‘Where shall we put her?’ Emma had asked her father the previous evening as if I were a piece of furniture.Recovered instantly from her tears, she had entered into the new room for Alix project with all her customary verve and elan.
‘Oh, the boudoir, I should think.’
The boudoir? Theboudoir! This job was getting beyond a joke – if it ever had been a joke in the first place. As well as being the chef and provider of Christmas trees, not to mentionconfidanteof the family daughter, was I now being promoted – or was it relegated – to the status of mistress? Vigorously tamping down an involuntary twitch of excitement this engendered, I had looked in dismay at Emma.
‘Oh, don’t panic!’ she had cried, seeing my expression. ‘We only call it the boudoir as a joke because after he dumped Gran and before Jess arrived on the scene, it’s where Grandpa Johnny used to sleep with his girlfriends.’
Luc had twitched. ‘Yes, that will do, Emma,’ he’d muttered.
‘Actually,’ Emma had continued, ignoring her father, ‘the word “boudoir” doesn’t mean what we all take it to mean these days anyway. It’s from the French “bouder” and really means “sulking room”.’ She’d giggled. ‘So if Dad’s nasty to you again, Alix, you’ll have somewhere to go and sulk.’
Luc had given a bark of uncomfortable laughter. ‘It’s just an ordinary room,’ he had said awkwardly.
It had proved to be anything but.
With a vast four-poster bed covered by an enormous canopy of crimson rep – I think it’s called that – the boudoir immediately made me think of the Red Room inJane Eyrewhere she was locked up as a child and whichfreaked her out. This was not encouraging. The rest of the furniture turned out to be an uncompromising collection of the Louis XIV-style furniture I’d seen in the old bathroom but here heavy, ugly and ornate and, in the case of the vast wardrobe when I had opened it, stinky with age. However, it didn’t look as though I had much choice in the matter, as had always turned out to be the case at the Villa Matisse. I had wondered whether I could sneak Alphonse up to bed with me as a bit of doggy reassurance if I found myself spooked in the stilly watches of the night.
***
It was this recollection which brought me back to the present and Jess’s baffling exclamation of ‘a Bedlington’.
‘I’m referring to the dog, Alix!’ she cried. ‘The dog is a Bedlington terrier!’
Yes, I had brought Alphonse with me to lunch with Jess at her restaurant, again something I didn’t seem to have much choice about when open warfare had again threatened to break out that morning between Luc Mandeville and his daughter, this time over the knotty problem of who was going to look after the dog. It had taken a little while to mature, however, once I had sat down at the kitchen table with my own cup of coffee.
***
‘Do you think this would suit me?’ Emma began, showing me a picture on her phone. It was of a poutingmodel wearing a fascinator, a very elaborate one with flowers and feathers and spiky bits and bows – you name it, it had it.
I nodded. ‘I should think so.’
Emma considered me a moment and then again her phone. ‘You don’t think so,’ she said, frowning.
‘No, it’s not that. It would probably suit you as well as anyone. It’s just that I personally don’t like fascinators. I think they make you look as though you’ve got weeds growing out of your head.’
Luc snorted as though disgusted, but as I glanced sideways at him, I saw he was smiling, except not at anything that seemed to be provoked by whatever he was looking at on his phone.
Emma sighed. ‘Well, I don’t know. But I’ve got to go to this big wedding when I get back in one of those, like, gross hotels where everybody will be wearing hats and I look stupid in them.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Luc murmured.
Emma looked at her father. ‘You’ve never seen me in a hat.’
‘You had a beautiful little pink sunhat when you were a little girl, and you looked gorgeous in it.’
‘Dad, I’m not a little girl now.’
‘More’s the pity.’
‘Whose wedding is it?’ I asked hastily.
‘My best friend Lucy’s mother’s. She’s getting married again and Lucy has got to be, like, her bridesmaid which she, like, hates, so I promised I’d go along to, like, support her.’
Luc gave another snort, but this time an impatient one.‘This could almost be interesting if you stopped saying “like”.’
‘I think you could carry off a really big hat,’ I said, again hastily.
‘Really?’ Emma looked interested but then she sighed again. ‘Oh, I just don’t want togo.’
