The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Paul was puzzled. “The rest?”

  “The follow-up,” explained Chloe. “I’ll consolidate. I’ll help him regain his confidence.” She paused. “I’m fond of him, Paul. He’s a good man. A good man with a bad restaurant.”

  Paul made a mental note. A good man with a bad restaurant. It could be a chapter title, because there were all sorts of questions it provoked. Why do bad restaurants happen to good people? Or possibly, Do we get the restaurants we deserve?

  He looked at Chloe. He had to agree. She was a conspicuously generous person and it would seem churlish if he declined. France was making him a gift, conferring on him the benison of its peaceful countryside, its quiet. He could very easily put something back, especially since he was writing about that precise subject, about food, about sharing and giving.

  He nodded his agreement.

  “I knew that you would,” enthused Chloe. “Just an hour or two a day. No more than that.”

  “Starting?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Will he accept it?” asked Paul. This was, he thought, a fundamental question. One did not simply barge in and tell a chef—and a French chef at that—how to do things.

  “He will,” said Chloe.

  “How can you be so confident?”

  Chloe gave the answer. “The poor man is in love with me,” she said. “He’ll do anything I ask.” She paused. “Just like you.”

  “Chloe,” said Paul, “I am not in love with you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Nor will I do anything you ask.”

  She looked surprised. “But I thought you would. How very disappointing.”

  “You’re incorrigible.”

  “And you’re delectable, Paul.”

  Paul shook a disapproving finger. “Flattery will get you nowhere, Chloe.”

  “I have no desire to get anywhere,” said Chloe. “I am one of those who have no inclination to go anywhere other than where they are—metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “In other words, you’re a conservative.”

  Chloe was animated in her denial. “Far from it. I don’t accept the contemporary orthodoxy, the repetition of clichés and the slavish adherence to the received view.” She paused. “But enough of that, Paul. The important thing is that you’ve agreed to help Claude. He will be a willing disciple, you mark my words.”

  “I’ll try. But I’m not sure that it’s going to work.”

  “I am,” said Chloe. “It will all work very well. It’ll be the best of all possible worlds.”

  The quotation from Voltaire hung in the air. “Pangloss,” muttered Paul.

  Chloe looked almost coy. “Did you know, Paul, I was married to a Dr. Pangloss? Did I ever tell you?”

  “A real Dr. Pangloss?”

  “That was his name.”

  Paul struggled with the implications of this unexpected disclosure. “So you were at some point actually Mrs. Pangloss?”

  “People laughed,” said Chloe.

  “Can you blame them?”

  Chloe looked thoughtful. “No, probably not. But still…” She looked at her watch. “Claude’s expecting me back at the restaurant. I mustn’t disappoint him.”

  Paul realised that there was something he needed to ask her. “You said…”

  “Yes, I said that he…”

  “…is in love with you. Were you serious?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I imagine he wants to marry me.”

  Paul felt a sudden stab of alarm. “But, Chloe, you barely know him. You can’t possibly…”

  “Don’t worry,” said Chloe. “I have no intention of acquiring yet another husband. I’m not impetuous in these matters, Paul—credit me with that.”

  “If you did marry him,” asked Paul, “what number would he be? Six?”

  Chloe frowned. “Do you count annulments? Because technically an annulment means that you were never married in the first place. That’s a matter of canon law.”

  “Count them,” said Paul.

  “In that case, darling, yes, six. But it’s not going to happen, as I’ve told you.”

  “Six, including Mr. Pangloss?”

  “Including him. And he was actually Dr. Pangloss,” said Chloe. “He had a Ph.D. So many people do these days.”

  “In what?”

  Chloe looked vague. “Byzantine frescoes,” she answered, adding, “I think.”

  Paul looked away, suddenly unsettled. How could you possibly live with somebody and not know the subject of his Ph.D.? You could not, because if there was one thing that people wanted to talk about, it was their Ph.D., and you would never fail to mention that to your spouse. You just wouldn’t.

  The thought disturbed him because as it occurred to him he reached that most painful of conclusions—that somebody close to you was not the person you imagined her to be. There was still a possibility that Chloe was being deliberately disingenuous in claiming not to know anything about her ex-husband’s Ph.D., but it was also possible, he felt, that she had made up a lot of what she had said to him. These doubts, once planted in his mind, grew rapidly. The Dr. Pangloss story was just too good to be true, and if that were the case, then the same might be true of other stories Chloe had told him. What about Antonio Gigliodoro and the bull-fight journalist—latterly of Poultry World—Octavio something or other? Could it be that Chloe had made them up too? She had often expressed a horror of a dull life, and for such a person, a whole series of colourful, but invented, husbands could be attractive. This meant that Chloe might never have had a husband—not a single one—and that all this talk of these men was no more than wish-fulfilment. If children created imaginary friends for themselves, then might adults not do the same?

  But why would somebody like Chloe have to do that? The articulation of the possibility—even the mere thinking of it—made him feel disloyal. It was tantamount to an accusation of deliberate lying on Chloe’s part, and that was a step far beyond anything he would have contemplated doing. Besides, he liked Chloe—he admired her—and he did not like the thought that she had been so mendacious. And yet Dr. Pangloss…that was surely pushing the boundaries of the believable.

