Before I could ask Moo-Moo or Elodie for more information, a double diversion came out on to the terrace.
First, sweet Sixtine, carrying a small tray with a large cup of coffee and – clever girl – a plate of madeleines – egg-shaped sponge cakes. I was reassured to see that, like me, she was forced to swerve her way through the scrum of kids.
‘Ah, merci, you are like the angels in the chapel with your name,’ I said, earning a blush from Sixtine and a warning cough from Elodie.
Sixtine put the tray on the stone parapet and looked inclined to hang around, but Moo-Moo dismissed her with a pointed ‘Merci, Sixtine.’
The second interruption was a guy who looked like a blend of uncles Babou and Mimi, except that he was even more spindly, and his hair was much longer. Instead of being parted on one side and combed across the head, his grey locks were brushed straight back, and stuck out over his ears as if he had grown wings out of the sides of his skull.
‘I’m going to the golf club,’ he announced to Moo-Moo. ‘Ah.’ He noticed me and introduced himself as François-Louis de Bonnepoire, Valéry’s father. So this was Dadou, the banker and diplomat. I shook his limp hand.
‘Golf?’ Moo-Moo echoed. ‘Ever since Babou and Mimi started playing, you have been going to that club at every opportunity. But you never play. I don’t understand your interest in the place.’
‘Come.’ Elodie pulled me away. I grabbed my tray and allowed myself to be led to the far end of the terrace, where there was a Roman fountain, with a gaping sun god spouting water into a giant stone clamshell.
‘Hang on,’ I said, looking back at the bickering couple. ‘Valéry’s dad is one of the Bonnepoire brothers, right? So where does Moo-Moo fit in? Surely he didn’t marry his first cousin, or his sister?’
‘Stop staring, Paul, please,’ she said. ‘No. That is what is so shocking. Moo-Moo is only a pièce rapportée.’
‘A what?’
‘Moo-Moo is like me, or like I will be. She is not of the family. She is only the wife of a Bonnepoire. She was the local doctor’s daughter.’
‘So how come she’s so snobbish towards you?’
‘You know, it’s like what they say about immigrants. The newest ones are the most racist. She could be an ally to Valéry, but she prefers to lick the ass of Bonne Maman and go for the big inheritance. You know, even this house, it isn’t hers and Dadou’s yet. It belongs a hundred per cent to the old bitch.’
This shed a whole new light on Moo-Moo’s holier-than-thou attitude.
‘And what was all that about the tables?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. We must ask Valéry. If he ever comes back from Saint Trop. Ah, look.’ Elodie nudged me. ‘The coast is clear.’
Dadou was leaving the terrace, walking in a way that could only be called a mince. His shoulders and small buttocks were performing a wiggling dance of irritation, while his hands were flapping the various children out of his way. No, I told myself, you’re being stupid. Six children, staunch Catholic? There was no way he could be gay.
While Elodie cruised the lounge doing PR, I went outside. Beyond the car park, I’d seen what looked like a vegetable plot and a small orchard. I was hoping to find enough ripe vitamins there to keep me alive for the afternoon.
Away from the cloying family atmosphere, it was a glorious day. The sky was an arc of pure blue, sweeping from the inland background of softly rounded hills to the seaward horizon of misted crystal. The small vegetable plot was divided up by tiny knee-high rosemary hedges so that it looked like a classical French garden, with beans, lettuces and tomatoes instead of royal rose beds. In one corner was a row of beehives, set between a stand of olive trees and a huge fig tree.
I could see no sign of a gardener, so I helped myself to a few cherry tomatoes and then headed for the trees. The olives smelt heady, and even though they hadn’t been doused in oil or brine, I figured that they might be worth a nibble. I reached up into the silvery branches and began feeling for a ripe one.
‘Paul!’
I turned to see Valéry standing up in his Mercedes sports car. Or rather, standing on it. He appeared to be perched on the boot.
‘What are you doing?’ he called out, laughing manically.
‘Just admiring the garden. Sorry, the park.’
‘What? Wait.’ He leapt down from the car and came hurdling across the rosemary hedges. He screeched to a halt in a cloud of dust and squinted at me through the olive leaves.
