Hotel Pastis (16 page)

He picked up his ticket at the desk and went through to the duty-free area, dodging past small, determined Japanese women as they stripped the shelves of malt whisky. What brand of cigarettes did Nicole smoke? What scent did she wear? As the final call for his flight was announced, he settled for two bottles of Dom Pérignon. She was certainly a champagne girl, he thought, as
all the best girls are, and he wondered what she’d found that couldn’t be explained over the phone. Whatever it was, it would be more interesting than his usual Saturday of working in an empty office. He had the pleasant feeling of playing truant, of taking a secret holiday.

The plane rose above the cushion of cloud positioned almost permanently over Heathrow, and his mood became even better at the sight of blue skies. French voices in the seats behind him discussed the glories of Harrods and Marks & Spencer and compared cashmere prices and London restaurants. He looked forward to dinner, a long, quiet dinner a million miles away from anyone who knew him. Escape felt very good.

Simon had never landed at Marseille before. It could almost have been North Africa—rail-thin dark men with their plump wives and fat plastic suitcases, the guttural cough of Arabic, the smell of black tobacco and sweat mixed with pungent, sweet cologne, flight announcements for Oran and Djibouti. Hard to believe it was less than two hours from London.

Nicole’s blond head stood out in a sea of swarthy faces. She was dressed for the mild Mediterranean winter in pale grey flannel trousers and a dark blue sweater, her skin still the colour of honey from the sun. “
Bonjour
, Mr. Shaw.” She held up her face for two kisses.

Simon smiled. “How are you, Madame Bouvier?”

She put her arm through his as they walked across the concourse to the baggage claim area. “You forgive me for taking you from the office?”

Simon looked down at her. “I have a nasty feeling it’ll still be there on Monday.”

They found Nicole’s little white car, and she was silent with concentration until they had filtered onto the autoroute.
“Bon,”
she said, and shook a cigarette from
the packet on the dashboard. “It’s easy to miss the turn, and then you find yourself in Aix.”

“There are worse places to end up.” Simon settled back and watched Nicole jab the cigar lighter with an impatient finger. He was pleased she didn’t wear nail varnish.

“Merde,”
she said. “This car. Nothing works.”

Simon found some matches, reached over and took the cigarette from her mouth and lit it, enjoying the faint taste of lipstick.

“Merci.”
She blew smoke out of the open window. “You don’t ask any questions, so I think you like to be surprised.” She glanced over at him.

“I’m on holiday, and I never ask questions on holiday. I turn into a giant vegetable. All I want is to be driven up and down the autoroute at dangerously high speed by a blonde who’s not looking at the road. That’s my idea of a nice relaxed time.”

Nicole laughed. Tiny lines appeared at the corners of her eyes, and one slightly irregular tooth stood out from the rest. She looked as good as he remembered.

They talked, easily and of nothing important, and as they left the autoroute, Simon noticed that autumn had come to the landscape. The sky was summer blue, but there were splashes of red leaves on the cherry trees now; some of the vines brown as rust, others yellow; dense pockets of shadow in the folds of the Lubéron; smoke rising from faraway bonfires.

They turned off the main road and began the climb up the long hill leading towards Gordes. “I made you a reservation at the same hotel,” Nicole said. “It’s okay?”

“Best view in Provence,” said Simon.

Nicole smiled and said nothing. She waited in the car while Simon checked in and left his suitcase. He came back carrying a bright yellow plastic bag.

“I almost forgot,” he said. “This is for you. Take it twice a day before meals, and you’ll never have indigestion.”

Nicole looked inside the bag and laughed. “A Frenchman would say more elegant things about champagne.”

“A Frenchman would only have bought one bottle. Where are we going.?”

“To my house first, and then we walk.”

Nicole’s house, the highest in Brassière-les-Deux-Eglises, was at the end of a cul-de-sac, a narrow, three-storey building of weathered stone with wooden shutters painted in a colour somewhere between grey and faded green. Stairs led up to a carved wooden front door with a knocker in the form of a hand holding a ball, and the leaves of an old wild-grape vine flared autumn red against the wall.

“This is lovely,” said Simon. “How long have you had it?”