  Or perhaps she had been speaking in jest, not expecting him to take her seriously. That was a possibility, but it was also, he thought, clutching at straws. The more likely conclusion was the uncomfortable one that Chloe was a fantasist who had deliberately misled him about her fictitious past.

  But why should somebody as sophisticated as Chloe find pleasure in such a pointless and ultimately counterproductive deception? What on earth could she have been thinking of?

  * * *

  —

  Chloe’s request was not the only one that Paul received that day. While he was still reflecting, with a mixture of hurt and puzzlement, on Chloe’s apparent fantasising, Annabelle called to see him. She came straight to the point.

  “Would you mind helping us with something this afternoon?”

  Paul could hardly refuse—at least in principle. “If I can.”

  Annabelle took that as agreement. “Good. Audette needs to go to the supermarket. She has no car at the moment and so somebody needs to drive her.”

  She looked at him expectantly. Paul wanted to sigh, but stopped himself.

  “The baby can’t go,” Annabelle continued, “and so somebody has to stay behind and look after him. Thérèse can’t manage that by herself—she gets anxious that the baby will stop breathing—which means I’ll have to stay with her. Which means there’s nobody to take Audette shopping.”

  Paul pointed out he had no means of transport. “I’m not sure if I’m insured for Chloe’s car. I could find out, if you like.”

  Annabelle said there was no need. “You can use our car, if you wish. It’s insured for all drivers.”


  She waited, and Paul knew that there was only one answer he could give. He liked the twins, and he wanted to be helpful. “I suppose I can do that. When?”

  They agreed a time, and, after a relatively fruitless couple of hours at his desk, Paul walked the short distance to Thérèse and Annabelle’s house. Thérèse answered the door, signalling to him to be quiet because, as she explained in whispered tones, the baby was asleep.

  Audette was in the kitchen, dressed in a faded pink housecoat and smoking a cigarette. When Paul entered the room, she stubbed out the cigarette in a saucer before rising to her feet.

  “I’m ready,” she said to the room at large.

  Annabelle produced the keys of the car. “The gears can be awkward,” she said, handing them to Paul. “I’m going to get the gearbox seen to, but you know how it is. But you’ll be all right.”

  “Time,” said Thérèse. “There’s never any time to do a thing.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Audette. “I can’t even buy cigarettes.”

  “The baby,” Thérèse explained to Paul.

  “Yes,” said Audette. “I’ve had my baby, you know.”

  “I’d heard that,” said Paul.

  Audette was gathering a few things she needed for the trip to the supermarket.

  “Have you got money?” asked Annabelle.

  Audette did not answer directly, but made a dismissive gesture. “I have a list,” she said, tapping her head with a finger. “Up here.”

  “We need bread,” said Thérèse. “I’ve asked Monsieur André to keep a couple of loaves.”

  “Pah!” said Audette.

  Annabelle caught Paul’s eye. “Audette and Monsieur André have their differences,” she whispered.

  “We all do,” said Paul tactfully.

  Audette had overheard. She looked at him with interest. “So you share my view of that mec?”

  “He didn’t say that,” Annabelle snapped. And then, as if to mollify Audette’s feelings, she added, “He sometimes has strong views, but his heart’s in the right place.”

  “Pah!” said Audette. “He’s a Le Pen man.”

  “Bakers should be judged on their bread, not their politics,” said Thérèse.

  Paul frowned. There was something fundamentally wrong with that, he felt, because the grounds of judgement had to be specified. He should talk about it in his book. There could be a section called “Our Daily Bread”…A good baker could be a bad man—and a bad man could be a good baker. One might decline to buy the bread of a good baker on the grounds that he was a bad man, but that was perhaps easier said than done, especially in a small village. And there were bigger issues too. Should we boycott food produced by countries with bad governments? Such attitudes might make people feel virtuous, but the people punished on the ground might be innocent farmers. That introduced complications that could be debated at greater length if he ever got that far with his book, which was beginning to look doubtful.

  “There are many fascists in the village,” said Thérèse. “They meet for coffee every Wednesday.”

  Paul sighed. “Why do people not remember?”

  “Remember what?” asked Thérèse.

  “The last time,” Paul replied. “The nineteen thirties.”

  “Because they’re ignorant,” said Thérèse. “Ordinary people are ignorant of history. Their education is full of slogans and superficialities. They’ve been made stupid by their teachers.” She looked down at the ground. “France used to be such a beautiful place. Peaceful. Ordered. Now…there’s an ugliness. We’re strangers to one another. We don’t know who our neighbours are.”

  Audette had lost interest. Turning to Paul, she said, “We must go. We can collect the bread on the way back. Come on.”

  The car had been parked outside, and Annabelle now explained the gear shift to Paul while Audette lowered herself into the passenger seat. “Ouf!” she said, and then, “Oh!”

