The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  * * *

  —

  It was on a Friday afternoon, when Paul returned from a trip into town, that he found Gloria waiting for him.

  “Close the door behind you,” she said. “As quickly as you can.”

  Paul complied, but was puzzled. “What’s going on?”

  “The cats are visiting,” she said. “I don’t want them to get out.”

  Gloria noticed Paul’s face fall. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said, adding, before Paul had time to say anything, “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Here in the flat?” he said. “Right here?”

  “But of course,” said Gloria. “I can’t let them out just yet. Cats have to get used to new surroundings before they can go outside safely.”

  Paul thought for a moment. He did not want to appear unwelcoming, but cats destroyed things: they sharpened their claws on sofas, they tended to be sick if they ate too much, they shed hair on cushions and on any jacket they could find to curl up on. Some cats had fleas; some even had worms that could be passed on to people if the cats walked over your plates, which they did, on their way to drink milk from your jug or investigate your butter dish. There were many drawbacks to cats, and yet now Paul tried to look at it from Gloria’s point of view. She wanted her cats to be happy, and of course so did he.

  “Well, I suppose it’s not for long.”

  Gloria nodded. “No, not for long. Just for…”

  He waited. He hoped that she would say “Just for the day,” but she did not.

  “Just for a change of scenery,” she said.

  Paul was aware of something rubbing against his legs. Looking down, he saw Mrs. Macdonald, pressing against him, her back arched, her eyes looking up at him in guileless innocence.

  “See!” exclaimed Gloria. “Mrs. Macdonald is showing her approval. That’s the way cats greet people they like. She’s transferring cat pheromones to your trousers. It’s the biggest compliment a cat can pay.”

  Paul looked down. Mrs. Macdonald was staring at him, as if challenging him to contradict what Gloria had said. “I’m not too sure about having cat pheromones on my trousers,” he muttered.

  Gloria disregarded this muted protest. “They have glands under their chins,” she said. “That’s why you see them rubbing their necks against things. It’s their way of making their surroundings smell agreeable.”

  “You mean to them,” said Paul. “Smell agreeable to them.”

  “Oh, we can’t smell it,” said Gloria. “We can’t really penetrate their parallel world. That’s the intriguing thing about cats—they lead these parallel lives, you see. We’re not privileged to be part of all that.”

  Hamish had now appeared in the hall. He too was staring at Paul, as if unconvinced of his right to be there.

  “It’s all right, Hamish,” said Gloria. “Paul will get used to you. Just give him a chance.”

  * * *

  —

  Paul did his best, even to the extent of being uncomplaining about the cats sleeping on the bed at night. “They feel more secure with us,” Gloria said. “Mrs. Macdonald has nightmares, and it’s much easier for her if she wakes up to find people around her.” He emptied the litter tray without so much as a murmur. He filled the cats’ food dishes with a breezy cheerfulness and plucked the cat hair off his clothing with a stoic insouciance.

  Gloria complimented him. “The cats really appreciate what you do for them,” she said. “They may not be able to express it, but they feel it nonetheless.”

  Paul did not want to be thought churlish. “I’m glad,” he said.

  Gloria looked relieved. “I knew you’d come round. Who could possibly resist Hamish and Mrs. Macdonald?”

  For a few moments the question hung in the air.

  Paul smiled. “They’re certainly strong characters,” he said.

  He was tolerant, and would have put up with the two feline visitors had it not been for the difficulty he encountered in working in their presence. Hamish and Mrs. Macdonald did not like being shut in any particular room, and so they had the free run of the flat, including Paul’s study. He tried closing that door, sequestering himself inside, but the two cats would simply demand entry, yowling in their voluble Siamese voices until he yielded. Once inside, they would prowl around, jumping up onto his table, walking across his computer keyboard, and rubbing themselves against the screen in an apparent effort to cover it with cat pheromones.

  Paul found it impossible to concentrate. He had now started work on The Philosophy of Food, and although he had identified several good themes, he was unable to make much progress in getting them down on paper—at least, as long as the cats were in the room. After two weeks, he found that he had written no more than four pages that, on his reading through them, sounded disjointed and unconvincing. He scrapped everything he had done and began again; now it was even more difficult, as the ideas he had entertained before began to evaporate. This was not going well.

  He would have to talk to Gloria. He had tried his best with the cats, but clearly the time had come to admit defeat and to ask her if the cats could possibly go back to her flat. He would have to get her to see it from his point of view: Gloria was normally a perceptive and sensitive person, but it seemed that when it came to her cats there was an uncharacteristic blind spot. In her eyes they could do no wrong, and it was inconceivable that anybody should find them less than unreservedly appealing. It was the same sort of blind spot, he thought, that people had about their children, and as such, it would require considerable tact.

  It was while he was building up his resolve to deal with the cat question that he received an unexpected telephone call. This came from a distant cousin of his father’s, who was known to him, and the rest of the family, as Remarkable Cousin Chloe.

  “I shall be in Edinburgh the day after tomorrow,” said Chloe, “and I wondered if we could meet for lunch at twelve thirty at the usual place. On me, of course—as always.” She paused, but not for long enough to allow Paul to answer, before she continued, “I take it that you’ll have nothing else on, you being unemployed.”

