But then, some folk were never satisfied, he thought, his big, strong hands spannering the pipes back into place. If they weren’t griping about lumpy mattresses, they were moaning because there wasn’t an ashtray, or could someone change their bedside lamp, it wasn’t bright enough to read by. Still. He mopped up the puddle of dirty water with a towel. Surrounded by such stunning scenery, people probably expected the same level of perfection from Les Pins. Most of the time, they blooming got it, too.
“I don’t believe it!” An hour must have passed before his mother came storming into the dining room, where he was cramming the last of the unwanted croissants in his mouth. “Look what you’ve done to Madame Fouquet’s towels!”
Eh?
She held up the filthy, sopping linen. “She’s absolutely livid, and quite frankly, so am I.”
Oh. Those towels. “Then she should have taken them back to her room,” he said, spraying crumbs over the table. “Instead of leaving them in the bathroom for anyone to use.”
“That’s still no excuse for you to use them as rags. And to just leave them lying there, as well, you lazy toad!”
“Sorry.”
It wasn’t often that he saw his mother angry, and it wasn’t simply because she had endless patience with him. She simply could not afford to lose control. Georges’ father, Marcel, was the chef, and since food was his passion as well as the foundation for his business, he was either shopping for it at the market or else creating magnificent works of art with it in the kitchen. The hotel management was Irene’s responsibility, something she accomplished with a combination of politeness, style, and military crispness, being just strict enough to keep the chambermaids on their toes, but not so tough that they looked for work elsewhere. Welcoming enough towards the guests, but not so sociable that they might be tempted to take advantage.
“Oh, Georgie, it’s not you,” she said, instantly calm again. “It’s that wretched bloody bathroom that’s got me so worked up.” She swiped her hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’m going to have to call a plumber out, and God knows how long that’ll take in August.”
“Why?” He might be big and slow and clumsy, but Georges took great pride in his work.
“Why?” Her voice rose. “Because that stupid, bloody washbasin’s blocked up again already—”
Wash... basin... “I’ll take another look.”
“Not sure there’s any point, you’ve only just been up there.”
“Yes, but I’ll check further down the pipes.” He turned away, so she wouldn’t see how red his cheeks had gone.
“Will you? Oh, you are an angel. And while you’re up there, would you put clean towels in Thirty-four for Madame Fouquet? I can hardly leave the poor woman with just a hand towel for her bath.”
“Right-oh.”
Washbasin. He wrote it on the back of his hand with a biro, so as not to forget. Second floor, he scribbled underneath. And towels.
Which was just as well, because by the time he’d brushed Minou the cat, topped up the birdbath, and then fed the ducks out on the lake, it was fast approaching midday. Four o’clock before he actually got round to fixing it.
Madame Fouquet never saw her towels.
For all its pine-scented air and picture-postcard views, it wasn’t always easy here for Georges. Life was comfortable enough. Marcel and Irene were the first to think of shipping in sand, to create a private lakefront beach. They revamped the gardens with Mediterranean palms and oleanders, tacked on a veranda, then a terrace, and built moorings for the hotel clients’ boats. This was good. With every improvement, the hotel grew and prospered.
The trouble was, in order to capitalize on a silence broken only by the croaking of frogs and the splash of fish — the very qualities their middle-aged, middle-class guests looked for in a holiday — his parents also banned transistor radios and banished TV to the public lounge. Their intention was that busy Parisians should come down, plug into two weeks of time-warp bliss, then go home refreshed and free of stress. But for Georges, this was his home. And, rather like the resort itself, which had grown up to create its own identity but in doing so had paradoxically isolated itself from the outside world, so he, too, became disconnected.
While other teenagers were rebelling, flower power passed him by, and whatever the Summer of Love might be, it never came his way. But not being “groovy” didn’t trouble him. To be honest, he didn’t know what groovy was, so it didn’t matter that Jesus might be loving Mrs. Robinson more than she would ever know, much less that Mick Jagger was having his mind and other things blown by honky-tonk girls. But then he turned sixteen and things began to change. Not being clever enough to stay on at school, he quickly lost touch with the few friends that he’d had, and though he took over as the hotel handyman from doddery old Rene, the staff were invariably too busy to stop for idle chit-chat. Naturally, Georges picked up the broad outline of events from the national news, but what he wasn’t getting was life’s rich tapestry of trivia, and this became a problem. All he wanted was to do what the Parisians did, only in reverse. Plug into normal life. But how?
The more time passed, the more his desire — his need — to tap into normality intensified. It wasn’t that he was lonely, exactly. He’d always enjoyed his own company, but there was a hole somewhere, a big black hole that needed to be filled, and whoever said it was the little things that mattered was absolutely right. And it was the little things that were missing from his life.
At least, that was the case until one warm and sunny April morning when his mother asked him to oil the sticky lock on No. 17. And would you believe it, there was the answer. Staring him right in the face. He oiled, he turned, he oiled, he turned. No sticking. No rubbing. No catching.
No noise...
At long last, Georges had found a way to connect to the world beyond Les Pins.
The idea of being called a Peeping Tom would have cut him to the quick. There was nothing mucky about what he was doing. Nothing sinister about his motives. He was simply using his master key to slip into the rooms, and there, just being among the guests while they slept, he was able to note other people’s eccentricities and foibles. The big, black void was filled.
While Irene was just delighted that her son had at last showed some initiative by oiling all the bedroom locks, not just the one.
“Madame Garnier’s eldest daughter’s getting married,” Georges told Parmesan, the heavy horse who used to pull a plough but had long since been put out to pasture. “I saw the telegram on her dressing table.”
MAMAN PAPA GUESS WHAT STOP HENRI PROPOSED AT LAST STOP ISN’T THIS JUST WONDERFUL STOP
“Both Monsieur and Madame Garnier were smiling in their sleep,” he added. “So they must be pleased about it.”
Although he still spent the same amount of time fishing, bird-watching, and watching squirrels in the woods, Georges and Parmesan tended to see a lot more of each other these days. Blissfully unaware, of course, that Marcel was having to drop his bœuf bordelaise and drive at breakneck speed so the Gerards — the LeBlancs — the St. Brices or whoever — didn’t miss their trains. Or that the Duponts, the Brossards, and the new people in 38 had to lug their cases up several flights of stairs, because the handyman had forgotten to reconnect the lift after re-greasing the cogs and chains.