The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You don’t go on, as you put it, Chloe. I like listening to you. I like what you say.”

  She looked at him gratefully. “Do you? I don’t overdo it?”

  “Not in the slightest. I may not agree with everything you say, but—”

  “Mais ni moi non plus, but I don’t either,” she interjected.

  They both laughed. And then Audette appeared through the swing door that led to the kitchen. She was carrying a tray, moving slowly in her advanced state of pregnancy. She glanced over at their table and nodded in acknowledgement of the smile Chloe gave her. “I’ll be with you,” she said. “One moment.”

  Now she stood beside their table. “Claude said you wanted a drink?”

  “Could we order wine now?” asked Paul. He looked across the table at Chloe. “Would that suit you? Rather than something else?”

  “We’ll go straight to wine,” said Chloe, giving Audette a barely concealed look of appraisal.

  Audette took a folded piece of paper from the pocket of the apron she was wearing. “This is the list,” she said. “But some of those are finished. Numbers two, three, five, six, seven, and nine are finished.”

  She handed the list to Paul, who looked at it. He frowned. “Since there are only ten, that means there are only one, four, eight, and ten.”

  “That looks like it,” said Audette, as if the whole matter had nothing to do with her.

  “Of which only one—number one—is white, and the rest are red,” continued Paul.

  “Could be,” said Audette, placing her left hand on the protruding bulge of her stomach.

  “When’s the great day?” enquired Chloe.

  “Three days ago,” replied Audette. “But I knew he was going to be late—I always knew it. I don’t want it to be too late. I had a friend who let it run for two weeks and it was awful, just awful.”

  Paul gave an involuntary shudder. He looked away. Chloe, though, looked sympathetic. “How dreadful,” she said.

  “There was blood everywhere, she said,” Audette continued. “All over the hospital bed. Blood. I can’t take blood—I just can’t. I don’t like the smell of it. Some people say they can’t smell it, you know, but I think it has got a smell. Definitely. It’s a sort of metallic smell, I’ve always thought.”

  Paul tapped the list. “What shall we have? Are you going to choose mussels?”

  Chloe nodded. “Yes. Definitely.”

  Paul pointed to a selection on the list. “Then we’d better have number one,” he said to Chloe. “It’s a Chablis. We could have that and then choose a half carafe of the house red.”

  “You can’t go wrong with Chablis,” Chloe said.

  Paul said nothing. You could go wrong with Chablis, he thought, and if anybody could do it, he imagined that the second-worst restaurant in France might do just that.

  Audette pencilled a note in her book. “Number one. Good. Then?” She suddenly gripped her stomach. “Oh. He kicks. How he kicks.”

  “Oh,” said Chloe.

  “It’s getting really sore. He wants to come.”

  Chloe raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps you should sit down.”

  “It’s worse when I sit down,” said Audette. “Being pregnant can give you haemorrhoids, you know.”

  Chloe gasped. “You poor thing…”

  Audette spoke loudly enough to be heard at neighbouring tables. The restaurant suddenly became silent, apart from the sound of cutlery on plates.

  “You ever had them?” Audette continued.

  Paul took control. “I’m going to start with mussels,” he said. He looked across the table at Chloe. “And you, Chloe? Mussels?”

  Chloe looked at the menu. “Yes, I shall have mussels too.”

  “Good,” said Audette. “Local. Very good.”

  Paul gave a start. “The mussels? Local?”

  “From over there,” said Audette, waving vaguely in the direction of the window.

  “Mussels come from the sea,” said Paul. “We’re pretty far inland here, aren’t we?”

  Audette shrugged. “And then?”

  Paul waited for Chloe. “Navarin printanier for me,” she said.

  He followed suit. “Likewise. And then, custard tart.”

  “And for me,” said Chloe.

  Audette made another note in her book, and then sighed before moving away, ponderously, towards the kitchen door.

  “Well!” whispered Chloe.

  “Yes,” said Paul.

  “Have you ever been talked to quite like that by somebody serving you in a restaurant?”

  Paul shook his head. “No,” he replied.

  “Mind you,” said Chloe, reflectively, “there are few conversational restraints these days. Anything goes, doesn’t it?”

  “People are frank,” Paul said.

  Chloe’s eyes lit up. “Perhaps everyone should wear a button on their lapel,” she suggested. “The equivalent of those warnings they slap on films. Contains explicit language. Some violence and nudity. That sort of thing—but for people. That way you’d know what sort of person you’re about to talk to.”

  Paul laughed. “Chloe, you’re ridiculous.”

  “So our friend Audette would wear something that said May speak about intimate personal problems.”

  Audette was in the kitchen for no more than a couple of minutes before she reappeared, now bearing a bottle of wine.

  “May serve Chablis warm,” whispered Paul. “Another possible warning.”

  Chloe glanced at Audette, approaching heavily across the room. “Poor woman,” she said under her breath. “People shouldn’t have to work when they’re that uncomfortable.”

  Audette reached the table. The trip from the kitchen appeared to have exhausted her. “Is this what you asked for?” she said, showing Paul the label on the bottle.

  “It looks like it,” said Paul. “I’ll taste it first.”

