Thierry Arnaud

The car came up the track at a quarter past one, in the dead hour, when every living thing at the mas was lying down in the dark and the yard was a white plate of heat with nothing on it but the shadow of the plane tree.

Yassine heard it from the room over the tack. He was not asleep; he had not slept in the afternoons since the night of the boat. He lay on the horsehair mattress with his arm over his eyes and listened to it come: tyres on the gravel of the track, slowly, a big engine running quiet, the sound a car makes when the person driving it has never in their life had to hurry. The dogs did not bark. That was what made him get up. The dogs barked at the post van, at the vet, at Timéo's scooter every single morning as if they had never seen it before. They did not bark at this.

He went to the window. Through the mended net he watched a dark grey saloon, German, clean in a way that nothing out here was clean, roll into the yard and stop in the shade of the plane tree, in the exact place where the trucks usually stood, and sit there with its engine ticking.

Nobody got out for a full minute.

Then the passenger door opened and the man in the linen jacket stepped down onto the gravel, and stood, and looked round the yard with mild interest, the way a man looks round a hotel lobby, and Yassine took his arm away from his eyes and went downstairs.

• • •

Fredo was already on the step. He had come out in his shirt and trousers and bare feet, and he stood there with his big hands hanging at his sides and his face showing nothing at all, and the man in the linen jacket came across the yard towards him smiling, and held out his hand, and Fredo shook it.

"Fredo," the man said. "Forgive me. The middle of the day. I know. I was passing."

"Nobody passes here."

"Then I came on purpose and I'm a liar." The man laughed, softly, as though they were old friends sharing a joke at the expense of a third, absent friend. Close to, in daylight, he was exactly as forgettable as he had been in the lane behind the bodega: middle height, middle weight, fifty or so, a narrow pleasant face, greying hair cut short and well, a good watch, no rings. The jacket was linen, pale, slightly creased, and under it his shirt was white and open at the collar and somehow untouched by the heat, as if he carried his own small weather with him. He had a box in his left hand, flat, wrapped in paper. "From Aix," he said, holding it out. "Calissons. For Magali. I remember she likes them."

Fredo took the box without looking at it.

The man turned. He looked at Yassine, who had stopped at the corner of the stables in the shade, and for a moment there was nothing in his face at all, and then the smile came back.

"And you're the new one," he said. "The one who ran at the fête. I saw. Very fine. I'm Thierry. Thierry Arnaud." He did not hold out his hand. "Fredo, you'll introduce us properly?"

"He's Yassine," Fredo said. "He works here."

"So I gathered." Arnaud looked at Yassine a moment longer. "You'll forgive me. I like to know the faces. It's a weakness. My mother used to say I'd have made a good priest, I never forget a face and I never forget a sin." He laughed again. "Can we sit somewhere cool, Fredo? Only for a moment. Then I'll leave you to your siesta."

Fredo looked at him. Then he stood aside from the door.

Yassine turned to go back to the stables. He had not been told to go, but he knew he should be gone, and he had taken two steps across the yard when Fredo said, behind him, without raising his voice, "Yassine."

He stopped.

"You stay," Fredo said. "Get the coffee."

Arnaud, in the doorway, looked from the old man to Yassine and back, and his eyebrows went up very slightly, the way a man's eyebrows go up when someone at a card table plays a card he did not expect. Then he smiled and went in.

• • •

The kitchen was dim and cool behind its shutters, and smelled of last night's stew and the cold stone of the floor. Magali was there already, standing at the sink with her back to them and her arms folded, as if she had been standing there for an hour waiting. She did not turn round when Arnaud said her name. She did not turn round when he put the box of calissons on the table, or when Fredo sat down at the head of it, or when Arnaud sat down at the side, in Gaëtan's chair, and crossed his legs and looked round the room with the same mild interest he had shown the yard.

Yassine made the coffee. It gave his hands something to do. The old aluminium pot, the gas, the blue flame. He stood with his back to the room and listened to it the way he had been trained to listen, the way he had listened through a wall in Nîmes for eleven days, and he found that the training was still there and still worked and that his heart, underneath it, was going like a hammer.

"It's been a hard year," Arnaud said. "On the coast. You've heard."

"I've heard."

"A lot of carelessness. People who should know better." He sighed, a small sound, regretful. "Young people, mostly. They think it's a game. They think it's a film. They forget that the people at the top of this business are businessmen, and businessmen don't like surprises." He paused. "I don't like surprises. You know that about me, Fredo. Nine years. Have I ever surprised you?"

"No."

"No. I've been very boring. Boring is good. Boring is the reason none of us has ever had a problem." He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. "But the market changes. That's not me. That's the world. The Moroccans have too much, the price goes down every year, and now there's the weed they grow in sheds in Holland and in Spain and in garages in Lille, God help us, and the young ones want that instead. The resin's an old man's smoke. It's going the way of your father's cigarettes." He smiled at Fredo. "Nostalgia. Very beautiful. Doesn't pay."

The coffee pot began to mutter on the flame. Yassine did not turn round.

"So," Arnaud said. "From the August moon. The new moon, I mean, the dark one. Your favourite." He said it lightly, almost tenderly. "The boats will be a little bigger. Not much. The same beach, the same horses, the same trucks, the same everything. Only, in among the resin, there'll be some of the other thing. Not a lot. To start with."

