‘Oh, no, but thank you for your kind invitation,’ she said, meticulously polite. ‘Forgive me, but on Sundays I always work at my English.’
Of course, it was Sunday. The vicissitudes of the last forty-eight hours meant I’d lost track of what day it was.
‘Sunday is meant to be a day of rest,’ I pointed out in tones of mock severity to her.
She responded in kind. ‘Not for me,’ she smiled, ‘I am a Muslim woman. In Islam, Friday is our holy day.’
‘Of course it is. I’m so sorry. Do you go to the mosque on Fridays, then?’ I knew there was at least one mosque in Nice. I’d seen one and heard the call to prayer on a previous visit. But I asked almost idly. France has the highest proportion of Islamic citizens in Europe, but I know little about their religion apart from the fundamentalist terrorism we all know about even if we don’t want to. Nicole certainly was not anything remotely resembling a fundamentalist.
‘Er,non. No. Yes. That is – maybe.’
She had averted her eyes, the question seeming to fluster her. Deciding to leave it at that, I stood up.
‘Fine. I’m not going to church, I’m probably what you would call a heathen, but I will go out for a bit later on if only for some exercise.’ I stretched and yawned.‘Actually, what I’d really like now is very long soak in a very hot bath. Do you need our bathroom for a bit?’
‘There is no bath in our bathroom.’
I’d forgotten that. I’d have to make do with a shower. Oh, hells bells.
‘There is a very big bath upstairs you can use,’ Nicole said brightly.
‘But that’s for the family surely?’
The French girl threw me a curiously old-fashioned look for someone of her age. ‘There are four bathrooms upstairs. And one extra. Every room has a bathroom.’
‘Oh. Of course,en-suitebedrooms. Fine. Right, I’ll go and collect my stuff.’
Upstairs, the Villa Matisse was even shabbier than its lower echelon, with scuffed, distinctly bumpy parquet flooring in need of re-laying and old faded watercolours hanging lopsided at regular intervals along the walls. The top of the marble staircase opened onto a small mezzanine sitting room furnished with a battered but comfortable-looking old sofa, a large television and some music paraphernalia. The wall adjacent to the sofa was lined with shelves crammed with books and CDs, the other two boasting big windows with awe-inspiring views over Nice and the Bay of Anges. Up a short flight of stairs leading off this area, a landing ran along the longest side of the Villa Matisse, opening on one side onto the full height ceiling of the vast paved entrance hall below. Off this landing were five doors, all closed but for one standing ajar. Through the gap as we passed by, I glimpsed an unmade bed with what was recognisably Luc Mandeville’s scruffy leatherjacket chucked across it and his biker boots lying apart and abandoned at its foot.
‘Are you sure it’s okay for me to use a bathroom up here?’ I asked Nicole nervously. The last thing I felt like was an unexpectedly returned Mandeville finding his ‘cook’ naked as a jay bird in his bath. But the French girl opened a final door at the far end.
‘Nobody use him,’ she said with a shrug, leading me into an equally worn but in this case charmingly out-of-date bathroom, obviously, from its size and the look of its fireplace and ornate wall mouldings, carved out of what originally must have been a bedroom. It was barely furnished apart from a vast armoire on one wall, its doors blotched and warped with damp, and a massive washbasin with dripping brass taps. But there in its centre, stained with trails of limescale, reposed a huge, free-standing, cast-iron tub standing on rusty clawed feet. Sunlight flooding in from the window was casting blue prisms of light on the chips in its enamelled roll-top.
‘I clean him for you?’ Nicole offered, wrinkling her nose.
‘Good heavens, no. Thank you, but it’s fine.’ I plonked my stuff down on a frayed wicker washstand next to the bath. ‘Oh, bother, I’ve forgotten my shampoo.’
I trooped back down the marble staircase behind her, but just as we reached the hall, the front door entry phone beeped.
‘I’ll get it,’ I said. ‘You go and get on with your English.’
‘Hello?’ I said into the receiver before suddenly remembering we were in France. ‘I mean –bonjour?’
A laugh echoed on the line. ‘Hi,’ came a female English voice. ‘Let me in, would you? It’s Jess.’
Jess? Who was Jess? No idea. Nevertheless, I pressed the button. If Jess had come to steal the Mandeville family silver, she was welcome to it.
‘How do you do?’ the woman said as we stood in the hall shaking hands. She clocked my expression. ‘Don’t panic. I haven’t come to steal the family silver.’
‘You’re welcome to it.’
‘Oh dear, bad as that, is it?’
I shrugged.
‘So you’re Alix. Jules has told me all about you.’ Retrieving a couple of empty cardboard boxes from the porch, she closed the front door behind her. ‘I’ve just come round to pick up some books. I texted Luc to say I was coming this morning. Is he not around?’ She looked about her.
‘Um, no. According to Nicole, he didn’t come home last night.’
