Ricard was ready to expand, and he made a decision that probably accelerated his success by several years. The area round Marseille was a competitive market; pastis was everywhere, a commonplace drink. And Marseille itself didn't enjoy the best of reputations among its neighbours. (Even today, a Marseillais is regarded as a blagueur, an exaggerator, a man who will describe a sardine as a whale, not entirely to be believed.)

  Further north, however, pastis could be sold as something exotic, and distance lent improvement to Marseille's reputation. It could be invested with the charm of the south – a slightly raffish, relaxed, sunny charm which would appeal to a northerner used to freezing winters and grey skies. So Ricard went north, first to Lyon and then to Paris, and the formula worked. Today, it would be unusual to find a bar anywhere in France without its bottle of le vrai pastis de Marseille.

  The man from Ricard who was telling me this talked about his patron with genuine liking. Monsieur Paul, he said, was un original, someone who looked for a challenge every day. When I asked if he was involved, like many powerful businessmen, in politics, there was a snort of laughter. ‘Politicians? He vomits on them all.’ I had some sympathy for the sentiment, but in a way I thought it was a pity. The idea of a pastis baron as President of France appealed to me, and he would probably have been elected on his advertising slogan: Un Ricard, sinon rien.

  But Ricard hadn't invented pastis. Like Pernod, he had bottled and marketed something that had been there before. Where had it come from? Who had first mixed the anis, the licorice, the sugar and the alcohol? Was there a monk (monks, for some reason, have an affinity for alcoholic invention, from champagne to Benedictine) who had made the discovery one blessed day in the monastery kitchens?

  Nobody around the table knew exactly how the first glass of pastis had come into a thirsty world, but lack of precise knowledge never inhibits a Provençal from expressing an opinion as fact, or a legend as reliable history. The least plausible, and therefore favourite, explanation was the hermit theory – hermits, of course, being almost up to monk standard when it comes to the invention of unusual apéritifs.

  This particular hermit lived in a hut deep in the forest on the slopes of the Lubéron. He collected herbs, which he stewed in a giant pot, the traditional bubbling cauldron favoured by witches, wizards and alchemists. The juices left in the cauldron after boiling had remarkable properties, not only quenching the hermit's thirst, but protecting him from an outbreak of plague that was threatening to decimate the population of the Lubéron. The hermit was a generous fellow, and shared his mixture with sufferers from the plague, who immediately recovered. Sensing, perhaps like Paul Ricard long after him, the wider possibilities for his miraculous drink, he left his forest but and did what any businesslike hermit would have done: he moved to Marseille and opened a bar.

  The less picturesque but more likely reason for Provence being the home of pastis is that the ingredients were easy to come by. The herbs were cheap, or free. Most peasants made their own wine and distilled their own head-splitting liqueurs, and until fairly recently the right of distillation was a family asset that could be passed down from father to son. That right has been revoked, but there are some surviving distillateurs who, until they die, are legally entitled to make what they drink, and pastis maison still exists.

  Madame Bosc, Michel's wife, was born near Carpentras and remembers her grandfather making a double-strength pastis, illegally alcoholic, a drink that could make a statue fall down. One day grandfather received a visit from the village gendarme. An official visit, on the official moto, in full uniform, never a good sign. The gendarme was persuaded into one of grandfather's virulent glasses of pastis; then another, then a third. The purpose of the visit was never discussed, but grandfather had to make two trips to the gendarmerie in his van. The first was to deliver the unconscious policeman and his bike; the second, to deliver his boots and his pistolet, which had been discovered later under the table.

  Those were the days. And somewhere in Provence, they probably still are.

  16

  Inside the Belly of Avignon

  Place Pie, in the centre of Avignon, is a forlorn sight in the dingy grey moments that come just before dawn. It is an architectural mongrel of a square, with two sides of seedy but elegant old buildings looking across at a hideous monument to modern town planning. A graduate of the béton armé school of construction has been given a free hand with the concrete, and he has made the worst of it.

