Chapter Seventeen
When you get a shock, you don’t always feel its effect immediately.
There’s an initial jolt, and then it takes a while to sink in.
It’s like throwing a pebble into a pool; there’s the splash, the splintering of the surface and then the fracture spreads out and out across the water, the ripples fanning in ever wider and wider circles until long after the pebble itself has disappeared.
So it was with Jules saying Luc was marrying Caroline.
It gave me a shock, and the ripples of that shock carried on until way after I had left the lunch with Jules.
Yet, my reaction to this was, why? Why should it give me a shock that Luc Mandeville was marrying Caroline de whatever-her-name-was?
I had known the man barely a week. In truth, I did not know him.
In another week’s time, I would go back to my humdrum existence and he to his own if possibly less humdrum life.
The collision of our lives was entirely incidental, pure happenstance.
However, all the time while I was trudging round the Cours Saleya market buying stuff for that night’s dinner, this sense of shock persisted.
Through choosing and buying a belated little Christmas present for Nicole, it dogged me.
When I found an enticing bottle of local liqueur made from rosemary for Billy, I still couldn’t get past it.
After a time, I became increasingly aggravated by the feeling, infuriated even.
Particularly when, unbidden if weirdly apt, the immortal lines from Hamlet began floating around in my head:
‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?’
Quite. What was Luc to me or I to Luc that he should weep for me?
Or the other way round? Luc Mandeville was nothing to me.
And I nothing to him. I’d simply let him get under my skin with his rudeness, that was all.
It was high time I got a grip on myself.
To this end, I decided to trawl my memory for a different, suitably distracting quotation.
But nothing came to mind, which was odd because I know I’m not simply annoyingly good at but actually a bit of pain in the arse when it comes to remembering quotations.
I venture to excuse this by saying it’s one of the perils of reading for a degree in English Literature.
For ages after I graduated I would interrupt every conversation with some duly appropriate lines from some literary text.
Mostly, people found it amusing, although I was aware a good many did not.
But since one guy I dated back in the day told me he felt like he was having dinner with The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I’ve managed to curb the habit.
Now, however, the quotation facility appeared to have abandoned me.
I was stuck in a groove with Hecuba, or perhaps Hecuba was stuck with me.
Not much difference when you come to think of it.
But then, as Hecuba and I started to wend our uncompanionable way back through the darkling winter afternoon to the Villa Matisse, something else struck me.
Like Hecuba in the play within a play, I suddenly felt I was in a play.
I was performing in a play, but a play where none of the actors knew their lines.
So, every time somebody said or did something, it came as a shock.
Method acting with a vengeance. It made me on a sudden furiously angry.
Nuts to it. I would make up my own lines.
And Luc Mandeville could exit stage left, preferably pursued by a bear.
Deciding this, I strode out with vigour. I felt the way you do when you’ve resolved a silly little worry that has long been fretting you. You feel better.
There was only one problem. I didn’t feel better. I felt worse.
Back at the Villa Matisse, I found Nicole in the kitchen, assiduously polishing wine glasses at the same time as crunching on a slice of Welsh rarebit.
I got that Welsh rarebit was her new passion, but this was becoming a mite extreme.
Oh well, it would probably be a short-lived craze and therefore couldn’t do her any harm, not if Carl is anything to go by.
He too went through a phase of demanding to exist exclusively on Welsh rarebit – when I let him, that is.
Talking of Carl, we had of course been chatting and texting each day.
Now the strictures of Christmas itself were over and he was on the slopes again, he was back to his ecstatic state.
It occurred to me that this was the longest time we’d ever been apart from each other and yet we’d got used to it, and my son’s whirlwind love affair with skiing had certainly helped.
All in all a good thing. Only another week till we were reunited anyway.
I made a mental note to get him a decent present; there’d been nothing in the market that tempted me. But for now I had Nicole’s.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said, unpacking the shopping and passing it to her. I’d had the stallholder wrap it in white tissue paper. ‘It’s a bit late but just a small gift for Christmas I thought you might like.’
The girl stood there as if stunned, clutching the package to her breast as if I were about to snatch it back. ‘You give to me a Christmas present?’ she faltered.
‘Yes, but it’s no big deal, only a little thing for Christ—’ I broke off mid-word, it all at once dawning on me that giving a devout Muslim woman a Christmas present might actually be considered a bit tactless, possibly even offensive.
