We came down into Buoux with Maurice braced, stiff-legged, hauling the reins tight against the headlong enthusiasm of the horse. She had scented home and food. To hell with humans and their picnics.

  The sodden but cheerful storm victims gathered in the restaurant to be revived with tea and coffee and marc. Gone were the elegant picnickers of the morning, replaced by dripping, lank-haired figures dressed in varying degrees of transparency. Showing through a pair of once-white, once-opaque trousers, red-lettered knickers wished us all Merry Xmas. Clothes that had billowed now clung, and the straw hats looked like plates of congealed cornflakes. We each stood in our own private pools of water.

  Madame and Marcel, the waiter, who had driven back in the van, served an assortment of dry clothes along with the marc, and the restaurant was transformed into a changing room. Bennett, pensive under his baseball cap, wondered if he might borrow a pair of swimming trunks for the drive home; the Land Rover was awash, and the driver's seat a puddle. But at least, he said, looking out of the window, the storm was over.

  If it was over in Buoux, it had never happened in Ménerbes. The drive up to the house was still dusty, the grass was still brown, the courtyard still hot. We watched the sun as it balanced for a moment in the notch of the twin peaks to the west of the house before disappearing beneath a flushed sky.

  ‘Well,’ said my wife, ‘now do you like picnics?’

  What a question. Of course I like picnics. I love picnics.

  8

  The Flic

  It was bad luck that I had no change for the parking meter on one of the few days that the Cavaillon traffic control authorities were out in force. There are two of them, well-padded and slow-moving men who do their best to look sinister in their peaked caps and sunglasses as they move with immense deliberation from car to car, looking for a contravention.

  I had found a vacant meter that needed feeding, and I went into a nearby café for some I-franc pieces. When I returned to the car, a portly figure in blue was squinting suspiciously at the dial on the meter. He looked up and aimed his sunglasses at me, tapping the dial with his pen.

  ‘He has expired.’

  I explained my problem, but he was not in the mood to consider any mitigating circumstances.

  ‘Tant pis pour vous,’ he said. ‘C'est une contravention.’

  I looked around and could see that there were half a dozen cars double-parked. A maçon's truck, brimming with rubble, was abandoned at the corner of a side street, completely blocking the exit. A van on the other side of the road had been left straddling a pedestrian crossing. My crime seemed relatively minor compared with these flagrant abuses, and I was unwise enough to say so.

  I then became officially invisible. There was no reply except a sniff of irritation, and the guardian of the highways walked around me so that he could take down the number of the car. He unsheathed his notebook and consulted his watch.

  He was starting to commit my sins to paper – probably adding on a bonus fine for impertinence – when there was a bawl from the café where I had been for change.

  ‘Eh, toi! Georges!’

  Georges and I looked round to see a stocky man making his way through the tables and chairs on the pavement, one finger wagging from side to side in the Provencal shorthand that expresses violent disagreement.

  For five minutes, Georges and the stocky man shrugged and gesticulated and tapped each other sternly on the chest while my case was discussed. It was true, said the newcomer. Monsieur had just arrived, and he had indeed been into the café to get change. There were witnesses. He flung his arm back towards the café, where three or four faces were turned towards us from the twilight of the bar.

  The law is the law, said Georges. It is a clear contravention. Besides, I have started to write the form, and so nothing can be done. It is irrevocable.

  Mais c'est de la connerie, ça. Change the form, and give it to that woodenhead who is blocking the street with his truck.

  Georges weakened. He looked at the truck and his notebook, gave another sniff, and turned to me so that he could have the last word. ‘Next time, have change.’ He looked at me intently, no doubt committing my criminal features to memory in case he might need to pull in a suspect one day, and moved off along the pavement towards the maçon's truck.

  My rescuer grinned and shook his head. ‘He has pois chiches for brains, that one.’

  I thanked him. Could I buy him a drink? We went into the café together and sat at a dark table in the corner, and I was there for the next two hours.

