In the end it turned out he was just taking me back to the Peugeot — they’d put it round the back, out of sight of the road. He sort of waved me towards it and said, “Monsieur, no trouble, please?”
Well, no one can say I’m the sort of chap who makes scenes about the steak not being rare enough or having to wait twenty minutes for coffee, but when I go into a restaurant for lunch and they leave me to starve in the wine cellar for nine hours I think I’m entitled to feel pretty miffed. So I told the barman chap that personally I didn’t see why there shouldn’t be trouble, lots and lots and lots of it, and if I didn’t get a jolly good explanation I was going to tell the whole story to the local fuzz, not to speak of Interpol and the British ambassador and the chaps who publish the Michelin Guide.
Actually, of course, the last thing I was going to do was pop round to the local fuzzery, because in the first place it would have taken hours and in the second place it wouldn’t have done any good and in the third place I’d have had to tell them about Wellieboots, and you can’t go setting the foreign fuzz on a fellow member of Lincoln’s Inn, can you, even if he is pretty villainous? But I didn’t see why I should tell the barman chap that.
His English wasn’t all that hot, so he may have missed some of the finer points of what I was saying, but I could see he was getting the gist. When I got to the bit about the Michelin Guide, he definitely looked stricken and started trying to plead with me. He said, “My uncle is an old man, monsieur,” and tapped the side of his head to indicate loopiness. “The war, monsieur.”
I was just going to tell him pretty sternly that other people had uncles who’d been in the war as well, and it hadn’t made them loopy enough to go locking people in cellars, when I realised who it was that the twinkly chap had reminded me of with his final twinkle. He’d looked just like my Uncle Here-ward does when he’s going to do something frightful, and if I’d tried to tell the barman character that my Uncle Hereward wasn’t loopy enough to lock people in cellars, I couldn’t have looked him in the eye when I said it. So I gave up and said I comprehended absolutely.
I did point out though that being on the verge of starvation makes people a bit edgy, and he nipped off to the restaurant and came back with a loaf of bread and a chicken leg and some pâté and some cheese and things. He stayed with me while I was eating them and we shared the bottle of wine I’d brought up from the cellar and talked about uncles and got quite matey.
He said it hadn’t been his uncle’s idea to lock me up — he’d been egged on to do it by an Englishman, a big man with thick eyebrows and lots of teeth who was a friend of his from the old days. That was all the barman chap knew about it, but at least it showed that hearing old Wellieboots laugh hadn’t been a hallucination.
I was getting a bit worried about Gabrielle by this time, because now I knew Wellieboots wouldn’t stick at putting people in cellars I didn’t know what he would stick at, and I felt pretty miffed with myself for not warning her about him when I had the chance. I decided the only thing for it was to go on heading south to Monte Carlo and hope he didn’t manage to do anything too serious before I could get in touch with her again. I thought if I kept going and she and her husband had stopped overnight somewhere, we’d probably get to Monte Carlo at about the same time.
I had the roads pretty much to myself and there was a big river going the same way as I was, so I made quite good going and didn’t get lost much. I suppose I ought to have been worrying about not getting back to Chambers and Henry being frightfully miffed, but actually I wasn’t. There’s something about the stars all shining and the air being warm and smelling of oranges that makes you not think much about Henry and more about how nice it would be to write poetry and read it to someone.
The sun was just coming up when I got to a town called Avignon. I think I’ve got a sort of intuition about the kind of places that Gabrielle might fancy — it was another of these historic-looking places with a wall all the way round it, and it struck me as soon as I saw it that she’d have wanted to stay there. I drove in through one of the gateways and half a minute later there was the Mercedes, parked in a side street next to a tremendously elegant-looking hotel.
I did a bit of cautious pootling about, and there in the next street was the Renault, so I knew that Wellieboots was still on the trail. I didn’t think anyone would be on the move for at least a couple of hours, so I found a strategic spot to leave the Peugeot and went off to look for breakfast.
There was a big square with a clock tower on one side of it and lots of cafés. The one at the top already had an awning up over the terrace and looked as if it was open, so I sat down there and asked for coffee and croissants.
One thing I’d made up my mind about was not passing up another chance to warn Gabrielle what was going on, so I borrowed some paper from the café owner and wrote her a note explaining everything.
Life being what it is, I thought if I took it myself the first person I’d run into in the lobby of the hotel would be old Wellieboots, wriggling his eyebrows and wanting to know why I wasn’t still locked in the cellar. So I asked the café owner if there was anyone who’d deliver it, and he offered to send his son, viz a quite bright-looking lad by the name of Gaston.
I told Gaston to make sure it wasn’t just left in a pigeonhole but taken straight up to Gabrielle in her room, and to hang about a bit in case there was an answer, and to scarper prontissimo if he saw a big man with thick eyebrows and a lot of teeth. After he’d gone I started worrying in case he gave it to the wrong person, and then I started worrying even more in case it got to Gabrielle and she simply thought I’d gone loopy, but there wasn’t much I could do about it except eat another croissant.
The café owner thought it was all fantastically romantic. He’d got the idea that I was trying to make an assignation with a beautiful married woman and the chap with eyebrows was her husband, and explaining it wasn’t like that seemed just too difficult to be worth it. He said it was like the troubadours — he said there used to be a lot of these troubadour chaps in that part of the world and they went in for having hopeless passions for beautiful married women who were tremendously virtuous. So they never got anywhere and had to spend all their time writing poetry and going off on the occasional Crusade. He said there was some Italian chap as well, who’d fallen for a bird called Laura, and Avignon was where he’d first met her.
Gaston was away for ages and I started to think he must have got kidnapped or something. By the time I saw him coming back I’d got so pessimistic I thought the letter he was holding was probably the same one I’d sent him with. It wasn’t, though, it was from Gabrielle.
It didn’t sound as if she thought I was loopy after all — actually it sounded as if she was pretty impressed, because it started, “Dear Michael, you are quite wonderful,” so I felt rather chuffed.
Anyway, the gist of it was that if I carried on to Monte Garlo and booked in at the Clair de Lune, she’d get in touch with me there and we could work out a strategy for dealing with old Wellieboots. So here I am, and I’m jolly well not leaving Monte Carlo until I’ve found out what Wellieboots is up to and put a stop to him persecuting Gabrielle. Just tell Henry hard cheese and sucks boo.
Over and out — Cantrip
There was much indignation. Cantrip by his absence had imposed, it was felt, quite sufficient inconvenience on his fellow juniors without the additional burden of conveying to Henry the unconciliatory message suggested in his final paragraph. Ragwort was especially severe. His sense of the world’s unfairness, assuaged in respect of St. Malo and Dourdan by the thought of Cantrip starving in a wine cellar, had been rekindled by the image of him breakfasting in the ancient city of the Popes, oblivious and undeserving of its architectural and artistic glories.