All That Man Is

by David Szalay

  The question was one for him as well. It seemed pretty obvious, anyway, what she had in mind.

  In the oppressive light of the lobby, though, the idea seemed silly. Somehow unpalatable. There was a short pause as they stood there.

  ‘I suppose we’d better get you a room,’ he heard himself say.

  To which, after a moment’s hesitation, she just nodded.

  And then he was at the desk, making the arrangements.

  And now he is in his own room, sitting on the bed.

  He pulls off his socks.

  He is tired, that’s true.

  Still.

  Might’ve been nice.

  There is a melancholy sense, as he takes off his socks, of opportunity lost.

  He wasn’t willing to make any effort to make it happen. It was the prospect of effort, more than anything, of even a minimal amount of effort, that had made the whole idea seem unappealing as they stood in the lobby.

  His friend Freddy would have put in the necessary effort. Obviously Freddy would have. Freddy, the last time they met, had told James proudly about how he had been playing the piano in a jazz quintet in Wales and after the show two members of the audience, a man and a woman, had asked him to join them for a drink. She was alright looking, Freddy said, so he had joined them, and they had had several drinks, and some lines of speed, and then they invited him to their place, where it was soon pretty obvious what they had in mind. Freddy was to fuck her while the husband watched, wanking. Thanks to the speed it went on for ever, Freddy said. It was daylight when he left.

  The story was a bit pathetic actually, James thinks, screwing up his used socks.

  Freddy was forty-five years old.

  Eking out an existence playing the piano at weddings, in wine bars. Sleeping on people’s sofas.

  ‘Don’t you worry?’ James would say to him.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About your life.’

  ‘What about it?’

  James took a moment to frame a more precise question. Then he said, ‘Whatever. Nothing.’

  Freddy was not as happy, not as entirely satisfied with his situation, as he made out. It wasn’t so much that he worried about being the cricket in the fable, exposed to the oncoming winter. (Though he was.) It was simpler than that. He wanted to be looked up to. He wanted status. When he was twenty-five, lurid sexual exploits did it for him – they won him that status among his envious peers. Now, not so much. They still felt flickers of envy on occasion, sure. They no longer wanted to be him though. He had no money, and the women he pulled these days were not, for the most part, very appealing.

  James is staring at his own face in the mirror as he moves the whirring, whirling head of the Braun electric about inside his mouth.

  His face has a dead-eyed flaccidity. A flushed indifference. He is looking at it as if it isn’t his own. He feels a definite distance between himself and the face in the mirror. The neon light – a bright lozenge on the wall – isn’t kind to it. He is drunk, slightly. Maybe more than slightly. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He silences the toothbrush, holds its head under the tap for a moment. Should’ve been here, thinking about what he plans to say to Noyer in the morning, not messing about with his PA.

  It’s not a joke.

  Life is not a fucking joke.

  3

  Cédric Noyer is a few years younger than James. There is something fogeyish about him though, something which finds visual expression in an incipient jowliness, a softening jawline, a dewlap of self-indulgence threatening his razor-scraped throat. He is wearing a Barbour. He is smoking a cigarette. Parked near him, where he stands in front of Les Chalets du Midi Apartments, is a mud-streaked Mitsubishi Pajero.

  He is the owner, James knows, of much land in the area. His father was a farmer – and still is, in a way. He still keeps a small herd, and the family income is swollen with agricultural subsidies. The land is the main thing now, though. The fields in and around Samoëns and Morillon; and, from Cédric’s mother’s side, further up the valley in Sixt.

  These apartments are the first development Cédric has undertaken himself. For many years, since the eighties, the family has been selling fields to developers – a hectare here, two hectares there – for prices that went steadily higher and higher. (The latest parcel, with planning permission, fetched well over a million euros.) It was Cédric, supported by his sister Marie-France, who pushed the idea of developing the land themselves – moving up the ‘value chain’, as he put it. He had learned the phrase at the École Supérieure de Commerce in Lyon. ‘I don’t just want to sell milk,’ he had said to his father, trying to put his ambition in terms the old man would understand. ‘I want to make cheese, lots of cheese.’