  Robert was his name. He was not quite short, not quite fat, broad across the chest and stomach, thick-necked, dark-faced, dashingly moustached. His smile was a contrast in gold fillings and nicotine-edged teeth, and his brown eyes were lively with amusement. There was an air of faintly unreliable charm about him, the charm of an engaging scamp. I could imagine him in Cavaillon market selling guaranteed indestructible crockery and almost genuine Levi's, whatever might have fallen off the back of the camion the night before.

  As it turned out, he had been a policeman, which was how he had come to know and dislike Georges. Now he was a security consultant, selling alarm systems to owners of second homes in the Lubéron. Cambrioleurs were everywhere nowadays, he said, looking for the open window or the unlocked door. It was wonderful for business. Did I have an alarm system? No? Quelle horreur! He slipped a card across the table. There was his name and a slogan that read Alarm Technology of the Future, a message that was somewhat at odds with his trademark – a small drawing of a parrot on a perch squawking ‘Au voleur!’

  I was interested in his work with the police, and why he had left. He settled back in a cloud of Gitanes smoke, waved his empty glass at the barman for more pastis, and started to talk.

  In the beginning, he said, it had been a little slow. Waiting for promotion, just like everyone else, trudging through the routine work, getting bored with the desk jobs, not the kind of excitement he had hoped for. And then came the break, one weekend in Fréjus, where he was taking a few days' leave.

  Every morning he went for breakfast to a café overlooking the sea, and every morning at the same time a man came down to the beach for windsurfing lessons. With the idle half-interest of a holidaymaker, Robert watched as the man got up on his windsurfer, fell off and got up again.

  There was something familiar about the man. Robert had never met him, he was sure, but he had seen him somewhere. There was a prominent mole on his neck, a tattoo on his left arm, the kind of small distinguishing marks that a policeman is trained to notice and remember. It was the windsurfer's profile that stirred Robert's memory, the mole on the neck and the slightly hooked nose.

  After two days, it came to him. He had seen the profile, in black and white with a number underneath it; an identity photograph, a police mug shot. The windsurfer had a record.

  Robert went to the local gendarmerie, and within half an hour he was looking at the face of a man who had escaped from prison the year before. He was the leader of le gang de Gardanne, and known to be dangerous. Physical characteristics included a mole on the neck and a tattoo on the left arm.

  A trap was set, which Robert described with some difficulty through his laughter. Twenty officers, disguised in swimming trunks, appeared on the beach bright and early and attempted to look inconspicuous despite the curious similarity of their bronzage – the policeman's suntan ofbrown forearms, brown vee at the neck and brown face, with everywhere else, from toes to forehead, an unweathered white.

  Fortunately, the fugitive was too busy getting aboard his windsurfer to notice anything suspicious about twenty pale men loitering with intent until they surrounded him in shallow water and took him away. A subsequent search of his studio apartment in Fréjus produced two Magnum 357 handguns and three grenades.

  Robert was credited with the collar, and seconded to plain-clothes duty at Marignane airport, where his powers of observation could be fully exploited.

  I stopped him there for a moment, because I had always been puzzled by the apparent lack of official surveillance at Marseille. Arriving passengers can leave their hand luggage with friends while they go to the baggage claim area, and if all they have is hand luggage they don't need to pass through Customs at all. Given Marseille's reputation, this seemed strangely casual.

  Robert tilted his head and laid a stubby finger along the side of his nose. It is not quite as décontracté as it appears, he said. Police and douaniers, sometimes dressed as business executives, sometimes in jeans and T-shirts, are always there, mingling with the passengers, strolling through the parking areas, watching and listening. He himself had caught one or two petty smugglers – nothing big, just amateurs who thought that once they were in the car park they'd be safe, they could slap each other on the back and talk about it. Crazy.

  But there were weeks when nothing much happened, and in the end boredom had got to him. That, and his zizi. He grinned, and pointed with his thumb down between his legs.

