Amour Provence (21 page)

The following autumn, Didier Falque harvested the grapes and paid Auri, who gave most of the money to his mother. With the remainder he was able to buy himself a scooter. Mathilde allowed him to ride it only on weekends. His greatest pleasure was taking the bike over the hills and up into the mountains, where the stands of pine trees sometimes opened up to reveal sunny glades. Sometimes he'd sit in their center and mound up a rocky cairn, or once, in a place where water sprang from between two old stones, he created a circular basin beneath. On rare occasions, he'd go down by the riverbed. From there he could see the top of what had been his father's workshop where the metal chimney glinted above the rough live-oak trees and the bushes of thorn and rosemary. It would be a long time of looking before he could gaze at that chimney without immense sadness.

Auri tried not to think about his father. When he did, he would get a severe ache as if his chest was compressed, and he would have to press his long forearms into himself to stop it. But it wasn't so bad when things would indirectly come to him, memories of carved stones or early sun in the eastern sky. Pictures of naked, dancing gods, and sometimes, even certain Provençal words—
pêchière, pommière, poirière
. The names of trees.

O
n a warm Sunday afternoon in October, Gilberte Perra MacLean arrived at her parents' house driven in a chauffeured limousine. At the sight of the gigantic car with its chrome fixtures and enormous white-walled tires, passersby began to gather in front of Domaine Petitjean's arched gateway. For years, the townspeople had referred to Gilberte as
“l'étrangère”
because she had departed for Scotland as a teenager and had never really returned. Her childhood friends still spoke of her fondly, and sometimes even saw her on her brief visits home, but they had no idea that she had planned this particular voyage. Gilberte's sons, William and Timothy, had occasionally come along on her rare stays, though as they grew older they balked at visiting due to the fact that they couldn't say a word to their grandparents or anyone else in the village because they could not speak French. Their Scottish father was rumored to be difficult,
though in what way no one really knew, as he had never once shown his face.

Gilberte's parents, Liliane and Clément Perra, still resided on the perimeter of the village of Beaucastel in a manor house with a capacious garden and a Renaissance outbuilding with a wide, arched doorway that had once served as the
cave
where Domaine Petitjean wines were made. Over the years, as the vineyard's production expanded, the vinification and bottling of the
cépages
had been transferred to what Gilberte had always considered an unattractive cinderblock hangar constructed on the flat plain by the river. She was aware that the grape harvest had been completed the previous month, so there would be no frenzy of work upon her arrival, and she hoped to be greeted by her parents and possibly even her brothers, Philippe and Marco, and Philippe's wife, Marie-France. They all lived nearby, and they knew, after all, that this was to be a permanent homecoming for Gilberte. But as the chauffeur slowly rolled the car up the stony drive, the front door of the house remained obstinately closed. No one peered out from the tall windows on the ground floor or shouted a greeting from a balcony above, so she found herself climbing the front steps and hammering the iron knocker, whose echoing thuds resounded within.

As she waited, the afternoon sun shone on her ebony hair, warming her arms and shoulders and submerging her in a golden glow that reminded her of the constancy and strength of the Provençal sunshine, so different from the gray and rain of Edinburgh. A pot of spiky verbena on the
landing emitted a perfume of citrus and she bent to pick a leaf, holding it to her nose and breathing in its lemony essence. She could hear the burble of water spilling into the stone
lavoir
just around the corner, the same fountain where many of the Arab women who resided in the village did their daily laundry. Unlike most vineyard owners, her father never hired Arabs for fieldwork or anything else. His family had owned property in Algeria, but after Algerian independence, they had lost everything. However, once in France, Clément had landed quite providentially on his feet. He'd successfully courted and married Liliane Petitjean, an only child and heiress to the large but not terribly profitable Petitjean vineyard that Clément made certain to take full credit for transforming into one of the more prosperous domaines in the area.

