Chapter 10
The promenade beneath our balcony wasn’t terribly busy, just a few people wandering about enjoying the afternoon, walking their dogs, and there were two children running around laughing with the sort of vitality that I envied.
Imagine having so much energy that you felt forced to run in order to get rid of some of it, and you still had some left to laugh and call your brother a caca boudin, which I thought was the same as poo head.
And then the girl fell over but instead of lying there howling and asking for an ambulance, she bounced back up and carried on running. Ah, the vigour of youth.
I must have been like that once, filled with the joy of living, never thinking that as the years passed our youthful expectations would change into something different.
And despite my regrets I didn’t feel as though my life had been wasted, it just made me realise that time is finite, and instead of dwelling on the past, I needed to make the most of what was left to me.
Every lovely sunset, each kindness, every interesting opportunity and happy thought.
Because after all, as someone wiser than I was once said, living well is the best revenge.
Then I noticed a man out there, standing in the shade of a palm tree.
He was tall and rather elegant and he was taking some photographs of our hotel with a proper camera, something which was unusual these days when everyone had cameras on their phones.
Perhaps he was a professional, or a journalist doing a piece for the local paper.
He looked sort of familiar, and I tilted my head to one side and squinted a bit against the sun to try and see him better.
Then he walked away, leisurely and relaxed.
And I watched him until he disappeared from view behind an ice cream stand.
I frowned, wondering if I had imagined it.
Meanwhile Harriet had selected the single bed furthest away from the window because she said it was safer.
What she expected to happen was anyone’s guess.
The front of the building to fall off? Random voleurs to creep in and rifle through her suitcase looking for her snow globe of the great wall of China?
Anyway, although she said her knee was greatly improved, she took a couple of painkillers and lay down.
‘I’m in need of a rest,’ she said in the same quavery voice she had used when we were hoping to get into our room early. Perhaps she had been convinced by her own acting skills.
Anna and I meanwhile raided the mini bar and selected a bottle of chilled sparkling wine, which I said I would pay for as she had covered the cost of the room and refused anything from us in return.
I could tell she really was feeling guilty about the mix-up with the rooms in Hotel Gloria, but being Anna, it was unlikely she would admit it again.
The two of us went to sit out on the balcony and raised our glasses towards each other in a toast.
‘This worked out better than I thought,’ Anna said. ‘You couldn’t get a better view.’
‘Glorious,’ I agreed. ‘And now you can tell me what you have planned for later. This karaoke thing.’
Anna laughed. ‘You don’t need to worry. I have worked out our costumes and everything.’
‘Anna, we need to know what you want us to do. I don’t really mind making a fool of myself in front of a room full of strangers I will never see again, but I am not dressing up as Tina Turner to do so.’
‘Of course not.’ She chuckled.
‘So tell me. It’s not Shirley Bassey or Gloria Gaynor. I might know a bit of Spice Girls if I was forced.’
‘Nothing so awful. We just need to all wear jeans and a white T-shirt, and I know we all have those. Here.’
She went to fetch a small paper bag from her backpack.
‘Here are our costumes.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘Just hear me out, we are going to be great.’
‘Ah what?’ I said, exasperated. ‘It’s not like this is a secret Santa. We have to know what we are supposed to do.’
Harriet appeared at the open doorway behind us, rubbing one hand over her face.
‘What are you doing? Why are you making so much noise? Why are you drinking prosecco without me?’
‘We thought you were asleep,’ I said.
‘Not much chance of that with you two yakking away, and I’m much better actually with this new knee support. What’s going on?’
I pulled up a chair for her to sit down and poured her a glass of prosecco.
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be mixing this with medication?’
Harriet took a sip of her drink and sighed happily.
‘I haven’t taken anything else. I had a nice cool shower and then that support bandage did the trick. My knee is feeling far less painful and I’m perfectly okay.’
‘I’m trying to get Anna to tell us what we are supposed to be doing this evening and she is being silly about it,’ I said.
‘We could always do “How Much is That Doggie in the Window”. I was good at that. It wasn’t my fault there was a coach trip from the Coventry Cat Lovers Club in the pub that night. They got really fierce too.’
