All That Man Is

1

He leaves the office two hours earlier than usual. Mid-afternoon, half-empty train to Gatwick. A window seat on the plane. Weak tea, and a square of chocolate with a picture of Alpine pasture on the wrapper. And then it hits him. Floating over the world, the hard earth fathoms down through shrouds of mist and vapour, the thought hits him like a missile. Wham. This is it. This is all there is. There is nothing else.

A silent explosion.

He is still staring out the window.

This is all there is.

It’s not a joke. Life is not a joke.

—

She is waiting for him at arrivals, holding up an iPad with his name on it, though she knows what he looks like from his picture on the website and approaches him, smiling, as he stands there facing the wall of drivers with their flimsy signs.

‘James?’ she says.

The difference in height is significant.

‘You must be Paulette.’

She has a scar — is it? — on her lower lip, a pale little lump, somewhat off centre. There is a handshake. ‘Welcome to Geneva,’ she says.

And then, the motorway — on stilts, through tunnels. France. The low sun on one side of his face. Fresh evening light.

She says, ‘So, tomorrow.’

‘Yes.’ He is watching something outside, something on the move in the green-gold light. Everywhere he looks, he sees money.

‘I’ve arranged for us to meet them at the site,’ she says.

‘Fine. Thank you.’ She is efficient, he knows that. She answers his emails promptly, with everything he needs.

He had started speaking to her in French, as he followed her out of the arrivals lounge. She had answered in English, and for a minute there was a silly situation with each of them speaking the other’s language.

An immaculate, turning tunnel — a sound like holding a shell to your ear.

Then the long, late-summer dusk again.

He says, in English, ‘What’s the weather going to be like? Tomorrow.’ It is important, will make a difference.

‘Like this,’ she says. ‘Perfect.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘I arranged it for you.’ It sounds slightly awkward, the way she says that.

He smiles tiredly.

Stops smiling.

Shifts his feet in the footwell.

‘Well,’ he says, after too long a pause, ‘thank you.’

The surge of the motorway is making him sleepy.

The lush glow of everything. Outside, green slopes strive skywards, rich with evening sunlight, thickly gold.

—

Les Chalets du Midi Apartments consists of twelve brand new apartments in one of the most lovely valleys in the French Alps. There is a wide variety of 1, 2, 3 and 4 bedroom apartments available from 252,000 euros ex VAT located in a central location in the lively and popular village of Samoëns. The village of Samoëns is a charming French village with many shops, restaurants and bars…

How many years has he been doing this now?

They leave the motorway at Cluses, and she pays a toll.

Cluses is prosaic, a series of small roundabouts. Flower baskets hanging from street lights. Midget plane trees brutally pollarded in the French fashion. It is where she lives, she tells him. She leans forward over the wheel to look up at some window and, pointing with a lifted index finger, says, ‘That’s where I live.’

‘Okay,’ he says, pretending to be interested.

Then they have left the town and are hairpinning up the side of the valley. On the other side, mountains soak up what is left of the sunlight.

She lowers her window a little. The air smells of manure, wet grass. ‘Do you know the area?’ she asks.

He says he doesn’t. ‘Mostly we do stuff a bit further south,’ he explains. ‘Cham. Val d’Isère.’

She nods.

‘Courchevel.’

She works for the developer, Noyer.

‘I cover part of Switzerland too,’ he tells her.

‘I see.’

The hairpins are over. The road passes through villages, under trees, through massing shadow.

‘This is nice,’ he says politely.

She nods again. ‘Yes, it’s nice, up here.’

‘Very. Has Monsieur Noyer got other plans?’ he asks, trying not to sound too interested. ‘After this.’

‘I think so. You can ask him, on Friday.’

‘I will.’ He wonders what Noyer is like, whether they’ll get on. What Noyer will make of his proposal. He isn’t even sure what his proposal will be yet. He needs to think about that.

‘It’s more and more popular, this area,’ she says.

‘I bet.’

‘It’s more typical,’ she says, ‘than the more established areas.’

‘Seems like it.’

A village. They slow markedly — severe speed humps. Trees heavy with moss. Ski-hire shops — Location du ski — shuttered out of season. Signs advertising honey for sale.

‘We’re nearly there,’ she says, accelerating as they leave the village. ‘It’s the next one.’

It is evening now, unambiguously. She has turned on the headlights.

There is a long straight stretch with solemn tall pines. Then the road swings left, passes over the noise of hurrying water — he sees it fraying white over stones — and they are there. ‘Here we are,’ she says.

A mass of signage meets them — signs for hotels, pizzerias, walking trails, ski lifts. Everyone trying to make some sort of living.

And then the deeper gloom of a modest avenue of trees.

On either side of the road, among the apartment buildings, a few old blackened barns still stand in unsold fields.

Quickly, imprecisely, seeing them through the trees, he tries to work out what they might be worth, those fields.

—

He walks for a while, in the last light. It is still there, pink, on the peaks that hang over the village. One in particular hangs there, implacable. Fading pink. A fountain warbles somewhere. Ice-cold water. In the old village, past the petrol station, there are handsome stone houses. He feels sad.

These trips to the Alps, alone. The empty evening hours.

Now a strange blue light stretches itself over the rocky tops of the peaks. It is dark in the street.

There is a decent amount going on after the lifts close in Samoëns with a good number of bars to keep you entertained and restaurants that offer a wide range of local specialties…

No sign of that tonight.

Instead, a solitary meal in the hotel dining room, peach-pink tablecloths and an inhibiting quiet. Table for one. While he waits for his food, he looks over the shiny brochures, his own prose — he can hear his voice in that stuff, his own voice saying it.

