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Thursday 4 December 2008

Christmas short story

Humiliation

The Spectator's short story for the holidays

I slipped out of bed and washed my face in the ewer. Calm down, Yves, I said to myself, bide your time, everything will be revealed. Maltravers clearly needs your complicity, your absolute discretion: he must be very unhappy to ask a favour of a man whose book he has so recently destroyed. What is going on?

I spent the day in the Café Riche with my guidebooks writing up my vicarious journey down the Dordogne valley. I finished my article for the English Motorist by mid-afternoon, went back to the hotel, had a snooze, some sort of a bath, changed my shirt and crossed the square to the Café Couderc for supper. Benoît was shucking oysters with a panicked, panting energy.

‘The Englishman,’ he said, gesturing at the new tray. ‘Now it is 36 in ten minutes.’

Maltravers had the oyster-need, the oyster-craving, clearly, but far worse than me. He was sitting erect at a table under the big clock, waiting for his next dozen. But he was with someone, a woman, her back to me. I sat on the other side of the big room, half obscured by a pillar. When Benoît brought Maltravers his third plate I saw the woman excuse herself, stand and go to the toilettes. She was tall, in her thirties I would say, with a fine clear face and thick dark-blond untidy hair. I found myself immediately and powerfully attracted to her, and that had nothing to do with Maltravers. I watched him eat his oysters. Everyone has their oyster-foibles, and Maltravers liked to swallow his directly off the shell, freeing the meat first, dousing it with a liberal spoonful of shallot-vinegar and then slurping the oyster down whole, giving a little jerk of the chin, flipping his small pointed beard as he swallowed. There was something unpleasant — carp-like, lamprey-like — about the way his long upper lip seemed to enfold the oyster-bearing shell. He ate the dozen in astonishing speed, in under a minute, like a refugee frightened his meal was going to be snatched away.

More articles from: William Boyd | this section

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