to have to scrape yourself off the road in that thing!’
‘Don’t worry, I’m a careful driver.’
He let in the clutch and the Bugatti leapt westwards down the coast, only stopping when it reached the outskirts of Saint-Tropez and the open-air café. Lounging in a wicker armchair, Marie-Dévote was reading a magazine with a cat on her lap. She turned her head and smiled.
‘Back already? Did you get bored?’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘It’s not really lunchtime yet. Will you be happy with a bowl of bouillabaisse?’
‘I’m sure I will.’
He sat down under the arbour, facing the beach, while she disappeared into the kitchen. A light breeze was blowing, raising ripples that expired on the white sand. He would happily have gone for a swim but the memory of his white, unappealing body disgusted him. Marie-Dévote put a steaming bowl and a carafe of Var wine in front of him.
‘It’s quiet here,’ he said.
‘On Sundays it gets busy.’
‘What day is it today?’
‘Friday. What are you doing that’s so interesting you can’t remember what day it is?’
‘Nothing,’ Antoine admitted.
‘Doesn’t your wife say anything?’
‘No.’
He wanted to ask her to sit on the corner of the table the way she had the day before, and swing her leg and show him her knee, but standing in front of him, hands on hips and feet apart, she seemed much stronger and more solid than he remembered her. Good health, sunshine, the men she had to serve and whose jokes she tolerated, had made her grown-up at twenty. But it was more than that: she had ripened, she was ripe like a luscious Provençal fruit, with that directness of expression and rough candour that women from the Midi have. When she laughed she revealed strong teeth solidly planted in a hungry mouth. Marie-Dévote was as far away as it was possible to be from those girls of good Norman families to whom he had been introduced and from whom, out of boredom and lack of critical sense, he had chosen Marie-Thérèse Mangepain.
‘Are you always on your own here?’ he asked.
‘Cheeky! I can’t half see you coming! No, I’m not on my own. Maman’s here. She never leaves the kitchen.’
‘And your father?’
‘My father’s dead. In the war. Like everybody.’
‘Not me.’
‘I saw you on the beach yesterday. Your shoulder’s all kersnaffled.’
Antoine didn’t know the expression, but there was no need. Marie-Dévote’s speech communicated above all by its musicality, her sentences that began sharply and finished smoothly, with an internal sensuous and lush music that he could have listened to for hours without trying to untangle its sense. But her attention had shifted from Antoine. A fishing boat was being rowed onto the sand. A tall tanned boy leapt out of it, his trousers rolled up to his knees, a bucket in his hand.
‘It’s Théo!’ she said delightedly. ‘He’s bringing the fish.’
She ran towards him in her bare feet. Antoine was eaten up with jealousy, and as he became aware of it he felt glad to experience the feeling. Something was moving inside him. A barrier was crumbling. He belonged to the world of the living, the world of Théo arriving with a bucket of fish, of Marie-Dévote running towards the young man with ill-concealed pleasure. Théo handed her the bucket and walked off, and Marie-Dévote lost her sparkle for a moment, became suddenly dull and lifeless, but the decline was brief. Antoine finished his carafe of rosé and asked for another, merely for the pleasure of seeing her get up, walk the length of the arbour and return with her light, swinging step, as if she were walking on the tips of her toes. Instinct demanded that he leave there and then, to nurse his appetite to return.
That evening he stopped again outside Charles’s garage at Aix. His work finished, Charles had his head under a tap of cold water.
‘All right, Captain? How’s the beast?’
‘Perfect, Charles. Are you free this evening?’
They had dinner together on a bistro terrace, talking naturally about the war they had shared together in the Balkans, a thankless and miserable episode but one that Charles, with a southerner’s talent for storytelling, had an ability to wrap in unexpected colours. Antoine, who remembered only mud, dysentery, thirst, hunger and wretchedness, listened with childlike attention as Charles crossed the Vardar on 22 September 1918, resupplied the Serbs at Gradsko two days later, raced in his truck to Prilep after the Bulgarians had set it on fire, and charged into Skopje alongside Colonel Gaspereau’s Chasseurs d’Afrique. Punctuated with a regular ‘crash, bang, wallop!’ that shook the table, his irresistible account attracted both waiters and patron to their table, making them briefly oblivious to the other diners. To Antoine Charles’s war was unrecognisable, as he juggled with entire divisions and possessed an incredible gift of ubiquity. But what did it matter? The former driver elevated the squalid, organised the disordered, gave reason to absurdity. When he at last sat down with the Bulgarian government to sign the armistice, the restaurant was in near rapture. The patron shook their hands, his eyes welling with tears.
‘You’re truly brave men,’ he said in a long sigh of garlic. ‘We owe you a great debt!’
A little unsteadily, drunk on stories and red wine, Antoine found a hotel room and slept a dreamless sleep.
Next morning Charles inspected the Bugatti, changed its tyres and spark plugs, and retimed the ignition. When the engine fired up, his mechanic’s eyes shone with pleasure. Back at the wheel, Antoine had one desire: to get back to La Sauveté, which he did at the astounding average of seventy kilometres an hour, seeing nothing but the road ahead, the dust, the bends, the trees that whistled past his ears.
La Sauveté had survived his absence. Driving through the gates, he saw Albert limping in front of a wheelbarrow being pushed by one of the village boys. Victoire Sanpeur was strolling hand in hand with Michel and Antoinette through the rose walks. Antoinette ran to her father and climbed up to sit next to him. They did a lap of the park and pulled up at the steps of the house as Jeanne was coming out with Jean in her arms. Marie-Thérèse showed her surprise in an offended frostiness.
‘Where were you?’ she said.
‘I went to see Geneviève.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you object?’
‘Not at all. I assume you’re joking.’
Antoine bent over Jean, who stared at him with wide eyes, and gently squeezed his cheek. The baby smiled and held out his arms.
‘Extraordinary!’ Marie-Thérèse said. ‘Such a difficult child, and look at him smiling at you.’
‘He’s not difficult,’ Jeanne countered. ‘He just doesn’t like everybody.’
‘He’s not wrong!’ Antoine said.
Marie-Thérèse flinched, and said with feigned gentleness, ‘I thought that children could always sense whether you really love them or not.’
Antoinette drew herself up, her eyes thunderous.
‘But Papa does love children!’
Tears welled in her eyes.
‘Don’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Antoine answered, distracted by the appearance of Victoire dragging Michel behind her. He succeeded in wriggling out of her grip and ran to bury himself in his mother’s skirts.
‘Maman!’ he yelled, trembling with fright. ‘I don’t want him to take you away in his car.’
‘There’s no danger of that, my darling.