A Good Year (2 page)

Amis greeted the arrival of his crème brûlée with another wink at the waitress. “Won’t wash, my friend, won’t wash. You want to know what’s wrong?” He looked at Max and nodded two or three times. “Personal life’s getting in the way. Too many late nights, too much chasing after totty. You’ve lost the killer instinct.” Taking his spoon, he stabbed his dessert through the heart.

“That’s crap, and you know it. Both those companies are ripe. This deal is as good as sewn up.”

Amis looked up at him, a fleck of yellow cream on his chin. “You’ve got that right, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m taking it over.” Amis spooned in another mouthful, crunching the caramelized sugar between his teeth.

Max took a deep breath. “We’ll see what the Lawtons have to say about that. They’re . . .”

“Too late, sunshine. They’re sorted. I got the green light from them this morning.”

Max saw months of work wiped out. Even worse, he saw his bonus disappearing into Amis’s bank account as his unpaid bills piled up and the bank moved in to tighten the noose around his neck. “You can’t do that. It’s bloody daylight robbery. It’s stealing.”

“Where have you been living? It’s business, that’s what it is. Business. Nothing personal, no hard feelings. And I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ve had a tip about a little engineering firm, but I won’t have time for that now. You can take it over.”

A memory came back to Max from many years ago, when his uncle Henry was giving him a lecture about life:
Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.
Max came to a decision. “I can take it over, can I? I can work it up, and then, when it’s all set, I can get screwed again. Is that what you’re saying?” Max leaned across the table. “Well, you can stuff your little engineering firm, and you can stuff your job. I’m not going to work for a thieving prick like you.”

Amis felt a glow of satisfaction as Max pushed back his chair. Lunch had gone according to plan; in fact, it couldn’t have gone better. He’d received a detailed, up-to-date brief on the deal, and, since Max had resigned, there wouldn’t be any severance to pay. Perfect. “Suit yourself,” he said. “Your decision. Make sure your desk is cleared out by this evening, OK?”

Max stood up, but Amis hadn’t finished with him. “Aren’t you forgetting something, my friend? The company vehicle?” He held out his hand. “I’ll have the car keys, if you don’t mind.”

Max took the keys from his pocket and hesitated for a moment before dropping them carefully into Amis’s half-eaten crème brûlée.

Amis watched him go. He reached for his cell phone and punched in Tracy’s number.

During the walk back to the office, Max’s emotions were a mixture of apprehension at what he’d just done and elation at having done it. This was a bad moment to be out of a job, it was true. But the thought of life without Amis and his constant needling was something of a consolation; unfortunately, it was not nearly enough to make up for the lost bonus. He was in trouble, and he needed to find something else. He decided to spend his last afternoon at Lawtons making a few calls. Might even try New York.

When he got back, however, he found he could barely squeeze into his cubicle. Tracy and two security guards were waiting for him.

“Jesus,” said Max. “What do you think I’m going to do, nick the carpet?”

“Standard termination procedure,” said Tracy. She turned to the guards. “Stay with him until he’s finished, and then report back to me.” She stopped in front of Max as she was leaving the cubicle and smiled sweetly. “How was lunch?”

Max looked around the space where he had spent most of his waking hours over the past eighteen months. What did he want to take with him? What would he be allowed to take? His diskettes? Certainly not. His official Lawton Brothers desk diary? God forbid. What else was there? Nothing much. He shrugged at the guards. “Help yourselves, boys.”

Out on Threadneedle Street, he saw an empty cab throwing up a miniature bow wave as it came toward him through the rain. He raised an arm to hail it, remembered that he had just joined the ranks of the unemployed, and waved it on. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on the London Underground. This was going to be a novel experience. He splashed toward the Bank station, feeling the moisture soaking through the soles of his shoes.

There was no solace to be found in his apartment. Max kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks. A leaden afternoon light, more like winter than summer, seeped through the windows. The answering machine blinked its red eye.

“You bastard! Where
were
you last night? I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. All those ghastly men trying to touch me up. Don’t bother ever . . .”

Max winced and shut off the diatribe before it had finished. Working late the night before, he’d completely forgotten that he’d arranged to meet his caller in the bar of the Chelsea Arts Club. Knowing some of his fellow members, he could imagine that their desire to make a pretty stranger feel welcome might have been expressed too enthusiastically. Oh God. Better send flowers and an abject note.