  He steps forward to shake James’s hand and offer him a brief supercilious smile – he treats him like a sort of servant, someone with a measure of technical expertise, like a plumber or a mechanic.

  He is very proud of his apartments, James sees that immediately.

  So he is tactful, as they inspect them together, the show flat first.

  Paulette is with them. A quiet presence this morning. She left the hotel very early in the morning, and drove home to Cluses. When she showed up again at nine she looked extremely tired.

  ‘Very nice,’ James says to Cédric, of the kitchen in the show flat. His tone is flat and polite, not enthusiastic. Cédric, wandering through the apartment in his Barbour and mustard-coloured corduroy trousers, does not seem to notice this.

  They stand on the balcony, admiring the view.

  ‘Magnifique,’ James says, more fulsomely.

  They are speaking French. The air has an autumnal feel this morning. The early mist has lifted. The sun is warmer now. Now. Do it now. Say something.

  ‘Do you have any other development plans?’ James asks, still staring at the dramatic mountain that hangs over the village.

  ‘Of course,’ Cédric says in a manner which suggests he is not minded to discuss the subject. The sun has raised a sweat on his smooth forehead. He lights an American cigarette.

  ‘I know you’ve been a bit unhappy with the service,’ James says.

  Cédric shrugs, still getting his fill of the view. ‘If you sell the flats, it’s okay,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, we’ll sell them,’ James assures him. ‘We’ll sell them. There won’t be a problem there.’

  ‘Then okay.’

  ‘No, why I mention it is,’ James says, ‘we’ve been focused mainly on the more traditional areas. I mean as a firm. Which is why we might not have been able to give you the time and attention you’re entitled to. Now we’re planning to start something more focused on some of the newer areas.’ There is a short pause. Then he says, ‘I’m planning to start something.’

  There it is.

  He’s said it.

  It’s out there.

  I’m planning to start something.

  Is Cédric even listening?

  James says, ‘I think there’s huge potential in some of the newer areas. I’m sure you agree.’

  ‘Of course.’ Cédric says this without looking at him.

  ‘So I want to focus on this area,’ James says. ‘Make something happen here. I think together we can make something happen here.’

  He is smiling.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you,’ he says, ‘about what other plans you have. Maybe get involved at an earlier stage. For instance, these flats,’ he tells him, ‘are fine. They’re very nice. I have to say, though, I think we can go upmarket with any future developments you have in mind. This is a stunning valley. It has a traditional feel unlike anywhere else I know in the French Alps. I mean the heritage aspect. Plus the ski infrastructure is improving all the time. There’s more money to be made from high-end stuff. We could do luxury here. Do you see what I’m saying?’

  He felt mortal, this morning, waking with a headache from the wine and aquavit, his lanky frame patched with sorenesses. A sort of weak milky light slipped through the c
urtains. Hardly enough to see his watch by.

  Time is slipping away.

  He is not young now.

  I am not young, he had thought, sitting there in the hotel with his hands in his lap, staring at the floor. When did that happen?

  He has started lately, the last year or two, to have the depressing feeling that he is able to see all the way to the end of his life – that he already knows everything that is going to happen, that it is all now entirely predictable. That was what he meant when he talked to Paulette about fate.

  And how many more opportunities, after this one, will there be to escape that?

  Not many.

  Maybe none.

  If indeed this is an opportunity. It seems it might not be, after all.

  Cédric is showing no interest in his proposal. Squinting in the sunlight, lifting the cigarette to his small mouth, he seems more interested in the light traffic passing, leaving the village on the road to Morillon, than in what James is telling him. Which is now that it will be necessary to invest more up front in the future to maximise the potential of the property. ‘There is more risk,’ he says. ‘If you want to offload some of that risk, we can find other investors to come in alongside you.’

  Cédric grunts, unenamoured with the idea.

