The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He wanted to encourage her. “I’ve been around a bit myself,” he said. “I don’t think you could shock me.”

  Chloe looked wistful. “Perhaps not,” she said. “Yet it’s rather sad to think that one has led a life that would fail to shock a younger cousin.” She paused. “Do you really want to know about them, Paul?”

  Paul nodded. “I do, I’m afraid. It’s a part of you that I should know about and don’t.”

  Chloe still looked reluctant. “I feel that it’s in somewhat poor taste to tell people about one’s husbands. I think one has to assume a lack of interest, don’t you?”

  “No,” said Paul, smiling. “I’d like to hear about them. I really would.”

  “After lunch, then,” conceded Chloe. “I’ll tell you over coffee. Now let’s get back to you. You said something about cats over the phone. Tell me about these cats. They sound like baggage. Is that the problem—does Gloria have baggage?”

  Paul told her about the cats and how difficult they were making it for him to work. She listened sympathetically, nodding and raising her eyebrows at appropriate points. Then, over coffee, Chloe began the story of her husbands. There was no regret in her voice as she spoke—if anything, there was a slight wistfulness. And Paul listened intently, without interrupting her with questions, and with no disapproving thoughts.

  * * *

  —

  “My first,” said Chloe, “or should I say my first husband, because he wasn’t exactly my first lover, was an Italian called Antonio. He had the most beautiful surname, Gigliodoro, which means golden lily in English. And he was, you know—he really was. We talk about gilding the lily when you try to adorn something that is already quite ornate enough, but I rather like the idea of a gilded lily, and believe me, Antonio was that, oh, my goodness.

  “We were both barely nineteen when we met. You may recall that I was expelled from my convent school when I was just seventeen. Did your parents never tell you that? I suppose that’s bowdlerisation for you, but there we are. It really was a most disagreeable place, and I was delighted to be expelled—it was something to do with a painting I did in the art class of the Mother Superior locked in an embrace with the then pope. The girls I showed it to thought it tremendously amusing, but the nuns did not like it, Paul—not one little bit. Except for one of the working nuns who was in charge of keeping the art room clean. She laughed out loud and muttered, ‘That’ll teach the old cow.’ I thought I had done it rather tastefully—they were, admittedly, on a couch of some sort, but they both had one foot on the floor, which was the test of propriety that Hollywood used to employ, you know. You could stretch out on a couch with somebody as long as you kept one foot planted firmly on the floor—that was the standard of respectability. I made that point to the Mother Superior, but I’m afraid it didn’t get through. She probably didn’t hear anything I said—she was that shocked. So I said, ‘Oh well, I suppose you’ll be wanting me to leave,’ and she said, ‘Immediately. And you’re not going into the dorm to get your things—they will be posted back to you.’ I suppose they felt that my wickedness was somehow contagious and I had to be bundled out tout de suite without saying goodbye to any of my friends.

  “Did I care, Paul? Not in the slightest. In fact, it was an immense relief, as I wouldn’t have been able to take those nuns much longer. They were divided into two groups, you know: there were the teaching nuns, who had degrees and knew a bit about at least something, and then there were the working nuns, who wore slightly different habits and mostly came from obscure villages in Ireland. They did the washing and the cooking and all the other tasks that the teaching nuns were too grand to do, with their degrees and their teaching certificates. These working nuns had chapped hands, while the teaching nuns had soft hands and delicately manicured fingernails. The teaching nuns treated the working nuns as if they were inferior because they had only a basic education and were very superstitious when it came to pictures of saints and the sacred heart and so on. They were always crossing themselves and saying, ‘Would Jesus, Mary, and Joseph all preserve us!’ I can understand how the teaching nuns found that a bit tedious, with their degrees and all that, but they didn’t have to look down on them quite so much. They struck me as being rather arrogant—snobbish, even—which is not an attitude that I like very much. I have always said, Paul, it matters not the slightest what bed you are born in—what counts is what you are inside, although there are some people, of course, who are quite impossible both inside and out.

  “So there I was, thrown out of school at seventeen, much to the dismay of my mother and the secret amusement, I think, of my father. My mother was all for sending me to a finishing school in France, but I drew the line at that—on principle, I might add—and managed to persuade them to send me to Florence instead. They eventually agreed to this, but said that I could only go once I had turned eighteen, which in due course I did. I enrolled on an art course at a college in Fiesole, in the hills above Florence, and found myself living in a casa dello studente, a sort of student hostel, with a whole lot of other young people from all over the world. You can imagine the sense of freedom and the sheer exhilaration of my situation. Oh, it was bliss—perfect bliss.

  “We were encouraged to haunt the Uffizi. They allowed us to copy some of the paintings—under supervision, of course—and we would also spend hours just soaking up the sheer beauty of the art. I gazed for hours at the Botticellis; I drooled over the Piero di Cosimos; I was permanently intoxicated with beauty. And then, one day after spending a full morning in the gallery, I was on a bus back up the hill to Fiesole when this boy came and sat down on the seat next to mine and we got talking. He spoke good English and looked as if he had stepped out of a Renaissance painting. We agreed to have dinner together that night—he said that he knew a restaurant where the manager was a friend of his father’s and would let us eat for half price. Italy is full of such arrangements—top to bottom, it’s the most splendidly corrupt country, bless them.

