‘Right then.’ Billy rubbed the palms of his hands together and blew on them. Grabbing a besom that was leaning against the wall, he started gently brushing the little tree free of any loose needles. ‘Mrs Mandeville must have flown in,’ he observed with a straight face as he plied the besom.
I laughed again, and even though I then had to painstakingly explain the joke to Nicole, who didn’t really get it although she politely pretended she did, I was feeling a whole lot better.
The previous evening had been odd – well, so far everything about the Villa Matisse had been odd, but yesterday evening’s oddness was off the scale. LucMandeville seemed to have undergone a complete change of character…
***
This epiphany or whatever it was, had not, however, been immediately apparent. When I let myself in through the front door, back from the day out with Jules, and found him peering over the mezzanine balustrade like some warder on the upper gallery of a prison, he was exactly the same, his customary abrupt, discourteous self. But then, after I recovered from my little wobbler alone in the kitchen, had the curry on the go and was setting a place for him in the dining room, he suddenly burst in through the swing door leading from the kitchen.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ he demanded.
I carefully put down the fork I was holding. ‘Setting a place for you at the dining table.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, but he said it kindly. ‘I’ll eat in the kitchen with you – that is, if you care to join me? Or have you already dined?’
It was one of those moments in life, mercifully rare, when you simply do not know how to respond when you’re asked a question requiring an answer. It struck me that Luc Mandeville was rather like a dog of uncertain temperament which my father had acquired from somewhere or someone when I was a child. He was a big dog and fully grown, although still at the stage of development where he wasn’t fully in control of his limbs – or jaws, come to that. As a family pet, the dog turned out to be a success – eventually. But at first he wasunpredictable. You could be playing a romping game with him, with an old slipper or a knotted rope, when all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, the dog would take a lump out of you.
‘Poor old boy,’ my father would mourn. ‘He’s traumatised.’
‘Poor! Old! Traumatised!’ my mother would counter tartly as she administered first aid to whichever bit of her offspring had been dented by the dog’s mighty muzzle. ‘This dog is barely out of puppyhood, and it is your children who are traumatised.’
And so it was with Luc Mandeville. I did not trust him not to take a lump out of me.
‘Well, while you’re deciding which of those questions you’d like to answer, if either, I’m going down to the cellar to get some wine. I won’t, however, confound you further by asking whether you’d like a drink.’ All this was said in a perfectly friendly, almost jovial tone of voice which meant, as he pushed his way back through the swing door, I was left standing at the dining table feeling not just wary but slightly silly.
‘It’ll be ready in about ten minutes,’ I said, stirring the curry at the stove as Mandeville emerged from the cellar with two bottles tucked under his arm, locked the door and carefully hung the key back on its nail on the door jamb; a bizarre arrangement, but it wasn’t my business. Putting the bottles down on the dresser and seizing a bowl, he crossed to the vast fridge and pressed a button. Ice cubes clattered into the bowl with a noise like giant hailstones.
‘I’m making myself a vodka and tonic,’ he said, going back to the dresser where the bottles of spirits stood.‘Would you like one?’
I turned to him. ‘Yes, please,’ I said firmly.
‘Good.’ Putting mine on the kitchen table, he took an enormous gulp of his own and then seized a corkscrew from a drawer to begin opening one of the bottles of wine. ‘It’s a Bandol red. A bit cold from being in the cellar but it goes well with curry.’
Sitting down at the table opposite him, I drank some vodka and tonic, so strong I nearly coughed, but it was reviving. ‘I know.’
‘Said like a connoisseur.’
‘No, I’m afraid not. I don’t know very much about wine at all.’ I swallowed some more vodka. ‘Apart from the fact that I like drinking it.’
Mandeville considered me a moment before suddenly ducking to retrieve a small carrier bag from under the table. It was one of those expensive-looking carriers, the sort they give you in snobby beauty boutiques selling skincare designed to give you eternal youth at the cost of a second mortgage. Placing it on the table, he whipped out a small box so like a conjuror I half expected him to come up with a rabbit. The box, however, was perfume, Nina Ricci’s L’Air du Temps–my perfume, the one Susan Mandeville had so casually purloined.
‘There you go.’ He pushed it towards me. ‘It’s sealed and quite untouched, a new one. My mother had… er,’ he chewed his lip and started again, ‘yours had been opened and… well, used,’ he finished rather uncomfortably.
I picked it up. ‘Thank you. But how did you get hold of this on a Sunday?’
He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh, all the shops areopen.’ He paused to raise his eyes to heaven. ‘Mammon will prevail at Christmas, dear Lord, even in once devoutly Catholic France.’
I didn’t know quite what to say to that. ‘I actually only wear this scent for work, but thank you for replacing it.’
‘Well, do me a big favour and leave it off for now, would you? My mother rather overdoes it so I’m drowning in the stuff, and that’s when I’m not keen on scent anyway.’ He gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘Most colognes, perfumes and unguents seem to smell far worse to me than any human ever could.’
I gave a shrug. ‘Okay. No problem.’
Recharging our glasses with vodka, he delved into the carrier bag again, this time retrieving something he kept hidden in his hand. ‘However,’ he said. ‘At the risk of sounding like something out ofGoldilocks and the Three Bears, who’s been having a bath inmybathroom?’ With this, he opened his fingers to show a small bottle of Neal’s Yard essence – my small bottle of Neal’s Yard essence. I must have left it in the upstairs bathroom this morning in my panic to escape.
I went very still. There was a short silence. Then, ‘I’m so sorry,’ I blurted.
‘Yes, quite.’