“Ten, eleven years.” Nicole turned the key in the door and nudged it open with her hip. “One day it will be finished. The top floor is still to do. Be careful with your head.”

Simon ducked inside. At the far end of the long, low room, through a glass door, he could see a small terrace with blue hills beyond. Comfortable, slightly shabby armchairs were arranged in front of a cut-stone fireplace that had been laid with vine clippings. On the other side of the room, the wall had been knocked away to waist height to make a bar, with a gap at one end leading through to the kitchen. Books were everywhere, books and flowers. The air smelled faintly of lavender.

Nicole unpacked the champagne and put it in the refrigerator, looking up at Simon as she closed the door. “Twice a day?”

“Absolutely—doctor’s orders.” He ran his hand over the stone top of the bar. “I like your house. I love places that aren’t fussy.”

“ ‘Fussy’? What is that?”

Simon thought of the house in Kensington where he and Caroline used to live. “Well, it’s when every square foot is decorated to death—when you have so much going on in a room that people spoil it. I had a house like that once, and I hated it. I was always sitting on the wrong cushion or putting cigar ash into the antique porcelain. It was like a bloody obstacle course. All that space and nowhere to live.”

Nicole nodded and laughed. “That’s good you don’t like fussy places. You’ll see when I show you.”

They left the house and walked down to the centre of the village, the afternoon sun already beginning to drop in the west. Fallen leaves the size of hands made a yellow carpet outside the café where Simon had spent his first night in Brassière, and he could see an old woman watching them from a window of the house next door, her face partly hidden by the folds of a lace curtain.

They turned to go down the street leading from the main
place
, and Simon saw the façade of the old
gendarmerie
, still without doors or windows, still abandoned.

Nicole touched his arm. “Have you guessed?”

They stopped, and looked through the empty building towards the Lubéron, a series of spectacular pictures framed by the openings in the far wall.

“Give me a clue.”

“You say you want to change how you live, change what you do,
non?
”

Simon nodded, half smiling at the serious expression on Nicole’s face.

She led him through the doorway of the
gendarmerie
, picking her way through the rubble to one of the window openings. “Look.
There
is the best view in Provence, and this—” she waved her arm at the dusty, cavernous room—“this, well, imagine how this could be. And then on top you have bedrooms, and below, the restaurant.”

“The restaurant?”

“Of course a restaurant—not too big, but with the
terrasse
in the summer, space for maybe forty people, a little bar by the
piscine—
”

“Nicole?”

“Oui?”

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed. “You didn’t guess already? This is your hotel. It’s perfect. Small, but with a charm—I can see it in my head—and the view, and so much work already done.…” Her voice trailed off. She perched on a stone window ledge and looked up at Simon. “
Voilà
. That’s my idea for you.”

He took out a cigar and lit it, feeling like a client who had just been shown a campaign he wasn’t expecting. It was ridiculous, of course. He knew nothing about running hotels, and it would be a full-time job just getting the place restored. Then finding staff, building up the business—although with his contacts that shouldn’t be a problem. All the same, it was a big undertaking, not something he could do sitting in an advertising agency in London. It would be a leap, a gamble, a complete change. But wasn’t that what he said he wanted? And Nicole was right; it could be spectacular. He looked at her. She was backlit by the last slanting rays of the sun, could have come straight out of a shampoo commercial. Once an advertising man, always an advertising man. Or was he?

“You’re very quiet, Simon.”

“I’m very surprised. It’s not every day I get offered a little hotel.”

“Do you see how it could be?” Nicole stood up and shivered. The chill in the air was having a distracting effect on her nipples under the thin sweater.

“It could be a lot warmer. Come on. Let me buy you a drink.”

“You already did. We have champagne at home. Doctor’s orders.”

If I had a doctor like you, Simon thought, I’d be an Olympic-standard hypochondriac. “Nicole, it’s a fascinating idea.” He winced at his own words. “God, I’m sorry. I sound exactly like one of my clients. It’s just that I need to think about it, and I need to know a lot more. Let’s get back, and you can tell me about it.”

