Chapter Six
When I opened my eyes the following morning, my first thought was that I simply could not believe the previous evening had happened.
I’ve cooked for some pretty weird dinner parties during my career, quite often the guests not speaking or not seeming to even like each other, but this one took the laurel wreath.
In the first place, it had never been clear, to me at least, who was actually the host; was it Luc Mandeville or his appalling mother?
And if it was the latter, then why wasn’t she staying at the Villa Matisse?
Unless my memory was failing me, she had effectively claimed ownership of the place; ‘my house’, she had said quite distinctly when making a prat of herself over the mistaking the sound of the word ‘pistou’.
And then, in the second, or perhaps it should be first, place, why did everyone suddenly leave?
Because that is exactly what they had done.
A few minutes after Nicole and I had served their main course, every single one of the guests simply… left.
With a groan, I levered myself out of bed and threw on some jeans and a T-shirt. It wasn’t late, about eight o’clock, but I thought I’d better see how the land was lying as soon as possible.
In the kitchen I found Nicole sitting at the table, simultaneously drinking coffee and eating a croissant, breaking off occasionally to scribble things in a notebook by her right hand.
‘Are you writing it down to make sense of what happened yesterday evening?’ I nodded at the notebook.
She frowned as she worked out my question. Then, ‘Oh, no, no,’ she cried. ‘I am writing my English vocabulary. If I write him, I remember,’ she explained.
Pouring myself a bowl of coffee, I sat down opposite her. I didn’t feel like having anything to eat. The shenanigans of the previous evening had left me totally unhungry.
‘Is there anyone around?’ I asked. ‘Any resident of the Villa Matisse in need of my services?’
‘No.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I knock on the door of the room of M’sieur Luc this morning but nobody respond. I think he never come ’ome last night.’
Probably too busy peeling off Caroline’s bodycon frock, I thought sourly and then wondered why I thought that sourly. It wasn’t as if I fancied Luc Mandeville; I didn’t even like the man. Drinking some coffee, I looked carefully at the French girl.
‘Tell me something. Why do you think they all suddenly scarpered?’
‘Excuse me, what is “scarpered”?’
‘Oh, um, sort of slang for “left” or “went”. All I am asking is, why did all the guests suddenly leave?’
***
We’d hardly said anything to each other the previous evening.
All Nicole and I knew was that five minutes after we’d served the main course and got back to the kitchen, a huge row broke out in the dining room, voices raised to such a pitch – Susan Mandeville’s being by far the highest decibel – that although you could not hear what was actually being said or shouted, the voices had been audibly angry and hence angrily audible in the kitchen.
A dead but lasting silence had then followed, after which I slid tentatively through the swing door only to find the dining room devoid of human presence.
All the plates of chicken and sauce soubise were untouched, save for the elderly English couple’s two.
Judging by the mess they’d left, it looked as though they’d had a bloody good go at getting as much of it down their throats as possible before they were removed. But were they removed? And why?
Speechless, Nicole and I simply exchanged shocked looks.
‘Did a bomb go off?’ I asked her. ‘And we didn’t hear it?’
Nicole looked awed. ‘I think he is a big bomb,’ she said, nodding at the wreckage.
Apart from sauce soubise enamelled on the surface of the table at the Acorns’ end, someone had knocked their wine glass over, creating a mini lake of Macon Villages.
A ragged slice of chicken had somehow found its way into Nicole’s flower arrangement.
One of the dining chairs lay flat on its back as if someone had punched its lights out, and several knives and forks seemed to have been more airborne than Covid.
What with restoring order there, dousing the fire and tidying up the sitting room, not to mention the chaos in the kitchen with congealing satay and sour cream everywhere – and a half-cooked tarte tatin – all we both felt like doing after that was going to bed.
***
‘I cannot say,’ Nicole muttered now, in answer to my question but looking uncomfortable.
Well, I wasn’t going to pump the girl. It wasn’t fair. She was too young, apparently employed by the family, and it wasn’t my business anyway.
‘Okay.’ I flexed my shoulders. They ached with tension.
In fact, my whole body felt as though I’d been flogged, and for some crime I hadn’t committed.
‘What are you doing with yourself today, then?’ I asked her.
‘Do you fancy us going out somewhere together?’ I glanced through the kitchen window at the cerulean-blue sky beyond the glass.
‘It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day. ’
‘Oh, no, but thank you for your kind invitation,’ she said, meticulously polite. ‘Forgive me, but on Sundays I always work at my English.’
