A Good Year

his shoulder. “Let’s get you settled in.”

They made a tour of the upstairs rooms, with Madame Passepartout flinging open shutters and flicking any surface she suspected of harboring dust, pointing out the views through the tall windows and muttering, not quite under her breath, about the waste of Max’s perfectly good bedroom. Christie looked with apprehension at the sagging beds, the ancient, lopsided armoires, the uneven tiled floors. Apprehension turned to disbelief when they came to one bathroom even more medieval than the others, with a shower attachment linked to the tub by twisted coils of cracked and faded pink rubber tubing. She shook her head slowly. “Far out,” she said. “Incredible.”

“Not exactly the Ritz, I know,” said Max. “But bags of charm. You won’t find anything like this in the States.” He perched on the lavatory seat and stretched both arms out toward the window. “I mean, you could spend many happy hours here. The view’s fantastic.”

A half smile couldn’t conceal Christie’s obvious dismay, just this side of horror, and Max tried to imagine the palatial sanitary arrangements she must have been accustomed to in California. Hygiene, as he knew, was one of the minor religions of America. He took pity on her. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you have my room and bathroom, and I’ll go somewhere else?”

And so it was decided. Leaving Christie to unpack, Max and Madame Passepartout went downstairs to the kitchen, Max to seek comfort in a glass of wine, Madame Passepartout to seek enlightenment.

“But why not?” she asked again. “It is the best room. The bed is large enough for two. You could be together. Tres cosy.”

“We’ve only just met.”

“So? You’ll get to know each other.”

“She’s my cousin. At least, I think she’s my cousin.”

Madame Passepartout dismissed that trifling accident of birth with a wave of the hand. “Half the aristocrats in France have liaisons with their cousins.” She poked Max in the chest for emphasis. “And many of the peasants. Why, even here in the village, it is well known that…”

Max cut her off in mid-revelation. “Look, the truth of it is…”

“Ah. The truth.”

“… the truth of it is that I’ve never really fancied blondes. I prefer brunettes. Always have.”

“C’est vrai?”

“Absolutely.”

Madame Passepartout couldn’t help a hand going up to touch her acceptably brunette hair, even as she shrugged. She had proposed what she considered to be a sensible and convenient arrangement-a potentially very pleasurable arrangement-and it had been declined for no other reason, as far as she could see, than the girl having been born a blonde. Absurd. How strange men were, English men in particular. She wished Max an agreeable evening and went off to discuss him and his foibles at length with her sister, Madame Roussel.

Max waited until her car had disappeared up the drive before taking a bottle of rose and two glasses out into the courtyard. He put the bottle under the flow of the fountain to keep a chill on the wine, and fetched two tattered wicker chairs from the barn, putting them beside the bassin so that they faced the sunset. He was, he thought, performing all the duties of a considerate host. But as he sat down to review the events of the day, he couldn’t ignore the thought that his days as a host might be numbered. Was the house really his, or would some arcane wrinkle in a law established centuries ago by Napoleon decide otherwise? Had he been stupid to bring up the problem in the first place? Possibly. But he liked to think of himself as a man with one or two basic principles, and a voice from the grave came back to remind him of something that Uncle Henry had often told him: a principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money. Not only money, in this case, but a new life.

“Hi.”

Max turned from the contemplation of his future to see Christie, dressed in fresh jeans and white T-shirt, her wet hair brushed straight back. She looked about eighteen.

“Congratulations. You worked out how to use the shower.” Max poured a glass of wine and held it out to her.

“Thanks. Is that all you ever get? A trickle?”

“The French aren’t great at showers. But they do wonderful sunsets.”

They sat for a moment without speaking, looking at a sky streaked with gold and pink and decorated with small, rose-colored clouds that could have been painted by Maxfield Parrish in one of his more extravagant moods. Water splashed from the fountain, the sound mingling with the chirrup of cigales and the croak of frogs calling out to one another across the bassin.

Christie turned to look at Max. “What was he like, my dad?”

Max stared into the distance, consulting his memory. “I think what I liked most about him was that he treated me like an adult instead of a schoolboy. And he was funny, especially about the French, although he loved them. ‘Our sweet enemy,’ he used to call them; or, if they were being particularly obstinate and difficult, ‘bloody frogs.’ But he rather admired their superiority complex and their good manners. He was a great one for good manners. I suppose nowadays he’d be considered very old-fashioned.”

“Why’s that?”

“He was a gent. You know, honorable, fair, decent-all those things that have rather gone out of style. You’d have liked him a lot. I did.” Max sipped his wine and glanced at his watch. “I thought we might go down to the village to eat. I’ll tell you more about him over dinner.”

Chez Fanny was noisy and already crowded with people from the village and a handful of tourists, these easily identified by their sun-flushed faces and their logo-spattered clothes. Fanny came over to greet Max, a look of surprise on her face when she saw he was not alone.

“It’s been so long,” she said, patting Max on the arm as she kissed him. “At least two days. Where have you been? And who’s this?”

Max made the introductions and watched the two women sizing one another up as they shook hands, a searching mutual inspection that neither bothered to conceal, almost like two dogs meeting in a park. Why was it that men were never as open in their curiosity? Max was smiling as they sat down at their table.

“What’s so funny?” asked Christie.

“You two,” he said. “I thought for a moment you were going to start sniffing each other.”

Christie’s eyes followed Fanny as she snaked her way through the tables. “They wear their clothes pretty tight over here, don’t they? If she sneezed she’d be out of that top.”

“I live in hope,” said Max. Seeing Christie raise a censorious eyebrow, he hurried on. “Now, what would you like? Have you ever had rabbit stuffed with tapenade? Wonderful.”

Christie seemed unconvinced. “We don’t do rabbit in California. Is it, you know, gamey?”

“Tastes like chicken. You’ll love it.”

The topic of Uncle Henry occupied most of dinner, and Max told Christie as much as he could remember of those summers long ago. His uncle had given him what amounted to a haphazard education, introducing him to tennis and chess and wine, good books and good music. Max recalled in particular one endless rainy day devoted to the Ring cycle, preceded by his uncle’s comment: “Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds.”

There had also been lessons on elementary tractor maintenance, gutting chickens, and the care and handling of a pet ferret whose job it was to keep the rats down. Tossed into this informative stew were other diverse ingredients, such as the unpredictable nature of red-haired women, the virtues of Aleppo soap, the importance of a good blue suit-“Remember your tailor in your will; it’s the only time you should pay him”-and a proven system of winning at backgammon.

“I loved those summers,” said Max. “It was just like being with an older boy who knew a lot more than I did.”

“Where were your parents?”