  ‘Anyway,’ James says, trying not to feel discouraged, ‘let’s talk about what plans you have, and take it from there.’ He hands Cédric a business card, one of the new ones he’s had made. ‘I want you to call me,’ he says.

  When they have finished looking over the apartments, he stands Cédric a coffee in a promisingly chichi little place in the village. Watches him eat a pastry – a tarte aux fraises – breaking it up with the side of a fork.

  Paulette is still there, with an empty espresso cup, emailing.

  Cédric has now shown some interest in James’s pitch – has offered anyway to drive him around the valley and show him some of the sites he has in mind for development.

  And James is starting to think, while Cédric scrapes the crème anglaise from his plate with the side of the fork, about where he can find some money – a few million, let’s say – to put into French Alpine property. He has some numbers. People Air Miles knows. It is, indeed, all about who you know. That much is true. Matching money with opportunity, taking a percentage. Taking something for yourself.

  For about an hour, they drive through the valley. Cédric seems to own about half of it, keeps pointing to fields and saying they’re his.

  They stop at one of them. It is on a slope just above the old village, up where the houses thin out and the pasture starts. Cédric says his family have owned this land for eighty years – it was where the herd went when it first emerged from its winter quarters, until the snow melted higher up. Le pré du printemps, he says its name is. He seems to think it’s his most promising plot for development.

  ‘What are you planning then?’ James asks him.

  ‘Something like the other,’ Cédric says, meaning the Chalets du Midi Apartments.

  No, no. Forget that.

  Small- to medium-sized chalets, James thinks. Eight maybe, nicely spaced. And apartments, in the middle somewhere. Maybe ten apartments. Parking underneath. Leisure facilities. Everything high spec. Plenty of slate, zinc.

  He does some preliminary sums, standing there up to his knees in the tired summer grass.

  Cédric is smoking.

  ‘What about planning regulations?’ James asks him. ‘Do you know anyone who can help us with that?’

  It turns out Cédric’s aunt is the deputy mayor. His extended family is all over the local administration like ivy.

  ‘This is an excellent site,’ James says. He is looking down at the slate roofs of the village: disordered, monochrome, bright. It is eerily still now, the village, in the early afternoon. End of the season. Autumn dead here, nothing happening. Eagles turning over the shadow-filled deeps of the valley all day.

  And far away, the other side, smothered in forest, in shade.

  In silence.

  4

  Sunday morning. They are walking up Tranmere Road, past terraced houses, the windows of the front rooms sticking out like smug little paunches. Muscular black Audis, BMW estates, VW Touaregs are parked outside. The spaces that separate the houses from the pavement are marked off by low walls, sometimes a bit of thinning hedge. There is usually a metal gate, less than waist high. Then tiles to narrow front doors. It is fashionable, James notices, to have, in the pane of glass over the door, the house number as islands of dark transparency in a milky frosting.

  His own house has something similar. Not quite as posh – the numbers just stencilled onto the glass, not picked out as negative space in the frosting. It was already there when they moved in. Miranda was pregnant at the time. The house was a mess. Ancient gas fire in the front room. Overgrown garden. A crust of dust on all the surfaces inside. Someone’s parent had lived there, then died, and it was being sold. The price was well over half a million. It was shocking, how little you got for all that money – and all the way out here, in this windy low-lying part of London about which he knew nothing, with its prisons, and its playing fields.

  Its empty expanse of sky.

  They had taken the house in hand. Miranda had. Spaces opened up, painted pale colours. The garden paved, turfed, filled with daffodils. Halogen lights embedded everywhere, flooding on at the touch of a switch. Everything quite small, admittedly. The living room – the street hidden behind linen blinds – only two paces from end to end. The table in the kitchen unable to accommodate more than four. The nursery so tiny the window hardly fitted in the wall.

  And outside, the daffodils shivered, the clouds massed and dispersed in the sky.

  And that was five years ago.

  Time passes.

  ‘Tommy,’ James shouts, as his son gets too far ahead of him. ‘Tom.’

