only fatten up those bastards in Paris – the same guys who made us burn mountains of good clothes while poor bloody Berbers in the mountains were shivering with cold. No, you’ll not catch me paying one more centime if I can help it.”

“I still think you should look for a paid job. I know they’re not easy to find around here. But there’s Grenoble or Paris.”

“I couldn’t stand living in a town.”

“You’ve never tried it.”

“Yes, I have. I had a day in Paris, before they shipped us out to Algeria. That was quite enough. I don’t understand how people stand it: Those long straight rows of houses, like gravestones. Not a tree in sight. And people, like ants, everywhere. And no one to greet you. No one knows you. The smell of the cars and busses and the noise,” he shuddered. “That’s no life. Not for me. I only feel sorry for the poor bastards who have to live in towns.”

”When, of an evening, I sit on my bench in my courtyard, blowing smoke-rings and drinking my glass of red, I remember all those chimneys pouring filth into the sky and I think how lucky I am to be right here. This is the life I was born to: watching the seasons come and go, weeding my garden, scything the nettles, fishing down by the brook, milking the cows. And yes, a bit of poaching. This is the life I was born to. Besides,” he said smiling, “the company is very agreeable.”

It had been a long time since Roger had talked so much.

“Well, I think you are doing wrong, Roger.”

“Are you firing me, grandfather?”

“No, good God, no. But you know: things are not going well with us. The finance company is squeezing us. It could happen – I’m not saying it is going to happen, but it could happen – that we’ll be kicked off this land. And what’s going to happen to you then?”

“And to the boys?  Don’t worry about me. Just let’s make sure the boys make a success of the farm.”

So at dawn next morning the Peyrols boys hooted outside Roger’s cottage and he went up to help with the milking. And so it was every day thereafter.

Not all the odd jobs that Roger took on were paid. When he saw that an elderly neighbour had difficulty keeping down the weeds, he sharpened his scythe, strolled over and without another word set to work. He would accept nothing but a few glasses of wine in return. He did the same for the “amiable Parisians”, although they could well have afforded to pay. Ignorant townees that they were, it took them some years to realise that their forecourt did not stay so well trimmed all by itself. As soon as Roger heard that they were due, he ambled over and scythed their grass.

But from well-to-do farmers Roger demanded the hourly rate for a skilled farmhand, plus meals with a bottle of red: One man needed help with fencing, another with cutting firewood. A wealthy widow, too fat to dig her own kitchen garden, would ask him to do it for her. The hotel proprietor in the bourg, nervous about cutting down an old oak in his garden, called in Roger. What he earned from such jobs paid for his cigarettes, for his monthly barrel of red, and allowed him to stand his round at a café.

Alas, the Café at the crossroads at the edge of the village had closed two years earlier and he was forced to travel on his motorbike to cafés down in the bourg. Descending the steep winding road was no great problem. Returning was different if it had been a merry evening. Others would try to persuade him to leave his motorcycle in the valley and accept a lift with one of the more sober drivers. Roger, however, always insisted on riding home by himself, even though he had had several falls and had ruined two good pairs of “Algerian” trousers, not to speak of the damage to his knees.

A pity about La Maison des Am: It had been more than a café for the locals. A peeling signboard boasted that it was a motel; that was perhaps an exaggeration, but a previous owner had built five austere bedrooms and one shower-room behind the café. Long-distance lorry drivers had occasionally stopped over for a night. They certainly enlivened the place: the strangers would entertain the locals with news of the wide world.

La Maison Des Am had been built at the corner where the village lane joined the route nationale. They said that in the previous century it had been a coaching inn, and horses had been changed there. It had been run by a popular couple – he served behind the bar; she did the cooking. Truck drivers stopped for meals – enormous meals of five or six courses, wine included – at modest prices. But it was one of the truck drivers who was, eventually, responsible for the closure: He stopped at least twice a week. An obliging fellow. He often gave la patronne a lift to the nearby town where she did her shopping at the supermarket. She would then come back on the country bus with boxes and baskets of food. Her husband would meet her with a handcart. One day he waited at the corner in vain. She did not come by the second bus either, or even the next day. The following week it got around that the driver had left his job. His family did not know where he was. Several months later someone reported seeing him down in the Midi with la patronne. She appeared to be pregnant.

Her husband, who had suspected nothing, was thunderstruck. He was left with the restaurant on his hands – and raucous comments from his clients. He was used to serving behind the bar, but not to cooking. “How can I pour a pastis and fry steak at the same time?” he grumbled. He soon gave up providing meals. The bar alone did not bring in enough money. Worse, he found the jokes of the regulars difficult to take. One day he, too upped and left – a year or so before his lease ran out – leaving several months’ rent unpaid.

Since then the old building had stood deserted. Climbing roses straggled wild over the windows. The courtyard where boules had been played – perhaps ever since the days of the stagecoaches – became overgrown with nettles. Plaster fell from the wall, and with it part of the painted name-sign, so that “La Maison des Amis”, became “La Maison des Am”.

That was until Mireille and Jean-Marie arrived and transformed the building. And much else.

Mireille must have been in her early 40’s. There were traces of beauty in her somewhat battered face – a vivacious face, with bright eyes and a challenging look. She had a way of raising one eyebrow and looking quizzically at men, as if to say: “I know you lot. You can’t pull any wool over my eyes.”

She wore tight jeans that modelled her firm buttocks. Her jeans were held up with a broad belt into which she stuck her thumbs, cowboy-style. Sometimes she served behind the bar wearing a man’s hat and high silver-studded American boots. Rumour had it she had worked in a circus.

“Of course,” she said when they asked her. “I was a lion tamer, so I know how to keep you lot under control.”

Her voice was unexpectedly loud, and always a little hoarse. She chain-smoked at the bar counter, between swigs of wine or pastis. She had a sharp wit which darted out when least expected. Sometimes she told risqué stories, usually about men she had known. It appeared she had known many. Very many.

With Mireille came Jean-Marie, twenty years younger, slight of build, shy, pimply, anxious to please. The first customers thought he was her son. They soon realised their mistake. He was her lover. He washed up, decanted barrels of wine, helped behind the bar, peeled potatoes, and swept the floor. He even started to panel the dining room in pine but that was a job he never finished because Mireille’s capital ran out. Nor did he ever get round to repairing the signboard, perhaps because the clients liked it that way:

A.M. stands for “assurance maladie” – “health insurance”. A drink at La Maison des Am, they bruited about, was good for your health. Mireille was far too shrewd to deprive herself of such free advertising. She informed her customers that at her place a pastis a day would keep the doctor away and half a bottle of wine would bankrupt the undertakers. Her remarks did the rounds. The customers came.

Among them was Roger.

She normally served lunches. Some evenings customers demanded a meal and if Mireille felt like it, she would prepare it. If she was tired or had drunk too much she would refuse.

One evening some long-distance lorry drivers wanted to stop for the night and asked for a meal. Mireille refused. They were a little tipsy and became loud and insistent. Mireille was aggressive in return: “Hop it,” she said. “I’m not your wife, you know. Maybe you can order her around. But not me. Go and find some other place to stay.”

Roger intervened. “I’ll cook for them, Mireille.”

“You?” the drivers laughed. “You’d be better at turning over cow muck than at tossing a steak.”

“Steady on,” said Roger, rising to his full height. “I was the cook for the officers’ mess in Oran.”

That was stretching truth a little. He had cooked for the soldiers’ mess, but two or three times he had done relief work when the officers’ cook was away. But who was to know that? The lorry drivers seemed impressed:

“What’s good enough for General Massu, will do for us,” said one.

After that Roger often helped out in Mireille’s kitchen and acquired the nickname of “the generals’ cook”. If a customer thought he had been served too small a portion of French fries, he would grumble: “Not surprising he was so thin, your Massu.” Or “No wonder we lost Algeria – the generals were weak with hunger.”

Roger took their chaffing with a smile. Only once did their banter provoke an angry, tight-lipped: “Shut up, damn you.”

That was after Roger had overcooked a trout. It had fallen apart and the customer grumbled. “Poor fish! Been tortured!”

In return for his help, Roger got his drinks free. He came around every evening after he had finished the milking up the hill. From the looks he gave Mireille it became clear that his interests were not confined to the free drink.

She, in turn, seemed interested in him: he was tall, powerful, quite good-looking. He had the easy slow movements of a bear, and a simple, friendly, nature.

One sweltering summer’s evening lightening flashed behind the distant mountains, then thunderclouds approached. Customers looked up at the sky and said: “Better get home before it starts”. The Café emptied. Only Roger and Mireille remained. Jean-Marie was away, helping his parents with the hay–making. They sat at a little table by the window watching the lightning come nearer. Then fat, heavy drops began to fall noisily on the corrugated iron roof of the kitchen extension. A few seconds later they were in the midst of a downpour. Rivulets formed and ran through the boules courtyard. Outside the door a cascade came down – there where the gutter was broken.

The thunder followed rapidly upon the flashes. The electric lights went out and they sat in the dark. His hand went out to hers. “Lightning has struck one of the poles,” said Roger.

“Yours too?” said Mireille, smiling in the dark.

“Yes,” he said simply, and after a moment of silence he added: “I want you.” “Okay – let’s go to bed.”

He hesitated. “What about Jean-Marie?”

“He doesn’t own me, and he knows it. Not he. And no one else either.”

Jean-Marie accepted the new situation without complaint. Some nights he shared Mireille’s bed. On other nights Roger did. It was she who invited one or the other.

The two men got on well, to the surprise of clientele and neighbours who soon guessed what was going on. It gave rise to much gossip in the village – especially after a balmy summer evening when the three were seen walking down the village lane arm in arm, Mireille in the middle. When she noticed that they were being watched, she kissed first the one, then the other. “That’ll set their tongues wagging!”

Jean-Marie was a nervy youngster and lacking in self-confidence. Roger appeared to him a model of what he would like to be. He took to copying Roger’s slow shambling walk. When asked a question he tried to remember not to fire a staccato reply but to wait, think, then reply in a voice deeper than his natural timbre. He listened almost reverently to Roger’s tales of Algeria.

Roger was fond of the youth, in much the same way as he was fond of the neighbourhood children. He taught Jean-Marie how to poach fish in the stream; how to set snares for hares; how to identify edible mushrooms. He passed on to him totally erroneous information about the solar system and the stars.

The two worked together: They repaired the leaking roof on the guest block of “La maison des Am”. They renewed the lino in the bar. When the Peyrols delivered a load of firewood to Roger, Jean-Marie came to help chop it. Most nights the two sat drinking with Mireille after the last customer had departed.

Sometimes Mireille told tales of her past life. Neither of her two listeners was quite convinced they were true. They knew she loved to outrage the good country folk. Was she having them on, too?

She told of an elderly sugar daddy she had, once upon a time. He’d been very jealous, the fat old fool. But she’d outwitted him. “I told him I had to keep the front door bolted because I was scared of men – scared when he wasn’t there to protect me. He never realised the real reason. It was to give my other visitor time to get out by the back door.”

Roger told of his two years in North Africa. One night one of “them” – an Algerian – had tried to stab him in the back. But he had grabbed the man’s arm and held it so tightly that the fellow had to drop his knife. “He would have killed me, you know. Mind you, I’m not blaming him. It was a dirty war on both sides. Our side too. You’d never believe just how dirty. Those Paris politicians – they got us into the shit. But they had no idea how to get us out. They made speeches with fine, fancy words. We wallowed in it. Paris? That place needs cleaning out like a cowshed in spring. There was only one good man: de Gaulle. He’s the one who got us out of Algeria in the end. He told the colons to fuck off. And our bloody colonels as well. I drink to his memory.”

After the last row with Louis, Roger no longer went back to their cottage. He had had enough. Why should he go on looking after his brother, when the brother could look after himself but wouldn’t? When Louis had first come out of hospital, he had cooked for him, cultivated the vegetable garden, looked after the rabbits. At that time his brother had been too weak to do it himself. But gradually his strength had come back. Had he ever said as much as “Thank you”? Had he ever offered to take back some of the jobs? No, he did nothing but grumble that it was he, Louis, who paid the rent. Well, even that wasn’t true. The landlord was always complaining that Louis was months in arrears. Then Louis complained constantly that it was he who bought the groceries. But what the hell? He, Roger, had grown all the vegetables. And who was it who had provided the pig for the deep-freeze, and the rabbits, and the firewood? Now that Louis had gone back to drinking, why should he continue to look after him?

Tears were running down Roger’s cheeks, not because he was overcome with grief but because he was slicing onions. He had no regrets. He was glad Louis had stopped coming up to the Café since the day when he’d fired his rifle … at his own brother! Did he think he could scare Roger?

“I have had bullets whistling past my ears before now.”

It had been depressing having Louis around. After a few drinks he became morose and picked a quarrel with anyone who was around. Whereas he, Roger, became jolly when he was a bit pickled. He liked to sing. And why not? Mireille and Jean-Marie were good company; the Peyrols were excellent fellows. And when they’d had a few drinks all of them were full of fun.

What would their mother have thought of Louis’ antics? She’d brought her children up carefully. It was she who had encouraged Louis to learn a trade, whatever he said himself. Wasted effort. What was wrong with the damned fellow? He’d never been the same since that trip of his to town, chasing after that woman. So he’d been jilted? That happened to many, but they didn’t all carry on like Louis. It must be that Louis was mad. There had been a granduncle who had died in a madhouse. Their mother had told them. That’s where Louis must have got it from. And a madhouse was where he should be, too.

Roger pounded some steaks. The road gang would be in soon to demand their meal. Time to put on the potatoes.

Jean-Marie looked into the kitchen. “Mireille says there’s a leak over the dining-room. See the wet patch? Shall we try and fix it?”

“Sure,” said Roger. ” After lunch. You hold the ladder. I’ll replace the tiles.”

Lunch was a convivial affair. Apart from several locals, there were Gilbert and Leon. They were always the life and soul of the party. They were Parisians who worked for a firm in a town several hours’ drive away, but their work sometimes brought them into the neighbourhood. They installed blinds and awnings in holiday homes and over shop windows. They came in for lunch whenever they were working nearby. Sometimes they stayed the night. When he had finished cooking, Roger joined their table. Gilbert was in the middle of a story about a butcher’s wife who made them install venetian blinds so that she could deceive her husband more discreetly. One day she had heard him coming up the stairs unexpectedly. Her lover had jumped from the window and had crash-landed on one of “their” roller blinds over the butcher’s shop. He hadn’t realised how sharp the aluminium fittings were. And now, poor devil, his days as a seducer were over.

“You must put that in your adverts,” said Mireille, “All the butchers will want you to fit such blinds.”

After the bottles of plonk supplied with the meal were empty, Gilbert called for a bottle of Bordeaux. Roger staggered down to the cellar to bring it up. It was after three when the two Parisians got back into their truck. “Watch out for the flics,” called Mireille.

Jean-Marie went off to fetch a ladder to replace roof tiles. “Perhaps I’d better go up,” he said. “You hold the ladder.” But Roger would have none of it. Jean-Marie had never repaired a roof whereas he, Roger, had done it often. In fact, he was an expert. Yes, he was quite safe. He could hold his drink.

“But you’re twice as heavy as I am,” argued Jean-Marie.

“And three times more experienced”, Roger boasted.

He replaced one or two of the lower tiles without much difficulty, but the ladder was too short to reach a broken tile just below the ridge. Roger had to step on to the roof tiles themselves. “You’ll crack them,” Jean-Marie warned him, “You’re heavy.”

“I won’t,” he called back, “but if I do, I’ll replace them.”

The rafters, though over a hundred years old, were sound and could take his weight. But the battens were not. Moreover, there was moss on the tiles. As he was nearing the ridge he slipped, the battens gave way with a sharp crack and Roger fell through the roof and the ceiling into the dining room.

He landed near Mireille who was still clearing tables. “Roger,” she said, “we do have a door!”

Jean-Marie rushed in anxiously. “Just a bit bruised,” said Roger. “It’s nothing.”

But it wasn’t. His wrist swelled up rapidly. He was in pain. When Mireille touched his arm, he howled. Later that afternoon they took him to the hospital in the nearby town.

“It’s a compound fracture,” said the doctor, examining the X-rays “three places, including the wrist. It will take time to mend. We’ll have to put it in plaster, and we’d better keep you in.”

“How long until I can work again?”

“Difficult to say. Perhaps six weeks, perhaps longer.”

Mireille came to see him the following day. They had put his arm in plaster. “The right arm, too,” she commiserated. “It’ll be a while before you’ll be able to do farm work again.”

Roger grinned: “Maybe I’ll get the dole – like Louis.”

“They say I should have had you insured. You were working for me.”

“But I wasn’t. Can’t a man do a girl a favour?” “How’s the hospital?”

“Food’s okay. Nurses okay. And they wash you every morning.”

“That makes a change,” said Mireille.

Roger ignored the remark. “But there’s no drink! For lunch they gave me one glass of wine. And when I asked for more, they brought me mineral water – Volvic!” and he rolled his eyes in comic despair. “Volvic! Mireille, if you don’t send Jean-Marie with some booze this very afternoon, I’ll discharge myself. I will. But tell him to hide it under his coat.”

It was several weeks before Roger returned to La Maison des Am. At the hospital they had had to break his wrist, just as he thought it was healing, because it had set badly. It was still tightly bandaged and in a sling when he came back, so he could not do any cooking. Farm-work was out of the question. The doctors doubted whether he would ever again be able to use his hand for hard physical work.

He sat around the café smoking and drinking all day long, speculating whether “they” would now grant him his disablement pay.

Inactivity did not suit him. Some days he strolled up the hill to chat to the Peyrols, other days he walked down the long road to the bourg to talk to the mayor to enlist his support. On other occasions he walked all the way down simply to watch the workers at the sawmill playing boules during their lunch hour. His one attempt at bowling with his left hand gave rise to much laughter.

Winter was approaching. The clouds would not lift. Darkness came early and he had to stay indoors. Television bored him. He drank more than ever. He yearned to chop firewood or to drive fencing posts into the ground with a heavy mallet – activities which in the past had helped him get over his hangovers. But he could not do any of these things. Even love-making had become awkward.

It was then that Louis died.

When Roger got maudlin, he would tell Mireille and Jean-Marie: “That’s how we all go in my family. There is a curse on us.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “What about your brother Richard? And your sister Anne?”

She had heard Roger talking about them: Richard owned a hardware shop in a suburb of Paris. His son was a rising civil servant in the customs department. Anne was the mother of a large family in a nearby town: all eminently sober citizens.

“I take after André – and our old man.”

Andre had been the oldest of four brothers. He had died of alcoholism several years earlier.

“You do the exercises that the nurse taught you, and you’ll soon be back at work.”

Then, for a few desultory minutes, Roger would stretch his hand as he had been taught, then clench it. It was obviously painful, and he did not persevere.

“It’s no good. Even the doctor at the hospital said he wasn’t sure I’d ever get back the full use of my hand.”

And sometimes, when his gloom was particularly deep, he would add ominously: “I’ve deserved it. It was bound to happen.”

“What’s all this nonsense?” said Mireille. “What do you mean?”

But he would not explain. He just shrugged his shoulders.

At his next check-up, the doctor at the hospital said: “I can’t recommend you for an invalidity pension. Not at this stage anyway. First, we’ll have to see how much better we can make you. Then we’ll talk. Provided you do your exercises regularly, the prognosis is good.”

The doctor was a young man from the city. When the session was over, the physiotherapist – a middle-aged woman and the daughter of peasants – turned to him. “Doctor,” she said, “he’ll not get any better – not until he’s got his pension. Afterwards, he may even do his exercises.”

As a result of their conversation, the physiotherapist was dispatched, on her motorbike, every Wednesday morning and came out to La Maison des Am to supervise Roger’s exercises. Sweat stood on his forehead as he tried to stretch his fingers and then clench them. Sometimes he winced when she seized his fingers to demonstrate how to flex his muscles. There was no doubt that the pain was genuine. Occasionally he murmured “I’ve deserved it.”  She assumed that he was arguing that he deserved money from the government. He had suffered enough.

He didn’t like Mireille to see him in pain. So he arranged to go down to the cottage for his sessions with the lady physiotherapist. He came to spend more time there. As the snow fell, La Maison des Am had become very cold. The ancient central heating system had seized up and the dining-room had no fireplace. A portable butane gas heater in the bar was the sole heating. At night Mireille would move it to her bedroom. Nights spent with her were snug and pleasant. But when it was Jean-Marie’s turn to share her bed, Roger would go down to his cottage and sleep there. They tried to dissuade him. The lane was icy: what if he broke his arm again? On evenings when he seemed unsteady on his feet Jean-Marie would walk down with him, arm in arm, then return to Mireille.

He kept a small fire going in the cottage most of the day. It was pleasant and warm, sitting smoking in the inglenook fireplace. His father had sat in that same old carved seat before him, and probably his grandfather as well.

With the help of Patate and Jean-Marie, he moved his bed from the loft to near the fireplace. That’s how it had been in his childhood. His parents had slept in a four-poster in that corner of the kitchen. The others had slept in the loft: the sister in a little room partitioned off on the left, the four boys on the right. Now that he was the only one left in the house, why not take over the privileged place?

His remaining brother and sister had both come on All Souls Day to bring flowers to the grave of their parents. They had held a family council and had agreed that Roger could have all the family furniture: It was full of woodworm and neither of them wanted to take it to their town apartments: the carved wardrobe, the beds and benches, even the dining table. Anyway, it was “old-fashioned stuff!”