Fredo said nothing.

"I know what you'll say," Arnaud went on, gently. "You've said it every year. I respect it. I do. I tell my people, the old man has his principles, leave him his principles, we're not barbarians. But I'm going to say a number to you now, Fredo, and I want you to hear it before you say the other thing." And he said a number.

Yassine heard it. He was standing with his back to them watching the coffee climb in the glass knob of the pot, and he heard the number, and for a moment the training slipped and he almost turned round. It was not a number for a manade. It was a number for a house in Montpellier and another one by the sea and the rest of your life. It was enough to clear the bank and the vet and the feed and the lease on the summer grass for ten years, and he knew it was, and so did Arnaud, because Arnaud said, into the silence that followed it:

"That's the Crédit Agricole, I think, isn't it? The letter. Third reminder. I'm told they've stopped being polite."

At the sink, Magali turned round.

"Get out," she said.

"Magali," said Fredo.

"He's read our post. He's—"

"Magali." The old man did not raise his voice. He did not need to. His daughter stopped, her face white under the sunburn, her arms tight across her chest, and stood there shaking with a rage so complete that Yassine could feel it across the kitchen like heat off a stove. Fredo did not look at her. He was looking at Arnaud.

"No," he said.

Arnaud nodded slowly, as if this were exactly what he had expected and he was pleased to have it confirmed.

"No," he repeated.

"I don't carry the white. I told you nine years ago. I'll tell you every year until I'm in the ground."

"I know." Arnaud uncrossed his legs. "And I'm going to ask again anyway, in a week or two, because that's my job, and because things change, and because you love this place, Fredo, I know you do, and so do I. I'd hate to see anything happen to it." He said it with real warmth. It was the warmth that made the hair stand up on Yassine's arms. "Think about it. Talk to Gaëtan. Talk to Magali. Talk to your new boy, if you like." His eyes went to Yassine's back for an instant. "You've got until the moon."

The coffee boiled. Yassine took it off the flame and poured it, three cups, his hands quite steady, and carried them to the table and set them down, one in front of Fredo, one in front of the empty place where Magali did not sit, and one in front of Arnaud, who looked up at him and said, "Thank you, Yassine," pleasantly, the way you thank a waiter.

The door from the passage opened and Gaëtan came in.

He had been asleep. His hair was flattened on one side and his shirt was unbuttoned and his feet were bare, like his father's, and he stopped in the doorway and looked at the man in his chair, and Yassine watched his face, and saw nothing on it at all. Not the laugh. Not surprise. Nothing.

"Thierry," Gaëtan said.

"Gaëtan. I've woken you. I'm sorry." Arnaud stood up, unhurried, and gave him back his chair with a little gesture of the hand. "I was just going. Your father and I have been talking business. He'll tell you."

Gaëtan looked at his father. Fredo looked at the table.

There was a silence in the kitchen then that lasted perhaps three seconds and that Yassine would remember afterwards for a long time: the old man at the head of the table with his big hands flat on the oilcloth among the faded lemons, the daughter at the sink, the son in the doorway with sleep still on his face, and the man in the linen jacket standing between them, smiling at no one, and the coffee going cold in three cups. Gaëtan did not say anything into it. Yassine waited for him to. He waited for the son to say what the father had said, no, or anything like it, anything at all. Gaëtan stood in the doorway and said nothing, and then the three seconds were over, and Arnaud was picking up his car keys from the table.

• • •

"Before I go," Arnaud said in the yard. "Your famous bull. Is he here?"

They were standing in the white heat by the grey car. Its engine was already running; the driver had not got out once, and through the tinted glass Yassine could see only a shape, a big man in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel, waiting.

"In the near pen," said Fredo. "He goes to Beaucaire on Sunday."

"May I?"

Fredo looked at him for a long moment, and then turned and walked towards the pens, barefoot across the hot gravel, and Arnaud followed, and after a second Yassine followed too, because nobody had told him not to.

Fangas was standing in the shade of the corrugated roof at the far end of the near pen. He was alone; they always kept him alone the day before a course, so that he would be fresh and in a temper. He lifted his head as they came to the rail and looked at them, the dark eye, the scarred horn, the rust along the spine, and blew out once through his nose, loud in the stillness.

Arnaud leaned on the rail. He looked at the bull for a long time. He seemed, for the first time since he had stepped out of the car, entirely sincere.

"Magnificent," he said quietly. "Truly. I'm not a man who knows about animals, Fredo. You know that. But even I can see it." He shook his head. "Look at him. The way he's looking at us. He knows exactly what we are."

Fangas went on looking at them.

"How old is he now?"

"Eleven."

"And how long do they live?" Arnaud said. He was still gazing at the bull. His voice was soft, curious, the voice of a man asking about something he had always wondered about and had never had the chance to learn. "A bull like this. If nothing happens to him. How long?"

Fredo did not answer.

The bull and the old man and the man in the linen jacket stood looking at one another across the rail in the heat, and none of them moved, and somewhere out in the marsh a heron cried once and was quiet. Then Arnaud straightened up, and smiled, and touched Fredo lightly on the shoulder, the way you touch a friend at a funeral, and walked back across the yard to his car, and got in, and the grey car turned under the plane tree and went away down the track, slowly, a big engine running quiet, and its dust hung in the air behind it for a long time in the windless heat, and settled, very gently, on everything.