There is a decent amount going on after the lifts close in Samoëns…

A decent amount…

Ugh.

Not that he would know what goes on here. This is the first time he’s seen the place. Giles was out in the spring, and made the deal with Noyer — exclusive marketing deal. Since then, James, speaking to him on the phone in slick French, has had the sense that Noyer feels neglected. He feels unloved. It is a situation that struck James, not so long ago, waiting on the wet platform of Earlsfield station one morning, as an opportunity, perhaps.

The fact is, for Giles this isn’t much. He himself hasn’t spoken to Noyer since that visit in the spring. Giles is now in Hong Kong — or Singapore, maybe, today — selling Alpine property to the Chinese. Selling whole developments. (What’s five per cent of twelve million euros? A nice day’s work.) Giles, Air Miles. ‘Air Miles in today?’ they say, James and the others, arriving at the office in Esher for another day of phoning and emailing.

How much does Giles make? They talk about that over their Pret sandwiches at lunchtime.

And how much is he worth?

He started the firm in the late eighties. He was in on some of the early deals himself, had a stake in them, is what John says — John who’s been there since the start, and somehow doesn’t have much to show for it. He wasn’t in on some of the early deals himself.

You don’t want to end up like John.

Alone at a table in the hotel dining room he turns over the shiny brochures. Faint smell of fresh ink. Les Chalets du Midi Apartments. Nearly finished now, apparently. Will be done in time for the skiing season. Furnished, everything. Ten to sell in the next few months. Should be okay. Will be out here a few times. Will know this place, the Hôtel Savoie. He looks up, looks at the starched, peach-pink space. He already does know it. Yeah, he knows it. He has stayed in how many hotels like this? Half-empty on an early September evening. First week of September — summer season over, more or less.

He wonders, finishing his flute of Alpine lager, what Noyer is like, whether they’ll get on.

—

After eating, he walks over to the apartments. It is a five-minute walk from the hotel, out of the stone centre of the village, into a silent area where there are still some open fields in the moonlight.

As well as mountain biking there are also a number of hiking trails with beautiful scenery. You can visit the vast natural parks in the region and see the extensive natural beauty the Alps have to offer. If you are feeling more adventurous you can go paragliding off the mountainside, rock climbing, or 4x4 driving off-road. Equally if you are feeling less adventurous there are much less strenuous activities to undertake…

The new apartments stand in a lumpy wasteland. He stops on the moon-shiny tarmac in front, putting his hands in his pockets. There is a pleasant smell of young timber lingering in the dark air. Pretty low-end stuff, he sees immediately. A standard design with some superficial ‘chalet’ trim, thrown up in a hurry in one short summer.

—

‘Miri?’

He is lying on the hotel bed, in his underwear. Neon light floods out of the open bathroom door.

‘It’s me.’

His voice sounds noisy in the staid hush of the hotel room.

‘Everything was fine,’ he says. ‘No, that was fine.’

Pine walls, waxed pine.

‘It’s, you know — Alpine. No, nice. Perfectly nice.’

‘Tomorrow I’ve got to spend the day with the punters,’ he says. ‘Do my thing. Wine them. Dine them. Show them a shop that sells nice cheese. You need a shop that sells nice cheese.’

He laughs at something.

‘I’m told there is one, yeah.’

‘No,’ he says, ‘on Friday it’s the developer.’

‘How are you?’ he asks. ‘How are things there?’

He says, ‘Yeah? Well, we expected that, didn’t we?’

‘I s’ppose,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he says.

He yawns and says, ‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about it.’

‘Do I?’ he asks.

‘I am, I s’ppose.’

‘Yeah,’ he says.

There is a pause, and then he says, ‘Same here.’

‘Night,’ he says.

‘Okay. Night.’

2

She is waiting for him, unexpectedly, at the hotel in the morning. She is there in the large pine lobby, talking to the manager as if she knows him well.

‘Hello,’ James says, sailing up to them in a well-pressed open-necked shirt. She turns to him and he sees, as if for the first time, the scar on her lower lip. It is texturally distinct from the flesh of her lip — like a small drip of wax, almost. He tries not to look at it. ‘Are you here for me?’ he asks.

‘Of course.’

‘That’s nice of you.’

She introduces him to the manager, and they talk for a few minutes in French, and with a sort of exaggerated politeness, about the village, how it’s developing.

Outside, among the postcards and mountain knick-knacks, she puts on Ray-Ban Wayfarers.

Her little Peugeot is parked in front of a shop selling artisanal eaux-de-vie.

They stroll towards it.

How well he knows these Alpine villages. Spick and span. Flowers and flags everywhere. The mountains hanging there decoratively, harmlessly, looking like pictures of themselves. And in the streets, the atmosphere of a posh suburb. Not a leaf out of place. An oppressive tidiness. Still, there is something here — a vestigial sense of a place with a life of its own. A few little streets that are still unspoilt, he thinks. There is still scope, in other words, for some money to be made.

She asks him, as she searches for her keys, hauling up handfuls of stuff from the depths of a large leather handbag, how he slept.

He says, ‘Perfectly. Thank you.’

‘That’s good.’

From his high forehead the hair, greying, hangs back in waves. He is getting craggy with the years — his sunglasses accentuate this. A sort of authority is growing in him too. He waits for her to find her keys.

‘And where,’ he asks, ‘will the new télécabine go from?’

‘Over there.’ She pushes her sunglasses up her nose and points past the petrol station, towards the entrance to the village where they arrived yesterday, the avenue of linden trees.

