Chapter 3

What She Said Between the Cheese and the Coffee

You come up to Les Aubes by a road that climbs and turns, and there is always a moment, after the third bend, when the valley opens out all at once on the right. As a child Mathilde used to count the bends so as to be ready for that one. She still counted them.

— There, she said.

Raphaël slowed down without being asked.

The rows weren't blue yet. In May the lavender is green and tight, like cushions lined up by someone obsessive, and you have to wait until July for it to do what people expect of it. Mathilde had always preferred May. She had never mentioned it to anyone because it sounded a bit foolish, put like that.

— It's big, said Raphaël.

— Fifty-two hectares.

— No, I mean: it's big.

Colette Sarlat was waiting for them in front of the door, which was not like her. Eighty-five years old, a bun held by two clips, a sleeveless cardigan she wore summer and winter and whose original colour nobody had ever known.

She kissed Mathilde twice, very quickly, and offered Raphaël her cheek.

— How long did it take you?

— Two hours forty, said Raphaël.

— That's too long. Did you take the motorway as far as Montélimar?

— Yes.

— You should have come off at Loriol.

She went inside without waiting for the answer. Raphaël looked at Mathilde. Mathilde gave him a face that meant: I did warn you.

The house smelled of what it had always smelled of: cold stone, wax polish, and underneath, far back, the greasy smell of the still that soaks into everything within fifty metres and never goes away.

Mathilde did what she did every time: she went to look at the sideboard.

The same photographs had been there for thirty years. Her grandfather Henri in a suit, dead in 1982, whom she had never known. Francis at twenty on a tractor. Her mother on her wedding day, with a fringe. Herself at seven, gap-toothed, on the low wall. Corentin as a baby.

At thirty-six she noticed that there was no photograph of Solange on that sideboard, although Solange had lived a hundred metres away since before she was born.

She noticed it, and the thought went by, and the lamb arrived.

There were nine of them. Colette at the head of the table. Francis, the uncle, sixty-one, his forearms cooked by forty summers, who had changed for lunch and was bothered by his shirt collar. His wife Josiane, who said little and kept refilling everyone's plate. Corentin, thirty-one, who had brought wine and poured it with the care of a sommelier, which made his father laugh. Véronique and Jean-Marc, Mathilde's parents, arrived from Valence at twelve on the dot. Mathilde. Raphaël.

There was one place setting fewer than there used to be. Nobody said so.

They ate tomatoes, leg of lamb, flat beans. Corentin told the story of an English customer who wanted organic lavender guaranteed free of insects. Francis talked about the pump on the top parcel. Véronique asked Mathilde whether she was eating properly, which, from her, was not a question but a diagnosis.

— You've lost weight.

— I haven't lost weight, Maman.

— You have.

— All right.

Jean-Marc, opposite, filled his daughter's glass and winked at her, which was his way of being in a conversation without joining it.

The cheese came. Josiane cleared. Colette laid both hands flat on the table, and everyone understood, before she opened her mouth, that nobody had driven two hundred kilometres for a leg of lamb.

— I'm going to hand over the estate, she said.

Francis looked up.

— I'm not ill, Colette added. Don't look at me like that. I'm not ill and I'm not tired. I'm eighty-five and I can count.

— Maman, Francis began.

— I haven't finished.

She waited. The silence settled the way it settles in families: someone puts a glass down too gently, someone else looks out of the window.

— My half, I'm passing to Mathilde.

Mathilde heard the sentence and didn't understand it. It is a strange thing, to hear a sentence perfectly clearly and not understand it. She looked at her grandmother, then at her uncle, then at her plate, where a piece of tomme was left.

— To Mathilde, Francis repeated.

— You heard me perfectly well.

— She lives in Lyon.

— I know where she lives.

— She's a physio.

— I know what she does.

Francis put his napkin down on the table. Not violently. He put it down, even smoothed it flat with his hand, and perhaps that was the worst of it.

— Forty years, he said. Forty years I've been up at five. Forty years of the cutting, the stills, the distilling, the cooperative's paperwork, the inspections, the three weeks in July when nobody sleeps.

— I know, said Colette.

— You know.

— I know perfectly well.

He stood up. His chair scraped. Josiane made a movement towards him and stopped halfway.

— I'm going to see to the pump, said Francis.

He went out. They heard him cross the yard, and then nothing.

Corentin was looking at his glass. Jean-Marc was looking at the tablecloth. Raphaël, beside Mathilde, wasn't moving at all, which with him was a form of attention.

It was Mathilde who spoke.

— Mamie. I don't know the first thing about it.

— It's something you learn.

— I've never done a harvest in my life.

— You've done eleven. You were eight and you filled the sacks.

— That's not the same.

— No, said Colette. It's not the same.

She took the cheese knife, cut a piece of tomme and put it on Mathilde's plate without asking her.

— Eat. You've lost weight.

Véronique, at that moment, should have said something. It was the moment. Everyone around the table was waiting for her to say something: to be outraged on her brother's behalf, to defend her daughter, to ask why, to ask how, to ask anything at all.

Véronique drank a mouthful of water, put her glass down, and looked at the window.

She said nothing at all.

And Mathilde, who was thirty-six and thought she knew her mother, felt something go past that she couldn't name and that was not anger.