Anything Considered (2 page)

But how much longer could he hang on? The contacts and sales that he had hoped to make as a result of helping out his nonpaying clients had not materialized. They’d been grateful. They’d sent Christmas cards, photographs of their children on ponies, puddings from Fortnum & Mason, the odd bottle of port. But so far, no customers. Soon it would be Easter. Soon the dustcovers would come off the elaborate furniture, and the home owners would return to do for themselves what Bennett had been doing
for them with such diligence all winter. Well, something might come of it once the season got under way.

But there was nothing immediate, and as he drove back to the tiny house in Saint-Martin-le-Vieux, he went through his options. The prospect of going back to producing television commercials, as he had done for ten years in London and Paris, was not attractive. He’d escaped just as the business was being taken over by unshaven young men with earrings, delusions of creativity, and that badge of the artistic temperament, the ponytail. He no longer had the patience to humor them. He’d been spoiled, having worked with some genuinely talented directors who had now graduated to Hollywood. The new breed, arrogant and ill-mannered, used special effects to disguise a lack of ideas, and lived in hope of a phone call offering them a rock video to shoot. No, he couldn’t go back to that.

He could, he supposed, try to scrape the money together to go off and look for the little bastard who had stolen his boat, but the Caribbean was a big place, and both the boat and Eddie Brynford-Smith might easily have different names now. He remembered the euphoric evening at the Blue Bar in Cannes when, in a haze of champagne, they had christened the elegant forty-five-foot yacht the
Floating Pound
and made their plans. Bennett had put up the money—all that he’d ever made from the production business—and Brynford-Smith was to take care of the chartering. He’d set off for Barbados with an all-girl crew, and hadn’t been heard from since. Bennett’s letters had
gone unanswered, and when he’d called the Barbados Yacht Club, they’d never heard of the boat or its skipper. Fast Eddie had disappeared. In his darker moments, Bennett hoped he’d gone down nosefirst somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.

And that, Bennett had to admit to himself, was the sum total of his current business opportunities: a backward step into commercials, or an expensive hunt for a floating needle in a watery haystack. It was time for some concentrated thought about his future. He decided to spend the rest of the day working on it at home, and cut across the N100 to take the steep, winding road that led up to the village.

Saint-Martin was saved from being chic by its mayor, an old Communist with a deep distrust of government, the middle classes, and progress. It had been the last village in the Lubéron to have paved streets and water mains, and applications from eager foreigners to restore the crumbling, faded stone houses, some of them three or four hundred years old, were resisted with all the considerable influence that the mayor could bring to bear. Bennett would have voted for him just for that. He enjoyed living in a picturesque anachronism, virtually untouched by the hand of architect or decorator, the houses innocent of chintz, silk-covered walls, or lavatories on plinths. Winters in Saint-Martin were cold and quiet; in summer, the scent of thyme and lavender struggled against a persistent whiff of drains. Tourists came and went, but never stayed. There
was
nowhere to stay.

Bennett’s house, in a narrow stepped alley at the end of the main street, had the overwhelming attraction of being almost free. It belonged to the village doctor, another bachelor, whom Bennett had met at a dinner party and who shared his interest in young women and old wines. The two had become friends, and when the doctor accepted a three-year posting to Mauritius, he had offered Bennett the house. The one condition was that the
femme de ménage
, a stalwart lady named Georgette, should continue as housekeeper.

Bennett opened the scarred oak front door and flinched at the blare of Radio Monte Carlo coming from the kitchen—pop music seemingly imprisoned in the seventies and wailing to get out. His efforts to introduce Georgette to the joys of Mozart and Brahms had been decisively dismissed. Georgette liked
le beat
while she worked.

All the furniture—simple, heavy, and dark—had been pushed back against the walls of the living room, and Georgette, on hands and knees, her rump swaying in time to the music, was attacking the already spotless floor tiles with a mixture of water and linseed oil. To her, the house was not so much a job as a hobby, a jewel to be scrubbed and polished and waxed and buffed. Dust was forbidden, untidiness a crime. Bennett had often thought that if he stood still long enough, he would be folded up and tucked neatly into a closet.

He bellowed to be heard over the radio. “
Bonjour
, Georgette.”

