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 Number 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 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 Irène 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 bordelaix and drive at breakneck speed so the Gérards — 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 regreasing the cogs and chains.
“Mother doesn’t like that Madame Dupont, with the blue-rinse hair, who rustles when she walks. She thinks she’s hard and crusty, but she’s not.” Georges passed the horse an apple. “She’s soft as dough inside.”
He knew this because of the soppy romances Madame Dupont read, and more than once he’d had to pick up a paperback that had fallen from her hand, replacing the bookmark and laying it gently on the cover next to her.
“You wouldn’t think it, but twenty-seven wears a toupee.” It gave Georges quite a fright, seeing it draped over the footstool. He thought it was a rat. “Someone should tell him he looks a lot younger without it, though.” Unlike Madame 27, whose teeth snarled at him from the glass beside the bed. “She snores, as well,” he said.
In fact, it was quite a revelation, seeing what the guests were really like, as opposed to what they wanted you to think. For instance, Georges could tell who was putting on a front, pretending to read highbrow literature when they were sneaking tabloid news inside their daily papers. He knew who was sloppy and who was not from the way they folded their clothes or tossed them on a chair, and, even more importantly, by squeezing the towels, he knew who took a bath every day and who only took one once a week and disguised their lack of personal hygiene with cologne.
Darker secrets came out, too. Major Chabou, for instance, swapped dirty pictures with the banker in the room upstairs. Suzette the chambermaid was having an affair with Number 14, even sleeping in his bed after his poor wife had had to rush back home to see to her sick mother. Mind you, Suzette didn’t sleep in curlers, like the other female guests. Or wear a hairnet, either, for that matter.
So summers came and summers went, and even though Georges assumed the Year of the Cat was just one more Chinese holiday, who cared? The same people booked the same rooms for the same two weeks in the season, and simply by taking stock of their toothbrushes, their writing pads, their cosmetics, and their clothes, he was able to follow the changes in their lives and circumstances.
Some guests never changed, of course. Monsieur Prince still put his dirty shoes on Irène’s clean white linen sheets. The Bernards still stashed the hotel’s face flannels at the bottom of their suitcase. Madame Morreau still treated Georges the same way she did when he was seven, only now instead of ruffling his hair and giving him a bag of aniseed, she had to reach up on tippy-toes just to pat his shoulder. But she still brought him aniseed, which Georges had never liked but which he could at least feed to Parmesan, even though it made him kick and swish his tail. And Georges still very much looked forward to her visits.
Which made it doubly hard when Madame Morreau died.
“Take a look at these architect’s plans, love, and tell me what you think.”
From the outset, his parents had involved him in their projects, but to be honest, the squares and boxes on the page confused him. What did it mean, “drawn to scale”, he wondered? Fish had scales. Kitchens had scales. But gardens? And this 250:1 stuff. Georges didn’t understand where bookmakers fitted into plans for new extensions, and whenever he saw things like this, he was glad he hadn’t been forced to stay on at school.
“Ten new bedrooms to be built during the winter shut-down, and what about this?” The excitement in his mother’s voice was catching. “No more trotting down the corridor in the middle of the night for our guests. As of next spring, they’ll all have their own individual, private bathroom!”
“And now the world’s opening up to foreign travel, son, what do you think about including couscous on the menu?” Marcel said.
Would that be meat, or some exotic vegetable, he wondered?
“Every room’ll have its own mini shampoo and soap.”
“Osso buco, perhaps?”
“Hair dryers in the bathrooms.”
“Definitely paella — are you all right, son?”
“Yeah.”
But there was no fooling his mother. “Oh, Georges.” She laid down her fountain pen. “You’re not still upset about Madame Morreau, are you?”
Marcel had brought him up that it was wrong to tell a lie, but for some reason he felt ashamed of saying yes out loud. Madame Morreau had been different from the other guests, somehow. Special. For a start, she was one of the few who weren’t wary of this big, shambling young man, who was constantly wandering round the hotel with a distant expression on his face and a toolbox in his hand. And she didn’t talk down to him, either. In fact, quite often she had to rebuke that weasel-faced nephew of hers for poking fun at him.
Georges is a wee bit slow, Jean-Paul. You need to make allowances.
Jean-Paul. That was Weasel’s name. Jean-Paul. And it was a funny thing, but until Madame Morreau said that, Georges had never thought of himself as slow. And yet, now he came to think of it, he had always been in the tail of any school race. How she knew all that was a mystery to him, but even so, Georges always made a point of quickening his pace when he saw her coming. Especially once Jean-Paul began to mouth Slowpoke at him behind her back.