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only difference being that few regular men could afford a summer home in the Dordogne. Perhaps that was the real reason why he never allowed a camera crew onto his ‘property’, as he referred to it. ‘This is my place,’ he himself said. ‘My place, for me and my family. It’s no one else’s business.’
    When he wasn’t lugging roofing tiles or sawing wood, he was out picking blackberries or blueberries. Blackberries and blueberries from which Babette then made jam: with her hair up in a kerchief, she spent days ladling out hot, sickly-sweet substances into hundreds of canning jars. Claire had no choice but to ask if she needed help, just as I felt obliged to help Serge with his roofing tiles.
    ‘Can I give you a hand?’ I asked after the seventh barrowful went by.
    ‘Well, now that you mention it,’ was his reply.
    ‘When can we leave?’ Claire asked me that night in bed, when we were finally alone and could cuddle up close – not too close, though, it was too hot for that. The berries had turned her fingers blue; a darker version of the blue was in her hair and streaked across her cheeks.
    ‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Oh, no, I mean the day after tomorrow.’
    On our last night, Serge and Babette invited friends and acquaintances over for dinner in the garden. They were Dutch friends and acquaintances, to a man, and they all had summer homes close by. ‘Nothing special,’ Serge said. ‘Just a little group of friends. Nice people, all of them, really.’
    Seventeen Dutch people, not counting the three of us, stood around the garden that evening with plates and glasses. There was an ageing actress (‘With no work and no husband,’ Claire filled me in the next morning), and a skinny choreographer who drank only Vittel water from half-litre bottles he had brought himself, and a pair of married homosexual writers who spent the whole evening carping at each other.
    On the table Babette had laid out a buffet of salads, French cheeses, little sausages and bread. Meanwhile, Serge turned his attention to the barbecue; he was wearing a red-and-white checked apron and he was grilling hamburgers and shish kebabs with bell peppers and onions. ‘The secret of a good barbecue is to build a good fire,’ he’d told me a few hours before the dinner with the little circle of friends. ‘The rest is a piece of cake.’
    My job was to collect dry twigs. Serge was drinking more than usual; a wicker bottle of wine stood beside him in the grass next to the barbecue, so maybe he was more nervous about how the evening would go than he was letting on.
    ‘In Holland they’re all sitting down to potatoes and gravy right now,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine it? This is the life, man!’ He waved his fork at the trees and bushes that kept the garden hidden from prying eyes.
    All the Dutch people I spoke to that evening told more or less the same story, often in the very same words. They didn’t envy their countrymen who were forced, by financial considerations or other obligations, to stay behind in Holland. ‘Around here, we’re as happy as God in France,’ said a woman, who told me she had worked for years in the ‘diet industry’. I thought she was joking, until I realized that she had uttered the phrase entirely in earnest, as though she had come up with it herself.
    I looked around at the other figures cradling their wineglasses in the golden-yellow glow from the braziers and torches positioned strategically around the garden, and in my mind I heard the voice of the old actor who figured in that TV commercial ten – or was it twenty? – years ago: ‘Yes, that’s right, you too can be as happy as God in France. With a good glass of cognac and real French cheese …’
    The mere thought brought with it a whiff of Boursin, as though someone had spread a slice of toast with that filthiest of all fake French cheeses and shoved it under my nose. It was the combination of the lighting and the odour of Boursin that kept me