Chapter Eight #3
‘I know. She texted me. I’d forgotten about it. I was… otherwise engaged.’
Otherwise engaged: you didn’t have to be Einstein to work out what that meant.
He had been with Caroline, although after the unimaginable horror of what he had just said about his father, this suddenly seemed unimportant, silly even.
Glancing at my watch, I saw the rice would be ready, so, getting up, I drained the pan and asked whether he’d like me to serve the food immediately.
‘No, keep it warm, please, and sit down again for a minute. We need to talk.’
Well, he’d actually said ‘please’. I had thought Luc Mandeville did not know the word, that it simply did not exist in his personal lexicon.
But it was beginning to look as though there was another side to Luc Mandeville, a much kinder side, a normal side.
A tiny smidgen of warmth – and vodka – crept into my heart.
‘Right,’ he’d begun, as I sat down. ‘The first thing is this.’ He paused for more vodka.
‘I’m going away for a couple of days so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you to run the show.
’ He put his empty glass down. ‘I’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning and returning on Christmas Eve with my daughter in tow. ’
Of course, he was going away with Caroline, the bodycon specialist, doubtless to some five-star hotel where he could enjoy her sculpted curves in private. My embryonic feeling of warmth ebbed away as quickly as surf on a shingle beach, leaving a distant thrumming in my ears.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yes.’ I got up. ‘You said you’re going away for a couple of days. Excuse me for a moment while I get my notebook.’
When I got back from my room, he was still sitting in the same place, this time sipping a glass of Bandol. He’d poured one for me too.
‘Are you all right?’ He peered across the table at me.
‘Yes, of course I am.’ I drank some wine, rather a lot, in one large gulp and arranged my notebook in best secretarial fashion. ‘What’s next?’ I said briskly.
‘Well…’ Hesitating, he looked me directly in the eye again but this time as if about to hand me a challenge. ‘I’d like you get hold of a Christmas tree,’ he said.
‘A Christmas tree?’
‘Yes, a Christmas tree – a real one, not one of those plastic abominations. And as big as possible. My mother wants a big Christmas tree.’
Drinking some more wine, I tried to dispel a sudden mental vision of me dragging a huge fir tree up the front steps of the Villa Matisse. Funny, but I’d never imagined my career as a chef would involve forestry.
‘There’s a box of decorations for it in the store room.
’ Mandeville paused to drink more wine. ‘You see, my mother wants a big family Christmas. And that includes a tree, although frankly, I don’t know what else she could possibly mean by “big”.
She knows as well as I do that we haven’t much in the way of family.
Never have had and these days nearly all the relations we did have are dead. Am I supposed to dig them up?’
I made a note.
‘What are you writing down?’ he said suspiciously.
‘Christmas tree.’ I threw him a sunny smile. ‘Right, I’ve got the tree, so suppose you now tell me how many guests you are expecting for Christmas dinner.’
Drinking again, he stroked his chin in a doubtful sort of manner. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t counted them.’
‘Fine.’ I drank some more too, despite by then being well aware the wine on top of the extra-strong vodka was seriously going to my head. ‘Well, how about you tell me who you’ve invited and then we can.’
‘Then we can what?’
‘Count them,’ I said patiently.
Despite equality, levelling out of the genders, you could still argue that the average male is fundamentally not designed to be good at anything remotely resembling domestic organisation.
My father, for instance, could command a battalion standing on his head but when it came to planning a drinks or dinner party for his own work colleagues, he would go into an immediate decline.
Of course, my father is at least three generations behind Luc Mandeville, and we are supposed to be in an emancipated age.
Neither of these facts made any difference when it came to the situation in which I found myself.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘There will be your mother and you for starters.’
‘I suppose so.’ He looked as if this was far from certain.
‘How about the elderly couple who came to dinner yesterday evening – have you invited them?’
‘God forbid!’ This seemed to wake him up.
‘They’re so boring!’ Then he looked guilty.
‘Look, I feel sorry for the poor devils, but I don’t want them here on Christmas Day.
Anyway, they’re not friends of mine, nor really of my mother, come to that.
They’re one of her charitable exercises,’ he said gloomily.
‘Okay. How about Jess, then? Have you invited her?’
The reaction was even stronger. He actually flopped backwards in his chair. ‘Jesus, whatever are you suggesting? My mother would spontaneously combust!’
Might be worth watching, I thought, but kept my counsel. Then suddenly he sprang into life.
‘Of course, there will be my daughter, Emma.’ He beamed with satisfaction. ‘She’s lovely. Everybody loves her.’
‘That’s nice,’ I said lightly. ‘How old is she?’
‘Eighteen.’
Oh, great. Now I could look forward to a teenager stomping and sulking about the place.
‘But if you knew her you wouldn’t think so. Emma’s actually very mature for her age. She’s wise beyond her years. In fact, she’s just brilliant in every way.’ Then he looked shamefaced. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve done it again.’
‘Done what again?’
‘Fallen foul of the Proud Parent Syndrome. I’m always doing it and it’s so tedious for others.’
Relenting slightly, I smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry. We all do it.’
‘It’s just that Emma, is—’ Breaking off mid-sentence, he stared at me. ‘What did you say? What did you just say?’