With a grunt, the kneeling figure stood up and turned to inspect him, hands on hips, a lick of black, silver-streaked hair escaping from the bright-yellow Ricard baseball cap that she wore for strenuous housework. Georgette was what the French would gallantly describe as a woman of a certain age, somewhere, in that mysterious period between forty and sixty. She matched the furniture in the house: low, heavyset, built to last. Her brown, seamed face was set in an expression of disapproval.

“You’ve been drinking cognac in bed again,” she said. “I found the glass on the floor.
En plus
, underwear and shirts thrown in the bidet, as if I haven’t got enough to do.” She flapped a hand at him. “Don’t stand there on the wet floor. There’s a
tartine
and coffee in the kitchen.”

She watched as he tiptoed across the living room and into the gleaming microscopic kitchen, where a tray had been laid for breakfast: starched linen cloth, white coffee bowl, lavender honey, and a baguette sliced in half and spread with pale Normandy butter. Bennett switched on the percolator, modified the radio to a bearable volume, and bit into the warm crust of the bread. He poked his head through the kitchen door.

“Georgette?”

The baseball cap rose from its examination of the floor. “Now what?”

“How long are you going to be? I was thinking of working at home today.”

Another grunt, as Georgette sat back on her haunches and looked at him. “
Impossible
. Do you think the house
cleans itself? It must be prepared for spring. Josephine is coming this morning to help with the turning of the mattress. Also Jean-Luc, with his ladder for the windows. Then there is the beating of the carpets.”

She wrung out the floor cloth as though she were throttling a chicken. “You would be inconvenient. Besides, you can work in the café.” She frowned at Bennett’s feet and sniffed. “Drop your crumbs on the floor there.”

Bennett withdrew, wiping his mouth guiltily. He knew himself to be a daily challenge to Georgette’s sense of neatness and order, but her liking for him was obvious from her actions. She might bully him as if he were a grubby schoolboy, but she took care of him like a prince—cooking for him, mending his clothes, fussing when he came down with flu—and he had once overheard her refer to him as “my little English
milor.
” Kind words and compliments addressed directly to him, however, were not part of the service, and when he left the house after breakfast, she shouted at him not to be back until the late afternoon, and to be sure to wipe his feet before coming into the house.

He walked down the main street to the bakery, with its gleaming iron-and-brass bread racks, which antique dealers were always trying to buy. He knew they wouldn’t succeed as long as Barbier was the baker—a proper baker, possessed of a baker’s stoop, a permanent flour pallor, and a stubborn attachment to the old ways of doing things. The thought pleased Bennett, and he stopped to take in the smell of fresh loaves and almond cakes.

“Jeune homme!”

Madame Joux beckoned to him from the open door of the
épicerie
next door. He obeyed the insistent finger, preparing himself for the worst. His account, a dispensation that he had been able to establish only after Georgette had bullied Madame Joux into accepting such a modern notion, was overdue. Credit facilities, always regarded with distrust in any self-respecting French village, were about to be withdrawn. He could sense it coming.

He took the sturdy hand of Madame Joux and bent over it politely, inhaling the aromatic traces of Roquefort and smoked sausage that clung to her fingers. “Madame,” he said. “As always, you add to the beauty of the morning.” He was encouraged to see the beginnings of a simper cross her face, and decided it was safe to broach the subject of his account. “I am desolated. I’ve run out of checks. You have no idea how inefficient these banks are nowadays. I myself …”

Madame Joux stopped him with a playful backhand to the chest. “A detail,” she said. “I trust you like a son.
Écoute
—my little Solange is coming this weekend from Avignon. You must join us for dinner
en famille.
”

Bennett’s smile slipped fractionally. Madame Joux had been trying to engineer a romance between him and little Solange for several months. He had nothing against the girl—she was quite sweet, in fact, and there had been a moment at the village fete last summer when he had almost been carried away during a
paso doble
under the trees—but the thought of being an appendage to the Joux dynasty had saved him.

“Madame,” he said, “nothing would give me more pleasure. If it wasn’t for my old aunt …”

“What aunt is this?”

“The one in Menton, with the varicose veins. I must be at her side this weekend. There is talk of an operation.”

