The Merde Factor: (Paul West 5)

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘Good on you, Jake,’ I told him, and we even had a quick man-hug as, on stage, fake Jimi finished his miming and got a huge cheer from the crowd.

  ‘Yes, now all that is missing from my life is a concourse of posy,’ Jake said. ‘What is missing from your life, Paul?’

  I coughed a laugh. Like the recently crowned French air-guitar champion, there was something very obvious lacking from my life.

  ‘Pretty well everything,’ I told him. ‘But hearing you talk, one thing has jumped to the front of the queue.’

  II

  To the untrained eye, the boulangerie down the road from Jake’s apartment probably looked timelessly French. By the door, there were the usual Ticket Restaurant stickers announcing that office workers could buy their takeaway lunches here. Before weekday lunchtimes, the long cold cabinet next to the till was always heaped with wrapped baguette sandwiches, the ham, Gruyère and lettuce poking out the end of long paper bags. Alongside them would be neat stacks of salads in their plastic tubs: lettuce, tomato, olives, boiled egg and sweetcorn, with a beige splash of vinaigrette. And at all times, the cabinet nearest the shop window was a parade ground of pastries, lined with ranks of glistening strawberry tarts, fruit-topped charlottes and bulbous religieuses: the snowman-shaped double-ball éclairs filled and glazed with coffee or chocolate cream. Apart from the prices and the focus on salads, it all looked like something out of the nineteenth century.

  But this boulangerie had moved with the times. The bakers working at the ovens on the other side of the glass partition were North African, as were the women serving, and in addition to the racks of traditionally French loaves, the shop also sold flat, round North African bread and an array of deliciously gooey bite-sized pâtisseries. Dripping with honey or coated with icing sugar, these were the perfect comfort food, so next morning I bought myself a selection and climbed upstairs to wonder how I was going to fill the gaps in my life. Cake would be a good starter.

  It didn’t take me long to get settled. I beat the more visible lumps out of the sofa bed, opened up the window to get some relatively fresh air into the oven that the apartment was becoming as the spring wore on, and then leant out to yell a couple of connards to make the old nutcase downstairs shut up. Finally it was time to lie back, close my eyes and get my fingers sticky, my teeth gummed together and my palate caked with sweet, chewy pastry.

  Not a good time for my phone to start buzzing. Half determined to ignore it, I looked at the number. It was a VianDiffusion extension. Oh shit, I thought, here we go.

  ‘Ago,’ I said, as close to ‘hello’ as my glued jaw could manage.

  ‘Monsieur Wess?’ a woman asked.

  ‘Oui.’

  ‘Bonjour. Monsieur Martin would like to meet you this morning,’ she told me in clipped French. It was Jean-Marie’s new fire-breathing dragon of a secretary.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘He has asked me to invite you to a meeting at eleven.’

  ‘Où?’ I asked – where?

  ‘Matty’s Ridge,’ she said.

  ‘Où?’ I repeated.

  ‘Le salon de thé. My Tea Is Rich?’

  So simply humiliating me wasn’t enough for Jean-Marie. He wanted me to go along and watch the execution of the tea room? No, he wanted me to perform it. The very act of signing my name on his forms would be like injecting poison into its veins.

  ‘No,’ I finally said. ‘Not at the tea room. I’ll come to your office.’

  ‘Non, non. It must be the salon de thé. Monsieur Martin insisted. It is a convocation.’

  This, I recognised, was a legal word. It was like a summons. So it was his lawyers who’d concocted the plan. Typical.

  ‘D’accord,’ I said. ‘Eleven o’clock.’ I thanked her for calling. It wasn’t her fault she was working for a shit. After all, I’d worked for him myself.

  III

  It was months since I’d been to the tea room. The last time I’d seen it had been in Alexa’s photos. Stupid, really, I told myself. I should have popped in more often, kept in touch with the place. If I had, maybe I would have spotted that it needed updating – with a burger menu, say.

