The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Chloe struggled with her keys. “I meant to sell this place,” she said as the lock turned. “But I never got round to it. It produces a bit of an income. Students like this part of town.”

  They gained entrance to the hallway, and then into the airy main body of the flat. Paul was impressed with the brightness of the rooms—the product of generous-sized windows. He could not work in depressing conditions, but there was no doubt as to this flat’s suitability.

  Chloe gestured to a desk in one corner of the living room. “Could you do your writing there?” she asked.

  Paul crossed the room to stand at the desk. From where it was positioned he could look out at the elm trees. It was, he said, perfect.

  “This is so generous of you, Chloe.”

  She smiled. “I wasn’t going to get new tenants until at least the end of September. I don’t like short-term summer lets. They tend to be groups of actors for the Fringe, and the like. Thespian tenants are…” She trailed off.

  “Difficult?”

  “Destructive. They hold parties.” She pointed to one of the living-room walls. Strange, semicircular marks ran up and down it, as if placed by an eccentric interior decorator. “I found out that those were made by a juggler. He practised against it.”

  “I see,” said Paul.

  “And in one of the bedrooms,” Chloe continued, “there were footprints on the wall. How they got there…”

  Paul laughed. “Best not to enquire.”

  Chloe pointed to the kitchen door. “I can show you what’s what in the kitchen.”

  “I suspect I won’t be cooking here,” said Paul. “I’ll just use it during the day, if you’re all right with that. And I’ll pop out to that corner deli for my lunch.”

  “A good choice,” said Chloe. “It has a literary name, doesn’t it? Proust’s, or something like that.”

  Paul corrected her. “Victor Hugo, I think.”

  “I knew it was something like that. Proust’s would be a good name for a deli, though. Everything would be described in long sentences.”

  “And they’d sell madeleine cakes,” Paul offered.

  “And lose your order in the mists of time.”

  There was a sudden thumping noise from the ceiling above. Paul looked up. In the room immediately above them, somebody had put music on at full volume. But it only lasted for a few seconds, before silence returned.

  “Students,” muttered Chloe. “The last tenants complained, but I think the students went away after their exams.”

  “It sounds as if they’re back.”

  Chloe nodded. “If they’re troublesome, go and complain. The other neighbours will generally back you up. Nobody likes students.” She paused. “Except their mothers, perhaps—and other students.”

  Paul smiled. “It could be worse,” he said. “I lived in a flat once where my neighbours had dogs. Six of them. They barked.”

  “As dogs will.”

  “It nearly drove me insane.”

  Chloe looked sympathetic. “It’s one of life’s great privileges,” she said, “not to have too many neighbours. People get needlessly sentimental over community.”

  Paul thought about this; Chloe might be colourful, but she tended to utter the first thing that came into her head, and then wrap it up in philosophical language. “Loneliness?” he said.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps.” Chloe brightened, changing the subject. Her philosophical ruminations seldom lasted long. “So, will this work for you, Paul? Will this help you finish this book of yours? What was it about again?”

  “The philosophy of food.”

  She looked at him with interest. “Yes, of course. But tell me, darling, is there all that much one can say about that?”

  He told her that volumes had been written, great tracts, and she smiled. “Well, Paul, you obviously have something to add, and this might be just the place to add it.”

  “You’re too kind, Chloe.”

  She smiled at him once more. “I’ll give you the key. It’s all yours.” She reached into her bag to retrieve the key. “Yours pro tem, that is.”

  * * *

  —

  He explained the arrangement to Gloria.

  “I need a place to work,” he said. “Chloe’s flat will be ideal. It’s quiet. No disturbances.”

  Gloria frowned. “I thought you worked best at home. You told me once…” She did not finish the sentence. “It’s nothing to do with me, is it?”

  He assured her it was not. “I like having you around,” he said.

  “But you can’t work when I’m here? Is that it?”

  He chose his words carefully. “No, you’re fine. But I can be disturbed from time to time by…”

  She could tell what he was about to say. “By Hamish and Mrs. Macdonald? Is that what you’re saying?”

  He nodded, uncertain what her response would be. She shook her head, as if with regret. “Such a pity.”

  “What’s a pity?”

  “That you won’t give yourself the chance to get to know them better.” There was a wistful note in her voice now. “If only you’d meet them halfway.”

  He tried to imagine how one met a cat halfway. “I’ve tried to be friendly,” he said. “I really have. But somehow, they’ve rebuffed me.”

  Gloria looked concerned. “I hope you don’t feel you’re being driven out.”

  “No, I don’t. But the cats are a bit of an issue.”

  “An issue?”

  Paul sighed. “I don’t actually dislike them, I suppose, but I don’t want them to interact with me all the time. It seems that those two have some deep interest in involving themselves in my life. They want to join in, but the trouble is…”

  She waited.

  “…well, the trouble is that they’re a different species. They lead their lives and we lead ours. I don’t really have much to say to cats.”

