The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I see.”

  “My mother told me to apologise and come back,” Hugo continued. “That’s why I’m here.”

  While this exchange was taking place, Claude appeared to have given up all pretence of being involved in the master-class and was busy helping Chloe to open, assess, and then rearrange jars of preserves. They were sampling a chutney and discussing the results. Chloe shook her head, and the jar was unceremoniously tipped into the bin.

  “Look at Uncle,” muttered Hugo. “He doesn’t care.”

  “Doesn’t care about what?”

  “About cooking. He doesn’t like it. He likes all the fussy bits—writing out the menus and so on. And he doesn’t mind serving—he likes it because he can talk to the customers. He’s a show-off, you see. He enjoys going to market too—he’s fond of bargaining.” There was a pause. Hugo now looked almost apologetic, as if ashamed of his disloyalty. “The truth of the matter,” he continued, “is that Uncle is really…” There was another pause, briefer this time. “He’s a really useless chef. Some people just are.”

  Paul said nothing; he was deep in thought. Sometimes, it seemed to him, people were in the wrong job. They believed they had to do one thing when they should be doing another. And if you showed them that there was somebody who could do their job—somebody who perhaps had been watching them all along—and that they could do another job perfectly well, then they were much happier and much more fulfilled. All they had to do was to make the switch.

  11

  Some Men Suffer Too

  “We don’t like the thought of you sitting there alone,” Annabelle said over the telephone. “Sitting there and thinking about this book of yours. No. You must have dinner with us.”

  Paul accepted without demur. Chloe was working in the restaurant and the house would seem empty without her; he had nothing to read; and the ancient television set in the sitting room seemed to have lost its ability to transmit sound. Paul had turned it on shortly before Annabelle’s call and had spent twenty minutes watching a discussion programme consisting entirely of talking, but silent, heads—over which a caption proclaimed CRISE IMMINENTE. The expression of the participants was grave—as befitted those who were debating an imminent crisis; after a while, though, the tenor appeared to change, and expressions of concern were replaced with smiles and silent laughter. Perhaps the crisis had abated, Paul thought; perhaps the imminence of threatened disaster had diminished and good humour could return.

  The surrealism of his watching this silent debate suddenly came home to Paul. As he switched off the defective television, a smell of overheated plastic, laced with notes of burning rubber, drifted up from the defunct set. Reaching down behind it, he took the plug out of the wall socket and thought, at that moment, of the electricity thief. There had been an electricity thief, somewhere…and it came back to him. Bleu, whom he had never met, had been the electricity thief. Bleu, lover of Audette and putative father of her baby.

  He had a few hours in hand before he was due to go for dinner. These he spent toying with his manuscript. He was now writing about food as offering, and it was slow going. Why did the ancient Greeks burn meat as a sacrifice to the gods? Perhaps the answer was simple: the gods, like everybody else, enjoyed the wafting smell of sizzling steaks. The Greek gods, after all, he wrote, were only human…No, that would not do. The Greek gods were not human…or were they human in their essence, and yet immortal? Was immortality the sole defining characteristic of a god in ancient Greece? The Greek gods were human in so far as they showed human emotions: they were ambitious, truculent, vindictive, and often strikingly petty. All of those were human characteristics which proper, monotheistic gods unambiguously eschewed. And yet, he thought, the monotheists’ gods still had susceptibility to flattery attributed to them: they liked their praises to be sung; they liked to be remembered in ritual; they encouraged references to their abiding wisdom.

  By the time he left the house he had added a grand total of ten sentences to his manuscript, scrapped three, and significantly altered two others. At this rate, he thought, he would finish The Philosophy of Food at the end of the following year, eighteen months beyond the deadline agreed with his publisher. Of course, publishers’ deadlines were rarely meant to be taken seriously—or so he had suggested to Gloria. “They factor in a delay,” he said. “Everybody knows that. They have a different calendar, rather like the Julian calendar, or is it the…”

  “No,” she said. “They don’t. They usually mean what they say. They’re odd that way.”

