Dial M for Merde

by Stephen Clarke

‘Yes, yes, true. What do you want?’

  Her question was aimed at a miniature Valéry who had materialized in the doorway, his eyes riveted to my bare legs. The apparition was dressed in 1930s clothes – a blue checked shirt done up tight at the neck, and corduroy shorts that ended just below the knee with a kind of cuff that could be buttoned to grip long socks. This, plus the haircut – close cropped except for a long tuft at the fringe – convinced me that it couldn’t be the spirit of Valéry as a seven-year-old. After all, he was too young to have been in the Hitler Youth.

  ‘Maman says coffee is almost finished,’ the boy said, still taking in my state of half-undress.

  ‘OK, we’re just coming.’ Elodie shooed him away. ‘One of Valéry’s little brothers,’ she explained when he had gone. ‘Poor kid.’

  ‘I can’t believe this Moo-Moo’s produced so many children. She looks like the archetypal spinster.’

  ‘Oh no, Paul. In the grandes familles, you must not confuse looking totally unsexy with being unmarried. In fact it is better for the wife to be unsexy, because then the husband can be sure that she will not shag the dentist. Moo-Moo has six children. Or seven, maybe. The oldest is Valéry, and that boy is the youngest. She and her husband are so Catholic that they have to have a baby every time they fuck, or it is a sin.’

  ‘So she hasn’t had sex in seven years? No wonder she’s a bit tense.’

  ‘Paul, please. Put on your trousers. You cannot discuss Moo-Moo while you are nearly naked. It reminds me of once when I was on holiday in Italy. I met a boy who liked to make love during Mass. It was disgusting. I could feel the Pope watching us.’ She smiled nostalgically, as if this sort of blasphemous action would have spiced up life in the chateau. The only sexy member of Moo-Moo’s generation of the family, she went on, was one of the aunts, called Ludivine.

  ‘She is a – how do you say? – porte-parole.’

  ‘Spokesperson?’

  ‘Yes, one of those, at the Elysée.’

  I stopped in mid-trouser leg. ‘She works at the presidential palace?’ I asked. So here was someone who’d be directly affected if the assassination plot succeeded.

  ‘Ludivine is an old friend of the President,’ Elodie said. ‘They were at school together. Valéry told me they screwed for the first time, you know, when they were virgins.’

  ‘She was his first lady, you might say.’

  Elodie laughed. ‘You mock, Paul, but you see, this family is at the heart of French society. And you know that France’s heart is between its legs.’

  2

  It felt like riding through the streets on the back of a cart, taking in every detail before I arrived at the scaffold.

  Filling an ante-room was a gilt-framed painting of a semi-naked young saint getting arrowed, his attacker shooting at him from no more than half a yard away. The archer was a pretty bad shot, too, because most of the arrows were embedded in the legs and arms, with only one hitting the torso, provoking a faint trickle of blood on the porcelain-white skin. Amazingly, the saint was looking only mildly pissed off with the guy taking pot-shots at him. I would have been furious myself. But I guessed that was why he was a saint.

  Elodie stopped below the painting to put the finishing touches to her pep-talk.

  ‘Now you must remember this,’ she whispered. ‘Bonne Maman, the bitch grand-mère, doesn’t want the marriage, right? And Moo-Moo is always agreeing with her because she wants her part of the family to be the main – you know – héritiers.’

  ‘Heirs?’

  ‘Yes, and also because she is a bitch.’

  ‘And what about the rest of the family?’ I asked, looking around the walls at old framed photos of whiskered men and bonneted ladies, the ancestors keeping an eye on things.

  Valéry’s dad was always called Dadou, Elodie told me, though his real name was François-Louis, ‘or some other royal combination’. There were three aunts, she thought, including one nun. A sizeable proportion of Moo-Moo’s generation would be here at some point during the weekend, she said, because as soon as they had a spare moment they seemed to gravitate together, unlike Elodie’s family who avoided each other as much as possible. It was, she conceded, the reason for their success as a clan, and as a class.

