by David Szalay
‘Fine. We need one of those. We need a shop that sells nice cheese. It’s important to the sort of people we’re dealing with. Their idea of what buying a property in France involves. La douceur de vivre. What time is it?’
She looks at her watch and says, ‘Nearly quarter to eleven.’
‘Mind giving me a lift up top?’ he asks. ‘I’d better have a look at the infrastructure up there, I suppose. So I can at least pretend I know what I’m talking about.’ He smiles. ‘Then we’ll have lunch.’
They leave the way they arrived yesterday, down the little avenue of linden trees. Immediately after leaving the village, though, they take a small turn-off that zigzags steeply up into the forest. She shifts from second to third to second as they take the steep turns.
Moves into fourth for a kilometre of open pasture. Sun. Farmhouse with deep eaves, time-blackened.
Then some more houses, almost a village.
All this land – what’s it worth? Fortunes here.
And more forest, then. And views, sometimes, through the trees, as they turn, and turn, of the valley, now falling away.
Second, third. Third, second, third. Her thin, tanned arm is permanently in action. Her elegantly sandaled foot. (Well-maintained toenails, he notices – hard pink shine like the inside of a shell.)
It takes twenty minutes to drive to the top.
‘Ah,’ he says, as they emerge from a final stretch of hugging shade and everything seems to open out. There is a lot of tarmac, suddenly, and further up, a major development, not so new – flats, a hotel maybe. Huts, houses. She parks on an empty expanse of tarmac in the shadow of the flats, and switches off.
There is no one around. Standing there in the sunlight he hears the throb of the pastures. And when the wind blows a quiet singing from overhead cables. Otherwise silence.
‘So, tell me about this,’ he says.
She starts talking about ski lifts and pistes.
Only half-listening to her, he has walked to the edge of the tarmac. Slopes fall away in slow undulations. There is a shuttered crêperie. The hum of insects. The ice-edged wind. And from somewhere, the lazy sound of cowbells, a sound like a spoon stirring something in a glass.
She is talking about ski school, École du Ski Français.
Yes, he knows memories of that. Long ago, that was. Snowploughing in line behind the vermilion uniform. Foggy day. Wet snow.
He feels the sun on his eyelids. The wind on his skin. Hands. Face.
With his eyes shut, he hears the cowbells, fading in and out on the wind.
Life has become so dense, these last years. There is so much happening. Thing after thing. So little space. In the thick of life now. Too near to see it.
The sun on his eyelids.
Cowbells fading in and out on the wind.
Warmth of the sun.
Wind on his skin.
To withdraw, somehow, to just this.
Hopeless.
It’s not a joke. Life is not a joke.
He opens his eyes.
Shimmering grass, shivering.
She says, ‘Eighty per cent of the slopes are north facing. The spring skiing here is particularly nice.’
This is it. This is his life, these things that are happening.
This is all there is.
She is standing next to him, quite near him.
‘Yes?’ he says. ‘How much is there? Skiing. Kilometres.’
‘Including the whole Grand Massif?’
‘Whatever.’
‘About two hundred and sixty kilometres.’
‘Wow.’
She says, ‘Including Flaine, Morillon, Les Carroz, Sixt and Samoëns.’
‘And they’re all interlinked, with lifts?’
‘Of course.’
‘One pass covers them all?’
‘You can get it,’ she tells him.
‘Okay,’ he says. Nice to have some facts.
For a moment he shuts his eyes again but there is nothing there now.
*
Lunch. A few minor confidences over a pizza. She was at art school in London. Then dropped out …
‘Why?’ he asks.
‘I fell in love.’
‘Love,’ he says. ‘It messes everything up, doesn’t it?’
‘You’re very cynical.’
‘Yes, I probably am,’ he admits.
‘Isn’t love the whole point?’
‘The whole point of what?’
‘Of life.’
‘So I’ve heard. What did you do then?’ he asks. ‘After you dropped out.’
She found a job as an estate agent.
So they talk about estate agenting – he did that too, once. And is doing it again now. ‘That seems to be my fate,’ he says.
‘Do you believe in fate?’ she asks, amused.
‘I do now,’ he says.
‘I don’t.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ he says. ‘You’re too young.’
She laughs at that. ‘Young?’
‘How old are you?’
She is twenty-nine.
‘I would have said twenty-five.’
‘Ach,’ she says, pleased.
He smiles.
‘How old are you?’
‘I am forty-four.’
‘And when did you start believing in fate?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
He is enjoying talking to her – there is something fresh and straightforward about her – so he tries to think of something else to say, something which is true. He says, ‘When I woke up one morning and realised it was too late to change anything. I mean, the big things.’
‘I don’t think it’s ever too late to change things,’ she says.
He just smiles. And he thinks: That’s the thing about fate, the way you only understand what your fate is when it’s too late to do anything about it. That’s why it is your fate – it’s too late to do anything about it.
‘So it’s something that only exists in hindsight?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘So it doesn’t really exist?’
‘Does that follow? I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’m not a philosopher.’
