David Szalay - All That Man Is

‘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.