Gilberte knocked again on the front door. She was certain that her mother would be waiting, her darling mother, Liliane, the one person she had truly missed during all her years abroad. Finally, she let go of the knocker and turned around to see an elderly neighbor, Louis Pierrefeu, standing just outside the gates amid the curious bystanders gathered there. He lifted his hat and called out, “It's you there, Berti, isn't it?” A warm feeling arose in Gilberte at the sound of her childhood name. She'd always been fond of Louis Pierrefeu. When she gave him a friendly wave and replied in the affirmative, he continued, “You aren't au courant? An ambulance took your mother to the hospital in Saint-Maxence and hour or so ago!”

“Oh!” Gilberte lifted her hands to her face. “What happened?”

“Je ne sais pas!”
He lifted his shoulders and gave an unhappy shake of his head.

As she turned to descend the steps, the interior bolt made a familiar creaking rasp and the front door jerked open. Her father's heavily lined face appeared and she approached to greet him. His frizzy gray hair in need of a cut stood straight out from his head like fiberglass, giving him a slightly deranged look. Yet, he was dressed in his Sunday best, a light twill jacket and a starched blue shirt and tie. Now that he had grown older, his skin had a purplish cast rather than the ruddy hue usually associated with farmers in the Midi. He could have been Greek or perhaps even Arab with those violet lips and dark, slightly bloodshot eyes.

“
Ma foi
, Gilberte, it's you!” he said, without giving her so much as a kiss on the cheek or even a friendly smile. “I forgot you were coming today. Your mother's had an accident!”

“Yes, Monsieur Pierrefeu was telling me. What happened?”

Her father glared at the small group ogling the fancy automobile and then said, “The silly goose fell and apparently broke her leg. Your brother just telephoned from the hospital. They're planning to operate tomorrow.”

“I'll get the car unloaded and we'll drive over there right away!” exclaimed Gilberte.

The chauffeur approached the foot of the front steps and tipped his visored hat, oblivious to the crisis. “Where would you like me to put your luggage, madame?”

“Right here in the front hall, please.”

As the chauffeur hefted a trunk fastened with a leather strap, her father stepped back, nearly losing his balance.

“You're not planning to move in here!” he exclaimed. Gilberte reached out to steady him and was shocked to find that his muscular forearm, normally firm as an ox shank, had turned to putty that slipped loosely over thin bone.

“
Papa
, I told you before, I've rented an apartment over in Serret in a house built into the rampart. The road is too narrow for this big car, so I'm temporarily dropping my things here until Marco can come to help me move in.”

As Gilberte entered the cooling shadow of the hallway, the savory smell of her mother's
daube de boeuf
, long-simmered beef in a particular combination of wine and herbs, enveloped her. The aroma was something she had rarely encountered during her years in Scotland, and she was flooded with memories of the leisurely Sunday lunches of her childhood where course followed upon course, always ending with her mother's almond
tartelettes
and the ubiquitous cherries preserved in glass jars of eau-de-vie for those adults who dared to partake.

“
Maman
must have left dinner in the oven. I better turn it off.”

“It's probably burned by now,” her father replied. But when she ran to check, Gilberte found the daube perfectly cooked. Pearl onions and olives floated in the rich sauce. When she gave it a stir, a slice of orange peel surfaced. Returning to the hallway, she found her father angrily hovering as the chauffeur piled up the rest of her luggage.

“What possessed you to come back here in that ridiculous automobile?” he asked.

“Oh,
Papa
! The MacLeans had business in Brazil, so they kindly offered me their private plane and they arranged for a car to pick me up when I arrived in Nîmes. I couldn't have boarded a commercial flight with so much luggage.”

“Those monsters must be thrilled to finally see the last of you! No wonder they were eager to send you off in their airplane!”

She didn't argue. It was true that her former parents-in-law had been implacable during her divorce from their son. The MacLeans had been furious that she was leaving Simon, largely because responsibility for their errant son would once again fall upon them. But that had all happened years before, and Gilberte had done her best to put any lingering resentments behind her.

Opening the double door to her parents' salon, she saw that nothing had changed since her last visit three years ago. Her father's chair, the only comfortable piece of furniture in the room, still stood in front of the fireplace, a leather ottoman placed in front of it. As usual, the heavy green drapes had been pulled closed against the western sun, leaving the darkened room hot and airless. Perhaps that's why her father seemed unsteady. Gilberte also felt a creeping fatigue. Her mouth was dry and she realized she hadn't had anything to drink since early that morning.