Of course, it was Sunday. The vicissitudes of the last forty-eight hours meant I’d lost track of what day it was.
‘Sunday is meant to be a day of rest,’ I pointed out in tones of mock severity to her.
She responded in kind. ‘Not for me,’ she smiled, ‘I am a Muslim woman. In Islam, Friday is our holy day.’
‘Of course it is. I’m so sorry. Do you go to the mosque on Fridays, then?
’ I knew there was at least one mosque in Nice.
I’d seen one and heard the call to prayer on a previous visit.
But I asked almost idly. France has the highest proportion of Islamic citizens in Europe, but I know little about their religion apart from the fundamentalist terrorism we all know about even if we don’t want to.
Nicole certainly was not anything remotely resembling a fundamentalist.
‘Er, non. No. Yes. That is – maybe.’
She had averted her eyes, the question seeming to fluster her. Deciding to leave it at that, I stood up.
‘Fine. I’m not going to church, I’m probably what you would call a heathen, but I will go out for a bit later on if only for some exercise.’ I stretched and yawned. ‘Actually, what I’d really like now is very long soak in a very hot bath. Do you need our bathroom for a bit?’
‘There is no bath in our bathroom.’
I’d forgotten that. I’d have to make do with a shower. Oh, hells bells.
‘There is a very big bath upstairs you can use,’ Nicole said brightly.
‘But that’s for the family surely?’
The French girl threw me a curiously old-fashioned look for someone of her age. ‘There are four bathrooms upstairs. And one extra. Every room has a bathroom.’
‘Oh. Of course, en-suite bedrooms. Fine. Right, I’ll go and collect my stuff.’
Upstairs, the Villa Matisse was even shabbier than its lower echelon, with scuffed, distinctly bumpy parquet flooring in need of re-laying and old faded watercolours hanging lopsided at regular intervals along the walls.
The top of the marble staircase opened onto a small mezzanine sitting room furnished with a battered but comfortable-looking old sofa, a large television and some music paraphernalia.
The wall adjacent to the sofa was lined with shelves crammed with books and CDs, the other two boasting big windows with awe-inspiring views over Nice and the Bay of Anges.
Up a short flight of stairs leading off this area, a landing ran along the longest side of the Villa Matisse, opening on one side onto the full height ceiling of the vast paved entrance hall below.
Off this landing were five doors, all closed but for one standing ajar.
Through the gap as we passed by, I glimpsed an unmade bed with what was recognisably Luc Mandeville’s scruffy leather jacket chucked across it and his biker boots lying apart and abandoned at its foot.
‘Are you sure it’s okay for me to use a bathroom up here?’ I asked Nicole nervously. The last thing I felt like was an unexpectedly returned Mandeville finding his ‘cook’ naked as a jay bird in his bath. But the French girl opened a final door at the far end.
‘Nobody use him,’ she said with a shrug, leading me into an equally worn but in this case charmingly out-of-date bathroom, obviously, from its size and the look of its fireplace and ornate wall mouldings, carved out of what originally must have been a bedroom.
It was barely furnished apart from a vast armoire on one wall, its doors blotched and warped with damp, and a massive washbasin with dripping brass taps.
But there in its centre, stained with trails of limescale, reposed a huge, free-standing, cast-iron tub standing on rusty clawed feet.
Sunlight flooding in from the window was casting blue prisms of light on the chips in its enamelled roll-top.
‘I clean him for you?’ Nicole offered, wrinkling her nose.
‘Good heavens, no. Thank you, but it’s fine.’ I plonked my stuff down on a frayed wicker washstand next to the bath. ‘Oh, bother, I’ve forgotten my shampoo.’
I trooped back down the marble staircase behind her, but just as we reached the hall, the front door entry phone beeped.
‘I’ll get it,’ I said. ‘You go and get on with your English.’
‘Hello?’ I said into the receiver before suddenly remembering we were in France. ‘I mean – bonjour?’
A laugh echoed on the line. ‘Hi,’ came a female English voice. ‘Let me in, would you? It’s Jess.’
Jess? Who was Jess? No idea. Nevertheless, I pressed the button. If Jess had come to steal the Mandeville family silver, she was welcome to it.
‘How do you do?’ the woman said as we stood in the hall shaking hands. She clocked my expression. ‘Don’t panic. I haven’t come to steal the family silver.’
‘You’re welcome to it.’
‘Oh dear, bad as that, is it?’