All That Man Is (30 page)

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.

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.