The garden was weird, in keeping with everything else about the Villa Matisse, I suppose. Not having seen it before, I’d imagined it to be elegant, with manicured lawns, burgeoning shrubs, silvery olive trees and boasting a gleaming swimming pool. Instead, aside from being surprisingly small in size, it was a series of slightly lopsided, paved terraces mounting to a rickety-looking, long, single-storey building occupying the entire length of the opposite boundary. This was painted bright blue, Matisse blue – you could weary of it – which gave it the appearance of a shack at a funfair, the Hall of Mirrors or even the Ghost Train if you added a few graffiti phantoms.
‘It’s where old Mr Mandeville used to keep his cars,’ said Billy, seeing the direction of my eyes. ‘He was a bit of a petrolhead.’
‘Where’s the swimming pool?’ I asked.
Billy inclined his head up the terraces towards the blue garage, which was what it now seemed it was. ‘On the top patio in front of that. But it’s empty now and tarped over for winter. Why? You fancying a dip, Alix?’
I laughed again. ‘Perhaps not today.’
I took one last look at the garden. With its chaotic design, it gave the impression of someone having had what they thought was a brilliant idea only to discover once it was put into practice that the idea wasn’t brilliant in any way whatsoever. It occurred to me I could say the same about myself.
‘You sound funny.’
This was practically the first thing Ros said when I phoned her after we’d hauled the Christmas tree into thesalon. It had taken some considerable effort and time, not to mention it depositing a squillion times more pine needles in its wake than the wretched thing had seemed to possess in the first place. I’d left Madame Mop to sort out the mess while Billy obligingly got started on untangling the set of fairy lights we found in the box of decorations.
‘Why,’ he’d pondered, ‘do Christmas tree lights always end up every year all tangled up no matter how careful you put them away?’ Why indeed? I could hear my father saying exactly the same thing. It’s one of the mysteries of creation. I’d escaped back to my room to phone Ros.
I felt guilty about Ros. She’d called me several times in the last couple of days, to which I’d responded only with brief texts saying,Busy, busy, busy, which had not of course been anything like true.
‘I sound funny?’ I said now, adopting a breezy tone. ‘Well, it’s because my wit and repartee have gone up a notch since living with the nobs. In fact, I’ve even been shucking with a handsome Belgian.’
There was a short silence. ‘I didn’t mean funny ha-ha,’ Ros said at length and rather heavily. ‘I meant funny as in not like yourself.’
‘Maybe because I’ve just done battle with a Christmas tree and it’s given me the needle.’
‘Oh, do be serious for once,’ she said crossly. ‘Stop joking all the time. What’s the matter? You sound odd. Have you fallen for some man?’
‘What? No, of course I haven’t. I mean – like who?’
‘The man you were,’ a disapproving sniff came downthe line, Ros doesn’t like crude jokes, ‘shucking oysters with.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Well, something’s up with you. I can tell.’
Another uncomfortable pause followed. ‘Okay, it’s Susan Mandeville, then,’ I said, extemporising furiously. ‘The matriarch of this set-up. She’s a cow.’
‘A cow in what way?’
‘Oh, fussy about food –megafussy.’ Familiar with my cousin’s unfashionably robust attitude when it comes to food faddishness – if her kids dare to object to what she’s put on their plates, she simply says, ‘If you don’t like it, go hungry’ – I knew this would distract her from asking me awkward questions. And it did.
‘Ah, attention seeker, then,’ she remarked with satisfaction. ‘Food becomes a weapon when all else fails. Children do it.’
‘Susan Mandeville is well into her seventies.’
‘Makes no difference. No, actually, it makes itworse. It means she’s always been pandered to. Well, don’t go there. No, on second thoughts,dogo there. Give her exactly what she demands and then if she doesn’t like it she’s left with no place to go.’
‘The thought had occurred to me.’
‘How’s Carl?’ asked Ros, changing the subject, which she always does the moment she feels she’s losing the upper hand.
I explained he was fine, had messaged me just before I got in the shower to say they were going to the slopes earlier than usual because ‘Papa has a boring meeting back in Milan this afternoon’. Ros immediately askedwho was looking after him, then. As I knew she would.
‘Giancarlo’s latest,’ I said shortly.
‘He’s moved on toanotherwoman?’
‘Apparently.’
