Chapter 7 #3
Wendy rolls her head and sighs. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ she says. ‘We didn’t know. I’m sorry.’
‘But how?’ Enzo asks, scanning the room again. ‘How do you use thirteen point three kilowatts in one night?’
‘Um, an electric heater, that’s all,’ Wendy tells him, wincing. ‘We didn’t know, so I bought one. From Intermarché. We won’t use it ag—’
‘An electric heater!’ Enzo interrupts her, as if this is the worst off-grid crime he’s ever come across. ‘You can’t do this. Never!’
‘Yes, I get that now,’ Wendy says. She’s beginning to feel like a child being scolded by the headmaster and is beginning to resent being made to feel that way.
‘No, never! Never!’ Enzo says, wiggling his finger at her to emphasise the point.
‘OK, OK! I got it!’ Wendy says, raising her voice despite herself.
‘And no…’ he makes a weird gesture near his ear, ‘for the ’air.’
‘For the air?’ Wendy repeats.
‘Yes. No drying the ’air.’
‘Oh, oh. I know,’ Jill says, sounding like she’s found the answer to a game-show question. ‘Hairdryer!’
‘Yes. No ’airdryer. Not today. Not tomorrow. Maybe after, if it’s sunny, maybe five minutes, it can be OK. But you must let the battery fill before this, otherwise it will happen again. The sun will maybe come this afternoon, so this is good.’
‘And if it doesn’t come back on?’
‘It will, when the battery hits 17 per cent.’
‘But what do I do if it doesn’t?’
He pats the top of his laptop. ‘It will. In one hour. Maybe two. I check. It’s already 11 per cent. At seventeen it’s all OK. I promise.’
Once he has left, Wendy slumps onto the sofa. ‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Solar panels. Who knew?’
‘And they didn’t warn you about this? I’d be asking for a refund.’
‘No, they didn’t, really,’ Wendy says. She grimaces and sucks through her teeth.
‘If I’m being honest the place is listed as an off-grid eco-cabin.
I mean, that’s the actual title. So they weren’t exactly hiding the fact.
I just didn’t think enough about what that meant.
So it’s partly my fault, I think. A tiny bit my fault, at any rate. ’
Jill fiddles with one of the light switches and twists her mouth sideways. ‘Maybe a good time to go out?’ she offers after some thought. ‘While we wait for the stupid battery to charge?’
‘Yeah, that’s kind of what I was thinking.’
‘So a drink in a nice bar somewhere, to cheer ourselves up, and then a posh dinner somewhere with a sea view.’
‘A meal out sounds good but I’m a tad concerned about the electricity,’ Wendy says. ‘I mean, suppose we get back – it’ll be night-time by then – so what if it still doesn’t work?’
‘We can leave the fire going, can’t we? So the place won’t be freezing cold. And if we’ve eaten then it won’t matter that we can’t cook. And if we’ve had enough to drink then we won’t care much about any of it.’
‘This is very true,’ Wendy concedes. ‘But if I can find one, I might buy myself a torch.’
‘Considering the circumstances,’ Jill says, ‘that sounds like an excellent investment.’
By the time they leave, the snow, thankfully, has vanished. Wendy heads south, in the general direction of the coast, without having really decided where they’re going.
The first village they pass is the pretty hilltop village of Gourdon, which she’s been intending to explore, so they perform a brief comedy lap around the car park before rejoining the main road and heading on down the mountain. It’s all too grey and cold up here today to be any fun at all.
For the simple reason that nearly all the road signs seem to point that way, they end up back in Nice, and miraculously, when they step out of the underground car park, the sun has reappeared.
‘That’s got to be a good omen if ever there was one,’ Jill declares.
Drawn by the lure of the horizon, they walk the length of a long, narrow park to the seafront.
‘Is it chemicals, do you think?’ Jill asks, when they finally reach the railings overlooking the pebble beach.
‘Is what – oh, you mean the colour?’ The sea, it has to be said, is an uncannily bright shade of blue.
‘Yeah. That can’t be natural, can it? It looks almost nuclear.’
‘I read somewhere that it’s silt,’ Wendy explains. ‘The rivers wash it down from the Alps, I think – it’s a kind of chalk or something. And it’s all the little particles reflecting the sky that make the sea look that crazy colour.
They walk along the sun-soaked Promenade des Anglais until they come to the point where, below Castle Hill, it swings around the headland into shadow, towards the port.
They turn back towards the town centre and after a few hundred yards Jill asks, ‘What about one of these?’ She’s gesturing at a row of seafront bars.
‘A drink?’ Wendy asks, glancing at her watch. ‘Already? It’s not even three o’clock, dear.’
‘God, you can have coffee if you want,’ Jill says. ‘I just thought it might be nice to have a sit up there.’ She points to a seafront balcony on the first floor of one of the bars. ‘The view’s got to be fabby from up there plus it’s in the sunshine and there’s space.’
