Didier, brisk and businesslike, informed us that he and his team were ready to resume work, and would be attacking two rooms at the bottom of the house. Normalement, they would certainly arrive tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. And how many puppies did we want? Pénélope had fallen pregnant to a hairy stranger in Goult.
And then there was an English voice, a man we remembered meeting in London. He had seemed pleasant, but we hardly knew him. This was about to change, because he and his wife were going to drop in. He didn't say when, and he didn't leave a number. Probably, in the way of the itinerant English, they would turn up one day just before lunch. But we'd had a quiet month so far, with few guests and fewer builders, and we were ready for a little company.
They arrived at dusk, as we were sitting down to dinner in the courtyard-Ted and Susan, wreathed in apologies and loud in their enthusiasm for Provence, which they had never seen before, and for our house, our dogs, us, everything. It was all, so they said several times in the first few minutes, super. Their breathless jollity was disarming. They talked in tandem, a seamless dialogue which neither required nor allowed any contribution from us.
"Have we come at a bad time? Typical of us, I'm afraid."
"Absolutely typical. You must loathe people dropping in like this. A glass of wine would be lovely."
"Darling, look at the pool. Isn't it pretty."
"Did you know the post office in Ménerbes has a little map showing how to find you? Les Anglais, they call you, and they fish out this map from under the counter."
"We'd have been here earlier, except that we bumped into this sweet old man in the village…"
"… well, his car, actually…"
"Yes, his car, but he was sweet about it, darling, wasn't he, and it wasn't really a shunt, more a scrape."
"So we took him into the café and bought him a drink…"
"Quite a few drinks, wasn't it, darling?"
"And some for those funny friends of his."
"Anyway, we're here now, and I must say it's absolutely lovely."
"And so kind of you to put up with us barging in on you like this."
They paused to drink some wine and catch their breath, looking around and making small humming noises of approval. My wife, acutely conscious of the slightest symptoms of undernourishment, noticed that Ted was eyeing our dinner, which was still untouched on the table. She asked if they would like to eat with us.
"Only if it's absolutely no trouble-just a crust and a scrap of cheese and maybe one more glass of wine."
Ted and Susan sat down, still chattering, and we brought out sausage, cheeses, salad, and some slices of the cold vegetable omelette called crespaou with warm, fresh tomato sauce. It was received with such rapture that I wondered how long it had been since their last meal, and what arrangements they had made for their next one.
"Where are you staying while you're down here?"
Ted filled his glass. Well, nothing had actually been booked-"Typical of us, absolutely typical"-but a little auberge, they thought, somewhere clean and simple and not too far away because they'd adore to see the house in the daytime if we could bear it. There must be half a dozen small hotels we could recommend.
There were, but it was past ten, getting close to bedtime in Provence, and not the moment to be banging on shuttered windows and locked doors and dodging the attentions of hotel guard dogs. Ted and Susan had better stay the night and find somewhere in the morning. They looked at each other, and began a duet of gratitude that lasted until their bags had been taken upstairs. They cooed a final good night from the guest-room window, and we could still hear them chirruping as we went off to bed. They were like two excited children, and we thought it would be fun to have them stay for a few days.
The barking of the dogs woke us just after three. They were intrigued by noises coming from the guest room, heads cocked at the sound of someone being comprehensively sick, interspersed with groans and the splash of running water.
I always find it difficult to know how best to respond to other people's ailments. I prefer to be left alone when I'm ill, remembering what an uncle had told me long ago. "Puke in private, dear boy," he had said. "Nobody else is interested in seeing what you ate." But there are other sufferers who are comforted by the sympathy of an audience.
The noises persisted, and I called upstairs to ask if there was anything we could do. Ted's worried face appeared around the door. Susan had eaten something. Poor old thing had a delicate stomach. All this excitement. There was nothing to be done except to let nature take its course, which it then loudly did again. We retreated to bed.
The thunder of falling masonry started shortly after seven. Didier had arrived as promised, and was limbering up with a sawed-off sledgehammer and an iron spike while his assistants tossed sacks of cement around and bullied the concrete mixer into life. Our invalid felt her way slowly down the stairs, clutching her brow against the din and the bright sunlight, but insisting that she was well enough for breakfast. She was wrong, and had to leave the table hurriedly to return to the bathroom. It was a perfect morning with no wind, no clouds, and a sky of true blue. We spent it finding a doctor who would come to the house, and then went shopping for suppositories in the pharmacy.
Over the next four or five days, we came to know the chemist well. The unlucky Susan and her stomach were at war. Garlic made her bilious. The local milk, admittedly rather curious stuff, put her bowels in an uproar. The oil, the butter, the water, the wine-nothing agreed with her, and twenty minutes in the sun turned her into a walking blister. She was allergic to the south.
It's not uncommon. Provence is such a shock to the northern system; everything is full-blooded. Temperatures are extreme, ranging from over a hundred degrees down to minus twenty. Rain, when it comes, falls with such abandon that it washes roads away and closes the autoroute. The Mistral is a brutal, exhausting wind, bitter in winter and harsh and dry in summer. The food is full of strong, earthy flavors that can overwhelm a digestion used to a less assertive diet. The wine is young and deceptive, easy to drink but sometimes higher in alcoholic content than older wines that are treated with more caution. The combined effects of the food and climate, so different from England, take time to get used to. There is nothing bland about Provence, and it can poleaxe people as it had poleaxed Susan. She and Ted left us to convalesce in more temperate surroundings.
Their visit made us realize how fortunate we were to have the constitutions of goats and skins that accepted the sun. The routine of our days had changed, and we were living outdoors. Getting dressed took thirty seconds. There were fresh figs and melons for breakfast, and errands were done early, before the warmth of the sun turned to heat in mid-morning. The flagstones around the pool were hot to the touch, the water still cool enough to bring us up from the first dive with a gasp. We slipped into the habit of that sensible Mediterranean indulgence, the siesta.
The wearing of socks was a distant memory. My watch stayed in a drawer, and I found that I could more or less tell the time by the position of the shadows in the courtyard, although I seldom knew what the date was. It didn't seem important. I was turning into a contented vegetable, maintaining sporadic contact with real life through telephone conversations with people in faraway offices. They always asked wistfully what the weather was like, and were not pleased with the answer. They consoled themselves by warning me about skin cancer and the addling effect of sun on the brain. I didn't argue with them; they were probably right. But addled, wrinkled, and potentially cancerous as I might have been, I had never felt better.