Not Quite Nice (15 page)
Authors: Celia Imrie
Alfie was using emotional blackmail to steer his mother into doing something he wanted her to do. Something that Faith appeared to have no idea of.
Sally wanted to know why.
‘Did you give him the money?’
‘I did. The best part of the remaining half is going to pay for the house.’
‘When are you next going to see your notaire to sign the documents?’ Sally asked.
‘At the end of the week,’ replied Faith.
‘Then I’ll come with you,’ said Sally. ‘You’ll need a witness, anyhow.’
Having heard Faith’s story, Sally knew that something terrible was going on. Faith was being taken for a dupe, and Sally was determined that she would get to the bottom of it.
Theresa had downed three glasses of wine before the doorbell rang again. She felt herself sway slightly as she got up to open the door.
It was Carol.
‘Darling, we’re so sorry we’re late.’
Carol breezed in, followed by a gaggle of people.
‘As you can see, I dragged along a little crowd for you. Where shall we put ourselves?’
Carol sniffed the air.
‘Delicious smell, Theresa! I can’t wait to get going. I am one lousy cook.’
Theresa ushered everyone to a chair.
‘Red or white?’ she asked, heading for the oven to rescue the cheese straws. ‘Brian is playing sommelier, for the evening.’
She spilled the hot cheese pastry pieces on to a pair of large brand-new plates. She started dipping each one into the cayenne and realised it would take for ever to do the lot, so she grabbed the bowl and shoved it on to the tray beside the plates. If people wanted to dip into the cayenne they could do it for themselves.
Carol raised her voice to say ‘There should have been one other, my dear old friend Zoe Redbridge, but she’s just off for a week in Switzerland.’
‘How lovely,’ said Theresa passing around the cheese straws. ‘Skiing?’
‘That’s what she’d like us all to
think
she’s doing,’ said Carol tartly. ‘But she goes for secret beauty treatments. She gets injected with lamb’s glands or something. It’s supposed to stop you ageing.’
William looked up. ‘You never told me about this!’
‘Really? She’s being doing it for years. It must certainly make her bank account lighter. It costs an arm and a leg.’
‘And does it make a great difference?’
Carol raised her eyebrows.
‘No.’
‘So why . . . ?’
‘Oh, in her youth everyone used to do it.’ Carol waved her arms in the air. ‘It was the chic thing to do back in the forties and fifties. Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Jackie O . . .’
William made an excited ‘ooh’ sound, and nudged the young man sitting next to him, while Carol continued. Both men wore similar velvet jackets, colourful shirts and bow ties.
‘. . . Cary Grant, Gloria Swanson, Charles de Gaulle, Somerset Maugham, Pope Pius XII.’
‘There you’ve lost me,’ said William.
Theresa laughed and offered cheese straws to the two men.
William spoke. ‘Oh, Theresa, this is my husband, Benjamin.’
Theresa and Benjamin caught eyes. They recognised one another at once. But in the few seconds during which she was remembering how, on her first full day here in the furniture cave Benjamin had so rudely tried to stop Pierre from selling her the prized table, she just missed the nanosecond during which Benjamin signalled her to pretend they had never met.
She blurted out: ‘Oh, Benjamin and I have met.’
Benjamin was shaking his head in a warning fashion, while maintaining a desperate eye contact with her.
Theresa finally understood and realised she should not continue. William had been kind to her after all, and she liked him. And both men were her neighbours. There was no point making enemies of them.
‘Really?’ said William. ‘How? Where?’
‘We . . . er . . .’ Theresa had no idea what story she could make up.
‘We met in the Huit-à-8,’ said Benjamin. ‘It’s the
only
place to meet. So divine a rendezvous, beloved by all the inhabitants of Bellevue-Sur-Mer.’
‘I have to confess,’ said Theresa to the assembled company. ‘That, due to unforeseen circumstances, this evening’s recipe is limited to produce I bought in that very shop about an hour ago. So please forgive me.’
She turned to her piles of cake tins and the ingredients on the kitchen tops.
‘There are eight of us here and I have four cake tins. So if we get into pairs we can all make something together.’
William and Benjamin, Carol and David already stood in ready-made pairs. Carol noticed that Ted made a beeline for Jessica, while Brian moved towards her, Theresa’s, side.
‘Go Fanny!’ he whispered into her ear.
‘Well,’ said Theresa, suppressing a giggle. ‘I am going to show you all a little spin on the French staple, tarte tatin. Only, tonight, we’re going to use tomatoes.’
She picked up her cake tin. ‘And as in most recipes, the first thing we do is butter our pans.’
William spoke. ‘Is it me, or does that sound vaguely obscene?’
Everyone laughed, Benjamin the loudest. He gave Theresa a conspiratorial wink.
It took less than forty minutes for everyone to produce and bake a very handsome dish of tomato tarte tatin.
As Theresa and Brian brought them out of the oven, everyone cooed and aahed over their own product.
Theresa lifted her own tart on to a plate and cut it into slices, she tried to deliver an old joke about pies – but changing the word pie to tart: ‘What is the best thing to put into a tart?’
Everyone stood round, pop-eyed with anticipation.
As she prepared to give the answer Theresa realised the joke had gained something in translation.
‘Oh Lord! The answer should be “your teeth”,’ she said, totally embarrassed. ‘But I can see that only makes it worse.’
‘As the actress said to the bishop,’ said Benjamin.
Everyone crowded round the glass-topped table where they sat down and ate.
