“Charlie, that’s terrific. Congratulations.”
“Well, don’t just sit there. Come and help me out with this bottle of Krug.”
“Where are you?”
“An old client of mine just opened this place off the Portobello Road. Pinot, it’s called-great bar, great wine list, and even as I speak it is crawling with crumpet. All the Notting Hill lovelies, dressed in flimsy garments. I’m fighting them off.”
Max was smiling as he put the phone down and went into the bedroom to change. Ever since they had met at school, Charlie had always been good for morale. And looking out of the window, Max saw that the rain had stopped. His spirits lifted, and he found himself whistling as he went downstairs.
Passing through the lobby on his way out, he stopped to check his mailbox. There was the usual collection of final demands and circulars and one or two of the dinner-party invitations that come the way of every London bachelor; but there was also an intriguing envelope with a French stamp. In the top left-hand corner was a small, stylized image of the statue of Justice, and below was printed the sender’s name: Cabinet Auzet, Notaires, Rue des Remparts, 84903 St.-Pons. Max started to open it, then decided to save it to use as a distraction from the horrors of the tube. He slipped the envelope in his pocket, stuffed the rest of his mail back in the box, and headed for the South Kensington Underground station.
Two
Standing in the crush of humanity as the tube rattled away from South Kensington toward Notting Hill, Max was rediscovering the face of public transport. Almost everyone around him, it seemed, had undergone the modern tribal ritual of piercing. Pierced nostrils, pierced eyebrows, pierced lips, pierced ears, several pallid but prominently displayed pierced navels. Other visible body parts, those that hadn’t been pierced, were tattooed. A handful of older, more conservative passengers, without nose jewelry or ear trinkets, looked like relics from a distant, unadorned age. They buried their faces in books or newspapers, carefully avoiding eye contact with those members of the pierced generation jammed up against them.
Max wedged himself in a corner of the lurching carriage and took the letter from his pocket. He read it once, then a second time, his rusty French gradually coming back to him as he went over the formal phrases. Lost in thought, he almost missed his stop, and he was still preoccupied when he pushed open the thick smoked-glass doors of the restaurant.
The hubbub of a fashionable haunt in full cry washed over him like a wave. The long, low-ceilinged room, with its hard surfaces and echoing acoustics, was a giant amplifier, following the popular theory that a high decibel level is essential for the enjoyment of food. It was a place where, if you were romantically inclined, you would have to bellow sweet nothings in your companion’s ear. But that was clearly part of the restaurant’s appeal, because every table seemed to be taken.
A sinuous young woman, tightly wrapped in what looked like black clingfilm, swayed up to Max, eyebrows raised, eyelashes a-flutter. “Do you have a reservation with us tonight?”
“I’m supposed to be meeting Mr. Willis.”
“Oh, Charlie. Of course. If you’d like to follow me?”
“To the ends of the earth,” said Max. The young woman giggled, and led the way with the undulant strut that none but the runway model or the restaurant hostess can achieve without dislocating a hip.
Charlie was at a corner table, an ice bucket at his elbow. He grinned as he saw Max. “I see you’ve met the lovely Monica. Isn’t she something? Only girl I know who plays tennis in high heels.”
Monica smiled at them before swaying back to the reception desk, and Max looked at the beaming, rosy face of his friend. Dear old Charlie. Nobody could call him handsome-he was a little overweight, carelessly dressed, his hair perpetually awry-but he possessed abundant charm, liquid brown eyes, and an evident enthusiasm for the company of women that they seemed to find irresistible. He had so far avoided marriage, but with some difficulty. Max had been less fortunate.
He had made the mistake, a few years before, of marrying Charlie’s sister Annabel. The marriage had been turbulent from the start, and had ended badly. Much to Charlie’s disapproval, Annabel had run off to Los Angeles with a film director, and now lived in a four-million-dollar wooden shack on the beach at Malibu. The last time Charlie had seen her, she had embraced the promise of eternal youth offered by Botox and power yoga. Beyond redemption, Charlie had said to Max. I could never stand her anyway; you’re better off without her. And so their friendship had survived the marriage, if anything stronger than before.
“Now then,” said Charlie, pouring champagne, “listen to this. They’ve doubled my salary, given me a Mercedes and full partnership shares, and told me the world’s my oyster. So tonight’s on me.” He raised his glass. “To London property prices-let’s hope they continue to go through the roof.”
“Congratulations, Charlie. It couldn’t happen to a nicer crook.” Max sipped his wine and studied the bubbles spiraling up from the base of his glass. Champagne, he thought, was always associated with good times-a drink for optimists.
Charlie looked at him, head cocked to one side. “You said it had been one of those days. What happened? No assets left to strip?”
Max described his lunch with Amis and the small humiliations of handing back his car keys and then finding two bruisers in uniform standing over his desk. “So that was the bad news: no bonus, no job, no car. But then this arrived.” He pushed the letter across the table.
Charlie took one look at it and shook his head. “Wasted on me, old son. My French isn’t up to it. You’ll have to translate.”
“Remember when we were at school and I used to be packed off to spend the summer holidays in France? My dad’s brother, Uncle Henry, had a place about an hour from Avignon -big old house surrounded by vines, not far from a little village. Uncle Henry and I used to play tennis and chess, and in the evenings he’d get me tipsy on watered-down wine and give me lectures about life. Very decent old stick, he was.” Max paused for another nip at the champagne. “Haven’t seen him for ages. Now I wish I’d seen more of him, because he died a couple of weeks ago.”
Charlie made sympathetic noises, and refilled Max’s glass.
“Anyway, he never got married, never had any children.” Max picked up the letter. “And according to the will, I’m his sole surviving relative. It looks as though he’s left me everything-house, twenty hectares of land, furniture, the lot.”
“Good God,” said Charlie. “Twenty hectares is more than forty acres, right? Sounds like an estate to me. A chateau.”
“I don’t remember it quite like that, but it’s certainly a big house.”