‘Seven minutes,’ she said. ‘Brilliant.’ Her smile faded when her phone began buzzing in her bag. She took it out, looked at the screen and gritted her teeth in frustration. ‘I’m going to have to take this, sorry.’
She wandered away down the line of flashy yachts, talking in French. She stopped about thirty yards away, at the foot of a wooden gangplank belonging to an old, classy boat – a long, curvaceous vessel with a brass deckrail. You could imagine 1930s film stars lounging there as they drank cocktails and sucked on cigarette holders. It made a change from the bulky ostentation of the fibreglass pimp cruisers.
M seemed to be arguing, cutting at the air with her free hand. But it didn’t look as though she was winning the argument.
‘Merde!’ I heard her clearly above the traffic noise from thirty yards away.
The Bendor ferry, a flat craft big enough for a single car, was backing up to the quayside when M returned, looking grim.
‘Did you tell them to get lost?’ I asked.
She grunted one of her short-lived laughs. I gathered that meant no.
There were two other passengers for the island – a businessman with a briefcase and laptop, probably on his way to sell the hotel new windows or management software, and a guy accompanying a pile of oyster boxes. That night’s entrée du jour, I guessed.
We sat on the open deck, and as we cruised through the marina I asked M which boat she’d choose if she could afford any of them. She picked a large modern vessel that was built for speed. She really was in the mood to escape from something.
Soon we were out in open water. The sea was surprisingly choppy, and waves were boiling around a low lighthouse that had obviously been built to warn ships away from a reef. Just beyond the lighthouse, Bendor began to fill the horizon. An angular, Italian-looking villa was perched on the left-hand corner of the island, a sort of flat-roofed stone chateau on a rocky outcrop. Behind it and above was a canopy of dark conifers, the treeline broken by one or two half-hidden rooftops.
As soon as the ferry pulled into the harbour, I got a glimpse of how rich and powerful Monsieur Ricard must have been. The waterfront was like a set from The Prisoner. It was a kid’s drawing of a fishing harbour, brought to life. He’d built a row of doll’s house cottages, one of which was decorated with a colourful fresco depicting medieval galleons. Beyond them was a miniature Italian village, and what looked like a Roman temple. Guests arriving on the island must have felt as if they were entering his personal playground.
The main chateau is now the hotel, and I pulled our bags the twenty yards or so to reception. M announced to a young woman in a suit that she’d booked a room in the ‘palais’, or palace.
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘They call it the palace, but it’s the new annexe on the harbour,’ M whispered. ‘It’s quieter there. They have weddings in the main building sometimes.’
‘You’ve been here before, then?’ I asked.
‘A couple of times,’ she said. ‘Business. They have conferences here.’
‘Double wow,’ I said. ‘Clever people, the French.’ The only conferences I’d been to were in stuffy rooms overlooking English motorways.
M did her thing with the credit card and then announced that she had to go.
‘Go?’ I asked. ‘Where to?’
‘I’ve got a meeting in town.’
‘I thought we were hiding out here? You said you were going to tell these guys you’d had enough of sturgeon-hunting.’ As usual, I was uncomfortable about trying to monopolize M, but I was beginning to feel a bit like her luggage, something to be deposited at the hotel before she went off to a meeting.
‘I know I did. Sorry,’ she said, and shrugged. She’d obviously bottled out.
‘Tell you what, I’ll come over with you,’ I said. When I saw the look of panic in her eyes, I added, ‘I’ll mooch around town and you can call me when you’ve finished. We’ll have a drink and gaze out at our posh new island.’
She softened. ‘OK.’
We dumped our bags and made it back to the jetty in time to catch the boat that had brought us over. The oyster guy was still there, I noticed. Perhaps he was just taking his pet shellfish for a ride.
Back on the mainland, we said a fond farewell, and M headed off towards the casino. Weird place to meet oceanographers, I thought.
