Chapter Two
‘What on earth for?’
‘It’s a job – it’s my job.’ I sighed. ‘You know, I really do not get what all this fuss is about. I’m thirty-six and—’
‘That makes absolutely no difference.’ Ros cut straight across me, as she often does. Just because she’s ten years older and bossed me about when I was a child, she still occasionally treats me like one.
‘I’m the mother of an eleven-year-old boy, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Quite. And it’s Christmas! Of all the times in the year, during the festive season you should be with your son.
’ Ros gave a sanctimonious sniff. We were sitting in her kitchen, which is always immaculately tidy, unlike mine, which is always a wreck, our mutual awareness of this fact seeming to lend weight to her general air of superiority.
‘Well, in an ideal world I would be. But this year Carl is spending the festive season,’ I scissored my fingers in quotation marks, ‘with his father. It’s only fair really. They’ve never spent a Christmas together just as father and son.’
‘Couldn’t you go with them? I mean, you get on okay with Gian-what’s-it, don’t you?’
‘Giancarlo, and yes, I do,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘In fact, Giancarlo did invite me. But I refused. And before you can say “What on earth for?” again,’ as I knew Ros was going to, ‘I refused because in the first place they’re going skiing and I hate bloody skiing and in the—’
‘You’ve never been skiing.’
‘Oh, yes, I have.’ The memory made me shudder.
‘You’ve forgotten, but when Dad was stationed in Germany we had a family holiday skiing in the French Alps.
Well, on the very first day when they were teaching us that stupid snowplough thing, I somehow did the splits and ended up pulling a ligament or something vital in a highly vulnerable place. ’
Ros started to laugh.
‘It hurt for months – months. I could barely walk. So quite apart from being the class joke when I hobbled back to school, I vowed never to get on a pair of bloody skis again.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t have to ski. You could sit cosily in a timber-lined café slurping great mugs of delicious hot chocolate or glasses of glühwein.’ She frowned. ‘Not that I personally like glühwein. It always sounds like something you use to stick tiles on bathroom walls.’
‘I agree, but in any case it’s German and they’re going to Italy, to Giancarlo’s chalet in a ski resort called Piani di Bobbio.’
Ros brightened. ‘Oh, how pretty,’ she exclaimed but added she still thought I was mad and then, as I knew she would, reproached me about my parents. ‘You’ll really upset Uncle Richard and Aunt Helen if they can’t see Carl at Christmas.’ (Richard and Helen were my parents.)
‘No, I won’t,’ I said firmly. ‘Because they’re going away too.
My brother has invited them to Cyprus for Christmas and they’ve accepted.
’ Having followed our father into a career in the services, my brother David was in the RAF currently based at Akrotiri in the south of the island with his wife and two children.
‘And before you ask me whether they invited Carl and me as well,’ I continued, ‘then, yes, of course they did. But I’m not doing that either. ’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because my dear sister-in-law is fixated on the idea of getting me “hitched”, as she calls it, which means whenever I see her she’s constantly producing what she describes as “eligible young flying officers” who then take one look at me and run for their goggles.’
My cousin gave a snort. ‘Oh, I give up.’
‘Yes, do.’
‘I just hope you don’t end up at the bottom of the Mediterranean with your feet in concrete.’
‘My feet in concrete! What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Over the years there’s been some very nefarious goings-on in that part of the world. And you know nothing about this woman, her family…’
‘Oh, the agency will have checked her out,’ I said airily.
‘Not necessarily. What about that psychotic family you did a silver wedding weekend for in East Grinstead? You swore then that you’d never stay over at a client’s house again in your life. You swore.’
‘Yes, I did,’ I conceded. ‘But I never said they were psychotic, for heaven’s sake. They were just a bit… well… dysfunctional.’
‘This lot could be criminals, drug dealers…’
‘Rosalind.’ I was beginning to lose my patience. ‘I’m going to Nice, not Bogotá.’
‘Nice is renowned for having a high crime rate.’
‘And I’m going to work for three weeks,’ I ignored the interruption, ‘for a perfectly respectable if somewhat squawky upper middle-class English lady in her family’s holiday home on the C?te d’Azur. It basically amounts to a lot of money for boiling a few sprouts and roasting a turkey.’
‘What does “a lot of money” mean?’