‘How did it go with Bonne Maman and Moo-Moo? Uh? Have you talked about the marriage? And the food? Have you talked about the food? Uh? What food have you suggested? Olives? Ha!’ He cackled at the olives as if they’d just made fools of themselves. ‘Moo-Moo, she’s terrible, no? And you have met my papa also, yes? You know he is gay, no? He goes to the golf club to screw one of the gardeners. Funny, isn’t it, no? Yes? Ha!’
Wow, I thought, if the leather-jacketed cop searched Valéry’s nostrils, he’d probably find enough powder up there to charge him with wholesaling the stuff.
‘Listen to me, Valéry.’ I grabbed his wrists to try and focus his attention. ‘Have you just been to town to buy some coke?’
‘What? You know?’ He looked around as if to pinpoint the person who’d ratted on him.
‘Yes, it’s a bit obvious.’
‘Well, it’s the only way I can support my family,’ he said, mournfully quiet for a second.
‘Support them?’ So he did it for the money? He was a dealer? No wonder the cops were after him. ‘What about your job at the bank?’ I asked. I would have thought that would give him ample income.
‘Oh, I never take it at the bank,’ he said. ‘Except maybe on a Friday afternoon. Ha!’ He was back in manic mode again. ‘What are you doing? Selecting olives for the marriage?’
‘No, I’m hungry, if you must know,’ I confessed. ‘I was looking for things to nibble on.’
‘Food? Oh, I will make you a meal. What do you want? A sandwich? Some ham? No, eggs! I will make an omelette. A big omelette with ham, yes? A giant one?’
He was growing so excited about the idea that I thought I’d better agree before he had an orgasm in the middle of the vegetable patch.
‘Wait here!’ He steeplechased into the house.
Doubting that I would ever see the omelette, I returned to inspecting the olives. They were hard, but some were black and shiny, and seemed to be crying out for a set of teeth to free all the smooth oil within.
I picked a likely looking one, bit into its flesh, and promptly spat it out again. How could something so sumptuous when marinated be so disgustingly bitter and woody? And what ancient tribe had been mad enough to crush such revolting fruit and expect rich, tasty oil to flow out?
‘I see you do not appreciate our olives, Monsieur.’
It was Bonne Maman, who had come outside armed with a pair of vicious-looking secateurs. Not, I hoped, to attack olive poachers. She was smiling at me from under a wide-brimmed straw hat.
‘In England, we don’t have olive trees,’ I explained.
‘There are many things you do not have in England. And yet you think you can be the traiteur for a French wedding?’ She gave a sabre-like flourish of her secateurs. Touché.
‘Ah, but I have a salon de thé in Paris,’ I said, ‘near the Champs-Elysées. And my French clients are very happy.’
‘Hmm.’ She was thinking this over when I saw Valéry reappear in the car park behind her. He was waving a frying pan in the air.
‘Two eggs? Three? Four?’ he shouted.
Looking in the opposite direction to lead Bonne Maman off the scent of her crazed grandson, I held up a hand and made a V sign.
‘Two? OK, two!’ Valéry yelled, but by the time his grandmother had turned around, he had hurtled back indoors again.
‘It was just some of the children,’ I said, in answer to her look of enquiry.
‘Ah. Yes, there are many things you do not have in England,’ the little old lady said, ‘but one th
ing you understand is class, n’est-ce pas?’
‘Class?’ I wasn’t sure I did understand. Working in London, I’d found that loudness of voice and size of salary counted for much more than family background.
‘Yes, origins,’ Bonne Maman went on. ‘You know who planted this olive tree? My husband. We have roots here. My husband bought the bastide during the Second World War. It was a ruin, but this was the unoccupied zone, so he moved his family down from Paris to safety. It was our refuge.’ She made the place sound like a back-garden bomb shelter. ‘He planted the vines, too, and insisted that we always have a vegetable garden. And around our estate in the Camargue, he bought rice fields and cattle. He wanted to protect his family from the dangers of history.’
And, I thought cynically, put his money into something solid like land instead of leaving it in a Nazi-occupied Parisian bank.
