HARVEST–TIME IN PROVENCE

                                                                                                                 Wednesday, September 24^th

It was the gold filigree glinting through leafy canopies that confirmed I was nearing the heart of Provence – my first visit for twenty years. Warming once again to the tunnels of plane trees with their greyish to lime trunks, boughs arching into emerald vaults. In those far-off days I had been exhilarated by the Ardeche raging through its vertical gorge in full springtime torrents, untamed by hydro-electric barrages; now it was a mere rivulet. Many of Daudet’s thirty-two Provencal winds gusted across the terraces patterned in counterpoint. Row upon row of cypresses, poplars, vines – the linear mentality of the French par excellence – only to be refuted by the bleached orange-tiled roofs rippling off at odd tangents.

From St Malo, had driven south-westwards to experience the mystery of the monoliths, ‘les alignements’, some four thousand stones standing in precise ranks for four or five thousand years. Slightly weathered, with something of that still, serene mood of the graveyard that gives rise to reflection. Wandered amongst the lozenges and menhirs in a light drizzle, which made me feel desolate. Until I came across a dolmen lying transversely with a hollowed-out heart for sacrifices and began to dwell on the unfortunate Tess at Stonehenge

Then Nantes eastwards along the sun-flowered valley of the Loire. Chenonceaux – not quite the white-stoned jewel shimmering in the water which had enchanted me one distant twilight in April, when a hunchbacked dwarf of a guide had spun tales of the huntress Diane de Poitiers, her alabaster breasts revealed in ravishing décolletage – the phrase itself was ravishing enough to be memorable - and Catherine de Medicis intriguing with potions of poison. Seems that in the years since, I had coated the chateau with more than a patina of whitewash, for when the mists had lifted on those exquisite horseshoe arches, some cracks appeared in my vision – the tourelles were smudged grey and patchy, and workmen were drilling away sixteenth-century bricks from the walls of the moat, shoals of sand and dead branches.

What had I come in search of in the early sixties? The burning white sunlight and vivid colours of a Matisse painting, cheap Cotes du Rhone reds, the array of goats milk cheeses, not least the opportunity to gain some field experience on the Roman excavations. And, it must be said, the pursuit of glamour: of a land whose language and culture I had studied, suffused with the tingling inevitability of romantic . . . no, sexual initiation at the hands of some haunted street-waif or even a sophisticated earth-mother, silly illusions stirred up by the winks and nudges of public schoolboys and the smut of seedy comedians on seaside piers. And what virginal youth can forget the erotic charge from those voluptuous or daring actresses, Bardot, of course, Martine Carol, and Jeanne Moreau, dressed in white, making love in a rowboat floating at midnight to a yearning, pulsating string sextet of Brahms. Louis Malle’s Les Amants has a lot to answer for!

Now getting excited about inhaling the beguiling scents of Provence once more. Must be wary of shifty, little Renaults punching in from my right, particularly in those manic minutes before noon and the two-hour lunch.

                                                                                                                           Saturday, September 27th

Apprehensiveness to some extent justified: the traffic-snarls in tourist towns now one-way; the burgeoning of faceless flats. Le Grau de Roi absolutely ruined. Formerly, such a sleepy, picturesque fishing-village. All around the Mediterranean it’s built up beyond recognition: e.g. the domino pyramids of La Grande Motte. Such is progress so-called!

Disappointed too by the fact that the more kilometres I clock up, the more I realize how many layers of past experience are buried under the barrage of present sensations. Consequently, I find myself not quite in tune with the cultural sensitivities of a region that had formed so much part of my education.

Gradually, familiar images returned: men in blue dungarees engrossed in a game of boules under wistful old plane trees, iron-clad balls clacking on sandy soil; the somnolence of shabby, brown-stained villages, shuttered against light, klaxons, smells of urine, garlic and Gitanes; the maquis and the scent of thyme and rosemary and spindles of sapling pine and horse-chestnuts and almonds – cracking them open with a rock and savouring their soft, warm, white kernels, an urge more satisfying these days than peering through the musty gloom at another Adoration de la Vierge in yet another Romanesque church awarded one star in the Michelin Guide. That relentless cerebral quest was at times irrational. Nowadays chewing up the routes touristiques provides sufficient sense of purpose and achievement.

                                                                                                                             Sunday, September 28th

How can I possibly describe Les Alpilles? Its spine resembles a dragon’s tail for thirty kilometres. Its conical peaks are glazed ice-blue to silver, as if sheeted by a mistral blast, its metallic gullies and shoulders a grizzled grey, at times a brazen mauve. Its talons yield a red dust, bauxite. This range mesmerizes and haunts, yet I cannot remember ever setting foot here. A name . . . Baux . . . Beaune . . . Beaumes does ring a bell in the mist, a dull monotone.