They also discussed one great surprise they had received shortly after Louis’ death: the postman had brought a letter drawing the attention of the heirs to Louis’ account in the post office savings bank. How had Louis acquired so much money? The dates of the deposits showed that it had been paid in, month by month, many years earlier, when he was still working as a mason. It had gathered interest over the years. For nearly twenty years there had been no withdrawals – except for two or three in his last, hard-drinking days. True, Louis had often boasted that he wasn’t stupid, that he had his “fistful”, but everyone had assumed he was referring to the monthly payments he was getting from Uncle Mitterand.

Louis had left no will. The law allowed them to share it equally. Roger’s third put more money into his hands than he had ever possessed at one time. He spoke of replacing the furniture in the cottage, or even of buying a second-hand car, but not until the matter of his own pension was settled. “They probably wouldn’t give me a sou if they thought I could afford new furniture.”

But the matter of the furniture was soon settled to everyone’s satisfaction. A salesman arrived at La Maison des Am and enquired whether Mireille knew of anyone who wanted to buy new furniture. He was willing to take old in part payment.

“Come and have a look at mine,” said Roger.

Roger studied the salesman’s catalogue: chromium-plated tubular-steel framed wardrobes with easy-to-clean plastic surfaces, a dining table in the same style, chairs.

The salesman looked at the furniture in Roger’s cottage: a heavy hand–carved peasant wardrobe in walnut, probably early 19th century – propped up on a brick – one leg missing; a long oak dining-table, gnarled and heavily pitted by a century of use, with a deep drawer for bread; some long backless benches, all bored into by woodworm.

“Not much use,” said the salesman, “Full of woodworm.”

“That’s nothing. I’ve never got round treating the wood. But it’s not difficult,” argued Roger.

“Look,” said the salesman, “it’s old junk. But I’ll take it off your hands, if you want to be rid of it, and because sales are bad at this time of the year, I’ll charge you no more than two–thirds the catalogue· price for brand-new furniture – any you care to choose.

“Listen”, said Roger. “You take me for a fool? All those Parisians who tart up old houses want antique furniture like this. If you want to have it, you give me a complete new set of furniture – for nothing.”

The haggling went on over a bottle of wine. Then a second. At last, the salesman conceded with some show of reluctance: “But you’ll have to throw in the inglenook seat as well.”

“Only if I can have one of those padded settees in its place.”

“They’s expensive. They’re padded with extra–soft foam – a high quality article.”

“Take it or leave it.” The salesman took it.

Roger was triumphant. The salesman did not appear to be displeased either. He effected the exchange the very next morning.

The white imitation-leather settee with its gleaming chromium looked out of place in the smoke-darkened kitchen, but Roger was delighted. He wondered whether he should not have offered his grandparents’ carved crucifix in return for a deep-freeze. Perhaps he could have thrown in the carved shelf that hung from the beams? What use was it, anyway? His parents had used it to store foodstuffs out of the reach of rats, but he only kept an old tin with pencils and pens on the shelf and a pot of home-made jam that Blanche had sent him.

Roger’s triumph was short-lived. He boasted of it to clients at La Maison des Am. Among them were the two Parisians, Gilbert and Leon, who were again installing double-glazing in the neighbourhood. They demanded to know the catalogue price of his new acquisitions then did a quick calculation: “Your antiques must have been worth three or even four times as much.”

This threw Roger back into gloom. Physiotherapy was not a success. His hand was improving very slowly, if at all. Love-making was awkward and difficult. He was afraid he would lose Mireille. He started keeping a tally: how many nights had she invited Jean-Marie shared her bed? More often than him?

He still awaited a decision about his pension. All the postman brought was advertising matter: offers for book-clubs or motor-spares or lawn-mowers, but never what he was waiting for. The winter seemed interminable. The lanes were icy. He walked down them with a stick in his left hand, treading cautiously like an old man. He drank heavily. Even so, he slept badly.

One morning Mireille sat up in bed early: “Roger, you’re not much fun to sleep with these days.”

He sat up as if stung.

“You have been crying in your sleep the last few nights. And moaning. Is that wrist really so painful?”

“No.”

“Roger, if there is something worrying you, it would be better to spit it out.”

“It’s nothing. I haven’t been sleeping well for a long time.” “You didn’t do in your brother, did you?”

“Nonsense,” he laughed. He had regained his composure.

But the following days he seemed taciturn and drank even more heavily than usual. Even the Peyrols brothers complained: “You’re not your cheerful self, man. That wrist will heal. Of course it will. Stop moping.”

Among the regulars at La Maison des Am was a lorry driver who had recently lost his young wife. He had a son of 10 or 11 who now lived with his mother-in-law. During the school-holidays, however, the boy liked to accompany his father. They usually stopped at the café for lunch. Sometimes, after lunch, Roger took the boy out into the yard to play ball. The boy grew fond of Roger and would sometimes ask his father to leave him there for the afternoon and pick him up in the evening. Roger had a way with children. They always took to him. In their company, he grew cheerful.

One grey winter’s day the boy came with his father and asked to stay for a ball game. Roger said that with his damaged hand he could not play.

“You play with your left. I’ll do the same.”

“You’ll cheat. You’ll use the right when I’m not looking.”

“Okay, you can tie my right behind my back.”

The two played until dusk, then Roger brought the boy inside and bought him a lemonade. Not long after there was a phone call from the boy’s father. His lorry had had a breakdown. Could Mireille find a bed for the child for the night?

She could, but it would have to be in one of the guest rooms in the courtyard. After supper, the boy appeared to be frightened to go across the dark courtyard and to sleep alone, some distance from the brightly lit bar and dining room.

Roger said he would go with him and tell him stories.  “And when you go to sleep, I’ll put a cow–bell next to your bed. If you wake up in the night, just ring it and I’ll come, just like batman on the television.”

The story Roger told was a story he remembered his own grandfather had told his grandchildren sitting in the fireplace – come to think, in the very gnarled old oak cantou seat that Roger had bartered away for a chromium and leatherette one filled with soft foam.

It was a story about a man who had three sons, three cows, three sheep. And how many apple trees do you think he had?

In the end the child insisted on kissing Roger good night. “I always kiss my dad before I go to sleep.”

Roger came back to the bar strangely morose. He drank several rums in quick succession.

“You wish you were a Daddy?” Mireille said, looking at him with a smile.

Roger did not reply but left the bar and took his glass to one of the occupied tables. But he sat turned away from the company, and she realised that he was close to tears. She took a bottle over and sat next to him.

“What’s biting you, Roger?” she said.

“I can’t forget. I can never forget.” “What can’t you forget?”

“What I have done to little boys like him.”

Conversation stopped abruptly. Mireille was the first to break the silence:

“Could have fooled me: I thought you were otherwise inclined!”

There was some guffawing.

It took Roger several seconds to understand what she had said. He blushed and protested:

“No. No, no. Nothing like that.” “Then what?”

There was now no avoiding it. He would have to speak.

“Algeria,” he said. “That was a dirty war. Very dirty. Torture. Even children!” Mireille sounded incredulous: “You?”

He nodded.

“A little boy like that…we pumped him …”

Mireille tried to intervene: “Come and tell me about it in the kitchen. I’ve got some cooking to do.”

But he wouldn’t be stopped: it was as if two decades of silence could no longer be kept, not for one more moment:

“He wouldn’t talk. He wouldn’t, whatever they threatened him with. So – we thrust a hosepipe down his mouth and turned on the water. You can drown people like that. You don’t need a sea to drown. Each time we stopped he vomited and begged us to stop. He went down on his knees. He embraced my feet. It was terrible. But our major twisted his arm and said: “Talk, you little bastard. Talk or you’ll die. You’ll be fed to the vultures before this night is out if you don’t talk.”

“They got so excited, those majors and captains of ours, as if they were drunk.”

“He talked in the end, that lad. But he died, too. Something inside him had ruptured.”

All were now seated around Roger.

“That’s enough for one night,” said Mireille. “Come upstairs.” But her efforts were in vain. The clients were asking questions:

“How the hell did you get into this?” one of them asked.

Roger took another drink. “I’ll tell you. I didn’t volunteer, that’s for sure. It was the night I sneaked out of camp. Well, yes….” he shrugged, “to find a woman. One of those bougnouls went for me with a knife. I was too quick for him and grabbed his wrist.

There was a struggle. I made him drop the knife. I have a firm grip – or I had before this accident. I shook the bastard till his teeth rattled. Then some military police came on the scene. Help, I thought, thank God for that. And yes, they handcuffed him and roughed him up a bit. You look surprised? Bougnouls were beaten up all the time. But then they turned on me. “Name? Regiment?” I thought they only wanted me as a witness. But no: “What the hell were you doing out of camp without permission?”

“They put me under arrest. Bloody awful cell, crawling with vermin. The next day they brought me up before two officers. Smart fellows, elegant fancy uniforms and perfumed. Well spoken. They were very fierce. Why was I out at night? Had I not understood the orders posted up everywhere? Did I not realise the danger?”

“Well, I said, I wasn’t too good at reading. I hadn’t had much schooling. I thought that might get me off more lightly. I knew that they usually sent you off to a punishment post, somewhere in the desert: stinking hot, nothing but sand, nothing to drink, no women. Even water rationed. I didn’t fancy that. Not one bit. So I tried to bullshit them about not being able to read the rules.”

“All of a sudden they didn’t seem so angry anymore. They whispered among themselves, and then changed their tack: ‘So – what education have you got? Not much? Never mind. But how do you feel about those bougnouls?”‘

“Well, at that moment I wasn’t exactly in love with guys who tried to stick a knife in my ribs. ‘I’d strangle the lot,’ I said.”

“Then I thought: Hell, that won’t do me any good, because a few days before we’d all had a jawing from an officer about winning hearts and minds and all that crap. But that didn’t worry them.”

“‘You grabbed his arm, and he dropped the knife?'” “‘Well, sir, I’m strong.”‘

“They seemed to like that.”

‘”You’re a country lad: Ever castrated a pig?'”

“Sure thing.” I wondered why the hell they wanted to know that.”

“Young bulls?”

“Yes.”

“Not too squeamish, are we?” “Captain, I’m not a townee!”

They laughed at that, the perfumed bastards. “Roger,” they said … Suddenly I was Roger!  “Roger, we may have just the job for you.”

By then I was getting a bit cocky: “Deep in the Sahara?” I said.

“No,” they laughed, “right here in Oran. In our interrogation department.

I thought, anything is better than a desert posting. I didn’t know anything about their interrogation department.

Mireille interrupted: “But you always told us you had been a cook in Algeria?” “That was later: After …. after I couldn’t go on anymore. Or wouldn’t.”

She tried to signal him to stop but he persisted doggedly:

“They’d caught this kid with two revolvers strapped to his body. They said he was carrying arms to FLN (National Liberation Front, the Algerian resistance army) fighters. Sure he was. They wanted to know where the revolvers came from.  Who had given them to him? Where were the arms stored?

That’s why we pumped him full of water, the poor little bastard. Oh, he talked in the end. Most of them did. But you can’t imagine how disgusting it all was.”

“Where did he get the guns from?”

“It was the imam of one of the mosques. He’d given them to him. A mosque – that’s like a church … and the imam was their priest. He’d told the kid he’d be a hero and that he’d go to heaven, something like that. They bullshitted the kids, those bloody priests, just like our officers bullshitted us about our great civilising mission. There was blood and piss and vomit all over the floor, but that’s what they talked about: France’s civilising mission. And when we were squashing some poor bastard’s balls they told us we were … saving lives: The faster we squeezed out where arms were hidden, the more lives we saved.”

“Hold it,” said one of the clients, having poured Roger another drink. “Couldn’t you have got out … I mean: once you had found out what and how?”

“I was nineteen! Nineteen. What did I know about anything? And they’d drummed it into us all the time: a soldier’s duty is to obey orders.”

“But you hated doing it.”

Roger was silent for a moment.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I’m ashamed to say it now: Did I hate it? There was extra pay. And extra booze. And they were always telling us we were the best, the toughest, the elite. We were saving Algeria for France. Cleansing it of rotten elements. I believed them. Or I think I did, at least for a while … But don’t you bloody well interrupt! I’ve been bottling this up for 20 years, for more than 20 years. All that time I’ve had nightmares about it. All these years I haven’t slept properly.”

Mireille was about to contradict him but decided to keep quiet.

“…. So you bloody well listen now.”

Silence descended upon the group.

“Some days later our men arrested that imam … the one the kid had identified. Fine looking fellow he was, with a grey beard. He looked a bit like Maitre de Fontaine. You know …the lawyer.

‘Tear off his turban’, they said. I tore off his turban. ‘Strip him’, they said. I stripped him. It was a bad thing to do to an old man. Then they started asking him questions in French. He didn’t know any French, or so he said. Then in Arabic. Several of those officers spoke it like the fellouzes. But he wouldn’t answer.

“Beat him,” they said, and I swiped him with my fist. He was spitting blood. ‘Again,’ they said. ‘And again.’

Then he turned to me and looked at me with those big eyes of his and all of a sudden, he could speak French. And what he said – that I can never forget. It comes back to me in all my dreams.”

“What?”

“May the curse of the Almighty fall on you: may your right hand wither”

There was a moment’s silence. Mireille put her hand on his shoulder. He laughed nervously and lifted up his bandaged right arm.

“You’ll call me a fool. O.K. But perhaps that’s why my wrist won’t heal now.”

There was a moment’s silence until Mireille said: “Nonsense. For twenty years you’ve had the strongest hands in Le Peuch!”

“What happened to that Arab?” asked someone else.

“The imam? He died too … in our interrogation department. They never discovered where the revolvers were hidden. But after that, I couldn’t carry on, or I wouldn’t. Not with that curse upon me. I shouted that I wanted to look after cows, gentle cows, beautiful chestnut-coloured Salers cows – nothing else. A cow, you know, is a wonderful beast, peaceful, motherly, friendly, with kind eyes, chewing the cud, patient, giving milk to men and to her young. I wanted to look after cows. “Fuck French Algeria.” I shouted, “I want to look after cows”.

“So they sent me to hospital. I’m not stupid: I knew they would do that if I bawled long enough. And at the hospital there was a quack, a decent fellow. He listened. He asked me about the interrogation centre. I don’t think he liked what he heard. I think he liked cows too. He told me that there were blacks somewhere – I can’t remember where – who thought that a cow was holy! Anyway, he certified me as shell-shocked. In fact, I’ve never been under shellfire. I don’t think the Arabs had shells. A few bullets may have whistled past me, but not many. That’s all. What shocked me wasn’t anything those Arabs threw at us. It was our glorious French way of running the war. It was the fucking padres who blessed our arms. We were upholding Christian values, they told us. That made me vomit. And it still does.

“They didn’t know what to do with me, I guess. Perhaps they thought I’d talk to the newspapers. Well, God’s my witness, and you too, Mireille. I haven’t talked about it these 20 … more than 20 years.

“Eventually, they sent me to a camp in the Kabyle, far up the mountains, and there they made me camp cook. And later I got myself posted me to Oran – again as a cook.”

There was silence. No one dared break it until Roger himself did, suddenly relieved, laughing:

“And that’s how I became the best cook in French Algeria. Only, French Algeria didn’t last much longer. Thanks to God and thanks to the General. And I tell you: that was good riddance.”

No one had ever heard Roger talk so much.

“Oh – one more thing and then I’ll shut up: that bastard sergeant in the military police – the one who arrested me in the first place – I did get my own back on him. Later. Much later … on the boat that took us back to Marseilles. In the dark – he never knew what hit him. Out, like a sack, he was. I wanted to tip him overboard, but my mates stopped me.”

“You shouldn’t have talked so much last night,” said Mireille the following morning when he woke by her side.

He groaned.

“They’ll all be chattering about you.”

And so they did. The story of Roger’s confession did the rounds from person to person. Customers who came to La Maison Des Am insisted on calling him out of the kitchen – even when he had started peeling potatoes – to exchange reminiscences about the great days in Algeria. He, however, thought they were all asking a question, or meaning to ask a question which, in fact, none of them ever posed so precisely: Why did you agree to be a torturer?

It was the question he kept asking himself. Could I have said ‘no’? Why didn’t I? Was I taken in by their bullshit about our being the best, the toughest, the defenders of something sacred? I certainly didn’t do it for the extra booze, nor the extra pay – fuck pay!

“So why? Damn it, I must have enjoyed what I was doing. God help me, I must have enjoyed it.”

The thought made him more morose, and he drank heavily. Every visitor to the café who as much as mentioned Algeria seemed to him an accuser.

Even totally innocent remarks like “Roger, have you got a piece of hosepipe?” seemed to him an accusation until the truck-driver explained: “I have to syphon some petrol from the barrel into my tank.”

Roger stopped going to La Maison Des Am: Too many people, too many questions. He started drinking outside his own cottage. Mireille came down to try and cheer him up. If Jean-Marie was away, she even closed the café to be with Roger. Some nights she slept with him at his cottage, in the bed he had moved into the kitchen-living-room, snug, near the open fire. He was grateful to her:

“You’re a good soul.”

But he remained morose.

“See that old house over there? The one with the roof-tiles falling off? That was our schoolhouse. There were 40 kids here in those days. 40! Now there are none. The only kids left in the village – two of them – are collected by bus every morning. They get taken down to the bourg. Ah, they were good days when there was still life in this village. In those days I could still sleep.”

“You’ve got to pull out of this, Roger! You must! Come up to the café. You can peel potatoes. Or serve at the bar. You know you can do quite a lot even with your arm in a sling. You mustn’t just sit here, moping and boozing. You know that I’m a boozer myself, but I drink and I laugh. You – you drink because you’re weeping.”

“You’re a good woman,” said Roger. “And I thank you. But …” and he shrugged his shoulder.

“If I could find the bastards that got you into that business,” she said,” I’d strangle them with my own hands.”

“Oh, I know where to find … one of them, at any rate. The worst.” But despite her questions, he would not say anything more.

One day, however, he was up at the Peyrols. They had heard about his confession at second hand. Who, in the neighbourhood, had not? They had, however, always avoided the subject.

José was talking about forthcoming elections. A Monsieur Delaporte was among the candidates.

“Delaporte?” Roger asked, ” Could that be Captain Didier Delaporte? The chatelain from Ste. Charmaine?

“Chatelain? I thought he was a businessman,” said José, “Big business. Stinking rich.”

“Could still be the same man,” said Old Pépé. “Someone told me that family owned a chateau not far away.”

“That’s him alright, the bastard.”

“You know him?”

“Sure. Only too well. He was one of my officers in Algeria. One of the worst: smart, perfumed fop. ‘Interrogating officers’ they were called. A sarcastic bastard. I used to think he perfumed himself because he couldn’t stand the stink of the vomit and the piss. But apart from the smell, he really enjoyed the job. He enjoyed playing cat and mouse with those poor fellouzes. Can I ever forget the name? “Listen, you bastard, I’m Captain Delaporte. You will answer my questions, every single one of them, because if you don’t I will open the ‘porte’ to the next world for you, as sure as my name is Delaporte.”

“When I wouldn’t carry on – before they carted me off to hospital – he called me in and he said: “You’re a disappointment to me, man. You’re a country lad, like me. Look upon it as mucking out, yes, mucking out … cleaning Algeria of all that’s rotten and filthy…”

José exploded: “Don’t let him come asking for my vote!”

And his brother Nicholas added: “I bet that bastard doesn’t have sleepless nights.”

“Him? Not bloody likely. When he ordered us to get rid of …” And he made a vague gesture. “… he called it mucking out the stable – that’s what he called it.”

“So why should you let it disturb your sleep. You were a soldier, obeying orders. It was he who gave those orders.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps if I were a chatelain …”

One night the two Parisians, Gilbert and Leon, were at La Maison des Am again. In the depth of winter their firm offered generous discounts for anyone who wanted to instal awnings or blinds. They had been working in the neighbourhood, but fog and ice had stopped them driving home. They never seemed to mind: If they dossed down in a cheap place like Mireille’s, they could make money on the firm’s overnight allowance. They sat drinking with Roger long after dinner, talking about their favourite subject – food. From steaks the conversation drifted to beef and beef cattle. They demanded to know why shrewd hard-bitten businessmen like Pépé Peyrols continued to raise Salers cattle – cattle which needed so much more labour than other breeds.  Robert waxed enthusiastic about the beautiful chestnut-coloured cattle of the region. He even burst into song about cattle in the old Auvergnat tongue. They pleaded with him to stop: his voice was not melodious. He persisted, amidst much laughter, and tried to teach them the refrain. They found the harsh alien language difficult to echo, and – unlike Roger – could not sing out of tune so enthusiastically. Eventually, when he got up to go home, they saw that he was staggering.

“We’ll walk you home,” they said. “It’s icy out there. You might fall.”

He said he did not need any help.

“What if you break that arm of yours again? Besides, we can see Mireille wants to close and we need another drink. Have you got any booze at home?”

“Have I any booze at home?” he said, “I’ve got a whole cellar full … Not just the usual plonk: I’ve got Bordeaux, Beaujolais, Cahors, and spirits: Pastis, rum, whisky … anything your heart can possibly desire.”

“You’re having us on, Roger.”

“Well, come and see.”

They looked puzzled. “How did you get all this?” Gilbert asked. “Is it the money you inherited from your brother?”

“Shhhhhh,” he said. “It’s a secret. A deadly secret.”

So the three of them staggered down the icy road, hanging on to each other and singing the refrain he had tried to teach them. At one point Roger fell. The road was very slippery.

“Look at the sky,” he said, lying on the ground. “One can see all the stars. Beautiful, aren’t they? You don’t see that in the city, do you?  It’s going to snow. I can tell.”