‘I hope… um, I hope you don’t mind,’ I stuttered.
‘Forget Christmas – it’s just a gift. Please don’t be offended. ’
‘Offended?’ Nicole opened her eyes very wide in bewilderment. In fact, she looked nothing short of dumbfounded. ‘How am I to be offended?’ she said at last. ‘This is the first Christmas present I have been given since my mother was dead.’
‘Oh, Nicole, love,’ I said, aghast. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I didn’t mean to upset you. When did she die?’
‘I am not upset. Two years before – no, I must say two years ago.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I hesitated. ‘Look, the present is really a little return for the lovely blouse you gave me.’
‘It is my mother who makes the blouse. She was a… a dressmaker, is it?’ she said uncertainly.
‘It is. And she must have been a brilliant one.’
‘Extremely brilliant. But sometimes the women, her customers, they order the clothes and then say no. So it is with the blouse, you see. I have it.’
‘No, I have.’ I smiled.
She smiled back at me, suddenly looking impish. Eyes sparkling, she waved the parcel at me. ‘I can open him?’
‘Of course you can. It’s your present.’
Well, you learn something every day as they say. I certainly did. I learnt that when you feel thoroughly upset and jangled and at war with everything, all you need to do is make a teenager happy, and lo and behold, the world looks pretty damn good again.
‘Where did you get that gorgeous pashmina?’
This was Emma, arriving home shortly after me and plunging into kitchen life at the Villa Matisse with her trademark unbridled energy.
Luc was bringing up the rear, but while looking possibly unbridled, it was certainly not with energy.
Instead he looked thoroughly tired and not a little pissed off.
‘Alix give him to me.’ Nicole began pirouetting round the kitchen, twirling her pashmina above her head like the sail on a yacht and singing a pretty little French song under her breath.
‘Wow. Great choice, Alix. That colour looks fabulous on her.’
I pointed out I’d only chosen the same fuchsia pink as the puffer coat Emma herself had given Nicole.
‘Is that so?’ exclaimed Emma hurriedly with one eye on her father. ‘I really wouldn’t know.’
‘Please don’t bother yourself with subterfuge,’ Luc said tiredly.
‘I know you fondly imagine your dear old dad never knows what’s going on, but I can assure you I’m not quite past it yet.
It’s entirely up to you if you wish to give your clothes away.
’ He cocked an ear as Nicole went on singing and spinning in a billow of pink.
‘Ohé! Ohé! Matelot!’
‘Well, it’s some years since I heard that,’ he said. ‘A little French children’s song about a ship that never sailed and a sailor whose crew mates are planning to eat him.’ He laughed. ‘They go on to discuss what sauce to serve with him.’
‘Matelot navigue sur les flots.’
Emma shuddered. ‘How macabre.’
‘Ohé! Ohé! Matelot!’
‘Oh, a healthy dose of horror never did any child any harm,’ scoffed Luc.
‘I don’t know about that,’ argued Emma with a dead straight face. ‘I remember when you took me to see Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree and Piglet’s house got flooded, I was quite traumatised.’
Luc gave a solemn nod. ‘I know. I was too. In therapy for months.’
They both roared with laughter.
‘But seriously,’ said Luc. ‘If you consider Grimms’ Fairy Tales, for instance, they were exactly that – grim. It’s only this prissy age that wants to launder everything. Spoils all the fun.’
I was on the point of agreeing with him when he nodded his head towards me.
‘However, talking of the macabre, I take it that ironmongery you’re wearing round your neck is courtesy of Jules?’
I bit my lip.
‘Thought so,’ he snapped. ‘Trust him to choose something so bloody outlandish.’ He turned on his heel. ‘I have some emails to write.’
As the door closed behind him, Emma looked at me, but before she could speak, I said quickly, ‘Actually, your father’s got a point. It is a bit outlandish – on me at any rate.’
‘Mmm. Not quite right for you maybe. Looks a bit like a dog collar on you somehow.’ Emma considered me with her head on one side. ‘I think you’ve got too much hair for it – lovely hair,’ she added hastily.
‘Don’t panic, dear,’ I said drily. ‘I get the picture.’
‘But hey, did Uncle Jules really give it to you? Have you been on a hot date with him or something?’
‘More lukewarm, I’d say.’