By the time they reached the house the sun was gone, leaving a pink afterglow in the sky. Nicole lit the fire and asked Simon to choose some music from the compact discs stacked between piles of books on the shelf, Tina Turner next to Mozart (he would have enjoyed that, Simon thought), Couperin, Fauré, Piaf, Brahms, Montserrat Caballé, Jeff Beck. He hesitated between Pavarotti and Chopin before picking Keith Jarrett. The first few quiet notes of the Köln concert were accompanied by the sound of a champagne cork. The room was warm, and aromatic with the scent of burning wood. Rutland Gate seemed a long way away.

Nicole handed him a glass.
“Santé.”

“Here’s to small and charming hotels.”

They sat in front of the fire, and Simon started with the obvious questions. Nicole had done her homework—she knew the square metres on each floor, the details of the work that had already been completed, the
asking price. As she’d told him before, the original plan had been to turn the
gendarmerie
into small apartments. Basic electrical and plumbing work had been finished. The pool had been dug and lined. The property was now ready for
les finitions—
plaster and glass and flagstones and fittings, lighting and landscaping, the exciting part of restoration that follows months and millions of francs devoted to essential but often invisible preparatory work.

“Let me ask you an impossible question,” Simon said. “What do you think it would cost to finish?”

Nicole leaned forward in her chair, elbows on her knees, her glass cradled in both hands. She wrinkled her nose in concentration. With her hair pushed back behind her ears, she looked about twenty. Simon felt himself slipping gently down the slope that leads from simple attraction to something more complicated.

“The
main-d’oeuvre
of the workers, that can always be calculated,” she said. “For the rest, it depends on your materials. There is one price for marble and another for stone from the local quarry. For me, the way to do this is with máterials from the region, very clean, not fussy. Like that, and with good furniture, maybe one or two antiques—” she looked up at the ceiling, and Simon admired the line of her throat—“I make a big guess: seven, eight million francs.”

“How long would it take?”

“This is Provence, remember. Five years?” Nicole laughed. “No, I’m not serious, but to be impatient here is expensive.”

“Could it be done in six months?”

Nicole held up one hand and rubbed fingers and thumb together. “With enough money, enough men, yes. Even here.”

Simon went on with his questions—architects, building permissions, a licence to serve alcohol, staff, a chef. A chef. He glanced at his watch. “I think we should do some research on chefs. Where would you like to eat?”

Nicole pretended to think. What she wanted was to stay here with this smiling, untidy man who still needed a haircut, and talk without the distractions of menus and waiters. He brought a warmth to the room that she liked very much.

“There are three or four places not too far away. But it’s Saturday. Without a reservation … I could try.” She hesitated, and shrugged. “Or I have pasta, with a fresh tomato sauce. Very simple.”

Simon closed his eyes in mock ecstasy, then opened one to look at her. “Fresh tomato sauce? With basil?”

“Of course with basil.”

“I’ll help. I’m good in kitchens. I wash dishes, I keep the cook’s glass filled, I don’t bump into things.”

Nicole laughed and stood up. “
Bon
. Do you open wine too?”

“No cork can resist me. It’s something I learned in the Boy Scouts.”

He followed her into the kitchen and watched as she slipped a long chef’s apron over her head, pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, and took a bottle of red wine from the rack.

“
Voilà, monsieur
. Château Val-Joanis. It comes from just the other side of the Lubéron.” She held out the bottle, and he noticed the delicate blue veins on the inside of her forearm. He liked a woman who rolled up her sleeves to cook, something that Caroline had never done. “Corkscrew and glasses on the bar.”

It was a fine kitchen, he thought—a proper cook’s kitchen, with copper pans hanging where you could
get at them, knives with blades worn thin by years of sharpening, a stove with a cast-iron top, a shelf of battered cookbooks, a round table of scarred, thick wood. Everything well used, well cared for. He poured the wine and took a glass to Nicole, who was ladling tomato sauce into a pan. He bent his head over the pan to inhale the wonderful summery smell, and then, with a quick, guilty dab, dipped a finger into the sauce and licked it clean.

Nicole tapped the back of his hand with the ladle. “No more. You help me better if you sit and talk.”