A Good Year Read Free Page A

welcome might have been expressed too enthusiastically. Oh God. Better send flowers and an abject note.
    He stripped off his tie and jacket and slumped on the couch, all energy and optimism gone. The apartment was a mess. His life was a mess. As an alternative to housework or vodka, he turned on the television. A cookery program. A documentary about salamanders. A man with blow-dried hair presenting the news from CNN. Golf, the instant soporific. Max dozed off, and dreamed of drowning Amis in a vat of crème brûlée.
    It was evening when the phone woke him. The golfers on the screen didn’t seem to have made any progress since Max had dropped off several hours before. Perhaps it was a long hole. He turned off the TV and picked up the phone.
    “There you are, you old bugger. I tried you at the office, but they said you’d left early. Are you all right?”
    It was Charlie, his closest friend and ex-brother-in-law.
    Max yawned. “I’m fine. No, actually, I’m not fine. It’s been one of those days.”
    “It’s going to start getting better. Tonight, you and I are celebrating the promotion of Charles Willis, real estate’s rising star. It happened this afternoon. Bingham & Trout have made me a full partner. Time for young blood, they said. The property business is changing, we must move with the times, a strong hand on the tiller, all that stuff.”
    “Charlie, that’s terrific. Congratulations.”
    “Well, don’t just sit there. Come and help me out with this bottle of Krug.”
    “Where are you?”
    “An old client of mine just opened this place off the Portobello Road. Pinot, it’s called—great bar, great wine list, and even as I speak it is
crawling
with crumpet. All the Notting Hill lovelies, dressed in flimsy garments. I’m fighting them off.”
    Max was smiling as he put the phone down and went into the bedroom to change. Ever since they had met at school, Charlie had always been good for morale. And looking out of the window, Max saw that the rain had stopped. His spirits lifted, and he found himself whistling as he went downstairs.
    Passing through the lobby on his way out, he stopped to check his mailbox. There was the usual collection of final demands and circulars and one or two of the dinner-party invitations that come the way of every London bachelor; but there was also an intriguing envelope with a French stamp. In the top left-hand corner was a small, stylized image of the statue of Justice, and below was printed the sender’s name:
Cabinet Auzet, Notaires, Rue des Remparts, 84903 St.-Pons.
Max started to open it, then decided to save it to use as a distraction from the horrors of the tube. He slipped the envelope in his pocket, stuffed the rest of his mail back in the box, and headed for the South Kensington Underground station.

Two
    Standing in the crush of humanity as the tube rattled away from South Kensington toward Notting Hill, Max was rediscovering the face of public transport. Almost everyone around him, it seemed, had undergone the modern tribal ritual of piercing. Pierced nostrils, pierced eyebrows, pierced lips, pierced ears, several pallid but prominently displayed pierced navels. Other visible body parts, those that hadn’t been pierced, were tattooed. A handful of older, more conservative passengers, without nose jewelry or ear trinkets, looked like relics from a distant, unadorned age. They buried their faces in books or newspapers, carefully avoiding eye contact with those members of the pierced generation jammed up against them.
    Max wedged himself in a corner of the lurching carriage and took the letter from his pocket. He read it once, then a second time, his rusty French gradually coming back to him as he went over the formal phrases. Lost in thought, he almost missed his stop, and he was still preoccupied when he pushed open the thick smoked-glass doors of the restaurant.
    The hubbub of a fashionable haunt in full cry washed over him like a wave. The long, low-ceilinged