‘Are you happy?’ she asks, putting ketchup on the last slice of her pizza.
‘Yes, I think so. It depends what you mean. I don’t have everything I want.’
‘Is that your definition of happiness?’
‘What’s yours?’ And then, while she thinks about it, he says, ‘I don’t have a definition of happiness. What’s the point?’
‘You must know whether you’re happy or not.’
‘I’m not unhappy,’ he says, and then wonders whether even that is true.
‘That’s not the same thing,’ she says.
‘And you?’ he asks. ‘Are you? Happy.’
‘No,’ she says, without hesitation. ‘I mean, my life isn’t where I want it to be.’
He wonders whether to ask her where she wants her life to be, whatever that means. Then he decides, after taking a sip of water, to leave it at that.
They talk about skiing.
After lunch they walk together to Les Chalets du Midi Apartments. Autumnal pink is starting to appear in the neat beech hedges that line the clean streets of the village. ‘Now I’ve got to do my thing,’ he says.
‘Now that I am looking forward to seeing.’
He laughs.
That he only met her yesterday seems strange suddenly.
*
The valley brims with heat. Not a cloud in the sky.
After he has shown them the flats, they all sit down on the terrace of a place in the main square, the Bar Samoëns. This is him ‘doing his thing’.
There are plastic tables and chairs outside, and he supervises the waitress as she puts two tables together for their largeish party. Then he takes everyone’s order.
Paulette, he finds, is sitting next to him. He smiles at her. ‘Alright?’ he says.
She nods.
/> Then he is doing his thing again.
‘Now that tree,’ he says, deploying with some authority a factoid he has only just learned himself, ‘is one of the oldest trees in France. Nearly, I think, seven hundred years old.’
Heads turn.
Its trunk is two metres wide, obese. Up among the big mossy boughs the leaves have, in places, already turned orange.
‘What sort of tree is it?’ someone asks.
‘A lime, I think?’ James turns to Paulette.
‘Yes, it’s a lime,’ she says. ‘It was planted by a famous Duke of Savoy.’
‘A Duke of Savoy,’ James echoes. ‘This whole village is so full of history,’ he says. ‘I love it here.’
Someone has left the table and is inspecting a plaque at the tree’s foot.
‘1438,’ this pedant, a shortish middle-aged man, shouts over to them, pointing at the plaque. He is very sensibly dressed in waterproof fabrics that make a lot of noise when he moves, and walking shoes with spongy laces. ‘So actually less than six hundred years old then,’ he points out, taking his seat again, next to his equally sensible wife.
‘A mere sapling,’ James declares, to some laughter from the others.
The drinks arrive.
‘Still,’ the man says, ‘I can’t believe that makes it one of the oldest trees in France. Less than six hundred years old?’
James decides to ignore him. He helps the waitress distribute the drinks.
‘There’s this olive tree,’ the pedant is telling the others, ‘it’s like two thousand years old …’
Pensioners, the pedant and his wife. Might even be thinking of moving down here full-time, James understands. Selling their little flat in Stoke Newington, swapping it for the penthouse of Les Chalets du Midi Apartments. They speak French the way Air Miles speaks it – James heard Mrs Pedant asking for the loo – not so much with an English accent as in English. They speak French in English. Like Air Miles, the old-school way.
James passes Pedant his straw-pale Alpine lager.
‘Merci,’ Pedant says. ‘Monsieur.’
‘Where else have you been looking?’ James asks him.
‘Oh, all over the place, really,’ the man says, with a moustache of foam. ‘We’re just sort of driving around. You know.’
Arnaud (London-based Frenchman, there with his partner Marcus) asks, ‘What can you tell us about the skiing?’
‘It’s fabulous,’ James says.
‘You have skied here?’ Arnaud asks him.
There is a minuscule hiatus. Then James says, ‘I haven’t personally, no. Paulette’s the expert there. She can tell you all about it. I mean,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to sit here and pretend it’s Verbier or anything. It’s properly serious, though. I mean, with the whole, er, Massif. There’s something like two hundred and fifty kilometres of pistes. One pass for the lot. And up at Flaine, it goes up to what – two eight, two nine?’
Paulette says, ‘Two thousand five hundred. More or less.’
‘Okay,’ James murmurs.
She says, ‘No, there’s always snow there. It’s wonderful, the skiing here.’
She talks about it for a while.
James watches her, her eyebrows jumping about above her sunglasses as she tries to be enthusiastic. She’s a bit stilted, to be honest. She’s doing an anecdote now – something about skiing – and not doing it very well. It happened over lunch too. Somehow it touched him, the way she killed those anecdotes. Tells them too slowly, or something. She’s just not very funny. Not in this sort of setting.
She’s losing these people now. The nice ones are kind of willing her on, with fixed smiles. Some of the others are starting to look away. So she’s hurrying it, which is just making it worse.
She’s starting to laugh at it herself, even though no one else is.
Shit, now she’s missed something out, something important, and has to go back and explain.
James looks up into the branches of the old lime, sun-filled leaves.
She has arrived, finally, at the end of the anecdote. It just ends.
