Paulette is still there, with an empty espresso cup, emailing.
Cédric has now shown some interest in James’s pitch — has offered anyway to drive him around the valley and show him some of the sites he has in mind for development.
And James is starting to think, while Cédric scrapes the crème anglaise from his plate with the side of the fork, about where he can find some money — a few million, let’s say — to put into French Alpine property. He has some numbers. People Air Miles knows. It is, indeed, all about who you know. That much is true. Matching money with opportunity, taking a percentage. Taking something for yourself.
For about an hour, they drive through the valley. Cédric seems to own about half of it, keeps pointing to fields and saying they’re his.
They stop at one of them. It is on a slope just above the old village, up where the houses thin out and the pasture starts. Cédric says his family have owned this land for eighty years — it was where the herd went when it first emerged from its winter quarters, until the snow melted higher up. Le pré du printemps, he says its name is. He seems to think it’s his most promising plot for development.
‘What are you planning then?’ James asks him.
‘Something like the other,’ Cédric says, meaning the Chalets du Midi Apartments.
No, no. Forget that.
Small- to medium-sized chalets, James thinks. Eight maybe, nicely spaced. And apartments, in the middle somewhere. Maybe ten apartments. Parking underneath. Leisure facilities. Everything high spec. Plenty of slate, zinc.
He does some preliminary sums, standing there up to his knees in the tired summer grass.
Cédric is smoking.
‘What about planning regulations?’ James asks him. ‘Do you know anyone who can help us with that?’
It turns out Cédric’s aunt is the deputy mayor. His extended family is all over the local administration like ivy.
‘This is an excellent site,’ James says. He is looking down at the slate roofs of the village: disordered, monochrome, bright. It is eerily still now, the village, in the early afternoon. End of the season. Autumn dead here, nothing happening. Eagles turning over the shadow-filled deeps of the valley all day.
And far away, the other side, smothered in forest, in shade.
In silence.
4
Sunday morning. They are walking up Tranmere Road, past terraced houses, the windows of the front rooms sticking out like smug little paunches. Muscular black Audis, BMW estates, VW Touaregs are parked outside. The spaces that separate the houses from the pavement are marked off by low walls, sometimes a bit of thinning hedge. There is usually a metal gate, less than waist high. Then tiles to narrow front doors. It is fashionable, James notices, to have, in the pane of glass over the door, the house number as islands of dark transparency in a milky frosting.
His own house has something similar. Not quite as posh — the numbers just stencilled onto the glass, not picked out as negative space in the frosting. It was already there when they moved in. Miranda was pregnant at the time. The house was a mess. Ancient gas fire in the front room. Overgrown garden. A crust of dust on all the surfaces inside. Someone’s parent had lived there, then died, and it was being sold. The price was well over half a million. It was shocking, how little you got for all that money — and all the way out here, in this windy low-lying part of London about which he knew nothing, with its prisons, and its playing fields.
Its empty expanse of sky.
They had taken the house in hand. Miranda had. Spaces opened up, painted pale colours. The garden paved, turfed, filled with daffodils. Halogen lights embedded everywhere, flooding on at the touch of a switch. Everything quite small, admittedly. The living room — the street hidden behind linen blinds — only two paces from end to end. The table in the kitchen unable to accommodate more than four. The nursery so tiny the window hardly fitted in the wall.
And outside, the daffodils shivered, the clouds massed and dispersed in the sky.
And that was five years ago.
Time passes.
‘Tommy,’ James shouts, as his son gets too far ahead of him. ‘Tom.’
They are at the end of Tranmere Road, where it meets Magdalen Road, and the primary school is, and further on Wandsworth cemetery, strung out along the railway line towards Clapham.
Tom waits for him, and James takes his hand to cross the road.
They arrive at the station, as James does every weekday morning. The names of places in Surrey scrolling across the information screen are as familiar to him as his dreams. They are part of him now, those names: New Malden, Surbiton, Esher…
He arrived home on Friday night to find the kids asleep and his wife watching television, some panel show. Every few seconds: laughter. He joined her on the sofa, leaving his things in the narrow hall. He took off his shoes.
Later, her shapes under the sheets.
On Saturday, though, he was short-tempered.
Last week, in high winds, a substantial piece of chimney fell off the house — stove in someone’s new Nissan Qashqai which was parked in front. An insurance nightmare. Miranda had been on the phone all week to the insurers, without much to show for it. Just to sort out the chimney, even that seemed problematic. He spent most of Saturday in the low bed under the sloping roof, peering at small print on a tablet screen, furious at having to spend his time on it. Tom sulking, damaging things. Alice wailing somewhere downstairs.
The train passes through sunlight. Passes allotments. Ivied walls. For a moment, some sort of waterway, shiny like mercury under dark trees. Masses of tracks run parallel as they draw near Wimbledon.
He is holding Tom’s hand when they step off the train onto the platform. People everywhere. District line trains waiting in the intermittent brightness as clouds swim overhead.
Miranda’s parents are coming for lunch today, driving in from Newbury. Miranda is in the kitchen, preparing food. Some sort of Italian lamb dish, James thinks.
Tom says, ‘Why are trees so high?’
They are on the bus, the number 93, as it makes its way from Wimbledon station to the Common, up Wimbledon Hill Road.
James considers the question.
It is his part, this morning, to take himself and Tom off somewhere to be out of the way while Miranda makes lunch, and Alice hangs in that harness thing which is supposed to keep her out of trouble.
He says, ‘I suppose they’re trying to get as near to the sun as possible.’
‘Why?’
Fond smiles from some of the people near them on the bus, which is not full. They are on the upper deck, near the front.
‘Well,’ James explains, ‘the sunlight makes them grow. They need it to grow.’
Tom is looking with interest at the plane trees that line the road, loom leafy over the wide pavements. London Sunday, the hum of the place only slightly subdued. People walking down there, purposefully. James sees a man and a woman walking up the hill, the same way the bus is travelling — tall woman with dark mass of hair, long arms expressing something.
‘They need it to grow,’ Tom repeats, a stray moment of sunlight finding the leaves he is looking at.
‘That’s right,’ James tells him, pleased.
Handsome red-brick houses here.
And new developments of flats.
Noyer. Never far from his thoughts.
Then Wimbledon ‘village’. The High Street with its posh little shops — people energetically shopping — and what was once a village green. War memorial.