  Benches, crude slabs, have been dumped around a central eyesore. On those benches, the weary sightseer can rest and contemplate a second, much more imposing eyesore, three stained concrete storeys which on weekdays are crammed with cars by eight in the morning. The reason for the cars, and the reason I was in Place Pie in time to see dawn's rosy flush come up on the concrete, is that the best food in Avignon is displayed and sold under the car park, in Les Halles.

  I arrived there a few minutes before six and parked in one of the few free places on the second level. Below me on the place, I saw two derelicts with skin the same colour as the bench they were sitting on. They were sharing a litre of red wine, taking turns to swig from the bottle. A gendarme came up to them and gestured them to move on, then stood with his hands on his hips, watching. They walked in the slouched, defeated way of men with nothing to hope for and nowhere to go, and sat on the pavement on the other side of the place. The gendarme shrugged and turned away.

  The contrast between the quiet, dull emptiness of the place and the interior of Les Halles was sudden and total. On one side of the door was a town still asleep; on the other, bright lights and bright colours, pandemonium and shouting and laughter, a working day in full and noisy swing.

  I had to jump aside to avoid collision with a trolley piled to head height with crates of peaches, pushed by a man chanting ‘Klaxon! Klaxon!’ as he careered round the corner. Other trolleys were behind him, their loads swaying. I looked for somewhere to escape from high-velocity fruit and vegetables, and made a dash for a sign that read buvette. If I was going to be run over, I would rather the tragedy occurred at a bar.

  Jacky and Isabelle, so the sign said, were the owners, and they were in a state of siege. The bar was so crowded that three men were reading the same newspaper, and all the tables nearby were taken up with the first sitting for breakfast, or possibly lunch. It was difficult to tell by looking at the food which meal was being eaten. Croissants were being dipped into thick, steaming cups of café crème next to tumblers of red wine and sausage sandwiches as long as a forearm, or beer and crusty squares of warm pizza. I felt a twinge of longing for the breakfast of champions, the half pint of red wine and the sausage sandwich, but drinking at dawn is the reward for working all night. I ordered coffee, and tried to see some semblance of order in the surrounding chaos.

  Les Halles take up an area perhaps seventy yards square, and very few inches are wasted. Three main passageways separate the étaux, stalls of varying sizes, and at that time in the morning it was hard to imagine customers being able to reach them. Crates, mangled cardboard boxes and wispy clumps of paper straw were stacked high in front of many of the counters, and the floor was garnished with casualties – lettuce leaves, squashed tomatoes, errant haricots – that had been unable to cling on during the last breakneck stage of delivery.

  The stallholders, too busy writing up the day's prices and arranging their produce to spare five minutes for a visit to the bar, bellowed for coffee, which was served to them by Isabelle's waitress, an acrobatic girl over the crates and a steady hand with her tray. She even managed to keep her footing in the high-risk zone of the fish-sellers, where the floor was slick with the ice that men with raw, nicked hands and rubber aprons were shovelling on to the steel display shelves.

  It made a noise like gravel on glass, and there was another, more painful sound that cut through the hubbub as the butchers sawed at bones and severed tendons with decisive, dangerously fast chops of their cleavers. I hoped for their fingers' sake that they hadn't had wine for breakfast.

  After half an hour it was safe to leave the bar. The piles

  of crates had been removed, the trolleys parked, the traffic was on legs now instead of wheels. An army of brooms had whisked away the scraps of fallen vegetables, prices had been marked on spiked plastic labels, tills unlocked, coffee drunk. Les Halles were open for business.

  I have never seen so much fresh food and so much variety in such a confined space. I counted fifty stalls, many of them entirely devoted to a single speciality. There were two stalls selling olives – just olives – in every conceivable style of preparation: olives à la grecque, olives in herb-flavoured oil, olives mixed with scarlet shards of pimento, olives from Nyons, olives from Les Baux, olives that looked like small black plums or elongated green grapes. They were lined up in squat wooden tubs, gleaming as though each one had been individually polished. At the end of the line were the only non-olives to be seen, a barrel of anchovies from Collioure, packed in tighter than any sardines, sharp and salty when I leant down to smell them. Madame behind the counter told me to try one, with a plump black olive. Did I know how to make tapenade, the olive and anchovy paste? A pot of that every day and I'd live to be a hundred.