  Looking around at the people walking in this chic neighbourhood, I couldn’t imagine a single one of them going into a diner. The middle-aged bourgeois couple, dressed like a throwback to the 1940s. The trotting fashionista, a rake-thin young guy in a suit delivering what looked like a couple of dresses to a show somewhere. The two concierges, Portuguese probably, chatting as one of them wheeled her green bins back into the open double doors of a fancy apartment building. Admittedly, the office workers were still at their desks. They wouldn’t come streaming out for an hour or so, but as I’d tried to tell Jean-Marie, they wouldn’t want to sit in a booth and eat stodgy comfort food every day. It just wasn’t chic enough. Even the kids of that middle-aged couple weren’t around often enough to make a diner work. They’d be here at weekends and holidays, but their school was miles away.

  And there, right outside My Tea Is Rich, shamelessly occupying a livraisons (delivery) space, stood Jean-Marie’s Jaguar, its top down and its vintage leather seats glistening in the sun.

  He was taking no chances, though. I could see him silhouetted in the window, keeping an eye on his baby. I couldn’t resist it. I got out my keys and scratched ‘Buy yourself a Renault’ on his bonnet. Or pretended to, anyway. From the way Jean-Marie gesticulated through the window, I could tell that for a satisfying few seconds, he thought it was for real.

  Sitting opposite him, I could see Amandine, which was a surprise. I thought she would have been excluded from all this.

  I walked in and was hit by the smell of my recent past. Toast, coffee, the vapour from a spicy soup. Benoît was busy setting out the bowls of salad that the customers would choose from as they moved along the counter – potato, Greek, Niçoise, sausage and haricot bean, grated carrot and beetroot – four portions with a soft drink for 8.50, almost exactly the price of an average Ticket Restaurant.

  Benoît was looking his usual self. Cool T-shirt, jeans, mild-mannered smile behind his soft growth of beard. The exact opposite of his dad, in fact. We shook hands, but he kept one eye on the figure of Jean-Marie behind me, as if he was worried about being too friendly with the condemned man.

  Four or five of the ten tables had people sitting at them – not bad for mid-morning – and Jean-Marie had commandeered the two in the window, one apparently just for his briefcase. On the other stood two mugs of coffee, diner-style.

  For once, he had actually let Amandine sit more than an inch away from him. She was looking great, but I noticed that she’d dressed down, with a loose black cardigan camouflaging her top half.

  ‘Bad joke, Pool,’ Jean-Marie said, nodding towards his car.

  ‘Bonjour, Jean-Mary,’ I replied, holding out my hand to remind him of the need for civility. ‘How do you know it was a joke?’

  Amandine shook her head.

  ‘Can’t you two stop the Pool and Jean-Mary thing?’ she said, in French, and stood up to give me a bise. I wondered what had happened to make her so assertive.

  ‘Comment ça va?’ I asked her, and for once it wasn’t just a greeting. I needed details. Something had happened.

  ‘Great,’ she said, switching back to English. ‘Jean-Marie has made me an offer, and I accepted.’

  With almost any other woman who’d had to work with Jean-Marie, the obvious question would have been: Was she to be a full-time mistress with luxury apartment or just a business-trip squeeze at a luxury hotel? Not with Amandine, though.

  ‘A job?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course, what else?’ She laughed.

  I turned to study Jean-Marie, who was smiling inscrutably.

  ‘You are surprised, Paul?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes, I wasn’t sure you two – how shall I put it? – would be able to work together any more.’

  Jean-Marie gave a chuckle worthy of Santa Claus.

  ‘Oh, that’s all in the past,’ he sa
id. ‘We had a frank exchange of opinions. It was very educational. Explain, please, Amandine.’

  I turned towards her, fearing the worst.

  ‘Jean-Marie is going to start a campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace,’ she said. ‘He wants me to make VianDiffusion into an “entreprise phare”. You know, a sort of role-model company.’

  ‘And you believed him?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Our slogan will be: “We sell meat, but we don’t treat our women employees like it.” We are going to put ads in the magazines.’

  ‘Is this true?’ I asked Jean-Marie.

  ‘Oh yes. I invented the slogan. Good, no?’

  Gross, I wanted to say, but brilliantly so. For some perverse reason, his sudden turnaround was all too credible. It was typical of Jean-Marie to turn his failing into a virtue and, meanwhile, make all his friends in high places suffer the same fate as him – I’m not allowed to touch up the interns any more, so why should you? He was probably going to get himself appointed Minister for Sexual Equality.

