The Avignon Quintet (111 page)

By now the youthful officer was also upon them, his pale face contorted with a rage which hardly allowed him to speak, uttering imprecations and orders in a voice which sounded almost like that of an adolescent. Here a moment of inattention came to the rescue of the two girls crouching on the platform. The German’s language was obviously foreign to the two peasants and they turned heavily round upon him in order to try and understand what he wanted of them. It was only a moment, but it sufficed for the quick-witted Nancy to cry, “Quick! Run for it!” And suiting the action to the word both girls raced along the platform, their feet barely touching it, or so it seemed: like duck upon the surface of a lake. The men turned growling and started to pursue them, but in a half-hearted surge which ended at the gate of the level crossing. Their quarry had darted sideways into the narrow streets of the town, while the driver of their car had had the wit to reverse into a nearby side street to await their return. Meanwhile they still ran frantically, in tears with rage and excitement at the humiliating beating they had received, but also aware that their escape had been providential – further down the platform they had seen soldiers running up, their rifle butts at the ready. One blow could crack a skull.

They burst at last into a small
estaminet
known to Quiminal and under the stolid and unimaginative stare of the landlord behind the bar – a man known for his Vichy sympathies – asked if they might dress their wounds in his toilet. Nancy had a lump on the back of her head, fortunately masked by her hair, and a mass of smaller contusions; Constance a black eye and a cut temple which would necessitate the wearing of dark glasses for a good week. It was mercifully limited, though both had aches and pains, bruises and sprains almost everywhere. And shock: they were still pale and trembling at their own audacity. By the time they went back to the bar the expressionless peasant behind it had set up two glasses and plenished them with yellow rum and sugar upon which he now poured hot water before pushing them forward and motioning to them with his head to drink. It was a generous gesture considering his sympathies and in view of possible consequences for himself – for already a platoon of soldiers wandered down the street checking identities, perhaps (one never knew) searching for them?

They took their drinks to the darkest corner of the establishment and drank gratefully, in this way calming themselves down before any further action. They decided to separate, Quiminal being quite near her objective; so Constance set out alone and managed to find her car and driver in a side street. Snow had begun to fall; the train had vanished into the slate-grey skies of the northern hills. Their journey was not a long one – Nîmes lay about an hour away, tucked into its dry scaly heaths called garrigues. But checkpoints were many and quite systematic, and even their quasi-official status availed them nothing. But it was at one such checkpoint near Bezouce that a familiar figure from the past floated into her presence with his arms spread to embrace. It was like some archaeological survival from a forgotten epoch – Ludovic the Honey Man, whom they had encountered in the Cevennes, and along the dusty roads of Provence so often, so very often. He was one of those unforgettable figures of the local genius who bear the full Mediterranean stamp: generous, copious, inexhaustibly rich in humour and earthy vivacity.

He walked like a bear emerging from its grotto, arms spread wide, radiating a massive benevolence. He recognised her at once – he had a peasant’s eye sharpened by a lifetime of fairground practice. No country fair had been complete without the presence of this great expert, who blazed and roared and crackled like a forest fire, cajoling, teasing, provoking, inspiring his customers to invest in one of his choice honeys – “honeys from the bosom of Nature, perfumed by the Virgin herself” as he was accustomed to declare – though in prevailingly Protestant country he used other terms. “My God,” said Constance, “It can’t be true.… Ludovic!” Moreover he had with him his honeycoach as he called the great furniture removal van which he had had adapted to the needs of his exacting craft, his hives.

