Catherine suspected that the old couple’s sniping was their way of warming up before they fell into each other’s passionate arms on Bastille Day, Christmas and, more recently, even Perdu’s birthday.
The elder Perdus and Jean and Catherine spent the period from 23 December to Twelfth Night in Bonnieux. They passed the days between the years with eating, laughing and talking, interspersed with long walks and wine-tasting sessions, female chatter and male silence. Now a new era was drawing near – again.
The late-winter blooming of the peach trees, when the approaching spring decorates the fruit trees along the Rh?ne with flowers, is the sign of new beginnings in Provence. Max and Vic had chosen this season of white and red blossoms for their wedding. She had made him woo her for twelve months before she would grant him his first kiss – but things had moved fast from then on.
Max’s first children’s book was published soon after: The Magician in the Garden – A Heroic Book for Children.
It dumbfounded the critics, upset parents and enthralled children and teenagers, who were amused by how worked up figures of authority were over the book. This was because it urged youngsters to challenge everything that grown-ups reacted to with the words: ‘You mustn’t do that!’
Catherine and Jean had combed Provence for an atelier until they finally found one. The main stumbling block had never been the premises themselves, but rather the fact that she wanted the countryside around to be an exact reflection of her and Jean’s inner landscapes. They eventually found a barn adjoining a charming, slightly rundown Proven?al farmhouse between Sault and Mazan, with a lavender field to the right of it, a mountain to the left and an uninterrupted view of vineyards and Mount Ventoux out the front. Behind it lay an orchard for their two cats, Rodin and Némirovsky, to patrol.
‘It’s like coming home,’ Catherine had announced to Jean, as with great satisfaction she paid over the majority of the divorce proceeds she had received from the lawyer.
Her sculptures were almost double human size. It was as though Catherine could detect beings trapped in the stone, as though she could see through the unhewn blocks into their soul, hear their cries and feel their hearts beating. Catherine would then begin to chisel them free.
Not all of her creations were likeable.
Hatred. Suffering. Forbearance. The soul reader.
Hang on!
It really was. From a block the size of a banana crate Catherine had released two hands that were forming a shape. Were these seeking, finding fingers reading, caressing or touching words? To whom did they belong? Were they pulling something out, or reaching in?
If you pressed your face to the stone, you could sense that a concealed, bricked-up wall was opening inside yourself. The entrance … to a room?
‘Everybody has an inner room where demons lurk. Only when we open it and face up to it are we free,’ said Catherine.
Jean Perdu looked after her in Provence and in Paris, when the two of them stayed in his old flat in Rue Montagnard. He made sure that Catherine ate and slept well, got together with her girlfriends and cast off her cobwebs of dreams in the morning.
They made love often, with the same concentrated languidness. He knew every inch of her, every perfect and imperfect spot. He stroked and caressed each of those imperfections until her body believed that for him she was the most beautiful woman alive.
When he wasn’t working part-time at the bookshop in Banon, Perdu went hunting. While Catherine was in Paris or sculpting alone on the farm, giving courses, selling art, filing, sanding and correcting, he went prospecting for the world’s most exciting books – in school libraries, concealed among the bequests of gnarled old teachers and blathering fruit growers, in forgotten Aladdin’s caves, and unfurnished homemade bunkers dating from the Cold War.
Perdu had launched his trade in unique books with a facsimile of Sanary’s handwritten manuscript, which had come into his possession by a roundabout route. Samy had insisted that her pseudonym must remain a secret.
With the help of Claudine Gulliver, the auctioneer’s registrar from the fifth floor at 27 Rue Montagnard, Perdu soon found a wealthy collector for this singular work. However, it was Perdu’s subjecting the man to an emotional test before he would sell him the book that had established his reputation as an eccentric book lover, whom even a substantial sum could not persuade to sell to the wrong person. Sometimes dozens of collectors would come clamouring for a book, but Perdu would select the person who struck him as that volume’s ideal friend, lover or patient; the money was secondary.
Perdu travelled from Istanbul to Stockholm, and from Lisbon to Hong Kong, unearthing the most precious, most intelligent and most dangerous books – as well as special ones for bedtime reading.