Anything Considered Read online

  PETER MAYLE

  ANYTHING

  CONSIDERED

  Peter Mayle spent fifteen years in the advertising business, first as a copywriter and then as a reluctant executive, before escaping Madison Avenue to write books. He is the author of A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence, as well as the novels Hotel Pastis and A Dog’s Life. His most recent novel is Chasing Cézanne. He and his wife and two dogs divide their time between the South of France and Long Island.

  Books by PETER MAYLE

  Chasing Cézanne

  Anything Considered

  A Dog’s Life

  Hotel Pastis

  Toujours Provence

  A Year in Provence

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1997

  Anything Considered copyright © 1996 by Escargot Productions, Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Mayle, Peter.

  Anything considered : a novel / by Peter Mayle.

  p. cm.

  1. Truffles—Marketing—Fiction. 2. British—Monaco—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  [PR6063.A8875A59 1996]

  823′.914—dc20 96-5761

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79193-1

  Author photograph courtesy of Jennie Mayle

  Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  Cover illustration by Ruth Marten

  v3.1

  For Jeremy

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I would like to thank Elizabeth O’Hara-Boyce and Richard La Plante for their generous help in providing me with information about truffle production and karate. Any inaccuracies are mine, not theirs.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters and their names are inventions, and have nothing to do with real life, with the possible exception of Lord Glebe.

  1

  SOMETHING would turn up, Bennett kept telling himself. On the good days, the days when the sun shone and no bills arrived, he found it easy to believe that this sudden poverty was a temporary blot on the landscape of life, a hiccup of fate, no more than a passing inconvenience. Even so, he couldn’t ignore the facts: his pockets were hollow, his checks were prone to bounce, and his financial prospects generally—as his bank manager had pointed out with the gloomy relish that bank managers convey when imparting bad news—were vague and unsatisfactory.

  But Bennett suffered from optimism, and he was unwilling to leave France. And so, with scanty qualifications, other than a good amateur eye for property and a pressing need for sales commissions, he had joined the roving band of agents immobiliers—some of them no better qualified than he—who spend their lives rooting through the Provençal countryside. Like them, he passed his days searching for ruins with character, barns with potential, pigsties with promise, sheep hangars with personality, disused pigeonniers, and any other tottering edifice that might, with massive applications of imagination and even more money, be suitable for transformation into a desirable residence.

  It had not been easy. Competition was intense; indeed, there were days when Bennett felt that property agents were thicker on the stony ground than clients. The market had gone soft, and the culprit was the French franc. It was too strong—particularly for the Americans, the British, the Dutch, and the Swedes. The Swiss had the money but were waiting, prudent and patient as ever, for the franc to drop. The few clients were either Germans laden with marks, or Parisians looking to invest cash they had discovered under Grandmama’s mattress. But even they were scarce.

  And then, the previous summer, a few flippant remarks—a joke not in the best of taste, Bennett had to admit—had led to a minor but potentially rewarding sideline to augment his qualifications as purveyor of real estate to the English gentry.

  He had been a guest at one of the parties thrown by members of the expatriate community that descends on Provence each year for its annual ration of sun and garlic. As a permanent resident, with the useful social advantages of being a presentable bachelor who spoke English—in other words, an invaluable Spare Man—Bennett was never short of invitations. He endured the gossip in exchange for a full stomach.

  Boredom was the occupational hazard, and mischief was the antidote, as it had been on that luminous August evening, the flagstones on the terrace still warm from the day’s sun, the view extending across the valley to the medieval skyline of Bonnieux. Slightly tipsy, and numbed by the other guests’ endless speculations about the future of British politics and the employment prospects for junior members of the royal family, Bennett had diverted himself by inventing a fresh nightmare for the prosperous owners of holiday homes. It would be a change for them, he thought, something different to talk about when they got home, an exotic addition to their normal complaints about burglars, frozen pipes, swimming pool vandals, and light-fingered staff.

  Bennett’s warning, which he delivered with tongue in cheek between mouthfuls of smoked salmon, struck at the very heart of rural domestic life: the plumbing. He claimed to have heard of a new and malevolent strain of dung beetle that had recently been observed in the region, invading any septic tank that was left unused and creating unsavory chaos throughout the plumbing system. Naturally, he said, the authorities were trying to hush it up, as dung beetles and tourists were not a happy combination. But the beetles were there, all right, biding their time until houses became empty and they could have the run of the pipes.

  His audience, two sisters from Oxford with matching pink-cheeked husbands, had listened to him with mounting dismay. To his surprise, he realized they were taking him seriously.

  “How absolutely ghastly,” said one of the sisters, in the precisely tailored accent of the English Home Counties. “What does one do? I mean, our house stays empty for months in the winter.”

