Murder in a Provence Village

At four in the afternoon the thermometer on the dashboard read thirty-six degrees, and the road out of Avignon shimmered as though the tarmac itself were trying to leave. Edmund drove with both hands on the wheel and his jacket still on, which told Margaret everything about the state of his nerves. A man who kept his jacket on in such heat was a man rehearsing a conversation. The first lavender had come. Not the great violet oceans of the postcards, not yet; that would be July, when the coaches disgorged their photographers onto the plateaus. This was the earlier thing, the shy thing: whole fields turning the colour of a bruise beginning to heal, the rows still more grey than blue, the scent arriving through the vents in gusts, then withdrawing, as if the country were deciding whether to trust them. Cicadas kept up their dry machinery in the pines. The light fell on everything with the particular Provençal weight that made English visitors say, every year, that they had never really seen light before. ‘You’ve gone quiet,’ Margaret said. ‘I’m concentrating on the road.’ ‘You’re concentrating on Aurélien.’ Edmund did not deny it, which was his way of confirming a thing. He had been an accountant for forty-one years, a chartered one, and chartered accountants did not deny; they declined to comment, and let the silence do the auditing. They had been married for thirty-eight of those years, and Margaret had learned to read her husband the way he read a set of accounts: not by what was entered, but by what refused to reconcile. Lately something had refused to reconcile. She had watched him at the kitchen table in Tunbridge Wells, three weeks running, with the Valmoure statements spread before him and a pencil he never used going soft between his fingers. He had said nothing. He had simply checked the figures twice, then a third time, and the third time was new. ‘I wrote to him,’ Edmund said now.’ Before we left. I asked to see the books.’ ‘You didn’t tell me.’ ‘I’m telling you now.’ The domaine had come into their lives seven years earlier, at a wine fair in Olympia, in the form of a bronzed young man in linen and a brochure printed on paper thick enough to shame a wedding invitation. Adopt a row of vines. One paid a sum, one received in return a stake in the harvest, a plaque with one’s name screwed to a post at the end of a row, an annual dividend, and the standing pleasure of telling one’s neighbours that one had, in a modest way, a vineyard in Provence. The bronzed young man had been Aurélien Castel. He had poured them a rosé the colour of a girl’s blush and spoken of terroir as other men spoke of their children, and Edmund — cautious Edmund, who queried every quotation from every plumber in Kent — had signed. Margaret had never let him forget that it was the wine and not the arithmetic that signed. She had teased him about it for seven years, gently, at dinner parties, the way a wife files down the edges of a thing so it can be lived with. Edmund bought us a vineyard, you know. On the strength of a glass of pink. And Edmund would allow the laugh, and refill the guest’s glass with something English and sensible, and never once let on that the joke had a splinter in it. Because he had known, even then, that he had bought with his heart and not his head, and Edmund Ashcombe did not forgive himself trespasses of that kind. He filed them. He waited. And now, it seemed, he had opened the file. Margaret watched the fields go by and tried to feel the way a wife was supposed to feel — indignant on his behalf, uneasy about the money. What she felt instead, and would not have confessed to anyone, was a small unworthy relief that the vineyard had turned out to be a mistake, because for seven years it had been the one reckless thing her careful husband had ever done, and it had made him, once a year, when the pallet arrived, briefly and helplessly happy. She had liked him best in those hours. Now the sum would not come out, and the happiness would go the way of all the things Edmund audited. ‘And the dividends,’ she said.