A Quiche Mogul’s Unwelcome Interruption
It was a quiet winter’s night in the lobby of Hotel Berchstein, the most extravagant hotel in the deepest nook of the Swiss alps. No one stops here without a damn good reason, and no one has a damn good reason without a deep pot of money. Myself, I am the heir to the Rance fortune, a family of quiche moguls at the tippy top of the upper crust, no pun intended. I had spent that day hammering my supplier, a Swiss cheese merchant in above his head, about his attempt to pull the wool over my eyes. The bastard thought I wouldn’t notice he had tried to sell me two hundred wheels of cheese with big gaping holes in them. It was an exhausting tirade, and what’s more I would be posted up at the Hotel Berchstein for the next two weeks while Herr Meyer painstakingly filled in the holes one by one, but you can’t make a good British quiche without some great Swiss cheese, and you can’t get great Swiss cheese without letting the wily cheesemongers know who’s boss. For a gentleman of leisure, the lobby was a peaceful place to wait, no sound but the crackle of the fireplace and the turning of pages. I sat in the corner with a week-old copy of the Financial Times, the latest that the hotel had been able to source. I lit my pipe as I immersed myself in the top story about the prime minister’s tax hike on Swiss cheese imports.
This most unwelcome news was disturbed, however, by the equally unwelcome sound of footsteps coming down the grand old staircase. The esteemed gentlemen in the lobby glanced up from our newspapers (I was one of the esteemed gentlemen). Lord Battenburg, with his scruffy moustache and overlong nose, sneered at the impropriety of the noise and returned to his Die Welt. The Count of Villacieros, with his greasy hair and piercing blue eyes, gazed down at the approaching man before those blue eyes fell back to his copy of El Pais. I, with my normal face and unremarkable features, was the one unfortunate enough to make eye contact. The man smiled and walked over to my table, I tried to seem buried in my reading, but he sat down without invitation and produced a pipe. This wasn’t a dignified gentlemanly pipe though, this was the kind of pipe a gruff sailor would wield, which was fitting because the fellow opposite me did seem to fit the gruff sailor archetype. As if it wasn’t undignified enough to look like that and smoke a pipe like that, he then patted his pockets, tutted and spoke to me.
“Excuse me, friend.” He said. “Have you got a light?” I rolled my eyes and produced a matchbook from my pocket, exaggerating the movement to emphasise the strenuousness of the task he had bequeathed me. I handed it over and went back to my paper. “Thanks.” He said as he lit up and started sucking on his pipe in the way that common people do, he then looked out of the window, at the blistering snow and wind that was whistling outside. “Hell of a storm this, you ever seen anything like it?” I shook my head, not looking up. Mouth firmly closed. But he went on, “Yep, crazy weather. I actually have seen something like it though.” I definitely didn’t ask, and if he was attempting to coax me into asking now, he was sadly mistaken. And yet he continued on, “I actually used to be a lighthouse keeper, you see. And it was on my very first day on the job that I saw the fiercest storm I had ever come across.” I could tell that he was gearing up for a big story.
“I remember it like it was yesterday. The rain was coming down with a vengeance and I can still hear the boom of thunder above my head as the ferry approached the island. The ferryman did a grand job pulling up alongside the jagged rocks and getting close enough for me to alight, but I still had to jump over with my bags — Almost slipped on the moss! He chucked me my last suitcase and sped off before I had the chance to say bye.
“I looked out onto the island ahead of me, and the lighthouse up the hill, and wondered what I had gotten myself in for. I was only young, still in my mid-20s, but even then I felt like I had made a big mistake. I had packed optimistically, but I scrambled across the rocks, slipping and sliding all over the place, and started to regret the flip-flops on my feet. The rain was fierce and the waves were crashing against the rocks, I knew that there were not gonna be any mermaids around for miles in these conditions. You see, this was back in the day when we still believed in mermaids. As a matter of fact, the only reason I had taken the job in the first place was because I was hoping to meet a mermaid, marry her, and then we could live off her gold for the rest of our lives together. Call it naive, but this is what all of my friends around that time were doing. It was almost every week you heard about an old school friend striking luck with a beautiful mermaid and retiring somewhere tropical. I merely wanted to join in the fun.
“Not a mermaid in sight in this storm though. I walked up to the lighthouse and knocked on the door, and I heard a horrible anguished howl coming from inside. Scared the life out of me. The door opened a few minutes later and I saw an old man looking red in the face, holding a pack of ice to his head. Apparently, when I knocked, he was woken up, sat bolt upright, and hit his head on the frying pan hanging above him. Now, don’t ask me why he slept below the frying pans, I never figured that out and he never bothered to tell me. I never saw him cook with them either, the only meal he ever made was seagull on a spit roast over the fireplace. I think all that time alone on the island had made him a bit tapped in the head, because there were plenty of modern meals we could have, the island got a supermarket delivery every week. But there he sat, every evening, spinning his seagull over the embers.