  He saw that she had looked away from him and was now staring thoughtfully at the floor. “I shouldn’t have assumed,” she said. “It was just too much.”

  “Well, there we are. I know it’s not a big issue—not in the cosmic scale of things—but it’s been difficult for me.” He reached out to touch her. She looked at him reproachfully.

  “I feel bad,” she said.

  “You don’t need to.”

  She hesitated. “Do you want me staying here with you?”

  He answered immediately. “Of course I do. Of course.”

  He kissed her, and she looked up at him. He felt protective of her, as he always did when they kissed. A kiss was a surrender—and a promise; and it was the promise that made him feel protective.

  As they drew apart, she said, “Because sometimes I feel…well, I feel excluded. It’s as if I’m trespassing on your space.”

  He felt a momentary pang of vague, unarticulated guilt, that familiar feeling that comes when somebody reproaches us in a way that is perfectly justified and appropriate. And he defended himself in the way in which we all defend ourselves in those circumstances—by denying the unwanted truth. “No, no. You’re not…”

  “Would you tell me if I were?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  She looked away. He wanted to apologise, but he did not know what to say. He would try to get on better with the cats. He would try, because he did not want to hurt Gloria in any way. That was not in his nature. He would try.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later, Paul used Chloe’s flat for the first time. Equipped with a small bag of books and papers, along with a coffee percolator, he let himself into the flat and settled down to work. He did not use the desk he had seen on his first visit. When he had come to inspect the place with Chloe, he had noticed that in one of the rooms at the back there was a table close to the window. This was the place he chose to w
ork; the view was not as good as that from the front of the flat, but he told himself that he was not there to contemplate the trees in the street below, but to write another chapter of The Philosophy of Food. This chapter—”The Otherness of Food”—was proving difficult. He had already identified and explored the central idea: that the act of eating is an act of incorporation in which we take food into ourselves, we put our stamp upon it in the way in which we prepare and present it, and yet we want it to remain something other than us—something which still has an identity of its own. Was that clear enough? Paul thought so. Possibly. He would have to give examples of the naming of food and the way in which the name established a separate identity, sometimes an exotic one, for what was otherwise familiar. By naming a dish we could give it a history, and a place too. This made something that was mundane and without much to it into something that could have a colourful identity. Once named, food could have a hinterland of associations with a culture or with a place. Yes, that was it: the acculturation of food; that was exactly it.

  He thought of Chicken Kiev. That was a dish on which he had already done his research, and he had the sheaf of notes with him. He began to write.

  The humble Chicken Kiev…He stopped. Was Chicken Kiev humble? No, that was not quite right. Chicken Kiev was common…but that, too, was the wrong word. Common suggested a certain simplicity and lack of anything but basic preparation. An unmarinated steak was common in that sense, as was fried fish, a grilled lamb chop, or a plain omelette. Chicken Kiev was widespread—that was the word, he decided; a widespread dish was one that cropped up frequently, on all sorts of menus and in all sorts of situations. Chicken Kiev was like the prawn cocktail that used to appear at the beginning of every golf club dinner, or on the Saturday-night menu of every three-star hotel trying to inject a bit of style into drab surroundings. Paul smiled as he thought this. What a social burden for a prawn to bear…

  He began again. That widespread dish Chicken Kiev is a good example of the exotically named dish that injects an element of glamour into a meal. Kiev…the word is suggestive of a world beyond the borders of Europe, a Russia that is not part of the West, that…He stopped once more. Kiev was in Ukraine, and not in Russia at all. And yet it had been bound up with Russia, had it not? That had been the case under the rule of tsars and then the Soviet Union, and its emergence as a modern independent state was quite recent. Of course, there were some Russians who considered it part of Russia and would have it back in the blink of an eye. Those same Russians, he imagined, would call Chicken Kiev a Russian dish, and might be quite offended if the Ukrainians claimed it as their own. And then there were some historians of food who took the view that the roots of Chicken Kiev were to be found in French cuisine, the characteristic way of preparing chicken in this style having been imported into Russia by French chefs engaged by Russian aristocrats. This view would give the credit for the invention of Chicken Kiev to the French, specifically to Marie-Antoine Carême, who founded haute cuisine and who visited Russia during the reign of Tsar Alexander I.

  But then he remembered something else. Somewhere in his scribbled notes was a reference to the Pozharsky Cutlet, a fried chicken dish associated with the Pozharsky family of innkeepers. French chefs took this cutlet from the Russians, rather than the other way round—or so the Russians claimed. This, they argued, was the precursor of Chicken Kiev.

  Paul stared up at the ceiling. The scope of The Philosophy of Food was going to be broader than he had imagined. It was going to be about history, ownership, pride, and national identity—and food, of course. One rich seam of enquiry would lead to another, and yet here he was still scratching the surface of the subject, hardly penetrating what was revealing itself to be a mass of debate and disagreement. He returned to his notes. Did he really have to say something about Pozharsky Cutlets? Did it really matter whether these cutlets preceded or succeeded the making of Chicken Kiev? Not really, he thought, and yet the fact that people would actually hold strong views on the subject said something about the power of these food associations.

