Chapter 35
Bee hated this driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road business. Especially in the dark. Especially when she was tired. Especially in a hire car that she’d only been driving for an hour. And especially when there were tears blurring her vision.
She’d landed at Bordeaux airport at nine o’clock and was now heading up eerily quiet Friday-night roads towards her father’s house near Angoulême. The small granite towns that stood flush to the road were all deserted, even the occasional strip-lit café or bar was empty.
Gregor had bought his old townhouse about four years ago, had it renovated at great expense and now spent most of his time here.
Bee couldn’t see the attraction herself.
She really wasn’t that keen on France: French food, French architecture, the French countryside, French music – or the French themselves, come to that.
She preferred Italy. Or Spain. Or Holland.
Or anywhere, really, on the European mainland apart from France.
Her father had, on the other hand, become a complete Francophile.
He could speak fluent French and was a popular figure in his adopted second-home town, where he went everywhere on his pushbike in a beret and neckerchief, stopping just short of the stripy Breton top and the string of garlic around his neck. But there you go – each to their own.
‘Hi-ee,’ she called, pulling her weekend case from the back seat and heading for the back door.
Her father was standing in the kitchen, wearing a striped butcher’s apron and stirring something in a huge blue le Creuset casserole pot.
He looked at her through the steamed-up windows and his face split open into an enormous grin.
He put down his wooden spoon, wiped his hands on his apron and came to the door.
‘Hello, darling,’ he said, smothering her in a big, fragrant bear-hug. He smelled of cologne and garlic. Bee squeezed him back, her arms barely meeting around his 50-inch chest.
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘You smell like a cigarette,’ he said, grabbing her head and sniffing her crown, ‘like a little red Marlboro. When are you going to quit?’
Bee ignored him and dropped her bag and her coat on a red chaise longue. He passed her a huge glass of red wine. ‘What’s cooking? ‘she said, kicking off her high heels and padding across terracotta tiles towards the stove.
‘Oh,’ said Gregor, smiling at her over his wine glass, ‘just a little something I’ve been slaving over for an entire day, that’s involved driving to three separate markets and bribing the farmer down the road with a litre of red.’
‘There aren’t any pig parts in it, are there?’ she said, peering over the edge of the pot.
‘What?’
‘You know – trotters, ears, snouts?’
He laughed his laugh and Bee smiled at him.
He was so much more mellow since he’d retired last year and since this place had finally been completed.
He’d adored directing but had hated the financial responsibilities involved in his profession, had always borne the pressure to direct a profitable production very heavily.
He used to have this air about him of someone who was trying too hard to look relaxed.
His smiles had always looked a little glued-on, and his back had given him constant pain.
Now he really was relaxed and it was a joy for Bee to behold.
He and Joe spent most of their time here in the Dordogne, just shopping, cooking, reading and drinking.
At home he went out to eat, saw friends, was on the board of a couple of AIDS charities and another charity for impoverished actors.
He was finally, at the age of sixty-one, a truly, serenely happy man.
She looked up at her big bear of a father, at his cheeks all pink with kitchen steam and red wine, his thick salt-and-pepper hair, his wiry beard and his trendy Lacoste sweatshirt tucked unfashionably into enormous corduroy trousers.
He was wearing soft, pastel Burlington-checked socks on his size-eleven feet and his trademark neckerchief around his now-jowly neck.
He looked a mess. A big, happy, lovely mess.
She felt overcome by a wave of love and affection and planted a kiss on his hot cheek.
‘Where’s Joe?’ She peered around the corner towards the living room.
Joe was Gregor’s partner of ten years’ standing.
He was a set designer, fifteen years Gregor’s junior.
Gregor could have had his pick of ambitious, beautiful, six-packed young actors, but he’d fallen for the slightly geeky-looking set designer, Joe, with his goatee and his little pigeon chest and his sensible lace-up shoes.
When Joe and Gregor walked around together they looked like father and ever-so-slightly backward son.
But Joe was actually highly intelligent, and he loved all the things that Gregor loved – France, food, people – Bee.
He adored Bee, almost worshipped her, in fact.
When her first single had come out, he’d spent the entire weekend in the HMV in Kensington High Street forcing complete strangers to buy it.