  The thought of his lack of progress made him feel downcast. He was not at all sure that he still wanted to write The Philosophy of Food. He had begun to feel that there was something excessively ambitious about the whole endeavour. He may have studied philosophy at university, but he never progressed beyond the introductory undergraduate courses, and did that entitle him to write on such matters? There were already people who had written books on the subject—serious books that, unlike his, had no recipes in them. There was Julian Baggini, who had talked about the moral implications of what we ate, and Harry Eyres, who wrote about Horace, and Horatian pleasures of the table. Then, of course, Roger Scruton devoted a whole book to the philosophy of wine. I drink, therefore I am…, Scruton had said, a haunting phrase which Paul felt he would never be able to match. I eat, therefore I am was a pale Cartesian reference by comparison, probably because eat did not rhyme with think and the play on words was lost. And that, he decided, was the problem. His whole enterprise was doomed to failure. This was the wrong thing to be doing. I am a charlatan, he thought. And then he thought again: No, I am not a charlatan because no real charlatan ever says “I am a charlatan.” The point about charlatans was that they never acknowledged their meretriciousness. And psychopaths, Paul suddenly asked himself. Did a psychopath ever say “I’m a psychopath”? Or did that admission require an insight that psychopaths simply would not have? If you are always in the right—as psychopaths must feel they are—then the whole concept of psychopathy would be inconceivable.

  Annabelle greeted him at the front door. “Audette has returned to her cottage, as perhaps you know, and Thérèse is cooking tonight,” she said. “Our tastes are very simple and she was worried that somebody like you might feel…” She looked at him quizzically.

  “I’m happy with anything,” he said. “The simpler the better.”

  “My view too,” she said. “The more you add, the more there is to go wrong.”

  “As in life,” said Paul. He thought of The Philosophy of Food. He should not have said yes. It was his own fault.

  As she led him towards the kitchen, Annabelle warmed to the theme. “Every so often you should just clear everything out,” she said. “Clear your diary. Throw the clutter away—the papers, the letters, the books—all the things you keep that you really don’t need to hang on to. It’s like going on a diet—one of those detoxifying ones. You feel all cleaned out.”

  Paul nodded his agreement. He did not feel all cleaned out—quite the opposite, in fact. His life was cluttered by one overwhelming burden, The Philosophy of Food. If that were not there, then he would feel free again. He could get up in the morning without a brooding sense of obligation to an omnipresent, reproachful taskmaster: a taskmaster composed of Gloria, his publisher, and his readership—a trinity of expectations and potential reproach.

  They were halfway down the corridor leading to the twins’ kitchen. On the wall at that point was a framed engraving of the carriage scene from “Boule de Suif,” with the nuns and Boule de Suif herself, with her picnic basket of delicacies. The eyes of the bourgeois travellers are drawn to the delights of the basket, while the aristocratic members of the party, as hungry as they are, struggle to maintain their haughty demeanour.

  He stopped, staring at the picture in the dim light of the corridor.

  “Maupassant,” explained Annabelle. “It was my mother�
��s favourite. Maupassant and Balzac. These days…” She shrugged. “These days people don’t want to read about that sort of France.”

  Paul only half heard what Annabelle had to say. He was examining the picnic basket more closely. There were pies and cold meats—a ham, a string of sausages—there were upturned puddings, which surely would not have kept their shape so well in real life; there was a jar of preserved fruit. And in the midst of this examination, he made up his mind: he would stop writing about the philosophy of food. He would write instead about a village in France that has a restaurant that needs improving. He would write about a man and woman who come to the village and find that all is not quite as it seems. It would be a book about rescue—about how something that was failing was made to succeed.

  He was brought back to the present moment by Annabelle. “We’ll go through here,” she said. “This is where we sit when we have visitors.”

