Acquired Tastes

by Peter Mayle

  And there is something else that I avoid and that, if you are only a moderately rich millionaire, you should avoid too: the chic auction.

  The people who go to the big sale rooms, glossy brochures tucked under mink-clad arms, are not like you and me. They might be upper-crust dealers, professional bidders for foundations of just Grade A plutocrats, but they have one thing in common: they are loaded. And when loaded people get together in the over-cranked atmosphere of competitive bidding, prices disappear upwards within seconds. If you should decide, out of curiosity, to be a spectator at one of these million dollar orgies, the golden rule is to sit on your hands. One absentminded scratch of your ear might catch the auctioneer’s eye and you could find yourself with a twelfth-century bleeding cup and a bill the size of a mortgage. You’re safer with Art Nouveau coat-racks.

  9

  Servants

  I like to have my morning newspaper ironed before I read it. I like to have my shoes boned before they are polished. I like to sit in the back of the car and be driven. I like beds to be made, dishes to be washed, grass to be cut, drinks to be served, telephones to be answered and common tasks to be dealt with invisibly and efficiently so that I can devote my time to major decisions like the choice of wines for dinner and who to vote for in the next election for the mayor of my village.

  That is life as it should be lived, and all it takes is money and servants.

  The instant and superficial attractions of having a personal staff are such that many a young man has rushed off in search of butlers and maids without pausing first to think the whole thing through. Believe it or not, there are disadvantages that are not immediately apparent. We shall come to those later. But first, the good news.

  The most obvious benefit of having servants is that they allow you to avoid disagreeable, uncomfortable or dangerous jobs. They will see to the small but important details of your daily life, from garbage disposal to laying out your clothes every morning and keeping the bar stocked. They can be sent out to do your Christmas shopping, to stand in line outside the movie theatre until you have finished dinner, to open up your house in the country or to lie prone in the street so you always have a parking space available. If you should stray into an unsavoury neighbourhood, you will have nothing to fear as long as you take a large servant with you. Let him reason with the muggers while you look for a cab.

  Aside from practical matters, servants are social assets. They confer status on their master, particularly if they are slightly exotic and don’t speak English. My personal preference would be exiled members of the Polish aristocracy. Or you can choose your staff on the basis of their national skills: a French cook (marvellous soufflés), an English valet (wonderful with clothes) and a German chauffeur (mechanically very sound). It all depends on the languages you speak and the size of your establishment.

  Here, unfortunately, we begin to come up against the problems of maintaining staff on the premises. Even the smallest servants take up a lot of house room. They must have separate quarters, or you will be forever tripping over the chambermaid in the bedroom or arguing with the butler about which TV programme to watch. In the good old days, servants could be tucked away in the attic, where they polished the silver by the light of a guttering candle, but now the minimum space requirement is a suite of bedroom, bathroom and living room. Obviously, the standard of comfort and decoration will not be anything like your own opulent surroundings. But even so, with rents the way they are, you’re looking at an additional overhead of a few thousand dollars a month.

  That may not be a problem. Indeed, you may take a benign pleasure in accommodating your servants so well that you hope they will really feel at home. They will. And since no good deed goes unpunished, your generosity will encourage them to behave just like junior members of the family. This inevitably leads to what the English upper classes describe as ‘forgetting their place,’ in other words, a lack of deference that shows itself in many irritating ways: backchat while serving dinner, unflattering remarks about your choice of ties and scotch, over-familiarity with your guests, demands for longer vacations, and all the rest of it.

  If you’re tolerant enough to put up with this for the sake of a quiet and idle life, worse is to come. Your servants will eventually grow old and develop into eccentrics, like the butler in an Irish country house whose habit it was to serve coffee after dinner stark naked and reeking of Old Bushmills. He was never fired, partly for sentimental reasons and partly because of his close links with the horseracing fraternity in Dublin, but that’s another story.

  One final snag: a houseful of servants will lead to an almost total loss of personal privacy. Let us imagine you have had a brutal day at the office. You return home wanting nothing more than a hot tub, a cold bottle of champagne, and an hour or so of peaceful reflection while you knit yourself together. Not a chance. As you undress, your valet will be catching your clothes before they hit the floor. You escape to what you hope will be the steamy solitude of the bathroom, only to find one of the maids in there testing the temperature of the water with her elbow and asking if you want your back scrubbed. The butler arrives with the champagne. The valet pops his head through the door to consult you about your plans for the evening so that he can prepare an appropriate outfit, and the chauffeur calls on the bathroom phone to ask when you want the car. The whole damned world is hovering around you, full of concern and good intentions, and it’s a nightmare.

  With servants, you are never truly on your own, and for some reason they always find something that needs to be done in the room you have chosen for a few moments of quiet rumination. Perhaps it’s evidence of effort—an instinctive desire to be seen working—but if you happen to be in the library, it won’t be long before someone tiptoes in to dust the bindings. You retire to your study, and they will follow you to change the paper clips. After a while, you will begin to agree with the Spanish proverb that describes servants as ‘unavoidable enemies.’

