He pointed to his throat, and made wheezing noises.

  ‘Mono,’ he said.

  Mono? I had no idea what that was, but I did know that Americans have much more sophisticated ailments than we do – haematomas instead of bruises, migraine instead of a headache, post-nasal drip – and so I muttered something about fresh air soon clearing it up and helped him into the car. On the way home, I learned that mono was the intimate form of address for mononucleosis, a viral infection. One symptom is a painful throat. ‘Like broken glass,’ said Benson, huddled behind his sunglasses and his handkerchief. ‘We have to call my brother in Brooklyn. He's a doctor.’

  We got back to the house to find the phone out of order. It was the beginning of a long holiday weekend, and so we would be without it for three days, normally a blessing. But Brooklyn had to be called. There was one particular antibiotic, a state of the art antibiotic, that Benson said would overcome all known forms of mono. I went down to the phone box at Les Baumettes and fed it with 5-franc pieces while Brooklyn hospital searched for Benson's brother. He gave me the name of the wonder drug. I called a doctor and asked him if he could come to the house.

  He arrived within an hour, and inspected the invalid, who was resting behind his sunglasses in a darkened room.

  ‘Alors, monsieur…’ the doctor began, but Benson cut him short.

  ‘Mono,’ he said, pointing at his throat.

  ‘Comment?’

  ‘Mono, man. Mononucleosis.’

  ‘Ah, mononucléose. Peut-être, peut-être.’

  The doctor looked into Benson's angry throat and took a swab. He wanted to run a laboratory test on the virus. And now, would Monsieur lower his trousers? He took out a syringe, which Benson peered at suspiciously over his shoulder as he slowly dropped his Calvin Klein jeans to half mast.

  ‘Tell him I'm allergic to most antibiotics. He should call my brother in Brooklyn.’

  ‘Comment?’

  I explained the problem. Did the doctor by any chance have the wonder drug in his bag? Non. We looked at each other round Benson's bare buttocks. They jerked as Benson coughed painfully. The doctor said he must be given something to reduce the inflammation, and that side-effects from this particular shot were extremely rare. I passed the news on to Benson.

  ‘Well… OK.’ He bent over, and the doctor injected with a flourish, like a matador going in over the horns. ‘Voilà!’

  While Benson waited for allergic reactions to send him reeling, the doctor told me that he would arrange for a nurse to come twice a day to give further injections, and that the test results would be through on Saturday. As soon as he had them, he would make out the necessary prescriptions. He wished us a bonne soirée. Benson communed noisily with his handkerchief. I thought a bonne soirée was unlikely.

  The nurse came and went, the test results came through and the doctor reappeared on Saturday evening as promised. The young Monsieur had been correct. It was mononucléose, but we would conquer it with the resources of French medicine. The doctor began to scribble like a poet on heat. As prescription after prescription flowed from his pen, it seemed as though every single resource was going to be called into action. He passed over a wad of hieroglyphics, and wished us a bon weekend. That too was unlikely.

  The Sunday of a holiday weekend in rural France is not the easiest time to find a pharmacy which is open for business, and the only one for miles around was the pharmacie de garde on the outskirts of Cavaillon. I was there at 8.30, and joined a man clutching a wad of prescriptions almost as thick as mine. Together we read the notice taped to the glass door: opening time was not until 10.00.

  The man sighed, and looked me up and down.

  ‘Are you an emergency?’

  No. It was for a friend.

  He nodded. He himself had an important arthrose in his shoulder, and also some malign fungus of the feet. He was not going to stand for an hour and a half in the sun to wait for the pharmacy to open. He sat down on the pavement next to the door and started to read chapter one of his prescriptions. I decided to go and have breakfast.

  ‘Come back well before ten,’ he said. ‘There will be many people today.’

  How did he know? Was a Sunday morning visit to the pharmacy a regular pre-lunch treat? I thanked him and ignored his advice, killing time with an old copy of Le Provençal in a café.

