Dial M for Merde (19 page)

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.

‘You sell your tennis courts to those people,' Dadou pointed out.

‘Of course I do. What does an intelligent man do when
he sees a cow? He milks it. But you don't want a cow marrying into your family.'

They both laughed again, and found their rosemary plant. They ripped off a few stalks and went back into the house, still chatting.

‘Do you really want to marry into this family?' I asked Elodie.

‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘More than ever.'

3

Dinner got off to a shaky start when Dadou asked what route I'd taken to drive to the bastide. I remembered that I was meant to have arrived from London, and said I'd driven from ‘Hee-air', my pronunciation of the airport just east of Toulon at Hyères.

This provoked a few sniggers amongst the dozen or so adult Bonnepoires who had assembled in the dining room. The kids were eating in the kitchen.

‘Yairr,' Dadou corrected me, and then asked for more details, probably hoping that I'd cock up a few more place names. He wasn't disappointed. Cavalaire passed without incident, even Borme les Mimosas, but I came unstuck at the coastal village of La Bouillabaisse, which I attempted to pronounce two or three times, asking whether it was the village that inspired the fish stew of the same name, or vice versa. No one knew, but they all seemed highly amused at the way I said the name, except Moo-Moo, whose pale face became even whiter. Eventually Elodie put me out of my misery, whispering that it was pronounced with an ‘s' sound at the end, not ‘z'. The way I'd said it made it sound like ‘boiled fuck'.

‘Can't you just stop talking for a while?' she begged me.

I kept my head down during the main course, but in a fit of optimism, while we were waiting for dessert, I pitched my idea for the pièce de résistance at Valéry's wedding. It might turn out to be a waste of breath, but it was better than listening to the family discussing the colour of a cousin's new pony, or the chances of getting a tenth Bonnepoire in as many years into the same elite school.

By chance or design, the dinner had been very local, with everything produced either in the grounds or by nearby farmers, so I was able to pick up the theme of a Provençal banquet.

I described my invention, a pièce montée – traditionally a giant pyramid of caramelized profiterole-style pastry balls – made out of fresh figs, which I've always seen as one of nature's more underrated gifts to humanity.

‘It would be impossible, totally impossible,' Uncle Babou said.

Elodie, who had been placed next to him, looked likely to stab him with a fork at any moment.

‘It's true that figs are not as solid as tennis balls,' I said, earning hearty laughs from most of the table. Babou pretended to be amused by this jibe about his profession, but I could see that I'd just made an enemy. Tough merde, I thought. After his little speech in the vegetable garden, he deserved all the punishment he got. ‘I have already asked the manager of my salon de thé in Paris to make a miniature one as a test,' I said.

‘Why are you not trying to persuade them to have an English wedding cake?' This was from one of Valéry's aunts, the presidential spokeswoman. She had introduced herself as Ludivine Saint Armand de Bonnepoire. A heavy handle to carry about. She'd obviously tacked her maiden
name on the end when she got married, and now wasted a full minute every time she had to sign a cheque.

She was tall, thin and fine-featured, a younger version of Dadou, with dyed brown hair swept back in a simple pony tail. She was, if anything, the snootiest of the lot, and had the definite air of someone who had hit the jackpot in life with their very first shag. It was morbidly fascinating to look at the woman who would have to make the announcement to the press if the President did get shot.