The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

Annabelle finished the explanation. “It’s just that they take some time to happen. That’s the difference.”

  “It’s flattering to be noticed,” said Chloe. “Attention is always better than indifference.”

  Thérèse addressed Paul. “You met Monsieur André? We’re very proud of him. It used to be that every small village in France had its baker. He was very important—almost as important as the local priest. Nowadays…” She shrugged.

  “Monsieur André would never desert us,” said Annabelle. “He’s had his offers, but he turns them down. He was even approached about a job in Paris, would you believe it? One of the Parisians who comes down here in the summer thought he could take Monsieur André back with him. Some fancy cake shop up there.”

  Thérèse became animated. “And he said no. He refused point blank. Refused the money, the status, the lot. Refused.”

  “Very fortunate,” said Chloe. “I’ve been buying his croissants. They’re delicious.”

  The compliment seemed to please both sisters. “We’re very proud of them,” said Annabelle.

  “People say that he makes his dough with holy water,” said Thérèse. “He gets the priest to bless it and then he uses it in the bakery.”

  Annabelle laughed dismissively. “People say all sorts of things. Little of what they say is true.” She turned to Paul. “Audette was there, I gather.”

  Paul looked blank.

  “That young woman,” Annabelle prompted. “The pregnant one. With the…” She pointed to her hair. “Untidy up there.”

  Paul nodded. “Yes, she was.”

  “She lives at the bottom of our garden,” said Thérèse. “Not in the garden, of course, but at the far end. It used to be part of the stables for this house. Now it’s a cottage. It’s not very nice.”

  Annabelle looked embarrassed. “We charge her very little rent.”

  “Which she hardly ever pays,” added Thérèse.

  Annabelle shook her head. “She has a cash-flow problem, poor girl.”

  “The least of her problems.”

  Chloe frowned. “There’s no man?”

  Annabelle made a face. “I wouldn’t say that. There were, if anything, rather too many men.”

  “But none at the moment,” explained Thérèse. “No man when one is required. The usual story.”

  Chloe sighed. “Men,” she said.

  There was an immediate response from Annabelle. “Yes, men.”

  Chloe looked at Paul. “Paul is a man, of course,” she said. “Not all men…” She left the sentence unfinished.

  The sisters both turned to Paul. “Please forgive us,” said Thérèse. “We are, in general, in favour of men, and there are many…”

  “…many agreeable men,” interjected Annabelle.

  Chloe agreed. “Many,” she said.

  “Exactly,” said Annabelle. “Unfortunately, Audette became involved with an unsuitable man.”

  “Profoundly unsuitable,” added Thérèse. “And when her…her condition became apparent, he was off like a shot.”

  “Men,” muttered Annabelle.

  Chloe put down her coffee cup. “Poor girl.”

  “She works part-time in the supermarket,” said Thérèse. “She does a few hours in the mornings. She steals most of her food from there. They all do, apparently. I met one of the managers and he told me. He said that every supermarket in France just has to accept that their employees steal from them. And they can’t fire them because of this country’s labour laws. You can’t lose your job in France.”

  “They all try to change that,” Annabelle explained. “All the politicians, one by one, promise the Germans that we’ll change our laws, and the Germans believe them. The Germans run Europe, as you probably know. They deny it, but we all know they’ve never really given up on that particular ambition. It’s been around for a long time—the Holy Roman Empire was all about that. So the French government has to report to them, so to speak, and it reassures them that everything is going to change and France will become a bit more like Germany—well run and efficient and so on. But then nothing happens, because we French will not accept any interference in our lives. We have our way of doing things and we won’t put up with people who want to reform everything. So everything remains the same and the supermarkets have to continue to feed their staff.”

  “We pay, of course,” Thérèse pointed out. “They add the cost to our bills.”

  Annabelle brought the conversation back to Audette. “She’s not too bad, actually. She’s rather a sweet girl who had a bad upbringing. Mother was a simple-minded creature who saw the Virgin Mary appear in a potato field one day. She made a big fuss about it and the Church sent people down from Paris to investigate it.”

