Hotel Pastis by Peter Mayle

Author:Peter Mayle [Mayle, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79191-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

Simon was woken up by the sun slanting through the bedroom window. Beside him, the sheets were still warm from Nicole’s body, and he heard the hiss of the coffee machine coming from the kitchen. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clothes that had been tossed hurriedly over the back of a chair the night before. Lust comes to the middle-aged man, he thought, and very nice too.

Now he could smell the coffee, and it dragged him out of bed, through the bathroom to pick up a towelling robe, and down the stairs. Nicole was waiting for the coffee jug to fill, dressed in one of Simon’s shirts, the hand on her hip pulling the shirttail up to the top of her thighs.

“Good morning, Madame Bouvier. I’ve got a message for you.”

She turned her head and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Oui?”

“You’re wanted in the bedroom.”

She poured the coffee and brought it over to the table, pushed Simon down into a chair, and sat on his lap. “Ernest is coming in five minutes.” She kissed him. “And you have a very busy morning.”

“That’s what I was hoping for.”

They were only halfway through the big bowls of coffee when there was a knock on the door. Simon watched Nicole run up the stairs and was thinking about a siesta as he let Ernest in.

“We couldn’t have hoped for a more glorious day, dear.” He tilted his head and looked down his nose at Simon’s bathrobe. “But I dare say you haven’t noticed the weather.”

“Jet lag, Ern. Otherwise I’d have been up hours ago. Help yourself to coffee while I get organised.”

There were still white smudges of frost in the shadows as the two men left the house and walked down to the square, past the steamed-up windows of the café and the old plane trees, now bare of leaves and pruned back to their mottled grey knuckles. The light was piercing, the sky a hard blue. Except for the lack of green among the vines below the village and the bite in the air, it could have been a day in early summer.

The parking area opposite the gendarmerie was crowded with vans and trucks. Monsieur Blanc’s BMW, the successful architect’s trademark, was the only vehicle that wasn’t scarred and dusty.

“He comes every day, Monsieur Blanc,” said Ernest, “and he’s quite strict with those poor boys working all day in the cold. Why they don’t wear gloves and mufflers, I don’t know.” They stopped in front of the entrance. Wooden shutters had been put up at the windows, and a temporary but solid door of thick planks. Ernest pushed it open. “Now then,” he said, “don’t expect the Connaught, but it’s coming along.”

The huge room shone with sunlight. A fire was already blazing, with stacks of oak logs arranged at either side of the hearth. On a long trestle table, covered with a cloth of red, white, and blue, a forest of bottles and glasses stretched from one end to the other, with a fifty-litre barrel of red wine in the centre.

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