  “Well,” said Bennett, “the only thing that works is regular flushing, at least twice a week. Drown the little devils, that’s the answer. They’re not amphibious, you see. Does anyone want that last shrimp? Pity to waste it.” He smiled, excused himself, and made his way across the terrace toward a pretty girl who he was sure needed rescuing from a notoriously boring local interior decorator. As he came closer, he heard the drone of a familiar mantra about the charm, the ageless charm, of distressed chintz, and plunged in to bring some light relief.

  Unknown to Bennett, the sisters from Oxford were spreading news of the dung beetle invasion throughout the party, and by the end of the evening it had reached the status of a full-scale epidemic that threatened the sanitary arrangements of every unattended house between Saint-Rémy and Aix. Faced
with this common menace, half a dozen anxious home owners formed an instant coalition and waylaid Bennett as he was about to leave.

  “This beetle business,” said the group’s spokesman, an ex–cabinet minister resting between elections, “sounds as though it could be rather nasty.” Solemn, sun-flushed faces nodded in agreement. “And we were all wondering if you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on things for us when we leave. Be our man on the spot, as it were.” He dropped his voice, in the way of the English when obliged to discuss a vulgar subject. “We’d make it worth your while, of course—proper commercial basis for services rendered. Wouldn’t dream of asking you to take it on otherwise.”

  Bennett looked at them—middle-aged, wealthy men who doubtless had many middle-aged, wealthy friends—and came to an instinctive decision. “Of course,” he said. “I’d be delighted to help out. But I won’t hear of being paid for it.” He waved their gratitude aside. Favors had a way of turning into introductions and then into sales, as he knew from listening to other agents. Most of them performed a variety of chores for their absent clients, from stocking the refrigerator to firing the alcoholic gardener. But none of them, he was certain, had received this ultimate mark of trust, or the position that went with it: official flusher, guardian of the septic tank, inspecteur sanitaire. In the quiet winter months that followed, it amused him to take his task seriously.

  ——

  He pressed the porcelain-clad lever, listened approvingly to the vigorous rush of water, and put a tick against a name on his clipboard: Carlson, the mustard tycoon from Nottingham, who had often been heard to boast that his fortune had been made from what people left on their plates; a rich man, and not afraid to show it, particularly in the matter of bathrooms, where his taste leaned toward the grandiose. Bennett stepped down from the raised throne, crossed the mosaic floor, and washed his hands at a basin sunk into a slab of polished granite. He looked through the window at what Carlson, with mock humility, called his little patch of garden—a dozen acres of groomed terracing, thickly studded with mature olive trees. Imported from Italy, Carlson had told him, not one of them less than two hundred years old. Bennett had once estimated their cost and had arrived at a figure that would have paid for a small house.

  He went downstairs, through gray humps of furniture shrouded in dustcovers, and set the alarm system before letting himself out. Standing on the raked, weedless gravel of the drive, he took a deep breath of crisp air and considered the morning. It was sending a clear signal of spring, with mist burning off in the valley below and almond blossom bright against a clean blue sky. How could he think of living anywhere else? He remembered the comment of a friend, all those years ago when he’d moved to France. Wonderful country, old chap. Pity about the people. Absolutely impossible. You’ll be back. As it happened, he had become fond of the French, and he had stayed.

  But how much longer could he hang on? The contacts and sales that he had hoped to make as a result of helping out his nonpaying clients had not materialized. They’d been grateful. They’d sent Christmas cards, photographs of their children on ponies, puddings from Fortnum & Mason, the odd bottle of port. But so far, no customers. Soon it would be Easter. Soon the dustcovers would come off the elaborate furniture, and the home owners would return to do for themselves what Bennett had been doing for them with such diligence all winter. Well, something might come of it once the season got under way.

  But there was nothing immediate, and as he drove back to the tiny house in Saint-Martin-le-Vieux, he went through his options. The prospect of going back to producing television commercials, as he had done for ten years in London and Paris, was not attractive. He’d escaped just as the business was being taken over by unshaven young men with earrings, delusions of creativity, and that badge of the artistic temperament, the ponytail. He no longer had the patience to humor them. He’d been spoiled, having worked with some genuinely talented directors who had now graduated to Hollywood. The new breed, arrogant and ill-mannered, used special effects to disguise a lack of ideas, and lived in hope of a phone call offering them a rock video to shoot. No, he couldn’t go back to that.

  He could, he supposed, try to scrape the money together to go off and look for the little bastard who had stolen his boat, but the Caribbean was a big place, and both the boat and Eddie Brynford-Smith might easily have different names now. He remembered the euphoric evening at the Blue Bar in Cannes when, in a haze of champagne, they had christened the elegant forty-five-foot yacht the Floating Pound and made their plans. Bennett had put up the money—all that he’d ever made from the production business—and Brynford-Smith was to take care of the chartering. He’d set off for Barbados with an all-girl crew, and hadn’t been heard from since. Bennett’s letters had gone unanswered, and when he’d called the Barbados Yacht Club, they’d never heard of the boat or its skipper. Fast Eddie had disappeared. In his darker moments, Bennett hoped he’d gone down nosefirst somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.

