mildly at Charles’s story of how he had picked him up at the roadside, wounded in the buttock by a Bulgarian cavalryman’s lance, but Charles – who, like every good storyteller, brooked no interruptions – stuck to his version and refused to back down, even when Antoine, by now rather tipsy, jumped up and began to drop his trousers to prove that his buttocks bore no trace of the alleged shameful gash. The restaurant owner halted this affront to public decency just in time, and Antoine resigned himself to accepting that the shrapnel wound in his right shoulder had metamorphosed into a less dignified laceration as the result of a heroic confrontation with a moustachioed horseman who had the yellow-tinged face of a Tatar and had been terrorising and violating the gentle Serbian peasant women in the countryside all around. In fact, Charles’s conviction was so strong that Antoine surprised himself on his return to his hotel by contorting himself in front of his wardrobe mirror to try to verify the mechanic’s words. All he could see was his slightly fat, fairly white and very ordinary bottom, and he went to bed nursing a pang of regret that he had not really had a truly heroic Balkan war.
Antoine’s appreciation of Charles Ventadour had grown at each meeting since their first in 1920. He was particularly grateful for Charles’s substitution of his own appalling and pitiful memories by an epic of men’s valour, an adventure in which Justice advanced in triumph at the head of armies marching to drive out the oppressors and restore the happiness of the oppressed. Alas, there remained the memory of Les Éparges, from which a man could not free himself so easily, and often at night Antoine woke up covered in an icy sweat, the taste of earth in his mouth, his temples thumping as if a mortar had just exploded, face to face with that colossus with the black, mud-covered head who had erupted in front of him in the small hours one morning leading a shrieking horde behind him, and whom he had had the good luck to kill with a single pistol shot to the heart. Who could transform the memory of such panic-stricken terror and cowardly slaughter into a knights’ joust, in which French elegance would crush Teutonic brutality? No one, sadly, and Antoine, sedated every three or four months by Charles on his way through Aix, found himself exposed afresh to the obsessive images of his nightmare as soon as he returned to La Sauveté. But Provence offered remission, and it would have been excessively ungrateful of him to complain. A new life began there, and whenever the Bugatti, singing down the route des Maures, rolled into Grimaud to the buzz of cicadas, the resin smell of pines, and the perfume of thyme and lavender, whenever a first bend suddenly disclosed the glittering Mediterranean, the roofs of Cogolin and Ramatuelle, and the small port of Saint-Tropez cluttered with tartanes and smaller boats, Antoine’s heart swelled with an inexpressible happiness. Often he would pull up to gaze at the view and delay the pleasure to come, to relish for a moment longer that wonderful ‘before’, so full of the promises of Marie-Dévote, of grilled fish on an open fire, of olives kept for him in oil and vinegar, of dried figs in winter or melting in the mouth in September, of Var rosé and glasses of pastis distilled secretly by Théo, drunk in the evening in the open air, bare feet on the table, chewing langoustines. Those people knew how to live.
It was lunchtime when he parked in front of the hotel, whose handsome sign could be seen from a long way off: Chez Antoine. To the beach café of 1920 had been added a pretty building finished in ochre plaster, whose bedrooms overlooked the beach. Marie-Dévote and Théo lived on the ground floor and rented the first, to painters mostly. Maman still ran the kitchen, invisibly but noisily, fanning the flames with her curses. Antoine had not seen her more than four or five times in three years, one such occasion being the marriage of Marie-Dévote, at which she had appeared swathed in black and wearing a wide-brimmed hat from which floated a veil held in place by a pair of jade pins. Of the face he caught a glimpse of that day, he could only remember a red nose and striking black eyes like Marie-Dévote’s.
Yes, Marie-Dévote was married. I have not had time to say so until now, or perhaps it was so obvious I did not take the trouble to make it clear. In any case, no marriage was more natural than hers, for she had been sleeping with Théo since she was fifteen and he was handsome and lazy, which makes it much easier to keep a man at home, have him all to yourself, not share him with his work, and keep him fresh for bed at night. There is an interesting philosophy at work here, which I have no leisure to develop because time presses, but which deserves some reflection by the reader. It will have its defenders and its critics. Some will judge it impracticable, others will point out that it can only thrive in sunny places, where a man can live on very little: an olive, a chunk of bread, figs off the tree, and bunches of grapes hanging from the arbour. The admirable thing is that this philosophy was an instinctive reflex for the happy young couple, who did not go round in circles analysing the situation. They simply lived the way their feelings took them, and, young but already wise, congratulated themselves on such a perfect success.
Théo helped by possessing great understanding. He had no better friend than Antoine, and on the days Antoine was there he went fishing at dawn and returned, noisily, in the small hours. The little hotel adjoining the beach café, and a fine new boat that was soon to be equipped with an outboard motor, justified this sacrifice. And when their benefactor had gone Marie-Dévote came back to him more tender than ever, and as though her appetite had merely been whetted.
*
Théo appeared first at the sound of the Bugatti’s engine revving for the last time before Antoine switched off. Antoine pulled off his helmet and goggles. The sight of his face reddened by the air, with a white line across his forehead and pale circles around his eyes, made Théo buckle with laughter.
‘Saints! You should see your face, old friend. You look like a watermelon. Come on, get out if you can. If not I’ll fetch the corkscrew.’
Antoine, ordinarily rather thin-skinned, put up with Théo’s jokes. He felt he owed it to the man whose wife he was sleeping with so openly. At least that was how he saw it, although from his point of view Théo was convinced that it was he, the husband, who was cuckolding the lover. As a result they were both full of sympathy for one another, and incapable of hurting each other.
Marie-Dévote was on the beach, at the water’s edge, her skirt hitched up to her thighs, showing off her beautiful long brown legs as she washed the catch she had just gutted.
‘Really, Antoine, it looks like you smelt there was going to be bouillabaisse today.’
‘My sense of smell is acute.’
He kissed her on both cheeks. She smelt of fish, and as he closed his eyes for an instant she changed in his imagination into a sea creature, a siren come to warm herself in the sun. He would happily have laid her down on the beach and wriggled beneath her skirt there and then, but Théo was standing a few steps away, his hands on his hips and his brown face lit by a wide smile.
‘I’m hungry!’ Antoine said to conceal his agitation.
And he was hungry for Marie-Dévote. She was one of those women that one wants to bite and eat, whose skin tastes of herbs and conjures up the pleasures of food as much as those between the sheets. He kissed her again on the neck and she squealed, ‘Hey! I’m not a radish, just because I’ve got a sprinkling of salt on me. Leave a bit of me for Théo. He needs feeding too.’
*
Unluckily, the sea’s blue suddenly darkened, violent gusts whipped across its surface, and a warm drizzle stained the sand. Eating under the arbour was out of the question. Marie-Dévote laid the tables in the dining room, one for Antoine, Théo and herself, another for the two painters living on the first floor, who came down soon afterwards.
Antoine regarded them with suspicion. He distrusted artists, though he had never seen any at close quarters and all his knowledge of them was from books. These two looked reasonable, however. Properly dressed in corduroy and suntanned, they conversed normally without raising their voices, ate with knives and forks, and drank in moderation. One was well-built and had a thick neck, the other was slim and distinguished-looking. Marie-Dévote served them