  Audette frowned. “You buy it the moment I take the cork out,” she warned. “Those are the rules. You can’t change your mind.”

  Paul raised an eyebrow. “But all I want to do is see that it’s not corked.”

  “It has a cork,” said Audette. There was a strong note of resentment in her voice. “All wine has corks.”

  Paul shook his head. “Well, not all, you know. And corked is a way of saying rotten. I want to check it’s not rotten.”

  Grudgingly, Audette applied a corkscrew and then poured a small amount of wine into a glass, offering it to Paul. He raised the glass and sipped. He frowned.

  “Not quite as chilled as one might like,” he said.

  Audette said nothing, but glowered at him, as if challenging him to reject the offering.

  “I suppose so,” said Paul.

  Audette poured a full glass for both of them—full almost to the brim.

  “Goodness,” said Chloe. “I shall have to be careful not to spill.”

  Paul raised his over-full glass to Chloe, carefully, but still transferring a small amount to the front of his shirt. “This is definitely an unusual restaurant,” he said. “But to your health, Chloe, and thank you for inviting me to France.”

  She raised her glass in response, and despite her steady hand the warm Chablis dribbled over the tablecloth. “We must give it a chance,” she said. “I’ve taken to the twins and I want to like their restaurant.”

  Paul understood. He, too, had taken to Annabelle and Thérèse, and hoped that after an unpromising start with Audette things would get better. You did not judge a restaurant solely on the conduct of a single member of staff, nor on her over-filling of a glass, her ignorance of the fact that mussels came from the sea, nor her inappropriate talk of intimate complaints. These were superficial matters—what really counted was the food, and they had yet to try that.

  Their wai
t for the mussels was a long one, but they entertained themselves by talking about Paul’s book and the doings of the Italian Futurists.

  “Italy is such a marvellous country,” Chloe pronounced, “and we all love it dearly. Romantic poets went there to die, which was just the right thing to do.”

  “To die? The right thing?”

  “Yes. If you’re a poet, Paul, you shouldn’t hang around too long. Best to write a bit of poetry and then expire while still young and romantic. Look at Keats—he was twenty-five. Shelley was twenty-nine. And there was Rupert Brooke, too—such a romantic figure, who chose a wonderful place to die. The island of Skyros, where you can be buried under an olive tree. An olive tree, Paul!”

  “Stands the church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”

  “Well,” Chloe said, “Brooke expresses it all, doesn’t he? He expresses England so very succinctly.” She paused. “Those lines almost make me cry, Paul.”

  He was surprised. “Why?”

  “Because of what has been lost, perhaps. The gentleness. The quiet. Honey for tea. That sort of thing. As you know, Paul, I’m half English and half Scottish. Well, with a bit of Irish thrown in there somewhere. But the English bit, which comes from my mother, responds to all that—to English understatement, to English reticence. To a cricket match, where nothing happens for hours. To people drinking tea together politely and not saying a word. To Morris dancing, even—have you seen much Morris dancing, Paul?”

  Paul said that he had been in Oxford once on May Day and seen the Morris dancers in their white outfits, bells at the knees, dancing their strange stick dances.

  “It’s extremely affecting,” said Chloe. “Pagan, really—that comes through very strongly. All that business about the Green Man and the renewal of spring. And the sight of men dancing together—that always moves me, Paul, because it makes the men look gentle, which is what men can be if encouraged. If only men would dance together more, rather than snarl at one another, as they’re slightly inclined to do.” She paused. “But let’s not discuss England, or Scotland, even. We’re not there at the moment, and you’re busy writing about Italian Futurists and their odd ideas about food. Let’s talk more about the Italians and why they’re such wonderful people and make such magnificent friends.”

  The conversation about Italy continued until the mussels arrived—carried, with further effort, and grimaces, by Audette.

  “Two mussels?” she announced as she reached their table.

  “Two mussels would be too few,” said Paul, with a smile.

  Audette looked at him. “What?”

  “I was just joking,” said Paul. “You see, two mussels would be no more than an amuse-bouche—and a small amuse-bouche at that.”

  Audette shrugged. “Two mussels,” she repeated. “Here.”

  Two bowls were placed before them and Audette retired to the kitchen. A wisp of steam and mussel rose from each plate. Paul sniffed at the air. “I love these things,” he said, dipping his spoon into the thin sauce in which the mussels were half submerged. Using a fork, he prised flesh from one of the shells and popped it into his mouth.

  “I’m thinking Proustian thoughts,” said Chloe, as she took her first mouthful. “The coast of Brittany, and I was thirteen, and there was a boy staying in the same hotel, and he was a year or two older than me and the kitchen at the hotel served mussels every night. The boy had freckles and he used to look at me from the table he occupied with his parents near the window, and I used to look back at him. And we never spoke for the entire ten days we were there—not once. And I was achingly—achingly—in love with him.”

  Paul was frowning. He used his fork to spear another mussel. This one he raised to his nose and sniffed at.

  “I’m not sure they’re all that fresh,” he said.

  “They’re all right,” said Chloe. “Mussels always taste a bit shellfishy. They’re fine.”

