Anything Considered

213 Pages·2011·1.07 MB·English

by  Mayle Peter

PETER MAYLE
ANYTHING
CONSIDERED
Peter Mayle spent fifteen years in the advertising business, first as a copywriter and then
as a reluctant executive, before escaping Madison Avenue to write books. He is the
author of A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence, as well as the novels Hotel Pastis and
A Dog’s Life. His most recent novel is Chasing Cézanne. He and his wife and two dogs
divide their time between the South of France and Long Island.
Books by PETER MAYLE
Chasing Cézanne
Anything Considered
A Dog’s Life
Hotel Pastis
Toujours Provence
A Year in Provence

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1997
Anything Considered copyright © 1996 by Escargot Productions, Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in
the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Mayle, Peter.
Anything considered : a novel / by Peter Mayle.
p. cm.
1. Truffles—Marketing—Fiction. 2. British—Monaco—Fiction.
I. Title.
[PR6063.A8875A59 1996]
823′.914—dc20 96-5761
eISBN: 978-0-30779193-1
Author photograph courtesy of Jennie Mayle
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
Cover design by Carol Devine Carson
Cover illustration by Ruth Marten
v3.1
For Jeremy
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I would like to thank Elizabeth O’Hara-Boyce and Richard La Plante for
their generous help in providing me with information about truffle
production and karate. Any inaccuracies are mine, not theirs.
This is a work of fiction. The characters and their names are inventions,
and have nothing to do with real life, with the possible exception of Lord
Glebe.
1
SOMETHING would turn up, Bennett kept telling himself. On the good
days, the days when the sun shone and no bills arrived, he found it easy
to believe that this sudden poverty was a temporary blot on the
landscape of life, a hiccup of fate, no more than a passing inconvenience.
Even so, he couldn’t ignore the facts: his pockets were hollow, his checks
were prone to bounce, and his financial prospects generally—as his bank
manager had pointed out with the gloomy relish that bank managers
convey when imparting bad news—were vague and unsatisfactory.
But Bennett suffered from optimism, and he was unwilling to leave
France. And so, with scanty qualifications, other than a good amateur
eye for property and a pressing need for sales commissions, he had
joined the roving band of agents immobiliers—some of them no better
qualified than he—who spend their lives rooting through the Provençal
countryside. Like them, he passed his days searching for ruins with
character, barns with potential, pigsties with promise, sheep hangars
with personality, disused pigeonniers, and any other tottering edifice that
might, with massive applications of imagination and even more money,
be suitable for transformation into a desirable residence.
It had not been easy. Competition was intense; indeed, there were
days when Bennett felt that property agents were thicker on the stony
ground than clients. The market had gone soft, and the culprit was the
French franc. It was too strong—particularly for the Americans, the
British, the Dutch, and the Swedes. The Swiss had the money but were
waiting, prudent and patient as ever, for the franc to drop. The few
clients were either Germans laden with marks, or Parisians looking to
invest cash they had discovered under Grandmama’s mattress. But even
they were scarce.
And then, the previous summer, a few flippant remarks—a joke not in