  You can, of course, tell them to go away and leave you alone. If you’re the sort of man who can kick a cocker spaniel in the teeth without a qualm, you won’t be affected by the hurt and reproachful look they give you as they cower out of the room. Otherwise, you will feel guilty and spend the rest of the day being excessively pleasant to them as penance for your harsh behaviour. One way or another, unless you are very careful, the servants you live with will influence your routine and your disposition to such an extent that your life will seem to revolve around them rather than the other way around.

  But what are the alternatives? To shine your own shoes, make your own bed, drive your own car, and devote your leisure time to drudgery? To be pointed out in the office as the only executive with dishpan hands? To be seen in the supermarket with an armful of toilet paper rolls? Living with servants might be exasperating, but living without them would be intolerable to a man of your position and refinement.

  Do not despair. I have spent many hours thinking about the servant dilemma, and I believe that I have found the solution—an arrangement that gives you privacy when you want it and round-the-clock service when you need it. And, apart from the occasional tip, it won’t cost you a cent.

  It is a bold and imaginative extension of the corporate lackey system that already exists in every office, the servant hierarchy that starts with cleaners and women who sterilise the phones, progresses through messengers, drivers, maintenance men and secretaries and finally reaches the dizzy level of executive personal assistant. The structure is in place. With some minor adjustments and additions, it can be made to conform precisely to your requirements.

  There are only two inflexible rules. The first is that everyone you hire is put on the company payroll. The second is that none of them lives in.

  You will need two chauffeurs—one for yourself and one to ferry staff in and out. You will need a cleaner. You will need a housekeeper to supervise general domestic maintenance and a gentleman’s gentleman to take care of your wardrobe. Then there is the cook and possi
bly someone to look after the houseplants and see to it that the flowers are changed every day.

  Seven people. What is that to a company? Nothing. When you consider that it is not uncommon for a chairman to have three secretaries, a chauffeur, a pilot for the Lear jet, a speechwriter and at least one all-purpose minion just to service him during office hours, your retinue looks almost skeletal in comparison. Maybe you should employ a sommelier as well to keep your wine cellar up to scratch.

  There will be murmurings of dissent, probably from the company treasurer or some busybody in personnel, but their concern will be more with terminology than with principle. “You can’t put a valet on the payroll,” they will say, with the relish of the professional wet blanket. Fair enough. Call him something else—corporate identity adviser, sartorial consultant. As long as it sounds official and businesslike, you will probably get away with it. So the cook will become a home economist, and everyone else can be hidden beneath the impenetrable camouflage of public relations.

  And there you have it. Servants when you want them, a home you can call your own, minimal overheads—now that I think of it, this arrangement is one of the very few inducements that might make me consider a return to the office and honest work.

  10

  In Defence of Scrooge

  By its nature, the expensive habit is not only physically gratifying but also beyond the financial reach of all but a fortunate few, thus making it a treat for the ego as well as the body. There is no lasting satisfaction to be gained from eating plover’s eggs and wearing four-ply cashmere sweaters if your neighbour, your chauffeur, and the urchin who delivers the groceries are all as privileged as yourself. The course of social history is marked by countless expensive habits, from psychoanalysis to travel, that have lost their cachet as they have become more generally available, but man in his ingenuity has always been able to devise rarer and ever more extravagant alternatives to anything that threatens to become commonplace. With one important exception.

  Christmas, for some reason, has managed to establish itself as the universal expensive habit, enjoyed (or, more probably, endured) by hundreds of millions of the world’s population, most of whom can’t afford it. What started as a simple religious celebration has turned into a commercial orgy with a Pentagon-size budget. In the festive build-up, gifts provoke retaliatory gifts. It is a time of year when otherwise sensible and well-adjusted people give serious consideration to the attractions of multilingual speak-your-weight machines, platinum toothpicks, his and hers stress monitors, ostrich-skin desk sets, crushed velvet jogging ensembles, authentic personalised replicas of nineteenth-century spittoons, pens that write underwater, executive egg-timers, bouncing shower soap, luminous bedroom slippers; no excess is so wretched that it doesn’t have a chance of being presented to a startled and embarrassed recipient.

  The charitable explanation for this frenzied worldwide shopping spree is the inherent generosity of the human spirit, but I have my doubts. I think we have been thoroughly indoctrinated by the erroneous notion that ‘tis better to give than to receive, and I attribute most of the blame to a single sinister figure.

  He is anonymous, but known to us all. For eleven months a year, we see nothing of him and hope that he might at last have choked on a surfeit of caviar or electrocuted himself with one of his innumerable gadgets. But no. Every December he reappears, venturing out from his thirty-sixth-floor triplex to goad us into near bankruptcy. He is, of course, the Man Who Has Everything.

  Why he can’t be given a bottle of champagne and a good book and told to stay home and leave us in peace is a mystery that continues to baffle learned men; in any case, if he has everything, why should we humour the acquisitive swine by giving him more? Equally mystifying is why his poverty-stricken but infinitely more deserving cousin, the Man Who Has Nothing, is left to languish in the basement without so much as a pair of hand-monogrammed regimental-striped raw silk undershorts to cheer him up. But then Christmas, like life, is unfair.