  The music above his head started very suddenly. He was surprised at how loud it was, and how its resonances seemed to be amplified as they travelled down the wall from the flat above. And then, while he was reflecting on this, he heard several people, it seemed, jumping up and down on the floor above. This was followed by laughter—also transmitted down the wall with extraordinary clarity—and the sound of exuberant shouting.

  The music stopped, but only for the few seconds needed for a change of tune. Now came something with deeper bass, thumping with that headache-inducing beat of heavy metal, sending vibrations into the very fabric of the building. Paul put his hands over his ears, but that did little to keep out the sound. It became louder now as a singer joined in, vociferously protesting about some injustice, some mistreatment or indifference. I knew you never cared, complained the disembodied voice. Never cared, never cared…Songs, thought Paul, are mostly about being head over heels in love or not being loved enough. There were no songs—as far as he knew—about simply being content, about merely liking somebody else. He liked Gloria, but if he wanted to sing about his feelings—and he did not—then he would be hard-pushed to think of any songs that expressed the way he felt.

  Paul rose to his feet. Chloe had told him to complain, if necessary, and he would. He was not being unreasonable, he told himself. This was the morning, after all; surely people were entitled to be able to hear themselves think during the working day. He was as tolerant as the next person—even more so, he told himself—but this level of noise was insupportable. It was selfish too: unless, of course, those who were making it were unaware of the fact that sound travelled so easily. But that, he felt, was unlikely. They would know that others could hear them, but would simply not care.

  He would be polite. He would say, “You know, I hate to complain—I really do—but I wonder if you could turn things down just a little. Not a whole lot, but just enough so that I can work downstairs.” A reasonable approach like that—not a blunt request to turn everything off—could hardly be rebuffed.

  He left the flat door open and went up the stairs to the landing above. The door, with its chipped paintwork, spoke of the landlord’s neglect. Beside the bell a list of six names confirmed what Chloe had told him: this was a student flat. It also reminded Paul of his age; how many years ago was it that he had last shared a flat with more than one person? When had he last put butter or cheese into the fridge and wondered whether it would still be there when he next looked? For a moment or two he hesitated. He was the adult now; the adolescents were inside. His knock on the door—the bell looked broken—would for those inside be an announcement of the adult world—the world of parents and authority and the spoilsport. How could it be anything else? If you were nineteen, or whatever age his neighbours were, you simply would not have the empathy required to see the situation from the other point of view. He toyed with the idea of putting up with this. It would not last forever, after all: they would get tired; they would go out; they might even—remote possibility that it was—remember that they were students and do some studying. But then he reminded himself that it was summer. Students tended not to study in the summer months, in which case they might have jobs—some restaurant or hotel somewhere might be waiting for them to start their shift, unless parents were paying the rent and everything else, and there was no job to go to.

  He suddenly felt annoyed. These kids—because that is what they were—could sit around playing their music because somebody else had worked to make it possible, and that person was still working. Every moment of leisure cost somebody, somewhere, the effort of work. Nobody lived on air.

  He knocked loudly, thumping the door with his fist in his growing irritation. He pressed the button of the bell too, but this wobbled uselessly under his finger. He resumed his knocking, hoping that it might be heard under the rising throb of the music inside.

  A
s his fist was about to descend with another thump the door suddenly opened. Just inside the hall, a young woman drew back in surprise.

  Paul dropped his fist. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t…”

  She grinned. “I didn’t think you were going to hit me. You were knocking—obviously.”

  “Yes,” he said lamely.

  Then she asked, “Are you from downstairs?” She answered her own question. “Yes, you are, aren’t you? Oh my God, I told them. I told them the music was too loud.”

  Paul nodded. “It is—a bit. I was wondering if you could…”

  “Turn it down? Of course. I’ll ask them, although…” She looked over her shoulder before turning back to face him and saying, apologetically, “Keith is…well, he sometimes doesn’t…if you see what I mean.”

  “It’s just that I’m trying to work.” And then, finding that he wanted to explain himself, he added, “I’m writing a book, you see, and it’s hard to work if there’s a din.”

  She looked over her shoulder again. Then she stepped forward, indicating that they should stand on the landing. “Sorry—I could hardly hear you. Can we talk outside? It’s easier.”

  She smiled at him. In a room behind her, somebody inside shouted something at somebody else and there was laughter.

  “Look,” she said, “could we talk downstairs?”

  Paul hesitated. He had not intended to engage beyond making his request, but this young woman was obviously trying to be helpful.

  “All right,” he said.

  She seemed pleased. “You don’t have any coffee, do you? I’m dying for a cup and we’ve just run out. In fact, we ran out yesterday and nobody could be bothered to go and buy some. They’re lazy.” She paused, and then added, “And noisy. But you know that, don’t you?”