  Annabelle finished her explanation of the gear shift. She had done this while sitting in the driver’s seat, with Paul looking on through the open door. Now, as she prepared to yield the seat to Paul, she said goodbye to Audette. “Be careful,” she said, and leaned over and kissed her. The kiss lasted more than a few seconds; it was lingering. Paul instinctively looked away. Once freed from Annabelle’s embrace, Audette started to adjust her safety belt. “I’m still too fat,” she muttered. “You have a baby and you think you’ll be lighter immediately. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “No,” said Paul. “I’m sure it doesn’t.”

  “You haven’t had a baby,” observed Audette.

  Paul was taken aback. “I never said I had.”

  “So you don’t know, then,” said Audette. “No man knows.”

  “I think I can imagine it,” said Paul mildly, struggling with the reluctant gear lever.

  “I don’t think so,” Audette retorted.

  Paul did not respond.

  “Do you think men should be allowed to marry one another?” asked Audette.

  “I don’t see why not,” Paul replied evenly. “If that’s what will make them happy.”

  Audette turned in her seat to fix him with an intense stare. “You think it’s all right for two men to try to have a baby?”

  “I don’t think that’s what they’re doing,” said Paul.

  “You think that?” challenged Audette.

  They moved slowly out onto the public road. “I do,” said Paul.

  “Would you marry another man?” asked Audette.

  “Some men prefer their own sex, as do some women.” He kept his gaze on the road ahead, but he felt her eyes upon him.

  “Why do you say that?” asked Audette. Once again there was a note of challenge in her voice. “Why do you say that about women?”

  “I was talking about men—and you asked me, didn’t you? I was just pointing out that what I said about men applied to women too.”

  Audette turned away. “Men don’t understand,” she said, and lapsed into silence.

  It was a drive of twenty minutes. A few miles down the road, with the fields of ripening wheat stretching out on either side, the road dipped down to a bridge over a sluggish river. A small creature—a ferret, perhaps—dashed out in front of the car, causing Paul to brake sharply. The animal disappeared into the undergrowth, delivered by whatever rural divinity it is that hedges such lives, and the journey was resumed. But the incident had jolted Audette out of her silence.

  “I’m very happy with my baby,” she said. “I didn’t think I would be.”

  “That’s good,” said Paul. “It would be difficult otherwise, I suppose.”

  “Bleu said at first I shouldn’t have him,” she went on. “He said that there were too many babies already. He shouted a lot.”

  Paul was tactful. “Bleu? He’s your…your partner?”

  Audette snorted. “Quel imbécile! Some partner.”

  “Ah well. Then you’re best without him.”

  Audette nodded. “Except that…” She did not complete the sentence. Paul waited.

  “Except?”

  “Except he wants the baby. He heard that he’d been born. Now he wants him.”

  “To take him from you? He seriously wants to take him from you?”

  Audette wound down the window and spat outside. Paul swerved slightly, but recovered.

  “Yes. He said since it’s a boy and he’s the father he has the right to him. He says that’s the way it is with his people.”

  Paul asked who his people were. Something had been said about horse thieves, he seemed to recall.

  “They’re scum,” said Audette. “Scum. Those people are scum.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Steal things. Cars, mostly, these days. It used to be horses, but there aren’t so many aroun
d now. They’ll take a horse if they find one, but usually it’s cars. And motorbikes. They steal motorbikes down here and take them up to Paris to sell them in the banlieues. The police never find them because they’re afraid to go in there.” She paused. “The police are cowards. All of them.”

  Paul said that he did not think anybody could take a baby from his mother. “Surely, nobody would allow that. You could go to court, couldn’t you?”

  Audette shrugged. “Bleu doesn’t care about that. He’ll still try.” She fixed Paul with a mournful stare. “He’s not like you. He’s a pig.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “Oh well, I wouldn’t worry.”

  “You see, you’re a gentleman, aren’t you?”

  He laughed. “You flatter me.”

  “No, I mean it. You never hit anybody, did you? You don’t do that sort of thing. You wouldn’t raise your hand to a woman.”

  “No. I wouldn’t. To anybody, I suppose. Violence doesn’t solve anything.”

  “Tell that to Bleu,” said Audette, her voice heavy with bitterness. She lowered her gaze, and suddenly, without warning, placed her hand lightly on his thigh. She looked up, as if to gauge his reaction.

  Paul glanced down. The pressure on his thigh was increased. He said the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t think so. Sorry.”

  She did not take her hand away. “You don’t like me?”

  “Of course I like you. I just don’t think that there’s going to be anything like that between us.”

  Her hand moved away.

  “Thank you,” said Paul.

  “I wondered,” she said.

  “Wondered what?”

  She looked out of the window. “I wondered whether you were interested, you see. So now I know you’re not.”

  Paul frowned. “I’m not.” And then he realised that this might be misunderstood; but it was too late.

  “Men like you—considerate men—often aren’t. I don’t mind. People should be allowed to do what they want to do. Boys, girls—does it matter? Same thing, really.”

  “I’m not,” Paul protested. “It’s not that.”

  Audette shook her head. “You don’t need to say anything else. Who cares these days?”