  He'd stopped a girl – a good-looking girl, well-dressed, travelling alone, the classic drug ‘mule’ – as she was getting into a car with Swiss plates. He asked her the standard question, how long the car had been in France. She became nervous, then friendly, then very friendly, and the two of them had spent the afternoon together in the airport hotel. Robert had been seen coming out with her, and that was it. Fini. Funnily enough, it had been the same week that a warden in Marseille's Beaumettes jail had been caught passing Scotch in doctored yogurt pots to one of the prisoners. Fini for him too.

  Robert shrugged. It was wrong, it was stupid, but policemen weren't saints. There were always the brebis galeuses, the black sheep. He looked down at his glass, the picture of a penitent man regretting past misdeeds. One

  slip, and a career in ruins. I started to feel sorry for him, and said so. He reached across the table and patted my arm, and then spoiled the effect by saying that another drink would make him feel much better. He laughed, and I wondered how much of what he'd told me was the truth.

  In a moment of pastis-scented bonhomie, Robert had said that he would come up to the house one day to advise us on our security arrangements. There would be no obligation, and if we should decide to make ourselves impregnable, he would install the most technically advanced booby traps at a prix d‘ami.

  I thanked him and forgot about it. Favours offered in bars should never be taken too seriously, particularly in Provence, where the most sober of promises is likely to take months to materialize. In any case, having seen how carefully members of the public ignore the shriek of car alarm systems in the streets, I was not convinced that electronic devices were much of a deterrent. I had more faith in a barking dog.

  To my surprise, Robert came as he said he would, in a silver BMW a-bristle with antennae, dressed in perilously tight trousers and a black shirt, humming with a musky and aggressive after-shave. The splendour of his appearance was explained by his companion, whom he introduced as his friend Isabelle. They were going to have lunch in Gordes, and Robert thought it was a chance to combine business with pleasure. He managed to make it sound infinitely suggestive.

  Isabelle was no more than twenty. A blonde fringe brushed the rims of gigantic sunglasses. A minimal part of her body was coated with hot-pink spandex, an iridescent tube which ended well above mid-thigh. The courtly Robert insisted that she lead the way up the steps to the house, and he clearly relished every step. He was a man who could give lessons in leering.

  While Isabelle busied herself with the contents of her make-up bag, I took Robert round the house, and he gave me a predictably disturbing assessment of the opportunities that our home provided for any larcenous idiot with a screwdriver. Windows and doors and shutters were all inspected and dismissed as being next to useless. And the dogs? Aucun problème. They could be taken care of with a few scraps of drugged meat, and then the house would be at the mercy of the thieves. Robert's overwhelming after-shave gusted over me as he pinned me against the wall. You have no idea what these animals do.

  His voice became low and confidential. He wouldn't want Madame my wife to overhear what he was about to tell me, since it was rather indelicate.

  Burglars, he said, are often superstitious. In many cases – he had seen it more times than he liked to think about – they feel it necessary before leaving a ransacked house to defecate, usually on the floor, preferably on fitted carpet. In this way, they think that any bad luck will remain in the house instead of with them. Merde partout, he said, and made the word sound as if he'd just stepped in it. C'est désagréable, non? It certainly was. Désagréable was a mild way of putting it.

  But, said Robert, life was sometimes just. An entire group of cambrioleurs had once been apprehended because of this very superstition. The house had been picked clean, the swag loaded into a truck, and all that remained was to perform the parting gesture, for good luck's sake. The head of the gang, however, experienced considerable difficulty in making his contribution. Try as he might, nothing happened. He was très, très constipé. And he was still there, crouched and cursing, when the police arrived.

  It was a heartening story, although I realized that according to the national average we had only a one in five chance of being visited by a constipated burglar. We couldn't count on it.

  Robert took me outside and began to propose his plans for turning the house into a fortress. At the bottom of the drive, there should be electronically operated steel gates. In front of the house, a pressure-activated lighting system; anything heavier than a chicken coming up the drive would be caught in the glare of a battery of floodlights. This was often enough to make burglars give up and run for it. But to be totally protected, to be able to sleep like an innocent child, one should also have the last word in repellents – la maison hurlante, the howling house.

