Chapter 8
France, July 2006
MAGGIE FIRST SAW HIM while carrying a tray of coffee to the pool for an Italian politician, who was staying at the hotel with his young mistress. (She’d assumed it was his wife but Phil, hushed in the kitchen one morning, had explained the situation to her sixteen-year-old niece.)
She blinked in the morning sunshine when she emerged from the chateau and lowered the tray to the table beside the politician’s sunbed.
It was the summer holidays and she was staying for two weeks to help Phil, ferrying out breakfast every morning, laying the tables, clearing the tables, and carrying coffee outside to guests who didn’t make it down to breakfast. She’d come out every summer since her first visit, back when it was still a ruin, and found herself increasingly entranced by the place each time – with the shimmering heat and the energy of the place, always alive with splashes from the pool, and the occasional, intriguing moan that escaped from an open bedroom window after lunch.
Six years earlier, in the spring of 2000, Phil had opened the hotel but – for a few anxious weeks – nothing had happened. No guests, no bookings, and Phil’s confidence had flagged. Had her sister been right? Was this going to be a disaster? She’d spent the savings she had left on new mattresses and bedding. If the hotel didn’t work, she was truly broke.
But then, thanks to a Parisian friend who worked for Le Monde , Le Figuier was written up in the paper, and secondly in a French interior design magazine, which was duly read by a British journalist who came to review it for Vogue . Phil Hemingway was a ravishingly beautiful former model who’d been pictured in newspaper diaries and glossy magazines since she was a teenager. True, she could also cook and had cooked in various famous restaurants around the world (she had supposedly seduced Mick Jagger with her roast chicken), but could she really run a hotel?
The headline of the subsequent review was a terrible cliché – Paradise in Provence – but it worked wonders for business because the writer rhapsodized about everything: the ‘perfect’ restoration of the chateau, the views of the hills, the donkeys meandering over the lawn, the ‘sublimely comfortable’ bedrooms, the natural pool but, most of all, the Proven?al cooking, made from scratch every evening by Phil.
Within days, Le Figuier was booked for the entire summer. By the following year, it had become the fashionable hotel for chic Parisians visiting the south, and a smattering of British and American celebrities who appreciated its privacy. Nobody could see the chateau or the pool from the road, which meant nobody could take paparazzi photographs. The summer after that, an Italian duke booked the entire hotel for a week and held his wedding ceremony there; the next spring, after much begging and pleading from a record label, Phil had accepted an eye-watering sum to allow Oasis to film a music video around the pool.
Six years on, it was already legendary, mentioned in the same breath as fashionable hotels in Mustique and Morocco, flocked to by beautiful people who wanted to experience the place themselves, see the views, taste the food, experience the pool and, crucially, protect their privacy. Because the hotel only had eight bedrooms, it felt very intimate, unlike the bigger hotels on the French riviera, which had hundreds of guests. Le Figuier was more like a private home, which meant that however famous the guests were, they could relax, drift about in kaftans, and be left undisturbed. And because they felt protected, they felt liberated to behave in whatever way they liked. There was a licentiousness to the hotel which Maggie, although only sixteen, could sense and desperately wanted to understand.
‘Shall I pour?’ Maggie asked, trying not to stare at the Italian politician’s mistress. It was quite hard not to stare because she looked like someone from a magazine: her skin was the colour of a conker and she’d untied her bikini top, revealing perfectly spherical breasts and nipples that pointed to the sky like bullets.
‘I can manage, grazie ,’ the politician said, batting her away.
She saw him when she stepped back from the sunbed: a boy with caramel-coloured skin, walking around the pool with a net. He was barefoot, wearing a baggy pair of board shorts and a white t-shirt, and every time he emptied the net on the lawn behind him, he brushed his hair off his face.
As Maggie walked back towards the chateau with the tray, she dared to turn for another look and he caught her eye and grinned. She smiled shyly back.
‘Who’s cleaning the pool?’ she asked her aunt inside.
‘Mmmm?’ murmured Phil. She was sitting at the kitchen table leafing through recipe books.
‘The boy outside, brown hair, board shorts …’
‘Pierre,’ Phil replied absent-mindedly, reaching for a battered, stained, smeary copy of another book. ‘Nico’s nephew. Wanted to make some money in his holidays. Why?’ She looked up at Maggie and saw her cheeks turn pink.
‘Oh, I see . Oh, this will be fun .’
‘No, Aunt Phil, I didn’t mean … I mean, please don’t do anything embarr—’
‘Shush, shush,’ said Phil, turning back to her book. ‘Leave it with me. He’s cute, Mags. A little summer romance, why not?’
On the one hand, why not? Maggie had never had a boyfriend. Laura and Rachel both had boyfriends, which meant they went to the cinema together. But Maggie didn’t have one so she didn’t get invited. She worried that her lack of boyfriend was because of her hairy arms; at the start of the holidays, she locked herself in the bathroom and rubbed her forearms with Immac, but it didn’t work and her mother complained about the smell in there afterwards.
