Hotel Pastis Read online

  Unattached, healthy, and paper-rich with agency shares, he was in a position that many people would envy. As long as the business prospered, he would never be short of a few hundred thousand pounds, despite Caroline’s unlimited enthusiasm for spending money. He remembered the time when her American Express card had been stolen. He hadn’t reported the loss for weeks; the thief had been spending less than she normally did. Although she was going to be a continuing source of trouble and expense, she could always be paid off.

  His business life was less straightforward. The challenge of building an agency was over. It was built, and now it had to be maintained and fed constantly with new clients. A five million–pound account, which in the early days would have been the excuse for euphoric celebration, was now just another bone to toss to the City. The excitement had gone, to be replaced by well-rewarded drudgery.

  And then there was New York, and Ziegler. When Simon had been forced to follow the Saatchis and Lowe into America, he had done a share-swap deal with Global Resources, one of the most aggressive of the advertising conglomerates, run by one of the most unpleasant of men. Nobody admitted to liking Ziegler, but nobody could deny that he was effective. He seemed to be able to bully clients into the agency, to overpower them with promises of more sales and bigger profits. Simon had seen him in operation dozens of times, brutal to his subordinates and almost manic in his pursuit of clients. Fear was the club he used within the agency, overpaying and then terrorising his staff. Fear of a different kind—the fear of losing market share—was always the basis of his presentations. He could deliver a sixty-minute tirade on his favourite topic, “Selling is war, and those bastards are out to get you,” which was usually successful in making even the most sophisticated clients look nervously over their shoulders before increasing their budgets.

  Simon’s relationship with Ziegler had been described (not within their hearing, of course) as two dogs sharing a kennel that was too small. Each was jealous of his own territory. Each wanted the whole kennel—which in this case was the world—to himself. Their mutual dislike was camouflaged with the corporate politeness that fools nobody, carefully phrased memos bristling with needles and a stilted camaraderie whenever they were on public view together. The moment wasn’t right yet for a decisive fight, but it would come. Simon knew it, and the thought of it, which once would have stimulated him, just made him weary.

  Like many advertising men, he thought often and vaguely about leaving the business. But to do what? He had no desire to go into politics or to become a gentleman farmer or to jump over the fence and become a client, running a company that made beer or soap powder. Besides, what else paid like advertising? He might be in a rut, but it was a rut of considerable luxury, hard to give up without an overwhelmingly attractive alternative. And so he dealt with these moments of discontent as many of his colleagues dealt with them, by finding a new distraction—a faster car, a bigger house, another expensive hobby. Living well is not only the best revenge but the easiest.

  He had reached the long, rolling hills of the Burgundy countryside, and thought about stopping at Chagny to have lunch at Lameloise. Dangerous. He stopped instead at a service station, had a cup of bitter coffee, and looked at the map. He could be in Avignon by mid-afternoon, sitting in the shade of a plane tree with a pastis, the back of the journey broken. He filled up the Porsche and continued south.

  As the names flicked by—Vonnas, Vienne, Valence—the light became brighter and the sky seemed to expand, blue and endless, the countryside harsher with rock and stunted scrub oak. In the vineyards cut out of the hills, small, scattered groups of figures, their backs bent under the sun, were gathering the first grapes of the harvest. This was Côtes-du-Rhône country, producing solid wine for people with outdoor thirsts and appetites. Simon looked forward to his first bottle.

  The sign for Avignon came up and flashed by while he was trying to decide whether to go down to the coast as he’d planned or to take Murat’s advice. Prochaine Sortie Cavaillon. Why not? He could always move on tomorrow if he didn’t like it.

  He turned off at the Cavaillon exit and crossed the bridge over the Durance, more of a trickle than a river after the summer drought. As he came into town, he saw the café tables under the trees, brown faces, cool golden glasses of beer. He parked the Porsche, eased his back, and went through the minor acrobatics necessary to get out. After the tinted glass and the air conditioning of the car, the glare and the heat came like a sudden shock. He felt the sun hit his head with a force that made him wince. In Paris, it had been autumn; here it was still like August.

