‘I’ve got to go to Banyuls,’ she said. ‘There’s a marine research institute there. They’ve been looking into unusual offshore activity.’
‘Exactly what I’ve been watching.’ I nodded towards the divers.
‘Soldiers,’ she said. ‘There’s a commando training centre in the castle. They go out on night dives and climb cliffs and stuff.’
‘Surely they’d notice if there were any sturgeon in the neighbourhood,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you ask them?’
‘I couldn’t. A foreign scientist trying to get secrets out of the French military? They’d never let me in the country again.’
‘Maybe I could talk to them,’ I suggested. ‘I want to help with your investigation.’
M laughed. ‘So you’re going to wander over and casually inquire whether any of their canoes have been savaged by prehistoric fish?’
‘I may be a man, but I am capable of some subtlety, you know.’
‘Oh, I know.’ She gave me a lascivious grin that a commando would have been proud of.
I was just about to suggest that she might enjoy a little more subtlety back at the hotel before she left for Banyuls when there was a barrage of whistling and whooping from the café terrace. The snoozing women had woken up and were giving the commandos a hard time as they wandered past in their diving gear.
Judging by the shouts of ‘Wahay’, ‘Get ’em off’ and ‘Is that a snorkel in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’ I guessed that the women were English. After raping and pillaging their way through Dublin, Prague and Cracow, it seemed that hen parties were coming south in search of prey.
Poor French soldiers, I thought. Nothing in their training could possibly prepare them for an English hen party.
I found the commando training centre with no difficulty at all. It was completely open to the public.
It was little more than an alcove at the base of the castle wall, a damp platform the size of a tennis court containing a rack of canoes and various bits of diving equipment. There was a ladder down to sea level, where three inflatable dinghies were moored, their massive outboards on open display for anyone to steal or sabotage. Of the commandos themselves, there was no sign at all, unless they were camouflaged as lumps of seaweed.
The only security measure I could see was a metal gate painted with the unit’s name: ‘CNEC, 1er Choc’. I presumed that the second part of the name meant something like ‘First Shock Battalion’ and was in no way related to the common French abbreviation for chocolate. Though the whole scene did smack of chocolate soldiers. Surely these guys couldn’t be serious commandos?
‘The soldiers, do they often swim?’ I asked a French guy who was filming the inflatables. A fellow spy, perhaps.
‘Oh yes, every morning,’ he said. ‘Beautiful motors, no? Wah!’ Not a spy, then, but an outboard fetishist.
Resolving to try my luck with the commandos the following morning, I strolled around the foot of the castle wall. M had left for Banyuls, so I was on my own for lunch, and I’d spotted an open-air restaurant that was catching the midday sun.
The meal would have delighted the strictest ecologist. The anchovies had been marinated a kilometre or so away, the waiter told me. The rosé was Appellation Contrôlée Collioure, so I could probably have spotted the vineyards just by turning round and looking inland. And my main course – whole grilled sea bream – looked so like the fish I’d swum with that morning that I felt a pang of guilt. Apart from the rice and the coffee, the item on the table that had travelled furthest might well have been the glass of tap water, which had probably been piped down from the Pyrenees. Practically everything else – braised courgettes and tomatoes included – could have been produced within a few miles of the restaurant. Vive la France, I thought. I hoped the other G8 members would remember things like that when they were handing out their carbon dioxide credits.
I was bathing in a rosé-tinted haze of self-satisfaction when I noticed that the people around me were gasping and swearing at something.
‘Merde!’
‘Putain!’
I followed their gaze and joined in myself.
‘Holy shit!’
On top of the castle wall, a dizzying hundred-foot drop to the concrete path below, a woman was walking along the battlements.
‘On va la ramasser à la petite cuillère, celle-là,’ the waiter said, meaning that if she fell, they’d need a spoon to scrape up her remains.
