And now … he was swimming again.
Jean was a man revived because he was in love. He knew a hundred new little things about this woman. For instance, that when Catherine woke in the morning she was still half caught up in her dreams. Occasionally she would flounder in the fog of the blues; what she had seen in the shadows of the night would make her irritable or ashamed or irksome or gloomy for hours on end. This was her daily struggle through the in-between world. Jean discovered that he could chase away the dream-ghosts by brewing Catherine a cup of hot coffee and guiding her down to the sea to drink it.
‘Because of your love I’m learning to love myself too,’ she said one morning when the sea was still a sleepy shade of grey-blue. ‘I have always taken what life has offered me … but I’ve never offered myself anything. I was never any good at looking after myself.’ As he pulled her tenderly to him, Jean thought that he felt the same: he was only capable of loving himself because Catherine loved him.
Then came the night when she held him close as a second great wave of anger smashed over him. This time it was anger at himself. He showered insults on himself, crudely and desperately, with the wrath of a man who realises, with terrifying clarity, that he has irrevocably wasted a part of his life, and the time remaining is all too short. Catherine didn’t stop him, she didn’t mollify him, she didn’t turn away.
Then peace flooded through him. Because that short time would still be enough. Because a few days could contain a lifetime.
Now to Bonnieux, the site of his distant past, a past that was still embedded deep within Jean, though it was no longer the only room in his emotional household. At last he had a present with which to counter it.
That’s why it feels easier to return, thought Jean, as Catherine and he took the narrow, rocky pass from Lourmarin – in Perdu’s opinion, this town was like a leech, sucking the blood of tourists – to Bonnieux. They overtook cyclists as they drove, and heard the crack of hunters’ guns in the craggy mountains. The occasional near-leafless tree cast a tattered shadow; otherwise the sun bleached out every colour. After the relentless motion of the sea, the inert bulk of the Luberon mountains made a stark, inhospitable impression on Jean. He was looking forward to seeing Max. Really looking forward to it. Max had booked them a big room under the roof in Madame Bonnet’s ivy-clad home, formerly a Resistance hideout.
When Catherine and Jean had put their luggage in their room, Max came over and led them to his dovecote. He had prepared a refreshing picnic of wine, fruit, ham and baguette on the broad wall by the fountain. It was the season for truffles and literature. The countryside was redolent of wild herbs, and glowed in autumnal rust reds and wine yellows.
Max was brown, Jean thought. Brown and looking much more of a man.
After two and a half months alone in the Luberon, he seemed at home, as if he had always been a southerner at heart. But Jean thought he also seemed very tired.
‘Who sleeps when the earth is dancing?’ Max mumbled cryptically when Jean brought it up.
Max told him that Madame had hired him without further ado as a ‘general dogsbody’ during his ‘sickness’. She and her husband, Gérard, were over sixty, and the property, with its three holiday houses and flats, was too big for them to contemplate growing old there on their own. They grew vegetables, fruit and a few vines; Max lent them a hand in return for board and lodging. His dovecote was piled high with notes, stories and drafts. He wrote at night and in the morning until noon. From late afternoon onward he helped out around the bounteous estate, doing anything that Gérard asked him to do: cutting vines, weeding, picking fruit; mending roofs; sowing and harvesting; loading the delivery van and driving to market with Gérard; looking for mottled mushrooms; cleaning truffles; shaking fig trees; pruning cypresses into the shape of standing stones; cleaning the pools; and fetching bread for the bed-and-breakfast guests.
‘I’ve learned to drive a tractor too and I can recognise the call of every toad in the pool,’ he announced to Jean with a self-deprecating grin.
The sun, the winds and shuffling around on his knees over the Provence soil had changed Max’s youthful city face into that of a man.
‘Sickness?’ Jean enquired as Max, having finished his account, poured them glasses of white Ventoux wine. ‘What sickness? You didn’t mention that in your letters.’
Max turned red beneath his tan and became a little fidgety.