Hotel Pastis

by Peter Mayle

  “I’ll tell Mr. Shaw you popped in.”

  “Sure. Nice talking to you, Ernie. Stay loose, you hear?”

  Ernest stood at the door and watched him stand on his pedals as he rode away. What an engaging young man, he thought, and apparently quite unspoiled, not at all what you’d expect a billionaire’s son to be. Some of his language was a little puzzling, though. “Stay loose”? Ernest shook his head and went back to his office.

  Nicole and Simon, flushed and guilty from an afternoon in bed, arrived at the hotel to find Françoise and Ernest pinned against the wall by a small and irate woman. Simon recognised her as the voyeur’s wife from next door. His smile was met by a frigid nod. Madame had reason to believe that one of the hotel guests had been exposing herself to the sun virtually naked. Simon’s attempts to look horrified and persuade madame that it was simply a flesh-coloured swimsuit were cut short by the appearance of a French guest, red-faced and indignant. He demanded that Ernest do something about the voyeur who had been staring at his wife over the wall and who refused to budge. Incroyable!

  There was a moment of silence when the protagonists realised they were standing side by outraged side, and then they turned away from each other to continue hissing their complaints at the assembled management.

  “Impudent voyeur!”

  “Nudiste!”

  “Insupportable!”

  “Scandaleux!”

  Simon led madame gently towards the door, nodding with all the solemnity he could muster, while Ernest did the same in the opposite direction with the husband. Nicole and Françoise melted away into the office, with faces kept resolutely straight. When Simon joined them some minutes later, he didn’t look like a man who had achieved a convincing diplomatic victory.

  “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” he said to them. “This is a crisis of morality. Madame told me it was.”

  “What can we do?”

  “God knows. I offered to build a higher wall, but she said it would block their light.”

  Françoise giggled. “Buy her husband a shorter ladder.”

  Simon tapped his forehead. “Of course. How wonderful it is to have a logical French mind.”

  He and Nicole went to join Ernest, who had mollified the husband with the hotelier’s secret weapon, champagne for two, and was now humming happily as he made minuscule adjustments to the table settings in the restaurant. He told them about Boone Parker’s visit—such a pleasant young man, and most impressively built—and then took a letter from his pocket. “This came, just addressed to the hotel, but I think it’s for you.” He passed it to Simon. “Do you have an artistic uncle? You’ve been keeping him very quiet if you have.”

  Simon looked at the large, manic handwriting on a sheet of paper headed “Pensione San Marco”:

  Hello you young bugger,

  News of your establishment has reached me here in Venice, where the muse and I are sharing the celestial views with 50,000 Japanese tourists. Painting is quite impossible. I long for light and space, the scent of thyme and lavender, a glimpse of honeyed skin, the rude vista or rock reaching eternally upwards to the unbearable blue of the sky. Ah, Provence!

  I have sufficient funds for a railway ticket to Avignon, and will advise time of arrival so that suitable arrangements can be made. There is no need for me to return home to Norfolk immediately, and so we will have ample time to renew the precious relationship that I cherish above all others.

  Until soon, as you say in France!

  Your affectionate uncle,

  William

  P.S. I am now called, by some of the more enlightened art critics, “The Goya of Norfolk.” It would be false modesty on my part to quarrel with them. Bring on the reclining nudes, dear boy! My brushes bristle with anticipation.

  “Shit.” Simon passed the letter to Nicole. “I don’t think I told you about him, did I?”

  Nicole frowned over the letter. “Is he a famous artist, this uncle?”

  “Not as famous as he’d like. I see him about once every three or four years, and he’s always broke, usually on the run from some widow he’s promised to marry.…” Simon paused and looked at Ernest. “We can’t let him take up a room here for long. He’d think he’d died and gone to heaven. We’d never get rid of him.”

  “In that case, dear,” Ernest said, “we’d better find him a widow, hadn’t we? Is he presentable, Uncle William?”

  Simon thought back to the last time he’d seen his uncle, looking like an unmade bed in an ancient corduroy suit, an army surplus shirt, and a threadbare Marylebone Cricket Club tie, smelling of whisky and turpentine. “Not in a conventional way, Ern, no. But women seem to like him.”

