Dial M for Merde (5 page)

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 just 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.'

‘As a scientist, I know that it's essential to tan very gradually and put on lots of sunblock. But yes, I travel a lot, and I like to spend siesta time stretched out in the sun. Where's the harm in that?'

‘No harm at all,' I said. Seemed I'd hit a nerve yet again. ‘You look fantastic.'

‘Thanks.' She smiled, and stroked my hand as if to apologize for the way she'd reacted.

I refilled our glasses and we drank to M's beautiful body. As I let the cold wine wash over my taste buds, I couldn't
help sneaking a glance towards the table where the lone woman was eating. Not very gallant when you're sitting opposite your lover, but there is something intriguing about a young woman eating dinner on her own. She had just finished her salad, and as she reached forward to pick up her glass, for a moment her face was lit in the glow from her candle. She raised a hand to flick her black hair off her cheek, and suddenly I knew why I'd felt the urge to stare at her. It was the girl who'd been parading around up on the castle wall. Our eyes met, and I was certain that there was a flash of recognition before she retreated to the shadows again. Which was weird. Had she really seen me mouthing warnings at her?

‘You OK?' M asked.

‘Yes, great. Hungry, though,' I said. It would have been too complicated to explain.

5

Next morning, I went out to buy some fruit to supplement our room-service breakfast. If there's one thing France has taught me, it's to seize every opportunity to eat seasonal fruit. Balls to year-round strawberries – in September, you binge on figs and Muscat grapes.

The two white ghosts were sitting out in the courtyard, side by side, drinking coffee. They met my ‘Bonjour' with curt nods.

When I got back with my bags of fruit, M was up and dressed. The breakfast had been delivered and she'd poured us each a cup of coffee. Hers was almost empty. She was just getting off the phone.

‘Can you pass me a pen?' She flicked her fingers towards
the bedside table. I picked up the nearest ballpoint. ‘No, not that one, the other one,' she said. I handed the second pen to her, and she scribbled something on a corner of newspaper that she tore off and folded up. ‘Sorry,' she said. ‘The other pen's black. I never write with a black pen.'

‘Why not?' I asked.

‘Oh, long story. I can't stand anything black. Black clothes, black cars.' I'd noticed that none of her clothes, even her underwear, was darker than chocolate brown. She was a Fauve at heart.

‘Well, I hope you don't mind black grapes and black figs,' I said, sliding the bags of fruit towards her.

‘They're purple, not black,' she said, nipping off a small bunch of grapes. ‘Oh, I have to go back to Banyuls, by the way. I'll probably be gone all day.'

‘Again?' I knew she'd come down here to work, but I couldn't help showing my disappointment. I'd thought we could take a boat out, explore the coast, do things together.

‘Yes, again,' she said defensively.

‘Shall I come with you? We can meet up for lunch or something.'

‘Better not. I can't let anyone know I'm mixing business with pleasure – they'd stop my subsidies. Anyway, it'll take ages. You don't know what it's like when us scientists get going. Lunch would be deathly boring unless you want to listen to them rabbiting on about the infestation rate of toxic algae in the northern Mediterranean.'

‘Ah,' I said, ‘well as it happens, I was reading on the web about that, and—'

She interrupted me with a kiss. ‘What are your plans for today?'

I had a think. I didn't fancy lying on the beach all day. ‘I
have to get some stuff for Elodie's wedding,' I said. Which would take me about ten minutes. ‘Why don't I see if I can get chatting to those commandos?'