  Even if you are fortunate enough not to know a Man Who Has Everything, there is still very little chance of being able to greet the New Year in a state of solvency. Being a generous and well organised fellow, you will have planned on giving appropriately thoughtful and expensive gifts to your friends and loved ones, to your secretary, to your kindly old bookmaker, and to various other worthy souls who have enriched your life during the past eleven months. Unfortunately, the best laid budgets are invariably put into deficit by the pincer attack that is mounted on your wallet from two directions.

  The first is the ambush by faithful retainers. It is quite remarkable how many people, unknown to you throughout the year, have been deeply concerned with your welfare. They begin to come out of the woodwork in early December, heralded by cheery little notes and cards wishing you the compliments of the season and another year of prompt garbage collection, beautifully ironed shirts, safely garaged cars, clean elevators, efficiently patrolled apartment lobbies and trouble-free plumbing. To ignore these hints is to risk having your garbage overlooked, your shirt collars toasted, and your fenders crumpled, as well as receiving icy glares from your doorman and having a plumber who is deaf to your cries for help. But at least you won’t have to go shopping for these providers of service, because they desire something more personal; something, in fact, that you have made yourself: money.

  Less predictable is the attack by the unforeseen gift, an eleventh-hour weapon guaranteed to cause inconvenience as well as expense. It happens when someone with whom you assumed you were merely on Christmas-card terms suddenly escalates the arrangement into the higher and more caring levels of friendship and presents you with a large and affectionately labelled package. No matter that it contains a hammered-pewter jardinière of surpassing ugliness, or that there are only four more shopping hours till Christmas. It’s the thought that counts, and if you don’t reciprocate, you will spend the entire holiday feeling guilty. And so you abandon your plans for an intimate drink with the blonde in Sales Analysis to brave the stores and join the wild-eyed battalion of last-minute shoppers.

  Christmas Eve is without a doubt the worst possible time to make any kind of rational purchase. These are animals with charge cards you’re mingling with here—shoving, grabbing, hammering you in the kidneys with gift-wrapped blunt instruments, any semblance of polite behaviour discarded in a stampede of panic buying. Good will to all men! Get out of my way! I saw it first! Trapped in a madhouse, you know you must escape as quickly as you can. You will buy almost anything, and to hell with the expense.

  The merchandise director of Santa’s Workshop is well aware that this phenomenon takes place on a massive scale every December, and that a normally unsalable item will be snapped up without a moment’s hesitation. That is why you will find such a bizarre selection of goods on display. Surely, you think as you survey the counters in astonishment, no person in his right mind could give stuff like this to a friend. But people can. And they do. And the friend on the receiving end will occasionally be you.

  The embarrassing gift can take many different forms, but it is always distinguished by the following characteristics. First, it is something that makes you wince each time you see it—a cushion with a cute motto, for instance, or a large ornament in nightmare colours. It is permanent; that is, you cannot excuse its absence from your living room by saying that you’ve eaten it, used it up, or worn it out. And, worst of all, it is given to you by someone whose feelings you don’t want to hurt, who visits you frequently, and whose first act on coming through the door is to check that the unspeakable object is prominently featured in your otherwise impeccably tasteful home. Over the years, you will fill several closets with these horrors, getting them out and dusting them off just before the donors arrive. They, naturally, are touched by the obvious care with which you have looked after their gifts and will make a mental note to give you something similar for your birthday.

  Once in a while, though, the unforeseen gift can bring a measure of joy to th
e most hardened and unfestive of men. I have a friend whose dislike of Christmas is matched only by his profound aversion to his mother-in-law, whose annual visit is the low point of his year. But one Christmas Eve, in addition to the customary necktie, she gave him the flu. It was necessary that he retire to bed, congested but happy, until she left on New Year’s Day. He said it was the first time he hadn’t wanted to take a gift of hers back and exchange it.

  It would be a mistake, however, to think of Christmas purely in commercial terms of dollars and cents and gifts. There are other prices to be paid, as there always are on occasions of enforced jollity, particularly when different generations are thrown together and obliged to have a Wonderful Time. A sociologist has put forward the theory that Christmas is the cause of more family disputes than anything else, with the possible exception of sloppy bathroom habits or adultery, and it is not difficult to see how he arrived at his conclusion.

  The classic holiday gathering consists of the children, the parents and the grandparents, an uneasy combination that is complicated by the guest appearances of neighbours and family friends who come by for a drink. The children, who have been up since 5 a.m., have broken their more fragile toys and are bored and ready for lunch by eleven, just about the time when the adults feel they can decently reach for the bottle. The first visitors arrive. Against the background of electronic hiccups from little Billy’s zap gun and the programme of carols blaring from the stereo, valiant attempts are made at conversation. The grandparents, unaccustomed to so much noise and alcohol, retreat to the kitchen and, for lack of anything else to do, burn the turkey. The visitors (do you think they always drink that much in the morning?) seem set to stay for the day, probably because they know what’s waiting for them at home. But eventually they are persuaded to go, and lunch is served.