‘You’re right,’ Wendy says. ‘Let’s do it.’
The bar is called Wakka, and the downstairs area looks much like the interior of an English pub. The staff seem to speak only English, which Wendy is a little disappointed about. She’d been hoping for a more authentic French experience.
But the view, from the narrow balcony – 180 degrees of blue – is spectacular, and even though the cloud cover is hovering only a few hundred yards behind them, the sunshine is so warm that, once they’ve been served their drinks – fluorescent orange glasses of Aperol spritz – they have to remove first their coats, and then their jumpers.
‘Amazing!’ Jill says, sipping her drink and turning her face towards the sun and sea.
‘Yes. This was an excellent idea,’ Wendy concedes, lighting up a cigarette.
‘My ideas always are,’ Jill mugs, nodding discreetly at a young man who has sat down at the far end of the balcony, behind Wendy.
‘You’re incorrigible,’ Wendy says once she has managed to steal a glance.
‘It’s called being alive,’ Jill says, with a smirk, still tilting her head so that she can peer past her friend. ‘It’s called having a pulse.’
When one spritz tastes this good, who could possibly resist a second? So by the time they leave Wakka an hour later, they’re both feeling vaguely tipsy.
‘Did you see that guy?’ Jill asks, as they step back out onto the street. ‘Imagine living somewhere where the men all look like that.’
‘The young one, behind me?’ Wendy asks, perplexed. ‘Are you really still on about him?’
‘Yes. The Italian one. He was speaking Italian; I heard him. But more importantly, did you see the chest hair on him?’
‘I did not,’ Wendy says, pulling a face. She’s not keen on chest hair anyway. One of Harry’s great advantages is his downy barely visible body hair. It almost makes up for the lack of lips.
‘God, you know, I love Bern and everything,’ Jill laughs. ‘I do. But if a guy like that tried it on… I’d lose myself in that chest and never leave.’
‘For God’s sake, he was about eighteen!’ Wendy laughs, feigning shock. She knows her friend is only joking.
‘He was old enough to have chest hair,’ Jill says. ‘And that’s old enough for me. Plus, cougars are very much in fashion, I’ll have you know. Fifty is the new thirty.’
They walk through an arch leading inland. ‘I can’t drive home, you know,’ Wendy says. ‘Not for hours. Not after those spritz things. I’m feeling quite light-headed.’
‘Who said anything about going home?’ Jill replies. ‘We’re eating here, aren’t we? We don’t even know if we can cook once we get home.’
On exiting the archway they find themselves in the vast pedestrian zone that is the Cours Saleya. It’s walled by open-air bars and restaurants sprawling across the pavement beneath multi-coloured facades in faded oranges and yellows and reds.
‘Wow!’ Wendy says. ‘This is beautiful.’
‘Gorgeous!’ Jill agrees.
They walk the length of the pedestrian zone, people-watching, before meandering off into smaller streets.
‘I always wanted to live in Brighton,’ Jill says.
‘On a sunny day it can feel a bit like this. But that’s the other problem, of course.
The bloody weather. They keep trying to scare us all with their global warming, but the sad truth is most of the people in Britain are just praying it will happen within their lifetimes so they can go to the bloody beach. ’
They buy croissants at a little bakery, with the intention of saving them until the morning, but Jill can’t resist sampling hers and once she does so and has encouraged Wendy to do the same, all is lost. They are fresh and warm and buttery, and within a hundred yards, they’re gone.
‘I need to wee,’ Jill says eventually, nodding at a bar/tabac on the corner. ‘Shall we sit here and have a coffee so I can use the loos?’
‘Sure,’ Wendy says. ‘I need to get more ciggies anyway… the rate you’re going through them.’
‘I’ve smoked, like, five since I got here!’ Jill protests, feigning outrage, starting to weave her way through the tables.
‘Five?’ Wendy pulls a face and takes a seat.
‘OK, ten, then.’
‘Ten?’
‘OK, a thousand, then. Whatever. Christ, I’ll buy some, OK? I’ll buy you a jumbo multipack. Calm down, dear.’
A waistcoated waiter appears behind them. ‘Bonjour.’
‘Two Aperol spritzes, please,’ Jill says, not even attempting to order in French.
‘But…’ Wendy protests.
‘Shhh, you! Two spritzes, please!’
The waiter spins on one foot and leaves.
‘You said coffee!’ Wendy protests half-heartedly.
‘Oh, do bloody relax a little, won’t you, darling?’ Jill says. ‘You’re going to end up bringing me down if you carry on being a killjoy.’
Once the sun dips behind the rooftops, they start to feel chilly and decide to move indoors.
Shockingly, despite an EU law that made indoor smoking illegal decades ago, smoking is exactly what everyone is doing.
‘God,’ Jill says, waving her hand in the smoky atmosphere.
‘It’s like being back in the bloody eighties. ’