Authors: Celia Imrie
Not Quite Nice
To my pals who brought me here to Nice, and to the city whose beauty saved and inspired me.
Contents
The small town of Bellevue-Sur-Mer sparkled like a diamond on the French Mediterranean coast. Sprawling down from the foothills of the Alpes Maritimes to the beach, the town consisted of stately cream-coloured villas and old ochre houses with yellow, pink and lime-green shutters, hunched up, gazing out to sea. Dark alleys and bright pathways zigzagged vertiginously between pastel painted walls, and the one main road took a series of terrifying hairpin bends in its descent from the corniches to the bustling cul-de-sac which bordered the harbour, with its railway station, souvenir shops, brasseries, hotels and a small but popular casino.
Everywhere you looked, the colours were almost startling in their intensity: vivid purples, pinks and reds of bougainvillea and oleander bushes crowded under the green boughs of umbrella pines, orange trees and palms, and all set against the turquoise and ultramarine background which was the sea and sky.
Understandably, Bellevue-Sur-Mer had, like most places on the Côte d’Azur, seen more than its fair share of artistic and literary visitors: you couldn’t walk five hundred yards without passing a building which had been associated with Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, H.G. Wells, Somerset Maugham, Jules Verne, Maupassant, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Chekhov or F. Scott Fitzgerald. In art galleries all over the world you could see vivid paintings of its streets and sea views, executed by the likes of Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Cocteau, Chagall and Dufy. Nowadays rock icons and Hollywood movie stars lurked behind the virgin walls of impressive villas perched in the rocks above the Old Town, while many of the more garish seafront mansions along the bay belonged to magnates of world industry and Russian oligarchs.
As in most of the beauty spots on the earth, there were, dotted among the native inhabitants, a gaggle of Brits, people who, for one reason or another, kept a second home here or, in many cases, particularly of the older generation, had chosen to move, lock, stock and barrel to this magnificent village to retire in the sun. All of them, more or less, knew one another, if only by sight. They had their own local English newspaper, and even a radio station which broadcast English-speaking programmes from nearby Monaco.
This morning Theresa Simmons would be joining them. She walked briskly along the seafront, gripping the keys to her new apartment. She stopped a while by the harbour wall to take in the beautiful view – the glass-like sea, shining silver in the late January midday light, the little fishing boats tethered to the quay, bobbing and clanking, the sky dappled at the edges with pink haze, but at its zenith as blue as a kingfisher.
She knew she’d done the right thing. How lucky that she had taken the plunge and chosen to come here. The flight and train ride might have taken less than three hours but Theresa’s journey here had taken six long months.
The whole business of her transplant from Highgate to Bellevue-Sur-Mer started one night in July – a night of babysitting her three granddaughters. She always babysat, twice a week. But this one nasty night came after a horrible day, during which, quite against her will, she was forced into retirement.
Until that day, Theresa had hoped to go on working as long as she could and planned to carry on in the house in which she had been living for the last thirty-five years. Although she was coming up to her sixtieth birthday, Theresa was not expecting her boss Mr Jacobs to give her the heave-ho but, as she put on her coat ready to leave for her daughter’s Wimbledon home, he had taken her aside and apologised, saying that in a few months he would be ‘letting her go’. Theresa protested that she enjoyed working and didn’t want to give up, but Mr Jacobs confessed that it was a cost-cutting effort. Like everyone else, Jacobs and Partners was going under financially and unless he did this to a couple of people now, in a few months they’d
all
be out of work, including him. He was very sorry, whether she liked it or not, Theresa had to go.
With a heavy heart she made her way to Wimbledon, for the usual dose of childcare. She rode at the back of the crowded bus, the warmth from the engine turning the back of her seat into a heat pad, leaving her sweltering in the already sweaty crush of the London rush hour.
She resisted the feeling that she was on a tumbrel, heading for the guillotine. Theresa knew that wasn’t really right. She was only going for an evening’s babysitting. That was all.