  “The Virgin Mary,” muttered Chloe.

  Annabelle made a gesture of resignation. “Yes, the Virgin Mary. You’d think she’d be too busy to appear in potato fields to rather simple country women. Why not manifest yourself on the Champs-Élysées if you’re going to do it?”

  “Good question,” said Thérèse. “Of course, they dismissed the whole thing and the priests went back to Paris. Anyway, that was her mother. Our parents sometimes gave her work in the kitchen, but she wasn’t very good at it. The father was in the army. He was a brute and he used to terrorise them. Eventually he went off to somewhere in West Africa and was shot, I think. Audette’s mother did her best with her, but it was difficult to keep her on the straight and narrow, and I think she gave up. She died about five years ago, leaving Audette to look after herself. She was just about twenty then, I think, and had moved in with a motor mechanic in Poitiers. He was a sort of Hells Angel. Awful.”

  Annabelle took up the story. “Then she came back here and we let her stay in the cottage. She took up with a farmer for a while, and then—”

  Thérèse interrupted. “She met a young man with only one eye. He came from quite a good family, actually. We called him Polyphemus, like the Cyclops. He rode a motorbike and always sat on it at a bit of an angle, so that he could see the road ahead with his one eye. It was very disconcerting.”

  “He had an accident,” said Annabelle. “And he went away. Audette seemed very upset by that one, and for a few months there were no men.”

  Thérèse corrected her. “Except for that plumber.”

  “Him!” snorted Annabelle. “He was married and had six children. Six children!”

  “Men,” said Chloe.

  “Then she took up with the man who everybody thinks is responsible for the baby,” said Thérèse. “He was called Bleu and he lived in the village, in one of those small houses in a row that you’ve probably walked past.”

  “Bleu,” said Annabelle with disgust. “What a ridiculous name. Bleu.”

  Thérèse remembered something. “It transpired that he was an electricity thief. We would have imagined many things of which he might be guilty—many unspeakable things…”

  “Unspeakable,” agreed Annabelle.

  Chloe’s eyes widened. She enjoyed hearing about unspeakable things, thought Paul. It was all grist to the mill.

  Thérèse continued, “But we would not have imagined that he was stealing electricity—on top of all those other things…”

  Chloe leaned forward. “These other things?” she said. “What exactly—”

  “Unspeakable,” Paul cut in. “Therefore, not to be spoken about.”

  Chloe shot him an irritated glance, but Thérèse was happy not to speculate. “Heaven knows,” she said. “Men like that…” She took a sip of coffee. “I was astonished, quite frankly. I’d never heard of anybody stealing electricity, but that’s just what he was doing.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of it,” volunteered Chloe. “It’s a common pursuit in Naples, where they are very ingenious in inventing new forms of dishonesty. You can buy—quite openly, app
arently—specially adapted meters that criminal electricians install in your house. These register only one-tenth of the power that you’re actually using. They save a vast amount on electricity bills, but it’s straightforward theft, isn’t it?”

  Bleu had not interfered with his meter, Thérèse said. “He didn’t steal electricity from the electricity company, he stole it from his neighbour. Their houses were joined together, you see, and he drilled through a common wall into his neighbour’s garage. Then he connected the wiring, so that his house ran on power from next door.”

  Chloe wondered how he was discovered.

  “The neighbour’s bills were sky high,” said Thérèse. “Twice, if not more, what they should have been because Bleu was using a lot of power for a small sawmill he had in his back garden. He made planks out of fallen wood and then sold them on to a timber merchant in Montmorillon.”

  “Fallen wood and chopped-down trees,” corrected Annabelle. “He cut down some of our trees, I’m sure of it—that wood beyond the étang. Those trees were perfectly healthy. Bleu cut some of them down.”

  “So the neighbour investigated?” asked Paul.

  Annabelle answered. “Not before he himself was investigated. The electricity people report to the police if somebody is using too much power. They suspect that this will be for cannabis growing. They force the plants in old barns and places like that. You need lots of power for the heat lamps.”