He stripped off his tie and jacket and slumped on the couch, all energy and optimism gone. The apartment was a mess. His life was a mess. As an alternative to housework or vodka, he turned on the television. A cookery program. A documentary about salamanders. A man with blow-dried hair presenting the news from CNN. Golf, the instant soporific. Max dozed off, and dreamed of drowning Amis in a vat of crème brûlée.

It was evening when the phone woke him. The golfers on the screen didn’t seem to have made any progress since Max had dropped off several hours before. Perhaps it was a long hole. He turned off the TV and picked up the phone.

“There you are, you old bugger. I tried you at the office, but they said you’d left early. Are you all right?”

It was Charlie, his closest friend and ex-brother-in-law.

Max yawned. “I’m fine. No, actually, I’m not fine. It’s been one of those days.”

“It’s going to start getting better. Tonight, you and I are celebrating the promotion of Charles Willis, real estate’s rising star. It happened this afternoon. Bingham & Trout have made me a full partner. Time for young blood, they said. The property business is changing, we must move with the times, a strong hand on the tiller, all that stuff.”

“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.”

“With vines, you said?”

“Sure. Vines all over the place.”

“Right,” said Charlie. “This calls for something a little out of the ordinary.” He raised an arm and made energetic circling motions at a waiter, calling out for a wine list. Turning back to Max, he said, “You know I’ve always liked a drop of wine. Well, I’m taking it seriously now, starting a cellar. I’m even going to an evening wine-tasting course. This is all most exciting. Ah, there you are.” The sommelier had arrived, and Charlie started to brief him.

“We’re celebrating,” he said. “My friend here has just inherited a chateau and a vineyard in France, and so we’re looking for something appropriate in the way of homemade wine.” He wagged a finger at the sommelier. “Homemade in Bordeaux, mind you. A classic claret. None of your New World novelties.”

Charlie and the sommelier bent over the list, exchanging knowledgeable murmurs while Max looked around the room—glossy women and prosperous-looking men, London’s privileged class, all of them talking at the top of their voices. Max felt a sudden desire to be somewhere quiet, and then thought of his empty apartment. Not that quiet. He looked down at the letter again, and wondered how much the property would fetch if he decided to sell; certainly more than enough to get him out of the hole he was in. He raised his glass in a private toast to Uncle Henry.

“Excellent,” said Charlie. “That’s the one.”

The sommelier pursed his lips and nodded in silent approval before going off in search of the wine.

“There,” said Charlie, pointing to his choice on the list. “The ’82 Léoville Barton. Top bottle. Can’t do better than that.”

Max looked at where the pointing finger had stopped. “Are you serious? Three hundred and eighty pounds?”

“That’s nothing these days. Not long ago, half a dozen punters—young bankers, I think they were—had dinner at some place in St. James’s and went mad. They blew forty-four thousand quid on six bottles of wine. The chef was so tickled he gave them a free dinner. You must have read about it.”

The sommelier returned, and Charlie paused to watch him perform the opening ceremony. The bottle was presented for inspection, in the way a proud parent displays a particularly well-favored baby. The lead capsule was cut, the long, aristocratic cork withdrawn and sniffed, the dark ruby liquid poured with practiced care into a decanter, with a little more than a mouthful going into a glass.

Now it was time for Charlie’s performance. “There are five steps,” he said, reaching for the glass, “that make all the difference between the art of drinking and the act of swallowing.” The sommelier looked on with the indulgent patience that comes from the thought of a substantial commission. “First,” said Charlie, “mental preparation.” He worshipped his glass for a few moments before raising it to the light. “Next, the pleasure of the eyes.” He tilted the glass so that the differences in color could be seen—deep red at the bottom, fading into a lighter maroon at the top, with a rim that was faintly tinged with brown. “Now for the nose.” He swirled the wine gently, opening it up to the air, before dipping his nose into the glass and inhaling. “Ah,” he said with a slow smile, his eyes closed. “Ah.”

Max felt like a voyeur spying on a profoundly personal moment. Over the years of their friendship, he had always been amused by the passion with which Charlie attacked his hobbies, from skateboarding when they were at school to last year’s preoccupation with karate. Now it seemed that wine had taken over. Max smiled at the expression of purest pleasure that had spread across Charlie’s face. “So far so good?” asked Max.

Charlie ignored him. “Now for the pleasures of mouth, tongue, and palate.” He took a sip of wine, holding it in his mouth while he sucked in a little air, making a discreet lapping sound. For a few seconds his jaw went up and down as though he were chewing, and then he swallowed. “Mmm,” he said. “The final step is appreciation. Messages from the palate to the brain. Thoughts of the wine still to come.” He nodded to the sommelier. “That’ll do nicely. You can let it breathe for a while. No, we can do better than that—you can let it regain its composure.”