Like everyone else, I held my breath as the woman swivelled and walked back towards us again. She was filming with a small handheld camera, and seemed to be talking to someone inside the castle. She was going to trip and fall, I knew it. She would scream and then splat sickeningly on the ground, no doubt ending up a lot like my sea bream after I’d finished forking it open. I wanted to shut my eyes, but like everyone else I was riveted.
She had black hair hanging loose down to her shoulders, what looked like a trim figure, and an air of complete self-confidence. She had to be a model, I decided, and had been ordered to risk her life to make an ad for shampoo or digital cameras. She was pacing back and forward, not even looking where she was treading, and calmly filming the beach.
I stared up at her and mouthed a silent message at her camera lens. ‘Get down,’ I told her. ‘Descendez, s’il vous plaît.’
Suddenly she lowered the camera from her eye and stared down towards me, as if she’d understood. I was too startled to react, but several other people started gesturing at her, urging her to get down.
At last she jumped back into the castle, out of view, and my fellow lunchers gave a sigh of relief and started an animated discussion about why the castle wardens didn’t stop visitors climbing up and risking their lives. But then, as I’d seen, security didn’t seem to be the castle’s biggest priority.
3
Back at the hotel, I looked up some of my new underwater friends on the internet. The fish with the black spot near its tail was an ‘oblade’. In English, a saddled sea bream. The yellow-striped one was a ‘sarpa sarpa’, and its flesh apparently had hallucinogenic properties. The Romans used to consume it as a recreational drug. And there was a case of one man eating the fish at a restaurant and suffering thirty-six hours of LSD-like visions. Perhaps that was what I’d had at lunch, I thought. I’d hallucinated the girl on the wall.
I surfed around for news stories on the Med, hoping to find something about sturgeon. It was vital, I’d decided, to gather some useful info for M’s investigation. It might relax her a little.
She was totally at ease in bed, but as soon as the sex was over, she seemed to become tense and overreact to innocent remarks. It had to be stress-related. If I could help her get ahead with her work, it would reduce her stress levels and make things easier between us. At the moment, we were vacillating between extreme closeness in bed and cold distance out of it. It was all a bit disorienting.
There were plenty of weird things going on beyond Collioure’s harbour wall, I discovered. Sardines with herpes, a great white shark attacking a small cargo ship, a cow found floating thirty kilometres off Marseille, and a new species of toxic seaweed that was killing off sea urchins. Not that I could see much wrong with zapping a few of those spiny bastards.
The Med was in turmoil, it seemed. The perfect place to hide some sturgeon. And they had to be very well hidden, because there were no French news stories about them on the internet. Either they’d been keeping themselves to themselves, or France’s caviar pirates were much better than its commandos at keeping their activities secret.
‘Paul, you haven’t forgotten me, have you?’
Elodie woke me up from the depths of a siesta. She was phoning to remind me that I was meant to be overseeing the catering arrangements for her wedding.
‘No, of course I haven’t forgotten you,’ I told her, as soon as I’d remembered where and who I was. ‘I’m going to sketch out some menu ideas. If I email them to you, maybe your brother and your dad can look after the actual ordering?’
&nb
sp; ‘No. You know Papa – he will buy illegal meat from Belgium or China. And Benoit will get the numbers wrong and order one bottle of wine and five hundred roast pigs.’
I began to defend her younger brother, who had been managing my tea room very efficiently for the best part of a year, but Elodie wouldn’t listen. I was going to have to deal with things myself.
‘We must satisfy Valéry’s bitch grand-mère,’ she told me.
‘His what?’
‘Didn’t I tell you? His grandmother is against the wedding. I don’t come from a grande famille, you see, so I’m not classe enough for her. She told Valéry that I am not – how do you say? – not “digne de porter son voile”?’
‘Not fit to carry her sail? She’s a sailor?’
‘No, imbecile. Her voile, the thing the woman wears on her face for a wedding.’
‘Her veil.’
‘Yes. In these families, the bride wears the veil of a grandmother or an important female ancestor. And the bitch grand-mère has told Valéry that I am not worthy to wear her veil. And she has never even met me, the grosse vache.’
