From his complete absence of expression, I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. ‘But Nicole told me you never used that bathroom, and I wanted to have a bath and there isn’t a bath in the one downstairs – the bathroom downstairs, that is…’ My inarticulate babble trailed away. I felt like the under house parlourmaid inDownton Abbeywho Carson the butler has come across trying on milady’srouge. Mandeville, however, gave a sudden snort of laughter.
‘Oh, use away,’ he said, sitting back. ‘Whenever you like. You’re not the under house parlourmaid.’ He contemplated me for a second. ‘However, little Nicole doesn’t know everything about me, even if she thinks she does. But then that’s down to her age.’ He’d smiled. ‘We all think we know everything at that age.’ He went on, ‘It’s actually now the only bath in the house that I can fit into decently. There used to be an enormous one in what was my father’s old suite, but Jess had that taken out when he became too… too…’ Floundering, he again seemed to search for the right words. ‘When he became too fragile,’ he finished. ‘He had Alzheimer’s disease, you know.’
He looked straight at me. I met his eyes, noticing for the first time that they were not simply blue but an extraordinary shade of blue, almost a light turquoise, making the rim round the iris look startlingly black.
‘I know,’ I said quietly. ‘Jess told me. It must have been horrible for you.’
‘It was, but much, much worse for Jess. She was here with Dad right up until the end. She refused to allow him to go into care. There were professional nurses coming in and I got down here as often as I could, but basically Jess shouldered the whole burden on her own.’ He paused, looking away from me. ‘It’s almost impossible to explain what it’s like to witness someone you love suffering from dementia. I don’t think we have the mental furniture to understand, let alone the vocabulary to describe it. What you end up with is like looking at a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, one of his grotesque depictions of hell with humanbeings in fragments.’ As his eyes swivelled back to me, he saw my face.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he exclaimed.
‘No, don’t apologise, please.’
‘It’s just I can’t seem to get that image out of my head.’
‘No, I can imagine you can’t. But then we always seem to remember the bad stuff far more powerfully than the good.’
He stared at me. ‘How true. I wonder why that is.’ Then he gave himself a little shake. ‘Anyway, from when he became very ill, there’s been this contraption in Dad’s bathroom that Icandescribe as looking like an instrument of torture.’ He tried a smile but it didn’t quite come off. ‘If I were to get into that, I’d end up crippled for life.’ Changing the subject, ‘I gather you’ve met Jess,’ he said.
‘This morning. I was just about to tell you.’ I explained about her coming to pick up some books.
‘I know. She texted me. I’d forgotten about it. I was… otherwise engaged.’
Otherwise engaged: you didn’t have to be Einstein to work out what that meant. He had been with Caroline, although after the unimaginable horror of what he had just said about his father, this suddenly seemed unimportant, silly even. Glancing at my watch, I saw the rice would be ready, so, getting up, I drained the pan and asked whether he’d like me to serve the food immediately.
‘No, keep it warm, please, and sit down again for a minute. We need to talk.’
Well, he’d actually said ‘please’. I had thought Luc Mandeville did not know the word, that it simply did not exist in his personal lexicon. But it was beginning tolook as though there was another side to Luc Mandeville, a much kinder side, anormalside. A tiny smidgen of warmth – and vodka – crept into my heart.
‘Right,’ he’d begun, as I sat down. ‘The first thing is this.’ He paused for more vodka. ‘I’m going away for a couple of days so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you to run the show.’ He put his empty glass down. ‘I’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning and returning on Christmas Eve with my daughter in tow.’
Of course, he was going away with Caroline, the bodycon specialist, doubtless to some five-star hotel where he could enjoy her sculpted curves in private. My embryonic feeling of warmth ebbed away as quickly as surf on a shingle beach, leaving a distant thrumming in my ears.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Yes.’ I got up. ‘You said you’re going away for a couple of days. Excuse me for a moment while I get my notebook.’
When I got back from my room, he was still sitting in the same place, this time sipping a glass of Bandol. He’d poured one for me too.
‘Are you all right?’ He peered across the table at me.
‘Yes, of course I am.’ I drank some wine, rather a lot, in one large gulp and arranged my notebook in best secretarial fashion. ‘What’s next?’ I said briskly.
‘Well…’ Hesitating, he looked me directly in the eye again but this time as if about to hand me a challenge. ‘I’d like you get hold of a Christmas tree,’ he said.
‘A Christmas tree?’
‘Yes, a Christmas tree – a real one, not one of thoseplastic abominations. And as big as possible. My mother wants a big Christmas tree.’
Drinking some more wine, I tried to dispel a sudden mental vision of me dragging a huge fir tree up the front steps of the Villa Matisse. Funny, but I’d never imagined my career as a chef would involve forestry.
‘There’s a box of decorations for it in the store room.’ Mandeville paused to drink more wine. ‘You see, my mother wants a big family Christmas. And that includes a tree, although frankly, I don’t know what else she could possibly mean by “big”. She knows as well as I do that we haven’t much in the way of family. Never have had and these days nearly all the relations we did have are dead. Am I supposed to dig them up?’
I made a note.
‘What are you writing down?’ he said suspiciously.
‘Christmas tree.’ I threw him a sunny smile. ‘Right, I’ve got the tree, so suppose you now tell me how many guests you are expecting for Christmas dinner.’
