Read A Short Walk from Harrods for Free Online

food.’
    â€˜There is also some mail. The sorting office in Nice, or some-where, seem to have found us. The second batch in three weeks.’
    â€˜Anything urgent looking? And where’s the bread?’
    â€˜In the basket. A
complet.
Nothing urgent-looking. No official signs, or OHMS.’
    I found a glass, opened a bottle of beer and went down the slate stairs into the Long Room below. I called up about Madame de Beauvallon, the car, the flat tyre, the concrete post which was apparently about to be stuck right in the view down to La Napoule.
    â€˜Ask them to paint it green,’ he shouted. ‘Won’t see it so much. I’m off to the village now …’
    â€˜By car?’
    â€˜How else?’
    â€˜It didn’t work …’
    â€˜It does now. I can’t stand the Ben Nicholson and sundry
faux
old masters sliding about the wainscoting any longer. What’s the French for “picture hooks”?’
    On the terrace, under the vine, in a spiking of self-sown hollyhocks of varied hue, I sat on a white-painted tin chair from Monoprix (end of season sale) while a thousand bees nudged and shouldered into the frilly red and pink discs.
    It was calm, cool, under the vine, the savannah ahead trembled and wavered in the heat. The car came wobbling slowly over the ruts from behind the house. Stopped. I raised my glass in a salute, a window wound down. ‘Won’t be long. I’ll get the dog meat. Did you get a London news-paper?’
    â€˜No. Not in when I was there. Careful of Madame de Beauvallon, she’s lethal with that Citroën – can’t see over the steering-wheel. Can’t steer anyway. But she
is
well disposed.’
    â€˜Understood.’ At that moment Labo the wild stray–dog I’d picked up in Rome, tore across the terrace, having heard the car, screaming with delight. Car-mad, he was scooped up,dumped in the back. They bounced slowly off again over the ruts in the track deep and hard as frozen plough.
    We’d have an awful lot to do to an awful lot of things. In time. For the moment I watched the listless dust rise and fall in fading clouds behind the inching car, fished a struggling bee out of my beer, flicked it into the hollyhocks with contented carelessness. I wasn’t fifty yet. There was plenty of time for drowning olives, rutted tracks and the unopened mail in the kitchen.
    My chunk of France lay almost dead-centre of a triangle of villages. Well, one proper village, Saint-Cyprien, up behind my land, Le Pré to the west, and Saint-Sulpice to the east. Le Pré straggled along the main road: a bar, some shops, two garages – an Elf and a Shell – a café with a juke-box, and a modest restaurant which served all right-ish food. Occasionally. Saint-Sulpice was not much more than a crossroads, a monument to its liberation by the Americans on August the 21st, 1944, a row of ageing mulberry trees, a
wide place
where the annual fair and circus was held and, along the road up towards Saint-Cyprien, the olive mill with its enormous wheel. Above the crossroads, on a modest hillock, stood the church with its Provençal flat roof, surrounded by olive trees and cypresses. There were some scattered houses, a churchyard sliding down the hill, the monuments and marble angels looking like a tilting chess set, and at the bottom of all this, neat and trim, the
bureau de poste.
The
bureau de poste
was to play a vastly important part in my life, although I was unaware of that fact in my early weeks – as unaware as I was that, just up the road beyond it, glittering in chrome and plate glass, the Mini-Market, opened in the week I took up my residency, would almost become my pivot.
    The mayor of Saint-Sulpice, Etienne Ranchett, a fierce little man with a face like a loganberry, was rumoured to keep a young (and disagreeable) mistress in a hideous little modern villa on the edge of the village. To make life more tolerable for his