  “He was raided,” said Thérèse. “We told you that nothing happened here, except sometimes. Well, this was one of those occasions. It was quite the biggest thing round here for a long time, as you can imagine. Ten policemen, most of them armed to the teeth and wearing those unflattering bullet-proof jackets.”

  “The only fashionable bullet-proof clothing is Italian,” interjected Chloe. “The Carabinieri have some very flattering armoured outfits. Just the thing.”

  They all looked at her. She smiled. “I lived in Italy, you see. I was married—all too briefly—to an Italian.”

  “This raid,” said Paul. “Did they find the wires?”

  Thérèse shook her head. “No. They turned the place upside down, but it was soon apparent that there was nothing to hide. The police were disappointed—I heard some of them talking about it in the street. It seems they’d been hoping for a shoot-out, because they hadn’t had one for years and yet they still had to dress up in those heavy flak jackets.”

  Annabelle explained that the neighbour had come across Bleu’s wires quite by chance. “He was moving a workbench in the garage when he bumped it against the wall. A bit of the plastering came away and he saw the wires behind it. All was revealed.

  “He reported Bleu to the police. They came down and had a word with him. There were difficulties with proof, though, as by the time they came he had taken all the wiring out.”

  “So that was the end of that?” asked Paul.

  Thérèse replied that it was not. The neighbour, it transpired, had been a civilian clerk in the Foreign Legion barracks in Corsica. He had plenty of ex-legionnaire friends, and one of these lived not far away. “They give them French citizenship, you see. After five years in the Legion you can become a French citizen. This mec was from somewhere in the Balkans, Montenegro, I think, and he had been in the Legion for years. I saw him once in Montmorillon, at the market, buying mushrooms with his wife. She’s French—a local woman—and quite petite. He’s a real bruiser, and has that typical Balkan male head. They all look as if they’ve been hit on the back of the head with a shovel. He had that.”

  “The brachycephalic skull,” said Chloe.

  “Anyway, this neighbour—Georges—had a word with his ex-Balkan friend in town and told him about Bleu’s stealing his electricity. He said that he had been swindled out of fifteen hundred euros because of it and he saw no prospect of getting it back. The Balk was outraged for his friend—you know how they hold grudges down there—and he said that he’d come and talk to Bleu about it. Well, he did, and lo and behold Bleu came round to apologise. He also brought a cheque for fifteen hundred euros. He had difficulty in saying much, though, as the Balk—ex-Balk—appeared to have broken his jaw for him.”

  “Ah well,” said Chloe. “Balkan men can be so decisive.”

  There was a brief silence while this remark was absorbed. Paul saw Thérèse and Annabelle exchange glances; they approved of Chloe—he could see that—because they were of the same type. Chloe had found her French counterparts. He smiled inwardly; one Chloe was enough to cope with, but three…

  Thérèse broke the silence. “Very.” She paused. “I must say, Chloe…if I may call you that…”

  “Of course.”

  “I must say that you’re refreshingly direct in your observations. We’ve become so used to people being afraid to say anything about anything for fear of offence. You seem to be unaffected by all that.”

  Paul groaned inwardly. Chloe needed no encouragement. “Well, the truth is the truth, and denying it doesn’t make it any the less true,” she said.

  He sighed. “I’m not sure if we should be talking about the shape of people’s skulls.” He paused. “It’s not helpful.” He thought: I sound so pious, but Chloe can’t expect not to be contradicted.

  Chloe made an insouciant gesture with her hand. “It happens to be true. Should you just ignore it? Pretend that people don’t have heads that are flat at the back? It’s no disgrace to look as if you’ve been hit on the back of the head with a shovel—it’s not an insult. It’s rather fetching, in fact.”

  Thérèse seemed keen to paper over the cracks. “Well, be that as it may. That was the business with the electricity. Then, when Audette revealed that she was expecting a baby and intended to keep it, it all became too much for him. He found a woman from a well-known family of horse thieves round here—people called Manistrol, a dreadful bunch—and went off with her in a caravan. The Manistrols steal caravans as well; in fact, more caravans than horses these days. That was Bleu.”