‘And when will it be finished?’ The question is important.

‘In time for the season,’ she says. She has found her keys, and is looking at some message on her phone.

‘Promise?’

She looks up.

He is smiling.

‘I promise,’ she says.

It takes less than a minute to drive to Les Chalets du Midi Apartments. They look smaller in the sunlight than they did last night, and even less inspired. The wasteland around them looks scruffier too, full of weeds and muddy hollows where huge puddles were, after the latest storm to trundle thunderously down the valley.

He stands there, looking at it, while she talks on her phone.

It might be Noyer she is talking to and he tries to hear what she is saying.

When she has finished, he half-turns his head to her and says, ‘That was the boss?’

‘It was.’

‘Everything okay?’

‘Everything,’ she says, ‘is okay.’

‘What’s he like?’

The question seems to surprise her. ‘What’s he like?’

‘Yeah.’

‘He’s…’ She takes a moment to think about it. ‘Fine.’

‘Does he know what he’s doing?’

Again she seems surprised. She says, ‘I’m sure he does. Why?’

‘Just wondering.’

Not only is her English perfect — she has, when she says some words, some vowels, an actual English accent, a sort of semi-posh London accent.

‘You must have lived in London at some point,’ he suggests, smiling at her in his sunglasses, not moving from where he is standing.

She says, ‘I did.’

‘Thought so.’

He is still looking at her. She is petite, a neat little figure. The dress she is wearing stops halfway down her thighs. Quite a stylish dress. He thinks — La belle plume fait le bel oiseau. The thought makes him smile again.

‘So — what do you think?’ she asks seriously, after a few seconds. Her finger finds the scar on her lip. She has a habit of touching it sometimes, of putting a finger to it for a moment.

He turns his attention to the brown development, its dour little windows.

There is nothing interesting about it whatsoever.

‘Nice,’ he says, finally. ‘Shall we?’

For the layout of these spacious apartments, the architect strived to achieve the maximum use of the available space. As a result, these apartments have a very practical layout. The living room with open kitchen provides access to the spacious terrace of 8m². The terrace is south facing and offers impressive views over the valley. Furthermore, these apartments offer a spacious bedroom…

His own words, written without ever seeing the place. Off-plan prose.

They stand in the show apartment.

Even after the unpromising exterior, he is disappointed. The whole thing makes a naff impression. The laminate flooring, the sub-IKEA furniture, the shitty pictures on the walls. Expense has been spared — that hits him the moment he steps in the door. The spaces are too tight. It isn’t ‘spacious’ at all, not even in the estate-agent definition of the word. It feels pinched. There is definitely no wow factor, except slightly out on the terrace, with the mountains shoving up into the sunlight.

Still, it won’t be an easy sell. Not at the list prices.

Who was advising Noyer? he wonders, stepping back inside. All this tatty stuff is just a false economy. Unless he didn’t have the money. In which case other investors should have been found. No problem. James knows where to find them, where to find money for things like that. Once Giles took him along to an event at the Gherkin — the money was waiting for them there, suited, smiling, munching nibbles.

Must be that Air Miles just wasn’t paying attention here. This is pretty small-time stuff. No oligarchs venture up this sleepy valley. Méribel it ain’t. Might as well do it properly, though. Squeeze everything you can out of it. Like this you’ll end up selling them for fifty thousand less. Why throw that money away? A few showy pieces of furniture, Smeg fridge, a touch of marble in the bathroom. Stuff like that makes the deal happen. These people fly in for a day. First impression is all they have.

He opens and shuts something flimsy in the kitchen.

Has to be some kind of wow factor.

The curtains, he thinks, look like something from a youth hostel. Some kind of hideous floral print, for fuck’s sake.

She sees he isn’t impressed.

‘You don’t like it?’

‘It’s fine,’ he tells her. ‘I mean,’ he says, ‘it’s economy, of course.’

He smiles at her. Sees she knows what he means. Has had the same thought herself. ‘Who was advising Monsieur Noyer here?’ he asks. And then says, smiling at her again, ‘I know you weren’t.’ From the way she dresses, just that, he knows she wasn’t. He wonders whether to say it to her. Something like that.

It’s too late, though. She is already saying, ‘No, I wasn’t. I don’t know.’

‘Madame Noyer, maybe?’ It’s a joke, sort of.

She just says again, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is there a Madame Noyer?’ he asks.

‘There is.’

‘Let’s have a look at the others then,’ he says.

—

Unfurnished, the other apartments are more appealing. There is, at least, a sense of potential in their emptiness. They will all, though, be the same as the show apartment. Despite what she said, Noyer obviously does not know what he’s doing. He needs help. He needs someone to hold his hand. Which is exactly what James was hoping to find — someone in need of help.

He wonders whether to even show them the show apartment. Might be better to show them these empty ones.

He stands at a window in the ‘penthouse’ — four hundred and twenty-five thousand euros (excluding VAT) — a duplex at the top of the development, with views up and down the valley. The valley ends in a mass of overlapping peaks. A wall of them. The other way, the horizon is low.

There is no flooring down here yet, just the screed under his feet as he walks around.

‘This one sleeps six, yeah?’ he asks.

‘Eight,’ she tells him.

‘Eight?’ He sounds sceptical, like a journalist interviewing a politician on TV.

She says, ‘Including the sofa bed in the living room.’

‘Right. Okay.’

He wanders over to one of the windows, larger here than in the other apartments.

‘Fireplaces would have been nice,’ he mentions.