‘Whereas if she could just hear you talk about her, she’d fall in love with you,’ I teased.
‘This is serious, Paul. The bitch grand-mère doesn’t want Valéry to marry me, so he has organized the wedding himself. He is paying a fortune to have the reception in a chateau near Avignon. But he is starting to weaken. He wants to be independent, but he is from a grande famille. For them, being independent means not going to your parents’ house for lunch one Sunday. Which is why you must help.’
‘OK. How?’
‘I want to silence the old vache with the opulence of my banquet. I want the best of everything. So you must put together a fantastic menu. Don’t worry about the cost. Anything you want.’
‘OK.’ I smiled to myself, wondering how her dad would react if he could hear her spending his money.
‘The problem is that the bitch grand-mère wants to meet you first, to make sure you are the right person to be ordering food for her family.’
‘What?’
‘You don’t know these grandes familles, Paul. They have a family conference every time one of them wants to buy socks. They are terrified that someone might buy red nylon.’
I laughed. ‘No worries there – I’m a strictly sweat-free, cotton-socks type of guy.’
‘Please, Paul!’ Elodie gave a little screech, and I felt guilty for not taking her seriously. Things were obviously getting very panicky. ‘You must go and meet the old bitch,’ she ordered. ‘Valéry will come to see you. He will brief you. You have to learn more about the vache. She is causing some serious merde.’
‘What merde?’
‘You’ll see. Valéry will phone you to arrange a meeting, OK?’
‘OK,’ I agreed.
‘Thank you. Oh, and one thing you can do. Once, when I was in Collioure with my family, we bought some superb anchois marinés. You know, anchovies hand-fished by Catalans and all that shit. You must get, oh, ten kilos.’
‘But you just said I should wait until—’
‘Paul!’ I could hear her teeth gritting from a thousand kilometres away. ‘You are definitely going to convince the bitch grand-mère that you are the right person, OK? Otherwise I will kill you. So you can start ordering food now. There is no time to waste.’
‘Fine. I’ll buy them for you.’
‘You will? Oh Paul, you are a hero.’
Wow, I thought, if only all women could be made so deliriously happy with the promise of a few pickled fish.
4
After my second snorkelling trip of the day, I got back to the hotel to find M’s clothes strewn across the bed. Steam was billowing out of the bathroom, and I could hear the roar of a full-open tap.
‘Honey, I’m home,’ I called out.
‘Come into the bathroom if you are who I think you are,’ she replied, and the tap clunked off.
She was lying full-length in the tub, only her face, breasts and knees above the surface of the soapy water.
‘Come on in, the water’s lovely,’ she said.
‘So is what’s in it.’
I threw my own clothes on the bed, and we spent a few awkward seconds deciding how I could slot into the bath with her. It wasn’t exactly a jacuzzi. Finally, I got in behind her, and sat with her head on my chest and a breast in each hand.
‘Good day?’ I asked.
‘Oh, lots of talk,’ she said. ‘The Banyuls people think I’m nuts, asking about sturgeon instead of their local species.’
‘You look tense,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it would help if I rubbed some of that ginger and honey bath gel over you?’
‘You could give it a try.’
Now I may be speaking only for myself here, but there aren’t many more pleasant things to do with your hands than massage scented bath gel over the body of a beautiful woman, especially one who lets you know how good it feels, with words and miscellaneous other sounds. It felt pretty good for me, too. My hands gliding over her hips, down on to her stomach and then up to cup her breasts. Perfectly shaped breasts, too, heavy but firm. It didn’t take long before both of us felt the urgent need for her to slide backwards and sit astride me. Soon her rocking hips were causing tides of water to wash over the side of the bath and on to the floor.
It was only now that I noticed something strange about her body. Watching her in the mirror, I saw that her breasts were exactly the same colour as the rest of her. She was golden brown all over. She really was a Bond girl, a less glittery version of Jill Masterson in Goldfinger, the woman who asphyxiates because Oddjob covers her in gold paint. Unlike Jill, though, M had left a gap in her all-over colour scheme. Thanks to her bikini thong, she’d kept a tiny triangle of pale skin at the base of her spine. This I could see very clearly, because it was bouncing up and down right in front of me. Thank God for that, I thought, she’s not going to asphyxiate. At which point her breathless gasps cut off, and she sank back lifeless on top of me. It’s what the French call orgasm, isn’t it? La petite mort.
