Encore Provence Read Online Free PDF Page B

strictly observed, mutterings from the Crédit Agricole about his bank loan. It was a heavy burden for a man on his own. What he needed, Arnaud often told himself, was a wife.
    He had one in early August, unfortunately not his own.
    She was younger than most of his customers, and a good fifteen years younger than her husband. Her marriage, if not exactly arranged, had been vigorously promoted by the two sets of parents, whose vineyards occupied adjoining slopes below the village. What could be more satisfactory than a union of blood and earth, families and land? As each family made its discreet calculations, the savings on tractors, on fertilizer, on vine stock, and on labor became delightfully apparent. A date was set for the wedding, and the two principals were encouraged to become fond of each other.
    The new husband, a placid man with modest ambitions, middle-aged from birth, found that marriage suited him. He was no longer dependent on his mother. He had someone to cook for him and mend his clothes and warm hisbed on long winter nights. One day he would inherit both vineyards. There would be children. Life was good, and he was content.
    But his young bride, once the excitement of the wedding was over, felt a sense of anticlimax that gradually turned into resentment as the reality of everyday routine set in. She was an only child and had been indulged. Now she was a wife, with a wife’s responsibilities: a house to run, a budget to juggle, a husband who came home each night hungry, tired, caked in dust from the fields, happy to spend the evening with his boots off reading the newspaper. Happy to be dull. She looked into the future and saw a lifetime of work and tedium.
    It was hardly surprising that she began to take increasing pleasure from her visits to the butcher, timing them for the afternoons when there was a greater chance that he would be alone. He was the bright spot in her day, always smiling and, she couldn’t help but notice, a fine figure of a man in his abbreviated summer uniform—sturdy, unlike her scrawny husband, with a fine glow to his skin and a clump of thick black hair curling over the top of his apron.
    It happened suddenly one afternoon, without anything being said. One minute they were standing side by side as he was wrapping some rump steak, close enough to feel the heat from each other’s bodies; the next, they were upstairs in the little apartment, slippery with sweat, clothes on the floor.
    Afterward, she let herself out of the shop, flushed and distracted, forgetting the meat on the counter.
    Speculation is the hobby of a small village, and information seems to travel by osmosis, seeping into the consciousnessas surely as sunlight through gauze. Secrets never last, and the women are always the first to know. In the weeks that followed his afternoon with the young wife, Arnaud noticed an increasing friskiness among his customers, and their tendency to stand closer to him. Hands that had previously been businesslike, paying money and receiving packages, now lingered, fingers brushing against his fingers. The young wife began to come in regularly just after two o’clock, closing the door behind her and turning the sign so that it read
Fermé
. Others followed, picking their moments. Arnaud lost weight and prospered.
    It is not certain who first alerted the husbands. Perhaps one of the oldest women of the village, whose joy in life it was to denounce every irregularity she saw; perhaps one of the wives who was disappointed never to have made the hurried journey up the stairs to the dark, beef-scented bedroom. But, inevitably, gossip and suspicion grew, eventually reaching the husbands. Accusations were made in the privacy of the matrimonial bed. Denials were disbelieved. Finally, one husband confided in another, and he in another. They discovered that they were members of the same miserable club.
    Five of them gathered one evening in the café: three farmers, the postman, and a man whose work