  “Self-employed, Chloe,” said Paul. “Not unemployed—self-employed.”

  “Oh, of course, of course.”

  Paul accepted the invitation. He had a soft spot for Chloe, in spite of her high-handed manner and her tactlessness. Chloe was only in her early fifties, but she belonged, it seemed to him, to a bygone era, when people made tactless remarks and rarely apologised for what they were. Chloe, as far as he could tell, had never apologised for anything. She drank; she smoked small cigarillos—“But only in moderation, my dear”; and she preferred the company of men to that of women, especially if the men were in uniform. “I met a general the other day, darling—an actual, card-carrying general. He was just too divine to look at, and I must confess I went all weak at the knees. He noticed, I’m afraid, and asked me if I was quite all right. I missed my chance: I should have fainted in his arms, but one always thinks of these things too late, and the opportunity passed.”

  But now she was businesslike. “I have a great deal to tell you,” Chloe said. “But I shall refrain from telling you until we meet. And vice versa, I hope.”

  “I won’t tell you just yet about the cats that have invaded my flat,” said Paul.

  “Rats?” asked Chloe. “You’ve been invaded by rats?”

  “Cats, Chloe. Cats.”

  “I look forward to hearing about it, darling. But until then, soldier on, as we all must. Happy days!”

  It was the way she finished every telephone conversation, and Paul had never worked out what the appropriate response was, as immediately after saying Happy days Chloe would put down the receiver, cutting off any possibility of further conversation. Now he noted down the details of the engagement, sighed again, and returned to the fruitless task of trying to work while tw
o Siamese cats, like opera singers limbering up for the performance, made their noisy presence felt.

  Eating is an act, wrote Paul. Like any other act, therefore, it takes place within the context of a moral past, a moral present, and a moral future.

  He sat back and read the sentence aloud several times. At the end of this he sighed again, and deleted what he had written. Now he typed something quite different, a heart-felt triplet: Why do voluble Siamese cats / Insist on screeching loudly / In other people’s flats?

  He looked at these lines on his screen and smiled to himself. The sentiment, he decided, was authentic: this is what he felt. It was a cri de coeur. He needed advice, and the obvious source of advice was Remarkable Cousin Chloe. He had turned to her in the past, and her advice had been robust. She had a brisk way of dealing with problems, and that is what he thought he needed. He had not followed it, of course, as those who seek advice rarely intend to do what is advised, but this time, perhaps, he should listen very carefully to any suggestions she had to make. Time was running through his fingers; of the six months he had in which to complete The Philosophy of Food, three weeks had already elapsed.

  2

  A Woman of Numerous Husbands

  Paul was immersed in the restaurant menu when Chloe arrived. Looking up, he saw her standing on the other side of the table, unwinding a silk scarf she had wrapped around her neck. He stood up, explaining apologetically that he had not noticed her coming in.

  “No need to apologise,” said Chloe, handing the scarf to a waiter who had appeared at her side. “Please hang this up for me, there’s a dear.” She flashed an appreciative smile at the waiter, who reciprocated. Noticing how the smile lingered, Paul thought, Flirting with the waiter in the first minute…

  Chloe sat down. “Where do they get them from?” she asked, leaning across the table conspiratorially. “I mean, these positively edible young men who work as waiters in these places. Where on earth do they get them from?”

  Paul shrugged. “I suspect that one’s from France.”

  “I suppose some of them are actors,” said Chloe. “Isn’t that how actors keep the wolf from the door? Waiting in restaurants?”

  “Possibly.”

  Chloe reached for a menu. “It’s a miracle that we seem to have an endless supply of young men like that. Somebody, somewhere, is still producing them. Do you think it’s on farms?” She waved a hand in the air, vaguely, but intended to convey an undefined rural hinterland.

  “The problem, though,” she continued, “is conversation.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “We haven’t exactly…”

  She raised a hand. “Oh, not us. Heavens no! You and I have never had any difficulty conversing. The problem is with young men—and their lack of conversation. They may look decorative, but try to talk to them about anything, and you pretty quickly plumb the shallows. They haven’t lived, you see, and so they know nothing—or next to nothing.”

  “Well, some of them…”

  “No, Paul, let me assure you—it’s most of them. To have anything to say, you have to have done something, or at least seen something.” She paused to look up from the menu. “Do you think I should risk the scallops?”

  Paul encouraged her. “I think they’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, I know they won’t be off,” said Chloe. “That was not what I was worried about. They’ll be fresh enough, but will they be mostly water?”

  Paul understood. “Most people don’t know about that,” he said.

  “Well, I do, dear, and I believe I may even have learned it from you. Put a scallop anywhere near water, and you end up with twenty-five per cent scallop and seventy-five per cent water—or is it the other way round?”

  “The other way round,” said Paul. “One quarter water and three-quarters scallop. They absorb it very readily.”

  Chloe nodded. “Since you imparted that pearl of wisdom to me some years ago,” she said, “I have assiduously avoided washing scallops. But the problem is: When you buy them already prepared, what’s happened to them before? They’re baptised, that’s what—and the water’s there. Frightfully convenient for the people selling them—they can charge the water at scallop rates.”