I wandered up into the small streets behind the harbour-front. This being the Côte d’Azur, there was a row of postcard shops and lavender-soap stores, but the smell of perfume was damped down by a tangy odour that had me homing in like a pig after truffles.
It was a caviste, a wine-seller whose shop was a deep, flag-stone-floored cavern. He was filling bottles from a gigantic barrel set into the wall. The red wine was gushing out like blood from a severed artery. The floor seemed to be coated in a film of velvet, and the vinegary smell was strong enough to make me heady. It wasn’t the red wine that interested me, though, it was a proud row of golden bottles in the window – ten different sorts of Muscat, the southern aperitif wine that is as heady as port or sherry, but as light as a sorbet. And it was this comparison that gave me my inspiration – Elodie wanted exotic food? She’d get it, homegrown.
Muscat sorbet. The name alone made my mouth water. I’d seen lots of southerners drinking Muscat on ice, and I’d tried it myself. I had expected the taste to be spoilt by diluting it, but somehow the cold wateriness of the ice actually enhanced the flavour of the wine. A sorbet would have the same effect when it melted in your mouth.
In short, there was absolutely no reason why these local ingredients shouldn’t be classier and tastier than anything Elodie wanted to jet in from the tropics. I was going to put together a carbon-neutral banquet that would blow the bitch grand-mère’s snooty knickers off.
M called me around six and suggested that we meet in one of the big cafés down by the harbour. When I got there, she held out her glass, which contained a rosé barely pinker than honey.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘You tell me, Mister food expert,’ she challenged me.
‘OK.’ I duly sloshed the cool liquid round in the glass and gave the rising aromas a professional sniff. ‘Yes, it definitely smells like wine,’ I said. ‘I’m picking up the scent of grape, and the tiniest hint of vine leaf. But to be sure, you’ve got to listen to it.’ I held the glass to my ear. ‘Yes, the wind fluttering through the vineyards, the sea in the distance – probably a local wine. Unless it’s Italian, Spanish, Californian, South African or Australian, of course. Am I getting warm?’
She laughed loudly, and kissed me. ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ she said.
‘I’m glad I’m here too, and that you’re here. That we’re here.’ I held out my arms towards the sun. It was still a recognizable ball of fire down here in the south, whereas it had been a faintly glimmering candle in Paris. ‘Did everything go the way you wanted this afternoon?’
‘No. Well, yes but no, if you know what I mean.’
I had to confess I didn’t. ‘Sturgeon problems?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, Paul, I know you got yourself arrested fighting for their cause, but fuck the sturgeon,’ she said.
‘I think that might be dangerous, after what it did to that guy’s canoe.’
‘Actually, that’s the sturgeon’s biggest problem,’ she said. ‘No one wants to fuck it. The Aquitaine sturgeon is the only European species still going in the wild, and numbers are critically low, so they can’t find any sexual partners. That one the commando saw in the Camargue could be just like your hen-party girls – horny and desperate.’
‘Not a good idea to go swimming in a sturgeon costume then?’ I said.
She guffawed into her glass, and then suddenly frowned.
I looked over at the source of her annoyance. A stocky guy was shamelessly ogling her, lounging way back in his chair, as if M might want to come over and check out what he had in store for her under the table.
I gave him a ‘Point it somewhere else, pal’ star
e and moved round in my seat to block his view of M. ‘Has he been bothering you?’ I asked her.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It happens to me all the time in France. Forget him.’
I ordered a couple more glasses of the rosé (which turned out to be called Chateau de Lascaux), and begged for some olives to absorb the alcohol.
The wine seemed to hold the key to the secret compartments in M’s life, and she began to open up at last. She told me why she’d dumped her last boyfriend.
‘He was French,’ she said, as though that might be reason enough. ‘And he kept telling me that I was the most beautiful woman in the world – no, the only woman in the world – and then I saw an email from some tart calling him “mon amour”. It was a reply to an email from him telling her she was the most beautiful woman in the world.’
‘Wow.’ I took all this in, not least the revelation that she was the kind of girl who read her bloke’s emails.