His horse, disshafted, cropped the grass in a nearby ditch; his capacious honeycoach with the back let down stood in a field beside the checkpoint. He had been busy selling his produce – his young son was still at it – to the German troops who manned the post in a good-natured way. Also to the passing traveller who, while his papers were being checked, strolled across to buy a pot of this “veritable nectar of the gods”. It was more than an apt word spoken in jest – it was true: there was no honey on earth as delicately perfumed as the honey manufactured by Ludovic, for the simple reason that he followed the blossoms with the rotation of the seasons and took his cleverly constructed hives with him. It was work of great refinement and delicacy, like the blending of a fine wine. His great coach had been decorated by a local artist with scenes from the Fete of the Tarasque – the mythical dragon-monster of Tarascon which enjoyed a whole festival procession on its own; this gave it some of the sharp brilliance of a Sicilian country cart with painted sideboards. In this contrivance he jogged his way about, following an exacting itinerary which began in High Provence with the first chestnut blooms and linden, and gradually descended the slopes of the Cevennes towards the plains; in his mind he had a complete map of his choicest blooms and their location. And with each flavour he had recourse to one of his four “widows” as he called them, who busied herself with the bottling and labelling of his produce. He also carried in his head a clear and detailed chronological chart of the various country fairs of which he was such an ornament. But just in case of doubt he always carried with him a copy of that extraordinary great compendium of learning,
Le Lahure: les foires de France
. From these pages he could tell you the time of day, year, hour of every festival and fete, not merely in Provence but in the whole of France. It was his only reading matter, and when he had nothing to do, while “the bees were working” as he put it, he would lie under a tree reading it with massive attention; and when he tired of it he spread a red handkerchief over his face and slept massively and often convulsively. After every seventh snore his whole face contorted and he appeared to swallow a large mouse. Then, recovering, the sound would be renewed. They sat together now under a bush by the cart, to discuss matters again, after so long a time apart.

He was full of complaints; his pots of honey sold well to his new clients but the roads were getting very difficult, movement was difficult, fodder for the horse was difficult. He had become quite a scavenger for scraps in what was once a land of plenty. With his large clasp-knife he cut off a hunk of cheese for her which tasted delicious, “situated” as it was by a glass of wine. He was full of quaint expression:
“Il faut le situer avec un coup de vin.”
The meaning presumably was to wash it down with the wine. Whatever it meant the act was appropriate and the wine delicious.

“Well, what do you say now?” he asked with flamboyant gloominess. “What a pretty mess we are in – what did I tell you long ago, eh? The youth of France has gone work-shy and gun-shy – and here’s the result. The country ruined and the Hun in charge.” He glared malevolently at the young soldiers who were circling round his quaint coach, eyeing it with curiosity. “I shall soon be out of business. Life in the hills has become hard and dangerous.”

“The Resistance?” she said, kindling, but he shook his head disdainfully and replied, “There’s no such thing. Simply slave-labour on the run, dodging the draft in order not to go to Germany. The hills are full of them. But they are hungry and dangerous. The Germans must be mad.”

There was nothing vastly original in the complaints of Ludovic; but it was amazing to see that he was still in business, plying his anachronistic trade despite the upsets caused by the Occupation. He had grimmer tales to tell, of course, as who had not, for he came from the poor devastated villages which had suffered reprisals for sporadic impulsive action by the odd
franc-tireur
or peasant driven mad by Nazi exactions. The smoke of burning barns and houses was still fresh in his nostrils. “And I can tell you that before the last shot is fired, I will fire one, I will take one of the swine with me, that I promise.”

They talked in this strain for a while and then he said that he must get going as he hoped to reach Remoulins before curfew time to avoid trouble. “When will we meet again?” he added sadly, “now there are no more fairs, and I have to sell in towns where I am tolerated, like Carpentras and St. Gilles. Let me at least take your address.” It so happened that he knew Tubain, and this cheered him up. He reharnessed his horse with a prodigious amount of purely theatrical roaring and shoving, while the little boy giggled himself witless. Then side by side they both waved to her as they clopped off down the road, while she rejoined her taciturn chauffeur and set off once more for Nîmes to despatch her business. She had been wondering what to say about the missing loaves of white bread, but when Ludovic had heard her story he at once offered to make good the loss with a dozen large pots of a choice honey, and nothing she could say would change his mind. He loaded them himself into the back of the car, expatiating on the virtues of honey for young people with big appetites and growing limbs. “Pure honey nourishes the intestinal flora,” he added inconsequentially but with an air of disinterested medical gravity. Where on earth could he have picked up such a phrase, she wondered?