  ‘And what do they all do?’ I asked. ‘Apart from banking and nunning.’

  ‘Oh, Dadou is a director at the bank and has a post in the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères. Mimi is a director in the bank and with Total Fina Elf. Babou has a company that installs tennis courts. He is the richest but they snob him a bit.’

  ‘What about the women?’ I asked. ‘Are they all nuns or President’s girlfriends?’

  Elodie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. The married women stop work as soon as they have a baby. Now come on, we must go and face them.’

  She opened a warped door and let loose a babble of conversation and a smell of coffee and enclosed warmth.

  I expected a polite silence when we walked in, but life went on as usual, and I got a good chance to study the crowd before we were noticed.

  Moo-Moo was sitting on a bulky old sofa with her back to us, looking out towards the garden. She was nodding frantically, as if agreeing with every word uttered by the person next to her. I couldn’t see who this was, because a girl with a rather attractive backside was bending over the back of the sofa, hugging someone who was hidden from view.

  Two almost identical men standing by the French windows had to be Valéry’s uncles, Babou and Mimi. Although they were dressed for golf, their tall, gangly frames, jerky wrist movements and slight facial tics seemed to suggest that the sporting gene had been erased from their bloodline. And one of them had skin so white that he couldn’t possibly have spent more than an hour out of doors since the previous winter. That had to be Mimi – Babou would be tanned to extol the virtues of his tennis courts.

  There were various younger people in their teens and twenties lounging in battered leather armchairs or draped around the walls. Apart from a tendency for the females to wear prim collars and long skirts, and for the guys to iron their jeans too often, they looked a normal enough bunch.

  Out on the terrace, a gaggle of children were chasing each other, wrestling and laughing. Only three of them were dressed as if they’d just got back from a summer camp in Bavaria.

  ‘Ah!’ One of the golfers had caught sight of Elodie and me, and was striding towards us. He took my hand in a tight grip and introduced himself.

  ‘Charles-Henri de Bonnepoire. Enchanté, Monsieur.’ Uncle Babou, then. He gave a small bow.

  ‘Paul West. Enchanté.’ I did the same.

  ‘Venez, venez.’ He pulled me into the room to meet everyone, and I did the rounds like you would at a party, introducing myself and instantly forgetting everyone’s name. I shook hands with anyone who looked older than me, and was allowed to kiss some of the younger females on the cheeks, though I could sense Moo-Moo watching me, and I guessed she wouldn’t approve. Kissing elevated me to the status of guest rather than tradesman.

  Finally we reached the sofa and the young woman standing behind it, who was just as attractive from the front as the rear. She told me her name was Sixteen, and that she was Valéry’s sister.

  ‘Sixteen,’ I repeated, thinking it was a weird thing to call a kid. Perhaps she had so many siblings that her parents had resorted to numbers. ‘An English name?’

  ‘No.’ She laughed and blushed.

  ‘It’s the chapel, Paul. At the Vatican.’ Elodie was staring at me as if I was an idiot.

  The penny dropped. ‘Ah, we call it the Sistine chapel.’ I laughed. ‘The Vatican is so complicated, n’est-ce pas? We call the pope Benedict, you call him Benoit. I don’t know why they can’t just—’

  A not-so-subtle kick in the ankle from Elodie warned me that religion wasn’t a theme that I should try and develop.

  ‘And you have already met Valéry’s mother, Marie-Angélique,’ Charles-Henri alias Babou said.

  ‘Ah, yes, I have had the pleasur
e.’ Moo-Moo’s face stiffened as if a wasp had just landed on her nose. She clearly thought that merely saying the word was a sin.

  ‘And this is my mother,’ Babou announced.

  I bowed low to shake the hand of the old lady sitting bolt upright in the middle of the sofa. Like all the best dictators, she was very small, a miniature grand. She had smooth powdery skin, hazel eyes much younger and brighter than her years, and a perfectly combed chestnut hairdo. She was dressed in an Austrian-green twin set and pearls. The expression on her face was one of benevolent superiority, as if I was a poodle that had been brought here to be house-trained.

