The house came with everything except groceries: linen, a good wine rack, a wide terrace facing the sea, and a neighbour who appeared on the second morning carrying a basket of tomatoes from his garden.
His name was Luc. He was perhaps forty-five. He had been coming to this part of the coast for ten years and knew which beach was worth the walk and which restaurant the guidebooks had ruined and where to buy fish that had been in the water the previous evening. He offered all of this information simply and without performance, in the way of someone who has decided that useful information freely given is its own form of hospitality.
Mireille thanked him for the tomatoes and made him coffee.
Her husband was flying in on the twenty-second. It was the third. She had nineteen days and she was not thinking about the twenty-second.
She had come ahead to write. This was the stated purpose and also the real purpose; she was not the kind of person who gave stated purposes that diverged entirely from real ones. She was a novelist who wrote a particular kind of novel — careful, precise, concerned with the interior of ordinary lives — and she needed time alone to make progress. Her husband understood this. He had a company to run; he would join her for the last two weeks and they would have a proper holiday. The arrangement was mutual and considered and worked very well as arrangements went.
She had made good progress on the novel in the first two days. She worked in the mornings from six until noon, ate alone on the terrace, swam in the afternoon. She had a method and the method was working.
Then the tomatoes arrived.
Luc was not a literary person. He had read some things and formed views about them but did not have the particular relationship with books that she was accustomed to in the people she spent time with. He was an architect. He thought about buildings — about the way light entered spaces and what this meant for the people who lived in them, about the relationship between structure and the life it contained. He talked about this with the same quality of ease with which he had offered information about beaches and restaurants: openly, as if sharing something that belonged to both of them, as if ideas were a kind of resource too.
She found this genuinely interesting and also slightly disorienting. She was accustomed to being the most interested person in a room. With Luc she was in a room where interest was already present and she had merely added to it.
They had dinner on the fourth evening. She cooked; he brought wine and a very good olive oil from a producer he knew. The conversation moved between architecture and fiction and places they had both been and the subject of what it meant to make something — what the actual experience of it was, the hours in between the finished things, which neither of them found unpleasant. They had a second bottle.
She was aware, as the evening progressed, that she found him attractive. She noted this as one notes a change in weather: something real and present that changes the quality of the air.
On the seventh evening, on the terrace after swimming, when the sun was at its particular late-afternoon angle that makes everything look like the best version of itself, he said: "I should tell you something."
"All right," she said.
"I find you very interesting," he said. "And very attractive. I'm telling you this because I think you should know, and because I have no intention of acting on it in any way that you haven't indicated you want. But I think you probably knew anyway and I find pretending not to know things I know quite tedious."
She looked at him. The sea below the terrace was doing what the sea does at that hour, which is produce a sound that is an argument for staying exactly where you are.
"I find you very interesting too," she said. "And attractive. My husband arrives on the twenty-second."
"I know," he said. "I'll be gone by then. I leave on the nineteenth. I'm not suggesting anything complicated."
"What are you suggesting?"
He was quiet for a moment. "The next twelve days," he said. "If you want them."
What followed was the kind of twelve days that become their own country.
She still worked in the mornings. He respected this entirely — she had been explicit about it and he had taken her at her word, which she had appreciated. After noon the structure dissolved. They walked. They cooked. They talked. They spent long hours doing very little in the particular productive way of people who are comfortable enough with each other that silence doesn't need filling.
The physical part of it was intense and also comfortable — the specific combination that takes time to arrive at with most people and had arrived unusually quickly with him, perhaps because they had both been paying close attention in the days before.
She did not think about the twenty-second. She thought about the morning and the afternoon and the evening and the next morning. She thought about the sea. She thought about the novel, which was going extremely well — she had written more in the first two weeks than in the previous three months. Something about the circumstances had loosened a particular gear in her mind and she was grateful for it without thinking too carefully about what the gear was.
He left on the morning of the nineteenth, as he had said he would.
They had breakfast on the terrace. She made coffee. He had brought bread and figs. The sea was very blue; it was going to be a hot day. They were easy with each other in a way she had noticed increasing over the twelve days — the ease that comes from having been honest about what something is and what it isn't, from having taken it seriously while knowing its limits.
"Will you come back here next summer?" she asked.
"Probably," he said. "Will you?"
"Probably," she said. "My husband likes it here."
He smiled at this. Not with irony — simply with the acknowledgment of a fact. "I hope he enjoys it," he said.
She walked him to his car. They said goodbye in the way of people who are not sure whether they'll see each other again but are at peace with either outcome, which is the best possible way to say goodbye to anyone.
She went back to the terrace and looked at the sea for a long time.
Then she went inside and wrote the final chapter of the novel in a sitting, from noon until nine in the evening, without stopping. The gear she had been trying to locate for months turned out to have been there all along — she had simply needed twelve days and a man who found ideas to be a form of hospitality and the sea at a particular hour and the sound of something that argued for staying exactly where you were.
Her husband arrived on the twenty-second. They had a lovely two weeks.