  “Just like bacon,” said Paul. “Look at the water that comes out when you fry a rasher of supermarket bacon. You pay for the weight of that water too.”

  Chloe sighed. “Food is such a battle, isn’t it? It’s us against the big interests.”

  “Agri-business.”

  “Yes, precisely. And those people have an interest in having us eat as much of their salt- and sugar-laden products as possible. And pay for their added water while we’re about it. They’re very powerful.”

  Paul said that he agreed. He was sympathetic to the local food movement—to the natural products from the local farm. His books, he said, were written with that in mind.

  “And well done you, darling, for making that stand,” said Chloe. “But look at what those people are doing now. They’re giving names to their ghastly products that imply that they’re from the farm down the road—faux local. They’re produced in factories in places like…” She waved a hand again, this time in the opposite direction from the last gesture. “And then they wrap them up and call them Old Lane Farm or something of the sort.”

  “With a picture of a bucolic farm setting,” Paul said. “Contented animals in the field, the old farmhouse—that sort of thing.”

  Chloe shook her head in disgust. “I wonder about free-range eggs. Do you think the hens that lay these so-called free-range eggs are really allowed out?”

  Paul sighed. “It’s deceptive,” he said. “The official definition of free-range eggs allows farmers to keep the hens in barns, as long as they have an outside run to which they can be given access. But there are no rules as to how often you have to let them use the run.”

  “And so they can spend most of their lives in the barn?”

  “Yes. And in the barn the farm’s allowed to keep nine hens for each square metre of floor space.”

  Chloe did a mental calculation. “But that’s hardly any room at all.”

  “Exactly. They’re cooped up together, shoulder to shoulder—or wing to wing, in their case. They get terribly stressed. There’s nothing for them to do. Some of them end up going mad and start cannibalising the others.”

  “You know something, darling?” said Chloe. “I feel in the mood for the vegetarian choice. It’s suddenly come over me.”

  Paul laughed. “The scallops had lots of room on the sea bed.”

  “Well, in that case, I might just manage a scallop or two.”

  * * *

  —

  “Now, tell me,” said Chloe. “Blow for blow—if that’s not the wrong expression in what I’m sure must be a very loving relationship—how are things going with you and Gloria? I have a lot of time for her, you know. She’s so much better than—” She stopped herself.

  “Becky,” supplied Paul.

  “I’m sorry,” said Chloe. “I didn’t mean to be so direct. But I am a sort of aunt, after all, even if we’re really…”

  “Third cousins,” supplied Paul.

  “Exactement,” said Chloe. “And in view of this relationship I feel that I can speak to you directly—without sautéeing my words.”

  “Mincing,” said Paul.

  “Perhaps, but mince is so rare these days—metaphors must keep up to date.” She paused. “Does anybody eat mince any longer, Paul? You should know, I suppose.”

  “Some do. But not—”

  “Not mince and tatties?” Mince and tatties—mince and potatoes—had been a staple of the Scottish diet for generations.

  Paul said that he thought this was still eaten, but mince was probably now more frequently used to make spaghetti bolognese. “We’ve become increasingly Mediterranean,” he said. “Exc
ept when we’re eating chicken tikka masala.”

  “Oh well,” said Chloe. “But back to Gloria—do tell all.”

  The waiter arrived with mineral water. Paul took a sip from his glass. “There’s not much to say,” he began. “We get on very well together. We see things the same way, I suppose—which is important, isn’t it? Imagine living with somebody who did not share your sense of humour.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes. “Very difficult,” she said. “If not impossible. My first husband, I suppose…”

  Paul waited. Chloe had had five husbands so far—or five to whom she admitted—but Paul, along with the rest of the family, knew very little about them. She referred to them by numeral: husband one, husband two, and so on, although she never said very much about them. All of them had lived abroad and never came to Scotland, with the result that none of the family had ever met them. “Chloe is enthusiastic when it comes to husbands,” Paul’s father had said to him when he was a young teenager. And then, in a remark directed at Paul’s two sisters, he had added, “She is not what I would call a role model in that department.”

  Now, in the restaurant, Paul felt that he might try to elicit further information.

  “I’d love to know more about your husbands, Chloe,” he said. “I don’t want to press you about it, but you’ve never really told us, you know.”

  Chloe frowned. “Never told you? I suppose you’re right. You were always too young.”

  “But that hardly applies now.”

  “Exactly how old are you, Paul?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  Chloe looked thoughtful as she calculated the gap between them: seventeen years. “Well, I suppose that’s old enough to know. I didn’t want to tell you when you were still impressionable—sixteen, seventeen…that sort of age. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to that sort of thing.” She paused. “Corruption of youth—isn’t that what they call it? It’s what they condemned poor Socrates for. Corrupting the youth of Athens, for which the punishment was hemlock. Although, frankly, I doubt if he corrupted them all that much—he probably civilised them. It’s terribly hard to corrupt young people, I always find—they’re inevitably more worldly-wise than I am.”