Pamela was driving the second-hand Range Rover she had bought for the riding school, with Fabiola beside her and Gilles in the back. Behind her came the baron in his stately old Citroën DS bringing Florence and her two children, who exploded from the rear door to embrace Balzac.
“Fresh from the hammam, you look wonderful,” said Bruno, embracing Florence. “And happy birthday.”
“It was my first time there, but it won’t be the last,” she said, kissing him on both cheeks. “I feel utterly, completely clean. Fabiola used this rough glove to scrape me down, and I tingle all over. I can’t think when I felt so completely relaxed. And I think I could eat two lunches, not just one.”
The baron handed Bruno a bottle of cold champagne, Gilles was carrying another, and Pamela a third.
“We can’t drink all that, at least not today,” Bruno said, handing it back and asking the baron to open it before bending down to take Dora and Daniel in each arm and then standing so they each hung around his neck. “Bonjour, les petits. Does maman think that apple juice is okay for you two?”
“One glass and water after that,” Florence said as they strolled to the table.
“Just like me,” said Fabiola. “I’m prescribing myself one very small glass of champagne, and then it’s water.”
A child on each knee as he sat at the head of his table, surrounded by his friends and with the sun on his face, Bruno felt content. He asked Florence what time she had been awoken that morning.
“They clambered into bed with me soon after dawn,” she said fondly. “They brought me a bowl of yogurt and a glass of orange juice, saying I deserved breakfast in bed for my birthday.”
“We’ll teach Fabiola’s baby to do the same for her birthday,” said Daniel.
“But only when the baby is big enough,” added Dora. “Can we go and see the chickens with Balzac?”
The children clambered down and scampered off with the basset hound, and Bruno was at last able to enjoy a sip of champagne and hear all about the hammam. Then the baron recounted his morning of babysitting. He had taken Florence’s children out in his canoe, safely tied into their life jackets, in the hope of catching some fish and treating Daniel and Dora to their first fresh trout, roasted on the riverbank.
“I’d forgotten how kids of that age are never silent,” he concluded. “They scared away all the fish for miles. But at least they didn’t fall in. And it’s given me an appetite. What are we eating, Bruno?”
“I’ll announce each dish as it comes to the table,” he replied. “Give me a moment to bring out the first course.”
In the kitchen, he turned on the heat beneath the soup and stirred it, and did the same for the new potatoes. Then he took out to the table a bowl of crème fraîche, the bread, and a cold bottle of his favorite local white wine, a Cuvée Mirabelle from Château de la Jaubertie. He asked Gilles to open it while the baron poured out the rest of the champagne. Florence called her children to the table as Bruno emerged with the soup tureen.
“Soupe aux orties,” he announced. “Nettles picked fresh this morning.”
“Will they sting?” Dora asked nervously as Bruno dropped a spoonful of crème fraîche into each helping. As this began to melt, he added some finely chopped chives.
“Not now they’ve been cooked, but if you don’t like it, Balzac will.”
“Oh no, this is mine,” Dora said firmly, and began to eat with appetite.
The bowls were emptied quickly, as was the tureen. Bruno excused himself and took the dirty dishes into the kitchen and set the dinner plates onto the rack above the grill to warm. He turned on his grill, took the tapenade from the fridge, and then began to slice the zucchini lengthways into very thin slices. Then he remembered Gervaise’s advice and went out to pick some sprigs of thyme from the herb garden.
He salted and peppered the insides of the mullets, laid them all on a baking tray skin side up, and broke a small sprig of thyme onto each one before sliding them beneath the grill. Then Bruno sautéed the delicately thin strips of zucchini in his largest frying pan in a little olive oil. He added salt and pepper, then the crushed basil leaves and two large tablespoons of tapenade, stirred it all, and then gently tossed the zucchini strips into the tapenade for a few moments. Finally, he quartered two lemons and began to arrange the zucchini onto the warmed plates.
The new potatoes were done, and he served them in a deep dish with slivers of butter over the top, and now the eight mullets were ready. He removed the baking tray and placed a mullet on top of the zucchini on each plate, gave a final twirl of his pepper mill, and began taking them out to the table. He served the children first so that Florence could help them with the fish. Finally, he brought out the new potatoes and another bottle of white wine.
A happy silence fell as his friends applied themselves energetically to their food and the children slipped bits of potato to Balzac until Florence lifted her glass and called for a toast to the cook. The others raised their glasses, and Bruno grinned at them all with pleasure and raised his own glass in thanks. The baron asked Pamela how the season looked, and she replied that her gîtes were all booked up for the summer. Fabiola was watching the children fondly with a look of private contentment on her face, one hand on her swelling belly and the other resting on Gilles’s hand on the table.
“There are no second helpings of the fish, I’m afraid,” said Bruno, clearing the plates. “But there’s cheese and salad to come. And dessert.”
Pamela helped him clear away, and in the kitchen she piled the plates in the sink and asked when he proposed giving Florence her presents. After the dessert, with the coffee, he replied, knowing that she had to be back at the riding school at four to check in the new tenants for her gîtes. She nodded and took out the cheese board while Bruno tossed the salad in vegetable oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar, adding a final splash of walnut oil for flavor, and brought it to the table, where he heard Florence explaining her latest plan for her pupils at the collège. She had already launched a computer club and a kitchen garden club, and now she was planning an archaeology club where the schoolchildren could attend lectures at the local prehistory museum and help on its local digs in the summer.