Anna reached into the paper bag and pulled out three square cotton scarves printed with the French flag.
‘One each. We are going to be brilliant.’
‘And the Doggie would have a good home,’ Harriet sang. ‘You see, I bet I still know all the words.’
* * *
The basement bar of the H?tel Mer de Bleue was crowded when we got there, and it was only seven thirty, so it wasn’t as though we were particularly late.
We were given a numbered ticket so we would know when to get onto the little stage and found a table quite near the front and I ordered a large bottle of mineral water.
We were going to need all our wits about us, and it was not the time for alcohol.
Proceedings were underway soon afterwards.
Arturo, now looking very lean in a black T-shirt with Johnny Halliday printed across the front, was our compere and he might have been from Louisiana but he spoke perfect French.
Very loud, very excited and fast. I missed most of what he was saying, but the crowd obviously loved it.
Perhaps we had stumbled into one of the highlights of the Nice season?
Maybe at last the three of us were mixing with cool people?
‘Alors, numero uno,’ Arturo yelled.
We looked at our ticket again, just to make sure. We were number fifteen.
A tall man in a DJ came forward and started crooning in the style of Sinatra.
He was quite good actually and gave a very passable rendition of ‘Come Fly With Me’, much to the delight of a lady in a voluminous pink caftan who was sitting by the stage, mouthing the words along with him, so she might have been his wife, or at least his bel ami.
He left the stage to loud applause and some piercing whistles from his enthusiastic fan.
‘He’s very good,’ Harriet shouted over the noise. ‘I bet he wins.’
I nodded, feeling rather worried. I’d never imagined we would be any good because we were not at all glamorous and we were definitely under rehearsed.
Number two was a scruffy and sulky-looking young man who glowered at us as Arturo announced he was going to sing ‘Le Pénitencier’, and we looked rather blank until the music started and realised he was actually going to sing – or, more accurately, growl – ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in French.
He ended in a clenched heap on the stage, one fist raised in the air.
His anguish was so great and for a moment we were concerned about him, but then he sauntered off back to the bar fully recovered.
‘I need the loo,’ Anna said. ‘Perhaps knocking back half a litre of San Pellegrino was a mistake?’
‘You’d better jolly well come back,’ I said, just for a moment wondering what we would do if she simply left.
Of course, then the two of us wondered if we needed the loo too, so what with the wondering and fretting and waiting, we couldn’t concentrate of the next part of the evening, but I remembered there was a duo who came up to sing a slow, sad song about a girl on the sand in the rain.
The audience was caught up in this and quite a few were waving their hands in the air, so they went down quite well.
Then I went off to the loo and apparently missed an older lady swathed in trailing garments who sang ‘Non, je Regrette Rien’, in a passable imitation of Edith Piaf.
This also was much appreciated by the audience, even though Anna said the woman couldn’t hold a note in a bucket.
Time was marching on and the stage was filled with several younger people singing a selection of French pop songs none of us knew, but all of which were slow and miserable. Arturo did his best but the mood in the room was definitely faltering.
It was enlivened once more by a terrifying woman dressed in a gold fringed dress as Tina Turner who did ‘Simply the Best’ in French, and she was excellent and had the audience clapping along in time with her and waving their arms in the air.
This was followed by a man with a banjo who sang something in Spanish about his dog dying, and the mood of everyone wavered again.
‘Can we just not do this?’ Harriet asked during a brief pause.
Arturo gave a little speech in French, Spanish and English about how marvellous everyone was, and please could everyone remember where the fire exits were because he had forgotten to point them out earlier.
At last number fourteen was called and the three of us sat mute at our table, knowing we were next.
Anna tied our French flag scarves around our throats and reminded us we were leaving in the morning and would never see any of these people again in our lives, so it didn’t matter if we were good or not. It was just a bit of fun.
It didn’t feel like fun. By then a lot of the audience had evidently lost interest and were crowding around the bar at the back of the room.
The act preceding us was a young man with a feathered head dress and tight satin trousers who looked as though he should have held off from the alcohol a bit longer, and after a lot of hip wiggling and one verse of ‘Copacabana’, fell off the stage.