  In the formal sitting room—the salon—Thérèse rose to greet him. From a table beside the piano, she took an already opened bottle of wine and poured Paul a glass and then one for her sister.

  “Our neighbour’s wine,” she said, lifting her glass in a toast. “He’s inordinately proud of it.”

  “It’s all right,” said Annabelle. “It’s not as good as he claims, perhaps, but it passes muster—just. Claude uses it as his house wine in the restaurant.”

  “People accuse him of watering it down,” said Thérèse. “But you know what people are like. They’ll look for any excuse to run others down.”

  Annabelle shook her head sadly. “It’s such a big problem in the country. It results from people not having enough to do. If you don’t have things to keep you busy, you end up starting fights with your neighbours.”

  Paul said that he found the wine pleasant enough.

  Annabelle smiled. “I’ll tell him. He loves to hear about people liking his wine.” She paused. “Your cousin…What a kind woman she must be.”

  “Yes,” said Thérèse. “To help Claude out like that! How many women would do that sort of thing for no other motive than the desire to help…” She left the sentence unfinished. Paul felt that there was an ominous note to it—as if a real desire to help was the very last motive she suspected.

  “She is a generous-spirited person,” he said firmly.

  “Of course,” said Thérèse quickly. “I wouldn’t suggest otherwise…not for a moment.” Again, the words came out with the opposite implication.

  Annabelle took a sip of her wine. “Your cousin,” she said, “has been married before?”

  Paul looked up at the ceiling. “Yes,” he said. It would be simplest, he felt, to avoid saying too much.

  “Just once?” asked Annabelle.

  The question was too casually put. They know, thought Paul; they know.

  He affected nonchalance. “Actually, more than once.”

  “Twice?” said Thérèse.

  This was followed by silence.

  Paul thought quickly. Technically it would be correct to say that Chloe had been married twice—because she had. She had also been married three times, and then four times, and then…But this, he realised, was pure sophistry.

  “Five times,” said Paul, adding, “I’m sorry to say.”

  Thérèse let out a brief cry of alarm. “Five times!”

  Annabelle pursed her lips. “There are some who make rather a lot of mistakes…in this department.”

  “But five times,” repeated Thérèse. “Five times is surely a little bit—how shall I put it?—greedy?”

  “There are not enough men to go round,” said Annabelle. “And in times of scarcity, to have five husbands is perhaps a little bit…just a touch…greedy.” She looked at Paul anxiously, and then added, “Not that I’m accusing your cousin of greed. Perish the thought.”

  “Well, you are,” said Thérèse bluntly. “And it is, I think. Five husbands—five! When the rest of us struggle to get one.”

  “And as often as not, that one may not be much good,” interjected Annabelle.

  Thérèse looked pained. “Exactly,” she said. “Philippe, alas, comes to mind in this context.” She looked at Paul. “Have I spoken of him before?”

  “You may have,” answered Paul. “But…” He did not want to rake over old coals, and he felt slightly embarrassed to be discussing husbands with these women he barely knew.

  “He was a very boring man,” Annabelle interjected. “I’ve met dull men before in my time, but Philippe…” She rolled her eyes.

  “I regret to say that my sister is right,” said Thérèse.

  “I’m surprised you married him,” said Annabelle. “I wouldn’t have.”

  “And I wouldn’t have married Antoine,” Thérèse retorted.

  “No, possibly not.”

  They looked at one another, united in regret. Paul tried to think of something to say. I should not say “Which one was worse?” he thought.

  Thérèse looked out of the window. “Yes,” she said, “Philippe was extremely dull. And yet, you know, I had no inkling of it at first. I had no idea—no idea at all.”

  Annabelle nodded. “That’s right. It was only later that she discovered how dull he was.”

  “Perhaps I should have detected it earlier. I sometimes wonder if I was—”

  Annabelle interrupted her. “No, my dear, you mustn’t reproach yourself.” She turned to Paul. “It was model railways, you see. He concealed his model railways from her to begin with.”