He kept a beautiful scrapbook of every last piece of press and publicity she got, writing to magazines for back issues sometimes if he missed something.
Joe was her greatest fan, greater even than Gregor.
Bee thought of him as a slightly nerdy but lovely big brother.
‘Oh. Joe’s not here.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s in Angoulême.’
Bee waited for Gregor to elaborate. He and Joe were usually completely inseparable. Bee couldn’t actually remember the last time she’d seen one without the other. But Gregor didn’t say anything, just started chopping a bunch of something green and leafy.
‘Is it me?’ she said, jokingly.
‘Oh. Nooo. Don’t be silly, Bee. No – he, er – he had some unexpected business to attend to.’
‘Oh,’ said Bee. ‘Right.’ She resisted the urge to pry any further. There was something untoward going on here. But she’d leave it for now. They could talk about it over dinner.
‘So,’ he said, going back to his pot, ‘what has my little pop star been up to, eh? Fill me in, fill me in …’
Bee raised her eyebrows and flopped on to the chaise longue. ‘You don’t want to know,’ she said.
‘I most certainly do. I have no life of my own now I’m retired. I have to live vicariously through my daughter. Tell me all your adventures.’
Bee felt her bottom lip start to quiver.
Her father was the only person in the world she could do lip-quivering stuff with, the only person she could be herself with.
The meeting with Dave Donkin had been on Tuesday and so far she hadn’t told anyone.
Not Flint, not Lol, nobody, because she’d wanted to wait and tell her father first.
‘They’re dropping me, Dad,’ she sobbed. ‘The bastards are dropping me’
‘What?’ He spun round.
‘Electrogram. They’re pulling the plug on the album. They’re not renewing my contract. They’re dropping me’
‘But … but what about your contract, darling? You signed a contract. They can’t …’
‘They can’
‘But surely they’re obliged to record and release your album – at the very least’
‘No.’ Bee shook her head and blew her nose snottily into the piece of kitchen towel her father had just handed her. ‘No. I’ve been through all this with my solicitor, their solicitor, everyone. They don’t have to do anything. It’s all legitimate’
Gregor perched himself gently on the edge of the chaise longue and put his arm around Bee. ‘But … why?’
‘Creative differences’
‘And what the hell does that mean?’
‘It means that I want to be a song-writer but my songs aren’t “commercial” enough for them, apparently, and as long as I refuse to be a little dolly-bird all dressed up by them and made up by them and singing some rubbish songs by them, they don’t want to know …’
‘Cunts,’ said Gregor, squeezing her shoulder and running his hand over her hair. ‘What utter cunts …’
Bee sniffed and snivelled and sapped up her father’s sympathy like blotting paper.
She knew that it wasn’t all down to Electrogram, and she knew that her father knew it wasn’t all down to Electrogram.
She knew that both of them knew that she’d been a manipulative, short-sighted control freak and that she’d pushed Electrogram to the very limits of their patience.
But they both also knew that now was not the moment for recriminations, that now was the moment for a father to hold his daughter and agree with her that the whole world was a big, fat bastard.
Bee let her head fall into her father’s soft, warm shoulder and felt herself relax as his mouth connected with the top of her head in a big plunger-like kiss, almost as if he was trying to suck the hurt out of her and swallow it.
She snuggled deeper into his big, comforting frame and felt at least some of the disappointment and deep, burning humiliation of the last few days start to melt away.
Life was simple here, under her father’s heavy arm, life was bearable, life was sweet.
‘You’ll get another deal in seconds’ – her father clicked his fingers – ‘you know that, don’t you?’
She sniffed and murmured.
‘Once word gets out about this, you’ll have every record label in London, in the country queuing round the block to sign you up. You know everything’s going to be OK, don’t you? You know that you’re a star, don’t you?’
She sniffed again and murmured again. She didn’t want to talk, she just wanted to sit here and listen to her father telling her that everything was going to be OK and that she was a star.
He unpeeled himself from her slowly and got to his feet creakily.
‘My cassoulet is calling,’ he said, padding towards the stove and sprinkling something green on top of the stew before giving it a good stir.
‘Hmmmm,’ he said, tasting it from the lip of a large wooden spoon.
He picked up a bottle of local Bordeaux and splashed it generously into the pot.