Chapter Five
I need not have worried. Although she had not started on the actual cooking, in the kitchen I found Nicole at the sink carefully washing a beautiful antique soup tureen with a matching ladle.
A quick look into the dining room showed me that she had laid the table – perfectly – with polished glasses and damask napkins at each place folded into a neat rectangle, even making for the table a lovely central arrangement of the bunch of mixed white flowers I had bought earlier in the market entwined with trailing tendrils of ivy which she must have filched from the garden.
On either side of the flowers, two gleaming silver filigree candelabra were waiting to be lit.
She had opened the sliding doors from the dining room to the salon and laid and lit a fire in the latter’s grate.
All the table lamps in the salon had been turned on as well as the overhead pendants, including spots over the pictures.
The brilliant light meant I saw with some surprise what I had not observed when I had entered the dimly lit room in the early hours of that morning: it was in fact distinctly shabby.
There were still the elegant pale linen sofas and ranks of blue-striped ticking cushions, which Nicole had evidently plumped, but they were on the grubby side, the sofa material worn in places, almost threadbare on a couple of the arms. The Matisse cut-outs still shone in their magnificence of course, but under the spotlights their heavy gilt frames looked cheaper somehow, chipped and blotchy as though someone had rather amateurishly had a go at renovating them.
In a way, however, this all made the room look more welcoming, more like a sitting room in an ordinary house that was loved and lived in.
But there was no time for reflection. Nicole was hopping from foot to foot, eager for instruction about what to do next, so, having got us both back to the kitchen, I quickly set her to preparing the vegetables for the main course while I started on the soup.
She proved to be the most tremendous help, not only doing everything I asked of her but genuinely interested in learning whatever cookery wisdom I cared to impart.
She paid the greatest possible attention to everything I said, then did whatever I’d asked her to do carefully but quickly and efficiently.
I did not have to say anything twice to her, with the result that, by a quarter to eight, all I had left to do was pop the tarte tatin I had made for pudding into the oven.
But I would do that once everybody had started on their soup. The girl was a miracle.
‘You’re a miracle,’ I said to her.
She blushed prettily but made a modest gesture of dismissal. ‘Je m’amuse. I am enjoying myself,’ she translated with a happy smile.
‘Good. Now, wine and drinks. Will Mr Mandeville see to all that?’
She nodded. ‘Oui. Always M’sieur Luc do the drinking.’
‘Fine.’ I smiled back at her. (Perhaps that was his problem!) Then, finishing off the arrangement of a platter of amuses bouches to go with whatever pre-dinner drinks were to be served, I put it down on the kitchen table and wiped my hands on my apron.
‘Now, I’m just going to nip back to my room to put on a clean apron and tidy myself up.
Will you be okay for five minutes or so?
Just give the pan of soup a gentle little stir now and then, if you don’t mind, while I’m gone. I won’t be long.’
She nodded, her eyes bright with intelligence, and I beetled off down the corridor.
No sooner had I re-plaited my hair, changed my apron, smeared on a discrete slash of lipstick and was about to add a light touch of perfume, however, than I heard the unmistakeable squawks of the elusive Susan Mandeville’s shrieky voice emanating from the kitchen, sounding anything but happy. I rushed back.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ I cried, shoving down on the table the box of Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps that I had bought on the plane and had been on the point of unwrapping.
Before me stood Nicole, her head bowed like a black tulip in a thunderstorm and looking as though she were about to be horsewhipped.
Facing her, and in her case looking as if about to administer such a punishment, was the smallest woman I have ever seen in my life.
I stepped forward to introduce myself, my hand outstretched. Susan Mandeville ignored it.
‘You must be the temporary cook,’ she said. ‘Now, will you please tell this silly little girl,’ she continued with a glare at Nicole, ‘that she is quite unsuitably dressed to wait at the table.’
I looked at Nicole; she peeped up under her eyelashes miserably back at me. The French girl was entirely suitably dressed, indeed wearing much the same as myself; a plain white shirt and a knee-length black skirt.
‘She looks perfectly fine to me,’ I said.
The woman scowled, which, with her undeniably handsome but slightly simian features, made her look like a discontented old monkey.