  When I returned to the pharmacy just before ten, it looked as though le tout Cavaillon had gathered outside. There were dozens of them standing with their voluminous prescriptions, swapping symptoms in the manner of an angler describing a prize fish. Monsieur Angine boasted about his sore throat. Madame Varices countered with the history of her varicose veins. The halt and the maimed chattered away cheerfully, consulting their watches and pressing ever closer to the still-locked door. At last, to a murmured accompaniment of enfin and elle arrive, a girl appeared from the back of the pharmacy, opened up, and stepped smartly aside as the stampede jostled through. Not for the first time, I realized that the Anglo-Saxon custom of the orderly queue has no place in French life.

  I must have been there for half an hour before I was able to take advantage of a gap in the scrum and give my documents to the pharmacist. She produced a plastic shopping bag and started to fill it with boxes and bottles, rubberstamping each prescription as she worked her way through the pile, a copy for her, a copy for me. With the bag at bursting point, one prescription remained. After disappearing for five minutes, the pharmacist admitted defeat; she was out of stock of whatever it was, and I would have to get it from another pharmacy. However, it was not grave, because the important medication was all there in the bag. Enough, it seemed to me, to bring a regiment back from the dead.

  Benson sucked and gargled and inhaled his way through the menu. By the next morning he had emerged from the shadow of the grave and was feeling sufficiently recovered to join us on a trip to the Ménerbes pharmacy in search of the last prescription.

  One of the village elders was there when we arrived, perched on a stool while his shopping bag was being stuffed full of nostrums. Curious about what exotic disease the foreigners might have, he remained seated while our prescription was being filled, leaning forward to see what was in the packet as it was put on the counter.

  The pharmacist opened the packet and took out a foil-wrapped object the size of a deformed Alka-Seltzer tablet. She held it up to Benson.

  ‘Deux fois par jour,’ she said.

  Benson shook his head and put his hand to his throat.

  ‘Too big,’ he said. ‘I couldn't swallow anything that size.’

  We translated for the pharmacist, but before she could reply the old man collapsed with laughter, rocking perilously on his stool and wiping his eyes with the back of a knobbly hand.

  The pharmacist smiled, and made delicate upward motions with the foil-wrapped lump. ‘C'est un suppositoire.’

  Benson looked bewildered. The old man, still laughing, hopped down from the stool and took the suppository from the pharmacist.

  ‘Regardez,’ he said to Benson. ‘On fait comme ça.’

  He moved away from the counter to give himself space, bent forward, holding the suppository above his head and then, with a flowing backwards swoop of his arm, applied the suppository firmly to the seat of his trousers. ‘Tok!’ said the old man. He looked up at Benson. ‘Vous voyez?’

  ‘Up the ass?’ Benson shook his head again. ‘Hey, that's weird. Jesus.’ He put on his sunglasses and moved a couple of paces backwards. ‘We don't do that where I come from.’

  We tried to explain that it was a very efficient method of getting medication into the bloodstream, but he wasn't convinced. And when we said that it wouldn't give him a sore throat either, he wasn't amused. I often wonder what he told his brother the doctor back in Brooklyn.

  Shortly afterwards, I met Massot in the forest and told him about the suppository lesson. It was droll, he thought, but for a truly dramatique episode there was nothing to touch the story of the man who had gone into hospital to have his appendix out and had woken up with his left leg amputated. Beh oui.

  I said it couldn't be true, but Massot insisted that it was.

  ‘If I am ever ill,’ he said, ‘I go to the vet. You know where you are with vets. I don't trust doctors.’

  Fortunately, Massot's view of the French medical profession is as unlikely to reflect reality as most of his views. There may be doctors with a taste for amputation in Provence, but we have never met them. In fact, apart from our brush with mononucleosis, we've only seen the doctor once, and that was to combat an attack of bureaucracy.

  It was the climax of months of paper-shuffling which we had gone through in order to get our cartes de séjour – the identity cards that are issued to foreign residents of France. We had been to the Mairie, to the Préfecture, to the Bureau des Impôts and back again to the Mairie. Everywhere we went, we were told that another form was required which, naturellement, could only be obtained somewhere else. In the end, when we were convinced that we had a full set of certificates, attestations, declarations, photographs and vital statistics, we made what we thought would be our last triumphal visit to the Mairie.

