Chapter Seven
‘Yesterday you looked like the loveliest woman in Nice, but today, with your hair about your shoulders, you look like the most loveliest anywhere in the world.’ This observation came from Jules Croisset as he expertly pronged an oyster out of its shell.
‘Or am I not allowed to say that?’ With a little sigh, he threw back his head to swallow the oyster.
‘You’ve truly no idea what sexual fascism has done to my gender when it comes to us venturing to compliment a woman on her appearance. ’
I smothered my amusement. ‘No, you’re not allowed to say it,’ I replied with a dead straight face.
‘Oh dear.’ He looked mortified. ‘Then I apologise.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ I smiled across the table at him. ‘I’m teasing you. It was a nice compliment. Except…’ I deliberately hesitated as I speared too an oyster. We’d both ordered six each.
‘Except what?’
‘Except you can’t say “the most loveliest”. “Loveliest” is the superlative and therefore you should not qualify it with “most”.’
For a second he looked baffled but then gave a great honk of laughter. ‘That’s very good,’ he croaked, wiping his eyes on a blue silk handkerchief which he stuffed back in his trouser pocket. ‘Very good.’
***
As to whether I looked the loveliest, most or not, I wouldn’t care to say.
When Jules telephoned to ask me out to lunch while I was hiccupping, dripping and topless on my bed, I flew into a minor panic, the way you do, as to what I could wear.
I hadn’t brought much in the way of clothes with me to the Villa Matisse; work stuff, obviously, a bunch of T-shirts, jeans and jumpers, a skirt or two, but nothing particularly smart.
I’d not anticipated any occasion when I might need to ramp it up.
Besides, I’m personally not greatly into clothes or fashion, come to that.
With my height, most dresses I try on make me look as though I’ve been poured into a test tube.
Skirts tend to be indecently short or cut me off mid-shin, which isn’t a good look when you’ve also been blessed with big feet.
There was the beautiful jacket Giancarlo had given me for Christmas, but Jules had already seen me in that.
Oh, what did it matter? I wasn’t after the guy, was I?
At least I had washed my hair. I could leave that loose and artistically dishevelled – actually, after it’s been washed it does artistically dishevelled of its own accord – which would hopefully distract attention from what I was wearing.
Surprisingly, however, the moment I told Nicole I was going out to lunch, adding an aside little moan about my sartorial dilemma, she whipped back into her room to unearth an exquisite blouse which, even more surprisingly, turned out to fit me perfectly.
‘He is too big for me,’ Nicole said rather disconcertingly.
But I promptly forgave her that given the blouse was a work of art.
You could have dismissed it as peasant style, earth mother-type hippy.
But it was too classy for that. Made of heavy, slightly off-white linen, with buttons down the front and a stand-up mandarin collar, it was form-fitted and completely plain except for the very wide sleeves gathered at the cuff and lightly embroidered with flowers in cream silk thread.
Actually, it wasn’t at all the sort of thing I’d normally buy or wear, for everyday or Sunday best, but, vanity aside, it became me extraordinarily well.
I decided to wear it with black jeans and my old brown boots.
Giancarlo’s jacket would look great with it.
‘Folklorique,’ Nicole said laconically, twitching the puffed sleeves of the blouse into shape as I obediently posed for her.
‘But it’s beautiful. Where on earth did you get it?’
The French girl averted her eyes in the way I now knew was her defence mechanism when she didn’t want to pursue a question. ‘I forget,’ she said vaguely. ‘Maybe one time I am knowing a person who make these things.’
Another puzzle. To me, the blouse looked handmade, by an expert, and was probably very expensive, but I knew better than to persist. Instead, I settled for thanking her profusely, and now here I was in a lovely restaurant eating oysters with a charming Belgian telling me I looked the loveliest. I wonder.
Perhaps all these years I’ve been missing a trick when it comes to how to dress.
Jules had offered me a choice when he had collected me from the Villa Matisse.
