‘Darling! How lovely!’ he exclaimed in a tone of voice quite different from any he had used so far with me. He started listening attentively and then talking animatedly back. I got up. You can’t sit opposite someone talking on the phone and pretend not to listen to them, however hard you try. But in another peremptory gesture, he jabbed a forefinger at me to sit back down. I ignored it, instead crossing the kitchen to the counter where the type of coffee machine you need a barista to operate was bubbling away with subdued enthusiasm. To my left, the young French girl was washing a few dishes in the sink.
‘Do you mind if I help myself to some coffee?’ I asked politely to her back, but no response. The back remained studiously turned. Oh, nuts to her too. Taking one of the huge green pottery bowls from its pile on the shelf above the machine, I poured some coffee and helped myself to a croissant from a paper bag open on the counter. I should be used to this. In the private catering trade, clients frequently never offer you any refreshment, often seeming scandalised that you should not only need to eat and drink but eat and drinktheirfood andtheirdrink. I went back to my chair at the table where discourtesy personified was still on the phone.
‘No, I know, darling. It was Granny’s idea. I hadnothing to do with it. I had to bike down from Paris overnight. What?’
There was a pause.
‘Oh, thanks, darling. No, it wasn’t great but I’m here now. Anyway, Gran’s suddenly decided she wants a big family Christmas with turkey and all that crap, as it’s the last one we’ll ever have in this house. She even wants a blessed Christmas tree, for heaven’s sake. What?’ Another pause. ‘Oh well, that’s different. Ifyouwant one, I’ll see what I can do…’
Yet a further pause followed, longer this time, during which I covertly studied the man opposite me from under my eyelashes while dipping my croissant in my bowl of coffee and then eating it. His age was difficult to judge – mid-forties, maybe older? Physically he looked on the thin side but then he was clearly very tall. Of course, he was sitting down, but even so I could immediately tell this, possibly because I’m so tall myself. You get used to estimating a man’s height whatever he’s doing when you’re a woman of 187.96 centimetres or, if you prefer, six foot two. The number of times I’ve been sitting all unawares next to a guy at a dinner party or in a pub and even occasionally been initially quite attracted only to find him on a level with my tits when we stood up.Idon’t care, by the way. It’s them that it seems to upset. No matter some of the most beautiful women in the world are very tall, they always look put out, even if they try to conceal it. My mother claims I imagine it, that I’ve got a phobia about my height. Maybe she’s right; it certainly plagued me growing up. The ‘My, you’re a big girl, aren’t you?’ refrain did not encourage adolescent self-confidence. It’sdifferent for men, it always has been and probably always will be. The man sitting opposite me wouldn’t mind in the least being tall. Rather, as he was so evidently a bully, he would relish it. As to the rest of his appearance, however, he didn’t quite add up.
Aside from being dressed in a grubby pink – or it might have been washed-out red – sweatshirt under the cracked and scruffy old leather jacket to match a pair of cracked and scruffy old leather trousers, he had long, mousey-dark hair. It was difficult to tell exactly what colour it was, but it was certainly in need of a wash. A straggly beard and hands heavily stained with what looked like motor oil did not tally with his ever-so-cultured accent. His face, with its strong, bony features and clear blue eyes, should have been attractive, handsome even, had it not been marred by a sullenness which even now kept making itself visible despite his apparently affectionate conversation with whoever he was talking to on the phone. It struck me that Luc Mandeville resembled nothing so much as an ageing, disgruntled greaser whose pack of biker mates had dumped him. So, no, he did not add up.
Then again, nothing so far had added up, about him or, for that matter, the Villa Matisse. It wasn’t that I was expecting some kind of rapturous welcome. Very few people I’ve cooked for privately have been friendly or turned out to be someone who I’d like to mix with socially or even ever see again. Perhaps I’ve been unlucky, but for me – and perhaps it is just down to me; my mother’s always telling me how difficult I am – whatever they’re like normally, most people these days seem immediately ill at ease when it comes to employing a private chef. Isay ‘people’ – it’s actually us women who are the worst offenders. They seem either to be suffering from a guilt complex about not doing the cooking themselves, meaning they keep telling you what to do or, worse still, make out cooking is somehow beneath them and are therefore offensively patronising. I work through an agency now, which means I can keep things impersonal. Before the Covid pandemic, I headed up a team in a gastro pub but the hours were hell, a massive consideration when you’re a single parent. Lockdown did it for the pub; it folded, and it wasn’t my cooking. But I needed to move on anyway, if only to get out the world of tattoos.