  Another stall, another specialist: anything with feathers. Pigeons, plucked and trussed, capons, breasts of duck and thighs of duckling, three different members of the chicken aristocracy, with the supreme chickens, the poulets de Bresse, wearing their red, white and blue labels like medals. Légale-ment contrôlée, said the labels, by the Comité Interprofessionel de la Volaille de Bresse. I could imagine the chosen chickens receiving their decorations from a dignified committee member, almost certainly with the traditional kiss on each side of the beak.

  And then there were fish, laid out gill to gill on a row of stalls that extended along the length of one wall, forty yards or more of glistening scales and still-bright eyes. Banks of crushed ice, smelling of the sea, separated the squid from the blood-darkened tuna, the rascasses from the loups de mer, the cod from the skate. Pyramids of clams, of the molluscs called seiches, of winkles, tiny grey shrimp and monster gambas, fish for friture, fish for soupe, lobsters the colour of dark steel, jolts of yellow coming from the dishes of fresh lemons on the counter, deft hands with long thin knives cutting and gutting, the squelch of rubber boots on the wet stone floor.

  It was coming up to seven o'clock, and the first housewives were starting to investigate, with prods and squeezes, what they would be cooking that night. The market opens at 5.30, and the first half hour is officially reserved for the commerçants and restaurant owners, but I couldn't see anyone being courageous enough to stand in the way of a determined Avignon matron who wanted to get her errands done before six. Shop early for the best, we had often been told, and wait until just before the market closes for the cheapest.

  But who could wait that long, surrounded by temptation like this? In one short stretch, I had mentally eaten a dozen times. A bowl of brown free-range eggs turned into a piperade, with Bayonne ham from the stall next door and peppers a few feet further on. That kept me going until I reached the smoked salmon and caviar. But there were the cheeses, the saucissons, the rabbit and hare and pork pâtés, the great pale scoops of rillettes, the confits de canard – it would be madness not to try them all.

  I very nearly stopped my researches to have a picnic in the car park. Everything I needed – including bread from one stall, wine from another – was within twenty yards, fresh and beautifully presented. What could have been a better way to start the day? I realized that my appetite had adjusted to the environment, leapfrogging several hours. My watch said 7.30. My stomach whispered lunch, and to hell with the time. I went to look for the liquid moral support of more coffee.

  There are three bars in Les Halles – Jacky and Isabelle, Cyrille and Evelyne and, the most dangerous of the three, Chez Kiki, where they start serving champagne long before most people get up. I saw two burly men toasting each other, their flûtes of champagne held delicately between thick fingers, earth under their fingernails, earth on their heavy boots. Obviously, they had sold their lettuces well that morning.

  The passageways and stalls were now crowded with members of the public, shopping with the intent, slightly suspicious expressions of people who were determined to find the most tender, the juiciest, the best. A woman put on her reading glasses to inspect a row of cauliflowers which, to me, looked identical. She picked one up, hefted it in her hand, peered at its tight white head, sniffed it, put it down. Three times she did this before making her choice, and then she watched the stallholder over the top of her glasses to make sure he didn't try to substitute it for a less perfect specimen in the back row. I remembered being told not to handle the vegetables in a London greengrocer's. There would have been outrage here if the same miserable ruling were introduced. No fruit or vegetables are bought without going through trial by touch, and any stallholder who tried to discourage the habit would be pelted out of the market.

  Avignon has had its Halles since 1910, although the site under the car park has only been in operation since 1973. That was as much information as the girl in the office could give me. When I asked about the amount of food sold in a day or a week, she just shrugged and told me beaucoup.

