You may laugh, Howard,’ Jolly said, ‘but at the time we thought he’d written the thing off. So would you. If you’d been here.’

Howard laughed again. ‘But he couldn’t have, Jolly. Not short of whacking it with a hammer.’

‘Which is what we reasonably assumed he’d done. You should have seen him.’

They were standing in the Place de l’Église squinting up at the ‘thing’ under discussion, its round white face almost painful to the eyes with the full glare of the morning sun blasting off it. It gave them a twitch of its minute hand, as if to settle any lingering doubts about its health.

‘Look, I understand your clock fetish,’ Jolly said. ‘I’m an artisan too, remember. But I don’t think you ever grasped the urgency of it all. A stinking review from our first holidaymakers and it’s not just tourism down the drain. It’s Alan’s entire plan for the village. And if you expect visitors to sleep next door to a clock that belts out the hour every hour—twice—right through the night…’

‘One gets used to it,’ Howard said. ‘In time.’

‘Quite. And you, you blighter, who were supposed to have neutered the damn thing, where were you? Up in Clermont losing a fight with some traction engine.’

‘A threshing machine, actually. If I’d known what it was going to do I’d have stood further back.’

‘Yes, well… Anyway, Léo fetches down old Bartélmy Pième, who manages to stagger up to the loft and call down for red wine. He’s up there banging and cursing and then there’s a sound like the end of the world. What are we supposed to think?’

Howard shrugged. ‘Silencing the clock is child’s play. You just unhook the cable that goes up to the hammer.’

‘However we didn’t know that. Nor, I suspect, did old Bartélmy, although he seems to have managed it in the end. But his main achievement that morning was to knock over your pile of scavenged ironmongery. You can’t imagine the racket it made.’

Howard gave a noncommittal movement of his head. At that moment Bénédict de Gompe, theoretically the village’s government-appointed Administrator, wished them a polite good morning as he crossed the Square in his odd crablike fashion, heading for les Coucous du Midi and his breakfast duties.

‘And he of course,’ said Jolly when Bénédict was out of earshot, ‘having finally flipped and shut down the restaurant, confiscated our Marmite and banned practically everything … he was on the roof of the château, poised to jump.’

‘So I heard,’ said Howard. ‘Must have been quite a morning.’

‘What ho, comrades.’ Alan, coming up behind, greeted the pair with a light hand on the shoulder. ‘Welcome back Howard. Elbow better?’

***

‘Frankly, Howard,’ Jolly went on, ‘the greater mystery is what your scrapheap was doing in the clock tower anyway.’

Howard scratched the back of his neck as he weighed this novel thought. ‘I suppose you could see it as a bit of a liberty, stashing it in the church. But Frances didn’t want it in the house for some reason, and how many storage places are there in the village?’

‘It was obviously your junk that we heard old Bartélmy tinkering with. He probably mistook it for the clock, through the brain fog. This may surprise you, Howard, but people have some difficulty understanding what you want with all that ironmongery.’

‘I dare say they do. But it’s not every day you come across old cog wheels and things, and it’s a shame not to hang on to them. Admittedly it’s not very likely they’d ever fit together to make something, but that’s no argument for not trying.’

‘Some people would say it is, Howard,’ Alan said gently. ‘Come on, let’s wander across and petition the good Ruth for a coffee and croissant.’

***

The good Ruth Tarrent was indeed good, but less simple than she looked as she went about her work in the kitchen of les Coucous du Midi. Ruth was actually no mean physicist, but you’d never guess it to look at her. Although on second thoughts… Maybe that was it. Maybe it was her air of timid, blue-stocking introversion, her blank-faced, lank-haired, nerdish lack of threat potential. Maybe she was the only person who could have coaxed Bénédict down. Seeing him clamber up the scaffolding, they’d all held back, scared of supplying the fatal nudge. But Ruth had gone up, with her tea tray. Maybe it was the tea tray that did it. Whatever it was, the Bénédict she led down was not the one who went up. Certainly it was not the man who, sent to rule over Pissevin-sous-Pronne in the absence of an elected Council, had fancied himself the reincarnation of Julius Caesar and Pontius Pilate.

They worked cautiously round him in the days that followed, as he seemed to settle down placidly in his unlikely new role, making the toast, spreading the Marmite and occasionally waiting on tables.

Old Léo, who no longer saw himself as a priest but who was still revered, had told them that the replacement of a warped personality by the emergence of a true one was a very rare thing, never achieved without prolonged and painful crisis. Miriam Truscott, of an age with Léo and his close companion but formidable and stern where he was gentle, was the one who had laid the basis for the transformation. It hadn’t taken her five minutes to shatter the egg shell of Bénédict’s self-esteem and put the fear of retribution into him. But seeing him in a state of collapse she’d softened, telling him that the village was capable of forgiveness, that it would take him in its embrace if only he would come down off his high horse and stop trying to conquer them.

Did she actually believe that? Would the village at large really treat him as kindly as she promised? There was an awful lot to forgive.

Miriam and the others did what they could. Hurriedly, they made up a bed for him in the room over his office in the Mairie. They did their best to shield him from the village’s wrath, and kept him fed. When they asked him what he usually ate he said, ‘Ham.’ When they asked what else he said, ‘From a tin.’ They set out to study him like naturalists, offering him variety and making a note of what he ate and what he didn’t. He ate everything.

To look at him, you would think he lived wrapped up in a blanket of total amnesia, the past with its humiliations hidden from him. Did he remember that he had a government-funded bedsitter down in Lodève? He evidently did. ‘The food is better here,’ he said, with some complacency. How much of his former official life did he remember then? Was he aware that he was supposed to constitute the village’s government? The question was partially answered on the first Wednesday morning. ‘It’s Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Old Pliquot will be here. I must go and see how he’s getting on.’

At the Mairie he greeted Agamemnon Pliquot, his elderly once-a-week Clerk, with a happy smile. ‘Hullo, Pliquot old man. Everything under control? That’s the spirit. Well, you know where to find me.’ And with that he returned to his day job, in the Cuckoo.