  “That was Antonio Gigliodoro, and exactly a year later, when we were both still nineteen, we were married. Our parents did not exactly approve—mine on the grounds that I was only nineteen and he was Italian, and his on the grounds that he was only nineteen and I was a foreigner who spoke hardly any Italian and came from heaven knows where. My family did not come to the wedding, and he had only a few members of his there, all looking very sombre. But we were very pleased with ourselves and I suppose we were in love—in the way in which nineteen-year-olds tend to be in love.

  “His family was wealthy and they rented for us a small flat with a view of the Ponte Vecchio, a wonderfully romantic place to spend your first days of marriage. Antonio was studying commerce at university and continued to do so—I carried on with my course at the art college. But then he failed his examinations and was thrown out of the university—with terrible results. In those days there was national service in Italy, and Antonio received his call-up papers. He was to go into the army.

  “His family was aghast. Apparently, they had paid a bribe to have him exempted, but the official taking the bribe had decided to make an example of him as somebody whose family did not pay a sufficiently large bribe, and his exemption was cancelled. His father was livid, and used all sorts of political contacts to get him off the list, all to no avail. So they decided to consult a cousin who was a prominent psychiatrist. He examined Antonio—whom he knew well, anyway—and declared him insane, which of course he wasn’t, even by Italian standards. He gave him a certificate to prove this, but the army didn’t seem to care. They said they had a special regiment composed entirely of lunatics and he could do his national service in that. So Antonio had to go in after all.

  “I must admit I was secretly relieved. We had married too young, I decided, and when I raised it with him, he confessed to feeling much the same way. I plucked up my courage sufficiently to go to his family and ask them whether they could use their connect
ions to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of Antonio’s insanity. They were delighted, of course, and gave me a handsome payment to mark their gratitude. Antonio was fine, by the way: he did rather well in the lunatics’ regiment and was eventually given a commission and some sort of medal. Perhaps the medal was for being sane—I really don’t know. Of course, practically everybody gets medals in Italy, sooner or later, but I’m sure his was well deserved.”

  * * *

  —

  “I felt that I had had enough of Italy, charming country though it undoubtedly was,” Chloe continued. “So I went off to Madrid, because I had friends who had gone there and they had invited me to come out and see them. And that is where I met my second husband—about whom I shall tell you in due course, but perhaps not now, because we need to talk more about you and your problems—to which, by the way, I think I have the solution.”

  Paul looked at Chloe with heightened interest.

  “My problems?” he asked.

  “Yes, Paul, yours. And now I shall tell you exactly what I propose.”

  3

  Chicken Kiev and Its Ramifications

  Paul sat with Chloe in her car, parked in front of the tenement block in Gladstone Terrace where Chloe owned an empty flat. Very little persuasion had been required to convince Paul that it might be the ideal place to work without feline interference, and they’d come to view the apartment.

  “Such solid architecture,” said Chloe, looking up at the buildings. “Thank God for the Victorians, Paul. They were an awful bunch of prudes, of course, and rapacious as hunting dogs, gobbling up half the world for their empire.”

  “But they built to last—you have to give them that.”

  “Oh,” said Chloe, “I’d give them much more. They built plenty of schools and hospitals, and they believed in education, I suppose, and in drainage, just like the Romans. They loved making drains too—it’s a sort of sewer mentality, in the nicest possible sense. But Victorians were so miserable in other ways. Unhappy people.”

  “Why?” asked Paul. “Why the unhappiness?”

  Chloe did not hesitate. “Because they were pre-Freud.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “Freud was the watershed?”

  Chloe smiled. “Freud changed everything. Released us from all sorts of suppression. Sex, my dear. He explained it. Shone a light on it.” She paused, and the smile turned to a look of regret. “The Victorians were just a little too early for all that. So they put all their energy into repression.”

  “Oh well…”

  “Of course, they were presided over by that monstrous dwarf, Victoria.” Chloe shuddered. “She cast a real shadow.”

  Paul protested, weakly. “She wasn’t that bad, surely.”

  “Oh, she was, Paul. Poor woman. As a child she was held prisoner, you know. Locked up in Kensington Palace and not allowed to play with other children. She was watched by an adult all the time—and I mean all the time. No wonder she looked so unhappy.” Chloe shook her head. “Unhappiness persists, you know, Paul. Somebody who’s unhappy today is probably paying for the misery of his grandparents.”

  Paul looked doubtful. “That’s a bit deterministic, surely.”

  Chloe was unperturbed. “But that’s the whole point, darling. We are determined. Parents and grandparents—they’re the problem.”

  She paused for a moment. “Cousin Annabel,” she said. “Remember her?”

  Paul remembered a tall woman with a Roman nose. He had met her a few times as a boy, but she lived in Malta and was rarely in the country. She had died a few years ago, still in Malta, where she had been running a small hotel with her Maltese husband.

  “She spent her life trying to prove something to her father,” said Chloe. “She was his only child, but he had set his heart on having a boy and he couldn’t conceal his disappointment that she was a girl.”