She was sixteen! Legally she could have sex but sex still felt like a very distant prospect. How sad was that? Even the government said she could have sex, but nobody wanted to have sex with her. Maggie had kissed one boy, Andrew Hutton, but she later found out it was a dare from some of the others in her year.
So a summer romance. Yes. Why not?
On the other hand, the boy cleaning the pool seemed out of her league. Like, people at school would laugh at her for even thinking that something could happen between them. Why would that tanned French boy look at pale, mousy Maggie? In her head, she could hear the taunts of everyone else in her year for even allowing herself the fantasy.
Phil (being Phil) wasted little time in trying to encourage this romance.
Later that day, Pierre came into the kitchen for a glass of water.
‘Have you got a girlfriend, Pierre?’ her aunt enquired, while washing salad leaves.
‘ Non ,’ he replied casually in a French accent, which made Maggie’s stomach feel funny. Curiously, she found that she could barely look at him. Like it was somehow embarrassing to look at him.
‘Just checking,’ Phil said, smiling innocently back from the sink.
Similar incidents happened multiple times over the next two weeks.
‘How old are you, Pierre?’ Phil checked, when he next came to the kitchen.
‘ Moi ? Seventeen.’
Maggie, rolling shortcrust pastry on the counter, knew what’s coming.
‘That’s funny, Maggie’s almost the same age,’ Phil replied lightly. ‘She’s sixteen.’
Another question the next morning: ‘What’s your favourite subject at school, Pierre?’
Pierre smiled and his eyes darted to Maggie’s face. ‘Er, I am not so good at the subjects like maths or history. But I like the sciences, I like biology,’ he said, although he pronounced it bee-ology.
‘Biology?’ replied Phil, turning to look at her niece. ‘ Very important, biology.’
Maggie was so embarrassed she wondered if she could fit into the oven.
One afternoon, Phil made her take out a piece of peach flan to the tool shed behind the vegetable garden. ‘Pierre? Hi … Phil … um, my aunt … she told me to bring this to you.’
He emerged from the shed and smiled the same way she’d come to know, the smile which made Maggie feel as if he was letting her in on a secret.
‘You make this?’ he asked, taking the plate before brushing his hair from his forehead.
‘Er, yep. But … I mean … my aunt did most of it.’
‘It’s good,’ said Pierre. ‘You are a good cook, Maggie.’
She blushed and hurried back to the kitchen.
Phil played her ace on Maggie’s final night. She was in the kitchen, making cherry clafoutis, while Maggie and Audrey (but mostly Maggie) laid the tables in the dining room, and carried water jugs through from the kitchen.
‘Mags, I need more cream. Can you get Pierre to run you to the village?’
‘I can just ask him to go?’
‘He’s a boy. He’ll get the wrong sort. I need the cream that comes in the small blue bottles, not the carton. Can you get me three? Take some money from my purse.’ Phil nodded at her bag, slung on a kitchen chair.
Feeling simultaneously thrilled and sick at the prospect of such an expedition, Maggie found Pierre standing under the pergola beside the pool, fixing the wiring. He didn’t have a shirt on.
‘Pierre?’ She felt the same awkwardness that she had when serving coffee to the Italian politician and trying not to stare at his mistress’s body. She both did and didn’t want to stare at Pierre’s chest. ‘My aunt needs more cream from the shop, so, er, is it OK if you take me down?’
‘Now?’
‘Mmhmm,’ said Maggie, blinking at the grass.
‘Sure,’ he said with a shrug, throwing his gloves down and leading her towards the car park.
‘Jump on,’ he instructed, having swung his leg over his moped.
Trying to look like she was used to climbing on to the back of mopeds, Maggie managed to get her leg over the seat, but didn’t know what to do with her arms.
‘Hold on to me.’
Maggie frowned at his back. Where should she hold on?
‘ Comme ?a ,’ said Pierre, reaching behind him for her hands and pulling them around his torso. ‘ ?a va ? You OK?’
‘Mmhmm,’ Maggie squeaked. Her chest was pressed against his bare back. They may have been only going to the village to buy cream, but it was the most erotic moment of her life.
It happened on the way back, when she’d bought the cream and Pierre had slung the plastic bag over his handlebar; he stopped just before the gates, and Maggie initially assumed it was because she was too heavy for the upwards slope of the track. But just as she was about to release her hands from around his torso, he put his own over hers, and turned in his seat to kiss her. It wasn’t for long. In fact, it was over almost before Maggie knew what was happening. But it definitely happened.
‘Thank you, my angel,’ Phil said smoothly, when Maggie floated back into the kitchen and handed over the cream. She didn’t ask, but Maggie was pretty sure she could tell.