She was wearing a jacket, jumper, slacks; navy and/or black. We were holding hands, but she was turning her head aside with extreme shyness. I had kept the photo for a few weeks, black & white, long shot and blurry. Black hair, collar length, high, plump cheeks.

Can’t for the deuce remember her name.

Which is odd. In my teens in Sussex I used to go rambling about the chalk pits, barrows and Iron Age hill-forts, the downland hamlets of malm stone or flint, often reliving events, conversations in my own life. Something of a loner consolidating his sense of existence. Now at the dreaded apex of forty, after all the deadweight cataloguing of trivia in po-faced museums, together with the futility of so much arty-farty hobnobbing, life has somehow lost whatever shape it may have held when I was more self-contained. I have to remind myself that I remain open to possibilities, including romance, as I’m not tied to a bond turned sour. Thus in my better moods the curtain on each morning lifts with promise (notwithstanding those wretched cockerels and chiens mechants), though evenings, as I stare at the bones of my poulet de Provence by candle light, have become null and void.

‘Vous avez fini, monsieur?’

Mm . . . fini.

                                                                                                                          Tuesday, September 30th

Plane trees so steadfast, like ghosts whispering in galleries, draw me into the shadowy reaches of times long lost. Every bole is distempered with dabs from an autumn palette, each with its distinctive blotch and scab and fascia, and occasionally posters half-peeled with scraps of fading images.

Through which murmur winds, echoes, refrains.

Je te prie, je te prie.

That’s right, at some Hotel de Ville. I was delivering a speech of thanks to the Committee of Cultural Exchange for their sponsorship. Of . . . what was it now? . . . the conservation of three spans of a Roman aqueduct . . . overgrown with brambles. Still standing some seventeen hundred years later. In the middle of olive groves. Cool, fresh water had been borne thirty or forty kilometres to Arles. How did the local newspaper put it? ‘I had spoken ‘dans un francais tres correct avec bien peu accent’. I found myelf ‘le grand Anglais’, the centre of civic attention.

And you were the daughter, the daughter of a mayor, a vintner with a square, swarthy head, bluish chin and heavy eyes. And at first you put me in mind of a black kitten that so delicately insinuates itself round a man’s ankles that he overlooks its proximity and promptly trips over its arched back, for there you were, admiring yet naïve, silent but for wondering, damson eyes.

Sixteen! Christ, she couldn’t have been! But once didn’t I catch her staring at her profile in a full-length mirror, holding her back erect and eyeing her bust-line. As if for the first time aware of its allure? Such a demure gesture, however modest, was like a red rag.

Cloistered, without taint. Was that her attraction? Did I actually relish the taste of corrupting an ingénue? Of being the first? Surely not! For I also remember another occasion, the Gard du Nord, when a passenger train was waiting to depart and out of every carriage window hung convent girls screaming and whistling like starlings at anything in trousers, a vision of hell for the starch-faced nuns in white-winged cornettes standing by helpless. I was frankly repelled, not flattered. Besides, I was revelling in my new-found status, effusing bonhomie to those who mattered and she provided an entrée into some social life. Made me feel I was an aspiring archeologist rather than some loose-footed student.

                                                                                                                            Wednesday, October 1st

One of those squally days when the mistral blew cold gusts at the planes, fetching down branches and nuts. The rain lashed for brief spells, but racing, black clouds threatened throughout. It’s the equinox, say the locals. Walked along the canal to the boulangerie. The grape- and apple-pickers are busy in the fields. Lorry loads of apples, trailers of grapes have become a commonplace sight.

Had trouble lighting the oil heater. Electricity and hot water cut off on the domaine, so lit candles and lay down on the settee.

Yes, we shared good times together that long, hot summer. Was it really so hot? But now I recall walking across the topmost, creamy-gold parapet of the Pont du Gard, laughing at her honking terror when I too was in reality terrified of plunging fifty metres into the river. How could I forget that? The way she’d shower me with boxes of calissons and duck into patisseries for sables or creamy religieuses or tatins. Seeking sherds of Roman pottery at Glanum. The lavender fields at Sault, where I bought her some heady essence and she treated me to the crunchiest almond nougat.