  But there was a problem with all of this: if Amandine and Jean-Marie were in each other’s good books again, where did it leave me?

  ‘Sit down, Paul, have a cup of tea,’ Jean-Marie said. ‘The other person will join us in a moment.’

  Ah yes, I thought, there were no lawyers present. Which one would it be, I wondered: the old guy, the hatchet man or the young apprentice? The young one, probably, to rub it into me that I was a mere minnow in Jean-Marie’s big pond.

  ‘I hope I’ll be walking out of here with a cheque,’ I said. ‘Just because you two are best friends again, it doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten why we’re here.’

  A frown crossed Amandine’s face and I saw that she wanted to tell me something, but Jean-Marie gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and she sat back in silence.

  ‘It’s self-service here, or have you forgotten?’ Jean-Marie said. ‘Maybe you should go to the bar and order. This place needs its profits, after all.’

  I got up.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just keep half the tea money so I can be sure you won’t freeze it in some bank account,’ I said, and went to see Benoît.

  ‘Benoît, please don’t discuss business with Paul, OK?’ Jean-Marie called over my shoulder, and his son nodded meekly. It was shutdown time.

  What I really fancied was a coffee with a double shot of whisky, but I ordered a cup of Darjeeling for old times’ sake, and watched Benoît steam the small teapot, then fill it with boiling water and drop the bag in, just as I’d taught him to do. It had taken a while to convince him that it was a good idea to depart from the typical French café custom of handing the customer a pot of water with a teabag on a saucer. That was a recipe for tasteless tea that no one would ever want to reorder.

  ‘Milk, Paul?’ Benoît asked, and I nodded. He poured a splash into the mug. Again, not a French thing to do. They’d have given me a little jug. Extra cost, extra washing up.

  ‘Non, non,’ he said when I tried to give him money. ‘Papa was joking. He says he will pay.’

  ‘I hope you got a lawyer to witness that promise,’ I said.

  When I turned around to walk back to Jean-Marie and Amandine, I almost poured the hot tea and cold milk down my shirt. Three faces were staring at me, enjoying my reaction, which for the moment was mute shock. I could do nothing but gape.

  ‘Is that tea for me, Paul?’ Alexa asked.

  ‘Sorry, but I think I need it,’ I told her. There are times in life, even in these days of espressos and caramel lattes, when an Englishman’s only refuge is a cup of tea. I sat down. ‘Is someone going to explain?’

  ‘You have a problem, Paul,’ Jean-Marie began. There, at least, he was on safe ground.

  ‘No, that’s not a good way to start,’ Alexa interrupted him. ‘What you need to know, Paul, is that My Tea Is Rich is not going to close.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘And it will stay a tea room.’

  ‘It will?’ This had to be a hallucination.

  ‘Your problem was—’ Jean-Marie began again, but Alexa cut him off a second time.

  ‘No negativity, please,’ she said. ‘Paul, I have offered to buy Jean-Marie’s half of the business.’

  ‘You have? But how?’

  ‘You remember I mentioned my grandfather left me some photos? Well, he also left me some money, and when you told me that the tea room might be closed in favour of a diner, I decided this was how I would spend the money.’

  ‘And you agreed to this?’ I asked Jean-Marie. He shrugged benevolently, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘But yesterday …’ I said, trying with outstretched hands to conjure up the disaster that had been imminent less than twenty-four hours before.

  ‘Yesterday afternoon, I contacted Alexa and told her what was happening,’ Amandine said.

  ‘But you didn’t know each other.’

  ‘There aren’t many photographers in Paris called Alexa,’ Amandine went on. ‘And when Jean-Marie’s lawyers returned to the offices at the end of the day to finalise the contracts, Alexa and I went to the meeting to discuss things.’ The way she said ‘discuss’, and the way Jean-Marie flinched ever so slightly as she said it, made me feel that the discussions must have been what politicians call ‘frank’.

  Jean-Marie saw me staring at him in disbelief.

  ‘Let’s just say,’ he said, ‘these two ladies showed me that the best course of action for my business interests was not to replace the tea room with a diner.’