  And beaucoup there certainly was, being stuffed and piled into every kind of receptacle from battered suitcases to handbags seemingly capable of infinite expansion. An elderly, bandy-legged man in shorts and a crash helmet wheeled his Mobylette up to the entrance and came in to collect his morning's shopping – a plastic cageot of melons and peaches, two enormous baskets straining to contain their contents, a cotton sack with a dozen baguettes. He distributed the weight carefully around his machine. The crate of fruit was secured with elastic straps to the rack behind the saddle, the baskets hung on the handlebars, the bread sack slung across his back. As he wheeled his load – enough food for a week – away from the market, he shouted at one of the stallholders, ‘À demain!’

  I watched him as he joined the traffic in the Place Pie, the tiny engine of his bike spluttering with effort, his head bent foward over the handlebars and the baguettes sticking up like a quiver of fat golden arrows. It was eleven o'clock, and the café opposite the market had tables on the pavement set for lunch.

  17

  Postcards from Summer

  It has taken us three years to accept the fact that we live in the same house, but in two different places.

  What we think of as normal life starts in September. Apart from market days in the towns, there are no crowds. Traffic on the back roads is sparse during the day – a tractor, a few vans – and virtually non-existent at night. There is always a table in every restaurant, except perhaps for Sunday lunch. Social life is intermittent and uncomplicated. The baker has bread, the plumber has time for a chat, the postman has time for a drink. After the first deafening weekend of the hunting season, the forest is quiet. Each field has a stooped, reflective figure working among the vines, very slowly up one line, very slowly down the next. The hours between noon and two are dead.

  And then we come to July and August.

  We used to treat them as just another two months of the year; hot months, certainly, but nothing that required much adjustment on our part except to make sure that the afternoon included a siesta.

  We were wrong. Where we live in July and August is still the Lubéron, but it's not the same Lubéron. It is the Lubéron en vacances, and our past efforts to live normally during abnormal times have been miserably unsuccessful. So unsuccessful that we once considered cancelling summer altogether and going somewhere grey and cool and peaceful, like the Hebrides.

  But if we did, we would probably miss it, all of it, even the days and incidents that have reduced us to sweating, irritated, over-tired zombies. So we have decided to come to terms with the Lubéron in the summer, to do our best to join the rest of the world on holiday and, like them, to send postcards telling distant friends about the wonderful times we are having. Here are a few.

  Marignane airport

  Three in the afternoon, and still no sign of the one o'clock plane.

  When I called to confirm that it was on time, I was given the standard optimistic lie. And so I left home at 11.30 and spent the hottest hour of a hot day on the autoroute, trying to avoid sudden death among a swarm of Renault 5 missiles launched early that morning from Paris and targeted on the Côte d'Azur. How can these people steer with all four wheels off the ground?

  Un petit retard is indicated on the flight arrivals board, nothing much, forty-five minutes. Time for coffee, two coffees. The flights to Oran have been delayed too, and the airport lounge is carpeted with Arab workmen and their families going home, the children nesting among overstuffed plastic suitcases striped in blue and pink and white. The expressions on the dark, seamed faces of the men are patient and resigned.

  The girl at the desk answers my question about the flight by pointing at the board: forty-five minutes late. When I say that the plane is already an hour late, she shrugs and consults the crystal ball in her computer. Yes, it is as the board indicates, forty-five minutes late. Has the plane left London yet? Yes, she says. But I know she's been trained in deception like all the rest of them.

  It is just before five when the plane gets in and the pale-faced, bad-tempered passengers begin to come through. The first hours of their holiday have been spent sitting on the tarmac at Heathrow. Some of them make the mistake of slapping their passports down impatiently on the counter in front of the immigration officer. He takes his revenge by examining each page with painstaking, exasperating thoroughness, pausing between pages to lick the tip of his finger.

  My friends come through, looking rumpled but cheerful. A few minutes to pick up the bags and then we can be back in plenty of time for a swim before dinner. But a quarter of an hour later they are still waiting in the deserted baggage claim area. The airline has made separate holiday arrangements for one of their suitcases – Newcastle, Hong Kong, who knows? – and we join the other castaways in Lost Luggage.