Chapter Eleven
‘Day four in Stalag III.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry.’ Billy frogged his mouth in apology. ‘I was just making a joke.’
‘Is that how you think of the Villa Matisse – as being like a prisoner-of-war camp?’
‘Well, it is a bit, isn’t it?’
‘Like The Great Escape?’ I suddenly felt hysterical. ‘Shall we tunnel out?’
Billy chuckled. ‘Nah, that’s not what I meant. Although you know something, Alix – there is a tunnel here, one right under the house. There’s an old door to it low down in the wall outside. It’s still open but nobody uses it. It’s something from, like, the original house here back before the war.’
‘Heavens.’
‘No, what I meant was there’s no real life here, nothing happening. It’s like a… a dead place. People come and people go but nothing changes, nothing, like, moves.’ He gestured at Nicole and me. ‘While we three fart about filling in the hours.’
I stared at him, too taken aback by this further shaft of perceptiveness to agree.
‘Anyway, it’s your fourth day at the Villa Matisse, Miss Alix,’ Billy said more cheerfully. ‘So I just thought you might be feeling the strain.’
Ohmigod, he was right. ‘I can’t believe I’ve only been here four days!’
‘There you go.’ He laughed again. ‘That’s what I mean. Gets to you, don’t it?’
Four days, or rather, it was only the fourth day.
That shocked me, or rather it shocked me how isolated and abandoned I was feeling.
I have always thought of myself as self-reliant, independent; I suppose I have prided myself on my independence and self-reliance.
‘Pride!’ I suddenly heard the voice of my late grandmother echo in my head.
‘Why is everyone so proud of themselves these days? Has everyone forgotten pride is a sin, one of the Seven Deadly Sins?’ It was her favourite rant, one of her many rants, and one that always ended with, ‘In my day you’d have had your ears boxed for saying you were proud of yourself.
That was showing off, and in my day showing off was not allowed.
’ Then she would also always add, ‘People even applaud themselves these days!’ Maybe that makes Gran sound a pain – she wasn’t; she was lovely.
And if anyone embodied self-reliance and independence, it was my grandmother.
Widowed in her sixties when I was still a child, after a genuine but appropriate period of grief – Gran never did anything that wasn’t genuine and appropriate – she sold what had been my mother’s family home in Surrey, moved to a zingy little flat in central London, and set about occupying the rest of her days with all the pastimes in which her husband had been firmly disinterested.
She was a highly educated woman: ‘A bluestocking they would have called me in my mother’s day,’ she said.
And, never having had much opportunity to express this in her own life – my grandfather being a diplomat meant their married life was largely spent abroad – her culture and intelligence found an outlet in me.
When I was at boarding school during the times my parents were overseas, she took me out every weekend, often for the whole weekend.
We did interesting stuff together: art exhibitions, trips to stately homes, the theatre, seeing the latest film releases at the cinema, which she usually thought a load of rubbish unless they had Harrison Ford in them but was decent enough to keep quiet about it.
Notwithstanding my being very young, she even treated me to lunches and dinners in fashionable restaurants which is where my fascination with good food and its preparation started.
More vitally, going as far back as I can remember, she always stood up for me.
She was my champion, particularly when it came to my relationship with my mother, whose mother she was.
Any criticism of me from Mum and Gran would step in.
‘Leave the girl be!’ Not that my mother had anything like a downer on me, you understand.
She’s always been great. But if Mum ever experienced disenchantment with either of her offspring, I was the preferred target.
I was too thin, I was too fat, I wasn’t working hard enough at school, I didn’t pay attention when asked to do something, I didn’t keep my bedroom tidy, I didn’t help round the house enough; the litany of crimes must be familiar to most daughters.
Somehow, it was never applied to my brother.
David never did a thing round the house that I can remember; his bedroom was a permanent tip and his response to being asked to do something was to say he was just off to play cricket, or rugby, or he had homework to do – even if he hadn’t.
