‘You must be the temporary cook,’ she said. ‘Now, will you please tell this silly little girl,’ she continued with a glare at Nicole, ‘that she is quite unsuitably dressed to wait at the table.’
I looked at Nicole; she peeped up under her eyelashes miserably back at me. The French girl was entirely suitably dressed, indeed wearing much the same as myself; a plain white shirt and a knee-length black skirt.
‘She looks perfectly fine to me,’ I said.
The woman scowled, which, with her undeniably handsome but slightly simian features, made her look like a discontented old monkey. ‘Nonsense,’ she said rudely, tossing, or rather attempting to toss, her iron-grey hair. It was so severely bobbed and lacquered it could have been a Norman helmet. All she needed was a pikestaff to complete the picture. ‘She should be dressed according to what she is,’ she was now saying with severity bordering on fascism. ‘And she is a waitress. I have supplied her with the correct uniform. She must wear it now.’
I had a sudden mental vision of what that uniform might be. A weeny little dress complete with frilly pinny and mob cap like some French farce. I almost laughed, but Susan Mandeville hadn’t finished. She now lookedme up and down.
‘And you should be wearing whites,’ she snapped.
‘Sorry,’ I said amiably, ‘but I forgot to pack my toque.’ I thought that would flummox her – nobody outside the trade ever knows the correct name for a chef’s hat. But if it did, she certainly wasn’t going to show it. I don’t think she even heard me. She was a woman on a mission.
‘You are not appropriately dressed, either of you,’ she rapped. ‘The Villa Matisse is not some gastric pub.’
‘Gastro,’ I corrected, stifling a snort, for in truth I was finding it difficult to take the woman seriously. The way she was dressed didn’t help. Although it was obviously a very expensive, possibly designer dress she was wearing, it boasted a rather unfortunate shape. Or at least it did on so tiny a woman. In wine-coloured velvet, falling to mid-calf, it finished in such a pronounced A-line round the hem that with her weedy little ankles sticking out the bottom, she looked like a bedside lamp fitted with way too large a shade.
‘Go and change,’ she ordered Nicole.
God knows what would have happened next, but before any of us could do anything – if we were going to – the swing door from the dining room flew open and into the kitchen burst Luc Mandeville.
‘So this is where you’ve got to, Mother!’ he cried and made to take her arm. ‘Come along,’ he urged. ‘Everybody’s arrived now and they’re all waiting for you.’ As the swing door slowly closed itself, I could hear a hum of chatter coming from the sitting room. Susan Mandeville, however, wrenched her arm away from her son.
‘Don’t call me “mother”,’ she said crossly, and then, frowning up at him, added, ‘and why aren’t you wearing a tie?’
I looked at Mandeville, taken aback myself, but not because he wasn’t wearing a tie. It was the change in him. He was unrecognisable. Gone was the lank and mousy hair; that was now fair to tawny blond, nicely cut and with a silky forelock combed elegantly back from his smooth, broad brow with silvery streaks of grey in the wings over his temples. The straggly beard had also been erased and in place of the scruffy biker gear he was clad in a navy-blue wool jacket over a pale-pink-and-white striped shirt and well-pressed light-grey chinos. Blimey, I thought in wonder, he’s scrubbed up well. I wondered whether his mood had changed for the better too. I didn’t get a chance to find out, however, as Susan Mandeville, her apish little eyes roving beadily round the kitchen in search of her next target, suddenly lighted on my box of scent on the table.
‘Oh, darling!’ she squawked at Mandeville. ‘You’ve bought me some perfume!’ The next moment she had skipped across the room in her lampshade, seized my scent and disappeared with it through the swing door.
Mandeville and I looked at each other across the kitchen. He said nothing. Neither did I. Yet, oddly, although I could not quite work out how, given we were not, after all, what you might call best mates, oddly, in the split second our eyes met, I knew we were thinking the same thing, that being: best not to do anythingnow. Hence, without saying a word, he marched across the kitchen, seized two bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne from the fridge and marched back out.
I turned to Nicole. ‘Please,’ I implored her, trying not to sound desperate. ‘Please don’t leave me with all this.’ I was terrified she might start weeping again, this time with good reason, but then I’d have to mop her up as well as dealing with the scent-stealing harpy. However, somewhat to my surprise, an expression of unexpected determination came over the French girl’s innocent face.