  Robert paused to gauge my reaction to this hideous novelty, and smiled across at Isabelle, who was peering over her sunglasses at her nails. They were a perfect hot-pink match for her dress.

  ‘Ça va, chou-chou?’

  She twitched a honey-coloured shoulder at him, and it was with a visible effort that he turned his thoughts back to howling houses.

  Alors, it was all done with electronic beams, which protected every door, every window, every orifice larger than a chink. And so if a determined and light-footed burglar managed to scale the steel gates and tiptoe through the floodlights, the merest touch of his finger on window or door would set the house screaming. One could also, bien sûr, enhance the effect by installing an amplifier on the roof so that the screams could be heard for several kilometres.

  But that wasn't the end of it. At the same time, a partner of Robert's near Gordes, whose house was linked to the system, would drive over instantly with his loaded pistolet and his large Alsatian. Secure behind this multi-layered protection, I would be perfectly tranquille.

  It sounded anything but tranquille. I immediately thought of Faustin in his tractor, pounding on the steel gates at six in the morning to get to the vines; of the floodlights going on all through the night as foxes or sangliers or the cat next door crossed the drive; of setting off the howling mechanism by accident, and having to apologize fast to an irritated man with a gun before his dog ripped me to pieces. Life in Fort Knox would be a permanent, dangerous hell. Even as a barricade against the August invasion, it simply wouldn't be worth the nervous wear and tear.

  Luckily, Robert was distracted from pressing for a sale. Isabelle, now satisfied with the state of her nails, the positioning of her sunglasses and the overall adhesion of her tubelet, was ready to go. She cooed across the courtyard at him. ‘Bobo, j'ai faim.’

  ‘Oui, oui, chérie. Deux secondes.’ He turned to me and tried to revert to business, but his howling mechanism had been activated and our domestic security was not the pressing priority of the moment.

  I asked him where he was going to have lunch.

  ‘La Bastide,’ he said. ‘Do you know it? It used to be the gendarmerie. Once a flic, always a flic, eh?’

  I said I'd heard that it was also an hotel, and he winked. He was a very expressive winker. This was a wink of the purest lubricity.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  9

  Mouthful for Mouthful with the Athlete Gourmet

  We heard about Régis from some friends. They had invited him to dinner at their house, and during the morning he had called to ask what he would be given to eat. Even in France, that shows a greater interest than normal in the menu, and his hostess was curious. Why was he asking? There were cold stuffed moules, there was pork with truffle gravy, there were cheeses, there were home-made sorbets. Were any of these a problem? Had he developed allergies? Become a vegetarian? Gone, God forbid, on a diet?

  Certainly not, said Régis. It all sounded delicious. But there was un petit inconvénient, and it was this: he was suffering from a sharp attack of piles, and found it impossible to sit through an entire dinner. A single course was all that he could manage without discomfort, and he wanted to pick the course which tempted him most. He was sure that his hostess would sympathize with his predicament.

  As it was Régis, she did. Régis, so she told us later, was a man whose life was dedicated to the table – knowledgeably, almost obsessively concerned with eating and drinking. But not as a glutton. No, Régis was a gourmet who happened to have a huge and extremely well-informed appetite. Also, she said, he was amusing about his passion, and he had some views which we might find interesting about the English attitude to food. Perhaps we would like to meet him once he had recovered from his crise postérieure.

  And, one evening a few weeks later, we did.

  He arrived in haste, nursing a cold bottle of Krug champagne, not quite cold enough, and spent the first five minutes fussing with an ice bucket to bring the bottle to the correct drinking temperature, which he said had to be between 5 and 7 degrees. While he rotated the bottle gently in the bucket, he told us of a dinner party he had been to the previous week which had been a gastronomic disaster. His only enjoyable moment, he said, had come at the end, when one of the female guests was saying goodbye to her hostess.