‘Was it a good visit? It’s almost evening now … I mean night – there is no twilight here, not really. It just goes dark …’ She offered her hand, we said goodnight, and I walked down the long driveway, the gravel crunching lightly under my feet. A bat was up, swooping, flittering, soaring.

At the lodge by the Simca a dog rushed out barking in a flurry of rage and surprise. I heard Martha Millar calling it to heel, and then she was there, one hand pulling at the choke-collar, the other raised against her good eye to shield it from the dying light. She had removed her eye-patch and the red scarf.

‘All right?’

‘I’m all right, thanks. Thank you. Not a long walk. Up or down. As you said.’

‘Breathless? I also said that. Remember?’

‘Breathless. Yep. Pretty winded.’

‘I thought you might be. I have a bottle of Jack Daniels here. And I pour a generous measure, they tell me. Could you use it?’

‘God, I could. Thank you. I really could.’

Chapter 10

After the second Jack Daniels it was suggested that we drop the ‘Miss’ and just use Martha. This I did. Easier, familiar, relaxing.

She was altogether comforting in her movements, slow, deliberate, calm, unfussed. After my trip up the hill I felt disjointed and unsettled. Bewildered, I suppose, is a better word.

Anyway, Martha, and Jack Daniels, sorted all that out comfortably.

The room, as far as I remember it that first day, was white, uncluttered, clear. Simple furniture, soft colours, flowers, books scattered, one or two old prints on the walls, a terracotta plate over the big fireplace of a Madonna and Child.

The dark, as always in Provence, had taken me by surprise. It would seem that quite a lot of things in Provence took me by surprise, but the fall of night was extraordinarily rapid, ravishingly lovely. A vague suggestion of twilight steals upon the brilliance of day, the sky slowly bleeds away from intense blue to bleached blue, to softest mother-of-pearl streaked suddenly with the faintest lemon tendrils, and then the sun begins to die in a ripple of tiny scarlet and orange waves of vapour. There is suddenly a perfectly tangible silence, a breath held, the evening fades away and night has fallen.

The air was still warm, the tiles of the little terrace beyond the open front door retained the heat of the sun; the dog, a Dalmatian, lay in a wide-legged sprawl, the scent of wallflowers mingled with the freshness of damp earth. She had been watering the pots and urns when I arrived and from a distance, somewhere in the valley, the frogs began to fiddle and cry. A star appeared, bats swung silently against the dark sky attracted by the beam of light which spilled out across the terrace as Martha lit an oil lamp on the small table at my elbow.