  In the past, a sentence like that would have been accompanied by a hand on a female knee. Now, though, his hands were above the table and pressed together, as if in prayer.

  ‘And with this, I must leave you,’ he announced. ‘I must go and buy American’s Dream. Whatever you think, Paul, that diner is a good business, and will do well.’

  ‘Yes, great, perfect,’ I said, still not quite able to believe that all this was really happening.

  Jean-Marie stood up, shook hands all round, and went to say a few words to Benoît, presumably to commiserate with him that he was soon to be the employee of an Englishman and a mad hippie woman.

  As soon as he’d left, all resemblance to a business meeting ended.

  ‘You two are fucking geniuses,’ I told the grinning girls. ‘You’re my fairy godmothers.’

  ‘No, Paul, I don’t like the idea of being your god or your mother,’ Alexa said, though she had a smile on her face.

  ‘But how did you do it? Am I allowed to kiss you?’

  We all stood up and did a group hug across the table.

  ‘How do you think we did it?’ Amandine asked. ‘Blackmail, of course. I told you I had my insurance.’

  She picked up her phone, pressed the screen, and a grainy film began. The sound was bad and the picture overexposed, but the action was unmistakable. It was Jean-Marie being smarmy and over-tactile.

  ‘I started recording and filming him as soon as he started harassing me,’ Amandine said. ‘And yesterday, after you walked out of the meeting with the low-yahs, I decided it was time to show him.’

  ‘Wow,’ was all I could say as I tried to imagine how Jean-Marie would have reacted to a humble intern, and a female one at that, squaring up to him. ‘But was he really worried about blackmail?’ I asked. ‘He usually just passes off all this kind of thing as being charming and French.’

  ‘No,’ Amandine said. ‘Times are changing, even in France. A compilation of his best lines on YouTube and he would look like a macho idiot.’

  Of course, the internet was powerful enough to sweep away even some of France’s oldest traditions. I had to laugh. Jean-Marie the power freak, obsessed with staying one step ahead of everyone’s game, had been well and truly nailed.

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked.

  ‘At first, nothing. Like he was scared I was filming his reaction. But about an hour later, he came and told me it was a difficult time at home for him, and all the usual married men’s m
erde. He said he was sorry and I had nothing to worry about. And he offered me a job in marketing.’

  ‘Bloody hell. Great.’

  ‘Well, no, I told him I didn’t want it, because of the lechy guy who keeps bothering me. You know, the one who comes into my office all the time. And Jean-Marie walked out, and when he came back he told me the lech had been fired.’

  ‘Fired?’ I couldn’t believe it. The last man to be fired for sexual harassment in France was probably a Napoleonic general who winked once too often at Josephine. ‘Yes, so we had a talk and he offered me this job presenting VianDiffusion as a leader in gender equality.’

  I had to laugh. Until yesterday, the last place Jean-Marie had wanted to lead a woman was towards equality.

  ‘He is a changed man,’ Amandine said solemnly.

  I was sceptical. Jean-Marie might change his suit and get his teeth bleached, but that didn’t alter the man inside. But if he was willing to leave Amandine and her female colleagues in peace, then that was the best the world could hope for.

  ‘And she called me,’ Alexa cut in, ‘and told me what was happening with the tea room. She knew Jean-Marie had been working with this anti-English website, and she thought I could come in and blackmail him about opening American diners while campaigning against Anglo culture.’

  ‘I just hoped we could stop Jean-Marie forcing you out of the business,’ Amandine said.

  Alexa nodded. ‘But I’d been thinking about it ever since you told me the tea room might close, and when I got Amandine’s call, I decided that that was what my grandfather’s money was for. This was one of the streets where he took his photos, after all. It was synchronicity. So when Jean-Marie’s lawyers came back, we were ready with our new blackmail and my offer.’

  ‘And they advised him to accept?’ I asked.

  ‘No, they advised him to fight,’ Alexa said. ‘They’re lawyers, Paul.’

  ‘Benoît repeated your arguments about the kind of food people eat at lunchtime,’ Amandine said. ‘I described what we saw in the rue de Bretagne. And he listened to me. I think his personal feelings against you had stopped him listening to you. It was a shame, because you were right.’