‘Nonsense,’ she said rudely, tossing, or rather attempting to toss, her iron-grey hair.
It was so severely bobbed and lacquered it could have been a Norman helmet.
All she needed was a pikestaff to complete the picture.
‘She should be dressed according to what she is,’ she was now saying with severity bordering on fascism.
‘And she is a waitress. I have supplied her with the correct uniform. She must wear it now.’
I had a sudden mental vision of what that uniform might be. A weeny little dress complete with frilly pinny and mob cap like some French farce. I almost laughed, but Susan Mandeville hadn’t finished. She now looked me up and down.
‘And you should be wearing whites,’ she snapped.
‘Sorry,’ I said amiably, ‘but I forgot to pack my toque.’ I thought that would flummox her – nobody outside the trade ever knows the correct name for a chef’s hat. But if it did, she certainly wasn’t going to show it. I don’t think she even heard me. She was a woman on a mission.
‘You are not appropriately dressed, either of you,’ she rapped. ‘The Villa Matisse is not some gastric pub.’
‘Gastro,’ I corrected, stifling a snort, for in truth I was finding it difficult to take the woman seriously.
The way she was dressed didn’t help. Although it was obviously a very expensive, possibly designer dress she was wearing, it boasted a rather unfortunate shape.
Or at least it did on so tiny a woman. In wine-coloured velvet, falling to mid-calf, it finished in such a pronounced A-line round the hem that with her weedy little ankles sticking out the bottom, she looked like a bedside lamp fitted with way too large a shade.
‘Go and change,’ she ordered Nicole.
God knows what would have happened next, but before any of us could do anything – if we were going to – the swing door from the dining room flew open and into the kitchen burst Luc Mandeville.
‘So this is where you’ve got to, Mother!
’ he cried and made to take her arm. ‘Come along,’ he urged.
‘Everybody’s arrived now and they’re all waiting for you.
’ As the swing door slowly closed itself, I could hear a hum of chatter coming from the sitting room.
Susan Mandeville, however, wrenched her arm away from her son.
‘Don’t call me “mother”,’ she said crossly, and then, frowning up at him, added, ‘and why aren’t you wearing a tie?’
I looked at Mandeville, taken aback myself, but not because he wasn’t wearing a tie.
It was the change in him. He was unrecognisable.
Gone was the lank and mousy hair; that was now fair to tawny blond, nicely cut and with a silky forelock combed elegantly back from his smooth, broad brow with silvery streaks of grey in the wings over his temples.
The straggly beard had also been erased and in place of the scruffy biker gear he was clad in a navy-blue wool jacket over a pale-pink-and-white striped shirt and well-pressed light-grey chinos.
Blimey, I thought in wonder, he’s scrubbed up well.
I wondered whether his mood had changed for the better too.
I didn’t get a chance to find out, however, as Susan Mandeville, her apish little eyes roving beadily round the kitchen in search of her next target, suddenly lighted on my box of scent on the table.
‘Oh, darling!’ she squawked at Mandeville. ‘You’ve bought me some perfume!’ The next moment she had skipped across the room in her lampshade, seized my scent and disappeared with it through the swing door.
Mandeville and I looked at each other across the kitchen.
He said nothing. Neither did I. Yet, oddly, although I could not quite work out how, given we were not, after all, what you might call best mates, oddly, in the split second our eyes met, I knew we were thinking the same thing, that being: best not to do anything now.
Hence, without saying a word, he marched across the kitchen, seized two bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne from the fridge and marched back out.
I turned to Nicole. ‘Please,’ I implored her, trying not to sound desperate.
‘Please don’t leave me with all this.’ I was terrified she might start weeping again, this time with good reason, but then I’d have to mop her up as well as dealing with the scent-stealing harpy.
However, somewhat to my surprise, an expression of unexpected determination came over the French girl’s innocent face.
‘No,’ she said, rather loudly as if to add emphasis. ‘I stay with you.’
Almost on the point of hysteria both at how daft we must sound, like some dumb pop song, quite apart from the farcical scene that had just passed, I controlled myself and thrust a small tray holding bowls of roasted almonds and pistachios at her.
‘Take this.’ I grabbed the platter of amuses bouches. ‘And follow me.’