They had some difficulty helping him up. He was heavy. But no, he had not hurt his arm. They marched on, singing.

Roger’s house was cold. The fire in the cantou had gone out. He opened the trapdoor to climb down into the cellar. They peered down and although it was dark they could see that he did indeed have as large hoard down there. He returned with two bottles of Bordeaux, one in his undamaged hand, the other tucked in his shirt.

They re-lit the fire in the “cantou”. There was a little dry firewood stacked under the new settee. Then they drank the first bottle. Roger fell asleep on the settee after the second glass.

“Shall we light the cooker?” said Gilbert. “That will warm the room up.” Roger stirred: “Don’t be silly: butane costs money. Just get a good fire going.”

And he dozed off again.

They were townsmen and they were puzzled. In the cottage there were two cookers – one ran off a butane cylinder: that was for use in summer. The other burnt firewood and was normally kept burning all winter. That took the chill off the house. But Roger had spent the last few nights at La Maison Des Am and the woodstove had gone out. Then there was the cantou – the open fireplace.

Presumably it was in the cantou that he wanted a good fire. He was fast asleep, and they did not want to wake him to ask.

They picked him up and carried him to bed, then took off his jacket and trousers. They left him in his underclothes, then piled bedding on top of him.  He was snoring.

They went outside to look for more firewood. They found some stacked under a plastic sheet.

“It’s going to freeze tonight. Pile it high.”

They left Roger in a deep sleep – dreamless, for once. They closed the door behind them and made their way back along the icy road to La Maison Des Am.

They were townsmen. Any child brought up in the country would have spotted that there were three different piles of firewood stacked in the yard. One had been cut to short lengths to fit into the firebox of a stove. The second had been prepared for an open “cantou” – each piece cut to stretch over the two firedogs and a little longer – to overhang by a hand’s breadth but no more than a hand’s breadth: Cut to the right length, the fire will eat away the centre of the piece leaving the two remaining outer pieces to fall inwards. This way they will burn safely. If the logs are too long, the weight of the unburnt overhangs would make them tip outwards. And who knows where they might roll?

The third pile in Roger’s yard was of long, unsplit logs, wet wood waiting to be cut to size. He had not been able to prepare it because of his broken arm.

It was from this last pile that Gilbert and Leon took logs and piled them high over the fire. The logs overlapped the firedogs by a foot or more on each side.

Any country-bred child would have known that the higher you pile the logs, the greater the risk of their rolling off.

Gilbert and Leon piled them high – to keep Roger snug, they thought.

The inevitable happened: the fire ate away the centre of two logs. The ends tipped outwards and rolled off the raised hearth. One smouldering log came to rest below the settee. It was the chromium-framed settee which Roger had taken in exchange for his antique carved wooden cantou bench. The settee – short enough to fit into the inglenook – was covered with plastic simulated to look like leather and filled with an inflammable foam. The simulated leather started smouldering. A minute or two later the foam burst noisily into flame. Flames spread to a flowered curtain which hid some shelves where Roger and Louis had kept their pots and pans. From there the fire spread to Roger’s bed. The mattress – also new and also inflammable foam – caught fire.

The roar of the burning settee frightened the cat. She miaowed and fled through the cat-door. The noise she made caused Roger to stir but did not wake him. Not until his mattress caught fire and thereafter his underclothes did he wake. The sudden pain roused him out of his drunken state. He gazed around, unable to take in what was happening. For a moment he imagined it was a nightmare. Then he realised the danger, jumped out of bed and began to strip off his smouldering underclothes. The calves of his legs were already scorched. Stripping off the underpants was painful and took a while. Perhaps it was only seconds, but even that was too long. The floorboards around the bed were aflame. They had had a century or more to dry out and they burnt only too well. Roger stumbled towards the door, giving the settee – burning now with high flames – as wide a berth as he could. His left foot went through a burning floorboard, but his right had firmer support and he managed to jump clear. He had almost reached the door when there was a sudden explosion. A ball of fire engulfed the entire room.

The village was asleep. A lone driver, half a mile away on the new road, saw the flames – now twice the height of the house – and turned off into the village. No one was stirring. He knocked at the door of the neighbouring cottage, but that had stood empty for nearly twenty years. Next, he rushed downhill to the old school-house. He knocked and shouted, but no one answered. The schoolhouse, too, had been abandoned many years earlier. His third attempt was more successful: he managed to rouse Madame Parlange. She had no phone but rushed over to Madame Couderc, shook her awake and made her phone the fire-brigade in the bourg. Despite the late hour it took the captain less than ten minutes to assemble his volunteers. They had often trained for such emergencies but had seldom had occasion to practise their skills. However, by the time they reached Le Peuch – even though they sped dangerously up the steep road winding through the forest – there was little they could do. The heat of the fire was so intense that they could not get close to the cottage.

The villagers, roused by Madame Parlange, had already thrown a few buckets of water in the general direction of the fire. That had made no impact on it. The fire-brigade had foam extinguishers but accomplished little more – except hissing and steam. The century-old beams and roof-joists were burning furiously. Part of the roof had collapsed. Glowing tiles were cascading down into the snow, forcing the firemen to draw further back. The tiles hissed as they hit the snow, leaving dark, melting patches which disfigured the smooth white slope.

The snow and the low clouds reflected the red of the flames and showed up the tears on the faces of the villagers.

Nobody went back to sleep that night. The firemen and the villagers stood around helplessly. All they could do was to water the three separate stacks of firewood piled up in the yard in front of the cottage. At least that stopped the fire spreading. Just before dawn, it started snowing again but nobody left the scene. Shortly after, as dawn broke, the firemen found they could get close enough to pump water on to what remained of the massive burning oak beams.

They then saw that the floorboards had given way, as had the beams that had supported the floor: the fridge, the two stoves and other heavy metallic junk had fallen into the cellar. The stoves were glowing red amidst the smouldering fallen beams. By their side lay a red-hot metal cannister, blown open like an orange hit with a heavy hammer.

“There!” said one of the firemen: “Just as I thought: the butane cylinder. When one of those explodes, it’s like a bomb. Then you don’t stand an earthly.”

It was several hours later – the wintry sun was already high in the sky – when they eventually managed to penetrate the cellar. There they found Roger’s charred body. The fridge had fallen on it. Its weight appeared to have broken his right arm again.

MIREILLE.

She sat on a log and gazed at the ruin. The firemen had kept her at a distance until they had carried what remained of Roger away on a stretcher. They had expected hysterics, but not a sound escaped her. She pulled at cigarette after cigarette, tossing them away after a few puffs, and stared at the ruin: a skeleton of a house without a roof. The beams that had supported the roof had collapsed and fallen and were smouldering in the cellar.

Her face looked puffed up and older than her forty-two years. A little while later Jean-Marie came down from the café. He, too, said nothing but stood behind her, placed a hand upon her shoulder and wept quietly.

“The good die young”, she said after a while. And a minute or two later she added: “And the bloody sods live on and on.”

She was remembering another death: Luc’s.

How she had bawled then. But she had only been – how old? Twenty or twenty-one? Experience had taught her since then. Tears no longer showed.

She accepted a cigarette which Jean-Marie had lit for her.

Luc! He had rescued her from life at her grandmother’s. How she had resented it when her parents went off to Spain and dumped her with the old woman … “to get a good French education.” She had hated the school, the village, the grandmother’s house. Only other old hags ever came there, and they spent all day grumbling about their neighbours, or about their varicose veins. Not that there was much to gossip about in that sleepy fishing-village. Nothing ever happened.

Work, after she left school, had been as bad: eight hours of operating a fish-canning machine: One repetitive movement, hour after hour, until the hooter sounded. The only breaks were furtive visits to the toilet for a smoke. She still shuddered at the thought of those reeking dustbins piled high with fish innards which were stored at the end of the shed. There were women who had been degutting fish in that factory for twenty years!

To escape, to shower, to dress up and go to the café where the young congregated – that was the only break she ever had. That is until they opened the “foyer rural” where – big deal! – there was a fortnightly hop. The pompous old mayor had explained at the opening that it had been built “to keep our young happy” so that they would not “escape to the bright lights of the cities”.

Even at the dances – all scrubbed and painted and even perfumed – you could still smell the fish on the hands of the factory girls.

She quarrelled with her grandmother and the old lady’s cronies. She had overheard them gossiping about one of the girls in the factory who appeared to be pregnant.

“She’s a good-natured soul – straight and honest – not a foul-mouthed snooper like some ….” she had shouted.

“An uncouth girl,” said one of the old ladies. “Ill-bred,” said the other.

Grandmother was furious with Mireille, but their criticism forced her on the defensive: “Temperamental, excitable. I think she misses her parents.”

Next morning Mireille realised, she should have controlled her temper and apologised to her grandmother. She could hardly have remained in the house without making peace. But what she really wanted was to escape at the earliest opportunity.

Yet she had been luckier than most: She was not short of money, unlike most of her friends. Her parents were raking it in Spain, and they were not mean. Perhaps they felt guilty for having dumped her with the old woman. So, thanks to a generous allowance to add to her own earnings, Mireille could dress well. On Saturday mornings she would take the bus to the nearest town and search the boutiques.

Luc dressed very elegantly – but then – he was a travelling salesman in men’s clothes. He knew all about the fashion business: about both men’s and women’s fashions.

The girls in the factory had talked about him even before she first met him: his good looks, his smart clothes, his flashy sportscar. His parents kept the tobacconist’s shop in the village, and he came back from time to time to visit them.

At one mid-summer dance he came up to Mireille and asked her for a dance. “You’re a smart little dresser,” he said. It was one of his ways of chatting up the girls. She didn’t take it very seriously. But he danced with her most of the evening. After that he started coming to the village almost every weekend, sometimes driving large distances to get there. He invited her for drives along the coast in his sportscar and to the nearest town.

He had no real home, he explained to her: He was constantly on the move, staying with friends or business acquaintances or dossing down in commercial travellers’ hotels. He had to cover all of Eastern France. He knew all the smartest clothes-shops.

“And all the prettiest salesgirls?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Sounds a wonderful life to me: seeing new things, new people, staying in hotels, eating in restaurants. Me – I’m just stuck in this dump.”

“Don’t you ever get out?”

“I do: Once a year. I go to Spain for my holidays. But that’s just another dump, the place where my parents have their café.”

“I bet all those hot-blooded Spaniards are after you.”

“I never see anyone. I do the washing up, while my mum gives herself airs: ‘Madame la patronne’.”

“Why don’t you come travelling with me?”

She laughed: “And give up my job? Be your kept woman?” “You’ll help me make more money!”

“How’s that? Are you’re going to send me out streetwalking?”

He was embarrassed – but not for the reason she thought.

Somewhat hesitantly he explained that his commission-earnings had dropped of late. His employers were grumbling. But they had not caught on to the real reason: he took Friday afternoons off to cross France to be with her. And sometimes he didn’t get back to his patch till Monday afternoon. Moreover, in the past, he had done his paperwork over weekends, stuck in some miserable commercial travellers’ hotel. Now he did it during the week when he might have been selling.

“So you see – it would be good for my career – and my earnings – if you came along. Mireille, I’ve fallen for you. And badly!”

Later that evening he came back to the subject: “You could do my paperwork, my accounts. I’d show you how.”

And that was how they started their life together as nomads. He worked hard all day. She had little to do. But he had friends in every town, and she often stayed with them. If not, she sat in cafés, smoking and reading journals. She liked doing his accounts in a café, watching the world go by. There were parties and dances and invitations to meals and evenings spent in restaurants. And there were nights and mornings of lovemaking; sometimes whole weekends spent in bed. He even ordered up meals to their bedroom!

She found the itinerant life exhilarating. Seldom sleeping enough; always on the go; always seeing new places and new people. Occasionally, she had her doubts whether they could keep this up indefinitely. But it was not easy to get Luc to talk seriously. He made light of all problems. They were having fun – weren’t they? Why worry about tomorrow?

One night, however, Luc became a little maudlin. It was after an evening with a former colleague from his firm:

“Poor old bastard!” he said, “They fired him last year: Too old, they said, to sell young fashions. So there he is now – still dragging himself around, selling – haberdashery! Darning needles. Mending wool. That’s how I’ll end up at 40 …  unless”

“Unless what?”

“Unless I get a settled job, a flat, a family. I could manage a menswear shop, even start one of my own one day. I know the trade.”

As it turned out, that never happened.

Not many weeks later Mireille found herself pregnant. For a while she kept it to herself, being uncertain how he would react. If she had the child, it would surely be the end of their free-and-easy life. Would he want her to have an abortion? Or if she insisted on having the child, would he get bored with her breastfeeding a brat?

But she could not hide the matter indefinitely: after a morning of vomiting, she owned up.

His face lit up. He was delighted.

“That’s it now. That’s made up my mind for me: Now, we must settle down. I’ll put it about among all my contacts that I want a job, a stationary job. But let’s get married first.”

She reproached herself for ever having doubted him.

 They prepared for the wedding. They would have it in his parents’ village. They would invite friends from all over France. What a party that would be! That sleepy hollow of a fishing village would not have seen anything like it – never before! Her parents would come from Spain – and they would cart in crates of champagne. After all, they got it wholesale. How the girls from the factory would envy her! And her grandmother’s old cronies – that would teach them a lesson: they had all tut-tutted when she first announced that she was going to travel with Luc … bloody old busybodies!

For the new season Luc’s firm had equipped him with another sports-car – even more gorgeous than the last. It was good for the firm’s image as purveyors of elegant, expensive fashion clothes. The village would gawp!

But it was spring – the height of the season for Luc. He spoke of postponing the marriage until the summer when sales slackened off. But by then her belly would be an embarrassment and give the old cronies plenty to gossip about. Moreover, her parents would not be able to come during the tourist season. They had started with a small café for French fishermen who worked off the Spanish coast. But times had changed: International tourism was growing and with it the demand for French cuisine. Maman had engaged an interior designer to remodel the place and later a Parisian cook. In the old days the café had never had a name. Now it sported a signboard in red, white and blue: “Le Seizieme”. Her mother had exchanged her blue-grey smock for a tailored costume and her greying hair for a blue rinse. She no longer did the cooking but sat enthroned at the reception desk. She now explained the sophistication of French cuisine, even in Spanish, well, Spanish of sorts. No, her parents could not possibly leave their place in summer.

So, a spring wedding it was, even though Luc would only be able to take off one long weekend.

But what a weekend it was! They danced all night, and drank champagne, and everybody said what a beautiful couple they made and raised their glasses to them as they danced. Telegrams from Luc’s friends and customers were read out between dances.

It was almost dawn when they gave up and piled into their cars. The entire cortège toured around the village and around the lanes outside and even the nearer neighbouring villages: once, twice, three times, sounding their hooters. Some say this is an alien custom brought in by the pieds noirs from Algeria, but the local youngsters adopted it with enthusiasm, mainly because it infuriated the old folk. Lights went on in the houses. Old women in lace nightcaps opened shutters and cackled: “Can’t get a wink of sleep! Louts!

Louts!” But then – old harridans only live to grumble, don’t they? It was certainly a night everybody would remember!

There was a lot of waving and signalling from car to car and people shouting: “Where do we get a cup of coffee?”

“And a chaser!”

“Old Rolland won’t be open.”

“Of course he will, there’s a train at 5.30”. “Well, it’s not yet five.”

In the end all those who had lasted stopped at the station café. It was not yet open, but the proprietor was awake, shaving upstairs. He peered own suspiciously from an   upstairs window.

“Mireille and Luc, is it? Well, for you two, I’ll open up. Why I’ve known those kids since they were toddlers”

He busied himself with his coffee-machine, still tucking his shirt into his trousers. “And what are you all going to do today – go to bed and sleep it all off?”

“Well, they may go to bed, but sleep?” joked one of the lads.

“Others may go to bed,” said Luc, “the lucky bastards. But Mireille and I must drive back to Tours. Some of us have work to do!”

He was slurring his words.

“Listen,” said Old Rolland, “Take an old friend’s advice. You’ve had a lot to drink. And good luck to you. Go and sleep it off. Drive to Tours tomorrow.”

“I’d love to, but I can’t. Got to make money: Have a wife to support – and 24 kids…” And he laughed.

The others joined in, trying to persuade him not to drive.  “Why so greedy? Relax, – what’s one day!”

“Listen, I’ve got the best and safest car in the world. And I’m the best and safest of drivers.”

“Well, one of the fastest at any rate,” said one of the lads.

Nothing they said could dissuade him. Mireille didn’t try. She had enormous confidence in him. He could do anything he put his mind to … even drive at 120 km an hour while high on champagne.

They collected their suitcases – hadn’t they lived out of suitcases for over a year – and set off in style with their friends cheering and wishing them well.

For the rest of her life Mireille blamed herself for saying, a quarter of an hour later: “Mind if I take a snooze?” He lowered the backrest for her. Had she stayed awake, could she, perhaps, have prevented what happened?

He drove at speed and with great confidence, cutting corners when he could see that the road was clear, overtaking lorries near the crest of hills. What a car! With such acceleration, he could always pull clear of oncoming traffic. Soon he would reach the autoroute. There he would really put the engine to work.

On a long straight stretch, he hit 150 km. He did not see the sign warning him that a sharp curve was ahead. Perhaps he nodded off. Perhaps he was lighting a cigarette. Perhaps it was only that his attention wandered for a moment.

The car smashed through the flimsy barrier, careered at full speed down the hill, hit a tree on the driver’s side, turned over on its side and slid down the hill. Mireille was thrown through the windscreen and knocked unconscious. When she recovered and had wiped the blood from her eyes, she crawled towards the car to look for Luc.

When the ambulancemen reached them, they found her cradling his bleeding head and sobbing: “No, no, no.”

She knew, and the ambulancemen confirmed, that he was dead, quite dead. He had broken his neck.

She started shouting: “But we’ve only been married one day, not even one day” – as if to persuade the heavens that such a fate was unjust, insupportable – and would simply have to be reversed. “Not even one day!” But the heavens had other ideas of justice – or none.

The surgeon at the hospital who stitched up her lacerated face said: “Pity, she must have been an attractive girl….” And although he had only just been roused from sleep, he worked with skill and care.

Her state of mind was such that they kept her under heavy sedation for several days. She kept demanding whether there was really nothing they were able to do for Luc – even days after he had been buried. Friends – and she had made many – drove all the way from Brittany to spend half-an-hour by her bedside. Business friends and colleagues of Luc’s came from other parts of France to see her. Her face was wrapped in bandages and they had difficulty in understanding what she mumbled behind her wrappings. In fact, she kept repeating: “What about Luc?” And they had to reassure her that he was, alas, dead, really dead – and had been buried several days previously.

The hospital sent for a priest, but she shouted that there was no goodness in God, none at all, and refused to listen to what he had to say in defence of the divinity.

It was over a week later, when a doctor was examining the facial stitches to see how they were healing, that she said: “What about the baby?”

It was only then that they realised that she was pregnant. The foetus had survived the accident. There were tests … and more tests. Finally, they told her that the pregnancy appeared to be proceeding normally. There was no reason to suppose that it would not be a healthy child.

Her common sense told her it was madness to go through with the pregnancy – to have a child without a man, without a job, without an income, and in her state of mind. But the foetus had survived the accident. The baby wanted to live. Did she?

“You’ve got to live,” Luc’s old boss told her, “You’ve got to live to have Luc’s son.”

Neither she nor he seemed to have any doubt that it would be a boy; that he would have Luc’s good looks, his charm, his generosity and would, somehow, compensate her for the loss of the father.

It was a girl – born in the brand-new hospital of a Spanish fishing-village turned fashionable holiday resort.

Her mother had appeared while Mireille was still in a state of shock, unable to decide what she wanted to do, and had spirited her off to Spain. A season or two earlier her parents had vacated the cramped rooms above the restaurant – they had been given over to the new French chef – and had built themselves a villa on the hill overlooking the harbour. It was one of those houses selected from a catalogue. But – as Maman explained to all who would listen – they had fitted superior tiles in the shower-rooms and parquet in place of terrazzo in the lounge. Of course, it cost extra.

Mireille regarded it all with indifference, even distaste·. But there was a spare room with its own balcony for her, and another smaller one for the child. Hour after hour she sat on the balcony staring out to sea, at the yachts in the harbour and the sports cars on the quay. Her mother’s attempts to occupy her in the restaurant had little success. Nor did she show much interest in the little girl. Perhaps if it had been a boy, she would have seen resemblances to Luc.

In the end, her mother hired a Spanish nursemaid – a warm and generous soul called Assunta – who loved the baby girl and enjoyed caring for her.

“You have to get back into life, Mireille. You never see a soul”, her mother pleaded. “Come and work as cashier, just a few hours a day.”

Mireille agreed at long last. She was nervous about her appearance: but her scars had started to fade. She was no longer ‘a sight’. In fact, men were starting to show an interest in her.

There was a Frenchman who kept a large yacht in the harbour – a rotund middle-aged building-contractor from Bayonne who smoked big cigars.

“He’s interested in you, I think. He’s been coming much more often since you’ve come”, said her mother.

“Yeah,” sniffed Mireille, “looks like he’s trying to get his pudgy fingers up my skirt.”

Maman looked pained. “He is wealthy. And a widower.”

“So?”

“You should give some thought to your own future.” “I have. And I sure couldn’t bear his weight!”

“I don’t know. I really don’t: We didn’t bring you up to be so – coarse.”

“And what’s come over you?” replied Mireille, “you never gave yourself such airs in the days when you were scrubbing floors for the mayor’s wife.”