When she heard the chauffeur come back into the front hall, she folded a generous wad of euros into her palm, but as she tried to give it to him he smiled and waved her hand away. Then he tipped his hat and wished her good luck for her return to France.

Inside the salon, she found her father ensconced in the
high-backed chair, his crepe-soled heels resting on the tiled floor. She bent down, saying, “You haven't kissed me hello yet,
Papa
.”

But he ignored her proffered cheek and simply replied, “I don't understand what you mean by coming back here. Why didn't you simply remarry and stay put in Edinburgh?” He leaned forward and clutched the carved mahogany lion's paws of his armchair as if he wished to squeeze out of them the truth of what his youngest daughter's reappearance really meant. Gilberte took a step back, knowing that even though he was getting on in years, her irascible father wouldn't hesitate to reach out and cuff her if he got annoyed. That aspect of his personality had never changed. Growing up, she and her sisters had gotten used to being dragged bodily to their rooms and locked up for hours whenever they were unlucky enough to spark their father's volatile temper. Once he'd even tied her eldest sister, Marguerite, to a chair, and there had been worse punishments. But their father's lack of restraint had been just as bad with regard to their brother Philippe. None of them would ever forget the blue-black eyes and bloody lip meted out by Clément when, as a teenager, Philippe had left one of the tractors on an incline and it had slipped backward, breaking through several rows of newly planted vines. Marco, the youngest, learned early on to flee if he detected the slightest trace of anger in his father's voice and was the only one to escape the physical chastisements that the rest of them considered to be the normal course of things.

Despite their seeming resignation while living under their father's roof, the three Perra girls had not lingered long in the
household. Marguerite was the first to go, before she was even eighteen. Gilberte's sister Pati had left home too, and Gilberte had followed in their footsteps, finding a job in Scotland, a place that had seemed to her impossibly foreign. At the end of her first summer in Edinburgh, she became affianced to a young Scotsman and definitively left her old life behind.

Gilberte sat down on the ottoman facing her father and repeated the same information that she'd already given several times by telephone. “I've told you,
Papa
, I'm back because I was tired of living abroad. My boys are grown and living their own lives. As you know, I'd been a French teacher for many years, not the most fascinating career, and so I've begun to think about doing something completely different.”

“You acted as a babysitter for that crazy husband of yours for years, and got nothing whatsoever out of it! The MacLeans should have been down on their knees to you!”

Gilberte stopped listening. Talking about her former in-laws held no appeal. They lived in the lavish manner of nouveaux riches because of investments in North Sea oil. During the years of her marriage, she had visited their houses on three continents and accepted expensive gifts along with unlimited credit-card accounts that were automatically paid for at the end of every month. All that had been intoxicating for a young girl brought up in a conservative agricultural family where extra funds were used either for the purchase of land or to replant vines, never for frivolous expenditures. But Gilberte's father was correct that there had been problems. With no money worries and no business or employment to which her husband had to attend, there was rarely any restraint where alcohol, drugs, or
eventually, other women were concerned. The wild nights that stretched into weekends and then weeks soon palled for Gilberte, especially after her two sons were born. But when they divorced, her husband had relinquished custody of Will and Tim, which was all she wanted. She never asked for any money beyond basic child support. In the end, she had remained on neutral terms with the MacLeans. She was all too aware of her ex-husband's problems, but they were no longer hers to cope with, and she had been simply too happy with her new freedom to bother casting any blame.
Comprendre est pardonner
—the phrase inscribed in gold letters above the church's altarpiece in Beaucastel had always made sense to her. It was better to forgive and forget. Afterward, Gilberte had enrolled at university and gotten a teaching degree. She'd made a modest living as a French instructor at a private boys' school in Edinburgh, but in the end, her three-bedroom flat in a tony area of Stockbridge, the one valuable asset she'd retained after the divorce, had become too expensive to maintain.