  Paul ate a few more. “They’re marginal, I’d say. You have to watch these things. We’re a long way from the sea here. Have they been properly refrigerated? That sort of thing.”

  Chloe put down her spoon. “Do you want to send them back? You might say, ‘These mussels are corked.’ That would give them something to think about.”

  Paul shook his head. “I said: they’re marginal. I’ll eat them.”

  “Good,” said Chloe. “Because I’m rather enjoying mine.”

  * * *

  —

  On the way home they saw fireflies—tiny points of light in the velvet of night. Chloe said, “I’m happy to be in France. I’m truly happy.”

  “So am I,” said Paul.

  “And I don’t want this to end.”

  Paul agreed. “Neither do I.”

  There was a brief silence. Somewhere in the night a dog barked; a reproachful voice brought the barking to an end. “Bonaparte! Quiet!”

  “Bonaparte!” said Chloe. “It’s a common dog’s name in France, you know. Médor, though, I’m told, is the equivalent of Fido. There are plenty of Médors.”

  They reached the house. Chloe had left a light on to welcome them back. As she fumbled with the keys, Paul had the first message of misgiving from his stomach. It was not pronounced at that stage—no more than a slight feeling of unease. There was a distant gurgling sound.

  “Are you all right?” asked Chloe. “Some tea?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll probably turn in straightaway.”

  “You’ve had a long day. How many pages?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t counted. Six, maybe. Seven.”

  As he went upstairs, he felt his stomach churn. He undressed and slipped into bed. There he felt the first sensation of real nausea. Mussels, he thought. Moules marinières.

  7

  Le Deuxième Mari

  The doctor, a cousin of Thérèse and Annabelle, stood beside Paul’s bed. He had not closed the door behind him, and Paul was vaguely aware of the presence of Chloe and the twins in the corridor outside his room. The doctor, a thickset man in his late fifties, with heavy grey eyebrows, peered at Paul before reaching out to check his pulse.

  “You have not been very well, monsieur.”

  Paul, who had woken up only a few minutes before, felt the dampness of the T-shirt he had worn to bed. The material was sticking to his skin; he had been sweating.

  “I think I’ve had a fever. I ate something, you see.”

  The doctor took a thermometer out of his pocket and placed it under Paul’s tongue. “Where?” he asked.

  Paul struggled to speak. “La Table…”

  The doctor sighed. “La Table de Saint Vincent?”

  Paul nodded.

  The doctor waited until he had extracted the thermometer before asking, “What?”

  “I think it was the mussels,” said Paul. “I thought they might be a bit off. But I ate them. It was my own fault.”

  He remembered that Chloe had also ordered mussels. “My cousin outside,” he said. “She had them too. Is she…”

  “She’s right as rain,” said the doctor. “She told me that you and she had exactly the same things.”

  “So maybe it was something else,” said Paul. “Something I touched, perhaps.”

  The doctor looked dubious. “No, it was probably the seafood. People react to toxins or bacteria in different ways. It depends on the flora of the digestive tract. Some people can eat virtually anything—others can’t. And sometimes it can just be in one mussel and not in all of them.” He paused. “You’re taking fluids?”

  “Yes. I’m thirsty now.”

  “Not too much. But keep yourself hydrated. You’ll be better in a couple of days, I think. If not…” He shrugged. “If not, I’ll come back and see if we need to give you something.”

  The doctor moved away from the bed. “I’ll have a wo
rd with them,” he said. “This is a public health matter. It’s not the first time I’ve had to speak to our restaurant.”

  “I don’t wish to cause difficulties for them,” said Paul.

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. “You’re very considerate. Most people—outsiders—would be up in arms about something like this.”

  “I’m not,” said Paul. “I know how difficult it can be to run a restaurant.”

  The doctor seemed relieved. “Claude has his enemies. Some people around here don’t like him for historical reasons. But he’s a good man and a lot of us are very fond of him. We don’t want him to fail.”

  Paul said that it would give him no pleasure to see any rural restaurant fail. “If those people give up, then the fast-food set-ups take over. Hamburgers…”

  The doctor took on an expression of disgust. “Them!”

  “And if France throws in the towel on that battle, then all is lost.”

  It was just the right note, and the doctor beamed with pleasure. “Exactly, monsieur! This is about France. This is about what we believe in.”

  “Still,” said Paul, “they need to watch the freshness of their seafood.”

  “But naturally,” said the doctor. “I’ll have a quiet word. I won’t report this further up the line. In the meantime, you rest and don’t exert yourself. Don’t eat anything just yet.”

  “I’m never going to eat again,” said Paul. “Never.”

  The doctor laughed. “Monsieur, you are very amusing. I hope that we shall meet again.” He started towards the door, but stopped. “Monsieur Stuart, may I ask you: how did Claude do the mussels last night?”

  “Very simply,” replied Paul. “Moules marinières. The usual thing.”

  The doctor shook his head sadly. “There are so many better ways of doing mussels. Moules dijonnaises, for instance—with a mustard sauce. I’m particularly partial to those. Have you tried them?”

  Paul felt the nausea rise in his stomach. The hair of the dog that bit you…