  They are at the end of Tranmere Road, where it meets Magdalen Road, and the primary school is, and further on Wandsworth cemetery, strung out along the railway line towards Clapham.

  Tom waits for him, and James takes his hand to cross the road.

  They arrive at the station, as James does every weekday morning. The names of places in Surrey scrolling across the information screen are as familiar to him as his dreams. They are part of him now, those names: New Malden, Surbiton, Esher …

  He arrived home on Friday night to find the kids asleep and his wife watching television, some panel show. Every few seconds: laughter. He joined her on the sofa, leaving his things in the narrow hall. He took off his shoes.

  Later, her shapes under the sheets.

  On Saturday, though, he was short-tempered.

  Last week, in high winds, a substantial piece of chimney fell off the house – stove in someone’s new Nissan Qashqai which was parked in front. An insurance nightmare. Miranda had been on the phone all week to the insurers, without much to show for it. Just to sort out the chimney, even that seemed problematic. He spent most of Saturday in the low bed under the sloping roof, peering at small print on a tablet screen, furious at having to spend his time on it. Tom sulking, damaging things. Alice wailing somewhere downstairs.

  The train passes through sunlight. Passes allotments. Ivied walls. For a moment, some sort of waterway, shiny like mercury under dark trees. Masses of tracks run parallel as they draw near Wimbledon.

  He is holding Tom’s hand when they step off the train onto the platform. People everywhere. District line trains waiting in the intermittent brightness as clouds swim overhead.

  Miranda’s parents are coming for lunch today, driving in from Newbury. Miranda is in the kitchen, preparing food. Some sort of Italian lamb dish, James thinks.

  Tom says, ‘Why are trees so high?’

  They are on the bus, the number 93, as it makes its way from Wimbledon station to the Common, up Wimbledon Hill Road.

  James considers the question.

  It is his part, this morning, to take himself and Tom off somewhere to be
out of the way while Miranda makes lunch, and Alice hangs in that harness thing which is supposed to keep her out of trouble.

  He says, ‘I suppose they’re trying to get as near to the sun as possible.’

  ‘Why?’

  Fond smiles from some of the people near them on the bus, which is not full. They are on the upper deck, near the front.

  ‘Well,’ James explains, ‘the sunlight makes them grow. They need it to grow.’

  Tom is looking with interest at the plane trees that line the road, loom leafy over the wide pavements. London Sunday, the hum of the place only slightly subdued. People walking down there, purposefully. James sees a man and a woman walking up the hill, the same way the bus is travelling – tall woman with dark mass of hair, long arms expressing something.

  ‘They need it to grow,’ Tom repeats, a stray moment of sunlight finding the leaves he is looking at.

  ‘That’s right,’ James tells him, pleased.

  Handsome red-brick houses here.

  And new developments of flats.

  Noyer. Never far from his thoughts.

  Then Wimbledon ‘village’. The High Street with its posh little shops – people energetically shopping – and what was once a village green. War memorial.

  Miranda’s parents will be on their way. They are fairly tweedy, Miranda’s parents. Members at Newbury Racecourse. The four of them went once. Hennessy Day. Fuck, that seems a long time ago. It seems like something from another life, that afternoon.

  Time passes.

  *

  The air sits thick and damp on the flat land of the common. There are people around – it is still summer, just, and the weekend. Ferns and bracken crackle as children rampage through their tired green fronds. Trees hang leafy limbs over dry bridleways. The showers that passed overnight just dampened the dust, and since dawn the sun has dried it. Falling through holes in the cloud cover, the sun is hot. It shines blinding white on the ponds.

  James follows his son further out into the quiet of the common, away from the places where people are playing football, and dogs are sprinting after sticks.

  He has been thinking, since Friday, whenever he has had time, about Noyer and the plot of land he showed him. He needs to come up with a plan himself, something he can present to Noyer, something obviously superior to his own idea of just plonking down a jumbo version of Les Chalets du Midi, full of shitty furniture. Eight chalets, was what James was thinking, and ten apartments.