Gran would shrug if I complained, saying it was just the way it was, things were different for boys and there was no point in railing against it.
She liked David of course, loved him, but I was her main focus.
From being around all the time when I was at school, the same thing continued through my university days.
Basically, until the day she died, she was always there, not forgetting of course that so were my parents, if in the background, and even dear old Ros.
Yet even with all this support, I had always assumed going to boarding school meant I was more capable of managing on my own than most people.
I was my own person. Now, at the Villa Matisse, it dawned on me that any so-called sense of independence and self-reliance where I was concerned was a chimera.
I’d never in my life been thrown entirely on my own resources, and now I was, I found myself knocked for six.
***
Yesterday afternoon had proved it. Once I finished roaming aimlessly around in the Cours Saleya – the only thing I had bought was a couple of distinctly dubious-looking jars of what seemed to be homemade mincemeat from an ancient Frenchwoman with a complexion the colour and texture of a sun-dried tomato – I walked down to the promenade.
There were masses of people about. It’s funny how you can feel even more lonely in a crowd, but I looked resolutely at the Mediterranean, its Dufy-blue surface ruffled into silken folds by the breeze.
It was very pretty, the beach packed with tourists, or at least you could safely assume they were tourists given nearly all of them were wearing T-shirts and shorts and some of the women even in bikinis.
One or two of the latter were topless. Their tits must have been perishing.
As Billy had predicted, there was snow capping the Alpes-Maritimes accounting for the near-freezing temperature.
But the tourists, it seemed, weren’t going to let a little thing like that put them off.
This was their holiday on the French Riviera, and they were going to get a suntan if it killed them.
I guessed you could also safely assume they were all British.
I sat on the promenade for a bit, squashed up at the end of a bench next to an English family in, yes, shorts and T-shirts.
Nearly dying of exposure might have been what had seemed to make the parents so bad-tempered, because all they were doing was shrieking at a small boy of six or seven who was gallivanting about all over the place, either hyperactive or more likely trying get some warmth into his little body.
‘Lucifer!’ his father kept yelling at him.
Lucifer? It couldn’t be that; nobody calls their child after the Devil, tempting as it might be occasionally.
I tried not to look shocked, eventually sidling off and reluctantly making my way back through the sparkling afternoon to the Villa Matisse.
There was nowhere else to go. Sightseeing or museums did not appeal in my present mood, and it was too cold to be comfortable sitting out.
It was even distinctly chilly inside when I let myself in through the front door of the Villa Matisse.
Everywhere was silent with the kind of silence you instinctively know means nobody is at home.
I tapped on Nicole’s door, but there was no reply, and when I opened it in case she had her headphones on and hadn’t heard me, it seemed she had gone out.
Billy of course had long gone home, and the rebarbative Tom was never around in the afternoon.
The latter should have been a relief, except it felt so disturbing being the sole occupant of the Villa Matisse that even his creepy company might have been welcome.
I went to my room and lay down on the bed, fighting the urge to ring Carl.
We had agreed at the outset we would not video call or phone or text each other all the time.
I had explained to him that, with his agreement, it would be good for him while we were apart to gain a sense of independence.
Independence! Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
It seemed I had unexpectedly developed a powerful albeit normal longing not just to hear my son’s voice but actually to have him moping down the line about how much he was missing me.
I even briefly imagined him saying he was unhappy, a thought so mean it shocked me.
Perhaps I simply wanted him to need me. No, that was incorrect.
I needed him. And that was not fair. Besides, although you could not fault him for being loving, my son is actually quite a self-contained child.
Displays of emotion embarrass him. He squirms when people spill out their hearts.
Anyway, he would be on the slopes because it was still light. And he would be enjoying himself.
In the event, he texted me – at six o’clock French time on the dot – to say he was spending the evening at the ice-rink with his half-sisters. Really groovy, Mum, ’cos they have really cool music here. I could do nothing but message back my delight at him having such a terrific time.