‘There was an issue,’ she says. ‘About the insurance.’

‘Yeah?’ He stands at the window, looking out. ‘Still.’

His hand is on the cold glass. On the other side, green slopes leap up, the sides of the valley, high pastures and stands of pine. The trees, from here, look like toys. Pointy toy trees. He is looking at them. So still, everything up there.

‘Nice, the double aspect here,’ he says.

She is waiting near the door, on the other side of the room. ‘Yes.’

‘Is there a shop in the village that sells nice cheese?’ he asks.

Again, the question seems to take her by surprise. She says, ‘Nice cheese?’

‘A posh cheese shop,’ he says, turning from the window. ‘Is there one?’

‘There’s a cheese shop,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what you mean by posh, exactly.’

‘I’m sure you do,’ he says with an encouraging smile.

‘I suppose you could call it posh.’

‘Lots of nice cheese?’

‘Yes,’ she says with a single emphatic nod.

‘Fine. We need one of those. We need a shop that sells nice cheese. It’s important to the sort of people we’re dealing with. Their idea of what buying a property in France involves. La douceur de vivre. What time is it?’

She looks at her watch and says, ‘Nearly quarter to eleven.’

‘Mind giving me a lift up top?’ he asks. ‘I’d better have a look at the infrastructure up there, I suppose. So I can at least pretend I know what I’m talking about.’ He smiles. ‘Then we’ll have lunch.’

—

They leave the way they arrived yesterday, down the little avenue of linden trees. Immediately after leaving the village, though, they take a small turn-off that zigzags steeply up into the forest. She shifts from second to third to second as they take the steep turns.

Moves into fourth for a kilometre of open pasture. Sun. Farmhouse with deep eaves, time-blackened.

Then some more houses, almost a village.

All this land — what’s it worth? Fortunes here.

And more forest, then. And views, sometimes, through the trees, as they turn, and turn, of the valley, now falling away.

Second, third. Third, second, third. Her thin, tanned arm is permanently in action. Her elegantly sandaled foot. (Well-maintained toenails, he notices — hard pink shine like the inside of a shell.)

It takes twenty minutes to drive to the top.

‘Ah,’ he says, as they emerge from a final stretch of hugging shade and everything seems to open out. There is a lot of tarmac, suddenly, and further up, a major development, not so new — flats, a hotel maybe. Huts, houses. She parks on an empty expanse of tarmac in the shadow of the flats, and switches off.

There is no one around. Standing there in the sunlight he hears the throb of the pastures. And when the wind blows a quiet singing from overhead cables. Otherwise silence.

‘So, tell me about this,’ he says.

She starts talking about ski lifts and pistes.

Only half-listening to her, he has walked to the edge of the tarmac. Slopes fall away in slow undulations. There is a shuttered crêperie. The hum of insects. The ice-edged wind. And from somewhere, the lazy sound of cowbells, a sound like a spoon stirring something in a glass.

She is talking about ski school, École du Ski Français.

Yes, he knows memories of that. Long ago, that was. Snowploughing in line behind the vermilion uniform. Foggy day. Wet snow.

He feels the sun on his eyelids. The wind on his skin. Hands. Face.

With his eyes shut, he hears the cowbells, fading in and out on the wind.

Life has become so dense, these last years. There is so much happening. Thing after thing. So little space. In the thick of life now. Too near to see it.

The sun on his eyelids.

Cowbells fading in and out on the wind.

Warmth of the sun.

Wind on his skin.

To withdraw, somehow, to just this.

Hopeless.

It’s not a joke. Life is not a joke.

He opens his eyes.

Shimmering grass, shivering.

She says, ‘Eighty per cent of the slopes are north facing. The spring skiing here is particularly nice.’

This is it. This is his life, these things that are happening.

This is all there is.

She is standing next to him, quite near him.

‘Yes?’ he says. ‘How much is there? Skiing. Kilometres.’

‘Including the whole Grand Massif?’

‘Whatever.’

‘About two hundred and sixty kilometres.’

‘Wow.’

She says, ‘Including Flaine, Morillon, Les Carroz, Sixt and Samoëns.’

‘And they’re all interlinked, with lifts?’

‘Of course.’

‘One pass covers them all?’

‘You can get it,’ she tells him.

‘Okay,’ he says. Nice to have some facts.

For a moment he shuts his eyes again but there is nothing there now.

—

Lunch. A few minor confidences over a pizza. She was at art school in London. Then dropped out…

‘Why?’ he asks.

‘I fell in love.’

‘Love,’ he says. ‘It messes everything up, doesn’t it?’

‘You’re very cynical.’

‘Yes, I probably am,’ he admits.

‘Isn’t love the whole point?’

‘The whole point of what?’

‘Of life.’

‘So I’ve heard. What did you do then?’ he asks. ‘After you dropped out.’

She found a job as an estate agent.

So they talk about estate agenting — he did that too, once. And is doing it again now. ‘That seems to be my fate,’ he says.

‘Do you believe in fate?’ she asks, amused.

‘I do now,’ he says.

‘I don’t.’

‘Of course you don’t,’ he says. ‘You’re too young.’

She laughs at that. ‘Young?’

‘How old are you?’

She is twenty-nine.

‘I would have said twenty-five.’

‘Ach,’ she says, pleased.

He smiles.

‘How old are you?’

‘I am forty-four.’

‘And when did you start believing in fate?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says.

He is enjoying talking to her — there is something fresh and straightforward about her — so he tries to think of something else to say, something which is true. He says, ‘When I woke up one morning and realised it was too late to change anything. I mean, the big things.’