  Our dossiers were examined carefully. Everything seemed to be in order. We were not going to be a drain on the state. We had no criminal record. We were not seeking to steal employment from French workers. Bon. The dossiers were closed. At last we were going to be official.

  The secretary of the Mairie smiled nicely, and passed over two more forms. It was necessary, she said, to have a medical examination to prove that we were of sound mind and body. Doctor Fenelon in Bonnieux would be pleased to examine us. Off to Bonnieux we went.

  Doctor Fenelon was charming and brisk as he X-rayed us and took us through the fine print of a short questionnaire. Were we mad? No. Epileptic? No. Addicted to drugs? Alcoholic? Prone to fainting? I was half expecting to be interrogated about bowel movements in case we might be adding to the constipated sector of the French population, but that didn't seem to be a concern of the immigration authorities. We signed forms. Doctor Fenelon signed the forms. Then he opened a drawer and produced two more forms.

  He was apologetic. ‘Bien sûr, vous n'avez pas le problème, mais…’ He shrugged, and explained that we must take the forms into Cavaillon and have a blood test before he could give us our certificats sanitaires.

  Was there anything special that we were being tested for?

  ‘Ah, oui.’ He looked even more apologetic. ‘La syphilis.’

  6

  The English Écrevisse

  ‘Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.’ That was Flaubert's opinion, and it is a fair expression of the way it feels if you choose to spend your working days putting words down on pieces of paper.

  For most of the time, it's a solitary, monotonous business. There is the occasional reward of a good sentence – or rather, what you think is a good sentence, since there's nobody else to tell you. There are long, unproductive stretches when you consider taking up some form of regular and useful employment like chartered accountancy. There is constant doubt that anyone will want to read what you're writing, panic at missing deadlines that you have imposed on yourself, and the deflating realization that those deadlines couldn't matter less to the rest of the world. A thousand words a day, or nothing; it makes no difference to anyone else but you. That part of writing is undoubtedly a dog's life.

  What makes it worth living is the happy shock of discovering that you have managed to give a few hours of entertainment to people you've never met. And if some of them should write to tell you, the pleasure of receiving their letters is like applause. It makes up for all the grind. You abandon thoughts of a career in accountancy and make tentative plans for another book.

  My first letter arrived shortly after the publication in April of A Year in Provence. It came from Luxembourg, polite and complimentary, and I kept looking at it all day. The next week a man wrote asking how to grow truffles in New Zealand. Then the letters began to arrive in a steady trickle – from London, from Beijing, from Queensland, from Her Majesty's Prison at Wormwood Scrubs, from the expatriate community on the Côte d'Azur, from the wilds of Wiltshire and the Surrey hills – some on embossed, true blue, toff's writing paper, others on pages torn from exercise books, one on the back of a map of the London Underground. The addresses were often so vague that the Post Office had to perform small marvels of deduction: ‘Les Anglais, Bonnieux' found us, despite the fact that we don't live in Bonnieux. So did my favourite: ‘L'Écrevisse Anglais, Ménerbes, Provence.’

  The letters were friendly and encouraging, and whenever there was an address to reply to, I replied, thinking that would be the end of it. But often it wasn't. Before long we found ourselves in the undeserved position of resident advisers on every aspect of Provençal life from buying a house to finding a baby-sitter. A woman telephoned from Memphis to ask about the burglary rate in the Vaucluse. A photographer from Essex wanted to know if he could make a living taking pictures in the Lubéron. Couples thinking about moving to Provence wrote pages of questions. Would their children fit in to the local schools? How high was the cost of living? What about doctors? What about income tax? Was it lonely? Would they be happy? We answered as best we could, but it was slightly uncomfortable to be involved in the personal decisions of total strangers.

  And then, as summer set in, what had been dropping through the mailbox started coming up the drive. Letters turned into people.

  It was hot and dry, and I was doing some Provencal weeding in the bone-hard ground with a pickaxe when a car arrived and the driver emerged with a broad smile, waving a copy of my book at me.

