LITMIR.BIZ

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forgotten about her. He quickly drank some orange juice and went back upstairs to dress.

      Then he phoned Melanie.

      Three rings.

      “Yes?” A really frosty tone for one word, he thought. Impressive.

      “Hi there!” he said cheerfully.

      “Ned Marriner,” she said, low and intense, “you are in so much trouble. You have no idea. You are pushing up daisies, meeting your Maker, joining the choir.” He heard her beginning to laugh, fighting it.

      “Damn!” he said. “I’m talented after all.”

      “Talented and dead. Sleeping with the fishes.”

      “But, Melanie!” he protested. “I’d thought you’d like it!”

      “‘The Wedding March’? ‘The Wedding March’ as a ringtone? We’re in a goddamned cathedral! Greg is in hysterics. He’s holding a pillar to stay upright. He is peeing on it! You will be made to suffer!”

      She sounded pleasingly hysterical herself. It was all very satisfying.

      “I’m sure. In the meantime, you might want to phone Steve and Greg when you get a chance.”

      She paused, lowered her voice. “Really? You got them, too?”

      “Got them, too. See you at lunch.”

      He hung up, grinning.

      On considered reflection, he decided to keep his new phone hidden away for the next little while. There wasn’t much he could do if she decided to short-sheet his bed, but he doubted she’d like garden snails in hers, and an offhand mention of the possibility might stave off retaliation. He thought he could handle Greg and Steve. Melanie was the challenge.

      He loafed around the house for the morning, energetically avoiding any thought of the papers he was supposed to be writing. He was still jet-lagged, wasn’t he? Who could possibly be expected to write an English or history essay while time-warped?

      Despite what Kate Wenger had said, he spent a bit of time online googling Celts+Provence, and scribbled a few notes. Then he went outside in the bright morning and listened to music on the terrace till he saw the van making its way up the hill to the villa gates.

      He took off the iPod and put it on the table. He had a premonition of what was coming. He sat up in the lounger and waved an enthusiastic hello to everyone. His father waved back from the driveway. Melanie stood by the van, hands on hips, trying to achieve a withering glare—which was hard when you were barely five feet tall, Ned thought.

      Greg and Steve, smiling benignly, came up to the terrace together. Still smiling, they grabbed Ned by hands and legs (pretty strong guys, both of them) and began lugging him down the steps and across the grass to the pool.

      “SpongeBob, spare me!” Ned cried, perhaps unwisely.

      He heard Melanie and his father laugh, which was pleasing, but by then he was flying.

      It was cold in the pool, it was really cold in the pool. Gasping and coughing, Ned surfaced. He knew what to say. There were time-honoured male ways of responding to this.

      “Ahh,” he said. “Very refreshing. Thank you so much, guys.”

      ned carefully mentioned snails, over lunch outside—how he’d heard they had a creepy habit of ending up in people’s beds here, especially in springtime.

      Interestingly, it was Steve who grew thoughtful, hearing that. Melanie pretended to treat it as a dubious piece of misinformation. It was hard to tell if she was faking or not.

      Ned’s father, in a surprisingly relaxed state, said he’d shot some potentially workable images in the baptistry, shooting towards the dome with soft flash bounces. They’d also done some of the columns in the cloister, and a zigzag pattern he’d noticed out there on the walkway. Ned hadn’t seen that, but he didn’t have his father’s eye, and he’d been just a bit unsettled the day before out there.

      “I really liked your Queen of Sheba,” his father said. “The colour’s gorgeous. Like amber from some angles. We’ll check the images later. But I think I’m going to want to have her. I’ll go back if I need to before we go home, maybe try late in the day, too. Two good calls, Ned.”

      He was meeting Oliver Lee at a café in town this afternoon, just the two of them, first actual encounter. Barrett, the art director, was coming over from New York next week and had wanted to be there, but both men had decided to get together without an intermediary.

      “I may or may not like him, but it doesn’t matter in the end. We don’t have to work together.”

      “And you know he’ll love you?” Ned grinned.

      The cold water had woken him up pretty effectively. Long-lost cure for jet lag: freezing pools.

      “Everyone loves me,” Edward Marriner said. “Even my son.”

      “Your son,” said Melanie, darkly, “is a terrible person.”

      “Really,” Greg agreed, shaking his head.

      Steve kept quiet, possibly thinking about snails in his bed. Ned decided he was going to have to do the snail thing at some point, and live with the consequences.

      it turned out the three others were going to drop his father in town then drive east towards Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Paul Cézanne had apparently painted, like a hundred times. The painter had been born and died here. He was Aix’s main celebrity and he’d made the mountain famous.

      Ned remembered his father grumbling about Cézanne on the flight over, leafing through Barrett Reinhardt’s notes: how it was almost impossible to get a picture of that mountain that wasn’t a cliché or some sentimental tribute to the painter. He wasn’t looking forward to it, but Barrett had said it was simply not possible to be in Provence working on a book of photographs and not shoot that peak. Especially if you were Edward Marriner and known for your mountainscapes.

      “Simply not possible,” his dad had repeated on the plane, imitating the art director’s voice.

      This afternoon’s drive would be partly an outing in the country, and partly to check some places Barrett had marked on local maps as where they might set up. Ned’s father would make that call himself, but the others were good at eliminating locations they knew he wouldn’t go for.

      “You coming?” Steve asked Ned.

      “Ah, I have to be in town by five-ish, actually. I’m meeting someone.”

      “Who? What? How?” Greg demanded. “We just got here!”

      Ned sighed. “I met a girl yesterday morning. We’re having a Coke.”

      “Holy-moly,” said Melanie, grinning.

      Greg was staring. “A date? Already? Jeez, the boy’s a man among men!”

      “Don’t rush him, or me,” Edward Marriner said. “I feel old enough as is.”

      “We’ll get you back in time,” Melanie said, checking her watch. “But change into running shoes, Ned, we may climb a bit. Sandals are no good.”

      “Okay. But will you tie my shoelaces for me?” Ned asked. Melanie grinned again. He was glad the subject had changed. This date thing was not something he was easy with.

      They dropped his father in Aix and then took the ring road around the city and headed into the countryside along a winding route Melanie said Cézanne used to walk along to find places to paint.

      It was a fair distance to the mountain if you were on foot. Ned thought about that: in the nineteenth century, the Middle Ages, Roman times, people walked, or rode donkeys or something, and the road would have been way rougher. Everything was farther, slower, back then.

      And at the beginning of the twenty-first

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