Virgile's Vineyard Read Free Page A

for an excuse to massage the stiffness in their backs.
    â€˜Bonjour, monsieur!’ they called out together, as if one voice alone might not have been strong enough to carry on the wind. ‘The English nephew, we suppose.’
    I was startled to think that my well-worn overcoat and jeans had so quickly betrayed both my Englishness and nephewness but then I remembered that the lane really leads nowhere but to me and the Groses. So it didn’t need Chief Inspector Clouseau to crack my identity.
    â€˜Did you get a good crop?’ they asked in their characteristic, tremulous unison.
    â€˜I’ve no idea,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve only just moved in and I can hardly see the olive trees for the brambles and whatever else is climbing over them.’
    â€˜Don’t leave it much later,’ they counselled, as they waved me on my way with a quavery ‘bon courage!’
    Rounding the corner, I had the postcard view of the village, perfectly positioned on an oval hillock between two river valleys and surrounded by darker, more dramatic hills climbing up to the sheer white cliffs that support the Larzac plateau high above. As many ancient houses as the ingenuity of successive centuries could contrive clung tenaciously to even the most vertical of the hillock’s edges, with a picturesquely fortified château crowning the summit.
    The main street was long, narrow, straight and steep. There was no pavement but rather a pair of deep stone ditches filled with fast-running water, making each side narrower still. Most of the houses rose as high as a fourth storey, the ground floor remaining invariably windowless, with a small door for people and a larger one for animals or machinery. Many of them had wrought iron balconies, with enough washing hanging on them to satisfy me that I was genuinely in the South of France but few enough geraniums to reassure me that I was still in one of its less discovered parts. Every twenty metres or so, an even narrower alleyway offered a miniature view of the countryside beyond, often no more than a tiny glimpse beneath one of the curious, arching, stone bridges that the residents seem to favour to link the upper levels of the buildings on either side, facilitating who knows what degrees of neighbourly intimacy.
    There was, however, no sign of the master baker whose trading presence I had so rashly assumed. I did pass one shop professing to butchery but its faded red and white blind looked as if it had not been raised in fifteen years. The only indication of commercial life was a tiny general store up in the Place de la Fontaine, near the Salle des Fêtes. It had three small rooms, strung together in an awkward ‘Z’ shape and filled, remarkably, with almost everything that the villagers might need, from handmade cheeses to photocopying services. But no croissants. The pretty young woman who appeared to be the owner explained that it operates as a ‘dépôt de pain’ but only ten croissants are deposited each day and six of those are reserved for the château. You have to be up early for the leftovers.
    I settled for a baguette and crossed the square to investigate what appeared to be the village’s only café. An outside terrace was shrouded in a zipped-up wall of transparent plastic sheeting. The whole establishment looked closed for the season but encouragingly convivial sounds from within suggested otherwise. I was searching in vain for an alternative entrance when the harassed-looking patronne came out to take pity on me and show me the secret panel in the plastic.
    About a dozen customers nodded civilly but silently in my direction. They were all male and all perched at the bar on an assortment of stools. The bar itself had started life as a traditional zinc, before suffering its more recent mock-wood extension. The centre of the room was completely dominated by a billiard table, swaddled in a protective plastic sheet, which in turn