Chapter 7
Xavier de Bonport picked up Sabrina at eight o’clock right on time, as promised. She had noticed that about him before, that he was punctual and precise, and he did what he promised. He was a man of his word.
He was dressed simply, but had a distinctive style.
He wasn’t showy or pretentious. He was wearing black jeans, a black turtleneck, a black leather jacket that was well worn, and impeccably shined black leather John Lobb shoes.
He and Sabrina almost looked like twins.
She was wearing identical jeans and sweater and an old Balenciaga black leather coat, an exact copy of one Audrey Hepburn had worn in one of her films. Her father had had many of Audrey Hepburn’s films as part of his library, and Sabrina had watched them again and again and had adopted several of her signature styles.
Sabrina and Xavier made a handsome couple as she got in his unassuming old Citroen and they headed toward Biarritz.
The restaurant he had chosen was on a narrow back street and looked plain from the outside, but the atmosphere was lively and fun inside, and they had delicious Basque food.
Sabrina had been reading about the region, and was intrigued by many of the local traditions and ties to Spain.
She was planning to drive around the area when the weather got better.
She and Malcolm had loved learning about local culture on their many trips to France.
She knew he would have loved Arcangues. And the people in the shops were friendly to her and patient with her French.
Xavier made some suggestions of what to eat, and Sabrina followed his advice. The food was excellent and she loved it.
“Thank you for taking me to dinner,” she said after the first course, as they shared some delicious homemade bread.
The cook and owner of the restaurant was a large woman who looked like a grandmother and went from table to table several times during the evening to make sure that everyone was loving the food.
They always did, and Sabrina was enjoying the ambiance and Xavier’s company.
His eyes were bright that night. He had talked about his daughter and how proud of her he was, and how much he missed her.
“The pandemic has disconnected us all,” he said, “from our families, our loved ones, our friends, our coworkers. That was one of the biggest impacts it had on me. It made us solitary. I find it hard to reconnect to people, especially as I’m here, and not in Paris, working,” although it was certainly not a bad place to live in exile.
“Are you working remotely?” she asked him.
She had no idea what his job was, and didn’t want to be presumptuous and ask.
He gave her the sense that he was a very private person, and he had an air of quiet dignity.
She could guess that he was a proud man, a well-known trait of the Basques that she was reading avidly about.
He hesitated before he answered her question.
“I’m not really working,” he said humbly.
“I haven’t in three years. I made a daring gamble with a new business, the pandemic hit, and a year and a half later, I lost. Everything.
” He said it without shame, and didn’t hide it, but she could see pain and regret in his eyes.
“It was a global travel business, a start-up, connecting every aspect of travel globally. The pandemic hit, the frontiers closed, every country shut down, and travel ended. We called it Bon Voyage. It was a great idea and the pandemic killed it. We couldn’t save it.
We lost the business. You bought me time and peace, by renting the chateau.
” He didn’t look as though he needed the money, but she had wondered why he had rented a home he was so intensely attached to.
He didn’t try to hide the truth from her or put on airs.
He was very open and direct and brave about it.
He didn’t want to start a friendship with her on false pretenses. He was an honest man.
“I was the head of a big ad agency in Paris for twenty years before that. It was a great job, greater than I knew at the time. But I fell in love with the idea of a global start-up based on travel. Perhaps the right idea at the wrong time. No one could have predicted the pandemic, and the entire world shut down. The idea was sound, but the timing was terrible. We had the worst luck in the world. When everything had become global, suddenly the entire planet stopped, countries closed their borders, no one could travel, alliances between companies and countries were severed, and panic reigned. We tried to ride it out, but we couldn’t.
We had it going full speed in the year before the pandemic, and it was headed to a huge success, which evaporated in our hands from the moment the pandemic hit.
I had given up a very big job to do it, and invested too much personal money in it.
One of my associates had a large fortune to draw on, and it was a lark to him.
He died in the first month of the pandemic, which hit us hard, personally and practically.
I had taken a huge risk and poured everything I had into the business, I was so sure it would work.
The third partner was a brilliant technician, and had very little money to put in.
He lost his wife and his interest in everything, including our business.
He had five children and he’s only now starting to see clearly again more than three years later.
He just remarried, and they moved to the Dominican Republic.
We had too many hard hits between one partner’s death, the other one losing his wife, and me losing all my money.
I think we would have won the bet and made billions without the pandemic, but with it we were doomed.
Or maybe the project was too ambitious, and the time for dreams and castles in the air is past. Travel is still very fragile now.
” He was being totally honest with her. “I lay low for a year after we closed, licking my wounds. I assumed I’d go back to a big job like the one I had before in advertising, but I think I was too old, or had demonstrated instability in some people’s eyes when I quit to start a new business with a global concept.
I thought I’d be the CEO of a large company again, after the pandemic, after the business failed.
I thought that finding a job as a CEO again would be easy and always available to me.
I was fifty-three when we dissolved the start-up.
I’m fifty-six now, almost fifty-seven, and that’s a dicey age.
People don’t want to invest in you or hire you if they’re only going to get five or ten years out of you at most. Or maybe what I tried to do was too crazy, or no one trusted me to be steadfast anymore, once I quit my big job.
The pandemic ended two years ago and I haven’t landed a job.
There are jobs out there but they’re going to younger men.
The whole concept of work is different. People have realized too that they don’t want to sacrifice their whole lives to their jobs, which is what I did for my entire career.
After spending two years at home, gardening and getting to know their children, whom they had never spent any time with, now people don’t want to go back to a traditional office.
And the simple fact is that younger men are cheaper to hire than I am.
Overnight I became a dinosaur, along with many traditional businesses.
Corporations have disbanded their offices, commercial buildings are empty, and the young workforce is at home in their pajamas and playing with their dog.
They’ve moved out of the cities, so it’s damn hard to put a functioning work team together, particularly with younger people who think we’ve destroyed the planet and their lives.
And classic, highly paid CEOs like me have gone out of style.
We blinked and a whole world ended and the life that went with it.
In some ways, I like it better too. I’m happier here in Arcangues where I grew up than I ever was in Paris.
The trouble is that I need the kind of salary I had to maintain that lifestyle, and I spent everything I’d saved on a start-up that failed.
I could be a gardener,” he said, smiling wryly at her, “or a carpenter, but I doubt that I’ll be a CEO again, and my entire life and professional structure was based on that.
Young people and investors don’t trust that model anymore.
So I’ve retreated to my land, like a feudal ‘seigneur,’ a lord, but I don’t have the fortune to support it.
All I have left is the chateau, and I’m hanging on to it for dear life for my daughter.
You helped me do that when you rented it.
You gave me time and breathing space to figure out what I’m going to do now.
The world has changed, and we all have to adapt,” he said nobly, but now she better understood the sadness she had seen in his eyes.
He was a proud man, and in his eyes, and perhaps the world’s, he had failed, not through his own fault, but the story wasn’t over yet.
“What does your wife say?” she asked, curious about her. “I gather she’s not in love with the idea of moving to the Pays Basque,” since she wasn’t there with him, and the separate bedrooms Sabrina had noticed when she first toured the house told their own tale.