‘I don’t think it’s ever too late to change things,’ she says.

He just smiles. And he thinks: That’s the thing about fate, the way you only understand what your fate is when it’s too late to do anything about it. That’s why it is your fate — it’s too late to do anything about it.

‘So it’s something that only exists in hindsight?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘So it doesn’t really exist?’

‘Does that follow? I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’m not a philosopher.’

‘Are you happy?’ she asks, putting ketchup on the last slice of her pizza.

‘Yes, I think so. It depends what you mean. I don’t have everything I want.’

‘Is that your definition of happiness?’

‘What’s yours?’ And then, while she thinks about it, he says, ‘I don’t have a definition of happiness. What’s the point?’

‘You must know whether you’re happy or not.’

‘I’m not unhappy,’ he says, and then wonders whether even that is true.

‘That’s not the same thing,’ she says.

‘And you?’ he asks. ‘Are you? Happy.’

‘No,’ she says, without hesitation. ‘I mean, my life isn’t where I want it to be.’

He wonders whether to ask her where she wants her life to be, whatever that means. Then he decides, after taking a sip of water, to leave it at that.

They talk about skiing.

After lunch they walk together to Les Chalets du Midi Apartments. Autumnal pink is starting to appear in the neat beech hedges that line the clean streets of the village. ‘Now I’ve got to do my thing,’ he says.

‘Now that I am looking forward to seeing.’

He laughs.

That he only met her yesterday seems strange suddenly.

—

The valley brims with heat. Not a cloud in the sky.

After he has shown them the flats, they all sit down on the terrace of a place in the main square, the Bar Samoëns. This is him ‘doing his thing’.

There are plastic tables and chairs outside, and he supervises the waitress as she puts two tables together for their largeish party. Then he takes everyone’s order.

Paulette, he finds, is sitting next to him. He smiles at her. ‘Alright?’ he says.

She nods.

Then he is doing his thing again.

‘Now that tree,’ he says, deploying with some authority a factoid he has only just learned himself, ‘is one of the oldest trees in France. Nearly, I think, seven hundred years old.’

Heads turn.

Its trunk is two metres wide, obese. Up among the big mossy boughs the leaves have, in places, already turned orange.

‘What sort of tree is it?’ someone asks.

‘A lime, I think?’ James turns to Paulette.

‘Yes, it’s a lime,’ she says. ‘It was planted by a famous Duke of Savoy.’

‘A Duke of Savoy,’ James echoes. ‘This whole village is so full of history,’ he says. ‘I love it here.’

Someone has left the table and is inspecting a plaque at the tree’s foot.

‘1438,’ this pedant, a shortish middle-aged man, shouts over to them, pointing at the plaque. He is very sensibly dressed in waterproof fabrics that make a lot of noise when he moves, and walking shoes with spongy laces. ‘So actually less than six hundred years old then,’ he points out, taking his seat again, next to his equally sensible wife.

‘A mere sapling,’ James declares, to some laughter from the others.

The drinks arrive.

‘Still,’ the man says, ‘I can’t believe that makes it one of the oldest trees in France. Less than six hundred years old?’

James decides to ignore him. He helps the waitress distribute the drinks.

‘There’s this olive tree,’ the pedant is telling the others, ‘it’s like two thousand years old…’

Pensioners, the pedant and his wife. Might even be thinking of moving down here full-time, James understands. Selling their little flat in Stoke Newington, swapping it for the penthouse of Les Chalets du Midi Apartments. They speak French the way Air Miles speaks it — James heard Mrs Pedant asking for the loo — not so much with an English accent as in English. They speak French in English. Like Air Miles, the old-school way.

James passes Pedant his straw-pale Alpine lager.

‘Merci,’ Pedant says. ‘Monsieur.’

‘Where else have you been looking?’ James asks him.

‘Oh, all over the place, really,’ the man says, with a moustache of foam. ‘We’re just sort of driving around. You know.’

Arnaud (London-based Frenchman, there with his partner Marcus) asks, ‘What can you tell us about the skiing?’

‘It’s fabulous,’ James says.

‘You have skied here?’ Arnaud asks him.

There is a minuscule hiatus. Then James says, ‘I haven’t personally, no. Paulette’s the expert there. She can tell you all about it. I mean,’ he says, ‘I’m not going to sit here and pretend it’s Verbier or anything. It’s properly serious, though. I mean, with the whole, er, Massif. There’s something like two hundred and fifty kilometres of pistes. One pass for the lot. And up at Flaine, it goes up to what — two eight, two nine?’

Paulette says, ‘Two thousand five hundred. More or less.’

‘Okay,’ James murmurs.

She says, ‘No, there’s always snow there. It’s wonderful, the skiing here.’

She talks about it for a while.

James watches her, her eyebrows jumping about above her sunglasses as she tries to be enthusiastic. She’s a bit stilted, to be honest. She’s doing an anecdote now — something about skiing — and not doing it very well. It happened over lunch too. Somehow it touched him, the way she killed those anecdotes. Tells them too slowly, or something. She’s just not very funny. Not in this sort of setting.

She’s losing these people now. The nice ones are kind of willing her on, with fixed smiles. Some of the others are starting to look away. So she’s hurrying it, which is just making it worse.

She’s starting to laugh at it herself, even though no one else is.

Shit, now she’s missed something out, something important, and has to go back and explain.

James looks up into the branches of the old lime, sun-filled leaves.

She has arrived, finally, at the end of the anecdote. It just ends.

Then people notice, and there are some polite sniggers.

