Peter Mayle - A Year In Provence

The week passed as uneventfully as could be expected, given that our guest was a man who could, and often did, spill his drink over himself while looking at his watch, and whose immaculate white trousers never survived the first course of dinner unsoiled. There were one or two breakages, the odd drowned towel in the swimming pool, a sudden panic when he realized that he had sent his passport to the dry cleaners, some worrying moments when he thought he had eaten a wasp, but no true calamities. We were sad to see him go, and hoped he would come back soon to finish the four half-empty glasses of Calvados we found under his bed, and to pick up the underpants that he had left hanging decoratively from the hat rack.

IT WAS BERNARD who had told us about the old station café in Bonnieux. Solid and serious was how he described it, a family restaurant of the kind that used to exist all over France before food became fashionable and bistrots started serving slivers of duckling instead of daube and tripe. Go soon, Bernard said, because la patronne talks about retiring, and take a big appetite with you. She likes to see clean plates.

The station at Bonnieux has been closed for more than forty years, and the path that leads to it is potholed and neglected. From the road there is nothing to see-no signs, no menus. We had passed by dozens of times, assuming that the building was unoccupied, not knowing that a crowded car park was hidden behind the trees.

We found a space between the local ambulance and a mason's scarred truck, and stood for a moment listening to the clatter of dishes and the murmur of conversation that came through the open windows. The restaurant was fifty yards from the station, foursquare and unpretentious, with faded lettering just legible in hand-painted capitals: Café de la Gare.

A small Renault van pulled into the car park, and two men in overalls got out. They washed their hands at the old sink against the outside wall, using the yellow banana of soap that was mounted over the taps on its bracket, and elbowed the door open, hands still wet. They were regulars, and went straight to the towel that hung from a hook at the end of the bar. By the time they had dried their hands two glasses of pastis and a jug of water were waiting for them.

It was a big, airy room, dark at the front and sunny at the back, where windows looked over fields and vineyards toward the hazy bulk of the Lubéron. There must have been forty people, all men, already eating. It was only a few minutes past noon, but the Provençal has a clock in his stomach, and lunch is his sole concession to punctuality. On mange à midi, and not a moment later.

Each table had its white paper cover and two unlabeled bottles of wine, a red and a pink, from the Bonnieux cooperative two hundred yards away on the other side of the road. There was no written menu. Madame cooked five meals a week, lunch from Monday to Friday, and customers ate what she decided they would eat. Her daughter brought us a basket of good, chewy bread, and asked us if we wanted water. No? Then we must tell her when we wanted more wine.

Most of the other customers seemed to know one another, and there were some spirited and insulting exchanges among the tables. An enormous man was accused of slimming. He looked up from his plate and stopped eating long enough to growl. We saw our electrician and Bruno, who lays the stone floors, eating together in a corner, and recognized two or three other faces that we hadn't seen since work had stopped on the house. The men were sunburned, looking fit and relaxed as if they had been on holiday. One of them called across to us.

" C'est tranquille chez vous? Peaceful without us?"

We said we hoped they would be coming back when work started again in August.

"Normalement, oui." The hand waggled. We knew what that meant.

Madame's daughter returned with the first course, and explained that it was a light meal today because of the heat. She put down an oval dish covered with slices of saucisson and cured ham, with tiny gherkins, some black olives, and grated carrots in a sharp marinade. A thick slice of white butter to dab on the saucisson. More bread.

Two men in jackets came in with a dog and took the last empty table. There was a rumor, so Madame's daughter said, that the older of the two men had been the French ambassador to a country in the Middle East. Un homme distingué. He sat there among the masons and plumbers and truck drivers, feeding his dog small pieces of sausage.

Salad arrived in glass bowls, the lettuce slick with dressing, and with it another oval dish. Noodles in a tomato sauce and slices of roast loin of pork, juicy in a dark onion gravy. We tried to imagine what Madame would serve up in the winter, when she wasn't toying with these light meals, and we hoped that she would have second thoughts about retiring. She had taken up her position behind the bar, a short, comfortably proportioned woman, her hair still dark and thick. She looked as though she could go on forever.

Her daughter cleared away, emptied the last of the red wine into our glasses and, unasked, brought another bottle with the cheese. The early customers were starting to leave to go back to work, wiping their mustaches and asking Madame what she proposed to give them tomorrow. Something good, she said.

I had to stop after the cheese. My wife, who has never yet been defeated by a menu, had a slice of tarte au citron. The room began to smell of coffee and Gitanes, and the sun coming through the window turned the smoke blue as it drifted above the heads of the three men sitting over thimble-sized glasses of marc. We ordered coffee and asked for a bill, but bills were not part of the routine. Customers settled up at the bar on the way out.

Madame told us what we owed. Fifty francs each for the food, and four francs for the coffee. The wine was included in the price. No wonder the place was full every day.

Was it really true she was going to retire?

She stopped polishing the bar. "When I was a little girl," she said, "I had to choose whether to work in the fields or in the kitchen. Even in those days I hated the land. It's hard, dirty work." She looked down at her hands, which were well kept and surprisingly young-looking. "So I chose the kitchen, and when I married we moved here. I've been cooking for thirty-eight years. It's enough."

We said how sorry we were, and she shrugged.

"One becomes tired." She was going to live in Orange, she said, in an apartment with a balcony, and sit in the sun.

It was two o'clock, and the room was empty except for an old man with white stubble on his leather cheeks, dipping a sugar lump into his Calvados. We thanked Madame for a fine lunch.

"C'est normal," she said.

The heat outside was like a blow on the skull and the road back to the house was a long mirage, liquid and rippling in the glare, the leaves on the vines drooping, the farm dogs silent, the countryside stunned and deserted. It was an afternoon for the pool and the hammock and an undemanding book, a rare afternoon without builders or guests, and it seemed to pass in slow motion.

By the evening, our skins prickling from the sun, we were sufficiently recovered from lunch to prepare for the sporting event of the week. We had accepted a challenge from some friends who, like us, had become addicted to one of the most pleasant games ever invented, and we were going to try to uphold the honor of Ménerbes on the boules court.

Long before, during a holiday, we had bought our first set of boules after watching the old men in Roussillon spend an enjoyably argumentative afternoon on the village court below the post office. We had taken our boules back to England, but it is not a game that suits the damp, and they gathered cobwebs in a barn. They had been almost the first things we unpacked when we came to live in Provence. Smooth and tactile, they fitted into the palm of the hand, heavy, dense, gleaming spheres of steel that made a satisfying chock when tapped together.