Sunday Read Free

a false notion of his motives.
    Long before she began working at La Bastide, it was rumoured in the neighbourhood that she was not like other girls. If nobody actually claimed she was mad, she was considered at best as retarded.
    Was this due to the fact that she seldom spoke and seemed to be afraid of people?
    At any rate, she was not completely normal. She did not behave like girls of her age and she did not mix with them any more than she mixed with boys.
    'She's a savage?'
    Her parents, too, lived like savages, cut off from the rest of the neighbourhood.
    When her father, Pascali, had set up house on the outskirts of Mouans-Sartoux, he already had grey hair, a face lined and baked by the sun, and he spoke only a half-intelligible mixture of Italian and French.
    As he was a good mason, he found work all over the place, mostly repair jobs, for he worked alone.
    He would disappear periodically for weeks at a stretch, then return and start work again.
    On one of these reappearances he was accompanied by a woman of about forty, who looked like a gipsy, and a small girl of twelve who did not answer when she was spoken to.
    Emile was barely twenty-five at the time and had just arrived at the Harnauds', who owned La Bastide and were to become his parents-in-law.
    He could remember a skinny girl who in this sunny country was one of the few to be always dressed in black, a strange garb, moreover, half dress, half apron, which hung shapelessly upon her body.
    People would come across her at a turning in a path, or in a wood, or beside the main road. They would say:
    'It's the daughter of Pascali and that gipsy woman.'
    But there was nothing to prove that the woman Pascali had brought back with him was a gipsy. In actual fact, nothing was known, and Pascali offered no explanation. Were the local police any the wiser? Probably not, for they would have talked of it sooner or later.
    Francesca did not mix with the other women, seldom left the house, which Pascali had eventually built between two jobs for his clients, and which looked unlike any other house.
    It was as if he had tried to put together examples of every kind of construction he knew, examples too of all types of stone and other building materials.
    People said he did not allow his wife to go out, that sometimes he shut her in and on various occasions beat her.
    Francesca's face was deformed by two scars across her cheeks, and these were attributed to the Italian's jealousy. Some claimed he had deliberately disfigured his wife, to discourage would-be lovers.
    Yet it was he who had taken his daughter, Ada, to La Bastide one day. Emile had already been married a certain time. His father-in-law was dead. His mother-in-law had gone back to Vendée where her family was.
    In his own dialect, which the Italians themselves could not understand, Pascali had discussed Ada's wages, her conditions of work, and it had all taken place in such a way that one might have thought he had come to sell her.
    He had not asked, on her behalf, for any days off, or annual holidays. She never took any. She seldom went, even for a visit, to her parents' house, which was a mere two kilometres away, and Pascali was content to appear after long intervals, covered in lime, and sit in the kitchen drinking a glass of wine and gazing at his daughter.
    Was this how it had started, or must it be still further back?
    On the beach, in front of the Carlton, the Majestic, the Miramar, people were already bathing, women were settling under sunshades, some of them surrounded by children, and rubbing oil into their bodies before exposing themselves to the sun.
    In the covered market Emile met colleagues who kept restaurants in town or in the vicinity. Cars were streaming in from the Esterel and others, from the direction of Nice, were arriving from Italy.
    It was all part of the preparations for a fine Sunday, which were taking place like the preparing of a restaurant, when the places are being laid and vases of