There followed weeks of near silence between mother and daughter. Mireille’s brief rejoinders had an earthiness designed to irritate her mother and to deflate her grande-dame airs.

One regular customer – a Spanish aristocrat (or so he seemed to be) with near-perfect French came to dine frequently bringing a succession of handsome young men friends. Mother addressed him as “Monsieur le marquis” and when she led him to his table, she carried the menu as if she bore a sceptre before him. Mireille laughed: It reminded her of the village mayor’s wife, back in Brittany, conducting a visiting prefect towards a ribbon he was to cut.

“Monsieur le marquis” was popular with the waiter. He tipped generously. So, Mireille always handed the bill to a waiter to present. One evening, after a tiff with her mother, she called to the waiter: “Bill for the gay at table six”.

Maman was livid: “He might have heard! Of course, he would never show it – he is such a gentleman. But you! How can you?”

She was finding the relationship with her daughter increasingly intolerable. If only she would go back to France – preferably without fuss. But Mireille’s father would have none of it. He was a kindly soul, somewhat astonished by his own financial success. He had, after all, started off as a fisherman himself.  He was somewhat embarrassed by his wife’s newly acquired grand airs. But, more relevantly, he adored his little grand-daughter and would have done anything he could to prevent Mireille taking her away.

After several weeks of tense near–silence, it was Mireille herself who brought the matter to a head. One morning she joined her parents at breakfast – the first time she had done so for a while. Over the second cup of coffee, she asked abruptly: “If I were to go back to France, would you look after the kid?”

Her mother was the first to recover from her surprise: “Assunta would,” she replied, and thought to herself: “And give the poor child far more maternal care than you ever would.”

“Right then, Maman, I’m off. Thanks for everything…”

Mireille had hoped that Luc’s former employer would give her a job. When he had come to see her in hospital, shortly after the accident, he had said something about taking over Luc’s patch. But in the intervening months this had been taken over by someone else. The best he could find her now, he said, was a telephonist’s job at his Paris headquarters “only until something better turns up, of course.”

But Mireille gave her notice after only two weeks. “I’m bored: I never see a soul here!”

She found herself a job as a barmaid in a run-down, narrow street in the Marais. It was one of those old-fashioned bars with a zinc counter, pitted by more than a century of glasses and bottles and fists banged down. It had seen angry fists in 1871, in 1914, in 1936 and again in 1940, but nowadays no one could tell which world event had provoked which indentation. There were also a few worn cast iron tables with walnut tops. The gentrification creeping over the quarter had not yet reached that narrow alley.

“So your folk run a place like this in Spain?” asked Marcel, the boss. He was a kindly old man, married to a fat, maternal woman who only descended the steep stairs from the flat above each evening to cash up.

Mireille smiled. “Le Seizieme” could hardly have been more different. Perhaps she liked Chez Marcel precisely because it was so unlike her mother’s pretentious establishment.

She was popular with the customers. They were mainly working men who came in for a glass of red and sometimes a hard-boiled egg or even a slice of bread with country ham.

One of the younger ones tried to date her, but she put him off with a joke: “You wouldn’t want a girl under the age of consent, would you now? I’ll come when I’m 16.” And when she went down to the cellar to bring up more wine Marcel, the patron, explained that she had been recently widowed – “on the morning after her wedding!” And they were sympathetic and said: “She’s a good sort, she is.”

At night the custom changed: prostitutes who worked the area around the Rue St. Denis dropped in. And with them, too, Mireille managed to establish an easy relationship.

Old Marcel was popular with “the girls”. He neither judged them, nor exploited them. And it seemed that all the rest of the world did one or the other.

With “the girls” – some of them over 50 – came men who lived off their earnings: often handsome men, always worldly wise, cynical.

They tried to recruit Mireille. “What are you doing here … earning pennies. I can fix you up …”

“Me?” she laughed. “You going blind, poor man? What you need is someone pretty … Pity about you. But I have a friend who trains guide–dogs.”

Of course, she was doing herself down. She did look older than her 22 years, and a bit battered. But her facial scars had faded, and her figure was shapely. There was something about her that attracted men: The eyes she opened wide as she listened to them – as if naively astonished; her bawdy wit which made them think she was easy and available. She was not. She certainly drew male customers into Old Marcel’s bar.

And then Raoul came in.

His hair was dark, his hawk-nose strong, his manner masterly, even when he only ordered a drink or called for his bill. He had some of Luc’s confident way with people and was usually surrounded by cronies who listened to his anecdotes, often salacious. That, too, appealed to Mireille, who was herself striving to sound hard-bitten, cynical, and older than she was.

After one or two visits, he stopped coming in the evening. “Too many pimps,” he said and started visiting in the early afternoon. He asked Mireille about her home and her parents. He stood her an occasional drink. One day he asked her to the cinema.

Old Marcel shook his head while he and Mireille were clearing up. “I’d give that fellow a wide berth if I were you,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because – how can I put it – he’s one of … of them.”

“Nonsense. He says he won’t come in the evenings because there are too many pimps here.”

“Perhaps he’s afraid of competition?”

Mireille smiled. Who would have thought it? The old man was jealous! She had believed that his kindness, his protective attitude, were those of a father. You never know with those old codgers!

She accepted Raoul’s invitations. She wondered vaguely how he had so much time to spare during the day. He explained that he was a firefighter. He was on duty at the oddest hours. He told her of rescues he had accomplished – spectacular acts of courage. He had risked his life to carry people and valuables out of burning buildings. He talked a lot about himself, but he was also able to listen sympathetically. She told him about her marriage, her family, her child. He took her out of town for pleasant meals in open-air restaurants. They had been going out for several weeks before he suggested that she might spend the night at his place.

After all, why not? She had been celibate for a year-and-a-half. Luc would not have expected her to become a nun.

Raoul was hungry as a lover and demanding. His lovemaking was rough.

Next morning she made coffee. She carried in the tray, naked. He took her in his arms again.

“That’s a pretty fancy apartment you’ve got here,” she said later, looking around, a little puzzled. “It’s like something on the television!”

He hastened to explain: “A fireman can make a lot on the side. Whenever there’s a fire or a flood, I tip off one of my mates who’s an insurance assessor. He gets the business, and he gives me a cut. That’s what makes it worthwhile being a fireman.”

Since Luc’s death, she had been drifting. Life had been pointless, disorganised. She gladly accepted Raoul’s guidance. He decided which films they were to see. He said where they were to go dancing, and where they were to eat.

One day, several weeks after they had become lovers, he suggested that she give up her job. She demurred: “No. I don’t want to be a kept woman.”

A few weeks earlier he had bought a second-hand sports-car “so that we can get some fresh air”. It wasn’t as elegant as Luc’s last. Nor was he as furious a driver. When she had a weekend off, he drove her into the country and found some beauty spot where they could picnic and, if possible, make love under the sky.

He made her generous gifts. One day he brought a fur-coat. When she protested it was too expensive a gift, he said he had received it as a present from a rich old lady. He had rescued her from the fifth floor of a burning building. He had carried her over his shoulder – down the ladder. But oh, had she squealed! But when he’d brought her on to solid ground she had calmed down. She had realised that she owed her life to him. Next day she had taken this coat out of her safe-deposit and had given it to him.

“She thought Persian lamb was your style?”

“No,” he said. “She gave it to me ‘for the woman I love’.”

Mireille accepted.

He told her many stories about his heroism in the midst of conflagration and the gratitude of those whose lives he had saved – mainly women. Mireille raised her eyebrow once or twice, but he swore he was not exaggerating. Not in the least.

They had been sleeping together some six weeks when, one morning, he said: “Mireille, I haven’t been able to sleep.”

She had not noticed it.

“I’ve got problems.”

“Can you tell me?”

“That car … I owe money on it. I borrowed it from Paul and he’s dunning me for payment. He’s a good friend, but …”

“So – what can we do?”

“Not we. You.”

“I?”

“Yes. He’s taken a tremendous fancy to you, and he says he’ll forget about the debt if …”

“If what?”

“Well, it seems terrible to make such demands on you…” “You know I’d do anything to help you…”

“He wants to sleep with you.”

There was a long silence. Then she refused:

“What do you take me for? If you cared for me, even one jot, how could you?”

“I know, I know,” he said, “I’m only telling you what Paul said. Of course, I understand. We’ll just give the car back. Nothing more to be said. Of course, there’ll not be any more weekends in the country. Mind you, even when I give it back, I’ll still be owing Paul money. I won’t get back the full purchase price. But what the hell.”

There was a long silence. They eyed each other.

It can’t be, she thought. It simply can’t be that old Marcel was right after all. Raoul didn’t conform to her image of ‘one of those’.

“Just once?” she said. ” You’re sure that’s all he wants?” He nodded.

“Let him come.”

After all, it wasn’t a holy sacrament. After all, she liked it. And Paul was not repugnant, not at all. She would put up with him – for one night.

The morning after, Raoul appeared. Paul had gone but she was still in bed. She felt awkward, but Raoul was all smiles, kissed her, then kissed her again for getting him out of a fix. He brought her coffee in bed, which he had never done before. Then he sat her down on his leopard-skin settee and poured a glass of champagne for her, and one for himself. After the second glass he said:

“There’s another guy I’d like you to meet. He badly wants to get to know you. I’ll bring him around tonight.”

There was a long silence as Mireille gazed at him. So that was it.

She got up, slowly, from his leopard-skin settee, walked to the mantlepiece and picked up the figurine of a near-naked Grecian lady. Slowly and deliberately, she walked back towards him, took a long swipe and smashed it in his face:

“You fucking bastard,” she shouted.

He retreated, startled. He was bleeding from a cut, his left eye almost blinded by blood.

She picked up one of his tapestry-covered dining-chairs, 2nd Empire reproduction, and charged at him, bringing it down on his head.

He fled. All his macho courage had deserted him. At the door, however, he turned: “You bloody bitch.” He shouted. “I’ll get my own back. You’ll see. I’ll carve you up.”

She threw an ashtray after him. It missed, but he ran, leaving his apartment to her.

She bolted the door behind him and proceeded methodically to wreck the place. She was as angry for having let herself be taken in as she was with him. She smashed his plates, cups, saucers, jugs. She found a hammer under the sink and gave special attention to the crystal glass which, she knew, he was particularly proud of. Then she turned to his corner bar with its fancy liqueurs – armagnac, Prune vieille, green Chartreuse.

“He didn’t get those working as a fireman,” she shouted, and smashed them against the wall, then trod the broken glass and the sticky liqueur into his carpets.

An hour later, dressed and her fury deflated, she felt cold and frightened. She hid the hammer in the pocket of her raincoat and left his apartment. She expected to be waylaid and to have to fight her way out. But there was no one within sight.

She went straight to old Marcel, her boss. “O.K.” she said. “You were right, and I was wrong. He is a bloody pimp.”

“We’re going to have trouble,” said Marcel after she had told him her story. “I know the type. I wish you’d listened to me in the first place.”

And indeed, trouble started that very evening.

As she left the café after work, she found Raoul waiting outside together with Paul and another henchman.

“There she is, the little bitch,” she heard him call. “Now for a little punishment.”

She fled back to Marcel’s protection. He thought for a moment, bolted the door, grumbled again about her not listening to him, then picked up the phone.

A short while later one of their regular clients appeared: Albert, a tough looking fellow. She had always disliked him without quite knowing why. Marcel let him in and spoke to him in a low voice. Albert nodded, grinned, and turned to Mireille: “Leave all that to us. Don’t you worry your pretty little head.”

Watching from an upstairs window – Marcel had put out the light before opening the shutters – she saw him walk up to Raoul and his mates. They were leaning against the lamppost at the corner, smoking. She could not hear what he said but after a minute she saw Raoul and company slope off down the road.

A short while later Albert came back, knocked at the downstairs door, and said to Marcel: “I think you’ll not have any more trouble with that lot. But if any of them should need a reminder, just buzz me, even if they are only seen hanging round your pub, or around Mireille’s place, I’ll be along … and I’ll bring some of our friends.”

“What’s all this about?” asked Mireille after he had departed.

“Look, my dear, I’ve been paying those fellows protection money for twelve years. This is the first time I’ve ever asked for their help.”

Mireille thought such things only happened in films.

“Well,” said Marcel, smiling, “you’ve had a sheltered upbringing. It’s a wicked world. Stick around. You’ll learn.”

She did. Fast.  When she woke up the next morning after a night of disturbed sleep, she swore to herself that no man was ever going to exploit her again. Never again. She was not going lose her head over any other Raoul. From now on, if there was to be any exploiting, it would be her doing it.

The year was 1968.

Even the narrow medieval alleys of the Marais heard the echo of events.

Students from the Sorbonne marched along the Rue de Rivoli to the Place de Bastille. They sang. They chanted slogans.

Mireille stood among the crowd on the pavements and watched, puzzled. So, this is where the action is! Here things were really happening.

Even in Marcel’s little pub, crowds of students turned up to mix with workers.

They drank. They argued. And they ogled her.

“Are you coming marching with us tomorrow?”

“Me? But didn’t you say I was a naive country girl? I wouldn’t know what it’s all about.”

Several of the lads were only too eager to explain. They had been arguing themselves hoarse in the Renault works but the response among the workers had been suspicious, uncomprehending, disappointing. Here was a more receptive listener – one of “the real people” … and attractive too!

She went with them on their marches. The camaraderie was exhilarating – marching arms linked, singing, cheering, chanting slogans in unison.

Sometimes she went home with them, smoked a joint, and listened to their debates. Often, she ended up in bed with one or other.

No: They were not exploiting her. They were all equals.

And if, a few days later, she lost her bed mate in that singing throng, she often ended her day in bed with another: One much like the first – vigorous, loquacious, intoxicated with ideas which she only half understood. The excitement of the time was a wonderful aphrodisiac.

What the hell? She had said she was never going to be exploited by any man again … and nor was she. They were a band of brethren, men and women, all struggling for the rights of man. Well, humankind. And how could a young woman not used to formulating concepts in words express her participation, her enthusiasm, her compassion, except in an embrace?

She had many lovers that summer.

Her work at Marcel’s pub had become somewhat irregular – but then, what was not, in that wonderful summer in Paris?

She had been drawn into the excitement, the crowds, the singing, the anger, but not – to be precise – into the politics. She had only a vague idea of how she wanted the world remade. What was clear was that it needed remaking. But then, her new friends seemed not to be very precise either. What everybody said was that the world needed change, and to that she could say “Amen”: A world where there would be no more pimps; no buying and selling of bodies; no protection money; no restaurant-keepers bowing before clients with fat bellies and fat chequebooks; no decadent aristocrats with coteries of pretty boys.

But when it all came to an end she did not lapse into depression, like some of her student friends. It was not her world that had collapsed, nor the end of all her hopes.

She went back to Marcel’s fulltime. Yes, it was a bit dull pouring drinks again, toasting cheese sandwiches, tossing omelettes. But for her, it was only an exciting holiday that had come to an end.

She enjoyed mixing with people. She enjoyed a smoke and a drink. As for hash, she liked the sensation, but she could take it or leave it. Hash linked her to young men, beddable young men.

But – she was determined to choose whom she would take home. Those she did not fancy she would dismiss with a wave towards the Rue St. Denis.

There were unemployed students who turned up from time to time and ordered a small glass of plonk – and found that she served a ham sandwich or even an omelette “on the house” … especially if Marcel had gone to the market or was looking after his wife.

But after a month or two she decided that life was too dull and drifted away from Marcel’s. There followed a time when she changed jobs frequently – mainly in the rag trade. In later years, when asked, she would say “I was mucking about” or “I was growing more beautiful.”

But once in a while, at La Maison des Am, she entertained clients with tales of her Parisian past – tales which had them wondering whether to believe them or not.

“I was working for that ever-so-smart dress shop: full of the ‘beautiful people’ – film stars or starlets and their escorts – people with more money than brains, most of them. It was a place for young fashions. So one day there turns up this old bag. Well, she was about the age I am now. Pearls down to her – mmm – let’s say to her bellybutton. She tries on one of those tight short leather skirts and she turns to me: “How does it suit me?”

“It doesn’t,” I said. “Makes you look ridiculous.”

“Thanks a lot,” she said, took it off, and left the shop in a bit of a huff. “Then I realise that the manageress had heard me. My God, steam was coming out of her ears! But the shop was full of customers. I thought to myself, Mireille, when the last customer goes, you’re for the chop.”

“Just then this gorgeous thing with the longest legs you’ve ever seen comes out of the next cubicle and strides over to me. She holds out her hand and says: “Darling, you must be the only honest salesgirl in Paris.”

“I didn’t know who she was, but they told me later that she was something very up-and-coming in the films.”

“Now, darling, I want your honest opinion about this number.”

“Well,” I said, “you would look gorgeous in a torn old sack.” “This costs a lot more.”

“True, but this is your style. In this dress you’ll have them panting after you. Think of it as an investment. It might hook you a millionaire.”

“She laughed, and bought it, and then another. And when she’d paid, she turned to the manageress and said: “That’s a wonderful saleslady you’ve got. I want her to serve me every time I come.” That saved my job.”

“Who was she?” asked her admiring listeners. “Have we ever seen her on the television?”

“So far as I know she sank without a trace. I’ve even forgotten her name. Perhaps she’s still up-and-coming. Or just coming.”

In those years “on the rampage” – as she called it later – Mireille occasionally dropped in at Marcel’s café for a drink and a chat.

One evening she mentioned that she was “between jobs”. She had just been fired from a job in a circus – for slapping the face of the impresario.

“Why don’t you come back here?” said Marcel. “We’re looking for someone. My wife is not at all well and I need someone to help.”

Mireille agreed readily. She was fond of the old couple. And she liked their clients: “Real people”, she said.

“But aren’t the customers in dress-shops real?” asked Marcel.

“No. They’re phoneys, the lot of them.”

Marcel’s wife, Margot, had a heart condition. She was grossly overweight and had recurring bouts of angina. When she was well, she would struggle down from their apartment above the café to do the accounts and sometimes even to help behind the bar. But there were days when she could not cope with the stairs. Then Mireille would carry up the books and the till print-out.

There were other days when Margot did not leave her bed and these became more frequent. Then Marcel would ask Mireille to look after the café while he cooked a meal for his wife. After a while Mireille protested: she was a better cook than he, and, certainly, he was better behind the bar. So Mireille came to look after Margot.

The two woman became friends.

“I wish I’d had a daughter like you.”

One morning, after a particularly bad night, Margot said: “When I die, you’ll have to marry Marcel. He needs a woman to look after him.”

“No,” said Mireille. “He’s a good man and a very kind one. But if I ever shack up with a man again – permanently, I mean – he’ll have to be ….” and she stopped, and waved her hands in the air sculpting, some gorgeous Samson.

She told Margot about her lovers. Margot was inquisitive and liked to hear about these matters. “Ah, to be young …”

Margot’s condition worsened. Her expeditions downstairs became rarer. Marcel had to cope with the accounts himself. To Mireille’s surprise he coped very well: he was the son of peasants, the first generation in the city. Fiddling income tax came naturally to him.

Mireille took over nursing Margot. Well after her normal working hours she prepared invalid food and sat by Margot’s bedside, gossiping.

One night a customer reported that Raoul was back, lurking around the neighbourhood.

Mireille was in a state of panic. Could she stay the night?

“Sure thing”, Marcel replied. “You know there is a spare room upstairs. It’s full of junk, but we can clear the bed. But I don’t think you need to worry: I’ll phone our – protectors.”

He did, and that was the last time Raoul was seen in the neighbourhood.

Mireille had started to send money to Spain, for the support of her daughter. Her parents protested that they did not need her sous – they were quite able to finance the education of their grandchild and any additional ones she wished to produce. Mireille, however, insisted. As a result, she was often hard up.

“Why don’t you give up your room and move in here?” Margot said to her one day. “You’ve been staying here day and night to help me. Now, I’m not asking you to look after me. But since you’re doing it anyway – God bless you – wouldn’t it be easier if you lived on the premises?”

So Mireille moved into the small box-room above the café.

Margot said “You must be missing your daughter terribly. Would you like to bring her here? We could rent a room in the neighbourhood.”

It had been a long time since Mireille had given any real thought to the child she had borne. She could not very well admit, even to herself, but though she sent a large part of her wages to Spain, it was not for love of the child. It was because her mother had done the same when she, Mireille, was a teenager. She did not want her mother to score points.

“Perhaps, one day,” said Mireille.

That night she lay awake late. She had been waiting for a visitor – one of her student friends – but he did not turn up.

She thought about Lucille, her daughter. Was the girl unhappy, as she had been unhappy when dumped on her grandmother? What was there for a teenager to do in that bleak Spanish timeshare housing estate that had grown around the old fishing harbour?

On her last visit to Spain – when? Two years earlier? – the girl had seemed to be happy. Perhaps was she just putting on a brave face?

Next morning she told Margot she would, indeed, like to invite her daughter to spend a week or two of the vacations in Paris.

So a room was rented around the corner. It was in one of the old aristocratic hotels still awaiting gentrification. The grand entrance portal with caryatids and the 16th century carved doors ensured that it would not be long before the residents were bought out and the building turned into apartments for the rich. The room was in the attic, up five flights of ill-lit stairs. However, the views over roof-tops seemed to Mireille to make up for the exhausting climb. Before Lucille’s arrival she spent a few nights there herself with her present lover. It was always awkward entertaining friends in Marcel and Margot’s place. He enthused over the view: “It’s like a cubist painting. Look at those slopes, the different angles, and the shadows.”