Two hours later she looked at her watch, horrified to see she still had three long hours ahead of her before she could go home. She was under siege on her daughter’s taupe leather sofa, while the little bastards, her grandchildren, Chloe, Lola and Cressida, crawled around, ducking behind the sofa, whispering obscenities and insults: ‘Granny smells! Granny pongs! Granny stinks! Granny wears make-up like a clown! Granny’s fat! Granny’s a mad cow! Granny’s a witch! Granny’s a bitch!’
She knew you were supposed to love your children. You were also supposed to love your grandchildren. In fact you were supposed to offer them all ‘unconditional’ love, a fashionable term which was merely a trite way of saying it didn’t matter how badly your family behaved towards you, you had to love them anyway.
But Theresa had come to the end of her tether. Yes, it was easy to love the
thought
of them all, to love some idealised notion of what they ought to be: beaming daughter and giggling grandchildren running to darling granny, doling out love and hugs all round, while granny proffered foul-tasting bits of butterscotch, which were supposed to make them all have fond memories of granny, even long into the future, when granny was under the sod and they themselves were grandparents.
But reality was nothing like the TV ads.
She thought about Mr Jacobs, and how he had smiled at her so pityingly as he reminded her that she was nearing retirement age anyhow. It would be less hard on her, he had said, than it would be on the youngsters.
She pointed out to him that, at her age, the prospects of her getting another job were nil.
‘So spoil yourself, Theresa, my dear,’ he said, ‘spend more time with your family, enjoy a dignified retirement.’
‘Granny smells! Granny’s got a fat arse! Granny’s a mad cow! Granny’s a witch! Granny’s a stinkypoo!’
A dignified retirement indeed.
This night was not a one-off. It was like this every time. In fact, though Theresa first started babysitting a few years ago, the three children had recognised the opportunity for larks right from the start. Theresa had tried to win them round. She’d attempted bribery, with sweets and comics, brought round DVDs for them to watch, and board games for them to play (in some wildly imaginary world
that
would have been – an evening of Monopoly!), but within seconds the three girls had got bored with her baubles and resumed their ritual chanting, with Theresa as their totem pole.
Nowadays, for the duration of her twice-weekly stint, Theresa tried to ignore it. Nothing she did made any difference. She had learned to close her ears, but not well enough. It was impossible to use the TV to drown out the little bastards, they could always get even louder. It was also impossible to ignore them. She’d long ago given up on trying to read books. Even newspapers were useless, as all three of them had caught the idea of banging the back, cracking the paper, making her jump while they recoiled in spasms of laughter.
Today Theresa sat in the armchair with a cookery book. It was a new idea. Recipes could certainly be taken in small doses, there was no story to follow, very few complex sentences, and a few phrases on the page conjured a delightful world where she could imagine being at home in the calm of her own kitchen, stirring and chopping, pricking pastry and painting it with milk or egg yolk, buttering baking trays and popping things into the oven. In her mind she could even get as far as taking the completed dishes of her imagination out of the oven, placing them on the table and sitting down to eat.
‘Granny’s an old bitch! Granny stinks! Granny wears make-up like a clown! Granny’s fat! Granny’s a mad cow! Granny’s a witch!’
Blah blah blah! She thought. Soon this purgatory would come to an end, she’d be released from her duties and she would go home, uncork a bottle and cook up a storm. A lovely cheese omelette – Gruyère of course – with champignons à la Provençale and a salad of sweet peppers. (No prizes for guessing she was deep into Elizabeth David’s
Mediterranean Cookery
and thereby not only thinking of lovely food but lovely places too, with a sparkling azure sea and indigo skies.)
Theresa had worked in that office, a small solicitors’ in Islington, for years. She’d been there ever since her husband Peter had buggered off with Annunziata the nanny, a nubile Italian girl with cow-like eyes and huge knockers.