  ‘Tracked you down!’ he said. ‘Did a little detective work in the village. No trouble at all.’

  I signed the book and felt like a real author, and when my wife came back from Cavaillon she was properly impressed. ‘A fan,’ she said. ‘You should have taken a photograph. How amazing that someone should bother.’

  She was less impressed a few days later when we were leaving the house to go out to dinner and found a pretty blonde lurking behind the cypress tree in the front garden.

  ‘Are you him?’ asked the blonde.

  ‘Yes,’ said my wife. ‘What a pity. We're just going out.’ Blondes are probably used to reactions like that from wives. She left.

  ‘That might have been a fan,’ I said to my wife.

  ‘She can go and be a fan somewhere else,’ she said. ‘And you can take that smirk off your face.’

  During July and August we became used to finding unfamiliar faces at the front door. Most of them were apologetic and well-mannered, just wanting their books signed, grateful for a glass of wine and a few minutes sitting in the courtyard out of the heat of the sun. They all seemed to be fascinated by the stone table we had finally managed to install with such difficulty.

  ‘So this is The Table,’ they'd say, walking round it and running their fingers over the surface as if it was one of Henry Moore's best efforts. It was a very curious sensation to have ourselves, our dogs (who loved it) and our house inspected with such interest. And, I suppose inevitably, there were times when it wasn't curious, but irritating, when a visit felt more like an invasion.

  Unseen by us one afternoon when the temperature was over 100°, the husband, the wife and the wife's friend, noses and knees sunburned to a matching angry red, had parked at the end of the drive and walked up to the house. The dogs were asleep, and hadn't heard them. When I went indoors to get a beer, I found them in the sitting-room, chatting to each other as they examined the books and the furniture. I was startled. They weren't.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ said the husband. ‘We read the bits in The Sunday Times, so we decided to pop in.’

  That was it. No excuses, no hint of awkwardness, no thought that I might not be thrilled to see them. They didn't even have a copy of the book. Waiting for the paperback to come out, they said. Hardcover books are so expensive these days. They oozed an unfortunate mixture of familiarity and condescension.

  It is not often that I take against people on sight, but I took against them. I asked them to leave.

  The husband's red wattles turned even redder, and he puffed up like an aggrieved turkey who had just been told the bad news about Christmas.

  ‘But we've driven all the way over from St Rémy.’ I asked him to drive all the way back, and they left in a cloud of muttering. That's one book we won't be buying, only wanted to look, anyone would think it was Buckingham Palace. I watched them march down the drive to their Volvo, shoulders rigid with indignation, and thought about getting a Rottweiler.

  After that, the sight of a car slowing down and stopping on the road in front of the house was the signal for what came to be known as a crawler alert. ‘Make yourself decent,’ my wife would say, ‘I think they're coming up the drive. No – they've stopped at the mailbox.’ And later on, when I went down to collect the post, there was a copy of the book in a plastic bag, to be signed and left under a stone on top of the well. The next day it was gone; taken, I hoped, by the considerate people who had delivered it without wanting to disturb us.

  By the end of summer, we were not the only ones to have received some attention from the public. Our neighbour Faustin had been asked to autograph a book, which had puzzled him since, as he said, he was not an écrivang. When I told him that people had been reading about him in England, he took off his cap and smoothed his hair and said Ah bon? twice, sounding rather pleased.

  Maurice the chef had also done his share of signing, and said he'd never had so many English customers in his restaurant. Some of them had been surprised to find that he actually existed; they thought I'd made him up. Others had arrived with copies of the book and had ordered, down to the final glass of marc, a meal that they had read about.

  And then there was the celebrity plumber, Monsieur Menicucci, who drops in from time to time between his œuvres to share with us his thoughts on politics, wild mushrooms, climatic irregularities, the prospects for the French rugby team, the genius of Mozart and any exciting developments in the world of sanitary fittings. I gave him a copy of the book and showed him passages in which he had starred, and told him that some of our visitors had expressed a desire to meet him.