When Lucille arrived, carrying a tennis-racket, she had no eyes for all that. “God,” she said, “don’t they ever clear slums here?”

On being shown her lavatory and shower were down a flight of steps she expressed the opinion that in Spain such a place would be condemned as unfit for human habitation. Were there bedbugs behind the peeling wallpaper, she wondered.

Disconsolately she accompanied her mother through the streets of old Paris: “You couldn’t even park a golf buggy in these streets.”

Marcel and his clients in the café greeted the girl affectionately but she turned up her nose at the sight of the place, its eroded walnut table tops and the pitted zinc counter.

“And to think you could be working in grandma’s place!”

Mother and daughter found they had little in common.

“You don’t even run a car? Grandma has promised me one when I’m 18.”

Lucille missed the yachting set, the boys with sleek sports-cars, the sangria parties after tennis matches.

Of Paris, only the boutiques appealed to her. She returned to Spain earlier than planned but carrying several dresses in the latest fashion bought in shops where Mireille had once worked (and where she was sure of a discount). Lucille was certain she would be the first to bring such fashions to the fishing village turned tourist resort which she regarded as home.

Mireille breathed a sigh of relief.

Margot’s state of health deteriorated, and Marcel and Mireille nursed her. The following year she died. Before she died, she repeated that Mireille should marry Marcel.

The idea did not fill Mireille with any enthusiasm: he was a kindly old codger and shrewd too, but she thought about Luc, and even about Raoul, and about various young men who were her occasional visitors. Anyway, Marcel did not ask her.

Not for 365 days, to be exact.

One year after Margot’s death – she was surprised to find him such a stickler for conventions – the evening after they closed the café, he proposed to her.

“Look, my dear,”– he said shyly – “I’m an old man. I wouldn’t be much of a lover. But I’m very fond of you. As I get older, I shall need someone to look after me … and there’s my property. I have no heirs, as you know.”

She asked for time to think.

Next day he came back to the subject: “Listen: I know what’s worrying you. You won’t find me a jealous husband. You can keep your separate bedroom – and your young friends. That does not worry me. All I want – at my age – is your companionship. And I am genuinely fond of you. I really am.”

She remained silent. After a pause he added: “I sometimes worry: when I go, who is going to close my eyes? And – you may not have too long to wait. They’ve diagnosed that I have leukaemia – that was over a year ago.”

She made the expected reply: “Nonsense: I had an aunt who had leukaemia for 17 years. You’ll live to a ripe old age.”

But it wasn’t an answer. She puzzled over it: Wouldn’t people say she was only doing it for the inheritance – especially if they ever heard that she had known that he did not have long to live? And didn’t that information, in fact, make it easier for her to say ‘yes’? Wasn’t there something base and calculating about such a marriage?

On the other hand, what harm would she be doing? To whom? He wanted it. She was looking after him in any case and would probably continue to do so as long as he needed her. So what harm was there if she agreed – and became his heir?

She talked it over with one of her young men: Sasha was a refugee from somewhere East; bright, amusing, argumentative and desperately poor. He was good in bed – very.

“You’d be doing a kind thing for the old man ” he said, “and a sensible thing for yourself.  Don’t be such a bloody idealist!”

She had never thought of herself as an idealist. In fact, she was not certain what it meant. But she felt reassured that Sasha would not think ill of her.

Next night Sasha came back to the subject, and to her bed: “And if you refuse him, who benefits? Have you thought about it? The state! The state would inherit. Since when have you been such a fervent supporter of the state?”

Much of that night – while she wanted to make love – he lectured her on the evils of the status quo and the need to undermine the system.

Next morning, bleary-eyed, shortly after Sasha left, she accepted Marcel’s proposal.

The wedding was a quiet affair at the mairie. Mireille was ill at ease throughout. What were the witnesses – two old friends of Marcel’s – thinking? Did they regard her as a gold-digger … her, Mireille, who had never cared for money; who had given up plush jobs when she got bored; who had walked out on her stinking-rich parents in Spain?

Were they laughing at Marcel, whispering behind his back that he would soon be cuckolded? The old man deserved better.

But the day passed quickly. There was no question of a honeymoon journey.

They soon reverted to their old routine.

One morning in spring Marcel said: “It’s years since I last took a vacation. Will you come to the Correze with me in July?”

Mireille knew that Marcel had inherited a family home ‘somewhere the back of beyond.’ Margot had often spoken about it. She had refused to go there: “Too uncomfortable,” she had said. “A pit latrine outside; no hot water. No heating. And for all I know, snakes crawling all over the place. And it’s miles from the nearest shops. No, that’s not for me! I’m not one of your country lasses.”

Mireille had no such hang-ups. “Why not?” she said. “It’ll make a change. You might as well see what you are going to inherit”.

So Marcel put up a notice to say that after July 14th the café would be closed for one month.

“A belated honeymoon?” joked one of the clients. The old man blushed.

They travelled by train. The local taxi and ambulance owner met them at the station. “Oh, you’ll be surprised, Marcel, what a good job they’ve made …”

Marcel signalled him to keep quiet. What’s the secret, Mireille wondered. It was a beautiful drive through a forest, then down steeply into a ravine which, after a while, widened out into a little valley. They came to a clearing – flat like a platform – with long views downhill.

“It’s magnificent,” exclaimed Mireille.

In the clearing stood three houses and several barns. The taxi stopped in front of the largest of the houses. It must have been built early in the last century, probably by a substantial farmer. Now it looked as if it could do with some replastering and painting.

The living-room was large, so large that it took a few moments before Mireille realised that one corner had been cut off and a partition erected. It smelt strongly of fresh paint, bright peeling cream paint that stood out against the darkness of the rest of the room.

“What’s behind there?” she asked.

“Go and see,” said Marcel.

It was a gleaming bathroom and a toilet.

“But Margot used to complain there was only an outside latrine?”

“Well, that’s still there, if you prefer it,” he chuckled, “but I thought … I didn’t want a second wife to take against the old house. Because I like it. I spent a happy childhood here.”

“They only finished the day before yesterday,” the taxi man told them, “Just in time.”

“You’re wonderful,” said Mireille, and planted a kiss on Marcel’s cheek. “So considerate.”

He was popular in the neighbourhood. Relatives and friends sent him messages via a friend at the top of the hill who had a telephone. This neighbour would cycle down many a morning and announce that this or that second cousin would drop in for an aperitif the following day and then take Marcel and Mireille back in his car for a meal.

The neighbour even saw to it that there were no double-bookings: “No, they can’t come tomorrow. They’re going to Therese. But they’re free on Friday. Ok?”

“This place is busier than the café,” Mireille laughed. “I was looking forward to the quiet of the countryside.”

“You shouldn’t have married such a nice guy. He’s popular,” said the

neighbour.

“Yes, I am lucky,” said Mireille, and surprised herself when she thought about it a moment later: she had meant it.

Everywhere they were served the heavy cooking of olden times – dishes that in these days weight – and cholesterol-conscious townees avoid. But Marcel was delighted: “It’s just like my mother used to cook.”

“And does your own mother cook like this?” – they asked Mireille. Food was, after all, their favourite subject for conversation. “Do Spaniards like it that way?”

“My mother?” Mireille laughed, “In her place they carve one slice of a raw carrot in a fancy shape, like a flower. That’s your first course! – And you pay 50 francs for it!”

They laughed: “Nouvelle cuisine!”

Heavy food was washed down with great quantities of heavy red wine. Mireille was used to drinking – clients in the café frequently stood her a glass – but drinking in the Correze was of a different magnitude: The holiday was spent in an alcoholic haze.

She came to feel closer to Marcel. Perhaps, she thought, I ought to give up seeing Sasha. Marcel hasn’t said anything, but I can see that it makes him sad to see me       carrying on.

One day an old friend of his came to collect them for a meal but his car would not start. They climbed out and started to push. At the third attempt it started, but Marcel did not get back in. He stood leaning against the car for a while, then staggered and sat down on the grass. “I don’t feel very well.”

They took him back into the house and he lay down for a while. “You’ve strained yourself pushing. Have a drink.”

He looked very pale and was sweating. His face looked contorted.

“Are you in pain?”

No, he wasn’t. After a few minutes he got up and said it had passed. He was feeling better. He was ready to go.

During the meal he ate very little and was unusually quiet. His face looked curiously twisted.

“It’ll pass. It’ll pass”, they assured him.

But the facial contortion remained. After a few days Mireille insisted that he go and see a doctor in the nearby market town. The doctor said he had had a light stroke:

“Nothing serious. But it’s a warning. You should take it easy. Have you thought about retiring?”

Marcel said little for a few days, then turned to Mireille: “Would you keep it after I’ve gone?”

“Keep what?”

“This house – after I’ve gone.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” she said. “Not for a long while.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be so certain. First leukaemia and now a stroke. The next one could be it.” He waved away her protests. “We ought to think about your future.”

“I love this place, and I’d keep it – but preferably with you in it.”

“Right, then I won’t try to sell it. But what about the café? I think we should get rid of that.”

“Why? Do you think I couldn’t manage it by myself?”

“You could, yes, of course you could. But – our ‘protectors’ – they’ve expressed some interest in taking it over for one of their crowd. While I’m around, I can negotiate a fair price.”

“And I couldn’t? You’ve no idea how good I am at haggling! You should see me in the vegetable market in Spain…””

“You wouldn’t stand a chance, my dear. Not against that bunch. They are not – gentlemen. But they do owe me some sort of a debt. I think I’d stand a better chance. And with the money which will come to you, you could buy a restaurant in the country, maybe. Or a shop. A dress shop? Anything, so long as it’s far away from ‘protectors’ and their like.”

“What is this debt that they owe you?” she wanted to know. “How involved are you with those thugs?”

“Not really involved. But, well, one day a stranger came to the pub and started chatting. And then he asked some odd questions and I realised “Aha! Flic.” The next day he was back again, asking more questions and I could see what he was after, and whom. So, after closing time I went to a phone box – I wasn’t going to use my own phone – and I spoke to the man and told him the police were on his trail. He and his goons had better make themselves scarce for a while. And they’ve been sort-of friendly ever since.”

“Why did I do it? Well, they were good customers, after all, and always paid for their drinks – even if at the end of the month they also collected. On the other hand, you know, I never felt comfortable with them around, so I was only too pleased to make sure they kept away for a few weeks. But they appreciated what I had done. I was their friend, after that, even their ally. So now, I think, they wouldn’t do me down … well, not too much anyway.”

They went back to Paris and Marcel started negotiations. The gang wanted the place for “Brainy” – one of their older members, an ex-boxer with a puffed-up face and a permanent grin. Some said he had been brain-damaged in his boxing career. Others said it had happened in a gang fight. He was of little use to his mates now, but they did not want him to starve. The café was to be his pension – and they were hoping to get it on the cheap. They offered far too little, but they had not bargained on Marcel’s peasant cunning. He bided his time.

“I don’t think I can afford to sell it unless I get a better offer.”

A few weeks later he persuaded a friend, a retired policeman, to make a higher bid. Whether it was ever a genuine bid Mireille never discovered, but it had the desired effect: Here was one competitor whom the gang did not dare frighten off. He would have called ex-colleagues to come to his aid.

Brainy’s friends raised their offer. In addition, after lengthy haggling, Marcel secured a life-tenancy for Mireille and himself for the flat above.

“We’ll stay in Paris in the winter and go to the Correze in the summer,” he told Mireille.

But the first winter of retirement was dull. Marcel spent his days in front of the television set or went downstairs and sat around in his old café. He talked about going fishing when the weather improved, but he never did. Mireille was bored. She often went to the cinema, alone, or joined Marcel and his chums in the café. She smoked too much and drank too much. With an amused smile she observed Brainy’s “side line business”. He was a receiver of stolen goods, in a small way. But nobody would entrust him with goods of any real value. Her interest soon palled. She felt caged. Should she look for a job? Certainly not with Brainy: Better steer clear of that lot.

Her thoughts went back again to the lover she had sent packing. And to other young men she had known, lithe and eager.

One spring afternoon, as she came from a film full of sultry sex scenes, she went into a café and phoned Sasha. He was out.

That same evening, as Marcel was making his way upstairs after a digestif, he had a massive heart-attack. He fell back and slid down the stairs. Mireille heard the noise and went to investigate. She found him lying at the bottom, bleeding heavily from a cut on his head. He was rushed to hospital. Just before dawn, he died.

Mireille was far more upset than she would have anticipated. She had grown fond of Marcel. He had been good to her, and she knew that good people were thin on the ground. Worse, she felt guilty. What if she had found Sasha at home?

What was she to do with the rest of her life? Widowed for the second time – and not yet 40.

She hung around Paris a few more months, but she never did call Sasha. Brainy grumbled: “Young woman like you needs a man.”

“Sure thing.”

“Well, what about me?”  He suggested she might welcome it if he moved into the flat above the café and shared her bed.

She shook her head: “You’re not quite my type.”

She remembered Marcel’s advice: take the money and get out of the city. Buy a restaurant or a shop in the country.

She thought of the forest, the sun-lit green clearing, the long view down the valley and of the house that now belonged to her. She did not think long. One grey and hung-over morning she upped and went. She had not bothered to sell any of the furniture nor dispose of Marcel’s clothes.

“It’s all yours,” she said to Brainy. “You can have the flat, too. I’m off!”

They were all so old!

Why had it not struck her the previous summer? Marcel’s cousins, his schoolmates, his aunts, the comrades who had served with him in the army – they were all old and boring.

True, they were kind and hospitable. They treated her as one of the family. The week after she arrived a distant cousin delivered a wagonload of firewood. Another drove her to town to buy a cooker. A neighbour offered to plough part of her field for a vegetable garden. They invited her to their houses and told her stories about Marcel – about his escapades as a schoolboy, his exploits as a soldier. She thought that if one more repeated that story about Marcel nicking the schoolmaster’s prize pears, she would scream.

One neighbour sent her his son to chop firewood. “You must be prepared for the winter.”

And that is how Jean-Marie came into her life.

He was a timid youth, barely 20. He seldom dared to raise his eyes to look at her but followed her about like a dog. She had sown some flower seeds among the stones outside the house. The next day he arrived with a spade and offered to dig “proper beds for vegetables”. Most evenings after he had finished milking his father’s cows, he rode over on his motorbike to see whether she needed any help. Sometimes she sent him into the village for groceries.

One day she asked to go with him on the back of his bike. She clung to his body. He blushed fiercely. Even the back of his neck turned red.

“Go on,” she said. “I’m not going to eat you.”

Sometime later she bought a second-hand car. She wanted it so that she could travel around and search for premises to open a restaurant or café. Once mobile she went into the village most days and stopped at the café for a drink.

One evening, when they were alone, the proprietress confided to her that gossips were saying that Mireille was ‘having it off with Jean-Marie.

“Hell, no,” said Mireille. “Do they take me for a cradle snatcher?”

All that winter she searched for suitable premises. There were places on offer that had gone bankrupt – probably because there were too many bars in the same village. They were no good. Others were so run down that renovation would have eaten up all her capital. Others, again, were sited in villages so sleepy, that she could not imagine herself living there: “I’d go bonkers.”

Whenever he could, Jean-Marie tagged along. He knew the area well which was useful. He said he would help her do up any place she wanted to buy. He had learnt some carpentry at school and had done repairs for his father.

She became used to his dogged presence: ‘Poor lad, she thought, I bet he’s never had a woman. Well, he is rather pimply. Some woman will have to take him in hand. But who will?’ She dismissed the idea.

The winter seemed interminable. Often the roads were icy and she had to stay by her fire, drinking more than was good for her.

Neighbours walked over from distant homesteads: Poor woman, they said to each other, she must be lonely and pining for her husband. They would rack their brains for stories about Marcel which she had not heard. But she always had.

Didn’t anyone realise what sort of a marriage it had been?

In the end she heard about a job going in the nearest town.  A dress-shop – Le Elvis – needed an assistant. They took her on.  “It’s something to do. And I won’t have to draw on capital.”

But the drive to town was a bore, and the people she met were – well – not exactly scintillating: Thick-set peasants who had not the remotest idea who Elvis had been. It wasn’t like being with Luc: His clients had been young and smart and amusing. In their company she had felt herself to be young and smart and amusing.

Quite often she phoned Le Elvis – she had had a phone installed – to say that the roads were icy, and she could not get in.

One evening, when she had sat around the house all day watching TV, Jean-Marie arrived with a gift of some vegetables. She had got used to these visits and missed them if, one day, he did not come because there was too much work on his father’s farm.

“You’re sweet,” she said, and kissed him lightly on the forehead. He blushed.

“Come on, “she said, “have a glass of wine.”

He sat at her feet, in front of the fire, as he often did. She looked at him and thought: “He’s a nice lad. But desperately shy. But he wants it – badly. Why the hell not?”

She said: “We’re going to have some mulled wine and a meal. And then you’re coming to bed with me. It’s a cold night and I need someone to keep me warm.” And she looked at him quizzically. He blushed.

And that was how Jean-Marie became her lover.

In the spring, she arranged to work only three days a week at Le Elvis, so as to have more time to search for premises. They toured in ever wider circles around the Correze and then into the neighbouring Cantal.

Then someone told her about “La Maison des Am”. Well-placed, she decided. Very well placed, on the way to Salin, which was popular with tourists and at the crossroad between the route nationale and the lane leading to Le Peuch. But the building looked run down, paint and plaster were peeling, the yard was overgrown, the facade smothered in creeping roses.

“It used to be an excellent place,” the landlord told her. “I admit, I’ve never run it myself – always leased it out. I’d like to run it, but my seed business keeps me too busy. But I can tell you, the last lessees made pots of money. Well … until that day when la patronne ran off. You must have heard about that?” He chuckled:  “Ran off with a lorry-driver!”

“What that place needs is a woman. All those lonely bachelors in the neighbourhood want a home from home, someone friendly, hospitable. Same with those lorry-drivers from far away. You – you’d do brilliantly. But a man on his own – somehow that didn’t work out.”

What the landlord omitted to mention was that his last lessee still owed him several months’ rent and that his own lawyer saw little chance of retrieving any of it.

“Of course, it’ll take you a little while to build up the clientele again, but if you plug away at it, you’ll make a packet. A good-looking young woman like you.”

“It’s a restaurant I want to run, not a brothel,” she said.

The owner looked pained – just as her own mother might have.

“It’s tourist country, too,” he continued. Marvellous for walking in summer and skiing in winter. And lots of passing lorry traffic. Yes, there are several fancy hotels in Salin and they say one more is about to be built. But they’re pricing themselves out of the market. This here is a simple place and the rent I’m charging is reasonable, so if you’re not too greedy.”

Mireille settled for a 10-year lease with an option to extend. Her friends had told her that if she ever wanted to sell, she would get more for the goodwill if she had a long lease.

She moved in the following spring and Jean-Marie moved in with her. The two strolled around the empty place: the main building looked sound enough: a small bar with worn lino and a few tables; behind it a large kitchen with several cookers; some bedrooms above. The whole thing was built over stables. Long, long ago La Maison Des Am had been a post-house. Since those days various bits had been altered or added, haphazardly. Part of the stables had been turned into a wine cellar. A large shed, shoddily built, had been added in the 30’s to serve for larger functions. The corrugated iron roof was rusting and looked as if it needed attention. A further addition was a lean-to which housed a toilet – the old squat-pan type. More recently, half-a-dozen bedrooms and a shower-room had been built in the yard behind.

Mireille had told Jean-Marie that she could not afford to pay him a salary. He had said he didn’t care. He was fed up with working for his father. The old man was always complaining about him. Nothing he ever did was right. He had to get out. He would find casual work in her neighbourhood and help at the café after work.

Well, why not? Now that he had overcome his timidity, he made quite a good lover … ever so anxious to learn. He was devoted to her, and a willing worker. Why the hell not?

In the beginning they only opened the bar while they renovated the rest of the building. She painted the walls and scrubbed the floor. He fixed wooden panelling in the dining-room, though he never quite finished because her funds ran low. The dining-room had been a cold, dark shed, but with light pine panelling and a wood fire, it came to feel quite homely.

Neighbours started to drift in for drinks and carried abroad tales of Mireille’s wit and her ability to hold her liquor. Her risqué jokes were repeated in the neighbourhood.

The neighbourhood women took against her at once:

“Retired Paris whore, I shouldn’t be surprised” grumbled Madame Parlange. “Brothel-keeper, more likely,” said Madame Couderc. “How else did she make the money to buy that lease!”

“And do all those renovations!”

“You don’t seriously believe that young man is her son, do you?”

But the more they gossiped about her, the more her fame spread. The bar was doing well. Long distance truckdrivers had got out of the habit of stopping there, but when she became the subject of gossip in bars over a wide area, they started to drop in again.

And then the Conseil Generale announced that the main road was to be realigned.

“What for?” asked the old hands.

“To speed up communications.”

“Why? To speed the milk to the creameries? Those van-drivers spend half the morning gossiping with the farmers. You think they care about saving a minute or two?”

“Maybe it’s because of the tourists.”

“The tourists? They’re on holiday and they’ve got more time than they know what to do with. They spend all day nosing around the knickknack shops. What’s a few minutes to them? They queue far longer for those little tourist guide earphones … you know, the ones the curé had installed to tell them about the old church.”

“It’s progress.”

Progress demanded that national roads be straightened. As soon as Mireille heard, she realised that the effect on her business could be serious. The new road would bypass her place by no more than a kilometre, but casual traffic would no longer pass and even the regulars might be tempted to keep to the main road. And here she was – saddled with a ten-year lease and a hefty monthly rent!

