Free A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle

arrived, and Bernard bounded up the steps in sunglasses, gray flannels, and blazer, twirling an umbrella in case the rain promised by the weather forecast should come our way. Following him with some difficulty was the secret of his continued elegance, a small, scruffy man weighed downwith tubs of chlorine, brushes, and a suction pump. This was Gaston, who was actually going to do the job under Bernard’s supervision.
    Later that morning, I went out to see how they were getting on. A fine drizzle had set in, and the sodden Gaston was wrestling with the serpentine coils of the suction hose while Bernard, blazer slung nonchalantly around his shoulders, was directing operations from the shelter of his umbrella. There, I thought, is a man who understands how to delegate. If anyone could help us move our stone table into the courtyard, surely it was Bernard. I took him away from his duties at the poolside and we went to study the situation.
    The table looked bigger, heavier and more permanently settled in its garnish of weeds than ever, but Bernard was not discouraged.
“C’est pas méchant,”
he said, “I know a man who could do it in half an hour.” I imagined a sweating giant heaving the great slabs around as a change from winning tug-of-war contests with teams of horses, but it was more prosaic than that. Bernard’s man had just acquired a machine called
un bob
, a scaled-down version of a fork-lift truck, narrow enough to pass through the courtyard doorway.
Voilà!
It sounded easy.
    The owner of
le bob
was telephoned and arrived within half an hour, eager to put his new machine into active service. He measured the width of the doorway and assessed the weight of the table. No problem;
le bob
could do it. There was a small adjustment to be made here and there, but a mason could take care of that. It was merely a question of removing the lintel over the doorway—just for five minutes—to provide sufficient height for the load to pass through. I looked at the lintel. It was another piece of stone, four feet wide, nine inches thick, and deeply embedded in the side of the house. It was major demolition, even to my inexpert eye. The table stayed where it was.
    The wretched thing had become a daily frustration. Here we were with hot weather and the outdoor eating season just around the corner—the days we had dreamed about back inEngland and through the winter—and we had nowhere to put a bowl of olives, let alone a five-course lunch. We seriously considered calling Pierrot at the quarry and asking for an introduction to the Carcassonne rugby team, and then Providence arrived with a screech of brakes and a dusty cocker spaniel.
    Didier had been working at a house on the other side of Saint-Rémy, and had been approached by a uniformed
gendarme.
Would there be any interest, the
gendarme
wondered, in a load of weathered stone, the old, lichen-covered stuff, that could be used to give a new wall instant antiquity? It so happened that one of the jobs on Didier’s long list was to build a wall at the front of our house, and he thought of us. The officer of the law wanted to be paid
au noir
, in cash, but stone like that was not easy to find. Would we like it?
    We would happily have agreed to half a ton of bird droppings if it meant getting Didier and his entourage back; we had often thought of them as movers of the table before they disappeared, and this seemed like a wink from the gods. Yes, we would have the stone, and could he give us a hand with the table? He looked at it and grinned. “Seven men,” he said. “I’ll come on Saturday with two when I bring the stone if you can find the rest.” We had a deal, and soon we would have a table. My wife started planning the first outdoor lunch of the year.
    We lured three more-or-less able-bodied young men with the promise of food and drink, and when Didier and his assistants arrived the seven of us took up our positions around the table to go through the ritual of spitting on