And Mrs Pedant, in her seat again, wants milk for her tea.

While Paulette leaps up to see to that — in thanking her James laid a hand for a moment on her arm — he talks some more to the others about how lovely the area is, doing his thing, in lilac shirt and sunglasses, handsome, at ease.

Seemingly at ease.

—

He pays for the drinks. Then he takes them to the cheese shop, and talks them through the immense selection. One or two timid purchases — avoiding the most odorous examples — are made.

Outside, he says, ‘We’ll be around later, if anyone wants to get some supper. I know some of you are staying locally, and there are some fabulous places in the village we’d be happy to show you. Why don’t we meet in the place on the main square at sevenish, if anyone wants to do that? Okay?’

There is a sense, as always, of acting.

And then, when the performance is finished and the audience has wandered away through the twisting streets of the village, this tinge of euphoria, this punchy energy.

They are standing in front of the fromagerie.

James says, ‘Drink?’

‘I think that went well, don’t you?’ he asks her, when they are sitting on the terrace of the Bar Samoëns again.

‘Very.’

‘I think there’s at least one sale in there, with that lot,’ he says.

She asks who he thinks it might be.

‘Well, Arnaud and Marcus,’ he says. ‘I think they may well take the plunge. Thanks for saving me on the skiing, by the way.’

‘You’re very welcome,’ Paulette says.

James shakes his head, with a sort of mock exasperation that makes her laugh. ‘Fuck. That was so embarrassing, when he asked me whether I’d skied here myself.’

‘What about the Knottbars?’ she asks. The Knottbars — Mr and Mrs Pedant.

‘Them?’ James makes a face. ‘No. Don’t think so. I’m not sure how serious they are. Not very, would be my guess.’

They spend a while taking the piss out of them, the Knottbars — James at one point scampering over to the ancient lime tree, as Mr Knottbar did, and shoving his finger at the plaque.

Walking back to the table where Paulette is laughing, her index finger held in a sort of hook shape over her mouth, he decides he must be slightly drunk, to have done that. Sweating lightly with the exertion, he sits and looks at his watch. ‘Another one?’ he suggests.

She nods, and he signals to the waitress.

Seven o’clock. No one turns up. They wait until twenty past, sitting in the twilight. Then James says, ‘Well…Looks like there aren’t any takers for supper. Do you want to get something? Or do you have to head off?’

They end up in a restaurant in one of the narrow streets that wander away from the main square, narrow between tall stone houses.

—

It is only after the meal, after all that Savoyard wine and a sample of the local aquavit, that it occurs to him: ‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’ he asks, as they leave.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Of course not.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

They are standing in the dark street. She says, ‘I don’t know.’

Leaving the question open, they start to walk towards his hotel. She is wearing his jacket over her dress — the temperature has dropped precipitously since they sat down to a meal that had turned extremely flirty.

For instance, the way he touched, at her invitation, the scar on her lip. (A spill from a moped had put it there, she told him, when she was fourteen.) The scar had started, at some point while they sat on the terrace of the Bar Samoëns, to mildly fixate him. It had distracted him throughout the early part of the meal.

He touched it lightly with his fingertip, and wondered out loud what it might be like to kiss it. And though she didn’t say, ‘Why don’t you try?’ he had had the feeling that she might have done if she’d had the nerve.

Instead she just looked at him, and he noticed how huge and earnest her hazel eyes were, and suggested they have a digestif.

That all took place in French. After the first half-litre of Mondeuse he had insisted on switching to French. And then he had had to explain why he spoke French so well — about how his father had lived in France when he was at school, and how he had spent all the school holidays there, in Paris or in the South. And she had asked him — with a sort of shining-eyed seriousness — whether he had had any homosexual experiences at boarding school in England, and he had said that no, he hadn’t. The idea that that was widespread was, he told her, a myth. And then she had volunteered a pretty vivid story about an experience of her own, once, with another woman, while he felt his mouth drying out and poured them some more wine.

What she hadn’t asked him was whether he was married or anything like that, and he had also avoided the subject.

She, it turned out, was a single mother. Her son’s father lived in Norway.

And so, after a second aquavit and a shared dessert, they found themselves outside under the stars.

Which they looked up at for a minute, standing there in the street, looking up between the dark eaves of the houses at the sky.

It did occur to him, since she was the one who had started it, that this was in fact practically an invitation to kiss her. (She was waiting there, with her face tilted upwards, shivering slightly.) And he did, with the wine and aquavit singing in his veins, sort of want to kiss her.

For a moment he felt that he was about to. And then he felt he wasn’t.

He looked at the dark street. The village was very quiet. She was still searching the sky.

He said, ‘You’re not going to drive, are you?’

He saw, as soon as he had said it, that the question would sound suggestive — that it would sound as if he actively wanted her to spend the night in the village.

She lowered her face to look at him tipsily, straight at him. ‘No, of course not.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘You don’t know?’

She shook her head.

Another moment: the wine and aquavit singing in his veins.

—

Without saying anything else, they started to walk towards his hotel.

So what are you going to do?

The question was one for him as well. It seemed pretty obvious, anyway, what she had in mind.

In the oppressive light of the lobby, though, the idea seemed silly. Somehow unpalatable. There was a short pause as they stood there.

‘I suppose we’d better get you a room,’ he heard himself say.

To which, after a moment’s hesitation, she just nodded.

And then he was at the desk, making the arrangements.

And now he is in his own room, sitting on the bed.

He pulls off his socks.

He is tired, that’s true.

Still.

Might’ve been nice.

There is a melancholy sense, as he takes off his socks, of opportunity lost.