  “Ah. Then there may be hope. Cherchez la veuve, Nicole.” Ernest waved at a couple going up from the pool to change for dinner. “I must fly. We’re fully booked tonight—le tout Lubéron has heard about dear Madame Pons.” He gave a final tweak to the nearest tablecloth and went off towards the kitchen.

  “There is a man,” said Nicole, “who has found his métier. He’s so happy. They all love him, you know.”

  “It’s strange. We’ve changed places. It’s the complete opposite of how it was in London. I almost feel I have to make an appointment to see him. Do you know what he said to me? ‘We must have lunch one day, and a chat.’ Saucy old sod.” Simon laughed. “That’s exactly what I used to say to him.”

  “Does that worry you?”

  Simon looked down at her face: the half-smile didn’t quite go with her serious eyes. “Oh, I’ll get used to it.”

  Nicole reached up to straighten the rumpled collar of his shirt. How could a man become untidy just by walking around? “If it worries you, you must talk about it. Don’t be so English.”

  “Right.” He leered at her, put his hands under her buttocks, and lifted her off the ground, burying his face in her neck. A waiter coming out of the kitchen stopped in his tracks, muttered “Bon appétit,” and reversed back through the door.

  It wasn’t surprising, Simon thought later, that so many people had daydreams about owning a restaurant. He looked around the terrace. Every seat was taken; animated brown faces shone in the candlelight; laughter and conversation disappeared upwards into the sky; and Ernest, squatting on his haunches so that his clients wouldn’t have to look up to talk to him, visited one contented table after another. It all looked so easy. Nobody, observing this panorama of relaxed enjoyment, could imagine the effort, the controlled panic in the kitchen, that had gone into producing it—sliced fingers, singed skin, split-second sauces, sweat, curses and spills, and always, before coming out of chaos into public view, the resumption of the calm expression, the steady hand, and the solicitous, unhurried patience that is the hallmark of the good waiter.

  Simon tried to put nationalities to faces, according to stereotype. The group of brawny, overtanned, and overjewelled men and women who had ordered Bordeaux rather than local wine should be German—prosperous, large, and loud. Any table giving off a cloud of cigarette smoke should be French, just as a table of nonsmokers, with more water being drunk than wine, should be American. The English loaded butter onto their bread and ordered the heaviest desserts. The Swiss ate neatly and kept their elbows off the table, alternating sips of wine and sips of water like clockwork. Simon smiled as he watched Ernest gliding between the tables, his eyes everywhere. He looked as if he’d been running a restaurant for years. There is a man who’s found his metier, Nicole had said. And here’s a man, thought Simon, who’s still looking.

  Now that the challenge of getting the hotel finished and open was over, he felt a sense of anticlimax. Ernest and Nicole were firmly in charge, the place was settling into a rhythm, and the only person without a steady job was the owner. Could he spend the next few years stroking guests and soothing his outraged neighbour? How different was that from stroking his clients and dealing with Ziegler and Jordan? The scale of the problems was different, certainly, but the technique of resolving them was familiar: tact, patienc
e, and bullshit.

  Simon left the restaurant, nodding and smiling as he passed the tables, and went upstairs. Nicole and Françoise were in the office, sharing a bottle of wine and the evening pile of paperwork. Nothing much he could do there. Nicole waved him out of the office, blew him a kiss, and told him she’d see him back at the house. He stepped out into the night air, now beginning to turn cool, saw lights still on in the café, and went inside for a glass of marc and some company.

  Ambrose Crouch, sitting at a table against the wall, looked up from last week’s Sunday Times. The carafe in front of him was down to a half-glass of purplish dregs. He should have eaten something. He stared resentfully at Simon’s back, and the wine he’d been drinking steadily all evening felt sour in his stomach.

  “Escaping from your tourist friends?”

  At the sound of Crouch’s voice, Simon looked round from the bar, recognised the malignant face, and turned back to his drink.

