‘The subject,’ Jules clarified with another charming smile. ‘You can tell us what Luc’s latest book isabout.’
‘Um… history.’
Jules sagely nodded his head. ‘History,’ he echoed, affecting to consider. ‘History. How enlightening.’
‘Shut up, Jules,’ Luc said mildly, scooping a ladleof bread sauce onto his plate. ‘You know as well as I do that my second book is the second I’ve written about the French Revolution, given, as you again know very well, the French Revolution is my specialism.’
‘That’s exactly what I said!’ cried Caroline.
‘Of course you did,’ put in Susan.
Henri entered the fray. He had been very lively ever since everyone had sat down, obligingly shouting a loud ‘Bang!’ every time someone had pulled their snap-less cracker. ‘I have always failed to comprehend,’ he was now saying in his archaic English, knitting his bushy brows, ‘why you dear British continue to be so frightfully interested in our Revolution. It is, after all, only a little piece of French history from long ago.’
‘I don’t think you can quite call it little,’ protested Luc, but with an affectionate smile at his uncle.
‘But you are frightfully interested?’
‘Actually,’ interjected Emma, ‘the only thing Dad’s frightfully interested in right now is persuading the BBC that he’s their next best option for history programmes.’
‘Like that Lucy Worsley,’ remarked Susan unexpectedly, sawing away at her cremated steak as if cutting up cadavers.
Luc glanced at his mother. ‘I’m not as pretty as Lucy Worsley,’ he said gently to her, at which Caroline scowled.
Seizing one of the trumpery cracker gifts lying abandoned on the table, Emma suddenly sprang to her feet and rushed over to her father. Giggling frantically, she fixed a small plastic hair slide in his forelock.
‘There you go, Dad. Lucy Worsley any day.’
‘It’d take more than a hair slide,’ remarked Jules.
Everybody laughed, Luc throwing his head back in glee as he hugged an arm round his daughter’s hips, which meant the hair slide flew off and disappeared into the salon.
‘Would you like me to retrieve that for you, Caroline?’ Jules asked smoothly. ‘It might suit your newcoiffeur.’
Caroline ignored him.
‘Caroline looks lovely!’ squawked Susan.
‘Indeed.’ With another smile, this time expansive, Jules addressed the table at large. ‘The Virginia Woolf look is all the rage this winter.’
Virginia Woolf? I sneaked a look at Caroline and immediately saw what he meant. Embarrassing as his attack on her was, Jules was right. The silly woman was channelling Bloomsbury, the classic sartorial statement ‘I might be dressed like a dreary old crone but that’s to show I am as clever as any man’. But who was she trying to impress? And then just as suddenly I got that too. The social butterfly in a tight dress had been set aside in her pursuit of Luc Mandeville, intellectual and afficionado of the French Revolution.
‘Ace turkey, Alix,’ said Emma, who had resumed her chair and was eating voraciously.
Everyone murmured agreement.
‘It is absolutely delicious, Madame,’ murmured Henri, kissing his bunched-up fingers at me.
‘Christmas pudding next!’ warbled Susan, sitting back from her empty plate. God knows how, but she had eaten all the Axminster carpet steak. The woman must have teeth like a sabre-toothed tiger. ‘I adore Christmas pudding!’
‘Actually, Gran,’ Emma informed her before I couldspeak. ‘I forgot to buy a Christmas pudding, so we’re havingBûche de Noël.’
‘What’s that?’ demanded her grandmother, lookingbûche-faced.
‘Chocolate log to you,’ Jules said laconically. ‘It’s French.’
‘French!’ squawked Susan, as though the word were obscene. ‘But I want Christmas pudding!’ she cried, so like a petulant child I half expected her to stamp her foot.
‘Tough titty,’ muttered Josh, which fortunately she didn’t hear.
