Chapter Twelve
Thursday morning, Christmas Eve, at the Villa Matisse dawned mild and heavily overcast. Stepping out for a quick power walk to get myself moving and thoroughly alert before getting down – at last!
– to some cooking, everywhere looked colourless and drab, the distant Mediterranean a motionless metallic grey.
It’s singular how dull the C?te d’Azur can appear without the sun, the vibrant ochres and blues of the architecture drained and flat, like party balloons losing their air.
The tubs and window boxes of scarlet geraniums strike the only lively note but seem oddly gaudy, unseemly, like someone wearing a red dress to a funeral.
It started to drizzle as I left the Villa Matisse by the front door, the hibiscus shrubs promptly closing up their trumpet flowers as if signalling their disgust. Walking briskly along the elegant avenue, besides looking damp and depressed, everywhere looked uncharacteristically familiar; I could have been in a suburban road in the English Midlands, the sort lined with sub-Lutyens manors and mock-Tudor mansions with immaculate BMWs sitting on gravel driveways.
It should have made me feel comforted, at home, not that I have a sub-Lutyens manor or a BMW, you understand.
Carl and I live in a messy flat converted from a Georgian three-storey house on a busy street in a nice but unremarkable Midlands town.
But I felt better nonetheless, principally because at last I had something to do.
Aside from a trip out yesterday shopping for the Christmas food, I’d done nothing for two days, which had left me feeling not simply bored and dissatisfied and sorry for myself but weirdly ashamed.
I couldn’t remember when I had last spent such an unproductive length of time.
By mid-afternoon yesterday, however, I was back online.
Everything was prepared and ready for Luc’s return with his daughter this evening, a beautiful boeuf bourguignon bubbling in the Bocuse, various other tempting treats and delicacies lying in wait.
I’d even made some ice cream by hand, there being no ice-cream maker at the Villa Matisse, to go with some gratifyingly successful salted caramel brownies.
(I’m not the greatest pastry chef but I do try.) Best of all, Nicole had reverted to her previous cheerful, helpful self, doing as much as she could to assist with everything.
From creeping me out, the Villa Matisse felt warm and welcoming, Christmassy even, at least in the kitchen.
There’d been no word from Luc. ‘Oh, I expect he’s got his hands full with Madame Caroline,’ Billy had said before he toddled off at lunchtime, the only low note and uncharacteristically leery of him.
Now, as Nicole and I sat down for a break with a cup of tea and a sneaky testing of the brownies, it occurred to me that Billy was almost certainly right, and Luc and the marvellous daughter would be arriving with Caroline de something in tow.
‘Nicole!’
‘Emma!’
‘How lovely to see you!’
‘Et toi aussi, mon amie!’
Conventional greetings maybe, but as the two young women embraced it was clear that they were genuinely fond of each other. Breaking the hug, Emma Mandeville turned to me.
‘Hi!’ she cried, her hand extended. ‘You must be Alix. It’s great to meet you.’
‘Hello.’ As we shook hands, I glanced at Luc to where he was dumping a vast array of carrier bags bulging with Christmas presents on the kitchen table.
‘Hello, Alix,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Everything okay?’
‘Fine, thanks,’ I mumbled, feeling suddenly oddly shy with him. I turned back to Emma Mandeville to cover it. ‘How was your flight?’ I asked her.
‘Good, thanks, wasn’t it, Dad?’
‘Oh!’ I couldn’t help my surprise. ‘You flew out together, then.’
‘Yeah, met up at Heathrow which was, like, rammed. So was the plane. But that’s Christmas, I guess.’
‘I expect so.’ I was trying to get my head round the fact that it seemed Luc had not been with Caroline after all. Emma started sorting through the bags on the table.
‘Caroline got me and Dad an upgrade, though. She pulled strings. Good, but honestly, that woman flies so much there ought to be a clause in the Kyoto protocol just for her. She’s Public Enemy Number One when it comes to global warming.
Now, must put Gran’s prezzies under the tree.
That is,’ she said, appealing to me, ‘we have got a Christmas tree, haven’t we? ’
‘Um… well, yes, sort of,’ I stammered, my head spinning with the Caroline stuff.
Nicole came to my rescue. ‘He is not well, the tree,’ she announced gravely. ‘His pins are descending.’
‘Eh?’ said Luc.
‘The needles are dropping off,’ I explained. ‘I’m afraid it’s a case of terminal alopecia.’
Everyone laughed.
‘Well, thanks for getting one anyway,’ Luc said to me.
‘Oh, the tree wasn’t really my doing,’ I began, only to be distracted by Emma Mandeville, who was rapidly unloading one of the carrier bags, disgorging a box of Christmas crackers – ‘No snaps. Security made us take them out at check-in’ – followed by three large tins of Heinz mulligatawny soup.