  He could have closed his eyes and known from the smell of the café that he was in France—black tobacco, strong coffee, and the sharp tang of aniseed from the glasses of pastis on the bar. The men playing cards at the table, most of them in sleeveless vests and faded, shapeless caps, looked up at him through the smoke of their cigarettes, and he was aware of his clean, out-of-place clothes.

  “Bière, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Bouteille ou pressiong?” The barman’s voice was throaty, his accent thick. It sounded like French, but not the French of Paris, or even the coast. It twanged.

  Simon took his Kronenbourg and sat by the window. Every other vehicle passing by seemed to be a huge truck, grunting and hissing its way through the traffic, loaded with the fruit and vegetables that Provence grew with such abundance. Simon listened to the voices around him and wondered how his French was going to cope with the swirling verbal syrup. He realised that for the first time in years, nobody knew exactly where he was. He himself didn’t know where he was going to be spending the night, and it pleased him to think that he was just another anonymous stranger.

  A boy came into the café selling newspapers, and Simon bought a copy of Le Provençal. The main story on the front page was a boules tournament, and the rest of the paper was filled with news of the local villages—a fête in Lourmarin, a wine tasting in Rognes, more boules tournaments. Despite its modern layout and excitable headlines, it had an old-fashioned, almost sleepy air about it after the British press.

  Simon finished his beer. Where had Murat told him to head for? Apt? He left the coolness of the café, watched again by the card players, and went back to the Porsche. It was being inspected by three boys, and he saw one of them stroke the fat curve of the wheel arch tentatively, as if the car might bite. The boys stepped back as they saw Simon, and watched him open the door.

  “Ça gaze, monsieur?” The bravest boy craned his head to look inside the cockpit.

  “Oui.” Simon pointed to the speedometer. “Deux cent quarante. Même plus.”

  The little boy shook his hand as though he’d burnt his fingers. “Ça boum, alors.”

  As Simon drove off, all of them shook their hands at him, three brown, grinning monkeys. He eased into the traffic and followed the road under the railway bridge towards Apt. On his right, behind the forest of billboards that sprout on the fringes of most provincial French towns, he could see a low, grey-green shape that rose away into the distance, the lower slopes of the Lubéron mountains. He turned off the air conditioning and pulled over to take the top down. It was four-thirty, the sun warm on his shoulders, the breeze in his hair. He’d have dinner on a quiet terrace somewhere. Life was getting better.

  He turned off the N-100 road to escape from local Grand Prix drivers determined to overtake a Porsche, and followed a narrow road that twisted up into the hills. He could see, far above him, the bleached stone and old tiled roofs of a village, and he dropped down a gear to accelerate. Maybe there would be a little auberge with a fat cook and a terrace overlooking the mountains.

  As he rounded a blind, steep bend, he had to stamp on the brake to avoid running into the tractor that was taking up the centre of the road. The tractor’s driver looked down at Simon, his brick-red face impassive beneath his cap. He jerked his thumb at the large container he was towing, filled with a purple pile of grapes. He shrugged his heavy shoulders. He wasn’t going to rev
erse.

  Simon backed off the road into a field, and heard something grate under the back of the car—a noise that any Porsche owner knows and dreads, an expensive noise. Shit. The tractor driver raised his hand and drove off while Simon was getting out of the car.

  He looked at the remains of his exhaust pipe, mangled and hanging by a strut, jammed against a rock half-concealed in the grass. He continued up the hill gingerly, in bottom gear, the dangling exhaust scraping noisily against the road.

  The village of Brassière-les-Deux-Eglises (winter population 702, summer population approximately 2,000) is balanced precariously on the crest of a foothill below the southern slope of Mont Ventoux. It has two churches, one café, a butcher, a baker, a mairie that is open for two hours on Tuesday afternoons, an épicerie, a two-pump Citroën garage, and a magnificent view of the Lubéron to the south. Apart from plans (which have been under discussion for four years) to install a public WC, there is no provision for the tourist trade. The regular summer visitors have their own highly restored houses in the village, but these stay shuttered and empty for ten months a year.