‘Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t hack into his account or anything,’ she said. ‘The daft berk left his laptop open. And when a message pops up with “baise-moi” – “fuck me” – in the subject field, you kind of get curious. You have a peek.’
‘It could have been spam.’
‘No, he was spam. I deleted him.’
Any possibility of continuing our conversation was ruled out when a guy started singing a French song that had no chorus, just an endless series of verses, all of which seemed to end on the same rhyme. It was like listening to someone suffering from severe hiccups. The singer, a thirty-something with spiky hair and a tight white sweatshirt that had been attacked by a gang of illiterate graffiti artists, was enjoying himself enormously, and a few of the customers were singing along. Even M was nodding her head in time to what only the French could have called music. She had to be very drunk indeed.
Things got even more painful when a female voice joined in. I looked up and caught my breath.
‘She’s not bad, but I had hoped you preferred blondes,’ M said.
‘I do,’ I told M. ‘It’s the song – it sent me into shock.’
This wasn’t the whole truth. For a second, I’d thought it was the wall-walking, solo-dining girl from Collioure. Which would have been just plain spooky.
I realized almost immediately that I was wrong. This girl had much longer hair, and she was older, too. Late thirties as opposed to late twenties. I didn’t know why I’d had the sudden flashback. It had to be wine lag.
I knew I couldn’t say anything to M. She’d only ask why I hadn’t mentioned the girl before. Which was a question I couldn’t really answer myself. So I kept my peace. What is it they say – discretion is the better part of cowardice?
At the end of the song, the duo decided that they had whipped the crowd of twenty or so into enough of a frenzy to try a bit of audience participation. They hummed the first line of a song and invited everyone to guess the song title. If we didn’t get it right, the guy with the spiky hair threatened, they wouldn’t sing the song. I said a silent prayer that no one would guess.
At first, my wish came true, and the shy audience all looked down at their plates. But this only goaded the duo into humming a whole verse to try and jog our memories. It was a bouncy playground-chant ditty, the type of thing that is inflicted on you if you get into a French taxi driven by a guy who tunes into an oldies station.
‘Allez!’ the girl implored us all. ‘Vous, Monsieur!’ She was looking at me.
‘Je suis anglais,’ I said, shrugging apologetically.
‘That’s not your fault,’ the spiky-haired guy said. ‘I blame your parents.’
I joined in the laughter. At least it meant that we were a few seconds further away from hearing the whole song.
‘I know!’ M suddenly shouted.
‘Oui? Madame knows?’ The male singer looked delighted, as did the guy who’d been ogling M earlier. He stood up and started to chant for M to sing the song. He was flexing his trousers at us in a horror-movie version of a belly-dance. I tried to stare him down, but he was too drunk or French to care.
M ignored him and called out the song title, a name of such brainwashing banality that I instantly forgot it.
‘Oui!’ She earned a cheer from the band, who launched into their first verse again.
I looked at her in astonishment. She actually knew this song?
‘I know what you really do when you meet up with your French scientists,’ I said. ‘You don’t talk about sturgeon. You play Name That Tune, don’t you?’
M blushed so red that I thought it might even be true.
2
Next morning, I made a scientific discovery. Reducing the carbon footprint of your wine does not diminish the impact it will make on your head. OK, not exactly Nobel Prize standard, but it was a fact I was not going to forget in a hurry.
M was moving about in the bedroom, and her footsteps on the tiled floor were like earthquakes in my skull. I, meanwhile, was clamped to the mattress by a force field that would have immobilized a herd of kangaroos.
‘Coffee on the bedside table,’ M bellowed into my ear, though she probably thought it was a whisper.
‘What time is it?’ I asked. ‘Six? Seven?’
It turned out that it was already late morning. M had been up and about for a couple of hours. She’d been to the island’s diving school and asked a few subtle questions about what kinds of fish they saw along this part of the coast. She’d even got a peek at their photo album. No signs of sturgeon, though.