I hadn’t seen mulligatawny soup since I was a small child and my mother used to buy it in what was then the NAAFI for my grandfather when he came to stay.
I was amazed it still existed. Emma saw me looking at the tins.
‘For my grandmother,’ she said, pulling a face.
‘Gran’s crazy about mulligatawny soup. In fact, aside from steak burnt to a cinder, it’s pretty much the only thing she’ll eat.
But, like, whatever keeps her happy.’ She turned to Nicole.
‘Come on, Nic. Show me this sick tree.’ Her eyes slid sideways at her father.
‘And before you start in on me, Dad, with one of your endless lectures about using slang, I meant “sick” in the literal sense of the word.’ Scooping up carrier bags, the two young women disappeared, chattering together.
Luc watched them go then looked at me. ‘I suppose I do give her a bit of a hard time. But I don’t understand why an intelligent, educated young woman wants to sound like someone out of Love Island.’
‘You don’t watch Love Island?’ I exclaimed, astonished out of my shyness.
‘Purely for research purposes,’ he said with dignity. Then he blushed. ‘Okay, I find it horribly fascinating.’
I smiled at him. ‘Me too.’ I hesitated. ‘But you do know, don’t you, that the more you react to your daughter using slang, the more she will use it?’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, I do know, but I can’t seem to stop myself. I’m prissy about language anyway, for reasons I won’t bore you with.’
He looked so downcast I wanted to cheer him up.
‘Well, your daughter’s lovely,’ I said, meaning it.
Emma Mandeville was slim and tall, nearly as tall as me.
When she and Nicole had embraced, she had dwarfed the petite French girl.
With a shock of tawny hair in fashionable disarray, her face, with its clear blue eyes and defined, almost masculine features, was arresting, especially when she smiled.
You might not describe her as pretty exactly, but you’d certainly notice her in a crowd. ‘And she’s astonishingly like you.’
‘Poor girl,’ Luc said, but he looked happier. ‘I suppose she does take after me physically. However, fortunately, she has inherited her mother’s nature. I wouldn’t wish my utterly bloody nature on anybody.’
‘You’re all right,’ I said gruffly and then, embarrassed by what I had said, quickly qualified this. ‘I mean, you must be if you watch Love Island.’
‘Oh, don’t spoil it.’
There was a pause as we smiled at each other. ‘Sorry for dumping everything on you,’ he said. ‘I meant to phone actually, to see how you were getting on.’
‘That’s okay. I expect you’ve been busy.’
‘Yes, I have, but it wasn’t that.’ He hesitated. ‘I have been busy sorting things out on my father’s estate. But it wasn’t that.’ He considered me for a second. ‘The truth is, I didn’t know quite what to say to you.’
‘About what?’
Before he could reply, Emma bounced back into the room. ‘You’ve gotta come and see this tree, Dad,’ she said, seizing her father’s arm. ‘It’s, like, a twig. Gran’s going to go ape.’
I spent the next hour or so finishing off the prep for dinner that evening. Emma disappeared upstairs to unpack while her father went to watch television in the gallery. Around five, I made tea for everyone, which Emma insisted on having in the kitchen.
‘We’ll eat in here tonight as well,’ she announced. ‘And you and Nic must join me and Dad.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘Nicole’s gone to the mosque. She won’t be back till quite late.’
Luc looked up from breaking apart a brownie. ‘Has she?’ He seemed put out. ‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea. We agreed she’d keep away from the mosque, at least for the time being.’
This baffled me all over again. What was going on here? But before I could ask, Emma cut in.
‘Dad, leave her be. It’s her religion, her faith. Leave her be.’
Luc looked thoughtfully at his daughter but said nothing. Emma chattered blithely on.
‘It’ll be the same with Josh tomorrow. Josh is my friend from school,’ she explained to me.
‘We came out on the same flight, although Joshy was stuck back in economy, poor sod. His parents live here part of the time, but he’d spent most of the dosh his dad gave him for a decent ticket out.
’ She giggled. ‘Josh is Jewish, so Christmas doesn’t mean a thing to him. ’
‘Is he coming tomorrow?’ asked Luc.
‘Yeah. Like, wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
‘Does he have any special dietary requirements?’ I asked, still aware of my professional responsibilities even if nobody else was.
‘Nah. Doesn’t give a shit about all that.’ Emma flicked her eyes mischievously at her father. ‘Hey, do you know what, Dad? Josh says I’m spicy.’
‘Spicy! Are you a curry or—’ Catching my eye, Luc stopped dead mid-sentence. ‘Well, that’s nice of him, isn’t it?’ he finished, a touch over-heartily.