But in the beginning, it turned out otherwise: the construction of the new road did not need a vast labour-force – only a dozen or two of truck and bulldozer drivers. They, did, however, need to be fed and housed and the Maison des Am was the nearest suitable place. All of that summer and autumn Mireille had regular clients en pension. Half of them slept in the rooms in her courtyard; the others in caravans parked in the yard. She readily agreed to let them use her showers and running water, knowing that it wasn’t water they were going to drink!

Her first year was a financial success.

They repeated her jokes and stood her drinks.

Once, when Jean-Marie was away, and she slightly pickled, she announced at closing time that it was going to be a lonely night.

Several of the road-gang immediately offered themselves. She raised an eyebrow quizzically, looked each of them up and down as if sizing them up, shook her head and said firmly “No”, then went up to her room, alone, and locked her door.

No one dared to follow her: Her “no” had been so determined. But it heightened their interest – was she or was she not ‘available’? It all served to increase the clientele.

She did once or twice take workmen to bed, but discreetly, without fuss – perhaps only to show Jean-Marie that she was a free and independent being and that he had no right to monopolise her. When, later, one of the workmen boasted of his conquest, no one believed him.

The road interfered with the natural drainage of the land, flooded two meadows in spring and ruined the natural grass. The owner started a lawsuit. He was, said the locals, heading for a decade of litigation which would probably ruin him. “You can’t win against Them,” they grumbled.

But at the end of the following year silence descended on La Maison des Am: The roadbuilders had gone.

The locals continued to come, and so did a handful of long-distance drivers who thought themselves to be Mireille’s friends and were willing to make the detour. Casual trade, however, declined sharply.

The following year was worse. Distant motorways had been pushed across central France, advancing year by year. They were joined up at last. Long-distance drivers could now shorten their route – and improve their earnings – by avoiding the area altogether.

Mireille had sunk much of her capital into the down-payments on the lease. In addition, she was liable for a monthly rental. On top of that there came the costs of refurbishing the place. She had known that she did not have enough to complete the renovations, but that had not worried her when she signed the lease: profits were sure to pay for later work.

But profits became smaller and smaller: some evenings there were a mere three of four locals drinking at her bar – a glass of plonk, the odd pastis – not enough to pay the monthly rental. She knew she would have to do something enterprising – or go broke.

Several times a week the thunder of fighter-planes on training flights swooped low over Le Peuch. They disturbed the peace of the countryside and frightened the ruminating cows.

“They come all the way from Marseilles,” said one of the lorry-drivers. “They’re going to a base somewhere near Paris.”

“They don’t mind the detour of a hundred kilometres.” said Mireille, “but our lorry-drivers do”.

The old country bus still stopped at the crossroads outside twice a day and picked up one or two travellers. Some came in for a coffee. Some ordered an aperitif. But that was not doing much to keep Mireille going.

One day the bus-driver mentioned that his company was doing good business off-season by taking old-age pensioners on daytrips into the mountains. Sometimes a concert of folk music was part of the entertainment: local amateur groups were willing to perform in return for applause and a few free drinks. The bus company had negotiated with one of the fancy new hotels in Salin to provide cut-price meals.

“Why don’t you offer to feed them for less?” he suggested. “You don’t have the same overheads.”

She took up the idea and did a deal. For several weekends her place was packed with old people who had very healthy appetites and drank all the ordinaire that was provided with the meal, but spent little extra.

At the end of the season, however, even that came to an end. The company did not renew the contract. The old people appeared to prefer the hotel in Salin. Perhaps it was because they liked the fancy ruffled curtains in pastel shades – “really pretty, don’t you think?” – or because they were impressed by the old prints of local chateaux on the walls: “Those must have cost them a pretty penny.” But more likely the real reason was more mundane: The hotel had more toilets, so there was no need for old gentlemen with weak bladders to queue and squat.

“Something will turn up,” said Mireille, but even she was not convinced. She drank more:  “It’s only money, after all. What’s the use of worrying?”

And there were the old faithfuls to support her: Roger, Patate, Jean-Marie and several more.

There were days when she could not be bothered to open up, usually when she had a hangover. What for? To make a few miserable sous? Better to stay in bed and smoke or make love.

Travellers could never be sure whether the place would be open, so the passing trade declined: “I thought you’d shut the old place down. When I passed last Wednesday, the shutters were closed.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mireille, “but I’m not one of your money-grubbers. If I don’t feel like opening up, I don’t. But – have this drink on the house to make up for the one you missed. Have two. Who’s counting? The world is too full of people counting!”

At other times there was an unexpected influx; but she could never be relied upon to provide meals when asked. That was when Roger offered to take over the cooking: General Massu’s personal cook – as the myth would have it. And who was she to refuse?

Not long after, she took Roger to bed for the first time.

One evening several months later, after Roger’s accident and after the last customers had departed, Roger announced that he was hungry. Surely so were Mireille and Jean-Marie? If it weren’t for his arm he would cook them a steak. Mireille took the hint and busied herself in the kitchen. Jean-Marie went to open another bottle. Roger managed to prepare a salad.

It was late, well after midnight, when they got around to the cheese. It was a warm evening and they had not closed the shutters. Mireille was in mid-anecdote – about a crook she had known in Paris, one who had bungled every single robbery. A motorcycle drove up. There was a knock on the open door and a gendarme marched in briskly:

“It’s after midnight.  You’re still serving drinks?  Don’t you know that your license …”

“Oh, bugger off,” said Mireille. “These aren’t customers. They work for me.”

“Do they?” said the cop. “I suppose you can prove that by producing their insurance papers?”

“Oh, go to bed.”

“Are you insulting an officer of the law in the execution of his duties?”

“Officer of the law!” Mireille mimicked him, “listen to this pompous con.”

“Con” is a tricky word to translate: Literally it means ‘cunt’. But in French it is in common usage and far less offensive, as a term of abuse, than its English equivalent. For the thin-skinned officer of the law it was, however, too offensive by far.

“Right,” he said. “I want the names and addresses of everyone present. You’ll be hearing more about this.”

Mireille and her two menfolk laughed long after he had marched out.

“He wouldn’t dare!” said Mireille. “He’d be laughing-stock of the entire neighbourhood! What a con!” And they brought up another bottle of wine.

Early next morning, however, well before they were properly awake, there was a harsh knock at the door. Mireille went down, dressed only in a dressing-gown. A uniformed man presented her with a summons: black typing on fancy headed paper. She shrugged, crunched it up and used it to light the stove.

“They’ll soon realise what fools they are making of themselves. Someone will tell them about this place, and about us.”

But she was wrong: the day after she was due to appear in court – but did not – two cars full of policemen drove up and surrounded La Maison des Am as if they expected armed resistance. Then they entered and arrested her. Perhaps they had heard that Roger’s late brother had once endangered the neighbourhood with a sharpshooter’s rifle.

“You’d think I was Bluebeard himself,” Mireille recounted afterwards.

In court, Mireille was at her most charming. She explained that these two were her good friends … close friends. They were not her customers. The place was closed for business. It was an unfortunate oversight that the doors and shutters had not been closed, but it had been a warm evening. The two didn’t work for her. They sometimes lent a helping hand. They were friends.

“What you are saying is totally irrelevant,” cut in the judge. “You are charged with insulting a constable in the execution of his duties. Do you admit that?”

“Yes, sir, I did call him a pompous con.”

There was tittering in court.

Mireille smiled sweetly: “But, your Honour, wouldn’t you have said the same? He was …”

His honour was not amused. She was sentenced to a hefty fine or a fortnight’s imprisonment. She refused to pay.

“So what?” she said to the reporter from La Montagne. “I’ve been inside before.”

The story (rude words deleted) made two columns. They published prominently a photo of her being marched off between two stern-faced policemen. She was giving a cheeky grin.

The bus-driver bought a print of the photograph from the editorial office in town and presented it to Jean-Marie, who was looking after the bar at La Maison des Am. He stuck it up between the bottles a few days before she was due back.

She laughed when she saw it and said: ” Two flics! They must have been terrified!” Then, looking around at the crowd that had gathered to welcome her – the place had not been so crowded since they diverted the road – she added: “Perhaps I ought to get myself sent down more often. It seems to be good for business.”

All the men of the neighbourhood wanted to hear her tell her story. More particularly, they hoped for an elucidation of her remark about having been “inside” before. It had rekindled extraordinary rumours about her lurid past.

She disappointed them: “Well, actually, it wasn’t quite what you think: I was only visiting a friend. That was in ’68. He’d been in a clash with the cops and his trousers got ripped. He sent me a message to bring him some clothes before he had to appear in court. He hoped he’d get off lightly if he looked – respectable.”

The neighbourhood was divided between those who believed her and those who did not. The latter were the majority. Her sympathisers insisted that whether truthful or not, she was a woman of spirit:

“And it’s true that the police do take themselves too damned seriously: they think the sun shines out of their arseholes.”

“Yes,” said Roger, “if it hadn’t been for my damned arm, I’d have bashed that flic. Like the one I did on the way back from Algeria. Have I told you about him?”

“Stop,” said Mireille, “Enough. No more about Algeria.”

She had worried about him while in prison. He had been moping since he’d broken his arm. It had got worse after the night when he broke down and confessed about his Algerian experiences. She had hoped that getting it off his chest, after years of silence, might help, but it did not. He now imagined that everyone was staring at him, talking about him, blaming him. Perhaps the death of his brother also affected him more than he would admit. It was, after all, the second of his brothers to die of drink. He was bound to wonder about his own end.

She could also predict that her next step would depress him even more.

The café had reverted to its quiet ways. There were days when no more than half a dozen people dropped in for a drink or two. The winter was the worst yet. The roads were icy. People made sure they got home early.

One evening, when she was alone with Jean-Marie and Roger, she broached the subject that had been occupying her mind:

“You realise I’m not making ends meet. The rent, the license and all that is costing more than I’m taking. I’m in debt to the liquor-merchant. There’s nothing for it. I’m going to have to close.”

“Couldn’t you find someone to take over the lease?” asked Jean-Marie.

“I’m seeing the lawyer next week. But I have my doubts. Even if someone liked the look of the place, he’d soon find out about the road.”

“Before anyone comes to view the place,” said Roger, “we’ll have to have another go at the roof. It’s leaking again.”

In fact, the roof was in a worse state than before he had fallen through. Only some perfunctory repairs had been undertaken while he was in hospital.

“You’re not climbing up there again,” she said firmly. “Anyway, I want to talk to the lawyer before I decide anything.”

The lawyer painted a gloomy picture: “There are empty houses in every village. The young move away to the towns. The old go to retirement homes – or get buried underground! Everybody wants to sell. Nobody wants to buy.”

He offered to see the landlord to negotiate a moratorium on the rent.

Mireille declined. “What if I just walked out?”

“You’d remain liable for payments for the duration of the lease. On the other hand, it would not be easy for the landlord to enforce it. I take it you don’t own any other property?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I do,” she told him about her house in the Correze.

“In that case you’ve got a problem.”

This had been an unwelcome result.

Mireille lied: “The house was a present from my father. I’ll simply ask him to take it back again.”

She phoned her parents in Spain that very night. A few days later Maman arrived – elegantly coiffed, expensively costumed, and very managerial.

“Officious old bitch,” thought Mireille.

But after inspecting “your old dump” and such elementary account books as were kept, Maman agreed that Mireille would have to cut her losses.

“You can come and stay with us in Spain.”

“Not bloody likely,” Mireille thought to herself.

Arrangements were set in train to transfer the ownership of the Correze house to her father.

Just before her departure Maman asked: “What are you going to do with … with them?” gesturing in the direction of Jean-Marie and Roger. She obviously did not much care for her daughter’s men and had not extended her invitation to Spain to them.

Mireille shrugged: “We’ll work something out.”

Roger said that evening: “You can come to stay at my place, now that Louis is no longer around. There’s always a bed – and a fire in the hearth.”

The La Maison des Am dragged on a few more weeks. The wine-merchant came to demand immediate settlement and when Mireille could not pay, he arranged to clear out her cellar and take back what remained of the wines and spirits he had supplied. In future, he said, he would only supply against cash in advance.

Jean-Marie and Roger made good use of the half-hour while the merchant went back home to fetch his lorry. They stacked up a wheelbarrow with a case of pastis, several of wine and two or three bottles of armagnac, covered it with a plastic sheet and wheeled it rapidly downhill to Roger’s cottage.

They hid their loot in the cellar.

It was from that secret store, a mere two weeks later, that Roger entertained the two Parisians, Leon and Gilbert, on his last night. He could not know that the spirits he had hidden in the cellar would only serve to feed the conflagration in which he perished.

At dawn – a bleak winter dawn, with the ruin still smouldering and a little snow falling – alcoholic fumes rose from the cellar. Mireille, sitting on a log, smoking, half heard one of the younger firemen make a tasteless joke about the smell and the dead man’s drinking habits. No one laughed. At any other time Mireille would have lashed him with her tongue, but that morning all fight had gone out of her.

What an awakening it had been! She and Jean-Marie had slept peacefully, unaware of the fire down the road. Two fire engines had passed during the night, but they had muted their sirens since there was no traffic on the road. It was only just before dawn that a fireman who knew her had banged at her door.

“And Roger?” she had asked when she had comprehended what he was saying.

He had shrugged his shoulder.

It had indeed been a bleak awakening.

“There’s nothing now to hold me here,” Mireille had thought, “nothing at all.” She walked back slowly, holding on to Jean-Marie’s arm to prevent herself from slipping on the icy lane.

“You’ll be leaving Le Peuch?” Patate had asked her, the following day.

“Le Peuch? The Peak?” She laughed: “It’s the pits, as far as I’m concerned.” She was slurring her words.

There followed several days of silence and inebriation. Then she called in a junk-dealer from the bourg, waved her arms around the furniture vaguely and demanded: “How much for the lot?”

He offered too little. She knew it, but shrugged her shoulder and asked: “Cash, on the nail, right now?”

He nodded.

“Right. Hand over.”

She, in turn, gave him a key. “Clear it out after we’ve gone.”

“What do I do with the key?”

“Drop it in down the well, for all I care! I’ve done with the place.”

After dark, she and Jean-Marie piled their personal belongings into her car and drove into the night.

Rumours about Mireille continued to circulate in the neighbourhood. Mme. Parlange informed her neighbours that Mireille was running a brothel in Morocco. She had overheard her making the arrangements by phone. Mme. Couderc knew for certain that she was working as a seamstress in a factory at Grenoble. Yet others claimed she had taken over her parents’ grand hotel in Spain.

No one at Le Peuch ever saw her again.

PÉPÉ

Pépé Peyrols tried to calm down his grandson:

“Don’t get so het up, José. He has to make a living. He has a wife and child.”

“Does that excuse his buggering off? Leaving all the clearing to me … my brother?”

“What clearing up, José?”

“These tools. You don’t want me to leave them for… for that lot, do you?

After what they’ve done to us?”

“What use are they? One rusty scythe? One old sledgehammer? It’s rubbish. Take the chainsaw – yes, that’s worth taking. As for the rest. Dump it”.

José ignored his grandfather and continued to load tools into his pickup truck:

“I’ll leave them nothing,” he said, and after a pause he added: “I don’t know how you can be so calm about it, granddad.”

The old man shrugged his shoulders.

“You built this place up. You. No one else. And now the ‘Spider’ wants to grab it all”. The ‘Spider’ was the nickname which the locals gave to Agricom, a large agricultural conglomerate: landowner, transporter, and processor that was gradually taking over many of the small farms.

“What’s lost is lost.”, said Pépé.

The dog came and rubbed his nose against the old man’s leg. Pépé petted him: “He’s unemployed, too, now – old Medor.”

“And he used to round up the largest herd in the region,” added José.”

He had finished loading and sat down on a log facing the old man. The tall lime tree sheltered them from the sun. He looked up at the gnarled face under its shock of full grey hair: a strong face. A pity to see the old man so bent these days and walking so slowly leaning on his stick. José loved the old man. He had never loved his own father that way. Well, thatfather!

Father would dash in, scatter presents – a bicycle, an airgun – and drive away again. But old Pépé would always be there when he was needed. He would sit with him if he’d woken from a nightmare. He would listen to his schoolboy worries and he would offer advice.

José looked at the old man silently for a while, then burst out: “You’re blaming me, granddad, aren’t you? You don’t say it, but I know: You think it’s our fault. Mine and Nicholas’.”

“I’m thinking nothing of the sort. I’m not blaming anyone. Least of all the two of you.”

They sat in silence for a while. “It’s the times,” the old man said eventually. “You can’t…..” but then he lapsed into silence and did not explain what one could not.

“Not even father is to blame?”

Pépé shrugged. “What good would that do?”

After another silence, José said “Shall I lock up?”

“No. Leave me the key. I’ll stay and wait for them.”

“Let them come down to the bourg and collect the keys.” “I’ll stay.”

José crossed over and put his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“I know what this place has meant to you”

Pépé said nothing.

He’s struggling with tears, thought José. I must get away. I couldn’t bear it. No, I couldn’t.

He jumped into his truck, tried to wave and called: “Don’t be late for dinner. Ma has something special for you.” Then he backed the truck out of the yard and drove down the hill.

Too fast, thought the old man. He could hear the wheels of the truck screeching in the distance. José must have reached the serpentine curves that led down to the valley.

Pépé remained, staring into the distance, patting the dog from time to time.

His eye travelled towards the upland pastures and the high mountains beyond. As a child he had sometimes accompanied friends who had been sent to herd cattle there in summer. He had felt sorry for them. It was cold in those windswept reaches. In shaded crevices the snows only melted in June or even July. They fed icy streams that plunged to the valley below: a valley that started out narrow and dark but broadened out to become sunny and friendly with rich pastures. Eventually it broadened out to accommodate a small market-town, the bourg. Beyond that it flattened out further until eventually it lost itself in the lowlands, far away in the blue haze.

Pépé’s family’s lands had been favourably placed around Le Peuch – among lush meadows. Here the snow normally melted by the end of March. The Peyrols had sufficient land and did not need to drive cattle to high pastures, so a child he had been spared uncomfortable summers.

In the distance he could hear the balers and binders pounding: The heartbeats of the country! That must be Bony making hay. The Peyrols’ own land, too, was ready for haymaking. But – Pépé had to remind himself: “It’s no longer ours. Someone else will cut the hay this year. And next.”

Wind was sweeping through the grass, making waves like those of the far away sea. It was a joy to watch and to listen to the distant pounding, and to see the brook, glimmering below, among the trees, like a living thing, twisting about in the sun.

On his left, he could see the field he had bought in ’42 or was it 43? Yes, it was ’43. He had been proud to be making his inheritance grow. The war had been good for farmers – at least for those who had not been dragged off to labour in Germany. But he, as an only son, had been exempted to work the land. He had sold cheese and butter to restaurants in Vichy. Cream too. That had been profitable. Very profitable. He had even bought a van to make his own deliveries. Petrol had been hard to get, but in those days Vichy restaurateurs were well connected. They needed his produce, so he got his fuel.

Of course, others had been less fortunate. But that, after all was the way of the world. Old Madame Chazal, for example. She had lost one of her two sons at the front. The second had been arrested – God alone knows what for. A weedy fellow – didn’t look much like a maquisard (resistance fighter). But he never came back. The old woman had to sell one of her fields. He had helped her in her predicament: A year or two later he had bought a second field from her. He could see them now, below. You could no longer make out the border between the two: he had had the stone wall between them bulldozed. With the stones he had built a little causeway to the brook and, the following year, had constructed a little wooden bridge. That was after he had acquired the meadow on the other side of the valley. Must have been in the 50’s when old man Vizet had become too decrepit to continue farming. He had got it cheap. There were many selling in those days – old men with no sons to take over, or old women. Anyway, he had paid a fair price, whatever the old fool had bruited about afterwards. Old Vizet could never grasp that on his side of the valley the land sloped too steeply. One couldn’t use machinery to cut hay at such an angle. More than one farmer had been killed when his tractor overturned on such a slope. He, Pépé, knew that he would have to abandon about a third of that meadow. And indeed, it had reverted to wasteland: bracken and thistles had taken over. Trees, too, had planted themselves: they were becoming quite tall by now. But back in the 50’s he had never succeeded in persuading Vizet that any of the land would have to be abandoned. All his life Vizet had scythed it by hand – like his father before him – and the steep slope had never bothered him. Old Vizet had his feet planted firmly on the ground. But his brain was less sturdy: He could not grasp that scything by hand was now uneconomic. Those days were over.

Later, of course, he, Pépé, had found a use for at least a bit of the wasteland: he’d constructed a hay-barn on the slope. As his herd and his property had increased, he had needed more storage.

The neighbours had been critical, of course, because he’d built a corrugated iron shed – the first in the village. “His hay will rot,” they had said. But it had cost half of a stone and slate shed and the hay had not rotted. Now many of the neighbours had sheds like his.

He listened for the sound of bells. Beautiful, red-brown Salers cattle. His herd – but his no longer. He knew every one of them by name. But that evening someone else would milk them; someone who could not call them by name. He listened to the music of their bells. Perhaps he should have taken the bells off as had been done when his father died: a sign of mourning. But life continues. There was no death. And when the bells stop, the countryside becomes desolate.

Close by he heard footsteps, the slow footsteps of an old man. It was Patate. Normally, he did not waste time listening to the man’s inane chatter. Just then, however, company – any company – seemed welcome. As Patate passed the gate Pépé greeted him, gestured to invite him in and offered him a cigarette. Patate sat down on a log:

“So. You’re leaving, patron?”

“As you can see.”

“I’m sorry.”

Pépé shrugged: “That’s life.”

