Virgile's Vineyard Read Free Page B

was half-covered by menus, bread-baskets and sauce bottles. Squashed between this and the bare stone walls, a line of small imitation-marble tables, already laid with cruets and cutlery, completed the impression that eating might be the café’s secondary sport.
    The twelve pairs of muddy boots at the bar testified to several hours already spent in the fields and most of the group were enjoying a mid-morning, restorative, aniseed-flavoured pastis or, failing that, a glass of red wine or beer. However, remembering my breakfast baguette, I confined myself to a coffee.
    The bustling, chain-smoking patronne gave no sign that she considered my order effeminate. She simply darted about, as petite as most of her clientèle were burly, her outfit as curiously matched as her décor. The formal, slightly prim cashmere top contrasted oddly with a loose, almost slovenly skirt, and the neat patent shoes belonged to a different woman altogether from the untidy ponytail. Maybe she was simply trying to be all things to all customers.
    Everyone else called her ‘Babette’. In fact, everyone else gave her careworn cheeks at least three kisses on arrival or departure and I wondered how long I should have to be here to count as an insider.
    â€˜Et le pauvre Manu?’ she asked, when she brought me the coffee. ‘Comment va-t-il?’
    Again I had the eerie impression that someone must have pinned a note of my address to the back of my jacket. Was I really the first stranger they had seen all winter?
    â€˜Manu’s my cousin,’ Babette explained, as she lit a new cigarette with the stub of the old and left the latter smouldering in my ashtray. ‘He said you’d be down before long. By rights, he ought to be my best customer. But guess-who placed the café out of bounds. I’m supposed to inform on him, if he comes here on his own, but I sometimes smuggle him in and out the back way!’
    She offered me a well-thumbed copy of the local newspaper and returned to the bar to embrace another wave of thirsty labourers. I had been wondering whether tomorrow’s weather forecast might augur well for a first assault on my olive jungle but I didn’t think I could face the gothic horrors predicted on the back page. I was just immersing myself in a more comforting report of a local onion-growing competition, when a new female voice intruded from a half-hidden corner behind the billiard table.
    â€˜I can see that you’ve been wondering whether I’m English,’ it said.
    I was, in fact, wondering nothing of the sort. What I am wondering is how much henna it must have taken to produce the mass of vividly auburn curls bearing down on my table. I suspect, however, that, beneath the expensive cut of an intimidating black trouser suit, she is neither as young nor as slender as she would like to be.
    â€˜Krystina,’ she booms, above the clank of her costume jewellery. ‘With a K and a Y. I live at the château. Bought it with my divorce money. Don’t worry, I know who you are,’ she assures me, as she draws a chair rather closer to mine than an acquaintance of this brevity would normally justify. ‘Steeped in history, of course, the château. Which I love. Used to teach it, you see. History. Before I married my serial philanderer. So it feels like I’m getting back to my roots …’
    The torrent of self-explanation continues in these conditions of unlooked-for proximity for another minute or two. When I finally have an opportunity to turn the monologue into something closer to conversation, all I can think of to ask is a rather pedestrian ‘How much do you know about the history of the Languedoc?’ Then I foolishly add that I’m terribly keen to learn all about the region’s wine-making history. Not that I’m uninterested, of course, but I really should have foreseen how avidly the merest flicker of enthusiasm would be pounced on.
    â€˜I