  “And good riddance,” added Annabelle.

  Thérèse poured more coffee. “Poor Audette,” she said. “We rather like her, even if her situation is somewhat hopeless. Mind you, she has Claude on her side. He’s very protective.”

  “I think he sees her good qualities,” said Annabelle. “There’s a kind side to her. When Thérèse was ill, she brought her soup every day.”

  Thérèse nodded. “Stolen from the supermarket, I think, but delicious nonetheless.” She looked at Chloe. “And what can you do when somebody brings you stolen soup? Decline to eat it?”

  Chloe sympathised. “One has to eat the soup that people bring you. I’ve never turned away soup—never.”

  Thérèse smiled at Chloe. Irony, thought Paul. Did the French do it in quite the same way as the British?

  “No,” said Annabelle, after a short pause. “One should not turn away a gift—of soup or anything else, for that matter.”

  “And she’s a hard worker,” added Thérèse. “The baby’s due any day, but she carries on working. She has another job, you know.”

  “She’s the waitress in our local restaurant,” Annabelle explained. “Have we told you about that place? We’re actually the owners, Thérèse and I; of the building, that is—we don’t run the restaurant, of course. You must go there.”

  “They were speaking about it in the bakery,” offered Paul.

  Annabelle and Thérèse exchanged glances. “What do they know?” said Annabelle dismissively. “They laugh—but what do they know?”

  Paul did not mention the baker’s comment.

  “We’re very proud of what Claude does with it,” said Thérèse. “There’s a little room for improvement, of course, but there always is, isn’t there?”

  “You must go there,” said Annabelle.

  “Do we need to book?” asked Paul.

  Thérèse nodded. “It can
get quite busy. There’s an important road not all that far away, you see. There’s a sign beside the road that says Highly Recommended, and so they stop.”

  “You’ll like Claude,” said Annabelle. “Salt of the earth. He’s the chef. His nephew, Hugo, is his sous-chef. Claude is a bit hard on him, perhaps, but who are we to interfere? They get by.”

  “Yes,” Thérèse said quickly. Paul felt that she did not want to talk about Claude. “You must go there.”

  Chloe was decisive. “We shall. We shall go tomorrow evening.”

  “I’ll warn them,” said Thérèse. She laughed nervously. “We’ll not warn them in that sense.”

  Annabelle corrected her. “Inform them, rather than warn.”

  “Yes.”

  6

  Moules

  If Paul had been concerned that progress with his book might be slowed by Chloe’s distracting conversation, then his fears proved to be misplaced. Rather than divert his attention from the task in hand, Chloe turned out to be something of a hard taskmaster, insisting that he be at his desk by nine each morning. There he should stay, she said, until lunchtime, unless, as on that first day, an important social engagement required his presence elsewhere. “And in the afternoon,” she said, “I suggest that you work between two and five. This will leave you time for a walk, if you are so inclined, before dusk and dinner, which will be at eight sharp.”

  He did not resent this somewhat high-handed structuring of his day. He had come to France to work, and it was only through turning his back on temptations and closeting himself in his room that The Philosophy of Food would be written. He knew that, and yet he also knew that he could so easily be caught up in other activities; and if that happened, the pile of paper that represented his manuscript so far would remain stubbornly the same size. He needed somebody to keep him at the task, and Chloe, notwithstanding her tendency to go off at a tangent, seemed single-minded when it came to work.

  “I’d never suggest that you work all the time,” she said to Paul. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, as the saying goes.” She paused, and looked dreamily out of the window. “I was married to a Jack once,” she said. “He was my American husband, bless him, and he was in so many respects the ideal husband. Immensely good-looking—oh my goodness, you should have seen him. He was like Apollo. People were dazzled by him. And generous by nature, which I think always goes so well with considerable assets. It’s all very well being generous if you have nothing to give away—anybody can be generous in such circumstances—but it’s much harder if you have an awful lot of money—and an awful lot of stuff. Being generous then is much more praiseworthy.”