‘Was she rich too, then?’
‘No, no,’ he repeated. ‘Not at all. Esther was a truly wonderful woman, so beautiful and her death a terrible tragedy. But you see, forgive me, she was never right for Luc. They were never right for each other. By the time she died, they were staying together only for the sake of their daughter – for Emma’s sake.’
‘Well, that’s all very sad,’ I said, briskly forking up omelette. ‘However, he’s not marrying Caroline, so what’s your problem?’
‘But he is! Lucisgoing to marry Caroline.’
For a split second, I stared at him and then quickly dropped my eyes to my plate. The remains of the omelette on it had gone cold, little frilly bits of butter congealingat the edges.
Jules peered across the table at me. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘No.’ I put my fork down. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Well, there we are. Luc is going to marry Caroline. She is planning a big wedding for next summer.’
Chapter Seventeen
When you get a shock, you don’t always feel its effect immediately. There’s an initial jolt, and then it takes a while to sink in. It’s like throwing a pebble into a pool; there’s the splash, the splintering of the surface and then the fracture spreads out and out across the water, the ripples fanning in ever wider and wider circles until long after the pebble itself has disappeared. So it was with Jules saying Luc was marrying Caroline. It gave me a shock, and the ripples of that shock carried on until way after I had left the lunch with Jules.
Yet, my reaction to this was, why? Why should it give me a shock that Luc Mandeville was marrying Caroline de whatever-her-name-was? I had known the man barely a week. In truth, I did not know him. In another week’s time, I would go back to my humdrum existence and he to his own if possibly less humdrum life. The collision of our lives was entirely incidental, pure happenstance.
However, all the time while I was trudging round the Cours Saleya market buying stuff for that night’sdinner, this sense of shock persisted. Through choosing and buying a belated little Christmas present for Nicole, it dogged me. When I found an enticing bottle of local liqueur made from rosemary for Billy, I still couldn’t get past it. After a time, I became increasingly aggravated by the feeling, infuriated even. Particularly when, unbidden if weirdly apt, the immortal lines fromHamletbegan floating around in my head:
‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her?’
Quite. What was Luc to me or I to Luc that he should weep for me? Or the other way round? Luc Mandeville was nothing to me. And I nothing to him. I’d simply let him get under my skin with his rudeness, that was all. It was high time I got a grip on myself. To this end, I decided to trawl my memory for a different, suitably distracting quotation.
But nothing came to mind, which was odd because I know I’m not simply annoyingly good at but actually a bit of pain in the arse when it comes to remembering quotations. I venture to excuse this by saying it’s one of the perils of reading for a degree in English Literature. For ages after I graduated I would interrupt every conversation with some duly appropriate lines from some literary text. Mostly, people found it amusing, although I was aware a good many did not. But since one guy I dated back in the day told me he felt like he was having dinner withThe Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I’ve managed to curb the habit. Now, however, the quotation facility appeared to have abandoned me. I was stuck in a groove with Hecuba, or perhaps Hecuba was stuck with me. Notmuch difference when you come to think of it.
But then, as Hecuba and I started to wend our uncompanionable way back through the darkling winter afternoon to the Villa Matisse, something else struck me. Like Hecuba in the play within a play, I suddenly feltIwas in a play. I was performing in a play, but a play where none of the actors knew their lines. So, every time somebody said or did something, it came as a shock. Method acting with a vengeance. It made me on a sudden furiously angry. Nuts to it. I would make up my own lines. And Luc Mandeville could exit stage left, preferably pursued by a bear.
Deciding this, I strode out with vigour. I felt the way you do when you’ve resolved a silly little worry that has long been fretting you. You feel better.
There was only one problem. I didn’t feel better. I felt worse.
Back at the Villa Matisse, I found Nicole in the kitchen, assiduously polishing wine glasses at the same time as crunching on a slice of Welsh rarebit. I got that Welsh rarebit was her new passion, but this was becoming a mite extreme. Oh well, it would probably be a short-lived craze and therefore couldn’t do her any harm, not if Carl is anything to go by. He too went through a phase of demanding to exist exclusively on Welsh rarebit – when I let him, that is.
Talking of Carl, we had of course been chatting and texting each day. Now the strictures of Christmas itself were over and he was on the slopes again, he was back to his ecstatic state. It occurred to me that this was thelongest time we’d ever been apart from each other and yet we’d got used to it, and my son’s whirlwind love affair with skiing had certainly helped. All in all a good thing. Only another week till we were reunited anyway. I made a mental note to get him a decent present; there’d been nothing in the market that tempted me. But for now I had Nicole’s.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said, unpacking the shopping and passing it to her. I’d had the stallholder wrap it in white tissue paper. ‘It’s a bit late but just a small gift for Christmas I thought you might like.’
The girl stood there as if stunned, clutching the package to her breast as if I were about to snatch it back. ‘You give to me a Christmas present?’ she faltered.
‘Yes, but it’s no big deal, only a little thing for Christ—’ I broke off mid-word, it all at once dawning on me that giving a devout Muslim woman a Christmas present might actually be considered a bit tactless, possibly even offensive. ‘I hope… um, I hope you don’t mind,’ I stuttered. ‘Forget Christmas – it’s just a gift. Please don’t be offended.’
‘Offended?’ Nicole opened her eyes very wide in bewilderment. In fact, she looked nothing short of dumbfounded. ‘How am I to be offended?’ she said at last. ‘This is the first Christmas present I have been given since my mother was dead.’
‘Oh, Nicole, love,’ I said, aghast. ‘I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I didn’t mean to upset you. When did she die?’
‘I am not upset. Two years before – no, I must say two yearsago.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I hesitated. ‘Look, the present is reallya little return for the lovely blouse you gave me.’
‘It is my mother who makes the blouse. She was a… a dressmaker, is it?’ she said uncertainly.
‘It is. And she must have been a brilliant one.’
‘Extremely brilliant. But sometimes the women, her customers, they order the clothes and then say no. So it is with the blouse, you see. I have it.’