Only once was she disagreeable. During the running of the bulls. She had held on to my shirt when I wanted to leap over the barricades. It was relatively safe. Four black bulls were trucked in from the Camargue – not exactly Pamplona, after all – and their horns were half sawn-off; but she hated the way the young daredevils, and not so young, frisked into the improvised corrida and clapped, whistled through their teeth, jumped up and down, anything to distract and aggravate, now on one side, now the other, as the beasts pawed and charged and tossed the empty air, drooling gouts of saliva, utterly bewildered; whereas I grew excited by the frantic diving under the carts or vaulting over the barriers or straining to slap a sweaty flank, whilst secretly hoping that one of those gadflies would get his come-uppance with a horn in his groin.

                                                                                                                                   Thursday, Oct, 2nd

I seem to have acquired a fixation for the genus Platanus! How I wish I were a painter! To capture in vivid detail the splashes of lime, blotches of grey, the (rabies!) of yellow, green and brown. Noted that the foliage on the side of the road more exposed to the sun has yellowed appreciably. After yesterday’s fierce wind, the trees are suddenly denuded. Council workers are already cropping the upper branches and sweeping up piles of fallen leaves.

Each time I drive through these avenues of planes, it’s as if I’m being filtered through tunnels of the past.

She had wanted to buy me a santon as a farewell gift. I advised her not to waste her pocket-money. She insisted on getting a shepherd embracing his lass in what I judged were colours too gaudy. A wicker basket of wild lavender and sunflowers lay at their feet. I suggested that if she had to give me one at all, I’d prefer the unpainted figurine of the bearded shepherd in gaucho hat with rippling cloak, holding a lamb in one hand and a staff in the other.

I could tell how disappointed she was, but she bought it all the same. It may be stashed in the loft somewhere. Or given away.

                                                                                                                                             Friday, 3rd

There was a castle . . . Baux . . . Beaune . . . Beaumes? We were strolling hand in hand when I lead her into a machicolation to look down at the sheer, dizzying drop into the valley below. She couldn’t bear to approach the edge. Closed her eyes and fussed for me to draw back. I swept her into my arms, laughing, to kiss her.

She responded in that feline, enveloping manner that slowly, insistently became cloyingly passionate. I had to firmly unclasp her arms. She pouted up at me with wide, plaintive eyes: ‘Quand est-ce que nous nous marierons?’

‘Pardon?’ Surely, the girl was joking. She hadn’t even known what a French kiss was.

‘Il faut que nous nous marierons maintenant,’

My first impulse was to roar with laughter, but her gravity sobered me. She grasped my hand and conducted me round the ramparts, smiling with an earnestness, an innocent surety, that made me realize how little I knew her, how little I really felt for her.

‘Tu dois m’ecrire quand je retournerai a l’ecole du couvent.’

‘Oui, bien sur. But there’s no need to talk about going back there just yet.’

‘Quand peux-tu revenir en France?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I’ll try to take a week next autumn.’

‘Si loin? Rapelle-toi, il pleut toujours en vendanges.’

‘Not if I can see you.’

‘Helas, mon pere me battra aussitot qu’il decouvrira que nous sommes affiances.’

Hot flushes of guilt or was it fear of being exposed, even resentment at being caught utterly unprepared in a trap, of having to face up to saying, ‘Sorry, no go’ sooner than later; and yet for me, the whole episode had an air of melodramatic unreality. Until I was forced to accept just how immature the girl was.

‘Tu es catholique?’

‘No.’

‘Ah, protestant alors.’

‘Well . . .’ Her eyes dilated, less with surprise than incipient fear. ‘More or less.’

She sighed with relief. Smiled to herself, with no little serenity. Perhaps she thought my hesitation was an example of English humility.

                                                                                                                                                       Sat. 4th

I recall something about her wanting to show me the ruins of Roche- . . . ? perched on a craggy hilltop, as if the crenellations were a natural embellishment of the rock. That excursion provided one of our rare tastes of freedom together, away from the vigilant eyes of her chaperone mother, but I was not so keen to venture off the road. For a start, a couple of Arab-looking men passing by on mopeds, baguettes extending from their panniers like tail-fins, gave long, sullen stares at us and the borrowed Peugeot by turns, as if on the look-out for easy pickings.

As we sauntered through the courtyard of a mas, deserted, it seemed, with empty chicken runs and dovecotes and byres of skeletal tractors, she related how Richelieu had laid waste the strongholds of Languedoc so as to centralize the power of the monarchy. Leaning high over us, the ravaged torso of a chapel fortress, ash-grey like the limestone from which it soared, its proud eminence shattered by a cannon, had become a rendezvous for swallows now swirling above.

Scaling the mounds and tracks of loose rock lined by broom, we clambered up to the ghost bastide of cavernous chambers and ready-to-topple walls.

