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house. Feeling slightly lightheaded at the possibility of a new life, he changed the message on his answering machine: “I’ve gone to France. Back in six months. Perhaps.”

    Heathrow was as depressing and congested as ever, and the weather in Paris was overcast. It wasn’t until the Air France
navette
was south of Saint-Etienne that the sky cleared and Max could see mile after cloudless mile of postcard-blue sky. And then, as he walked out of Marignane airport to the car rental area, there was the glorious shock of heat. Taxi drivers in short sleeves and sunglasses loitered in the shade by their cars, eyeing the girls in their summer dresses. A light breeze carried a whiff of diesel, an evocative whiff that Max always associated with France, and every wrinkle of the limestone cliffs behind the airport was crisp and well defined in the brilliant clarity of the light. Artists’ light. His London clothes felt heavy and drab.
    Driving in his baby Renault toward the Luberon, the scenery was at the same time fresh and yet familiar, reminding Max of the times when Uncle Henry had picked him up at the start of his summer visits. He turned off the N7 toward Rognes and followed the narrow road that twisted through groves of pine and oak, warm air coming through the open window, the sound of Patrick Bruel whispering
“Parlez-moi d’amour”
trickling like honey from the radio.
    Thoughts of
amour
were pushed aside by an increasingly pressing need to relieve himself. Max pulled off the road, parked next to a dusty white Peugeot, and sought the comfort of a bush. He found the Peugeot’s driver already installed, and they nodded to one another, two men with the same urgent mission.
    After a while, Max broke the silence. “Nice day,” he said. “Wonderful sunshine.”
    “C’est normal.”
    “Not where I come from.”
    The man shrugged, zipped, lit a cigarette, and nodded once again before going back to his car, leaving Max to reflect on the insouciant French attitude to bodily functions. He couldn’t imagine the same episode taking place on the Kingston bypass back in England, where such activities—if carried out at all—would be conducted in an atmosphere of furtive embarrassment, with many a contorted and guilty glance over the shoulder, in dread of a passing police car and subsequent arrest for indecent exposure.
    He took the bridge across the Durance, once a river, now shrunk by the early-summer drought to little more than a muddy stream, and entered the
département
of the Vaucluse. The Luberon was directly ahead—a series of low, rounded humps, softened by a coating of perennially green scrub oak, a cosy, photogenic range that had been disparagingly described as designer mountains. It was true that they were pretty from a distance. But, as Max remembered from boyhood explorations, the slopes were steeper and higher than they appeared, the rocks beneath the scrub oak were as sharp as coral, and the going was hard.
    Turning off the main road, he followed the signs to Saint-Pons, and wondered if it had changed much in the years since he last saw it. He guessed not. It was on the wrong side of the Luberon to be considered chic, and, unlike the high-fashion villages—Gordes, Ménerbes, Bonnieux, Roussillon, Lacoste—Saint-Pons couldn’t claim the distinction of being a
village perché,
having been built on the plain and not on the top of a hill. Perhaps the lack of altitude had affected the disposition of the inhabitants, because the Saint-Ponnois were known in the region to be more friendly and hospitable than their neighbors to the north who spent their lives perched on crags, and who, several centuries ago, had spent many years at war with one another.
    A long avenue of plane trees formed a graceful natural entrance to the village. They had been planted, like every other plane tree in Provence—if one believed the stories—by Napoleon, in order to provide shade for his marching armies. History didn’t relate how