Chapter Eight The Return to Cap Ferrat
Three weeks after the fish and chips, James did something that surprised even me.
He invited Anastasia back to Cap Ferrat.
‘Just the two of us,’ he said, when he told me about it.
We were in his flat and he was attempting to pack, which for James meant standing in front of his wardrobe looking bewildered while clothes accumulated on every horizontal surface.
‘I thought I’d take her out on the boat.
Show her my favourite spots. It’s different when you’re not at a party, you know. Quieter. More... real.’
‘You’re taking her to meet Maurice,’ I said jokingly.
‘I’m not taking her to meet anyone, the idea is to have some time alone.’
‘It’s Cap Ferrat, Maurice will be there and he will want to say hello or at least shrug at you.’
‘Maurice can go drown himself in cheap red wine for all I care. Now to the important stuff.’ James held up two nearly identical linen shirts. ‘Which one?’
‘They’re the same shirt.’
‘They’re not the same. This one is ecru and this one is cream.’
‘Those are the same colour, James.’
‘They’re absolutely not. Ecru has undertones.’
I left him to his undertones and went home, privately convinced that the weekend would be either a disaster or a revelation. With James, there was rarely anything in between.
???
They flew to Nice on the Friday morning, James having successfully packed a bag containing what appeared to be exclusively linen in various shades of not-quite-white.
Anastasia had packed more sensibly, which is to say she had packed at all, rather than simply grabbing things at random and hoping for the best.
Maurice met them at the marina with his customary expression of weary resignation.
He had been looking after the Ashworth-Pemberton boat for thirty years (since before James was born) and he had long ago stopped being surprised by anything the family did.
He had, however, never stopped being disappointed.
‘Monsieur James,’ he said, in the tone of a man greeting an inevitable natural disaster. ‘You have brought a guest.’
‘Maurice, this is Anastasia. Anastasia, Maurice. He’s been with the family forever. He knows where all the bodies are buried.’
‘There are no bodies,’ Maurice said. ‘Yet.’
‘He’s joking,’ James assured Anastasia.
‘I am not joking.’
Maurice studied Anastasia for approximately thirty seconds, then nodded once and made himself scarce. This was, apparently, high praise. Maurice had taken significantly longer to approve of James’s university girlfriends and had never, to anyone’s knowledge, nodded at any of them.
They slipped out of the harbour early the next morning, while Anastasia was still asleep.
James, who could barely make toast without supervision, had somehow managed to source fresh croissants from the bakery in the town and squeeze oranges for juice without waking her or, more remarkably, injuring himself.
When she emerged from the cabin, blinking in the early light, they were anchored in a small cove off La Fosse beach, the boat rocking gently in the shelter of the headland.
‘I made breakfast,’ James said, with the pride of a man announcing he had cured a disease.
‘You made breakfast?’
‘Well, I assembled breakfast. The croissants were already made. And the oranges were already oranges. But I put them on plates and I squeezed things.’
They ate on the deck, watching the sun climb over the hills, the water shifting from grey to green and that intense Mediterranean blue that looks like it’s been mixed from gemstones.
The air was still cool, carrying the scent of pine and salt and the only sounds were seabirds and the gentle lap of water against the hull.
‘This is your favourite place,’ Anastasia said.
‘One of them. I’ve been coming here since I was a child. My grandmother, the kind one, not the terrifying one, used to bring me. We’d anchor here and swim and she’d tell me stories about mermaids and pirates. I believed her completely. I was very gullible.’
‘Was?’
‘Am. Am very gullible. It’s an ongoing condition.’ He topped up her orange juice. ‘But this place... it doesn’t change. Everything else changes but this stays the same. The water, the rocks, that little beach. It’s like a fixed point. Something to come back to.’
They swam in water that was still cold enough to make James yelp and afterwards he produced a mango from somewhere and proceeded to peel it in the sea with a diving knife he claimed had belonged to his grandfather.
‘This is the only way to eat mango,’ he insisted, handing her a slice that was dripping with juice and seawater. ‘Sweet and salty. Trust me.’
‘You’re standing in the Mediterranean cutting fruit with a knife. This feels dangerous.’
‘It’s not dangerous. It’s traditional.’
‘Traditional for whom?’
‘For me. I’ve been doing this since I was twelve.’
Anastasia took the mango slice. It was, she admitted later, surprisingly good, the salt cutting through the sweetness, the cold water making the fruit taste somehow more intense.
Or perhaps it was just the context: the boat, the cove, James standing chest-deep in water looking absurdly pleased with himself.
???
They spent the day exploring. James knew the coastline like he knew his own flat.
Better, probably, since he was forever losing things in the flat and never lost anything here.
He showed her the hidden beach that could only be reached by swimming around a rock formation, where the sand was soft and white and the tourists never came.
He showed her the underwater cave where he had once found a Roman coin.
Or what he had convinced himself was a Roman coin, though it had later turned out to be a button from a French naval uniform, worth approximately nothing but still kept in a drawer in his London flat.
