‘And do you know what, Alix? Luc was always fine with me. I became his mother.’ She gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? I wasn’t allowed a baby of my own; instead, I was obliged to mummyhercast-off.’
‘What do you mean you weren’talloweda baby of your own?’
‘Johnny didn’t want any more children after Luc.’
‘But you said he was Catholic.’
‘Oh, fuck that for a game of soldiers. He got round it on the old saw of “birth control is a matter for your own conscience”. They all do it – Catholics, I mean.’
I said nothing. It struck me that if the late, lamented Johnny Mandeville had been possessed of a conscience, he’d had it well under control.
‘When sometimes it was possible, I cheated, of course; I lied to Johnny about my using birth control. But still nothing happened. I think you’ve both got to want a baby for it to work, and, courtesy of Susan buggering up his life, Johnny didn’t want a child with me.’
There was a pause. ‘Well, at least you had Luc,’ I said presently if feebly.
‘Yes, I had Luc,’ she sighed, ‘and Luc was a nice kid. Do you know something, Alix?’
Oh God, I felt something like panic – when was this going to end?
‘Johnny once told me that when Luc was very small, about four or five, he used to go up to whichever strange woman was around the Villa Matisse at the time and ask her whether she was his mummy.’ Then she laughed. ‘Weird, isn’t it? Especially when you see what a lovely guy Luc became and is now, although, of course, losing Esther changed him forever.’
‘Esther? Was Esther his late wife?’
‘Oh, you know. Yes, that’s right. She was. It was all desperately tragic. And even though it’s now over seven years since she died, Luc has never got over it. In fact, I don’t think he ever will.’
I stared dumbly at Jess, suddenly feeling slightly sick.
‘Are you all right, Alix?’
Jess had stopped eating and was looking at me in concern. I dropped my eyes. ‘Yes, of course.’ Luc Mandeville and his dead wife were nothing to do with me.
Jess swivelled round in her seat to look at the blackboard menu. ‘What you need is some pudding,’ she said.
The rest of the lunch passed off without anything of great significance being said. Jess seemed to have shot her bolt and, with the exception of a few observations, not always flattering, on the subject of Jules Croisset – ‘Watch him; he’s nice but you need to be on your guard’ – the conversation hinged on anodyne topics: the weather in Nice, where I had trained, how tourism on the Côte d’Azur had become a monster.
I did, however, casually mention Nicole, saying I was a little puzzled as to what she was actually doing at the Villa Matisse. ‘Was she an au pair or something?’
But Jess didn’t seem particularly interested in the question, unless it was that she did not want to answer it. Nicole was a sort of student, she said vaguely, doing a bit of light housework in return for her accommodation while she studied English. This was still unsatisfactory, but it looked as though that was as much as I was going to get. Nevertheless, it set my mind at rest to a degree in that even given I had not known Jess very long, I could not believe she would countenance anything wrong or inappropriate where Nicole was concerned. Come to that, despite his ability to be unpleasant, I could not believeit of Luc Mandeville either. It must have been, as I had thought, Tom and his nasty mind.
Leaving around three o’clock, I wandered down through the labyrinth of narrow streets leading from Jess’s restaurant to the Cours Saleya, ostensibly in search of Christmas food but in reality wholly preoccupied with everything she had told me. I could not help pitying the woman. Jess was obviously irredeemably bitter. Then Esther, Luc Mandeville’s wife, whose tragic death he had never got over. Yet, leaving her aside, it was a far more poignant image that I could not get out of my head; the image of a little boy called Luc asking woman after strange woman whether she was his mummy.
Chapter Eleven
‘Day four in Stalag III.’
‘What?’
‘Sorry.’ Billy frogged his mouth in apology. ‘I was just making a joke.’
‘Is that how you think of the Villa Matisse – as beinglike a prisoner-of-war camp?’
‘Well, it is a bit, isn’t it?’
‘LikeThe Great Escape?’ I suddenly felt hysterical. ‘Shall we tunnel out?’
Billy chuckled. ‘Nah, that’s not what I meant. Although you know something, Alix – there is a tunnel here, one right under the house. There’s an old door to it low down in the wall outside. It’s still open but nobody uses it. It’s something from, like, the original house here back before the war.’
‘Heavens.’