He wasn’t willing to make any effort to make it happen. It was the prospect of effort, more than anything, of even a minimal amount of effort, that had made the whole idea seem unappealing as they stood in the lobby.

His friend Freddy would have put in the necessary effort. Obviously Freddy would have. Freddy, the last time they met, had told James proudly about how he had been playing the piano in a jazz quintet in Wales and after the show two members of the audience, a man and a woman, had asked him to join them for a drink. She was alright looking, Freddy said, so he had joined them, and they had had several drinks, and some lines of speed, and then they invited him to their place, where it was soon pretty obvious what they had in mind. Freddy was to fuck her while the husband watched, wanking. Thanks to the speed it went on for ever, Freddy said. It was daylight when he left.

The story was a bit pathetic actually, James thinks, screwing up his used socks.

Freddy was forty-five years old.

Eking out an existence playing the piano at weddings, in wine bars. Sleeping on people’s sofas.

‘Don’t you worry?’ James would say to him.

‘About what?’

‘About your life.’

‘What about it?’

James took a moment to frame a more precise question. Then he said, ‘Whatever. Nothing.’

Freddy was not as happy, not as entirely satisfied with his situation, as he made out. It wasn’t so much that he worried about being the cricket in the fable, exposed to the oncoming winter. (Though he was.) It was simpler than that. He wanted to be looked up to. He wanted status. When he was twenty-five, lurid sexual exploits did it for him — they won him that status among his envious peers. Now, not so much. They still felt flickers of envy on occasion, sure. They no longer wanted to be him though. He had no money, and the women he pulled these days were not, for the most part, very appealing.

James is staring at his own face in the mirror as he moves the whirring, whirling head of the Braun electric about inside his mouth.

His face has a dead-eyed flaccidity. A flushed indifference. He is looking at it as if it isn’t his own. He feels a definite distance between himself and the face in the mirror. The neon light — a bright lozenge on the wall — isn’t kind to it. He is drunk, slightly. Maybe more than slightly. That wasn’t supposed to happen. He silences the toothbrush, holds its head under the tap for a moment. Should’ve been here, thinking about what he plans to say to Noyer in the morning, not messing about with his PA.

It’s not a joke.

Life is not a fucking joke.

3

Cédric Noyer is a few years younger than James. There is something fogeyish about him though, something which finds visual expression in an incipient jowliness, a softening jawline, a dewlap of self-indulgence threatening his razor-scraped throat. He is wearing a Barbour. He is smoking a cigarette. Parked near him, where he stands in front of Les Chalets du Midi Apartments, is a mud-streaked Mitsubishi Pajero.

He is the owner, James knows, of much land in the area. His father was a farmer — and still is, in a way. He still keeps a small herd, and the family income is swollen with agricultural subsidies. The land is the main thing now, though. The fields in and around Samoëns and Morillon; and, from Cédric’s mother’s side, further up the valley in Sixt.

These apartments are the first development Cédric has undertaken himself. For many years, since the eighties, the family has been selling fields to developers — a hectare here, two hectares there — for prices that went steadily higher and higher. (The latest parcel, with planning permission, fetched well over a million euros.) It was Cédric, supported by his sister Marie-France, who pushed the idea of developing the land themselves — moving up the ‘value chain’, as he put it. He had learned the phrase at the École Supérieure de Commerce in Lyon. ‘I don’t just want to sell milk,’ he had said to his father, trying to put his ambition in terms the old man would understand. ‘I want to make cheese, lots of cheese.’

He steps forward to shake James’s hand and offer him a brief supercilious smile — he treats him like a sort of servant, someone with a measure of technical expertise, like a plumber or a mechanic.

He is very proud of his apartments, James sees that immediately.

So he is tactful, as they inspect them together, the show flat first.

Paulette is with them. A quiet presence this morning. She left the hotel very early in the morning, and drove home to Cluses. When she showed up again at nine she looked extremely tired.

‘Very nice,’ James says to Cédric, of the kitchen in the show flat. His tone is flat and polite, not enthusiastic. Cédric, wandering through the apartment in his Barbour and mustard-coloured corduroy trousers, does not seem to notice this.

They stand on the balcony, admiring the view.

‘Magnifique,’ James says, more fulsomely. They are speaking French.

The air has an autumnal feel this morning. The early mist has lifted. The sun is warmer now. Now. Do it now. Say something.

‘Do you have any other development plans?’ James asks, still staring at the dramatic mountain that hangs over the village.

‘Of course,’ Cédric says in a manner which suggests he is not minded to discuss the subject. The sun has raised a sweat on his smooth forehead. He lights an American cigarette.

‘I know you’ve been a bit unhappy with the service,’ James says.

Cédric shrugs, still getting his fill of the view. ‘If you sell the flats, it’s okay,’ he says.

‘Oh, we’ll sell them,’ James assures him. ‘We’ll sell them. There won’t be a problem there.’

‘Then okay.’

‘No, why I mention it is,’ James says, ‘we’ve been focused mainly on the more traditional areas. I mean as a firm. Which is why we might not have been able to give you the time and attention you’re entitled to. Now we’re planning to start something more focused on some of the newer areas.’ There is a short pause. Then he says, ‘I’m planning to start something.’

There it is.

He’s said it.

It’s out there.

I’m planning to start something.

Is Cédric even listening?

James says, ‘I think there’s huge potential in some of the newer areas. I’m sure you agree.’

‘Of course.’ Cédric says this without looking at him.

‘So I want to focus on this area,’ James says. ‘Make something happen here. I think together we can make something happen here.’