“Very impressive,” said Max. “You had me on the edge of my seat. Is that what you learned in the wine-tasting course?”

Charlie nodded. “Elementary stuff, but it’s surprising what a difference it makes—just taking the time to concentrate on what you’re drinking. And we’re in luck tonight. I had a look at the menu while I was waiting, and there’s saddle of lamb. Terrific with a great Bordeaux. And I thought we might start with a few blinis to go with the rest of the champagne. How does that sound?”

The congealed chops of Max’s lunch with Amis seemed a long way away. “Sounds like the ideal diet for an unemployed man.”

Charlie dismissed the problem with a wave of his hand. “You’ll be fine. Anyway, there’s your inheritance. You’re part of the landed gentry now. Tell me about the chateau.”

“The house, Charlie, the house.” Max was silent for a moment, looking back into his memory. “It’s quite old; goes back to the eighteenth century, I think, what they call down there a
bastide,
which is a step or two up from a farmhouse. Big rooms, high ceilings, tiled floors, tall windows, thick walls. I remember it was always cool indoors. Cool, and actually a bit of a mess. Uncle Henry wasn’t too fussy about housework. A wonderful old dear used to come on a bicycle once a week and rearrange the dust in between drinks. She was always catatonic by lunchtime. There was a little scullery behind the kitchen where she used to sleep it off in the afternoon.”

Charlie nodded. “Probably still there. Now come on, give me something an estate agent could get his teeth into: number of bedrooms, reception rooms, bathrooms—I take it there’s what we in the trade call indoor sanitation facilities—lavish appointments, architectural features, turrets, crenellations, that sort of thing.” He leaned back to allow the waiter to serve the caviar blinis, and the interrogation stopped while they ate the golden, savory pancakes, a perfect foil for the glistening mounds of black, salty bubbles that burst in the mouth.

“I could get used to this,” said Max, as he wiped his plate clean. “Do you think it would taste as good if it were called fish eggs?”

Charlie dabbed his mouth with his napkin, and finished his champagne. “Not another drop of wine do you get until you give me some more details. Furnish me with particulars, old son. Furnish me with particulars.”

“Furnish you? God, you’re beginning to sound like a property ad in
Country Life.
” Charlie grinned, and nodded in agreement as Max continued. “It’s been a long time since I was there. Years, actually. Let’s see. I remember a library with a huge stuffed bear in it, a dining room we never used because we always ate in the kitchen, an enormous vaulted sitting room, a wine cellar . . .”

“Good, good,” said Charlie. “Always a most desirable feature.”

“. . . a row of attics that ran the length of the third floor of the house . . .”

“Not attics, Max. Staff accommodation,” murmured Charlie. “Excellent. Plenty of room for the odd maid and butler.”

“. . . I think there were half a dozen bedrooms and two or three bathrooms. Oh, and a grass tennis court and outbuildings, barns and things like that. A courtyard with an old fountain.”

“I can see it now. Sounds to me like a stately home. General state of repair and decoration? Has the refurbisher been around in the last hundred years or so?”

Max shook his head.

“No? Well, they’ve probably been keeping him busy in the Cotswolds. So how would you describe the interiors?”

“Not great. You know, slightly shabby.”

It was Charlie’s turn to shake his head. “No, no, Max. We don’t call it shabby. We call it the patina and faded charm of a bygone age.”

“Of course, right. Well, there’s plenty of that.”

The lamb arrived, moist and tender. The wine was poured, admired, and sipped. Charlie, his nose still hovering over his glass, looked up at Max. “How would you rate it?”

Max took another sip, rolling the wine around his mouth as Charlie had done. “Bloody good.
Bloody
good.”

Charlie raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Won’t do, old son. You can’t describe a work of art like that. You’ve got to brush up on the jargon, the connoisseur’s vocabulary.” He held up one hand, anticipating Charlie’s reaction. “I know, I know. You’re always saying we talk a lot of crap in the property business. But believe me, we’re just beginners compared to the wine boys.” He struck a pose, holding his glass by its base and swirling it gently. “Do I detect faded tulips? Beethoven in a mellow mood? The complexity, the almost Gothic structure . . .” He grinned at the expression on Max’s face. “I’ve never heard such a lot of twaddle in my life, but that’s the way some of them bang on.”