‘See, you’re a much better spy than me,’ she said, and then spoilt it all by announcing, ‘I have to go to Marseille. I probably won’t be back till tomorrow morning.’
‘What?’ Suddenly I was awake and sober. Marseille was only an hour away. I didn’t see why the short trip merited an overnight stay.
‘I have a couple of meetings at an institute there, and then I have to have dinner with some people,’ M said. ‘But if the dinner ends early, I’ll come back tonight. The boats run till eleven or so.’
I sat up in bed. ‘I don’t know why we even came to Bendor,’ I said. ‘You spend more time on the ferry than on the island.’
‘Don’t you like it here?’ she asked defensively.
‘Sure, but I came down south to be with you, not to go on a singles holiday. Why don’t we both go to Marseille, get a hotel there? It’s a fun place, so everyone tells me.’
‘No, we’re fine here.’
‘I’m fine here, you mean. You’d be better off in Marseille. Are you trying to stash me away, or what? Have I become that much of a liability?’
‘Oh Paul, I’d prefer to stay out here on the island and relax with you, believe me,’ she said. ‘But I can’t. Sorry.’ She turned away, and opened the wardrobe to get her jacket.
So that’s that, I thought. End of discussion.
Standing on the quayside, waving goodbye to the ferry, I knew what Parisian housewives felt like. At the beginning of July or August, husbands drive wifey and kids out to Brittany, settle them into their holiday home, and then drive back to Paris on the Sunday night, back to the real world, and often back to their mistresses, with whom they can now have a few uninterrupted nights out. No need to end the date at nine o’clock and head home complaining about a long meeting.
Not that I thought M was going off to meet up with some other guy. It would have been too absurd. She didn’t need the hassle of inviting me down here, and then cheating on me. No, she was just a woman who kept changing her mind, I told myself. Or who said one thing and did another.
And the bare facts were that I was checked in, free of charge, to a luxury hotel on a Mediterranean island. It was sunny, the sea was inches away from my eager toes, and I had almost nothing to do for the rest of the day except relax, swim and eat. My only obligations were a couple of phone calls about the wedding.
Zero stress.
I changed into shorts and flip-flops, grabbed my snorkelling gear and headed out into the sun. By now it was getting on for lun
chtime, and the receptionist told me that there was an open-air restaurant at the far end of the island. ‘Far end’ being a five-minute stroll away.
Instead of going past the row of fake fishermen’s cottages and the Roman temple, I turned up an alleyway and found myself on the ‘wild’ side of the island. There were almost no buildings here, just a well-maintained coastal path that followed the line of the rocky shore. Every twenty yards or so, Monsieur Ricard had built concrete stairways down to tiny gaps in the rocks so that visitors could get in and out of the sea easily. Considerate kind of guy.
I rounded a small headland and came out on the land-ward coast again, above the restaurant. It consisted of little more than a couple of rows of white plastic tables, set out in the open air. All of them were laid for two, I noticed – it was a place designed for romance. I felt a niggle of resentment at being alone.
Against the low inland cliff was an open grill that had blackened the stone above it. The slightest shower of rain would force the place to close, which seemed to say volumes about the weather down here. Between the tables and the water’s edge there was a smooth concrete bathing platform with just enough room for a line of ten or so loungers. Almost all of these were occupied, either by sunbathers or their towels.
There were already a few people eating, presumably the owners of the towels. They reminded me that I hadn’t had any breakfast, so I went straight to a table and ordered some grilled seiche (squid) and a half-bottle of rosé.
‘Is it OK if I swim before I eat?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ the waitress said, as if it would have been absurd to do anything else. On a hot day, people probably dived into the sea between courses the way that Parisians smoke a cigarette.
I stripped to the legal minimum, rinsed my snorkel and climbed down a short metal ladder into the clear sea. The water here was a couple of degrees warmer than at Collioure, and I spent a few joyful minutes renewing acquaintance with my old friends the spotted oblade and the hallucinogenic sarpa sarpa. I was even glad to meet up with a few spiny black urchins.