  “What’s the matter? Do you only talk to rich Germans now, is that it? Kiss Fritz’s ass and take his money?” Crouch finished his wine and laughed. “Of course, you’ve had plenty of practice. An ad man knows all about that.”

  Simon sighed and walked over to the table. Crouch looked up at him. “A visit from the patron. I’m honoured.”

  “I think you’re pissed. Why don’t you go home?”

  “You don’t own the café.” Crouch fingered his empty glass and leaned back in his chair. “Or is that another of your plans? A nice tasteful renovation for the tourists?”

  Simon hesitated for a moment and thought about leaving. Irritation got the better of him. He sat down. “You’re only a tourist yourself. You’ve just been here longer than the others. You’re no more a native than I am, and on top of that you’re a hypocrite. All that crap in your column about the horrors of progress. Progress is fine when it suits you.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Of course it is. You’ve got a phone, you’ve got a fax, you’ve got electricity, I presume you’ve got a bathroom. That’s progress, isn’t it?”

  “And what do you call the invasion of these villages by people who tart up houses they only use for two months a year?”

  “You’d rather they were left to rot, I suppose. You know as well as I do that the young people have been leaving for years, because they’d rather work in towns than on the land. Some of these villages would be dead without tourism.”

  Crouch exercised his sneer. “Where have I heard that before?”

  “It happens to be true.”

  “So we must resign ourselves to golf courses and boutiques and nasty little villas and traffic jams—I presume that’s what you mean by saving the villages from dying?”

  “Tourism is a fact of life. It can either be handled well or badly, but you can’t ignore it and hope it will go away.”

  “I don’t ignore it, Mr. Shaw, as you know.”

  Simon had run out of marc and patience. “No, you don’t. You make a living bitching about it instead, and sometimes you don’t even have the guts to put your name to your own opinions.”

  Crouch looked at him, a smile spreading across his sly, fuddled face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There are others who share my view that tourism is a vulgar epidemic.”

  Simon pushed back his chair and stood up. “And where do they go on holiday, these others? Or do they stay at home and feel superior?”

  It was an unsatisfactory draw, Simon thought as he left the café, an argument that he would have liked to continue with anyone less obnoxious than the drunken journalist. He stood for a moment looking up at the faded blue-black ink of the sky, and admitted to himself that he’d enjoyed it anyway. It had made a change from the perpetual pleasantries that were required from a professional host. And it had made him think. Tourism had turned most of the Mediterranean coastline into a crowded, polluted nightmare. Would that spread up through Provence? Or had some lessons been learned? Crouch undoubtedly had a point, even if he was a snob and a patronising little prick. Simon smiled to himself in the darkness. He was in danger of becoming reasonable.

  Boone Parker had fallen into the habit of cycling over to the hotel almost every afternoon, torn between his interest in watching Madame Pons at work in the kitchen and an increasing desire to overcome the language barrier that stood between him and getting to grips with Françoise. It amused Simon and Ernest to see the two of them circling each other like tentative young animals as they tried to find a bridge between Texan English and Provençal French. Boone could now ask for his beer ration in French, and Françoise had mastered the essentials of “Have a nice day” and “How you doing?” They were moving on to higher academic ground one afternoon, identifying parts of the body, when studies were interrupted by a call from Avignon station. Uncle William had arrived from Venice.

  Simon found him in the station bar, sitting over a glass of pastis and fanning himself with a tattered, yellowing Panama hat. He was wearing what looked like the same corduroy trousers that Simon had last seen him in, baggy and balding with age, and a creased linen jacket the colour of pale, soiled custard that is so often favoured by the elderly Englishman who ventures abroad into warm climates. His florid, perspiring face, under a wispy tangle of silver hair, lit up as Simon picked his way through the piles of baggage between the tables.

  “Dear boy, how it does my heart good to see a familiar face in foreign parts—and so brown, too! You do look well. Provence must agree with you, and why not indeed?” He smoothed back his hair and put his hat on, tossed back the last of his pastis, shuddered, and began to pat his pockets. “A small formality, and then we can be off.” He produced a handful of small change and looked at it with dismay, as though he had been expecting to find a roll of bank notes. “Ah. Do you think they take lire?”