But after the warmth of this encounter – a voice emerging from prehistory it seemed – she found the journey turn cold and forbidding again. The grave heathlands through which they were starting to mount looked austere and forbidding, like cruel drypoints which soon the snow would mantle and hide. Her head ached partly from the belabouring she had received at the station and partly from the strain of conversation with Ludovic who conversed in a wild and whirling manner and in a high register complete with a whole repertoire of extravagant gestures. A conversation with him was like a whole season of opera. But how well she could recall the smell of the croissants they ate at breakfast daubed with his lavender honey. Blanford made the sacrifice of cycling down to Tubain for the bread and croissants almost before first light each morning. The honey of Provence – how romantic it had seemed to them then as they sat round the breakfast table smearing it on their bread while Blanford read them the head-lines in the newspaper and commented thereon with gravity and a touch of pomposity.

So a new rhythm began and as the nights grew longer and the country a prey to the frost and the tearing mistral the journey home each night, or at the end of each professional visitation, grew more precious, more than ever desirable. Sometimes she kept the duty car for the night, sometimes she was dropped at Tu Duc at dusk. It was bliss to know that there would be a small fire in the grate, a lamp lit, an oven heating. It made her almost guilty to enjoy the mothering of the peasant girl and the warm solicitude of her husband, who had always brought off some
coup
in the matter of food for them, and sometimes even wine or a
marc
of smoky intensity.

At other times, but the occasions were rare, she managed to bring with her Nancy Quiminal for a night. Nor were there any special alarms, though once or twice at the end of the year, at the full moon, she heard steps in the road at night. But nobody stopped; as for the patrols, they made so much noise with their service cars and motor-bike combinations that it was possible to plot their journey from afar; she got used to the particular swarming noise of the Volkswagen and Mercedes engines. These coveys of armed men passed regularly, at stipulated times, and they did not seem to be seeking for any trouble in this lonely corner of the countryside. After a few weeks she could tell the time by them almost, though she was careful to avoid them if she could where her own movements were concerned. She sought no contact with the patrol station up the hill.

One day some small indisposition had made her ask for the afternoon off, and she spent the after-lunch period in turning out the upstairs rooms where, here and there, in corners and cupboards she found odd relics of their last summer stay; a bundle of newspapers, some old letters, a torn sweater belonging to Blanford. There was a little frail sunshine and she opened the window upon the garden to capture some of it. As she did so she heard, or thought she heard, the faint pure sound of a voice down by the weir – a voice pitched slightly above the steady drumming tone of the water. In fact it sounded exactly like the voice of Livia, her vanished sister, and, like her, it was intoning the
Aum
just as she used once to do at the beginning of her yoga sessions. Quite dazed with surprise Constance leaned out of the window, craning to see if there was anything which might substantiate this, for she told herself that it was a figment, a trick of memory – this low pure sound upon the cold air. Twice the voice intoned the word and then fell silent. Constance closed the window with a bang and made her way downstairs at breakneck speed. She slipped out of the verandah door and ran lightly down the avenue of planes into the dense patch of forest which bordered the weir. As she ran she parted the bushes with her hands, half afraid that at one such gesture she might reveal something so strange and frightening that she would be struck dumb with astonishment. She really did not know what to expect, so that it was a relief to discover nothing to correspond to the sound. By the old weir the frosty grass was trampled, yes, but by rabbits. There was no sign of anyone. Nonplussed, she turned and retraced her steps towards the house. And in the final alley she came nose to nose with Blaise. “You heard it?” he said, and she nodded.

“Does it sound like your sister to you?” he went on. And when she nodded he said that he had heard the sound twice before but there had never been anyone when he went to investigate. “But once my wife said she saw far away a girl on a bicycle heading down the hill for Tubain. It was too far for her to see clearly.”