Chapter Thirteen #2
As Christmas dinners go, it could have been worse.
Looking back afterwards, I realised it could have been a lot worse if only on account of the mismatched collection of guests.
But then, that’s typical Christmas, isn’t it?
You end up sitting down to a meal with people you probably don’t see from one year’s end to the next – you probably don’t even like them much.
None of you know what to say to each other, which is where the Christmas code of behaviour kicks in.
Not only does this entail acting as though your cup is filled, but it demands uproarious amusement on everyone’s part at everyone’s slightest utterance.
By the time three o’clock in the afternoon arrives, and everyone, rabid anti-monarchists included, sits down to watch whoever is on the throne performing their particular Christmas act, a kind of reverence generally associated with spiritual worship takes over, not out of respect but because we’re all too bloody shattered with trying to be nice to do anything else.
So it was at the Villa Matisse. With one glaring exception: everyone seemed disposed to comport themselves pleasantly, laughing obligingly at the chronic cracker mottos, eulogising about the food as if they’d never had something so ambrosial in their life and determinedly preserving the pretence that they were ecstatic to be in each other’s company.
In other words, honour was satisfied. This was Christmas, and this was how you behave.
Except for Jules. When it came to Jules, it quickly became plain that he was bent on mischief.
Indeed, where Caroline was concerned, Jules had seemed bent on nothing short of malice.
It began over the turkey. Up until that point, everything had been going swimmingly, the prawn cocktail going down a treat and Susan Mandeville happily plunged to such a depth in her vat of mulligatawny soup I feared she might suffer the bends if she ever came up for air.
Then, ‘I hear you’ve a second book coming out in the spring,’ Jules remarked to Luc as I discretely placed an individual dish of sprouts cooked without lardons next to Josh’s plate.
Whatever Emma, who was kindly helping me serve, might have said about her Jewish friend’s food requirements, I wasn’t taking any risks; he had declined the pigs in blankets, I noticed.
‘Thank you,’ he murmured, with a sweet little smile of gratitude up at me.
Everybody else was looking at Luc, there being too few guests too close to each other round the table to indulge in separate conversations.
Emma had kindly set the table earlier, quite nicely if not quite up to Nicole’s standards, but she hadn’t extended it with the extra leaf.
Personally, if it had been me arranging the table, I would have extended it with every leaf a tree could provide.
‘Indeed he has!’ squawked Caroline, in response to Jules’s remark and laying a proprietorial hand on Luc’s arm. She had reached that tactile stage of being so bent on establishing ownership I wondered she didn’t sit in his lap. ‘And it’s brilliant!’
‘You’ve read it?’ queried Jules, helping himself to gravy.
‘Of course.’ Caroline gave a haughty little toss of her head.
‘Ah.’ Jules smiled at her. ‘Then you can tell us what it’s about.’
‘What?’
‘The subject,’ Jules clarified with another charming smile. ‘You can tell us what Luc’s latest book is about.’
‘Um… history.’
Jules sagely nodded his head. ‘History,’ he echoed, affecting to consider. ‘History. How enlightening.’
‘Shut up, Jules,’ Luc said mildly, scooping a ladle of bread sauce onto his plate. ‘You know as well as I do that my second book is the second I’ve written about the French Revolution, given, as you again know very well, the French Revolution is my specialism.’
‘That’s exactly what I said!’ cried Caroline.
‘Of course you did,’ put in Susan.
Henri entered the fray. He had been very lively ever since everyone had sat down, obligingly shouting a loud ‘Bang!’ every time someone had pulled their snap-less cracker.
‘I have always failed to comprehend,’ he was now saying in his archaic English, knitting his bushy brows, ‘why you dear British continue to be so frightfully interested in our Revolution. It is, after all, only a little piece of French history from long ago.’
‘I don’t think you can quite call it little,’ protested Luc, but with an affectionate smile at his uncle.
‘But you are frightfully interested?’
‘Actually,’ interjected Emma, ‘the only thing Dad’s frightfully interested in right now is persuading the BBC that he’s their next best option for history programmes.’
‘Like that Lucy Worsley,’ remarked Susan unexpectedly, sawing away at her cremated steak as if cutting up cadavers.
Luc glanced at his mother. ‘I’m not as pretty as Lucy Worsley,’ he said gently to her, at which Caroline scowled.