At the end of the evening, the members of Theresa’s Cookery Club left her flat, laughing and happy, each couple clutching their own take-home tart on a paper plate, wrapped in tin foil.
Theresa wondered who would actually eat the tart made jointly by Jessica and Ted or would they be going somewhere now to share it?
Brian helped Theresa clean up the kitchen and put all the dishes, tins and glasses into the dishwasher. Then they bade each other goodnight and went to their separate rooms.
Theresa lay in her new bed staring out into the moonlight spilling down into the dark courtyard. She felt happy and positive. Things
would
work out here. All would be well.
She had done the right thing in moving from Highgate.
The first club meeting had gone so perfectly that she really looked forward to the next one, for which she planned to be better prepared.
She’d made a bit of money to put straight into the bank, and had more coming in from Brian’s rent. So far, he was proving to be the exemplary lodger.
She pulled the blanket up over her shoulder and rolled over nearer the window so that she could see the tiny square of starlit sky above the Hôtel Astra. She could hear the voices of the people in the hotel room. It all sounded very romantic.
In the darkness, she smiled to herself.
What would Imogen make of all this? Her mother running a cookery club and sharing a small flat with a good-looking eligible bachelor?
Brian was quite a catch. He was such a gent, and him making that little joke into her ear before the cookery session started had really given her the confidence to go for it. There was nothing to relax the atmosphere like a slightly rude joke.
She wondered about him. What was he thinking, lying there in that rather uncomfortable tiny room? Was he in bed next door thinking of her?
For all she knew, Brian had designs on her.
And indeed he did.
In the small box room across the corridor, Brian was indeed thinking about Theresa. He thought about how generous she was, how kind-hearted and how much she had to offer.
Oh, yes, Brian certainly had designs on Theresa.
His room was very small, like a prison cell, but that was something Brian was quite used to. For, only two months earlier, under his real name, Ronald Arthur Tate, Brian had been a prisoner, doing time in Wormwood Scrubs.
Ingredients
Small plum tomatoes
Honey
Puff pastry
*
Basil
Salt and pepper
Egg yolk or milk
Method
Place the tomatoes, bunched together, in a cake tin.
Drizzle over a little honey, salt and pepper.
Cut the pastry slightly larger than the cake tin and lay over the top, tucking in to make a tight fit.
Brush the top with milk or egg yolk.
Bake at 180° for about 15–20 minutes.
When cooked cover with serving plate and tip over so that the tart turns on to the plate upside down.
Decorate with basil leaves.
Serve.
*
The traditional recipe uses a kind of pizza dough. I prefer puff pastry.
(From Nissart – the Niçoise dialect – meaning, literally, hot bath)
Ingredients
200 g butter
100g olive oil
Jar of anchovies
4 cloves of garlic
Salt and black pepper
Raw vegetables: carrots, celery, spring onions, chopped peppers, quartered little gem lettuces, radishes, hard-boiled egg – anything you fancy.
Method
Prepare and arrange the vegetables in a basket.
Melt the butter with the oil, add the crushed garlic, and then the anchovies. Stir vigorously over heat until the anchovies dissolve into the mixture.
Season and serve in a dipping bowl (if possible, kept warm by a candle from beneath).
Gather round and dip the vegetables into the ‘hot bath’.
All along the Côte d’Azur, from Marseille to Menton, the yellows of February – the lemons, daffodils and mimosa – made way for the purples, reds and shocking pinks of March and April. Oleander plants with their poisonous splashes of blood-red peered out from behind every stone wall and bougainvillea bushes spread lushly up the sides of houses and spilled over fences.
The carnival was over, Lent almost done and Easter was imminent.
The famous Riviera heat, now at its most pleasant, brought people out on to the streets to drink and dine. The sun shone almost every day. The sky was blue, all day a perfect cerulean, darkening at night to a faultless Prussian. The sea dazzled with its ever-changing shades ranging from pale turquoise to dark navy, always sparkling with diamonds of light.
Bobbing upon it, the cruise ships, so scarce during the winter when most of them were off on world tours or in the Caribbean, returned to their regular summer Mediterranean circuits. Almost every day saw a huge white liner unload its passengers in Villefranche-Sur-Mer or Monte Carlo, from where they dispersed in coaches for the day to all the towns and villages along the coast.
Daily, tourists arrived from the airport, having taken up spring bargain flights to Nice. From there they moved along the coast to picturesque spots where they wandered around the shops, buying postcards and souvenirs, and filled the beaches and the pavement tables of all the cafes and bars.
For the English-speaking residents of Bellevue-Sur-Mer it was business as usual. For them nothing much had changed.
As ever, they were all in and out of one another’s homes and lives, laughing, sharing, eating, drinking, gossiping and being very good neighbours.
In March, one by one, they had all gone down with a nasty cold, and then took it in turns to watch out for each other, turning up with supplies of fruit, ibuprofen and bottles of whisky for hot toddies.
Carol and David continued to drive around, nipping in and out of Nice, and taking their friends off for trips to local olive farms and vineyards to stock up with
produits de terroir
, while William and Benjamin could be seen most evenings in their matching jackets, drinking wine on the terraces of the local bars.
Sian spent quite a bit more time at home while she searched for a suitable local location for her new boutique. People couldn’t help noticing that for some unknown reason she seemed oddly serene. She declined attending Theresa’s Cookery Club, as, she told everyone in a very loud voice, she had a blue ribbon in cookery from a course she had taken while at Lucie Clayton’s School when she was twenty. She allowed Ted to go. He was, he told people, writing again, though no one really believed that.
