Chapter One #2
Yet a further pause followed, longer this time, during which I covertly studied the man opposite me from under my eyelashes while dipping my croissant in my bowl of coffee and then eating it.
His age was difficult to judge – mid-forties, maybe older?
Physically he looked on the thin side but then he was clearly very tall.
Of course, he was sitting down, but even so I could immediately tell this, possibly because I’m so tall myself.
You get used to estimating a man’s height whatever he’s doing when you’re a woman of 187.
96 centimetres or, if you prefer, six foot two.
The number of times I’ve been sitting all unawares next to a guy at a dinner party or in a pub and even occasionally been initially quite attracted only to find him on a level with my tits when we stood up.
I don’t care, by the way. It’s them that it seems to upset.
No matter some of the most beautiful women in the world are very tall, they always look put out, even if they try to conceal it.
My mother claims I imagine it, that I’ve got a phobia about my height.
Maybe she’s right; it certainly plagued me growing up.
The ‘My, you’re a big girl, aren’t you?’ refrain did not encourage adolescent self-confidence.
It’s different for men, it always has been and probably always will be.
The man sitting opposite me wouldn’t mind in the least being tall.
Rather, as he was so evidently a bully, he would relish it.
As to the rest of his appearance, however, he didn’t quite add up.
Aside from being dressed in a grubby pink – or it might have been washed-out red – sweatshirt under the cracked and scruffy old leather jacket to match a pair of cracked and scruffy old leather trousers, he had long, mousey-dark hair.
It was difficult to tell exactly what colour it was, but it was certainly in need of a wash.
A straggly beard and hands heavily stained with what looked like motor oil did not tally with his ever-so-cultured accent.
His face, with its strong, bony features and clear blue eyes, should have been attractive, handsome even, had it not been marred by a sullenness which even now kept making itself visible despite his apparently affectionate conversation with whoever he was talking to on the phone.
It struck me that Luc Mandeville resembled nothing so much as an ageing, disgruntled greaser whose pack of biker mates had dumped him. So, no, he did not add up.
Then again, nothing so far had added up, about him or, for that matter, the Villa Matisse.
It wasn’t that I was expecting some kind of rapturous welcome.
Very few people I’ve cooked for privately have been friendly or turned out to be someone who I’d like to mix with socially or even ever see again.
Perhaps I’ve been unlucky, but for me – and perhaps it is just down to me; my mother’s always telling me how difficult I am – whatever they’re like normally, most people these days seem immediately ill at ease when it comes to employing a private chef.
I say ‘people’ – it’s actually us women who are the worst offenders.
They seem either to be suffering from a guilt complex about not doing the cooking themselves, meaning they keep telling you what to do or, worse still, make out cooking is somehow beneath them and are therefore offensively patronising.
I work through an agency now, which means I can keep things impersonal.
Before the Covid pandemic, I headed up a team in a gastro pub but the hours were hell, a massive consideration when you’re a single parent.
Lockdown did it for the pub; it folded, and it wasn’t my cooking.
But I needed to move on anyway, if only to get out the world of tattoos.
Now I do private temporary placements, which was how I’d ended up at the Villa Matisse.
The prospect of living and working in a stranger’s house for Christmas and New Year didn’t exactly enchant me, but for quite a while lately I’ve been feeling in need of a challenge.
I don’t know, I’ve just felt restless. Besides, this job fitted in with my personal plans.
It meant my son Carl could spend some much-needed time on his own with his father without me hanging around in the background like a slightly unwelcome smell.
Then there was the incredible money on offer, not a small consideration.
So, having delivered Carl to his dad in Milan and girded my cheffing loins, I had made my way down to the C?te d’Azur and Nice – or rather, I had tried to – not really knowing what to expect but determined to make a go of it.
Now I was beginning to wonder if that was possible, if it was a bad move.
Everyone at home had been, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic when I told them what I was planning on doing.
Friends, family, you name them, they all took a deeply dim view of what I saw as enterprising – apart from my father, that is.
My father got very excited. However, because all he kept saying was how much he had loved Monte in the fifties, my mother told him to shut up and talk some sense into me.
‘Aside from the fact that you were far too young in the fifties even to remember Monte Carlo,’ she said crossly to him.
‘Your daughter is actually going to Nice – Nice. She is going to work for three weeks over Christmas and New Year for some family we know absolutely nothing about when she should be with her son – with our grandson.’
My cousin Ros was the worst of the lot…