‘Est-ce que tu peux comprendre comment la Provence a perdu beaucoup de son independance?’ she asked. ‘Des milliers etaient tues, d’autres etaient rendus sans foyer par un coup de foudre. C’est ou le people a commence a construire de nouveaux villages dans les vallees. Sans la fortification, sauf contre le soleil et, bien sur, les frissons du mistral.’

‘At least it was another step towards civilisation. The Bourbons couldn’t have tolerated all those feudal brigands.’

From those crumbling eye-sockets the panoramic patterns over stony vineyards and orchards were magnificent, so tranquil and timeless. Give me any time the uncomplicated aesthetic of the natural environment imbued with a sense of history.

‘Tout ca me rend melancolique,’ she whispered, slinking up into my side. True, the vaguest outline of frescoes drained of all colour save a brown smear and the broken pediments of still-straining columns made you realize how many centuries of human toil were smashed within a few hours – the perduring faith of stone masons and painters and tapestry-weavers made a mockery by a master-gunner’s charge of gunpowder. Gone to dust in an instant.

Crunching awkwardly over the fallen masonry, peering into dank, dark shafts, occasionally stopping to glance at the graffiti, I steered her out of the forlorn chapel and away towards the more sheltered scarp. Here lay a circle of houses now reduced to rectangles of stone two or three feet high.

‘La-bas reste une memoire de la vraie Provence. Les anciens villages, forts mais dignes, situes sur les collines. Maintenant, regarde. Des ruines, simplement.’

The haunting quality of that remote pinnacle, the mood of nostalgia, the evocation of mortality or at least of time catching up, whatever . . . I found myself coaxing her into sitting, reclining, sinking on to some spikes of grass.

‘Sois gentil,’ she whispered in a hollow tone. Her mournful eyes reminded me of moist black olives. ‘Doucement, doucement, mon nordiste,’

There was a woodenness, a holding off in spite of the fierce way she held the back of my head. Her eyes seemed struck wide-open, frightened turning wild. That must have disconcerted me. Fumbling for the zip of her slacks, I wrenched it down more roughly than intended.

‘Non, non!’ she moaned, too petrified to push me away. ‘Pas cela. Ca c’est defendu.’

‘I hoisted myself on to her body, merely rubbing against two layers of trousers, underclothes etc. but levering to gain pressure. The force against my head was becoming unbearable as she ground her teeth with groaning. At last I came, in a strangulated shoot that was almost as painful as embarrassing.

She lay as if perplexed in sleep, her eyes sealed with tears. ‘Maintenant,’ she suddenly murmured, ‘Je suis femme.’

After that astonishing but repellent scene, it was obvious that we had little physical rapport. I became irritated by the sentimentality of our relationship, those misty-eyed silences where clasping fingers was tantamount to a moment of exaltation. But her wistful smiles, tinged with ever more sadness, increasingly etched with anxiety, were growing desperate.

One day, quite out of character, she rushed up to me and grabbed my arms.

‘Quand est-ce que tu partiras? Dis-moi. Je sais que tu me quitteras bientot.’

‘Yes, very soon.’

‘Ecoute.’ She had bunched up a fold of my shirt-front. ‘Je suis enceinte!’

‘Ridiculous,‘ I scoffed, pressing my hands against her ears and patting her on the head. ‘My little cabbage’s imagination is working overtime.’

‘Ne te moque pas, s’il te plait. Je suis serieuse.’ Traces of crimson coloured her lower lip. ‘Je suis affreuse.’

‘Listen, you must stop thinking like that. Where’s that sang-froid francais?’ Tears began to trickle down her cheeks. ‘All right, what are the signs?’

‘Je n’avais pas eu mes regles.’

‘What!’

‘Je n’avais pas eu mes regles.’

‘You mean . . . ?’

‘Oui.’

‘How many days have you gone?’

‘Comment?’

‘How many days have passed since you expected it?’

‘Sept.’

‘It doesn’t always come regularly, you know . . . Does it?’

‘Je suis enceinte. J’en suis sure.’

‘But that’s impossible! Absurd!’

‘Pas du tout. J’avais commis un peche charnel.’ Her whisper was scarcely audible, for she gabbled repeatedly through her tears, mechanically, breathlessly. ‘J’ai ete justement punie. Il faut nous marier toute de suite.’

She began dragging me to I don’t know where. I was becoming panicky myself.

‘But you’re only sixteen. Not old enough to make such an important decision. It’s your whole life you’re signing away.’

‘Mais la honte –‘

‘Listen, your father has invited me to dinner tomorrow evening. If your period has come, wear your blue sweater. Got that? Your blue sweater. Comprends-tu? If it hasn’t, but I’m sure it will, but if it hasn’t, then put on a black one. Do you understand?’