“Well, he welcomed me into the room, maybe a bit begrudgingly, and I’m not afraid to say he didn’t seem too impressed at the look of his new assistant. He looked me up and down, and then shook his head slowly and mournfully, like I had come to deliver the news of his son dying at war. He showed me to my room and gave me some time to unpack. I was right in the middle of unpacking when, you’ll never guess, he comes back into my room and starts complaining that I’m making too much noise. He says I should make myself useful and start doing some chores. He gave me a list with maybe half a dozen items on there. I can’t remember all of them but it was stuff like do the dishes, clean the windows, collect driftwood. You know, most of the jobs were outdoors, and this was still in the middle of an absolutely terrifying storm. I got the indoor ones out of the way first, did the dishes etc., but it was clear he wanted me out of the house because he kept looking over my shoulder and telling me that that was good enough, they didn’t have to be completely clean.
“So, next thing I know I’m wrapping up in my biggest coat, getting my boots on and heading out the door. I did the windows first, they seemed like they hadn’t been cleaned in years and with good cause. The ladder would absolutely not stay still on the rocks, I did the ground floor alright, cleaned away years of grime and left it looking like new, but I couldn’t even get halfway up the ladder. Lighthouses are tall, you know? I didn’t risk it, I didn’t want to die in a storm in my first day on the job. Next thing I did was collect driftwood, which, would you believe it, was no easier. Like I said, it was slippery and windy and rainy and I could barely stay on my feet with my arms free, let alone when I was weighed down by random misshapen bits of wood. The island was deceptively big and the driftwood had managed to come at it from all angles so I had to cover the whole perimeter, if it wasn’t such vicious weather I would have sworn that my boss was going out after I covered each corner and putting the driftwood back in order to keep me occupied. Night was closing in as I finally got the last of it into the log store. I saw my boss through the nice, clean window and gave him a big hearty wave. He merely shook his head slowly, while still looking me dead in the eyes, and waited for me to walk off.
“The last task on the list was, and I’m not lying here, to hunt seagulls. There was so much food that it wasn’t in the slightest bit necessary, and I saw maybe three seagulls across the whole island. I don’t know what my boss had been using to catch them but all there was by the front door was a big net. And I’m not talking about the kind of net that gladiators have, that you can throw over something, I’m talking about the kind of net that kids fish in rock pools with. Those cheap terrible ones that are on the end of a bamboo stick. Well, I grabbed it and headed to the side of the island where I saw some seagulls. Of course they immediately flew away when I came even within ten metres, and my net was only a metre long. I chased after them for maybe five minutes, playing whack-a-mole but without any whacking, I wasn’t even sure that the net was big enough to hold a seagull if I got close, but I persevered for a little while. I had a terrible temper in those days though and after maybe the twentieth attempt I lost it, I threw the net at the seagulls flying over my head, as if I would be able to harpoon them.
“I was in almighty huff. I walked back to the lighthouse and banged on the door. I could barely hear myself over the wind and the rain. To call the weather inclement would be an understatement. It was getting worse and worse and I feared being swept away. The waves were getting larger and were almost reaching the lighthouse. I banged on the door with all my might but my boss refused to open it. He said I could either come in with a seagull or not at all. I looked around, there was nothing that could remotely come close to seagull-hunting weaponry. I tried to reason with him that maybe I could grab something that was inside and use that. He refused to budge, he said he caught a seagull every day with that dinky little fishing net. Couldn’t be true, unless he had some kind of special technique or was a seagull-whisperer, but what could I do? I was soaked through at this point and I started to cry as I screamed through the door. Suddenly I felt a splash of water around my knees! A wave had made it all the way to the door! A jolt of fear ran through me. I couldn’t get a seagull, I was going to be stuck out here. I slammed my whole body against the door and begged and pleaded with him to let me in. And then I heard it. I looked to my left and a wave twice my height was mounting at the edge of the island. That was it. I knew that I was going to die. I stood locked in place by my panic as it got closer, it hung over my head like an anvil. I thought about my family, all the people that I had loved, the mermaid whose tender company I would never keep. The wave started to break above my head, right before hitting me and-”
“Sorry, mate.” I interrupted. “I’m actually trying to read the paper, can you leave me alone?”
And he did.
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