Her energy was extraordinary, Bruno thought. But he was even more impressed by her vision of the way she used her role as a teacher to broaden the horizons of her pupils far beyond the curriculum she taught. He’d never had teachers like Florence when he was at school. And she was raising two delightful children as a single mother. Proposing that Florence apply for the job as science teacher at the collège may have been the most useful contribution he’d made to the town of St. Denis.
He took the used plates away and brought out not the tray of desserts his friends had expected, but a large wrapped box, with three more smaller wrapped items on top. Without a word, he went back to the kitchen and brought out the glasses of lemon mousse on a tray. Pamela realized what he planned and brought out another wrapped gift from her bag and placed it with the others. The baron went to his car and returned with what had to be a framed painting of some kind, wrapped in paper covered with snowmen, clearly left over from Christmas. Gilles followed suit and brought back what seemed to be a book, also wrapped.
“I suspect you have something planned, but I love lemon mousse and I intend to eat it right now,” said Florence, smiling widely and shushing her children when they asked if they could start opening her presents. She gave each of them a spoonful of the lemon mousse instead, which successfully distracted them and everyone else at the table.
Once the mousse was appreciated and devoured, Florence scanned the gifts and asked Dora to choose one to open.
The little girl picked out Pamela’s present, ripped open the paper, and cried, “DVDs, maman!” But then she paused and made a grimace. “Is this French?” she asked.
“They have French subtitles,” said Pamela. “And I kn
ow you’re learning to read, Dora.”
Florence rose and embraced Pamela and promised that they would all watch the Jane Austen films together. Then it was Daniel’s turn, and he opened Gilles’s book, a copy of the latest Prix Goncourt winner.
“Just what I wanted,” Florence declared, embracing him.
“Now it’s your turn to open something,” said the baron, handing her the painting. “It’s something I found at an exhibition of local painters.”
Florence unwrapped it to reveal a framed watercolor of the bridge and waterfront of St. Denis, painted from the opposite side of the river, framed by willow fronds trailing at one side of the painting and a family of ducks at the other.
“It’s charming,” Florence said, hugging the old man. “This is a wonderful birthday. I can’t think when I’ve had a better one; breakfast in bed, hammam, gifts, and lunch with dear friends.”
“I think you might need both Daniel and Dora to help you open this,” said Bruno, handing her the box.
Florence removed the outer layer, used her cheese knife to slit the tape and open the box, and then the children removed the newspaper wrappings one by one, groaning theatrically each time they realized there was yet more paper until at last the carafe emerged.
“It’s lovely, Bruno,” Florence said, kissing him. “But you’re too generous. You’ve already given me this splendid lunch with our friends. And what are these three wrapped items still on the table?”
“I thought Dora and Daniel worked so hard, they deserved to have a small gift, too,” Bruno said. But before handing them their presents, he added, “You have to wait to open them at the same time as maman opens her last gift because these are three things that go together like a family. Now all of you sit down, and when I count to three, each of you opens your gift and I’ll explain them. One, two, three…”
The arrowhead, the flint scraper, and the hand ax emerged, and three sets of rather confused eyes stared at him.
“Daniel, that’s an arrowhead made by people who lived here thousands and thousands of years ago, used for hunting so they could feed themselves,” he explained. “And Dora, your gift is a scraper from the same people. When they hunted a deer, they removed the skin and used scrapers like this to remove the fat and prepare the skin to be a cloak to keep them warm or a blanket to sleep under. Without scrapers such as that one in your hand, there would have been no clothing in winter, so it was a really important tool.
“And Florence, yours is a Mousterian hand ax, one of the earliest handmade human tools, at least forty thousand years old. Now that you’re starting the archaeology club, you’ll need to know about these things.”
“But weren’t these treasures yours?” Florence asked. “Not the hand ax but the arrowhead and scraper—I’ve seen them on your bookcase. That’s your personal collection.”
Bruno shook his head. “My real archaeological collection is something else. He’s sitting beneath the table. There was an article in the latest Archéologie magazine about the skeleton of a dog, not a wolf, being found in a cave in Belgium with some human remains dating from thirty thousand years ago. And there’s a nineteen-thousand-year-old painting of a dog just down the road from here at the Font-de-Gaume cave.
“Historians have long thought that one of the crucial moments in human history was when our ancestors learned to domesticate dogs,” Bruno went on. “This was not only because dogs were useful for hunting, just as they are today, but because it was only after dogs that humans learned how to domesticate other animals as well, sheep and goats and cattle and eventually horses. That was the great shift that took our ancestors from being hunter-gatherers into farmers. That’s how important dogs have been to us.”
“So Florence and her children now each have their own little piece of the prehistory of our region,” said the baron.
“And I have mine, in Balzac,” Bruno said. “Happy birthday, Florence. And happy history, to us all.”
Discover more at PenguinRandomHouse.com
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
A Birthday Lunch Page 2
