A Good Year by Peter Mayle Read Free Book Online

complicated to explain, and I don’t really have time today . . .”
    Max held up a hand. “I’ve just had a wonderful idea.”
    She looked at him, half-smiling.
    “Tomorrow. Lunch. Even
notaires
eat lunch, don’t they?”
    She took off her glasses. There was a moment’s hesitation and a twitch of one shoulder. “Yes,” she said, “
notaires
eat lunch.”
    Max stood up and inclined his head in an abbreviated bow. “Until tomorrow, then.” He turned to leave.
    “Monsieur Skinner?’ Her smile had broadened. “Don’t forget your keys.”
    Max gathered up the keys and the bulky file, stopping at the secretary’s desk on his way out. “I hope you have a truly splendid evening, madame. Champagne and dancing.”
    The woman looked up at him and nodded. “Of course, monsieur.” She watched him go through the front door, whistling as he went. The younger men were often like that after meeting Maître Auzet for the first time.

Four
    Max drove out of the village toward the house, finding memories around every bend. The ditches on either side of the road were still as deep and overgrown as they had been when Uncle Henry used to send him down to the baker’s every morning on a dilapidated bicycle, with the promise of a five-franc reward if the croissants were still warm by the time he got back. He used to race against himself, legs pumping furiously to break his previous best time and add to the collection of five-franc pieces that he kept in an old mustard pot beside his bed. The pot, empty at the beginning of the holidays, would be full and wonderfully heavy by the end. It had been Max’s first experience of feeling rich.
    He pulled up in front of the stone pillars, crumbling and stained almost black by two centuries of weather, that marked the entrance to the dirt road leading down to the house. The name of the property could just be made out etched into the stone: Le Griffon, the letters soft and fuzzy with lichen after their prolonged battle against the elements.
    Max drove on, through rows of well-kept vines, and parked under the plane tree—a huge tree, pre-Napoleonic—that shaded the long south wall of the
bastide.
In contrast to the clipped and orderly vines, the garden was in a state of some neglect, as indeed was the outside of the house. It made Max think of a distinguished grande dame whose makeup was starting to crack. The handsome façade needed repointing, the closed shutters hadn’t seen fresh paint for years, the dark green varnish on the front door was buckled and peeling. In the courtyard, vigorous weeds had pushed through the gravel, and the water in the square stone
bassin
made a viscous, opaque setting for a group of struggling water lilies. Pigeons squabbled in the branches of the tree.
    A little sad. And yet, you could see what the house had been, and what it could very easily be again. Max walked around to the two open-fronted barns attached to one side of the house, where he remembered Uncle Henry had kept his dented black Citroen DS. That had gone, leaving only a selection of rusting agricultural implements and two bicycles—old even when Max first saw them—with the red rubber tires that he had found so exotic.
    Returning to the front door, he matched one of the keys to the keyhole, but failed several times to make it turn. Then he remembered that, in typically perverse French fashion, the lock worked in the opposite direction from Anglo-Saxon locks. He shook his head as he pushed open the door. They never made it easy for foreigners, the French. Even the simple things were complicated.
    Once inside, he could make out the broad steps of a stone staircase rising up into the shuttered gloom. On either side of the entrance hall, double doors led to the main rooms of the ground floor, the classic
bastide
layout. He let himself into the cavernous kitchen, opening the shutters so that the late-afternoon sunlight flooded in to illuminate the motes of dust floating in the still air. A massive