A Year In Provence

player-a wide-shouldered drape jacket shot through with gleaming threads, a lime-green shirt, capacious trousers that narrowed to hug his ankles, shoes of dark blue suede with bulbous crepe soles, a flash of turquoise socks.

'Fructus, Thierry. Agent d'assurance.' He walked into the house with short, jaunty steps. I half expected him to start snapping his fingers and make a few mean moves across the floor. I offered him a beer while I got over my surprise, and he sat down and gave me the benefit of his vibrant socks.

'Une belle mesong.' He had a strong Provencal accent which contrasted strangely with the clothes, and which I found reassuring. He was businesslike and serious, and asked if we were living in the house all year round; the high rate of burglaries in the Vaucluse, he said, was partly due to the large number of holiday homes. When houses are left empty for ten months a year, well… the shoulders of his jacket escalated in an upholstered shrug. The stories one heard in his profession made you want to live in a safe.

But that needn't concern us. We were permanent. And, furthermore, we had dogs. This was good, and it would be taken into account when he assessed the premium. Were they vicious? If not, perhaps they could be trained. He knew a man who could turn poodles into lethal weapons.

He made some notes in a neat, small hand and finished his beer. We went on a tour of the house. He approved of the heavy wooden shutters and solid old doors, but stopped and sucked his teeth in front of a small window-a fenestron that was less than a foot square. The modern professional burglar, he told us, will often work like Victorian chimney sweeps used to, sending a child through openings that would be impossible for adults. Since we were in France, there was an official, established size for juvenile burglars; they were all more than 12 centimeters wide, and narrower gaps were therefore childproof. Quite how this had been calculated Monsieur Fructus didn't know, but the little window would have to be barred to make it safe from the depredations of anorexic five-year-olds.

For the second time that day, the itinerant cherry pickers were held up as a threat to domestic security- Spaniards or Italians, Monsieur Fructus said, working for a pittance of three francs a kilo, here today and gone tomorrow, a grave risk. One cannot be too careful. I promised to stay on the alert and to barricade the window as soon as possible, and to talk to the dogs about being vicious. Reassured, he drove off into the sunset with the sound of Bruce Springsteen bellowing from the car stereo.

The cherry pickers had started to hold an awful fascination for us. We wanted to see some of these light- fingered scoundrels in the flesh; surely it would be any day now that they would descend on us, because the cherries were certainly ready to pick. We'd tasted them. We now had breakfast on a small terrace which faced the early sun, twenty yards from an old tree bowed down with fruit. While my wife made coffee, I picked cherries. They were cool and juicy, almost black, and they were our first treat of the day.

We knew that organized picking had begun the morning we heard a radio playing somewhere between the house and the road. The dogs went to investigate, bristling and noisy with self-importance, and I followed, expecting to find a gang of swarthy strangers and their larcenous children. The leaves on the trees hid their bodies from the waist upward. All I could see were various pairs of legs balanced on triangular wooden ladders, and then a great brown moon of a face under a straw trilby poked through the foliage.

'Sont bonnes, les cerises.' He offered me a finger, with a pair of cherries dangling from the end. It was Faustin. He and Henriette and assorted relatives had decided to gather the fruit themselves because of the wages demanded by outside labor. Someone had actually asked for five francs a kilo. Imagine! I tried to: an uncomfortable ten-hour working day perched on a ladder and tormented by fruit flies, nights sleeping rough in a barn or the back of a van-it didn't sound like overgenerous pay to me. But Faustin was adamant. It was daylight robbery, mais enfin, what could you expect from cherry pickers? He reckoned to get about two tons of fruit for the jam factory in Apt, and the proceeds would be kept in the family.

The orchards were well stocked with pickers of all shapes and sizes during the next few days, and I stopped to give two of them a ride into Bonnieux one evening. They were students from Australia, red from the sun and stained with cherry juice. They were exhausted, and complained about the hours and the tedium and the stinginess of the French peasant.

'Well, at least you're seeing a bit of France.'

' France?' said one of them. 'All I've seen is the inside of a flaming cherry tree.'

They were determined to go back to Australia with no good memories of their time in Provence. They didn't like the people. They were suspicious of the food. French beer gave them the runs. Even the scenery was small by Australian standards. They couldn't believe I had chosen to live here. I tried to explain, but we were talking about two different countries. I dropped them off at the cafe, where they would spend the evening being homesick. They were the only miserable Australians I had ever met, and it was depressing to hear a place that I loved being so thoroughly condemned.

Bernard cheered me up. I had come to his office in Bonnieux with the translation of a letter that he had received from an English client, and he was laughing as he opened the door.

His friend Christian, who was also our architect, had just been asked to redesign a brothel in Cavaillon. There were, naturellement, many unusual requirements to be met. The placing of mirrors, for instance, was of crucial importance. Certain fittings not normally found in polite bedrooms would have to be accommodated. The bidets would be working overtime, and they would have to function impeccably. I thought of Monsieur Menicucci and jeune trying to adjust their taps and washers while traveling salesmen from Lille chased scantily clad young ladies through the corridors. I thought of Ramon the plasterer, a man with a definite twinkle in his eye, let loose among the filles de joie. He'd stay there for the rest of his life. It was a wonderful prospect.

Unfortunately, said Bernard, although Christian regarded it as an interesting architectural challenge, he was going to turn it down. Madame who ran the enterprise wanted the work finished in an impossibly short time, and she wasn't prepared to close the premises while it was being done, which would place severe demands on the workmen's powers of concentration. Nor was she prepared to pay the TVA, arguing that she didn't charge her clients a sales tax, so why should she have to pay one? In the end, she would hire a couple of renegade masons who would do a fast and clumsy job, and the chance of getting Cavaillon's brothel photographed for the pages of the Architectural Digest would be lost. A sad day for posterity.

WE WERE LEARNING what it was like to live more or less permanently with guests. The advance guard had arrived at Easter, and others were booked in until the end of October. Half-forgotten invitations, made in the distant safety of winter, were coming home to roost and drink and sunbathe. The girl in the laundry assumed from our sheet count that we were in the hotel business, and we remembered the warnings of more experienced residents.

As it turned out, the early visitors must have taken a course in being ideal guests. They rented a car, so that they weren't dependent on us to ferry them around. They amused themselves during the day, and we had dinner together in the evening. They left when they had said they were going to. If they were all like that, we thought, the summer would pass very pleasantly.

The greatest problem, as we soon came to realize, was that our guests were on holiday. We weren't. We got up at seven. They were often in bed until ten or eleven, sometimes finishing breakfast just in time for a swim before lunch. We worked while they sunbathed. Refreshed by an afternoon nap, they came to life in the evening, getting into high social gear as we were falling asleep in the salad. My wife, who has a congenitally hospitable nature and a horror of seeing people underfed, spent hours in the kitchen, and we washed dishes far into the night.

Sundays were different. Everybody who came to stay with us wanted to go to one of the Sunday markets, and they start early. For once in the week, we and the guests kept the same hours. Bleary-eyed and unusually quiet, they would doze in the back of the car during the twenty-minute ride to breakfast in the cafe overlooking the river at Isle-sur-la-Sorgue.

We parked by the bridge and woke our friends. They had gone to bed, reluctant and still boisterous, at two in the morning, and the bright light was having savage effects on their hangovers. They hid behind sunglasses and nursed big cups of cafe creme. At the dark end of the bar, a gendarme swallowed a surreptitious pastis. The man selling lottery tickets promised instant wealth to anyone who hesitated by his table. Two overnight truck drivers with blue sandpaper chins