Management Planning Systems was Francois Retief's company. There were four of us all told: Francois, me, a gifted young programmer named Ian McDonagh, and our office manager, Linda Ritchie, who also happened to be Ian's mother. MPS held the agency for a handful of software lines, but PSNext — the flagship project management software from Sciforma, the Californian firm we represented in South Africa — was by far the biggest of them, and from my very first day my focus had been on it and nothing else. I became an expert at using it, configuring it, marketing it, and putting it in front of corporate customers in technical sales presentations — the Kumba Iron Ore pitch I've described elsewhere being one of them. I'd also made myself useful on the wider marketing side: I'd run an email campaign, and I'd convinced Francois on a series of adverts that were on Talk Radio 702 that were, if I say so myself, rather successful. We also held a yearly conference, gathering up our existing customers and our prospects to show off whatever clever new things the latest version of PSNext could do.
It was at one of these that Yann Le Bihan appeared around 2007.
Yann was a Frenchman, and his company — Le Bihan Agencies, out of Paris — were Sciforma's representatives in France, exactly as we were in South Africa. He was a slightly built man, angular in the face, with greying hair and a pair of perfectly circular spectacles that I never once saw him remove — the overall effect being that of an ageing, rather sophisticated, John Lennon. What we knew of him was mostly by reputation, and the reputation was formidable: he'd done extraordinarily well with PSNext, landing the sort of customers we could only dream of like Societe General and SNCF, the French railways. We were genuinely honoured that a man of his standing would come all the way down to Johannesburg to see what we were up to. And before he left, he extended an invitation — we should come to Paris and see how things were done over there.
So, in March 2008, we went.
It was Francois, me and Anna-Marie, his wife. Anna-Marie was a very elegant Afrikaans lady and, like Francois, formidably intelligent; she ran a couple of silver jewellery shops and had been part of the business herself before I came along. The three of us flew into Paris in what felt like the dead of winter, and the trip became, very quickly, a revelation — not only of French sophistication, though there was a great deal of that, but of Francois's particular quirkiness.
It started with the office. Yann ran his operation from high up in the Tour Montparnasse — the single great high-rise in that part of the city, standing alone above everything around it. We went up, and up, and stepped out into a proper business: forty people, at least. I think that was the first moment the scale of what Yann had built actually landed on me. This was no two-man agency like ours. This was a serious company, and the realisation was slightly humbling.
Then there was the matter of lunch, which floored us completely. We'd be up in the office through the morning, midday would roll round, and out we'd all go — not for the sandwich-and-a-coffee-at-your-desk affair that passes for lunch in Johannesburg, but for a proper meal. A long one. With wine. On an ordinary working Tuesday, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. We kept waiting for the occasion to reveal itself, and there never was one. That was simply how they did things, and it blew our minds.
Even the hotel taught me something. This was right at the moment when wifi was only beginning to catch on, and I wandered down to the lobby to ask whether they had any way of getting onto the internet.
"But of course, monsieur," the man said, faintly wounded that I should doubt it. "We 'ave wee-fee."
I asked what it would cost.
He looked at me as though I'd asked him to explain breathing. "Monsieur. This is France. The internet, it is free — like ze watair."
Francois, for his part, approached Paris the way he approached everything: methodically, exhaustively, and with no apparent awareness that the people with him might be cold, or footsore, or wanting to sit down. He had, in effect, a list. Every monument, every building of note, every square — we saw the lot, in an order known only to Francois, in a wind that came straight off Siberia. It all had to be done in the freezing night because the days were all business. He was not, let us say, the easiest man to travel with. But I was fond of him, plus he was my boss, and so we marched.
The high point — though that isn't quite the word — was the evening Yann invited us to dinner.
Yann lived in what he called an apartment, which turned out to be two full storeys of a building in one of those Parisian neighbourhoods where one does not enquire about prices. A Porsche Cayenne downstairs, and a wine collection he kept in a cellar in the Pyrenees which he shipped to his apartment a case at a time. His wife looked as though she'd stepped straight off the cover of Vogue. We were being thoroughly, magnificently looked after.
After a magnificent dinner, his wife was flicking through photographs — on the very first iPhone I had ever laid eyes on, as it happened — and then Yann put them up on a large screen for us all to admire. A trip they had taken to Morocco: Yann and his wife, and another couple. And somewhere around the third or fourth picture it became quietly, unmistakably obvious to Anna-Marie and me that there was something going on between Yann and the other man's wife. Nothing you could have pointed to. Just the poses. The way the two of them kept ending up side by side. Anna-Marie and I clocked it in the same instant and said precisely nothing — a whole conversation conducted in the careful art of not looking at each other.
Francois, meanwhile, was three glasses into a quite spectacular red. And Francois had no filter.
"Wow," he says, in that broad Afrikaans accent, peering up at the screen, "she's really into you, that one!"
The wife's face went, by slow degrees, from porcelain to thundercloud.
The walk back to the hotel was one of the funniest of my life. Anna-Marie and I were in absolute hysterics — and Francois, bless him, was utterly bewildered, genuinely surprised that he might have said anything the least bit out of place. He had sailed through the entire evening's subtext without registering a single ripple of it. He simply hadn't seen it. That was Francois. A brilliant man, a lovely man, and very, very left brain.