‘No,’ she said, rather loudly as if to add emphasis. ‘I stay with you.’
Almost on the point of hysteria both at how daft we must sound, like some dumb pop song, quite apart from the farcical scene that had just passed, I controlled myself and thrust a small tray holding bowls of roasted almonds and pistachios at her.
‘Take this.’ I grabbed the platter ofamuses bouches. ‘And follow me.’
In the sitting room Luc Mandeville and another slightly shorter man were standing in front of the fire with their backs to me. Perched on the arm of the sofa adjacent to them was a dark-haired woman of around my own age, good-looking, slim and elegant but wearing such an incredibly tight bodycon dress it made you fear for her circulation. Holding a flute of champagne in one immaculately manicured hand, she was laughing gaily up at Luc Mandeville at something he had apparently just said. Nodding at Nicole to go to the fire group, I headed for the opposite sofa and its potentially lethal occupant – Susan Mandeville. She too was roosting on a sofa arm, the rest of it being occupied by an evidently British but so completely ordinary-looking elderly couple that theymight have strayed off course from the set ofLast of the Summer Wine. The man was wearing one of those blouson jackets some old codgers seem to favour, usually strained over a beer belly, but not in his case. Rather, as I studied them covertly over the tray ofamuses bouches, he and his wife – she had to be his wife – both looked distinctly on the side of undernourished. They had that papery look some poor oldies seem to get when they’re either ill or not feeding themselves properly. With his casual blouson, the husband was wearing a stringy tie which perhaps made it acceptable, in a certain person’s eyes if nobody else’s. The wife, covered in a sort of sack-like linen dress the colour of which defied identification, was quite simply totally nondescript except for a large and weird necklace slung across her bony chest made apparently entirely from acorns.
‘And what are these?’ demanded Susan Mandeville, stretching her wattle to peer at the plate as, bending over the trio, I proffered the canapes. I explained, whereupon, ‘Blinis withcaviar?’ she shrieked as if I’d said blinis with cadavers. ‘Prawnsatay! Tomato withanchovy!’
Damn! Too late I realised I’d forgotten Mandeville’s embargo on fish. Except I hadn’t exactly forgotten it. It was simply that I’d assumed he had meant no fourth or fish course in the dinner, not that he was warning me of imminent ichthyophobia. The elderly couple, however, clearly suffered from no such reservations. Rising from the sofa like pariah dogs from a ditch, they each seized at least threeamuses bouches, the wife immediately biting so ferociously into a blini that soured cream shot all over her acorns. Balancing the plate on one hand, I passedher a cocktail napkin, but she didn’t seem to notice so I attempted to pass her another, but by this stage she was heavily into the satay. I decided to withdraw while there was still some food left on the plate and not the acorns.
‘Take your tray over to the others,’ I said quietly to Nicole when I reached the fireplace group. Facing Susan Mandeville again must have been too much for the girl, however, because although she obeyed my instruction, she simply placed the tray down on the carved chest coffee table in front of the other sofa and fled back to the kitchen.
Mandeville and the other man turned round from the fireplace at the same time as the woman in the super-tight frock stood up from the sofa.
‘Wow, blinis and caviar,’ she exclaimed in exaggerated delight as she helped herself to one, smiling at me in such a friendly way I was again taken aback. And then I twigged. The friendliness wasn’t for my benefit. It was that little technique some of us women employ when we’re trying to impress a guy we’re attracted to by showing him how nice we are. Evidently, therefore, whoever she was, this woman had Luc Mandeville in her sights. ‘How did you know they’re my favourite?’ she purred to me.
Flustered, I mumbled something in reply, but I’m not sure quite what because as he turned from the fire, there in front of me, also looking taken aback if handling it better than me, the other man standing next to Luc Mandeville was the Belgian guy I’d met in the Cours Saleya that morning – Jules Croisset.
‘How could she possibly know, Caroline?’ Mandeville said rather crushingly, helping himself to a round oftomato and anchovy. ‘Ms Bailey has only just arrived. She is our temporary cook.’
‘Hello, Alix,’ said Jules, and treated me to a broad grin. He wagged a finger at Mandeville in mock reproof. ‘Alix is a chef, my friend, a chef. Not acook.’
I’ve never seen anyone looking as chagrined as Luc Mandeville; it was really quite gratifying. ‘You two know each other?’ he said, sounding stunned.