  And that, Bennett had to admit to himself, was the sum total of his current business opportunities: a backward step into commercials, or an expensive hunt for a floating needle in a watery haystack. It was time for some concentrated thought about his future. He decided to spend the rest of the day working on it at home, and cut across the N100 to take the steep, winding road that led up to the village.

  Saint-Martin was saved from being chic by its mayor, an old Communist with a deep distrust of government, the middle classes, and progress. It had been the last village in the Lubéron to have paved streets and water mains, and applications from eager foreigners to restore the crumbling, faded stone houses, some of them three or four hundred years old, were resisted with all the considerable influence that the mayor could bring to bear. Bennett would have voted for him just for that. He enjoyed living in a picturesque anachronism, virtually untouched by the hand of architect or decorator, the houses innocent of chintz, silk-covered walls, or lavatories on plinths. Winters in Saint-Martin were cold and quiet; in summer, the scent of thyme and lavender struggled against a persistent whiff of drains. Tourists came and went, but never stayed. There was nowhere to stay.

  Bennett’s house, in a narrow stepped alley at the end of the main street, had the overwhelming attraction of being almost free. It belonged to the village doctor, another bachelor, whom Bennett had met at a dinner party and who shared his interest in young women and old wines. The two had become friends, and when the doctor accepted a three-year posting to Mauritius, he had offered Bennett the house. The one condition was that the femme de ménage, a stalwart lady named Georgette, should continue as housekeeper.

  Bennett opened the scarred oak front door and flinched at the blare of Radio Monte Carlo coming from the kitchen—pop music seemingly imprisoned in the seventies and wailing to get out. His efforts to introduce Georgette to the joys of Mozart and Brahms had been decisively dismissed. Georgette liked le beat while she worked.

  All the furniture—simple, heavy, and dark—had been pushed back against the walls of the living room, and Georgette, on hands and knees, her rump swaying in time to the music, was attacking the already spotless floor tiles with a mixture of water and linseed oil. To her, the house was not so much a job as a hobby, a jewel to be scrubbed and polished and waxed and buffed. Dust was forbidden, untidiness a crime. Bennett had often thought that if he stood still long enough, he would be folded up and tucked neatly into a closet.

  He bellowed to be heard over the radio. “Bonjour, Georgette.”

  With a grunt, the kneeling figure stood up and turned to inspect him, hands on hips, a lick of black, silver-streaked hair escaping from the bright-yellow Ricard baseball cap that she wore for strenuous housework. Georgette was what the French would gallantly describe as a woman of a certain age, somewhere, in that mysterious period between forty and sixty. She matched the furniture in the house: low, heavyset, built to last. Her brown, seamed face was set in an expression of disapproval.

  “You’ve been drinking cognac
in bed again,” she said. “I found the glass on the floor. En plus, underwear and shirts thrown in the bidet, as if I haven’t got enough to do.” She flapped a hand at him. “Don’t stand there on the wet floor. There’s a tartine and coffee in the kitchen.”

  She watched as he tiptoed across the living room and into the gleaming microscopic kitchen, where a tray had been laid for breakfast: starched linen cloth, white coffee bowl, lavender honey, and a baguette sliced in half and spread with pale Normandy butter. Bennett switched on the percolator, modified the radio to a bearable volume, and bit into the warm crust of the bread. He poked his head through the kitchen door.

  “Georgette?”

  The baseball cap rose from its examination of the floor. “Now what?”

  “How long are you going to be? I was thinking of working at home today.”

  Another grunt, as Georgette sat back on her haunches and looked at him. “Impossible. Do you think the house cleans itself? It must be prepared for spring. Josephine is coming this morning to help with the turning of the mattress. Also Jean-Luc, with his ladder for the windows. Then there is the beating of the carpets.”

  She wrung out the floor cloth as though she were throttling a chicken. “You would be inconvenient. Besides, you can work in the café.” She frowned at Bennett’s feet and sniffed. “Drop your crumbs on the floor there.”

  Bennett withdrew, wiping his mouth guiltily. He knew himself to be a daily challenge to Georgette’s sense of neatness and order, but her liking for him was obvious from her actions. She might bully him as if he were a grubby schoolboy, but she took care of him like a prince—cooking for him, mending his clothes, fussing when he came down with flu—and he had once overheard her refer to him as “my little English milor.” Kind words and compliments addressed directly to him, however, were not part of the service, and when he left the house after breakfast, she shouted at him not to be back until the late afternoon, and to be sure to wipe his feet before coming into the house.