Oui, oui, je le pense. Oh, la Sainte Vierge de Dieu!’ She made the sign of the Cross. ‘Je suis perdue. Que faire? Que faire?’

The soiree was meant to be one of those splendid Provencal feasts that go on and on for three to four hours and include twenty courses or assiettes with five different glasses per head. Monsieur . . . the Mayor met me with less arm-touching cordiality, with a more intense scrutiny from that heavy, brassy face. The girl’s grandmother shuffled in, a refugee from Barcelona in the Civil War, dressed in black from scarf to pantoufles, nodding and muttering in patois. Then Madame emerged shiny-faced from the kitchen and toasted me with a glass of pastis.

I was too edgy and guilt-ridden to make much conversation, though both parents were interested in my plans as a curator in a chalk museum in the Weald.

At long last she made an appearance, head cast down, expirating ‘Bonsoir’ to the polished stone floor.

Wearing the black sweater.

Did I never speak to her alone that evening? I don’t think so. God. surely I must have. At times I was wondering whether she was manoeuvring to slip me a note, but I studiously avoided any contact or tell-tale glance.

Two mornings later my train was well on its way from Nimes to Paris, then on to Le Havre. My student days were over.

I remember clearly tearing down my favourite Toulouse Lautrec poster, Aristide Bruant at the Ambassadeurs, the cabaret singer wearing an orange scarf, his dashing black hat set at a carefree angle.

But letters still found their way to me, two or three per week at first. I feared to read them right through, just snatching at ‘Je t’aime de tout mon coeur’, ‘Je t’aime encore’, ‘Je m’echapperai en Angleterre!’ ‘Je te prie! Je te prie!’ There was nothing for it but to tear them up and throw them away. So much childish nonsense. There was no way she was pregnant and no way I was going to marry her.

That must have been the last time I saw her.

                                                                                                                                                Sunday

Decided it would be a good day to drive up to Les Baux. But as the road wound round, higher and higher into those lunar craters suggestive of Gaudi’s organic shapes and textures or Dali’s disturbing dream landscapes with their high, deep caves for degustation and grisaille peaks, suddenly the south face of the dead city loomed above. Something else began to kindle. There was a secluded track leading away from the town. Where the wild lavender strews amid the boulders. I had grown more angry than anxious. Ordered her to lie down out of sight. Do as you’re told! Of course, I’m not going to hurt you! Began pummeling her abdomen with measured, stabbing blows.

‘Non, non, tu es bete, tu es cruel.!’

‘Shut up!’ I warned, pinioning both her arms under my knees. ‘It’s for your own good.’ She wasn’t going to upset my plans and ruin my life. ‘It’s the only way, believe me. Now tell me when this really hurts.’

She was whimpering and shuddering. With each brisk punch she gave a start, a clenched sigh. ‘Tu as tort,’ she pleaded. ‘Il n’est pas necessaire si tu m’aimes.’

‘We’re too young, J . . . Joc . . . Jocylene’ – so that was your name – ‘Love and marriage are two different things. What’s more, your father would kill both of us.’

The soft, plump flesh was white where my fist landed, suffusing red between blows. The short, black hairs were foreign, her body pubescent, distasteful.

‘Ca suffit, je te prie! Cesse, je te prie!’

But did you stop? For God’s sake, did you? . . . I suppose I must have . . . How could you even have contemplated . . . I had to put her mind at rest . . . Your mind! . . . Our minds, then . . . But they took you for a humanist scholar . . . I was, I was. But you can’t always help getting involved . . . You could have been more sensitive, gentle, compassionate, even if you had no sense of responsibility . . . I was. At first . . . And you can obliterate such brutish behaviour just like that? . . . I was somebody else then . . . Were you? Were you really? Le grand Anglais, always rationalizing.

                                                                                                                                                    10.10

Last day in Provence, thank God! Set to drive straight up N.7 tomorrow.

Problems with my bladder getting worse, BUT!!! – this is significant breakthrough in my personal growth – have overcome my squeamishness re. urinoirs AND if nature calls can now do comme les Francais, pee at side of road regardless of traffic.

Charcuterie too fatty rich these days but as wine knocks me up a bit, glad to have found Vichy, Vittel, Perrier not TOO boring.

Bouillabaisse tastes more of rubber + seawater than it used to.

Palais de Papes over-run by Americans. Tant pis!

N.B. Wild horses on Camargue not pure white + never canter at dusk through salt pans + spray doesn’t fly about their fetlocks.

Il pleut toujours en vendanges.


October, 1984

published:  Her Natural Life and Other Stories, Tamarillo, 1988