Anything Considered

I would like to thank Elizabeth O’Hara-Boyce and Richard La Plante for their generous help in providing me with information about truffle production and karate. Any inaccuracies are mine, not theirs.

This is a work of fiction. The characters and their names are inventions, and have nothing to do with real life, with the possible exception of Lord Glebe.

SOMETHING would turn up, Bennett kept telling himself. On the good days, the days when the sun shone and no bills arrived, he found it easy to believe that this sudden poverty was a temporary blot on the landscape of life, a hiccup of fate, no more than a passing inconvenience. Even so, he couldn’t ignore the facts: his pockets were hollow, his checks were prone to bounce, and his financial prospects generally—as his bank manager had pointed out with the gloomy relish that bank managers convey when imparting bad news—were vague and unsatisfactory.

But Bennett suffered from optimism, and he was unwilling to leave France. And so, with scanty qualifications, other than a good amateur eye for property and a pressing need for sales commissions, he had joined the roving band of
agents immobiliers—
some of them no better qualified than he—who spend their lives rooting through the Provençal countryside. Like them, he passed his days searching for ruins with character, barns with potential, pigsties with promise, sheep hangars with personality,
disused
pigeonniers
, and any other tottering edifice that might, with massive applications of imagination and even more money, be suitable for transformation into a desirable residence.

It had not been easy. Competition was intense; indeed, there were days when Bennett felt that property agents were thicker on the stony ground than clients. The market had gone soft, and the culprit was the French franc. It was too strong—particularly for the Americans, the British, the Dutch, and the Swedes. The Swiss had the money but were waiting, prudent and patient as ever, for the franc to drop. The few clients were either Germans laden with marks, or Parisians looking to invest cash they had discovered under Grandmama’s mattress. But even they were scarce.

And then, the previous summer, a few flippant remarks—a joke not in the best of taste, Bennett had to admit—had led to a minor but potentially rewarding sideline to augment his qualifications as purveyor of real estate to the English gentry.

He had been a guest at one of the parties thrown by members of the expatriate community that descends on Provence each year for its annual ration of sun and garlic. As a permanent resident, with the useful social advantages of being a presentable bachelor who spoke English—in other words, an invaluable Spare Man—Bennett was never short of invitations. He endured the gossip in exchange for a full stomach.

Boredom was the occupational hazard, and mischief
was the antidote, as it had been on that luminous August evening, the flagstones on the terrace still warm from the day’s sun, the view extending across the valley to the medieval skyline of Bonnieux. Slightly tipsy, and numbed by the other guests’ endless speculations about the future of British politics and the employment prospects for junior members of the royal family, Bennett had diverted himself by inventing a fresh nightmare for the prosperous owners of holiday homes. It would be a change for them, he thought, something different to talk about when they got home, an exotic addition to their normal complaints about burglars, frozen pipes, swimming pool vandals, and light-fingered staff.

Bennett’s warning, which he delivered with tongue in cheek between mouthfuls of smoked salmon, struck at the very heart of rural domestic life: the plumbing. He claimed to have heard of a new and malevolent strain of dung beetle that had recently been observed in the region, invading any septic tank that was left unused and creating unsavory chaos throughout the plumbing system. Naturally, he said, the authorities were trying to hush it up, as dung beetles and tourists were not a happy combination. But the beetles were there, all right, biding their time until houses became empty and they could have the run of the pipes.

His audience, two sisters from Oxford with matching pink-cheeked husbands, had listened to him with mounting dismay. To his surprise, he realized they were taking him seriously.

“How absolutely
ghastly
,” said one of the sisters, in the precisely tailored accent of the English Home Counties. “What does one do? I mean, our house stays empty for
months
in the winter.”

“Well,” said Bennett, “the only thing that works is regular flushing, at least twice a week. Drown the little devils, that’s the answer. They’re not amphibious, you see. Does anyone want that last shrimp? Pity to waste it.” He smiled, excused himself, and made his way across the terrace toward a pretty girl who he was sure needed rescuing from a notoriously boring local interior decorator. As he came closer, he heard the drone of a familiar mantra about the charm, the ageless charm, of distressed chintz, and plunged in to bring some light relief.

Unknown to Bennett, the sisters from Oxford were spreading news of the dung beetle invasion throughout the party, and by the end of the evening it had reached the status of a full-scale epidemic that threatened the sanitary arrangements of every unattended house between Saint-Rémy and Aix. Faced with this common menace, half a dozen anxious home owners formed an instant coalition and waylaid Bennett as he was about to leave.

“This beetle business,” said the group’s spokesman, an ex–cabinet minister resting between elections, “sounds as though it could be rather nasty.” Solemn, sun-flushed faces nodded in agreement. “And we were all wondering if you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on things for us when we leave. Be our man on the spot, as it were.” He dropped his voice, in the way of the English when obliged to discuss
a vulgar subject. “We’d make it worth your while, of course—proper commercial basis for services rendered. Wouldn’t dream of asking you to take it on otherwise.”

Bennett looked at them—middle-aged, wealthy men who doubtless had many middle-aged, wealthy friends—and came to an instinctive decision. “Of course,” he said. “I’d be delighted to help out. But I won’t hear of being paid for it.” He waved their gratitude aside. Favors had a way of turning into introductions and then into sales, as he knew from listening to other agents. Most of them performed a variety of chores for their absent clients, from stocking the refrigerator to firing the alcoholic gardener. But none of them, he was certain, had received this ultimate mark of trust, or the position that went with it: official flusher, guardian of the septic tank,
inspecteur sanitaire
. In the quiet winter months that followed, it amused him to take his task seriously.

——

He pressed the porcelain-clad lever, listened approvingly to the vigorous rush of water, and put a tick against a name on his clipboard: Carlson, the mustard tycoon from Nottingham, who had often been heard to boast that his fortune had been made from what people left on their plates; a rich man, and not afraid to show it, particularly in the matter of bathrooms, where his taste leaned toward the grandiose. Bennett stepped down from the raised throne, crossed the mosaic floor, and washed his hands at a basin
sunk into a slab of polished granite. He looked through the window at what Carlson, with mock humility, called his little patch of garden—a dozen acres of groomed terracing, thickly studded with mature olive trees. Imported from Italy, Carlson had told him, not one of them less than two hundred years old. Bennett had once estimated their cost and had arrived at a figure that would have paid for a small house.

He went downstairs, through gray humps of furniture shrouded in dustcovers, and set the alarm system before letting himself out. Standing on the raked, weedless gravel of the drive, he took a deep breath of crisp air and considered the morning. It was sending a clear signal of spring, with mist burning off in the valley below and almond blossom bright against a clean blue sky. How could he think of living anywhere else? He remembered the comment of a friend, all those years ago when he’d moved to France.
Wonderful country, old chap. Pity about the people. Absolutely impossible. You’ll be back
. As it happened, he had become fond of the French, and he had stayed.