  The Porsche limped up to the garage and stopped. Simon could hear the sound of a radio coming from the small workshop. He stepped over a large greasy Alsatian sleeping in the sun and looked into the dark shambles of Garage Duclos. The proprietor’s oily canvas boots were visible, tapping together in time to the music from the radio. The rest of him was under a Citroën van. Simon knocked on the van’s door, and Duclos rolled into view on a low trolley.

  He lay there, looking up, a wrench in one blackened hand, a rag in the other. “Oui?”

  “Monsieur, bonjour. J’ai un petit problème.”

  “Comme tout le monde.” Duclos sat up and wiped his hands. “Alors, qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Ma voiture …”

  Duclos levered himself off his trolley and took out a packet of Bastos as they went out to the Porsche. Simon’s vocabulary, he realised, didn’t include exhaust pipes, so he crouched down and pointed. Duclos crouched beside him, dragging on his cigarette. The dog got up and joined them, pushing his way between them to sniff the back wheel of the Porsche thoughtfully before lifting his leg against it.

  “Filou! Va t’en!” Duclos cuffed the dog away and bent forward for a closer look at the hanging, bent pipe. “Putain.” He reached out and tapped the twisted metal and shook his head. “Il faut le remplacer.” Another reflective drag on his cigarette. “Beh oui. C’est foutu.”

  But, as he explained to Simon, a spare part for such a car—a German car, not at all common in these parts—would take time. A new exhaust assembly would have to be ordered from Avignon, maybe even from Paris. Two days, three days. And then there was the fitting. Could monsieur come back at the end of the week? By then, normalement, it would be done.

  Simon’s first reaction was to make a phone call. All problems in life could be solved with a phone call. But whom could he call, and what good would it do? It was late afternoon, and the village didn’t look the kind of place to have a resident taxi. He was stranded. Duclos looked at him and shrugged. Simon smiled at him and shrugged back. He was, after all, on holiday.

  He took his bags from the Porsche and walked up to the tiny village square. Four sun-wizened old men were playing boules in front of the café—Le Sporting, it said in washed-out blue letters above the door—and Simon dumped his bags by a tin table and went into the bar.

  It was empty except for the flies buzzing over the dented ice cream cabinet in one corner. Plastic-topped tables and an assortment of old chairs were arranged haphazardly around the room, and behind the long zinc bar a fly curtain made from what looked like dead caterpillars hung in a doorway, turning slowly in the warm, quiet air. Well, Simon thought, it’s not the Ritz. He strolled over to the wide plate-glass window at the end of the room and whistled softly at the view.

  It was full south, overlooking a long, flat plain that ended at the foot of the Lubéron, perhaps five miles away. The evening sunlight, slanting in from the west, made shadows of deep black in the folds of the mountain, contrasting with the lighter haze, somewhere between purple and grey, of the rock face, and the green of pine and oak trees. Down on the plain, the orderly lines of vines were broken up by scattered farm buildings that might have been painted onto the landscape, flat and sharp and glowing. A toy tractor, bright yellow, moved silently along the black ribbon of road. Everything else was motionless.

  “Monsieur?”

  Simon looked round and saw a girl behind the bar. He ordered a pastis, and smiled at the memory of what Murat had said; here she was, just as he’d described her—the ripe young Provençale with the dark eyes and olive skin. She reached up to fill his glass from one of the bottles fixed behind the bar, and Simon watched the flicker of muscles on her bare arms. Murat would have been over the bar with a rose between his teeth by now.

  “Merci, mademoiselle.” Simon topped up his glass with water and went outside. It was curious how much he enjoyed pastis in the heat of southern France, and how he never drank it anywhere else. He remembered ordering it once in the Connaught, and it didn’t taste the same at all. But here it was perfect—sweet and sharp and heady. He took a mouthful and thought about the unusual position he found himself in.

  He had no car, no hotel reservation—and, from the look of the village, no hotel. No Liz, no Ernest. He was on his own, cut off from the human support system that normally took care of the daily details of his life. But, rather to his surprise, he found that he was enjoying the novelty of it all. Alone in a foreign wilderness, with nothing between him and starvation except a wallet stuffed to bursting with five hundred–franc notes. It was hardly a major catastrophe. In any case, it was impossible to feel depressed here, watching the old men laugh and argue over their boules.