‘Onions? Onions?’ Valéry was leaping around in the car park, waving two globes by their long green stems.
‘What is that?’ Again, Bonne Maman was confused, and again I kept her that way by looking in the wrong direction. Meanwhile I held up an index finger and wiggled it in the French negative. Valéry lobbed the onions into the lavender patch and disappeared again.
‘You understand class, Monsieur, and origins, so …’ Bonne Maman paused as if she couldn’t bring herself to say the next phrase, but I could tell that she was relishing every moment of her educational little speech. ‘So you can understand that young Elodie is not of the right class. Her grandfather was a humble butcher, n’est-ce pas? And her father, well, he is the same except that the butchering is now done by machines instead of men.’
Given that Jean-Marie was not only my partner in the tea room but also my former boss, I guessed that Bonne Maman’s class system put me even lower down the evolutionary scale.
‘But Elodie is a beautiful, intelligent woman, and has a great future,’ I said. ‘She studied business in New York.’ OK, most of the business had involved procuring hookers for a French pop star, but that was as traditional an industry as banking, wasn’t it? ‘And Valéry loves her,’ I added, seeing with mild alarm that the man in question had emerged yet again, this time holding a smoking pan in one hand and a black circular object – presumably a cremated omelette – in the other. He was shrugging apologetically.
‘And Valéry should think himself lucky to have her,’ I wanted to add, ‘because he is a total fucking cokehead.’
Instead, I managed to keep a wistful smile on my face. ‘What can you do about l’amour?’ I asked philosophically.
‘Huh, l’amour,’ Bonne Maman grunted. ‘That is enough for poor people. Not for us.’
Valéry finally managed to connect pan to omelette and whooped with laughter as the black disc flew through the air and attached itself to the windscreen of a Renault.
‘What is that?’ Before I could distract her, Bonne Maman swivelled and caught Valéry in mid lap of honour around the car park.
‘He is mad with l’amour,’ I said, doing my best to protect the drug-crazed idiot. I mean, what fool gets coked up in the presence of the old lady who controls his financial future?
‘Perhaps it is love,’ Bonne Maman said. ‘Or do you think it might be the cocaine?’
Leaving me to muse on the fact that she knew all about Valéry’s bad habits, Bonne Maman cut some flowers and went back indoors.
I looked for Valéry, but he had disappeared, so I went to carry out a raid on the fig tree. The pale-green fruit was thick-skinned and slightly unripe, but that only meant that they were less messy to eat. I ripped open half a dozen of them, and chewed hungrily on the sweet red seeds.
After this zero-carbon-impact picnic, I spotted a hammock strung between two young peach trees, and, feeling like a true Mediterranean, I lay back and let my stomach gurgle a happy hello to the recent delivery of fresh fruit. I closed my eyes to enjoy the birdsong of every sort, from whistling chatter to deep cackles, and watched the alternate flicker of black and orange on my eyelids as the breeze parted and closed my parasol of leaves.
It was the perfect place to chill out and let the world get on with its business without me for a while. And to think about Bonne Maman. I’d been shocked but not surprised by what she’d said. After all, efficient dictators always know what everyone is getting up to. I half-expected her to announce that she was hiring the golf-club gardener to trim the vines, so that Dadou’s antics wouldn’t cause a scandal outside the family circle.
All in all, her comment about the cocaine seemed to suggest that if she had decided Valéry wasn’t getting married, then he wasn’t getting married. She was in total control, and all my speeches about local sea bream and marinated goat’s cheese were just adding to the excess of carbon dioxide on the planet.
It was a shame, but that was that.
It was a realization that took some of the pressure off me. And, of course, left me free to panic about M.
I fell asleep dreaming of a president getting assassinated by a flying omelette, and woke again when his funeral service turned into a disco.
My phone was singing at me. I really ought to change that ringtone.
‘I want to get off the island,’ M told me.
‘Why?’ I wondered if she’d cottoned on to the fact that the police were watching her.
‘I’m bored here without you.’
‘But you never stay with me for more than ten minutes before you have to rush off to a meeting somewhere.’
‘Yes, well I know it sounds naff, but I like knowing that you’re here to come back to.’