  Simon paid the bill, picked up the two cracked leather suitcases that Uncle William had indicated with a wave of his hand, and followed him out towards the car park. The old man stopped so abruptly that Simon nearly ran into him. “Behold!” Uncle William raised a wrinkled arm towards the ramparts that have protected central Avignon for centuries. “Stern custodians of the papal city! The whiff of history, the shock of the light! Ravishing, ravishing. Already I feel faint stirrings of the muse.”

  “Let’s get out of the way of the bus.”

  Uncle William pounced on Simon’s cigars in the car and lit one with a huge sigh of satisfaction. Venice had not been a happy experience, he said. The crowds and the prices, those revolting pigeons everywhere, the misunderstanding over the bill at the pensione—no, there were no regrets at leaving. But what a joy to find succour and lodging in Provence, where an artist could bloom in the sun!

  “I’ve got a bit of a problem with succour and lodging, Uncle Willy. The hotel’s getting very booked up.”

  “A detail, dear boy, a detail. You know me. My needs are few and simple.” He took a long draw at his Havana. “A truckle bed in a garret, soup and a crust, the noble purity of an ascetic life.”

  Simon knew what that meant. “Are you okay for money?”

  Uncle William tapped ash from his cigar and blew at the glowing tip. “Alas, I am not immune from the recession.”

  “You’re broke.”

  “I have a cash flow problem.”

  “You’re broke.”

  “I’m expecting a remittance.”

  “Still? The same one?”

  Uncle William, disdaining any further discussion of his finances, turned his attention to the beauties of the countryside. As they left the outskirts of Avignon and drove past the prostitute in the BMW, now in her summer ensemble of shorts and gold high heels, he raised his hat gallantly and muttered “Charming, charming.” Simon shook his head and wondered where he was going to put Uncle William for what had all the signs of an extended visit. He could stay at the hotel for a week, no longer. After that, all the rooms were taken.

  “A penny for your thoughts, dear boy.”

  “I was trying to think o
f somewhere we could put you up. How long do you plan to stay?”

  Uncle William murmured with delight as they passed a field of sunflowers, precise rows of bright heads all facing the same direction as if they had been individually arranged. “Who knows? A month? A lifetime? Look at the years Cézanne spent painting Sainte-Victoire.” He waved his cigar at the view. “This splendid scenery—the crag, the olive, the verdant vine—this must be sipped slowly, like fine wine, not gulped. The change of the seasons, I’m quite sure, will provide endless inspiration.” He leaned over and patted Simon’s knee. “And there is the added pleasure of being close to a loved one.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Simon muttered, half under his breath.

  Uncle William was, predictably, enchanted by the hotel, and since he was no fool, he recognised almost instantly that Ernest would make an invaluable ally. Within an hour of arriving, he had suggested a portrait—“a head of classic proportions,” he said; “I am reminded of certain Roman emperors”—and when he insisted that Mrs. Gibbons should be included, reclining at Ernest’s feet, there was no doubt that he had established the beginnings of a rapport. The Goya of Norfolk was digging in for the summer.

  20

  The cyclists breathed easily, their legs pumping up and down with the smooth regularity of pistons. Watching them as they climbed the steep, curving road towards Gordes, it was difficult to imagine that first unsteady expedition, with its jelly muscles and cursing and coughing. The General was pleased. They looked like thousands of other serious club cyclists, good for one hundred kilometres on a sunny morning with nothing worse to show for it than a heavy sweat.

  They had ridden a long loop, over to Isle-sur-Sorgue, up to Pernes and across to Venasque and Murs before dropping down to the D-2, and then one final hill, the back road into Gordes, to give them an appetite for the lunch that the General had laid on for them in the barn.

  He had taken considerable trouble over lunch, setting up chairs and a trestle table and a barbecue for the gambas and the thick slices of gigot. There were bags of ice for the pastis and rosé, and a dozen of the Chateauneuf that he’d been saving for their last Sunday of training, their last Sunday as poor men.