Chapter Three
No sooner had I got there, however, and started shoving things angrily back in my suitcase, than my phone rang. Levering it out of my skirt pocket, I answered it without even glancing at who was calling.
‘Hello, darling!’ I cried, stuffing the bunch of pants I was holding anyhow into the case and sitting down on the bed.
‘I was just about to ring you. I’ve got some really great news!
’ Carl would be delighted to hear I was dumping the Villa Matisse and making my way back to him.
Although he’d tried to be nice about it, he too had thought the whole idea a bit iffy in the first place. Now it seemed he was right, didn’t it?
‘Wow! From that I take it you’re having a fantastic time.’
It was Ros. It wasn’t Carl, it was Ros.
‘Hello? Alix? Are you still there?’
I literally could not think of a thing to say.
Because something had just occurred to me.
If I threw in the towel at the Villa Matisse and crept ignominiously back to where I belonged with my son, everybody would have a field day.
I’d never live it down. The ‘I told you so’ refrains would rent the air.
Especially from Ros. And anyway, wasn’t I making too much of it all, of the lack of friendliness or courtesy on the part of the denizens of the Villa Matisse?
After all, I wasn’t their friend; I was an employee and, given they were clearly an extremely wealthy family, it’s a well-known fact that rich types are often rude, bloody rude. They feel entitled.
And, I reminded myself, on arrival, despite the awful journey getting there and the off-kilter reception, I had been pretty thrilled with the Villa Matisse. In fact, first impressions of it had turned out to be precisely the stuff of my dreams…
***
True, once the grumpy taxi driver shot off, leaving me alone in Cimiez in the middle of the night on the pavement on the wrong side of dense and prickly high hedges and an even higher black, metal security gate topped with disconcertingly vicious-looking spikes, I felt more than a little anxious.
But then I immediately saw the gate was open – slightly ajar, at any rate.
Good. Relief. I was expected. Clearly someone was at home.
Picking up my suitcase, I pushed the gate wider, sidled through and found myself at the foot of a gently rising flight of shallow, wide stone steps curving up to the front door of a large and attractive house.
Okay, the Villa Matisse wasn’t exactly the faded old fin-de-siècle Franco-Italianate mansion with sun-bleached pastel shutters and scarlet geraniums spilling out of window boxes that I’d been having one of my fantasies about.
Instead, lit by powerful security arc lights lining the deep eaves, it looked relatively modern, certainly post-war if not later.
But it had elegant lines with ranks of tall, traditionally French-style windows flanked by wooden louvre shutters painted a vivid blue – Matisse blue, in fact.
The shutters stood open, the interiors behind them dark, but never mind – it looked good.
My spirits rose further. However, turning, I had closed the gate behind me at which point something had promptly given a high-pitched little double beep sounding so uncannily like a disembodied child’s voice saying ‘Merci!’ that I had stopped in my tracks.
After a second or two, no child, French or English, disembodied or corporeal, appearing, I turned back to look up the flight of steps.
They were lined on either side with hibiscus shrubs, their pale-pink trumpets now sleepily closed, which was perhaps just as well, as a much deeper-pink – in fact, a clashing purple – bougainvillea was shedding its papery flowers all over the front porch above them.
I waited a second or two but still nobody appeared.
So, in the absence of a better plan, I dragged my case and myself up the steps to the porch and was about to grasp the huge brass door knocker in the shape of a hand clasping a ball when I saw this entrance too was standing slightly ajar.
Hesitating only slightly, I had then pushed it open and stepped inside to find myself standing in a vast entrance hall, so high-ceilinged it had the effect of a covered atrium, an impression borne out by the fleshy tropical plants placed at strategic intervals on the stone paving in enormous terracotta pots.
I looked up. A galleried landing ran round two upper sides of the hall, reached by a marble staircase with wrought-iron banisters.
But this was in darkness. And although the hall below was lit by a large lamp sitting on an old, carved wooden chest to the side of the front door, there was no sign of human life.
It was also incredibly echoey, which I discovered as I plonked my heavy suitcase down on the stone floor, the thud of it landing coming back eerily to meet me. I turned and closed the front door – another spooky little ‘Merci!’ beep – and stood there in a quandary, wondering what to do next.