There was a good deal of yelping and complaints from the poor chap, and the resulting commotion meant that everything ground to a halt while he was helped off and probably into the back of an ambulance.
So, it was our turn, and surely, never had three older women faced such a lukewarm audience before.
We shuffled up onto the stage, pulling at our French flag neckerchiefs, and waited for Arturo to find our accompanying music.
He looked across at Anna with an enquiring gaze and a frown, and she nodded firmly back at him.
‘Hit it, Artie,’ she shouted, and he did.
There were a few cymbal crashes and trumpet blasts on the soundtrack, which made all the people at the bar who were a bit disconnected start with surprise, and then, eyes firmly fixed on the back of the room, we launched into it.
‘Allons enfants de la Patrie,
La jour de gloire est arrivé!’
Yes, Anna’s brilliant idea was that we should sing ‘La Marseillaise’. As she had said, we had all learned it at school during our French lessons.
‘Yes, about fifty years ago,’ I’d said the previous evening.
‘We can’t sing that!’ Harriet had stuttered.
‘Why ever not? A good tune never goes out of fashion,’ Anna had insisted, ‘and they are hardly going to boo us off the stage if we are singing their national anthem, are they?’
That night by the time we got to:
Contre nous de la tyrannie
‘l’étendard sanglant est levé
we had gained everyone’s attention.
Not sure if it was a good thing or not, we pressed on.
And when we got to:
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
it was clear that Anna’s hunch had been right. People were already standing on their chairs, singing along, some with their clenched fists in the air. A few had their arms around each other’s shoulders and were almost shouting the words.
At last we got to the rousing finale.
Marchons! Marchons!
The noise in the room was incredible and when we finished, there was an absolute roar of approval.
The three of us took off our French flag neckerchiefs and waved them above our heads to another huge cheer from the audience and then there was a flash from a camera somewhere near the back of the bar which caught my attention.
And over the tops of people’s heads and waving arms, I saw him. And despite the heat from the room and the warmth of our reception, I felt quite cold with shock.
It was him. It was the man I had seen earlier. The same man from the train. How on earth could he be here? What was going on?
I wiped the perspiration from my face and looked again.
Yes, it was definitely him. He was looking down at his camera, adjusting something and then taking some more pictures.
Was he after all actually stalking us? But why? Surely not? We weren’t worth stalking; we weren’t famous or even the mothers of famous people.
He looked up and grinned across the crowd at me and then he gave me a little salute and disappeared out into the street.
Meanwhile the three of us were being helped down off the stage and Arturo was trying to restore some sort of order.
‘I think I need a drink,’ I gasped, ‘and I don’t mean Pellegrino.’
Someone from the audience had bought us three brandies, someone else three Cointreaus, and they were plonked on our table in front of us like some sort of miniature beer pong experiment.
It was quite hard to drink brandy when a lot of people were patting you on the back and jostling around the table and taking pictures on their phones, but we managed it, and the heat of the brandy warmed me up again in a very pleasant way.
‘He was here,’ I shouted to the others.
‘Who?’ Anna shouted back.
‘That man. Mr Grumpy. The same man from the train.’
‘No, it couldn’t be,’ Harriet said. ‘Don’t be daft. You’re imagining things.’
I looked around the room again, hoping to see him.
Had I imagined it? Was I losing the plot? Was I seeing a man where there was no one actually there? That was a bit scary. Perhaps all this unfamiliar noise, excitement and too much alcohol had knocked me off balance a bit. Maybe I was hallucinating?
I knocked back the Cointreau and spluttered.
Thank heavens we were going tomorrow.
In the morning, we would get a taxi to the railway station.
Then we would change at Ventimiglia and get on to the train for Venice.
At the end of our train journey there would be a simple transfer to our boat.
Ship. Whatever it was called, and then we would meet up with Harriet’s godmother who was called Evelyn Beauchamp.
From what Harriet had told us she was good company but so old that she would probably be pleasantly vague and not want to do much, and we would spend a glorious few days sailing and eating lovely food and admiring the scenery. I liked the sound of that.