Goodmans Hotel

'Good idea. We know each other well enough now not to have to put up a front. Go with you and have a bit of a fling myself for a few days if I could, but you know what married life is. You're right to make the best of your chances while you can. There will be four of us, Caroline is bringing her friend Marie. Better warn you about Marie, I'm afraid you've no chance in that direction. She's the religious type, fiancé away on missionary work, Philippines or somewhere. Still, you know what the French are like, you won't have to look far if you want a bit of mademoiselle.'

At the Hotel des Amis Marie smiled bravely when she opened the door of her room, and we went down together to meet Peter and Caroline. We all strolled along a forest path Madame had suggested to a small lake full of fish. We walked around it, joking that the evening meal would probably turn out to have been caught there. On our way back we noticed behind the hotel a large well kept vegetable plot, in which vigorous plants were disciplined into a patchwork of geometrically straight rows, a dozen or so different crops arranged in a neatly executed ground plan. Working steadily, too absorbed in ordering his vegetable brigades to notice us, was Georges, the young man who had helped earlier with our baggage.

That evening at dinner Madame took our order for aperitifs, but it was Georges, in a clean T-shirt, his face freshly washed, though still in his old trousers with their bulging side pockets, who brought them to our table. He uttered a series of odd syllables that made no sense to me, but seeing him pick up the orange juice I gestured towards Marie. The remaining three drinks were all pastis and he positioned them carefully on our place mats. As he was on his way back to the kitchen Peter destroyed any hopes that he had forgotten his earlier bad temper. He bellowed in a voice that echoed around the restaurant: 'I hope that half-wit won't be serving us our dinner.'

He was a quick judge of people, and had realised what my own mind had been groping towards, that Georges had limited mental abilities. Peter's anger was to be mercilessly released on Madame and Georges.

In an instant she was at our table to ask if anything was wrong. Caroline and Marie stared at each other as though daring one another to speak, while I looked unflinchingly at Peter, unsuccessfully willing him to moderate his words. 'Tell her,' he instructed me in a determined tone, 'that in the restaurant I expect to be served by a waiter or waitress, or failing that by Madame herself. I do not expect to be served by the village idiot.'