Now I do private temporary placements, which was how I’d ended up at the Villa Matisse. The prospect of living and working in a stranger’s house for Christmas and New Year didn’t exactly enchant me, but for quite a while lately I’ve been feeling in need of a challenge. I don’t know, I’ve just felt restless. Besides, this job fitted in with my personal plans. It meant my son Carl could spend some much-needed time on his own with his father without me hanging around in the background like a slightly unwelcome smell. Then there was the incredible money on offer, not a small consideration. So, having delivered Carl to his dad in Milan and girded my cheffing loins, I had made my way down to the Côte d’Azur and Nice – or rather, I had tried to – not really knowing what to expect but determined to make a go of it.
Now I was beginning to wonder if that was possible, if it was a bad move. Everyone at home had been, to put it mildly, less than enthusiastic when I told them what I was planning on doing. Friends, family, you name them, theyall took a deeply dim view of what I saw as enterprising – apart from my father, that is. My father got very excited. However, because all he kept saying was how much he had loved Monte in the fifties, my mother told him to shut up and talk some sense into me. ‘Aside from the fact that you were far too young in the fifties even torememberMonte Carlo,’ she said crossly to him. ‘Your daughter is actually going to Nice –Nice. She is going to work for three weeks over Christmas and New Year for some family we know absolutely nothing about when she should be with her son – with our grandson.’
My cousin Ros was the worst of the lot…
Chapter Two
‘What on earth for?’
‘It’s a job – it’smyjob.’ I sighed. ‘You know, I really do not get what all this fuss is about. I’m thirty-six and—’
‘That makes absolutely no difference.’ Ros cut straight across me, as she often does. Just because she’s ten years older and bossed me about when I was a child, she still occasionally treats me like one.
‘I’m the mother of an eleven-year-old boy, for heaven’s sake!’
‘Quite. And it’s Christmas! Of all the times in the year, during the festive season you should be with your son.’ Ros gave a sanctimonious sniff. We were sitting inher kitchen, which is always immaculately tidy, unlike mine, which is always a wreck, our mutual awareness of this fact seeming to lend weight to her general air of superiority.
‘Well, in an ideal world I would be. But this year Carl is spending thefestive season,’ I scissored my fingers in quotation marks, ‘with his father. It’s only fair really. They’ve never spent a Christmas together just as father and son.’
‘Couldn’t you go with them? I mean, you get on okay with Gian-what’s-it, don’t you?’
‘Giancarlo, and yes, I do,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘In fact, Giancarlo did invite me. But I refused. And before you can say “What on earth for?” again,’ as I knew Ros was going to, ‘I refused because in the first place they’re going skiing and Ihatebloody skiing and in the—’
‘You’ve never been skiing.’
‘Oh, yes, I have.’ The memory made me shudder. ‘You’ve forgotten, but when Dad was stationed in Germany we had a family holiday skiing in the French Alps. Well, on the very first day when they were teaching us that stupid snowplough thing, I somehow did the splits and ended up pulling a ligament or something vital in a highly vulnerable place.’
Ros started to laugh.
‘It hurt for months –months. I could barely walk. So quite apart from being the class joke when I hobbled back to school, I vowed never to get on a pair of bloody skis again.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t have to ski. You could sit cosily in a timber-lined café slurping great mugs of delicious hot chocolate or glasses of glühwein.’ She frowned. ‘Not that I personally like glühwein. It always sounds like something you use to stick tiles on bathroom walls.’
‘I agree, but in any case it’s German and they’re going to Italy, to Giancarlo’s chalet in a ski resort called Piani di Bobbio.’
Ros brightened. ‘Oh, how pretty,’ she exclaimed but added she still thought I was mad and then, as I knew she would, reproached me about my parents. ‘You’ll really upset Uncle Richard and Aunt Helen if they can’t see Carl at Christmas.’ (Richard and Helen were my parents.)
‘No, I won’t,’ I said firmly. ‘Because they’re going away too. My brother has invited them to Cyprus for Christmas and they’ve accepted.’ Having followed our father into a career in the services, my brother David was in the RAF currently based at Akrotiri in the south of the island with his wife and two children. ‘And before you ask me whethertheyinvited Carl and me as well,’ I continued, ‘then, yes, of course they did. But I’m not doing that either.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because my dear sister-in-law is fixated on the idea of getting me “hitched”, as she calls it, which means whenever I see her she’s constantly producing what shedescribes as “eligible young flying officers” who then take one look at me and run for their goggles.’