‘I said we all do it – the proud parent stuff. It’s perfectly natural when you love your child.’
He stared at me, looking completely astonished. ‘Are you saying you are a parent – a mother – you have a child?’
I almost laughed. ‘Why are you looking at me as if I’ve just confessed to being a serial killer? But yes, I have a son. He’s eleven,’ I added helpfully.
‘But where… where is he?’ Mandeville looked frantically round the room as if he expected Carl to suddenly leap out of a cupboard.
I chuckled. ‘Not here, obviously. He’s in Italy, spending Christmas and New Year skiing with his father.’
‘You’re married?’
‘No, I’m not married.’
This produced a little pause while Mandeville seemed to be trying to absorb what I’d said and I fiddled with my notebook to avoid his disconcertingly penetrating gaze.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last, filling our glasses with yet more wine and then sitting back. As if at a loss, he waved a mystified hand in the air before letting it fall with a thud onto the table. ‘It’s just I know so little about you.’
‘Everything is in my profile,’ I pointed out, ‘which the agency sent to your mother.’
‘I’ve never had proper sight of your profile.’ He looked defensive. ‘All I got was a text from my mother ordering me to get down here as quickly as possible because she’d engaged a cook.’
‘So you were expecting some beefy matron with forearms like pork chops and calling herself “Mrs” even though she’d never been married in her life.’
He gave an uncomfortable laugh. ‘Probably.’
You’re way out of date, buster, I thought, but decided to leave it there. However, he then surprised me.
‘I certainly didn’t expect you,’ he said with heavy emphasis on the last word.
‘Look,’ I said, flustered by the way he was studying me. ‘Do you mind very much if I serve the curry now? The rice will dry up.’ And I was by now really feeling the effect of the drink. Glancing at the bottle, I saw we were more than halfway down it.
He waved another hand, this time a careless one. ‘Sure.’
We ate largely in silence. Perhaps we both felt too much had been said.
But in any case, we were both eating quite voraciously, he because he was evidently extremely hungry and for my part on account of being desperate to mop up some alcohol, especially as Mandeville had opened the second bottle of Bandol and poured us both more.
Yes, I know I could have refused it, but it was one of those situations which seems by its very nature to necessitate a hell of a lot of drink, not least because Mandeville seemed incapable of telling me exactly how many guests he had invited to Christmas dinner.
Instead, he kept going off into little dreams, about what I wouldn’t care to imagine, save they certainly rendered him mentally absent.
‘Oh, I’ve asked Uncle Henri,’ he managed at length, as if I would know who Uncle Henry pronounced Onri was.
‘He’s not an uncle really but a third cousin of my father, God knows how many times removed.
But we’ve always called him “uncle”, and my father was extremely fond of him.
He’s in his eighties and… well… quite a character. ’
That description, I knew from experience, is generally a kind way of saying someone is difficult.
Great again. However, then I gleaned during further nagging that there would be Jules Croisset – I perked up a bit at that – as well as, possibly, a friend, gender unspecified, of the brilliant daughter, Emma.
And, of course, there would be Bodycon Incorporated, Caroline.
‘She’s flying down from Paris,’ Mandeville informed me, as if she were a bat swooping from the roof beams.
As to what he wanted me to cook for Christmas dinner, this fairly essential consideration was also left vague.
‘Oh, turkey and all that shit, you know.’ He levered an envelope out of his back trouser pocket at this point.
It contained one thousand euros, he told me, to pay for everything.
I didn’t bother to protest at it being far too much, partly because it might not be and partly because I’d just remembered something vital, that being whether the chicken-phobic Mrs Susan Mandeville would eat turkey.
‘Ohmigod, no!’ He affected a brow-mopping gesture. ‘Thank God you said that.’ Never mind, there was steak in the freezer, I told him, tons of it. ‘Good, but it must be burnt,’ he said with emphasis. ‘My mother only eats steak if it is burnt.’
I said that would be fine. There wasn’t much else I could say. Then, declining my offer of some fruit and cheese for dessert – the unused tarte tatin from the previous evening was beyond resuscitation and I hadn’t had time to make a fresh pudding – Mandeville lumbered to his feet.
‘I’m very tired,’ he said, not quite but almost apologetically. ‘So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m turning in.’
‘Can I just ask one last question?’
He smothered a cavernous yawn. ‘Go on.’
‘You said earlier that your daughter will be arriving on Christmas Eve. Will you be requiring me to cook dinner for you that evening, then?’
For a second or two, he looked again bemused. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Right, that’s fine, of course, but how many for? You said she had invited a friend for Christmas. Will that friend be joining you for dinner? I’m afraid I do need to know how many guests I’m catering for.’
He still seemed at sea, so I tried again.
‘Okay,’ I said patiently. ‘For example, will your daughter’s mother also be joining you?
’ I had put it clumsily but could think of no more diplomatic way to ask.
Mandeville, I had deduced, was almost certainly divorced, but people are pretty laid back these days about exes on the family gathering front.
‘My daughter’s mother?’ He halted en route to shuffling to the door and turned.
I nodded.
‘My wife?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at me. ‘My wife is dead,’ he said.