Seizing one of the trumpery cracker gifts lying abandoned on the table, Emma suddenly sprang to her feet and rushed over to her father. Giggling frantically, she fixed a small plastic hair slide in his forelock.
‘There you go, Dad. Lucy Worsley any day.’
‘It’d take more than a hair slide,’ remarked Jules.
Everybody laughed, Luc throwing his head back in glee as he hugged an arm round his daughter’s hips, which meant the hair slide flew off and disappeared into the salon.
‘Would you like me to retrieve that for you, Caroline?’ Jules asked smoothly. ‘It might suit your new coiffeur.’
Caroline ignored him.
‘Caroline looks lovely!’ squawked Susan.
‘Indeed.’ With another smile, this time expansive, Jules addressed the table at large. ‘The Virginia Woolf look is all the rage this winter.’
Virginia Woolf? I sneaked a look at Caroline and immediately saw what he meant.
Embarrassing as his attack on her was, Jules was right.
The silly woman was channelling Bloomsbury, the classic sartorial statement ‘I might be dressed like a dreary old crone but that’s to show I am as clever as any man’.
But who was she trying to impress? And then just as suddenly I got that too.
The social butterfly in a tight dress had been set aside in her pursuit of Luc Mandeville, intellectual and afficionado of the French Revolution.
‘Ace turkey, Alix,’ said Emma, who had resumed her chair and was eating voraciously.
Everyone murmured agreement.
‘It is absolutely delicious, Madame,’ murmured Henri, kissing his bunched-up fingers at me.
‘Christmas pudding next!’ warbled Susan, sitting back from her empty plate. God knows how, but she had eaten all the Axminster carpet steak. The woman must have teeth like a sabre-toothed tiger. ‘I adore Christmas pudding!’
‘Actually, Gran,’ Emma informed her before I could speak. ‘I forgot to buy a Christmas pudding, so we’re having B?che de Noel.’
‘What’s that?’ demanded her grandmother, looking b?che-faced.
‘Chocolate log to you,’ Jules said laconically. ‘It’s French.’
‘French!’ squawked Susan, as though the word were obscene. ‘But I want Christmas pudding!’ she cried, so like a petulant child I half expected her to stamp her foot.
‘Tough titty,’ muttered Josh, which fortunately she didn’t hear.
Quietly but extremely firmly, I explained I hadn’t been able to make a Christmas pudding in the time available. Christmas pudding needed several weeks to mature, I finished in a tone that brooked no argument.
‘Goodness!’ exclaimed Caroline, fluttering her hands in mock horror – she had temporarily left off pawing Luc. ‘Cooks are such martinets. We used to say the same about our cook at home. Daddy called her the Sergeant-Major.’
Susan promptly descended into fits of squeaky giggles. ‘Oh, you are a scream, Caroline!’
Catching my eye, Emma sprang to her feet. ‘Would anyone like some more turkey?’ she said brightly. ‘Or sprouts? We’ve a helluva lot of sprouts.’
By three o’clock, the witching hour if you’re into the monarchy, everybody had departed, even Susan, although convincing her the King was not on the BBC for another hour because we were on French time took such a concerted effort of persuasion it could have graced the UN Security Council.
In the end, an exasperated Luc more or less shovelled her out of the house, promising her he would watch the King’s Christmas address on television with her back at her hotel.
This he seemed to say through a clenched jaw and gritted teeth.
But then, given his self-confessed obsession with the French Revolution, he was almost certainly a rabid republican.
I was occupied with being despatched to find sufficient bags to transport Susan’s vast pile of Christmas presents, coming up with some supermarket carriers, at which point Susan threw her most impressive tantrum to date.
She adamantly refused to be seen entering the Negresco hotel carrying a collection of plastic bags from E.Leclerc.
The Negresco! This was the first I’d heard of where Susan Mandeville was staying.
Not that I’d given it much thought, but to learn she was billeted in what must be one of the most, if not the most, expensive luxurious hotels not just on the Riviera but in the whole of France – it’s practically a national institution – certainly gave me pause for thought.
No wonder Jess was so resentful. In the end, however, I grabbed the dog’s suitcase in the kitchen, emptied it of Bonios, and shoved Susan’s presents in that.
The suitcase wasn’t exactly Louis Vuitton and smelt more than a bit on the doggy side, but, mercifully, Susan deemed it acceptable.