  The girl came out of the café and saw his empty glass. She came over to the table, walking in the loose, indolent way of people who live in the sun.

  “Un autre?”

  “Merci.” She smiled at him, and he watched her walk away, hips rolling lazily under her short cotton skirt, her down-at-heel espadrilles slapping softly against her feet. Simon wondered what she’d look like in twenty years’ time, if the peach would turn into a prune.

  When she came back, he asked her if there was anywhere nearby he could stay for the night.

  She made the classic French grimace—eyebrows up, lips pushed forward and turned down. “Beh non.” There was the gîte of Madame Dufour, but that was closed now until Easter. Or there were hotels in Gordes. She waved a brown arm over towards the west, as though Gordes were on the very rim of civilisation, a thousand miles away.

  The problem, said Simon, was that he had no way of getting to Gordes.

  “Ah bon.” The girl thought for a moment, biting her lower lip with small white teeth. “Attends. Je vais chercher Maman.”

  Simon heard the girl calling her mother, and then a loud, rapid exchange that he couldn’t follow.

  Maman appeared, a vast billow of a woman in a floral dress and carpet slippers, the girl following behind. She beamed at Simon, gold teeth glinting beneath the faint shadow of a moustache. “Ah, ce pauvre monsieur.” She lowered herself until she had engulfed the chair next to Simon and leaned towards him, emanating garlic and goodwill. All was not lost, she said. Monsieur would not be obliged to pass the night under the tree in the village square. There was a room over the café, pas grand’ chose, but clean. Monsieur could stay there, and since there was no restaurant in the village, he could eat with them en famille. Three hundred francs, including the use of the family shower. Voilà. It was settled.

  Simon took his bags and followed the girl up two flights of narrow stairs, trying unsuccessfully not to be mesmerised by the hips swaying a few inches from his face. Close your eyes and think of Mum’s moustache. They reached a tiny landing, and the girl opened a door and led him into a room that was very little bigger, an attic with a low, steeply pitched ceiling, twilight-dark and as hot as an ove
n. “Ça chauffe, eh?” The girl opened the window, and then the shutters, letting in the view that Simon had admired earlier. He looked at the room—a single bed, a bare bulb hanging above it, worn linoleum on the floor. It reminded him of the junior dormitory when he had been at boarding school. Except for the view.

  “Formidable,” he said. He put down his bags and stretched.

  “C’est pas un grand lit, mais vous êtes seul.” The girl smiled.

  “Malheureusement, oui.” Simon found himself shrugging, the contagious tic of France.

  The girl became businesslike. Dinner was in an hour, in the kitchen. The bathroom was on the floor below, through the blue door. If there was anything else monsieur needed, she and Maman would be downstairs.

  Simon thought about the phone and decided not to bother until tomorrow. He unpacked and went to look for the blue door and a shower.

  The plumbing arrangements of the French, a nation of great ingenuity and style, often come as a shock to foreigners who are used to concealed pipes, discreetly muted lavatory flushes, and firmly anchored taps, and Simon spent a few minutes working out how the flimsy but complicated arrangement of pipes and nozzles worked. He finally succeeded in showering by sections with a hand-held rubber contraption that alternated between scalding and freezing water, to the accompaniment of gurgling echoes from the pipes. A sign on the back of the bathroom door, stolen from a hotel on Lake Annecy, caught his eye as he was leaving the bathroom:

  The Management Welcomes Dogs.

  They Do Not Clean Their Shoes on

  the Curtains, or Make Pipi in the Bidet.

  We Ask Our Amiable Clientele to

  Follow Their Example.

  He went downstairs and followed the sound of conversation coming from the kitchen. A long table, covered in checked oilcloth, was set for four, with litre bottles of wine and water, a giant baguette, a basin-sized plastic bowl filled with salad, and, at one end, a television with the sound turned down. Maman and the girl were rubbing steaks with olive oil and cloves of garlic, and washing his hands at the sink was the man with the brick-red face Simon had last seen driving a tractor. Papa.