Madame Joux was a connoisseur of other people’s operations, ever hopeful that some fascinating complications might develop. She pursed her lips and nodded. Patting her on the shoulder, Bennett took his leave before Madame Joux could suggest that the fictitious aunt should be brought to Saint-Martin to convalesce. He’d have to lie low during the weekend, and be prepared for many questions of a surgical nature during the following week. As he continued down the street, he reflected on the complexities of village life, realizing how much he enjoyed them.

He ducked through the narrow door of the post office. Saint-Martin—or rather the mayor—had declined a delivery service as being elitist and unnecessary, so villagers were obliged to collect their mail from the mayor’s brother-in-law, Monsieur Papin, who took a close interest in all incoming communications; he was widely believed to steam open letters that looked in any way personal. He greeted Bennett with small clucking sounds and shook his head.

“No love letters today, monsieur. No
billets-doux
. Just two bills.” He slid the drab envelopes across the stained plastic counter. “Oh, and your newspaper.”

Bennett slipped the bills into his pocket, nodded to Papin, and took his
International Herald Tribune
next door
to the Café Crillon, center of Saint-Martin’s social life, headquarters of the village
boules
club, and the setting, every day at noon, for a fifty-franc lunch. The room was long and dark, with a pockmarked zinc bar to one side, tables and chairs scattered at random across the bare tiled floor, and a video-game machine, which had lost an argument with an overenthusiastic player two years earlier and had been out of order ever since.

What ambiance there was came from Anne-Marie and Léon, the young couple who had exchanged office life in Lyon for, as Anne-Marie put it, a career in hospitality. They were regarded in the village with some suspicion, being considered foreign and unnaturally cheerful, and it would be twenty years or so before they were accepted. Bennett, another foreigner who hadn’t learned enough about life to lose his optimism, found them a delightful change from the monosyllabic peasants who played cards each day in the back while they waited for the crack of doom to sound.

Léon looked up from the copy of
Le Provençal
that was spread over the bar.
“Bonjour, chef. Du champagne?”
He shook Bennett’s hand and raised his eyebrows.
“Bière? Pastaga?”
Léon’s idea of a good client was one who started drinking shortly after breakfast, and it was with an air of disappointment that he took Bennett’s order for a coffee. “With a little something, perhaps? I have some homemade
Calva.
”

Bennett shook his head. “Maybe after lunch. What’s Anny cooking today?”

Léon’s rosy moon face beamed, and he kissed the tips of his stubby fingers. “A triumph—lentils, bacon, and Lyonnais sausage. Too good for fifty francs.” He shrugged. “But what can you do? Here, they expect a banquet for nothing.”

“It’s a hard life, Léon.”

“
Bien sûr
. And then you die.” He grinned and poured himself a beer, as Bennett took his coffee to a table by the window, where he unfolded his paper.

The Herald Tribune
was Bennett’s small daily indulgence. He liked its manageable size, the balance of its editorial content, and its restrained treatment of the recurring political indiscretions that turned newspapers on the other side of the Channel into shrill scandal sheets. He had given up reading the British press once he realized that he no longer recognized the names of the people being pilloried in its pages.

Sipping his coffee, he reviewed the state of the world as shown on the front page. Unrest in Russia. Bickering in the European Community. Squabbling in the U.S. Senate. The death of a venerable Hollywood actor. Not one of the
Tribune
’s jollier days, he thought, and stared through the window at the little village square, where miniature French flags snapped in the breeze above the war memorial. The sun was higher now, the sky a deeper blue, the mountains gray-green and hazy in the distance. He would hate to leave this place for the grind of an office in a morose northern city.

But the question nagged away at him: How could he
afford to stay? He started to make notes on the back of an envelope. Current assets: excellent health, colloquial French picked up during his years in Paris, no family ties, a small wardrobe of old but good clothes, a Carrier watch that had so far avoided the pawnshop, a secondhand Peugeot, and approximately twenty thousand francs in cash, the residue of a split commission from a house sale. Current liabilities: domestic bills, Georgette’s wages, and a dispiriting absence of brilliant moneymaking ideas. He had enough to get by on for another two or three months, providing he was frugal. But economy had never been one of his vices, and ten years of expense account life in the production business hadn’t helped.