We could go back to the Cours Saleya to the restaurant that he had mentioned when we first met.
‘The one with intellectuals eating their heads off?’ Or, he had suggested with a smile, he could take me on a ‘magical mystery tour’ – the old Beatles song of the same name was playing on his car stereo as he said this.
I opted for that. In the event, however, Jules’s tour proved not to have any mystery about it, for me at least, as, driving us out of Nice along the coast in the direction of Antibes, we soon turned inland and in due course ended up in the hillside village of Biot.
I had been there before, several times. But I loved the place, so no problem.
Biot prefers to call itself a village even if now it’s really a town, mainly because a village is what it originally was but also because ‘village’ sounds more bijou, and that is exactly what Biot is – bijou.
Once a fortified settlement dating back to long before medieval times, it’s a centre for glass-blowing, art and ceramics, and, inevitably, tourism.
Yet the ancient buildings and cobbled lanes winding about its centre still cannot fail to captivate.
I had told Jules that I felt in need of a bit of exercise, so, after he had parked the car, we had set off walking, quite soon giving into the temptation offered by the galleries and gift shops lining the picturesque streets.
‘I’m afraid I must buy my mother a present for Christmas.’ Jules looked shamefaced, as if he needed an excuse for his interest in retail therapy – the way men often do.
I had the same notion about getting something for Carl, but I hadn’t told Jules that I had a son yet.
I hadn’t told him anything very much. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him.
I did. He was, as Jess had said, a nice guy and seemed entirely decent and trustworthy.
But somehow I had an inkling that Jules Croisset might be just a tiny bit of a gossip.
The fact that he had talked about me to Jess had put me on my guard.
I don’t believe I’m neurotically secretive or even a particularly private person, but I didn’t relish the idea that anything I said about myself would find its way back to the Villa Matisse or, more discouragingly, Luc Mandeville.
So I had kept the conversation when we were in the car deliberately impersonal, at least as far as I was concerned; not unfriendly, just neutral.
Instead, I asked him about himself, genuinely interested, I emphasise, because he was interesting.
He was divorced, he told me, with a daughter of twenty-two who was currently travelling in South America on a post-university gap year.
‘I worry about her every single day,’ he confessed, and at that point, seeing he really meant what he said, I felt I was being curmudgeonly about being so closed-mouthed with him.
I probably was being neurotic, but with my father in the army I had plenty of experience of Brits abroad.
In Germany, Belize, Cyprus, Nigeria, however well they assimilate, the expatriate British form their own community, usually quite an incestuous one in the social sense.
Everybody knows everybody’s business, all the time; it can make you wary of saying or doing anything unless you want everybody else to know about it.
Well, it was doubtless exactly the same in Nice.
With her little bistro, Jess, pleasant as she was, was probably a founder member of such a set-up.
And, even though he was of course Belgian, Jules Croisset, with his fluent English, had probably latched onto that.
But what did it matter? I wasn’t ashamed of having a son, for heaven’s sake – quite the reverse, in fact; Carl is my greatest achievement. So I told him.
‘That’s lovely,’ he said, adding rather sadly, ‘I always wanted a son,’ as if it were now out of the question. But then, as if immediately aware he had breached his own personal code of privacy, he hurried on.
He was based in Brussels, he’d told me, where he kept a small apartment.
But he spent much of his working time down here on the C?te d’Azur where he had another small apartment.
He owned and ran an online company that organised tours to Provence and the south of France for retired wealthy British holidaymakers in search of the whole cultural experience that this part of France could offer.
They weren’t people after beaches and suntans and pizza and chips and getting off their heads on Bandol.
They wanted the art, the art of Picasso, of Matisse and Renoir, and above all they wanted to experience a Riviera that harked back to the days of Somerset Maugham, of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald.
Given the latter was a world that no longer existed, it was quite a challenge, he admitted. But he enjoyed it.
‘It’s very demanding but very satisfying,’ he told me with a smile. ‘At least, it is when you get it right.’