  Paul struggled to conceal his surprise. “He was a model railway enthusiast?”

  “Fanatic,” said Thérèse.

  “Obsessive,” added Annabelle.

  Thérèse sighed. “He built model railway systems. It began in a spare room we had, and then he acquired an old storeroom somewhere and set up a system there. He had a few friends who did this. They had a timetable.”

  “And kept the trains running according to a schedule,” explained Annabelle. “The trains ran more or less twenty-four hours a day. One of them was always on duty.”

  Paul drew in his breath.

  “Yes,” said Thérèse. “It was that bad.”

  “I see,” said Paul.

  “Poor Thérèse,” said Annabelle. “How could one compete with that sort of thing?” She answered her own question. “It was impossible—quite impossible.”

  “I issued him with an ultimatum,” Thérèse said. “It was me or the model railways.”

  There was silence. Eventually Paul said, “I’m very sorry.”

  “It was for the best,” said Thérèse. “These things are often for the best.”

  “I sometimes wonder if he’s happy,” said Annabelle.

  Thérèse did not hesitate. “He is. He’s very happy. For some men, model railways are enough.”

  “Well,” said Paul, “that’s something, isn’t it?”

  “And I’m happy,” said Thérèse. She paused, looking expectantly at her sister. “And there was Antoine.”

  Paul waited.

  “I met Antoine when we were both twenty-two,” said Annabelle. “It’s too young, that. It didn’t used to be, but it is these days.”

  “Our parents met at about that age,” said Thérèse. “They were both students in Paris. It was 1968.”

  “Ah,” said Paul. “Sous les pavés, la plage.”

  Thérèse smiled. “Exactly. 1968.”

  Annabelle sipped at her wine. “They hated de Gaulle, you know. They thought that he stood for everything that was wrong with the world. Authority. The past.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “They listened to people like Sartre. Sartre and de Beauvoir. They hung on every word they uttered.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Sartre actually idolised Mao. And then, lo and behold, Mao turns out to be a mass murderer, like all the other mass murderers. Stal
in. Hitler. Pol Pot.”

  “Our parents were very naïve,” Thérèse remarked. “Babes in the wood.”

  “It was chic,” said Paul. “Mao and Che Guevara. They were symbols of resistance to the tyranny of the middle-aged.”

  Annabelle looked at him challengingly. “Do the middle-aged perpetuate a tyranny?”

  Paul explained that he did not consider it a tyranny himself—but some did.

  “Pah!” snorted Annabelle dismissively, and then returned to the subject of Antoine. He had been chronically unfaithful, she said. “He couldn’t resist women. He tried, I think, but it was just too much for him. I grew tired of his deceptions.”

  “You had a terrible time,” said Thérèse.

  Annabelle shrugged. “There are so many women about whom one would say that.”

  She looked at Paul, perhaps a bit reproachfully, he thought. Should I apologise? he wondered. But Thérèse now said, “And men too.”

  Paul nodded. “Some men suffer too,” he said.

  “Possibly,” Annabelle conceded. “Possibly.” She offered to fill Paul’s glass, and he accepted.

  Thérèse looked at him over her wine glass. “Your cousin…”

  “Yes?”

  Thérèse exchanged a glance with Annabelle before continuing. It was clear to Paul that whatever was to come had been rehearsed by the two sisters beforehand.

  “Your cousin,” continued Thérèse, “has become very friendly with Claude. Very close.”

  Annabelle was watching his reaction.

  “I’ve noticed,” he said. “My cousin is…well, she enjoys the company of men.”

  The two Frenchwomen regarded him impassively. Eventually Annabelle said, “The company of men?”

  “Yes,” said Paul. “There are some women who enjoy that. They like having men friends.”

  Annabelle looked away. Then, turning to face Paul again, she said, “Young Hugo feels that the situation requires our attention.”