Chapter Ten #2
But Jess swept on. ‘So, whether he fictionalised his illustrious bloodline or not was unimportant. Johnny struck gold – or thought he had. He was young, handsome, single and rich, Susan even younger, very pretty and only too willing to be swept off to what she imagined to be the high life on the C?te d’Azur.
I think she had visions of the likes of Somerset Maugham and F.
Scott Fitzgerald squiring her about. In reality, not only had the hoi polloi all buggered off by then, but the Villa Matisse was at that stage almost a derelict dump.
Having practically entirely demolished the original house, Johnny was having a new one constructed.
Well, there was no way Susan was living on a building site, so it was a disaster from the get-go.
Another delusion, but this time a tragic one on both sides. ’
‘You make it sound like King Charles and poor old Princess Di.’
‘Oh, it was far worse than that,’ Jess said dismissively.
‘So they divorced.’
‘Nope. They never divorced. Susan refused to countenance divorce.’
I frowned. ‘I don’t think you can refuse to divorce under English law,’ I said, but Jess dismissed this too with another wave of her hand.
‘If you say so, but anyway, Johnny was Catholic, seriously Catholic.’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah indeed.’ Jess looked at me again, this time as if she was about to test me on something. ‘Do you know what I mean by a “remittance man”?’ she said.
I’d heard my father use the term. ‘A black sheep of the family? Someone whose relatives pay him to keep away – literally, I mean?’
‘That’s right. Well, that’s what Johnny did in effect with Susan.
He paid her to keep away. A lot of money, and by a lot, I mean millions.
He paid her whatever she demanded. And he carried on paying her whatever she demanded until the day he died.
And I tell you, did she demand! In fact, she demanded to such an extent we would have gone under if I hadn’t kept us afloat with the income from this place.
’ As Jess paused to glance briefly round her restaurant, I did the same.
‘Well, it’s very nice,’ I said bracingly. But Jess was yet again not to be deflected. Her eyes swivelled back to me.
‘She bled us dry,’ she said icily.
Our starters arrived, and in the short hiatus that followed as we began eating, I suddenly realised why Jess was telling me all this.
It wasn’t about Luc, or Johnny or even Susan.
It was about herself. It was about her love for a man she could never marry and the vast sums of money that he’d spent on the woman who had prevented her own fulfilment.
It was horribly sad, and the rest of the story she told was even sadder.
By the time Luc was a couple of months old, Jess told me, Susan had effectively jumped ship and high-tailed it back to England.
She had always refused to learn a word of French, she had always loathed the half-built Villa Matisse and, above all, her pregnancy as soon as the ink on the marriage licence had dried, inevitably followed by a baby, had not been part of the bargain as she had seen it.
‘I’m not sure what she thought marriage was for.
’ Luc was brought up in Nice with his father and Susan did not see him again until he was eleven and sent to boarding school in England.
At which point, as Jess would have it, it suddenly dawned on Susan that not only was her son more than rather clever – ‘He’s brilliant, actually’ – but that she could swan around in designer outfits at speech days and at last be the envy of all.
I was sure I did not want to hear any more.
We’d eaten the starters, a simple but delicious selection of typically mediterranean hors d’oeuvres, and our main course of some kind of beef casserole had arrived.
Its aroma alone would have tempted the most recalcitrant of appetites had I not suddenly lost mine.
Jess, however, had not done with me. She came on the scene when Luc was about six, she told me.
Luc came home from school one day to find a strange woman living in his father’s house.
But then, there had over the years been many strange women living in his father’s house.
Johnny’s devout Catholicism did not, it seemed, extend to celibacy.
‘Yet he was never ever anything but completely faithful to me,’ she declared as if expecting me to challenge this.
‘Of course,’ I murmured.
A pause followed this while Jess rapidly mopped up beef casserole with a fork and I pushed mine round the plate.
‘And do you know what, Alix? Luc was always fine with me. I became his mother.’ She gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? I wasn’t allowed a baby of my own; instead, I was obliged to mummy her cast-off.’
‘What do you mean you weren’t allowed a baby of your own?’
‘Johnny didn’t want any more children after Luc.’
‘But you said he was Catholic.’
‘Oh, fuck that for a game of soldiers. He got round it on the old saw of “birth control is a matter for your own conscience”. They all do it – Catholics, I mean.’
I said nothing. It struck me that if the late, lamented Johnny Mandeville had been possessed of a conscience, he’d had it well under control.
‘When sometimes it was possible, I cheated, of course; I lied to Johnny about my using birth control. But still nothing happened. I think you’ve both got to want a baby for it to work, and, courtesy of Susan buggering up his life, Johnny didn’t want a child with me.’
There was a pause. ‘Well, at least you had Luc,’ I said presently if feebly.
‘Yes, I had Luc,’ she sighed, ‘and Luc was a nice kid. Do you know something, Alix?’
Oh God, I felt something like panic – when was this going to end?
‘Johnny once told me that when Luc was very small, about four or five, he used to go up to whichever strange woman was around the Villa Matisse at the time and ask her whether she was his mummy.’ Then she laughed.
‘Weird, isn’t it? Especially when you see what a lovely guy Luc became and is now, although, of course, losing Esther changed him forever. ’
‘Esther? Was Esther his late wife?’
‘Oh, you know. Yes, that’s right. She was. It was all desperately tragic. And even though it’s now over seven years since she died, Luc has never got over it. In fact, I don’t think he ever will.’
I stared dumbly at Jess, suddenly feeling slightly sick.
‘Are you all right, Alix?’
Jess had stopped eating and was looking at me in concern. I dropped my eyes. ‘Yes, of course.’ Luc Mandeville and his dead wife were nothing to do with me.
Jess swivelled round in her seat to look at the blackboard menu. ‘What you need is some pudding,’ she said.
The rest of the lunch passed off without anything of great significance being said.
Jess seemed to have shot her bolt and, with the exception of a few observations, not always flattering, on the subject of Jules Croisset – ‘Watch him; he’s nice but you need to be on your guard’ – the conversation hinged on anodyne topics: the weather in Nice, where I had trained, how tourism on the C?te d’Azur had become a monster.
I did, however, casually mention Nicole, saying I was a little puzzled as to what she was actually doing at the Villa Matisse. ‘Was she an au pair or something?’
But Jess didn’t seem particularly interested in the question, unless it was that she did not want to answer it.
Nicole was a sort of student, she said vaguely, doing a bit of light housework in return for her accommodation while she studied English.
This was still unsatisfactory, but it looked as though that was as much as I was going to get.
Nevertheless, it set my mind at rest to a degree in that even given I had not known Jess very long, I could not believe she would countenance anything wrong or inappropriate where Nicole was concerned.
Come to that, despite his ability to be unpleasant, I could not believe it of Luc Mandeville either.
It must have been, as I had thought, Tom and his nasty mind.
Leaving around three o’clock, I wandered down through the labyrinth of narrow streets leading from Jess’s restaurant to the Cours Saleya, ostensibly in search of Christmas food but in reality wholly preoccupied with everything she had told me.
I could not help pitying the woman. Jess was obviously irredeemably bitter.
Then Esther, Luc Mandeville’s wife, whose tragic death he had never got over.
Yet, leaving her aside, it was a far more poignant image that I could not get out of my head; the image of a little boy called Luc asking woman after strange woman whether she was his mummy.