  Chloe looked at Paul. “The worst mistake a parent can make,” she said. “Not to love a child for what she is.”

  “Yes,” agreed Paul. He had been loved by his parents and he found it difficult to imagine what it must be like to be denied that love. The world would seem all wrong; just wrong.

  “So she felt she had to prove something to him,” Chloe went on. “She had to prove that girls were as good as boys. It was as simple as that. He didn’t expect her to do what a son would have done, and so she tried and tried to show him that he was wrong. And when she herself had children, she bent over backwards to encourage her daughter—and discourage her son.”

  Paul groaned. “He’s the one who got into a spot of trouble…” He tried to remember what it was; something sufficiently serious to involve the police.

  “Yes,” said Chloe. “But, you know, Paul, you can’t really blame him for what he did. It can’t have been easy being Annabel’s son.”

  “And the daughter? What was her name? What happened to her?”

  Chloe looked sympathetic. “Anastasia. Poor girl. She was burdened with that name—on top of everything else. Did you ever meet her?”

  Paul shook his head. “Not that I recall.”

  “I saw quite a bit of her,” said Chloe. “She tried to get people to call her Nancy, which sounds a little bit like Anastasia, but people who knew her as Anastasia simply couldn’t remember to make the change. She married a man called Flip.”

  “Flip?”

  “My thoughts exactly. How can you be remotely serious if you’re called Flip?”

  “It would be difficult,” said Paul.

  Chloe continued, “Annabel disapproved, largely because she disapproved of all men, as far as I could make out. Flip didn’t stand a chance—he was undermined from the word go. As for the son, he ran away to somewhere in the Caribbean—Antigua, I think it was—where he bought a yacht and took people for cruises round the islands. St. Kitts and Montserrat—places like that.”

  “Well, some would say an enviable life—”

  Chloe interrupted him. “Yes, possibly. These cruises, though, were naked. Everyone—naked.”

  “I see.”

  “Except when they came into port,” added Chloe. “Apparently, they’re a bit straitlaced on these Caribbean islands. Very churchy people, many of them. They like people to wear clothes.”

  Paul suddenly felt sorry for the son. What made anybody go off to Antigua and start running naked cruises? “Do you think his choice of…career was anything to do with his mother? Was he fighting her?”

  Paul had not been serious, but Chloe was. “Very probably. He wanted her attention. And he eventually attracted it—but not in a way of which most mothers would approve.” Chloe looked thoughtful. “You see toddlers doing it, don’t you? They deliberately drop their food on the floor and then look at you to see what your reaction’s going to be.” She paused; she was looking up at the building. “I must get the windows cleaned. Remind me, Paul.”

  “I could do it myself,” offered Paul. “It’s the least I can do—you’re letting me use the place, after all.”

  Chloe patted his arm. “You’re such a sweetie, Paul.” She opened the driver’s door of the car and started to get out. “Let’s go and check that everything is going to be all right. We have a cleaning lady who goes in from time to time, and I asked her to make sure that it was all up to scratch after the tenants left.”

  As they made their way towards the entrance to the common stair, Chloe remarked, “I mentioned Montserrat. You know I went there myself some years back—before the volcano erupted.”

  Paul vaguely remembered the Montserrat volcano and the images of the islanders fleeing from their homes.

  “They were the most engaging people,” said Chloe. “Friendly. Courteous. The police chief was a charming man, I recall. He’d been a senior policeman in Jamaica, you see, and had ended up there. He wore a corset. Yes, a corset, to make him look thinner—he wouldn’t lea
ve the house without it, and the problem was that if he was called out on any emergency there was always a delay while he got himself into his corset.”

  Paul laughed. “And the islands’ criminals knew that response might be a bit slow—as a result of the corset?”

  Chloe looked thoughtful. “Yes, it must have been awkward at times. But do you think many men still wear corsets?”

  “If they ever did,” Paul answered.

  Chloe agreed. “I think very few do,” she said. “But perhaps more should—for aesthetic reasons. Men do tend to develop those stomachs, don’t they? Corsets would address the problem.”

  “Possibly,” said Paul. They had reached the door. He thought of the police chief on Montserrat, imagining him in his room with a fan overhead and luxuriant vegetation visible through the window. He saw red flowers on the shrubs and heard the screech of insects. He saw the corset laid out on a chair, ready for use, and he heard the resigned sigh of its owner.

  * * *

  —

  The flat was on the first floor of a four-storey Victorian tenement on the edge of the Meadows. It was an attractive and well-kept terrace, clad in the honey-coloured stone of which vast swathes of Edinburgh were built. There were, in fact, two terraces, facing each other across a wide street, on either side of which, marching up a gently rising slope, was a line of elm trees, now in the full leaf of summer, and as tall as the buildings themselves. There was an air of quiet satisfaction to the place, and this made Paul think, Yes, I can work here.

  From the entrance hall, a stone stairway, worn down by the tread of feet over a century and a half, gave access to the landings. Each landing had two flats off it, the front doors of which were painted the same dark blue as the street door below. Light filtered down the stairwell from the glass cupola three floors up. The air was cool, with that slightly dusty smell that old stone will have.