He showed her the point where the currents met and the water turned suddenly cold and the spot where the fish gathered in clouds of silver and blue.
In the afternoon, they walked the coastal path on the Cap itself, the Sentier du Littoral, which wound around the headland through pine forests and past spectacular villas, offering views that made you understand why people paid tens of millions to live here.
James greeted everyone they passed: the gardener trimming hedges at a villa gate, the elderly woman walking a very small dog even the group of hikers consulting a map with expressions of increasing concern.
‘You know everyone,’ Anastasia observed.
‘I’ve been coming here since I could walk. After a while, you just... accumulate people.’
???
They stopped at a small café overlooking the port of Saint-Jean, where James was embraced by a woman called Madame (no one seemed to use her surname) who fussed over him like a returning soldier and seated them at the best table on the terrace without being asked.
‘Jacques!’ she called to someone in the kitchen. ‘Jacques, le petit James est revenu! Et avec une jolie fille!’
‘I’m not petit,’ James muttered. ‘I’m over six feet.’
‘You must have been small when she met you. You’ll always be small to her.’ Anastasia was smiling. ‘She likes you.’
‘She likes everyone, well, not everyone. She doesn’t like Freddie, but Freddie was sick in her fountain after racing down the hill in a shopping trolley, so that’s understandable.’
They ate bouillabaisse and drank rosé and watched the boats come and go in the harbour below.
James pointed out various vessels and their histories: that one belonged to a Russian oligarch who hadn’t been seen in years, that one was owned by a retired actress who had been famous in the seventies and still dressed as if she expected to be photographed, another that was sunk in Monaco harbour by the mob back in the 70s and was now considered lucky, though James had never understood the logic.
‘And there is ours,’ he said, pointing to where Maurice was doing something complicated with ropes on the deck.
‘Well, the family’s. But I think of it as ours.
Mine and Maurice’s. Mine, because I love it more than anyone in the family, it is my special place.
And Maurice, well he’s been looking after it forever, he probably knows it better than anyone. ’
‘He seems very... dedicated.’
‘Maurice? He’s practically furniture. In the best way. He came with the boat when my grandfather bought it and he’s been there ever since. Through everything: the divorces, the scandals, the time Uncle Peregrine tried to sail to Corsica and ended up in Sardinia. Maurice just... endures.’
???
They returned to the boat as the sun was setting, painting the water in shades of orange and pink.
Anastasia cooked that night: varenyky, the Ukrainian dumplings she had mentioned once, filled with cheese and potato, then fried in butter until crispy.
She had bought the ingredients at the market in Beaulieu, dragging James through stalls of vegetables and cheese and cured meats while he trailed behind carrying bags and trying not to get lost.
‘My grandmother’s recipe,’ she said, setting the plate between them. ‘Or as close as I can get without her telling me I’m doing everything wrong.’
They ate on the deck, watching the stars emerge, the lights of the coast twinkling in the darkness. Maurice had gone ashore. ‘To give you privacy,’ he said, in a tone that suggested privacy was something for young people and that he didn’t want to witness it.
At some point, James wasn’t sure when, Anastasia had gone quiet. He looked over to find her staring at the water, her expression unreadable.
‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.
She was silent for a long moment. Then: ‘I’m thinking that I’m not used to this.’
‘To what? Boats? Stars? Excellent dumplings?’
‘To feeling safe. I spent a long time not feeling safe. And now I’m here, on a boat, in a beautiful place, with someone who makes me laugh and I feel...’ She trailed off.
‘You feel?’
‘I feel like I’m waiting for something to go wrong. Because something always goes wrong.’ She turned to look at him. ‘That’s not fair to you, you’ve done nothing but be kind, but I keep expecting...’
‘Expecting what?’
‘I don’t know. The catch. The other shoe. Whatever you call it in English.’
James was quiet for a moment. Then he reached out and took her hand.
‘There’s no catch,’ he said. ‘I’m exactly what I seem to be.
A fairly useless man with a nice boat and a talent for peeling mango with an oversized knife.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. If you’re waiting for me to turn out to be secretly interesting or dangerous, you’re going to be waiting a long time. ’
She laughed, surprising herself. ‘That might be the least romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.’
‘I know. I’m very bad at this. Ask anyone.’
‘I’m not asking anyone, I already know.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘Thank you. For this, for showing me your favourite places and for being...’
‘Fairly useless with a nice boat?’
‘Exactly, that and everything else.’
They sat there as the night deepened around them, hands intertwined, not speaking. In the distance, the lights of Beaulieu glittered along the shore. Above them, the stars wheeled slowly through the infinite dark.
James didn’t know it then, couldn’t have known, but Anastasia had been on the verge of telling him something. About her past, about Viktor, about the life she had left behind. The words had been there, forming in her throat, waiting to be spoken.
She had swallowed them down.
There would be time, she told herself. There would be a right moment. And until then, she would let herself have this: this boat, this man, this feeling of being, for the first time in years, exactly where she wanted to be.