When we left for dinner, two almost identical guys were sitting side by side at a table in the hotel courtyard, reading newspapers by the light of a lamp hanging in the tree overhead. They were both wearing cardigans to protect themselves against the early autumn chill. Their woollies, like their hair and their shirts, were white. If it hadn’t been for the black newsprint in their hands, they would have been invisible against the pale stone of the courtyard floor and the white of the garden furniture.
I wished them ‘Bonsoir’ and they nodded in reply.
M, in a boisterous post-lovemaking mood, wasn’t satisfied with this, and repeated a loud, accusatory ‘Bonsoir!’
The men answered ‘Monsieur, Madame,’ and smiled as they watched M walk past.
Yes, I thought, she was looking good enough to turn gay men straight. She gripped my hand and I felt a surge of happiness. I was experiencing that irreplaceable thrill you get when you go to bed with someone and then find that you want to do so again. And again. And again.
I’d reserved a table at a restaurant in the old town. It was a tiny, dark place in a narrow street that had caught my eye because its menu was so short. In touristy areas, restaurant menus can seem too eager to please, offering everything that a hungry visitor could possibly want to eat. And you can be pretty sure that most of it will come out of the freezer. At this place, though, the handwritten menu told us what chef was making today, and that all of it was fresh.
We ordered a bottle of Collioure rosé and clinked glasses, looking each other in the eye as you must.
‘To our reunion,’ I said. ‘What do they say in French – retrouvailles? Finding each other again.’
‘We certainly found the right spot in the bath,’ M whispered. ‘And you found a great little restaurant,’ she added, looking around at the dark red and black décor. ‘Very intimate.’
She was right. In the candlelight it was so intimate that you could only ju
st see the person sitting opposite you. I did see, though, that we weren’t the only people there. Half of the restaurant’s ten or so tables were occupied, mostly by middle-aged couples. The only lone diner was a woman in a corner, apparently reading a book. She was sitting in deep shade against the dark background of the wall. It was so gloomy that she had to be reading with infra-red glasses.
‘Exactly my kind of place,’ M said. ‘Clever of you to know.’
‘It was a lucky guess,’ I said. ‘I hardly know anything about you.’ It had occurred to me that when we’d come down from Perpignan in the taxi, I’d done all the talking. She’d answered all my questions with questions of her own.
‘You know me a lot more intimately than most men,’ she said.
‘No, but seriously. I mean, I don’t know what films you like, what music. Who are your heroes, for example?’
‘Heroes?’ She looked surprised by the question.
‘Or heroines, of course.’
‘No, I have a hero,’ she said. ‘Peter Willcox.’
‘Who?’
‘Exactly.’ She tutted. ‘Not your fault. No one’s heard of him. He’s an environmentalist. He’s spent most of his life trying to protect the oceans against nuclear testing and whaling. He never gives up, never lets the politicians get him down, even though he’s taken some very hard knocks. He’s a real hero. And half the people who’ve actually heard of him are trying to stop him.’ She paused and took a sip of wine.
‘And he inspired you to go into marine ecology?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘But just for tonight, can’t we give work a miss?’ she said. ‘I want to relax, have a good time. OK?’
‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘Let’s get shallow. If you stay too long in the deep end, you only get tired and sink. And you’re never far from the serious end of the pool, are you? There’s always heavy stuff going on just beneath the surface.’
‘You’re probably right.’ M looked down into her glass, staring almost sadly through the transparent wine. ‘It goes with the job.’
‘But you devote time to shallow stuff, as well. Your suntan, for instance.’ I told her that I’d noticed her all-over colour. ‘I thought that as a scientist, you’d have been more concerned about skin cancer.’