“Yes. That’s life. My old man – he always knew it.”

This did not appear to call for an answer. They sat smoking in silence for a moment, until Patate realised that he had not made his point:

“He always said all this would come to no good.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your place here, patron. My old man, he said you were going to overreach yourself. That’s what he said. ‘Tractors, harvesters, motorcars, more land … God knows what next. Milking machines I suppose!’. That’s what he used to say.”

“Your old man?!”

“Yes. That’s what he said. ‘Too ambitious,’ he said. I remember it well. He said you were too ambitious. You’d overreach yourself. And when your son got going – but that was after my father’s death – I said to my brothers: ‘You remember what the Old Man used to say? They’ll overreach themselves. Watch it,” I said.

Pépé snorted but did not reply. They smoked in silence. Patate felt he had, perhaps, said too much. One had to be careful with the rich and powerful. And even if Pépé was no longer as rich as he had been … well, he did still have a motorcar. An ingratiating smile came over Patate’s face:

“Excuse me asking, patron, but I was going up to the dairy in Bois for cheese. It’s a long walk, and my corns are giving me trouble, terrible trouble. You couldn’t spare five minutes, could you, to give me a lift up the hill?”

“No,” said Pépé brusquely. “I’m waiting for the Spider’s men.” And after a moment he added: “My ambition is to hand over the place neat and tidy. My last ambition.”

Patate got up: “Thanks for the cigarette,” he said, grinning knowingly, and started to walk painfully up the hill. Once out of sight, beyond the copse, his walk became a little more brisk.

Pépé lit another cigarette: Fancy that! Old Rednose … that’s what he’d said? That I’d overreach myself? What did that old boozer know about … about anything. He used to work here in the old days, in the days when hay was cut by hand. But I fired him after I got my first tractor – not immediately but once we got it working properly. It must have been in ’38 or ’39 … before the war. He was the first I got rid of. “Why me?” he’d complained. “I’ve been with you longer than most.” But he deserved it. Totally unreliable, that fellow. Each payday he would have a barrel of wine delivered to his cottage. Then he took to his bed and wouldn’t get up till the barrel was empty – except to piss and to beat his wife. No doubt he felt sore, because I kept on men who’d been engaged years after him. But the only way you could make sure Old Rednose reported for work at haymaking was to withhold his pay. His poor long-suffering wife would come up begging for an advance, so that she could feed her brood. Twelve children! I never employed any of them – thought they would probably take after Old Rednose. Strange – Patate still calls me patron. And he still expects favours.

“Too ambitious? Overreaching oneself?” Curious – they’re the very words I used when rowing with Claude. We had many a row about it in the years after I handed over the farm.

“Could it be … could it possibly be that I, myself, set the bad example?

“But no: it’s all a matter of judgement! To weigh each step; to calculate; to consult… regular consultations with the men at the Agricultural Bank, the lawyer and sometimes even with a distant cousin in the Ministry of Agriculture.

Claude, on the other hand, consulted nobody. Always impulsive. He was intoxicated with success, with money, with property and even more so with women. Befuddled – he’d gone over the top. The grandsons, poor lads, had inherited the mess. Hardworking lads, but how could they save the enterprise? Perhaps had I been younger I could have helped them.

His eyes wandered back to the wind making waves through the meadow below. Such beautiful tall grass! Still – that grass had provoked their first major row, shortly after Claude’s marriage.

Claude had announced – out of the blue – that he was going to plough up the field and lay down perforated pipes to improve the drainage. After that he would sow a high yield grass that had been developed in America. That’s what everybody was doing in the north, he had explained, and abroad. But he, Pépé, had argued, that in this fortunate region nature provided the soil and the rainfall for good pasturage without any additional investment. How much more would that fancy new grass yield? How many more cattle would the land support? Had Claude worked out how many years it would take to get his capital back? Was he sure it was a worthwhile investment?

Claude had accused him of being an old stick-in-the-mud, out of touch with the times. Him, Pépé, whom they used to call the most progressive farmer in the region! And Claude had drained the field and resown it. Alas, it hadn’t taken very long to show who was right: The government had imposed cattle quotas to keep down what they called the “butter mountain”. That beautiful high-yield grass never fed any extra cattle.

Truth to tell, neither he, Pépé, nor even his cousin in the ministry had foreseen what Paris would get up to…. Paris or Brussels. But, Pépé insisted, his instinct had been sound.

After that he had tried to avoid rows and had withdrawn increasingly from the management of the farm. There had been other dubious decisions, but he had said nothing, or little. Not until the whole house of cards had collapsed.

Perhaps it would have been better if he had said more a lot earlier – when Claude was still at agricultural college. His teachers had complained: he spends his days playing billiards or cards and his nights chasing the girls. Pépé had laughed and had continued to send Claude his generous allowance.

The priest had told his wife that Claude never took communion. She, in turn, had wanted Pépé to give the boy a serious talking-to but he had refused. “Church,” he had grumbled, “is for old women.”

Then there had been that scandal! The day after the mid-course exams, Claude had been found in bed with the wife of one of his tutors. The director had been furious and ever so pompous. Claude was expelled with great formality. His mother had been outraged, but he, Pépé, had only chuckled: “Young men will sow wild oats. The boy has so much charm! No wonder.”

Claude’s exam results (when they were eventually posted) had been quite good. All Pépé had said was “They could have been a lot better if you had taken your studies seriously!”

The boy had pleaded to be sent to another agricultural college, further away. Pépé had agreed without fuss.

“Dad, I didn’t break up that marriage. It was in pieces long before I got involved. What harm did I do?”.

Yes, Claude had even persuaded him to give him a car – so that he could come home for weekends. Not that he did, or only very rarely. Yes, he had spoilt the boy. He had wanted him to have the things that he, himself, had only dreamt about when young. He had been proud that he could afford to give his son a good life. Had he been wrong?

His wife, God rest her soul, had worried constantly about the boy. In the middle of the night, she had woken him up. “That boy, he’s going to do something stupid. You’ll see. He’s going to get one of those silly shop-girls pregnant. And then he’ll have to marry her.”

She had become rather snobbish, Pépé had thought, choosing to forget that she herself had once served behind a baker’s counter. Many a night he’d had to calm her: “Don’t worry: That boy is no fool.”

Claude had passed his finals – not brilliantly, but better than many, and he had come home to work with his father. Only a few days later, over dinner, he had announced to his startled parents that he was thinking of getting married. He would like to bring home his fiancé. Would the following evening suit them? And before his mother had had time to work herself into a state, he had announced that the girl in question was Blanche Durif. He had proposed to her and been accepted. Both parents were speechless:  A good marriage. A sensible marriage. A girl from a family they themselves might have chosen for him. Not a pretty girl, but serious and sensible. But above all – rich.

The Durifs were delighted to marry their daughter to so presentable a young man, one who would inherit one of the largest farms in the area. They settled a substantial sum on Blanche and bought Claude a field adjoining the family farm as a wedding present.

Claude’s first lorries had been bought with her dowry. Pépé had had his doubts about the transport business, but how could he object?  It was not his money. It was a year of drought and Claude had reasoned that they were paying too much for the hay trucked in from the north. So he had bought a lorry, had worked long hours driving it himself and had indeed brought in hay far more reasonably. Then he had done the same for several neighbours at cut price and had still made a handsome profit.

“And what if next year there is no need to buy in hay?” Pépé had asked.

“Then we’ll transport our calves to Italy and cut out the middlemen.” In fact, Claude bought a second lorry and engaged a driver, and then a third. In good years they made a fine profit, but only one year in three was good. Nevertheless, Claude had insisted on continuing with the transport business. Pépé had had his suspicions that Claude’s trips were not all work and no pleasure, but he had said nothing. He was fond of his daughter-in-law and did not want to cause her pain. But she was absorbed in bringing up her sons and did not seem to notice.

Next, Claude had complained about the profits made by the abattoirs: they bought cattle cheap and sold meat dear. It was a mug’s game raising beef when it was the middlemen – the abattoir owners and the transport operators – who made the real profits. One evening he had come back to announce that he had bought the abattoir at Chalvinac.

He, Pépé, had demanded to know whether Claude had had the books audited.

Blanche, too, had expressed doubts – a sensible woman. It was an old building, she had said, and would need renovation. Had he obtained estimates of costs? What was the annual turn-over?

But Claude had been full of confidence. Wasn’t it the only abattoir in the vicinity? People had to eat, even in times of depression. Food was the safest investment of all.

By the end of the evening he had convinced them that it had been a bold and enterprising purchase.”

New government hygiene regulations required heavy investment. The abattoir had to be brought up to standards demanded by Brussels: walls had to be tiled and hosed down regularly; drainage improved; windows gauzed. Much of Blanche’s dowry went into modernising the abattoir. But other abattoirs over a wide area could not keep up with the new demands. Several closed down and Claude’s turnover doubled. He was now transporting meat to several cities. Claude appeared to have been vindicated.

But new regulation followed new regulation: farmers complained that the industry was supporting more pen-pushers than peasants. “I spend more time clearing out last year’s government forms than cleaning out my stables,” grumbled M. Bony, one of the neighbours.

It was at this point that Pépé had decided to retire and hand over the running of the farm to Claude. “After all, we sent you to agricultural college to learn how to fill in forms,” he chuckled. His grandsons would soon be available to help Claude – they were growing up to be fine, sturdy lads, both of them. Why should he bother?

Pépé retained a financial interest but made sure that he withdrew enough money to build a small block of six apartments: “If you and I quarrel, I’ll move into one of them myself. Anyway, it’s a hedge against you going broke.”

A joke, he thought, nothing but a joke.

He decided that from now on he could take it easy, supervise the building of the flats, plant a garden around them and, of course, eventually collect the rents. In the meantime, he remained in the family house. Blanche cooked well, he got on splendidly with her and with his grandsons. As for Claude – well, he was seldom at home.

“My going into transport was a sound decision,” Claude announced over dinner one night. “But – I should have bought refrigerated lorries straight away. Meat deliveries to Paris, Turin, Milan would bring in a fortune”

And that was how Blanche and Pépé got to hear that he had sold his lorries – four by now – and had replaced them with expensive refrigerated trucks.

Yet he seemed to be making lots of money, transporting meat to faraway places. Pépé thought he should be concentrating on raising cattle, and perhaps managing the abattoir but Claude took a lot of time off to drive one of his trucks himself.

“Why can’t you leave that to your employees?” his wife demanded.

“You don’t understand: One needs to know the market, to be in touch with the customers.”

“You’re not selling clothes. Meat fashions don’t change, do they?” she had replied. “Meat’s always meat.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. Look at all that nouvelle cuisine stuff. They want leaner meat, to give you one example.”

But Pépé, by then, had started to realise what was afoot: he had overheard Claude joking with one of the drivers. The driver had said he was off towards the wine, women and song of Italy. And Claude had said: “I, myself, go easy on the wine. Those autostradas!” And there had been sly complicity about their laughter.

One night one of the drivers – he was by then almost part of the household – was chatting with Pépé after Blanche and the boys had gone to bed. He mentioned that he wasn’t expecting Claude that night because he was likely to spend the night at Rodez.

“At Rodez? But he could get back here within an hour or two?”

The driver had appeared embarrassed and had blushed: “But you know, it’s not a good idea to drive when you’re fagged out; when you need a bed.”

Pépé understood.

The boys grew up. They were nearly men. Blanche grew increasingly disenchanted. She, too, had realised by now what was keeping Claude from home.

Claude had installed a manager at the farm so as to have more time to look after his widening commercial interests.

Pépé – overcoming his reluctance to getting involved – drove up to the farm once or twice a week. In the end he said to Claude – on one of the increasingly rare evenings when his son dined at home – that the manager was not very competent, nor very conscientious.

Claude barely listened: “Look: I’m into the big time. I’m not into hand-feeding calves.”

Soon after, Claude bought up a high-class butchers’ shop in the city: “If you can control the entire chain, it’s you who reaps the reward for your efforts, not the middlemen who do fuck-all to earn it,” he explained.

He had persuaded Blanche’s brothers to take a half-share in that enterprise. “Isn’t he over-extending himself?” Pépé and Blanche had worried.

The next week Claude turned up with a new car – a handsome foreign-made one, a Jaguar. No-one had seen so fancy a car in the region.

“God!” Blanche had said,” It’s a beauty. But can we afford it?”

“We can’t afford not to,” Claude had said. “If you’ve got a growing business, you need to raise capital to keep on growing. You must convince people that you’re doing brilliantly. So – this car is a good investment”.

“You do remember my father’s deux-cheveaux?” said Pépé. “He was a rich man, and a successful one. But he never got into debt. Never.”

“Different times – different ways!” Claude had said and had driven away.

Then, one day, suddenly, he was into horses!

“So – those idiots in Brussels have put a quota on cows? Okay: We’ll breed horses! I’ve been in touch with a horse-butcher in Marseilles. He says he can’t get enough. Far too few people are breeding them these days. And they don’t need milking.”

So, horses were bought. Ramblers stopped by the side of the meadow to show them to their children – beautiful, graceful beasts that galloped up and down the meadows just for the fun of it. They were not slaughtered in Claude’s abattoir but trucked off south.

The French market in horsemeat was in decline. In fact, it had long been so. The newly affluent would not eat horse. Pépé had grumbled from the start that Claude’s new enterprise was doomed.

“Not at all,” Claude had said, “There is still a vast market for horsemeat in Italy. Nobody seems to have realised it.”

And indeed, Italy appeared to be a good market.

“You see? None of these stick-in-the-muds here have ever had the wit to explore foreign markets! One has to be on the ball these days.”

Claude often drove trucks of horses to Italy himself.

And then, suddenly, that ceased. The blow came from an unexpected quarter: The Dutch press ran an expose about Italians exporting French horsemeat to Holland labelled as beef. One journalist even traced the meat served in an Amsterdam steakhouse back to the Auvergne. An Auvergnat provincial paper splashed the story on its front page.

There were frantic phone calls, cancelled orders, lorries diverted at the border before Italian veterinary inspectors could examine the contents.

Claude exploded: ” What the hell is wrong with horsemeat, I ask you? Why this prejudice? It’s tastier than beef. It ought to sell for more.”

But orders from Italy dried up.

“Don’t worry.” Claude assured Pépé and Blanche. “A minor hiccup. Every business has its setbacks. The Italian business may even recover. After all, re-export was only a part of it. And – the abattoir is doing very well.”

He did, indeed, build a new refrigeration wing on to the abattoir. The banks appeared to have confidence in his acumen and lent him money for expansion: for the new wing; for further refrigerated trucks; and even for additional land purchases. Even Blanche’s brother, Pierre, assured them that they need have no worries about Claude: Claude was as smart as they come and was doing very nicely. He, Pierre, himself had decided to invest in the new wing. Why were Pépé and Blanche looking so glum? Pierre was known as a shrewd businessman – he had built up a large business in tractors and other agricultural machinery.

But Pépé and Blanche were at the receiving end of complaints from suppliers with unpaid bills and from employees who complained they were never paid on time.

“Look,” said Claude when Blanche confronted him, “every expanding business has liquidity problems once in a while. Even millionaires have them. It’s nothing.”

But it wasn’t.

Pépé would never forget ‘that morning’. Claude’s employees sent a three-man delegation to the house to see Claude and demand their overdue wages. Claude was not around. That was not unusual and Pépé explained that he appeared to have driven one of the trucks to Italy.

“What trucks?” said one of the men. “The trucks have been sold. Didn’t you know?”

No, Pépé did not know.

The following day the bank-manager himself came over all the way from the city. He had never done that before. Claude was nowhere to be found. The manager had a long conversation with Blanche.

Later that day Blanche pulled Pépé into her pantry – her own private domaine where she kept home-made jams and smoked legs of pork. In a low voice she told him: “His wardrobe has been cleared. Completely empty: just one torn winter coat which he hasn’t worn for years. And you know what the bank manager told me? Our current account has been cleared out. Our joint account! I can’t even pay for the week’s groceries!”

“What’s he up to?”

In the days following that became obvious: Claude had done a bunk. He was insolvent and was leaving others to clear up the mess. It was a far worse mess than they anticipated.

Pierre – Blanche’s brother – arrived, almost speechless with fury: Claude had forged his signature, he shouted. Yes, he had guaranteed one of Claude’s bank-loans. That was true. But Claude had contracted two more and had offered Pierre’s business as security, except that the two signatures purporting to be Claude’s were not his.

After a long discussion between Blanche and her brother, behind closed doors, Pierre decided to honour the signature “to save the family reputation”. Or so he said.

In fact, Pépé knew better: It was not the family reputation but Pierre’s own business that was at risk. At the last country-fair, while he was having an aperitif in the local café, he had been approached by a group of businessmen. They had sat around him, looking serious and one of them – obviously selected as their spokesman – had told him they were worried about his brother-in-law’s financial soundness. He owed each one of them money.

Pierre (as Pépé found out later) had held forth in extravagant terms: Claude was a brilliant and enterprising businessman, far-sighted and absolutely sound. Why, he himself had invested heavily in Claude’s enterprises – success should be reinforced. Did they trust him, personally? Yes? In that case they could rest assured about his brother-in-law.

It had been a very public discussion. There had been more than six people present – all big farmers or cattle-dealers – and Pierre’s reassurance had been spread to an even wider circle. If it now got around that he, Pierre, was being dragged into a bankruptcy, his own credit would be in danger. Certainly, his reputation for sound judgement would disperse like the morning mists before the sun.

Pierre’s intervention avoided a bankruptcy, but it cost him dear.

Despite his distress, Pépé got a certain satisfaction out of Pierre’s predicament: Serves him right, shooting his mouth off!

For weeks there was no sign of Claude. Had he escaped abroad? He had long talked about making enough money to spend the rest of his life in Martinique. “On the beach – with a glass of rum and Coca-Cola in one hand, and a dusky dancing girl in the other,” he had said, more than once, mainly to observe Blanche’s annoyance.

Blanche actually took steps to have enquiries made in Martinique. They yielded nothing.

There were, however, more immediate problems than tracing Claude: the bank still threatened to foreclose. In the end he, Pépé, had decided to intervene.

“And I thought I was old enough to cop out of responsibility!” he had grumbled to Blanche.

Reluctantly, he had gone to see the bank-manager, an old mate, and together they had worked out an arrangement. The abattoirs were sold outright. “Good riddance!” said Blanche. Pépé agreed. Various other fringe enterprises, including some that the family did not even know Claude owned, were closed down or sold at knock-down prices. But the family farm – that was different. Pépé fought for it – it had been “his” farm. But for all his tenacity he could not prevent the major part of the equity getting into the hands of “The Spider”. Agricom owned half-a-dozen farms in the neighbourhood and the two largest dairies. It was the sort of enterprise Claude had, no doubt, dreamt about creating. “They’re buying up the world,” the locals grumbled. But the regional manager – Phillipe – was the son of one of Pépé’s oldest friends. When an infant, Phillipe had been carried on Pépé’s shoulders around the Peyrols farm and been shown the new-born calves. It made a bond of sorts. After long discussions Phillipe had agreed to install Pépé’s two grandsons, only 19 and 21, as managers. He added “provisionally, mark you!” – for a period of five years – “provided my chairman doesn’t veto it”. The two lads each retained a 2% share of the enterprise. But the hard part of the deal – as far as Pépé was concerned – was that he, himself, would have to take up another 3% share. That meant selling off two of the apartments he had built, and only retaining four. Pépé was reluctant. So far he had been shrewd enough to lose very little of his own money in his son’s collapse. Why get drawn in now? But it was the only way of keeping a stake in the farm for the family.

“You must see: I need you, personally, involved financially,” Phillipe had explained. “Without you, I can never sell the deal to my chairman. He’s a tough customer. I need to assure him that you’ll keep an eye on things. You’re known as a shrewd manager. As for your grandsons – they’re young. How can my chairman know whether they take after you or … after him?”

Pépé succeeded in inserting a clause into the agreement whereby his grandsons would be allowed to buy back the 7% share that had passed out of the family’s hands from their share of the profits.

“Stiff terms,” Pépé had said to Blanche, “but if God and those fellows in Brussels or Paris don’t bugger us up, we’ll manage. Provided, of course, your husband keeps away”

“He’ll keep away, don’t you worry: There could be a case of forgery against him, as you know. But Pépé, honestly, can that farm really be brought back into profit?”

“Well, I worry about that myself: Two young lads and one old dodderer plus a very large herd? But we’ll try our hardest, I promise you.”

“Have you thought of reducing the herd? To half, perhaps?”

“Not if we want to pay the Spider its share and then have some over to buy back the rest; even slowly, bit by bit, say over ten years. I’ve been sitting up most of last night doing my arithmetic. If we cut down on the size of the herd, we don’t stand an earthly. All our profits would go to the Spider. There would be little enough to feed you and the boys. And – if my arithmetic is right – there’d be nothing over for buying back. We simply must cope with the entire herd.”

The Peyrols’ collapse was the talk of the village and even of the bourg down in the valley. It could not be hidden: the remaining staff had had to be dismissed. It was, after all, the largest farm in the area.

And then, two days later Roger had ambled up the hill, broad-shouldered, almost a giant, wearing, as always, a pair of ex-Algeria army fatigues and sucking at a Gitane. He had sat down on the very bench where he, Pépé was sitting now, waiting.

“I am coming to work for you, old man,” he had said.

“Don’t be silly, Roger,” Pépé had replied, “we gave you notice. We can’t pay you. I thought you understood.”