Then people notice, and there are some polite sniggers.
And Mrs Pedant, in her seat again, wants milk for her tea.
While Paulette leaps up to see to that – in thanking her James laid a hand for a moment on her arm – he talks some more to the others about how lovely the area is, doing his thing, in lilac shirt and sunglasses, handsome, at ease.
Seemingly at ease.
He pays for the drinks. Then he takes them to the cheese shop, and talks them through the immense selection. One or two timid purchases – avoiding the most odorous examples – are made.
Outside, he says, ‘We’ll be around later, if anyone wants to get some supper. I know some of you are staying locally, and there are some fabulous places in the village we’d be happy to show you. Why don’t we meet in the place on the main square at sevenish, if anyone wants to do that? Okay?’
There is a sense, as always, of acting.
And then, when the performance is finished and the audience has wandered away through the twisting streets of the village, this tinge of euphoria, this punchy energy.
They are standing in front of the fromagerie.
James says, ‘Drink?’
‘I think that went well, don’t you?’ he asks her, when they are sitting on the terrace of the Bar Samoëns again.
‘Very.’
‘I think there’s at least one sale in there, with that lot,’ he says.
She asks who he thinks it might be.
‘Well, Arnaud and Marcus,’ he says. ‘I think they may well take the plunge. Thanks for saving me on the skiing, by the way.’
‘You’re very welcome,’ Paulette says.
James shakes his head, with a sort of mock exasperation that makes her laugh. ‘Fuck. That was so embarrassing, when he asked me whether I’d skied here myself.’
‘What about the Knottbars?’ she asks. The Knottbars – Mr and Mrs Pedant.
‘Them?’ James makes a face. ‘No. Don’t think so. I’m not sure how serious they are. Not very, would be my guess.’
They spend a while taking the piss out of them, the Knottbars – James at one point scampering over to the ancient lime tree, as Mr Knottbar did, and shoving his finger at the plaque.
Walking back to the table where Paulette is laughing, her index finger held in a sort of hook shape over her mouth, he decides he must be slightly drunk, to have done that. Sweating lightly with the exertion, he sits and looks at his watch. ‘Another one?’ he suggests.
She nods, and he signals to the waitress.
Seven o’clock. No one turns up. They wait until twenty past, sitting in the twilight. Then James says, ‘Well … Looks like there aren’t any takers for supper. Do you want to get something? Or do you have to head off?’
They end up in a restaurant in one of the narrow streets that wander away from the main square, narrow between tall stone houses.
It is only after the meal, after all that Savoyard wine and a sample of the local aquavit, that it occurs to him: ‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’ he asks, as they leave.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
They are standing in the dark street. She says, ‘I don’t know.’
Leaving the question open, they start to walk towards his hotel. She is wearing his jacket over her dress – the temperature has dropped precipitously since they sat down to a meal that had turned extremely flirty.
For instance, the way he touched, at her invitation, the scar on her lip. (A spill from a moped had put it there, she told him, when she was fourteen.) The scar had started, at some point while they sat on the terrace of the Bar Samoëns, to mildly fixate him. It had distracted him throughout the early part of the meal.
He touched it lightly with his fingertip, and wondered out loud what it might be like to kiss it. And though she didn’t say, ‘Why don’t you try?’ he had had t
he feeling that she might have done if she’d had the nerve.
Instead she just looked at him, and he noticed how huge and earnest her hazel eyes were, and suggested they have a digestif.
That all took place in French. After the first half-litre of Mondeuse he had insisted on switching to French. And then he had had to explain why he spoke French so well – about how his father had lived in France when he was at school, and how he had spent all the school holidays there, in Paris or in the South. And she had asked him – with a sort of shining-eyed seriousness – whether he had had any homosexual experiences at boarding school in England, and he had said that no, he hadn’t. The idea that that was widespread was, he told her, a myth. And then she had volunteered a pretty vivid story about an experience of her own, once, with another woman, while he felt his mouth drying out and poured them some more wine.
What she hadn’t asked him was whether he was married or anything like that, and he had also avoided the subject.
She, it turned out, was a single mother. Her son’s father lived in Norway.
And so, after a second aquavit and a shared dessert, they found themselves outside under the stars.
Which they looked up at for a minute, standing there in the street, looking up between the dark eaves of the houses at the sky.
It did occur to him, since she was the one who had started it, that this was in fact practically an invitation to kiss her. (She was waiting there, with her face tilted upwards, shivering slightly.) And he did, with the wine and aquavit singing in his veins, sort of want to kiss her.
For a moment he felt that he was about to. And then he felt he wasn’t. He looked at the dark street. The village was very quiet. She was still searching the sky.
He said, ‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’
He saw, as soon as he had said it, that the question would sound suggestive – that it would sound as if he actively wanted her to spend the night in the village.
She lowered her face to look at him tipsily, straight at him. ‘No, of course not.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
‘You don’t know?’
She shook her head.
Another moment: the wine and aquavit singing in his veins.
Without saying anything else, they started to walk towards his hotel.
So what are you going to do?