I told her. But it made no difference. Ros simply remarked that paying such a ridiculous amount made it all the more iffy. We were quiet for a moment. Until abruptly she said, ‘Do you know what Somerset Maugham called the French Riviera?’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve forgotten, but I’m sure you’re going to remind me what Somerset Maugham called the French Riviera.’
‘“A sunny place for shady people.”’
I said nothing. Boy, did Ros annoy me sometimes. Then I smiled. ‘Okay, how about this one? Do you know what the artist Henri Matisse said?’
‘No.’
‘“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” I rest my case. I am going to Nice to work at the Villa Matisse.’
***
Now, as I sat in the charming kitchen of the charming Villa Matisse feeling nothing like charmed, I could not prevent what Ros had said coming back to me.
It wasn’t that this guy in his biker gear looked shady or even criminal, although in all honesty I’m not entirely sure what a criminal is meant to look like, are you?
When you see them on television, they generally look pretty much the same as everyone else.
But I simply did not know who this man was.
The woman who I’d spoken to on the phone when I accepted the job through the agency told me, punctuated by her shrieky laughs, that her name was Susan Mandeville, Mrs Mandeville, she’d repeated with heavy emphasis as if she feared I might be tempted to commit the unforgiveable sin of using her given name only.
She would be at the Villa Matisse to receive me, she explained – and yes, she did actually say ‘receive’ not ‘meet’ or ‘greet’ or ‘welcome’ – and then she gave me a number to call in case of any problems arising. Which of course they then did.
Okay, maybe it was reasonable to assume everyone I’d met so far at the Villa Matisse was merely pissed off on account of my arriving in the middle of the night. But that had been hardly my fault and in any event did not adequately excuse rudeness, let alone the downright hostility.
But then, nothing so far had gone right with this job. The enterprise seemed doomed from the beginning, starting with the moment I arrived at the station in Milan only to be told there was a problem with all train connections to Nice and likely to remain so for several hours.
Giancarlo, my son’s father, nice guy that he is, and he is nice even given his failings, had promptly offered to take me back with Carl to his flat in Milan where his mother was preparing lunch and from where I could try to get away later in the day or even the next.
(Or give the whole enterprise the boot and stay with them, which Carl enthusiastically seconded.) But somehow, much as I appreciated the kindness, I didn’t want to do that.
I wanted to get going and, more importantly, not give Carl the opportunity to reflect on whether he felt entirely happy about spending the next three weeks without Mum.
At that point he was buoyed up with confidence, a confidence largely born of over-excitement, I knew, but that was how I wanted him to stay.
Apart from sleeping over with my parents or a weekend with one of his friends, he’s never been separated from me for long.
But he’s coming up to twelve and I don’t want him turning into a mummy’s boy when God knows there’d been enough danger of that during lockdown.
Besides, the last person I wanted to see was Giancarlo’s mother.
She’s such a typically traditional Italian mamma she’s virtually a caricature.
Hence, as far as she’s concerned, I’m the scarlet woman who tempted her irreproachable son into wicked ways.
This, of course, totally ignores the well-known fact that Giancarlo is one of those men who has never been able to keep it in his pants.
He has two children other than Carl, daughters, by two different women and is currently being divorced by his second wife.
No matter. In the end, after a bit of low-key argy-bargy with Giancarlo, I managed to get a seat on a coach that had been put on specially, was just about to leave and which would take me directly to Nice.
I waved off my son and his father, bought myself a bottle of water and a sandwich and boarded the coach.
It didn’t leave for three hours.
All in all, given that the said coach, once it eventually got going, could have rivalled the infamous slow boat to China, I did not arrive in Nice until after midnight.
Of course I had immediately called Susan Mandeville – sorry, Mrs Mandeville – to explain my predicament on the contact number for the Villa Matisse that she had given me.
But it went straight to voicemail, as it continued to do when I phoned again every hour that followed.
(It sounded like a landline, with an old-fashioned answerphone.) Perhaps because of that but a little too late in the day, it occurred to me to phone the agency who’d found me the job.
Perhaps they had a mobile number for Mrs Susan Mandeville.
But by then it was gone 6.00pm GMT and also went straight to voicemail.
Evidently, everybody had gone home, which I supposed was fair enough for a Friday evening, if rather odd practice for an agency dealing in the provision of catering staff.