'Oh I have a phrase book, and quite a few of the people speak some English, one or two are very good. We get by. I watch the gardeners from the conservatory and exchange the occasional word with them. There's even a male nurse who flirts with me a little, at least, that's what I like to think he's doing. In one way my luck has held out, the holiday insurance is paying for all this. Everything I need is here. Take my advice, if your going to be ill, come to France. I've been lucky in life really - yes it would've been nice to see through another expansion of the business, but you have to let go at some stage. Remembering all the good people I've worked with at the garden centre and Ferns and Foliage gives me a lot of satisfaction, and for the future you and Tom will be there to steady things and keep the businesses running properly.' He looked away from me, back towards the conservatory. 'You know what I tell my fellow patients here when they brag about their relatives? I tell them I have good people in London to take over from me, that's what I say to them.'
We talked about his travels until Darren and Tom joined us, when all four of us set off again down the path, Tom pushing Andrew this time, while Darren and I hung back to let them talk privately. At the end of the garden Tom and Andrew stopped to wait for us; when we caught up Darren produced his camera and had us pose for photographs, balancing it on a rock and using the time delay to take one with himself standing behind Andrew, and Tom and me at either side of his chair.
We took a more winding path back, and by the time we were approaching the conservatory Andrew was beginning to look tired. We passed a round pond with a raised stone edge where golden carp swam among water lilies. 'This is one of the places I like to sit during the afternoons, here or in the conservatory, depending on the weather. There's a little patch of waste ground over there covered in wild flowers that I'd like to show Darren, if you wouldn't mind waiting for us for a few minutes in the salon on the first floor.'
Tom and I did as he asked. In the salon we watched a nurse help an old lady with a stick make her way very slowly, careful step by careful step, to a chair by a window. We had spent little more than two hours with Andrew, but we sensed that our intrusion into the quiet closed world of the Grand Hotel de Luzenac was drawing to an end. The major purpose of the place was obvious. The reason we had seen so few of the patients was that frailty kept them to their rooms. No doubt, as Andrew had said, a few people came in the belief that the waters had curative powers, and a few perhaps came for a period of convalescence, but when the time for the majority of patients to leave the establishment came, they would not be going because their health had been restored.