“I understood very well,” Roger had said. “But I still say – I’m coming to work for you. There’s no need to pay me. Well, when things look up financially, we can talk again. In the meantime, I don’t want your money. I’ll share your lunch, if you can manage that.”

There followed some arguments. Pépé had taken Roger down to the bourg so that Blanche could be in on the matter: Blanche, too, had protested they could not accept his offer.

“Look! Since you people fired me, I have been around”, said Roger: “nobody is offering jobs except people I wouldn’t want to work for – like Paul Parlange.”

They knew that with his help they had a chance of pulling through – “God, and those buggers in Brussels and Paris willing…”. But without him we’d stand no chance.

In the end Pépé had embraced Roger, kissed him on both cheeks and had said: “It’s not likely that I shall be there to repay you. But the boys will. And if they don’t make it, there’s God Almighty himself – if he has any justice left. You never know about that these days – not even about Him.”

Roger had laughed and said: “Forget about God Almighty. I’m offering because I’m fond of you, you old bastard, and of your lads. If I’d ever had children of my own, I’d have hoped they would be like them. And, it’s better than sitting at home and hearing my brother moan all day …”

They had sat – Pépé, Blanche and the two boys – and drank a bottle; and then a second, to celebrate their reunion.

So they struggled on. Some years the rains were good. Other years they were bad and hay had to be ordered and trucked expensively from afar. But without fodder cows yield no milk.

Most years the beasts were strong and gave birth to sturdy calves. But in the third year there was an outbreak of Yersinia enterocolitica (cattle disease). Several calves died. That cut further into the farm’s income.

Others in the neighbourhood suffered similarly, but they did not have the same burden of debt. They met from time to time at La Maison des Am: “for a moaning session”, as Pépé put it. He joined them occasionally f or a glass of wine, just to keep in touch.

One evening M. Désnais was present. His grandfather, long dead, had farmed not far from Le Peuch, but the farm had been sold many years earlier. “Young” Désnais – he was himself approaching 60 – worked in a museum in Paris. He was, however, a frequent visitor to the region. The regional council had commissioned him to set up a museum of traditional crafts. A derelict chateau had been leased for the purpose and was being renovated. Désnais toured farmsteads searching barns for old farm-implements, craftsmen’s tools and faded photographs. cafés where the locals congregated were useful to him for contacts. But at La Maison des Am he was not popular: He was a short, fat, balding, pink faced man with thick spectacles – an alien among the weather-beaten Auvergnats. He always knew better than the locals how an old tool had been used or what farming techniques had been employed in the 19th century, or the 18th, or the 17th. They did not much like a townsman who claimed to know better than they did. In fact, he did know better. Behind his back they called him M. Disney – “Watch out: he’s going to turn this place into another Disneyland.”

Overhearing one of their “moaning sessions”, Désnais had interrupted: “So – what’s new? Farmers are always grumbling. I’m waiting to hear one who’ll admit that he’s doing well.”

1. Bony, one of the younger farmers who had had a drink or two too many became abusive. Mireille thought there might be a fight. She was about to intervene, when Pépé stepped in.

“You may be right, M. Désnais,” Pépé said, “we do grumble too much, but we have a lot to grumble about. You townsfolk don’t see it. Our livelihood is unpredictable. We work Sundays, holy days, even on the 14th of July. Our cows have to be milked twice a day, every day. You can’t ever skip a day. But despite all that we never know: are our efforts going to be rewarded? One hailstorm, or an epidemic, and we’d be in trouble”.

1. ‘Disney’ argued: “You’re a damned sight better off than in the old days. I remember my grandfather: He was almost ruined one year when the rains failed. His cows actually died of hunger. Or rather, they were about to die but he slaughtered them just before. It took him years to recover, financially. You people? Nowadays you just pick up the phone and order hay. And with all those subsidies and support prices, you’re in clover”.

“There are support prices,” Pépé conceded, “But they’re as much beyond our control as hail or Yersinia enterocolitica. More so. If we’re lucky the Met office gives us early warning of hail. So we work all hours, day and night, to bring in the hay – as much of it as we can. But government decisions? Who can predict them? Some of the edicts that come out of Paris or Brussels are crazy, totally crazy. Or at least, so they seem to us, seen from our angle.”

Turning to Bony, who farmed near him, he added: “You remember the year when Claude sowed that fancy grass? Well, I had my doubts at the time, but I must admit that even I didn’t predict that twelve months later they would impose a quota on us.” And turning to Désnais he explained: “That was the year they imposed a limit on the number of cows we were allowed to raise. Planting that high-yield grass cost us a fortune, but it never fed one single additional cow.”

When Désnais still seemed sceptical, Pépé added: “Look, I have a nephew. He comes from these parts, but he now lives at Grenoble.  He was apprenticed to a motor-mechanic. Now he has his own garage. He works hard and he’s conscientious. In a few years’ time he’s going to be a rich man. But if he’d stayed here, on the land, who knows? He could be well-off or he could be stony-broke. It’s unpredictable. Maybe not as bad as in your grandfather’s days – what with price supports and subsidies and all that – but it’s still precarious.”

“Pépé is right,” said M. Bony, a little less excited now. “They’re all crazy in those ministries: Half the world is starving – have you seen those TV pictures from Africa? And they ask us to reduce production and to set aside good grazing land! It’s pure lunacy!”

“Of course, M. Bony,” said Désnais, “you’re offering to give your produce to the starving blacks – for nothing? Or are you?”

“M. Désnais, you know perfectly well I can’t do that. But why can’t those international do-gooders buy it from me to feed the poor bastards?”

“Because,” said Désnais, “they can buy it from America at half the price you ask. That’s why.”

“So what’s going to happen here?  They say they’re going to pay us money to take land out of production. It’ll go to waste. Or will you turn it into a Disneyland?

They all laughed, wondering whether Désnais knew his local nickname. Bony continued: “a museum to show how we savages lived in the late 20th century?”

“Many years ago, I set some land aside,” Pépé interrupted, “though at that time nobody paid me for it. It sloped too steeply so we couldn’t work it by tractor. Now it’s covered with bracken and broom and ash trees – all self-sown. The foxes are flourishing, and my grandson has seen a couple of badgers.”

“So – face facts.” said Désnais “In the days of the Ancient Gauls all this area was forest: ash and beech.”

“And there were wolves.” said Bony, the angry young man, “They’ll come back too – and I hope they get you by the throat.”

“M. Désnais,” said Pépé, “I’ve always prided myself on being realistic, but this? Well, no doubt it’s easier to contemplate this if one lives in a comfortable apartment in Paris.”

The family gave little thought to Claude. Was he alive? Had he gone abroad? Eventually it was the taxmen who sniffed him out. Pépé opened a letter addressed to Claude: the original had gone to a logging-camp in the Pyrenees. A copy had been sent to the family home. The letter threatened prosecution for unpaid VAT.

Pépé was worried: would his son end up in jail and bring yet more disgrace upon the family? He said nothing to Blanche, nor to the boys, but a week later he took off on a weekend – “to see an old cousin,” he pretended – and drove down to the Pyrenees.

He found Claude sharing a caravan with a pretty girl half his age: “A silly, giggly girl,” he told Blanche upon his return.

“He’s boasting that he’ll rebuild his empire – that’s what he called it – ‘his empire’. He’s going to rebuild it to twice its former size. He thinks he’s Napoleon at Elba. He says your brother conspired to ruin him, and we – you, Blanche and I – were part of the plot. God alone knows whether he believes all this rubbish or whether he’s just trying to impress the girl.”

“So what’s he doing?”

“Working a crane. He works long hours piling timber on to lorries. Sometimes he drives the lorries down to the sawmill himself and does the food shopping. They live in a miserable little caravan, the two of them: no running water, a pit latrine, gas lamps. I’m surprised the girl puts up with it. But he says he’s about to pull off a big deal with an old mate – he’s going to take over a hotel complex in Martinique. If you ask me, he’s lost touch with reality.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Blanche.

Pépé shook his head sadly. “Blanche,” he said, “that’s your husband you’re talking about. And my son.”

After that Claude was not mentioned for a long time. There were more immediate worries. Would they manage to pull the farm out of the morass, despite drought and disease?

The boys got up before dawn each morning, drove up the steep road from the bourg and collected Roger, either from his own cottage or from Mireille’s Café. Together they milked the cows: Salers cattle.

Cows of this species have a will of their own: they will not give milk unless their calf is first brought to them.

The calves are kept separate from their mothers all day and night and only reunited for the two daily milking periods. The farmer calls each calf by name. The calf responds to the summons, is allowed into the milking shed and heads straight for its mother. The calf is then allowed to start sucking on one teat, while the milking machine is attached to the other three.

It is labour-intensive work. The more money-minded farmers give up Salers cattle for breeds that require less work. But many among the mountain farmers have a deep and, perhaps irrational, attachment to their beasts – these beautiful, reddish-brown cattle, long-haired, with the gentle eyes and lyre-shaped curved horns. The strong maternal instinct of the cows appears to find an echo in their owners. Yes, they can rationalise their attachment: They say that this is the breed best-adapted to mountain pastures. Salers are sturdy and good breeders – birth complications are rare. Most important, they are versatile: they provide a good yield of milk which makes a popular cheese. They will sell their cattle for slaughter for the excellent meat – “Well, we have to make a living, don’t we?” – but many of the breeders will not eat beef, or only very rarely. In their homes they eat pork or lamb or rabbit or chicken.

Auvergnats have a reputation for money-mindedness. If money were their sole consideration, they would give up Salers for other breeds easier to raise, or at least they would cross them with white Charolais. Some do, but so far they are very few.

Pépé was pleased with his grandsons – they were conscientious lads and, together with Roger, they worked hard. But the cards seemed to be stacked against them.

Pépé kept in touch with his cousin-twice-removed in the ministry. One year he invited the cousin and his wife to come and spend their summer vacation with him. The two men spent many an evening chatting over a bottle of Pépé’s favourite Cahors.

“Listen,” said the cousin; “let me give you my honest view: the long-term outlook is gloomy. Those Canadians and Australians produce cheese and butter and beef for, well, for practically nothing. In the long run, you can’t compete – not here in your mountains. Look, around: A man who has 30 cows in the Auvergne is a big man. But over there they run six hundred, a thousand cows, even more.”

“You can graze a thousand in the Australian outback – for slaughter. But you can’t milk a thousand – not without a vast staff. And that costs.”

“Or by factory methods with a lot of fancy machinery! Listen, Pépé: The ministry is fighting to safeguard your livelihood. But if I had children, I’d advise them to get off the land. Prices are not going to rise. They can only fall. Do you realise that if subsidies were abolished, and intervention prices too, if you people had to sell at world market prices, your incomes would be halved? Halved! They’re bound to get less in the long run. The best we can do is prevent them shrinking too fast.

For five years they battled on. The grandsons became more skilled and required less of Roger’s assistance. He spent more time at Mireille’s. But in Year Four they fell behind with their payments to “The Spider”. Pépé went to see the manager.

Unfortunately, behind the desk was a new manager whom Pépé had never met. Phillipe had been transferred and his replacement was a youngster in a smart suit and tie, with a mobile telephone. Nothing could impress such a fellow except a cheque on time. Pépé could see he was used to dealing with accountancy whiz kids. With a type like that, grey hair and half a century of farming experience counted for nothing.

“Times are bad. Prices are low.” Pépé told him.  “This year we have to sell three calves to earn what we used to make on two. Give us time.”

“I’ll have to refer your case to my chairman,” he said. “I doubt whether he’ll be very sympathetic. In his view low prices – in the short run – are a very good thing: ‘excellent for mucking out the idle and inefficient’. That’s what he says.”

“Is that so? Mucking out – eh? You did say mucking out?”

The following year was no better; worse, in fact, both financially and because of Roger’s death. He had not been able to do much work after he broke his arm, but he had strolled up the hill from time to time. Even in pain or depressed, he had cheered up in the company of “the boys”. He insisted on calling them that, even though Nicholas was already married and a father. Roger tried to sound optimistic:   “Next year the rains will certainly be better. We have never had three dry years in a row.” Or: “That new bull of yours – he’ll give you the finest calves in the region.”

After his death, each time Pépé came up, he said: “I can’t help it: I always look around for him. I really miss that fellow.”

Then, one morning in the autumn of the fifth year the postman had delivered a curt letter:

“We regret to note that two years running you have fallen behind in your payments. Furthermore, the payments you undertook to make towards repurchasing this company’s shares have not materialised. We therefore regret to have to inform you that we must terminate our agreement”.

Pépé read the letter over and over. It was signed “Didier Delaporte, Chairman.”

“Delaporte? Where have I heard that name before?” But he could not remember.

The local manager with the mobile telephone informed him that the company had decided to take over the direct management of the farm. They were proposing to combine its management with that of another estate they owned a few kilometres away. The same staff could run both, motoring between the farms. Of course, they would no longer breed cows for milking, only for beef. Salers would be replaced by beasts that required less manpower.

The grandsons had been deeply upset: “Ugly white and black beasts, aliens.” They loved their herd. Nicholas, angry and agitated, dashed around searching for a job. He soon found one as a part-time lorry driver. It was badly paid but he accepted: He had a wife and baby to support. Whenever he could, he came back to the farm to help with the milking. José, on the other hand, carried on as if nothing was happening. He could not bear to think of a life without the farm.

The old man said nothing.

“His suffering is too deep,” said José.

“Don’t you believe it. He’s hard as nails.” said Nicholas.

And there he sat now, an old man on an old bench under a lime tree, just where he had sat as a schoolboy. He smoked and waited.  Normally, he limited himself to four cigarettes in the afternoon, and two after dinner. Today he did not count.

The lime tree had grown in the 80 years he had sheltered under its shade. His mother had told him that even his cradle had stood under it.

“If they don’t come soon,” Pépé said to himself, “I’ll go. They can send down to the bourg for the keys. I’ll give them another quarter hour. No more.”

And he lit another cigarette.

As a child he had often sat in the same place in the early morning when it was still too early to go to school. That was after he had helped with the milking – all done by hand in those days. The valley below would be shrouded in mist but as the sun rose the mist would part and creep away into hollows. He had thought of it as a herd of animals hiding, only to sneak back the next night. Eventually he would pick up his satchel and trudge down to school – the old primary school. He could see the building now, some way down the hill, just beyond the gaunt black ruins of Roger’s cottage. The schoolhouse too would soon be in ruins. It had stood empty and neglected for many years. Every year the winter storms brought down one or two more tiles from the roof. The timbers would start to rot, if they hadn’t started already. The government had closed the school – when was it? – nearly 40 years ago. There were no longer enough children at Le Peuch, nor in the surrounding villages. For some further years the building had housed teachers who taught in the new primary school in the bourg. Then one had refused to live so far from his workplace and others had followed suit. Primary school teachers did not run cars in those days, and the municipality had not yet bought a school bus.

He, Pépé, no doubt, also bore a share of the responsibility for the closure of that school, for he had moved his family out of the village. His wife had been in favour of the move to the bourg – for the child’s sake: Before long Claude would have to go to secondary school and that would mean walking to the bourg. It would be hard for a child to walk six kilometres downhill each morning. It would be harder still back uphill in the evening. His own motive for the move had been different: He had long dreamt of owning one of those grand bourgeois houses down there. When the old lawyer died, he had made an offer to the son only a week after the funeral. Later neighbours had said he had been too keen. He might have got it more cheaply if he had been more patient. But for him the house represented a break with the peasant life; with the life his parents had lived in this very house he was now waiting to hand over: one large room with a vast open fireplace over which his mother had hovered, stirring a cooking pot. That’s how they built houses in the days of Napoleon I. A four-poster had stood in the corner – for his parents; in the centre was a large table around which they took their meals, sitting uncomfortably on wooden benches. In fact, the old bench he now sat on must have been one of those. He and his brother had slept among the hay in the loft. Every day, after school, they had drawn three buckets of water from the well – water for cooking and for washing themselves. For her laundry, his mother had gone all the way down to the brook.

Now the lawyer’s house – that was something different: what the estate agents nowadays call a belle epoque house: a dining-room separate from the kitchen, and a fine salon for receiving visitors; large windows upstairs opening on to delicately wrought balcony rails; intricate iron decorations above the ridge of the roof, and a weathercock in the centre. Of course, the house had running water and electricity. No child of his would have to carry buckets of water nor struggle to do his homework by an oil-lamp.

An excess of vanity? Unholy ambition?

Then there was the church. Not that he cared for that, but his wife did. In the early years she had walked twelve kilometres every Sunday. That was before he got his first car. And once he had a car, living at a distance from his herd was no longer an obstacle. Anyway, he had quartered one of his cattlemen in the old family house. And once the telephone reached Le Peuch, life was easier.

Several neighbours had followed him into the bourg. Others, the young men and women, went off to Paris or Grenoble.

So now, all these years later, the roof of the schoolhouse was collapsing. Well, you can’t put a brake on time. The teacher who had been quartered in the schoolhouse – many years ago – had spent his days regretting the death of the mountain hamlets. But not he, not Pépé.

His thoughts were disturbed by the sound he had been expecting: diesel trucks chugging up the hill. They were coming up to collect the herd. Pépé glanced at his watch: It was almost milking time! Would they try and move them before milking? The poor beasts would be in pain.

Three heavy cattle trucks, one with a trailer, struggled up the hill. The noise and the fumes alerted the entire village to what was happening.

The drivers could not get all three lorries into the forecourt. The first truck pulled in and came to a stop under the lime tree, spreading a pall of diesel fumes. The others stopped in the lane outside. Pépé got up, holding his nose.

He was surprised to see that the first truck was driven by René, who had been one of Claude’s drivers. In fact, René had bought his first lorry from Claude. He now ran his own small transport business.

René climbed out very hesitantly. He had not expected to come face-to-face with the father of his old boss. He walked over to the old man and embraced him.

“That it should come to this!” There were tears in his eyes.

“None of your sentimentality!” said Pépé. ” Get on with it! Here are the keys. Give them to the agent. But make sure you milk the cows before you move them, the poor beasts.”

Nobody had warned the drivers about that, and the new Agricom representative, who should have known, had not yet arrived.

But they were the sons of peasants, all three of the truck drivers. They knew how to use a milking machine, and they knew that there was no way they could move those cows, even to slaughter, without first milking them. It would have been a sin – whether the company’s representatives knew it or not.

“We’ll get on with it in a moment,” said René, and implied: “After you have gone.”

They couldn’t milk the beasts in front of him and then tip out the milk. Pépé decided it was time to go. Blanche was frying chicken-liver, which he loved. He whistled for the dog who jumped into the car and sat down in the back, as he had done every day for many years.

The three truck drivers moved to the side and stood in a line to let him drive out of the courtyard. A bent old man with a stick, he walked slowly towards his little deux-chevaux. The three spontaneously extinguished their cigarettes and took off their caps.

Pépé stared at them. It took him a moment to realise what they were trying to say.

“You’ll catch cold”, he called over to them.

And then he saw that two women from the next village, Madame Dauzet and Madame Apcher had also turned up. Their car must have followed the trucks up the hill. They were lining the side of the road opposite the gate. Madame Apcher was weeping – but then she was given to tears.

“Do you remember what happened with Old Ribière?” she whispered to her companion. She was thinking of a tragedy which had occurred in her village many years earlier: An old man had committed suicide when his farm had been taken from him.

“Dear God, protect this man, “said Madame Apcher.

“What’s bugging them all?” thought Pépé. “They look as if they expect a speech from me. Not bloody likely.”

René, the lead-truck driver, approached Pépé’s car: “You know, patron, we’re all of us deeply….”, he searched for the word, “distressed, all of us who grew up in this area”.

“Forget it,” Pépé cut him short. He waved perfunctorily and started the engine.

“The phone,” shouted the second driver so as to be heard above the noise of the engine. In the abandoned cottage the phone was ringing.

“Let it ring,” said the old man, and manoeuvred his car past the lorry. “Magnificent, the courage of that old man!” thought René.

“Bugger them,” said Pépé to himself. “Bugger the bloody lot!

And drove off down the hill.

The noise of the heavy diesel lorries had alerted the entire village: nothing like it had happened in Le Peuch in their lifetime. So there they were: Madame Parlange stood in her vegetable patch outside her house and waved to him. Patate, on his way back from the dairy, turned and took off his beret. Pépé could not remember seeing him without his headgear – not since Louis’ funeral anyway. How ridiculous he looked, all naked and bald.

“Sentimental fools, the lot!” Pépé snorted to himself. “I’m okay. I’ve got a solid house with a good roof and a south-facing terrace where I can sun my arthritic limbs. My flats yield an adequate income. There’s Blanche to cook for me – and she’s a good cook. Why shouldn’t she? She lives rent-free in my house. There’s a soft white bed with clean sheets to lie in for the years that remain, a good bed to die in when my time is up.

“But not yet. No hurry. In the meantime, I’ve got a cellar-full of good wine, laid down by Claude… only sensible thing the stupid fellow ever did. And I’ve got my cigars.

“Old Marshall Petain, after all his glory and all his humiliation, is supposed to have said ‘that’s all that matters: Good food and good fucks. Nothing else.’ Probably he was right. If he ever said it.”

As he passed Madame Couderc’s house he saw her standing at the gate. She bowed her head.

“You’d think I was the Madonna carried in procession,” he snorted and shrugged his shoulders.

Just beyond the curve, below the last house, he stopped the car to piss, then buttoned his fly carefully, lit a cigar, and inhaled deeply. He looked down into the valley and wondered what it had looked like in the days of the ancient Gauls, all covered with forest, ash and beech.

He could hear the faint sound of wolves howling from somewhere distant in the valley, or was he imagining it?