It’s extremely difficult to know what to use as a hail in French.
The French only ever say ‘Allo?’ on the telephone.
‘Bonjour!’ or ‘Bonsoir!’ is of course the standard greeting but yelling ‘Bonsoir!’ when you’ve just let yourself uninvited into a stranger’s home in the middle of night sounds daft.
However, I reminded myself, if the elusive Mrs Susan Mandeville was anything to go by, this was an English household.
Duly, therefore, I drew a deep breath and called out a courteous but loud, ‘Hello!’
Nothing, zilch, nada, just another chorus of echoes.
God, this was getting beyond a joke. Feeling irritated more than anything else at that point, I had marched across the hall to a pair of sliding doors to the left of the staircase; they also were standing slightly open onto a room, which, although very dimly lit, was clearly visible beyond the gap.
I edged through the gap. The room was empty, empty of human presence that is, but I found myself standing in a beautiful sitting room, or salon, I suppose, given we were in France, so exquisitely appointed that for a moment I forgot to be irritated in my admiration.
On the right-hand wall were another pair of sliding doors, narrower and closed, which I assumed opened onto a dining room, the larger of the L-shape being the sitting room.
And it was just the sort of sitting room I have always longed for, a blend of modern and antique in impeccable taste.
Two long, deep and squashy sofas loosely covered in off-white linen flanked an old marble fireplace, the sofas’ immaculate depths relieved by discretely serried ranks of cushions covered in blue-and-white-striped ticking.
Between the sofas stood another low, intricately carved pale wood chest – you couldn’t insult it by calling it a coffee table – on which stood a blue-and-yellow pottery bowl full of fir cones.
The lighting was muted yet pervasive, seemingly seeping from somewhere near the ceiling. Spellbound, I stepped further in.
The walls, painted plain soft white, displayed an eclectic collection of pictures; a Monet from the Giverny lilies series; what might possibly be a small Ingres and – of course!
– several large Matisse cut-outs, the blue ones from his later years when his arthritis got so bad that the poor guy couldn’t hold a paintbrush properly so resorted to collage.
At the sight of these, my awe dropped a notch.
I mean, I know very little about art and I’m no snob when it comes to interior décor – you can hang Mickey Mouse on the walls if that’s what floats your boat.
But reproductions of the Matisse cut-outs are so ubiquitous these days as to be generic.
Not ‘good’ taste anyway. They certainly did not fit with the restrained yet expensive luxury of the rest of the room…
oh my God! It suddenly occurred to me that I was not looking at reproductions.
They were originals, Matisse originals. I walked across to the nearest for a closer examination.
‘What are you doing?’
It’s really a joke, isn’t it, when someone makes you jump like that?
Everybody always laughs. Well, not so the young French girl who had silently entered the sitting room behind me and shouted.
She had simply looked as unfriendly as she did the following morning in the kitchen of the Villa Matisse.
And you couldn’t put her hostility down to the language barrier.
Notwithstanding her yelling in English at me, when I had out of courtesy started to explain in French who I was, she had immediately snapped, ‘I speak English.’ However, she did look very young.
French African and very pretty, she could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen at the outside.
Maybe that meant she was simply shy or a bit gauche, with which I sympathised, although her demeanour belied this.
‘Come,’ she had said coldly, without waiting for me to answer or recover myself. ‘I show to you your room.’
Which she had duly done, but that was absolutely all she had duly done. I had gone to bed completely in ignorance and not a little perturbed as to what the hell was going on at the Villa Matisse.
***
‘Alix? Alix!’
I came back to the present to realise Ros was hollering at me down the phone.
‘Sorry,’ I said hastily. ‘The line broke up for a moment.’
‘Sure it’s not being drowned out by the sound of a concrete mixer?’
‘A concrete mixer?’ I hadn’t the least idea what she was talking about.
‘To put your feet in. Sorry – only joking. You just sounded really perky, from which I take it everything is going so well that I shall have to eat very humble pie.’
‘Er no – I mean yes!’ I almost shouted. Crossing my fingers, I added, ‘Yes, it’s all fantastic.’
‘Well, that’s good to hear, really good. I’ve been so worried about you.’