He is smiling.

‘I’d like to talk to you,’ he says, ‘about what other plans you have. Maybe get involved at an earlier stage. For instance, these flats,’ he tells him, ‘are fine. They’re very nice. I have to say, though, I think we can go upmarket with any future developments you have in mind. This is a stunning valley. It has a traditional feel unlike anywhere else I know in the French Alps. I mean the heritage aspect. Plus the ski infrastructure is improving all the time. There’s more money to be made from high-end stuff. We could do luxury here. Do you see what I’m saying?’

He felt mortal, this morning, waking with a headache from the wine and aquavit, his lanky frame patched with sorenesses. A sort of weak milky light slipped through the curtains. Hardly enough to see his watch by.

Time is slipping away.

He is not young now.

I am not young, he had thought, sitting there in the hotel with his hands in his lap, staring at the floor. When did that happen?

He has started lately, the last year or two, to have the depressing feeling that he is able to see all the way to the end of his life — that he already knows everything that is going to happen, that it is all now entirely predictable. That was what he meant when he talked to Paulette about fate.

And how many more opportunities, after this one, will there be to escape that?

Not many.

Maybe none.

If indeed this is an opportunity. It seems it might not be, after all.

Cédric is showing no interest in his proposal. Squinting in the sunlight, lifting the cigarette to his small mouth, he seems more interested in the light traffic passing, leaving the village on the road to Morillon, than in what James is telling him. Which is now that it will be necessary to invest more up front in the future to maximise the potential of the property. ‘There is more risk,’ he says. ‘If you want to offload some of that risk, we can find other investors to come in alongside you.’

Cédric grunts, unenamoured with the idea.

‘Anyway,’ James says, trying not to feel discouraged, ‘let’s talk about what plans you have, and take it from there.’ He hands Cédric a business card, one of the new ones he’s had made. ‘I want you to call me,’ he says.

When they have finished looking over the apartments, he stands Cédric a coffee in a promisingly chichi little place in the village. Watches him eat a pastry — a tarte aux fraises — breaking it up with the side of a fork.

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.

Miranda’s parents will be on their way. They are fairly tweedy, Miranda’s parents. Members at Newbury Racecourse. The four of them went once. Hennessy Day. Fuck, that seems a long time ago. It seems like something from another life, that afternoon.

Time passes.

—

The air sits thick and damp on the flat land of the common. There are people around — it is still summer, just, and the weekend. Ferns and bracken crackle as children rampage through their tired green fronds. Trees hang leafy limbs over dry bridleways. The showers that passed overnight just dampened the dust, and since dawn the sun has dried it. Falling through holes in the cloud cover, the sun is hot. It shines blinding white on the ponds.

James follows his son further out into the quiet of the common, away from the places where people are playing football, and dogs are sprinting after sticks.

He has been thinking, since Friday, whenever he has had time, about Noyer and the plot of land he showed him. He needs to come up with a plan himself, something he can present to Noyer, something obviously superior to his own idea of just plonking down a jumbo version of Les Chalets du Midi, full of shitty furniture. Eight chalets, was what James was thinking, and ten apartments.

They have left the rutted bridleway, its long brown puddles, and are pushing into the wood. Mature trees. Ferns everywhere, starting to turn on top, some of them. Keeping up with his son, wading through the damp ferns, leaves him short-winded. ‘Tom,’ he calls out. ‘Tom! Oi. Wait for me.’

Eight chalets, ten apartments.

Five million to do it all? More? Utilities need sorting. Access. Just a track now. Yes, more, probably.

Noyer won’t have that kind of money. Maybe one or two million he can put in.

So need say four or five million from somewhere. Leave Noyer with about — plus the land — about forty per cent. Will he be happy with that? With nearly half the profit? Double his money, pretty much. Should be happy: not doubling his money on Chalets du Midi, that’s for sure.

He has lost sight of Tom. ‘Tom!’ he shouts.

He will have to, on Monday, tomorrow, start thinking seriously about who he might go to for money. He is already thinking about it. He has some old names. Starting points. Tristan Elphinstone, for one. (Number still work? Will soon see.) He pocketed some cards, that evening at the Gherkin with Air Miles. Time to find those. The thing is, he should leave Esher first, if he goes to Air Miles’s people, probably. Shouldn’t he? Something dishonest, otherwise.

Or worse — to be sued by Air Miles would not be fun.

Leave Esher.

That would be a major step.

So many overheads these days, that’s the thing. Mortgage. School fees. Laima’s salary — the Lithuanian nanny.

He has not even told Miranda about Noyer yet. The Esher job is something she likes. It is quite well paid. It seems secure. She thinks he likes it too — all those jaunts out to the mountains. Once or twice, in the early days, she went with him. Skiing weekends. Pre-kids, of course. He started there at almost the same time they got together, that summer.

Leave Esher. The thought frightens him. Firm things up with Noyer first. Send him a plan — see what he says.

And suddenly the whole thing seems totally speculative, insubstantial. Talk.

Lost Tom again.

Panting slightly, James stands on the trunk of a fallen tree, the huge trunk half-submerged in the ferns. He sees Tom in the midst of them, inspecting something. He is aware of neglecting his son, of not even talking to him much, too preoccupied with his own stuff. His own plans.

This is his life, these things that are happening.

‘Tommy,’ he says.

The boy’s face looks pale, looking up at him from the sea of green ferns.

He has the clear blue eyes of his mother, not his father’s more troubled blue.

The day is windless.

It’s not a joke.

Life is not a joke.