‘You’re right,’ I said. I’d been treated like a poodle enough for one day. ‘It does sound a bit naff.’
‘What I mean is, I miss you. Why don’t I come to Saint Tropez?’
‘It wouldn’t be practical right now.’ I did my best to tone down my horror at the suggestion. ‘I’m staying with Valéry’s family, and they’re a bunch of fundamentalist Catholics. You know, no sex before or during marriage.’
‘Can’t you sneak me in through your bedroom window? It might be fun.’ She giggled, sounding like nothing more sinister than a girl who fancied meeting up for a bit of sneaky sex. It took all my mental faculties to remind myself who, and what, she was.
‘They’ve put me in a kiddie’s room no bigger than a shower cubicle,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’m going to fit in the bed on my own, never mind with you there. Anyway, don’t you have to stay on that part of the coast for all your meetings?’
‘I can come away for a couple of days.’
‘And what about the Camargue sighting? Have you followed up that lead?’
‘Oh, Paul, do we have to talk about my work?’ She tried to make this sound like a girlish plea, but all I heard was her evasiveness. She was hiding something, and making a pretty amateurish job of it. I’d been an idiot not to see through her before.
‘Sorry, I’ve got to go,’ I said, more harshly than I’d intended. I made an effort to sound warmer when I added that I’d call her later. After all, I was under police orders to stay on good terms with her.
It was dusk when I woke up, or rather when I was shaken awake. Elodie was leaning over the hammock, pinching and poking sensitive parts of me.
As soon as I opened my eyes, she began ranting at me in a hoarse whisper about tables. I suspected that she’d been sniffing at Valéry’s perpetual-motion powder.
‘I forced Valéry to tell me,’ she hissed. ‘And it is the legs – they must be covered up.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Yes. At Bénédicte’s marriage, the table legs were thin, and metal.’
‘So?’ Not only was she speaking ultra-quickly, she also seemed to be straying off into Valéry’s world of pop-eyed madness.
‘The legs had lots of tables. I mean, the tables had lots of legs, and they were not covered by the tablecloths. They showed in the photos. Someone saw the metal legs in Paris Match and said that it looked like a common fête de village. Bonne Maman nearly had a
heart attack at the shame of it all.’
‘I get the picture.’ The Bonnepoires had been out-snobbed by the snobs.
‘So you see, we must show Moo-Moo a photo of some tables without legs, OK? Or with wooden legs. As soon as possible.’ Elodie stopped talking and grinned insanely at me.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But there’s a much bigger problem than tables.’
Before she could interrupt or object, I outlined the problem as I saw it. Bonne Maman was just too omniscient to let the wedding go ahead, I said. If it became necessary, I was sure she would take Valéry into a quiet corner and blackmail him about the cocaine.
‘No, never,’ Elodie said, but she looked less sure than she sounded. ‘She would not tell the police about that. She would never betray her family.’
‘So you really think she’ll let you marry Valéry?’
‘Yes. If we can convince the rest of the family, then Bonne Maman must give her approval.’
We stopped talking. Both of us had heard men’s voices drifting through the calm evening air. They were coming towards us.
‘Rosemary,’ one of them said. ‘Of course I know what it looks like. I used to grow all sorts of plants out here, don’t you remember?’
‘Babou,’ Elodie whispered. ‘I think.’
‘Don’t you remember when Bonne Maman found your little plantation? We thought she didn’t know what it was, but she just happened to find it when the leaves were exactly the right size for smoking.’
‘That’s Dadou,’ Elodie said, even more quietly. They were very close now, and we were holding our breath so as not to be heard. I didn’t really know why we were hiding, but subterfuge seemed to be the order of the day.
The two brothers were laughing, and saying something about keeping secrets in the family. I could make out their silhouettes clearly now.
‘Which would be worse?’ Babou said. ‘That a child of yours marries a communist or a nouveau riche?’
Dadou laughed.
‘With a communist,’ Babou went on, ‘at least things are clear. But this Elodie is the nouveau-riche daughter of a butcher.’ Instinctively, I gripped Elodie’s arm. I was afraid she might pull up a carrot and bludgeon them with it.