I’d wondered if, after a week and some of the parents – adults, you know – around all the time, if we would turn, in our sudden solitude, savage; if we would fight each other for the last Coco Pops cereal bar left in the pantry; if, in stinking rags, we would burn the house down and dance around the bonfire.

Turns out the house is still standing, we do the laundry and hang it out to dry under the low fig tree, and we make tarts, sweet and savoury. There is ratatouille tasty one night and tastier the next. On Mondays or Wednesdays, there may be pizza from the big red van, down in the village, next to the petanque players. The pizza is made, in his big red van, by the ex-village postman. He has a wife, a belly and a wood-burning fire in his van, this last of which sounds like just about time for the lights and sirens to start flashing “Danger, Will Robinson!” but maybe living by the sea plays down such incendiary imaginings. I suppose the man could just drive straight into the water, should things go awry.

The tarts, the ratatouille, the thin-crust pizza – and I have just found lamb steaks in the freezer! – plus, there are yoghurt and fresh peaches at breakfast, or figs and Fjords after dinner. I don’t know what a Fjord is, exactly – it is a cousin of yoghurt, clearly, but other than that, well. The little Fjord pot reads “spécialité laitière” – “dairy product”, essentially, or, if accompanied by spirit fingers, “dairy specialty” – which is not so much help, and the only other hint is the picture, on the peel-off top, of two men dressed as penguins. What?, French people, what? I have the special yoghurt-like tendencies, I have the penguins, but I cannot tell you more. Olive’s father and stepmother left the fridge full of Fjords before they parted for the big city sometime last week. While they were still here, though, the stepmother would say, after dinner: “Quelqu’un veut un dessert ?” Her hands were usually clasped, at this point. She was calm, always, and I realise now what I couldn’t quite put my finger on then – the strange something in the air – it was that she was without the excitement dessert usually brings. “Quelqu’un veut un dessert ?”, she would say, then she would pause before saying: “Moi, je voudrais un Fjord.”

I tell you what, I’m not denigrating the Fjord – the Fjord is nice and all, it goes very well with fig jam or a slice of banana tart – but the Fjord, he is no Tropézienne.



The Tropézienne you get from Filigheddu the boulangerie-pâtisserie. You stop on the way down to the beach, you tell the nice lady to reserve you one for the way back up, you pick it up in a pink box on the way back up. Later, up the hill, after post-beach showers, you eat it cold from the fridge. The Tropézienne is pastry and cream, see, so you eat it cold from the fridge. You eat it sitting down, for if you were standing up you would FALL OVER from the WONDROUSNESS your mouth is experiencing.

It is like a giant chouquette – do you know the chouquette ? – the chouquette is a small ball of pastry with bits of sugar embedded in the top. It is just light enough – for otherwise it would float off into the wind with fairy wildflowers in the summer – and just sweet enough. You cannot have just one chouquette, and they don’t sell them singly, anyway. You buy a paper bag of chouquettes from the nice baker man, you wait in line and hope they don’t sell out by the time you get to the head of the queue –

the Tropézienne, hence, is like a giant chouquette, sliced in half horizontally, and then filled with cream. Cream like clouds, cream like a blanket of clouds. So, okay: a cream sandwich, basically. I know it doesn’t sound like something special, but it is, friends, it is. And it’s not rocket science, but it sure can send a girl to the moon.