  ‘Enchanté, Madame de Bonnepoire,’ I said, being careful not to squash her delicate hand. ‘Or may I call you Bonne Maman?’

  Elodie gave a soft moan beside me, and Sixtine giggled. I’d meant to show the grand-mère that I’d heard Valéry use the affectionate name for her, but I’d committed another gaffe. First the wrong driveway, and now the wrong name.

  ‘No, you may call me Madame,’ she said. ‘And when you say Madame with the family name, you omit the de. So you may call me Madame Bonnepoire.’

  ‘Enchanté, Madame Bonnepoire,’ I corrected myself. ‘Your family has a beautiful chateau.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Moo-Moo interrupted.

  I tried to think what else I might have done wrong. Did she think I was trying it on with Bonne Maman?

  ‘It’s not a chateau, Monsieur,’ Moo-Moo explained, noticing my confused expression. ‘It is a typical large house of the region. A bastard.’

  ‘Ah. Well you have a lovely bastard.’ Who was I to argue?

  ‘Bastide,’ Elodie said, correcting my pronunciation.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘You are too late for coffee,’ Moo-Moo said. ‘But we will make an exception. Sixtine?’

  ‘Would you like—’ Sixtine began, before Moo-Moo gave a cough like a bronchitic camel. Sixtine blushed and started again, this time using ‘vous’ instead of the familiar ‘tu’.

  I accepted a coffee, praying that it would come with a packet of biscuits and maybe a kilo or two of cheese.

  ‘I am very happy that you have invited me to talk to you about the organization of Elodie’s wedding,’ I told Bonne Maman, speaking extra-slowly to get the grammar right.

  ‘Bonne Maman did not invite you,’ Moo-Moo corrected me. ‘We accepted Valéry’s request that you be received to discuss the possibility of an eventual ceremony.’

  It sounded to me as if Elodie’s plan to get married in under ten days was a touch optimistic.

  ‘Well, I would be very happy to discuss the organization of the possibility of an eventual ceremony,’ I said, turning back towards Bonne Maman. ‘I have some ideas. I hope that they will please you.’

  ‘You will discuss them with me first, Monsieur,’ Moo-Moo said. ‘We do not want to disturb Bonne Maman unless it is absolutely necessary.’ The old dear in question was sitting there as if conserving her energy for a cross-Channel swim. ‘Come, we will go outside,’ Moo-Moo decreed.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I said, ‘you have a magnificent garden.’

  ‘It is not a garden, it’s a park.’

  I was beginning to see why she’d only had sex six times in thirty years.

  Moo-Moo didn’t seem to notice the horde of sprogs charging around on the terrace, and they all seemed to possess a sixth sense that stopped them colliding with her as she moved towards the stone parapet. Every time an apparently out-of-control child careered in her direction, an invisible force seemed to wrench it to a standstill or make it veer to one side.

  I, on the other hand, had to tread as carefully as a drunk in a minefield to avoid blundering into a junior Bonnepoire. I hardly had time to notice the splendour of my surroundings – the canopy of vines hanging from a trellis above our heads, the twisting branches and yellowing leaves intertwining to cast mottled shade over the marble flooring. In more peaceful times, I could have leaned back in a deckchair and let trained sparrows drop grapes into my mouth.

  ‘Venez, Monsieur.’ Moo-Moo had taken up a proprietorial stance overlooking the ‘park’ and was waiting for me to disentangle myself from a rugby scrum that had suddenly started up around my knees. Elodie was hovering nearby, looking anxious.

  Not the best time, then, for my phone to start ringing. Especially because, to psych myself up for this meeting, I’d chosen ‘We Are Family’ as my ringtone, and its sudden eruption made all the kids prick up their ears. I guessed they didn’t hear much disco around the bastide.

  It was Léanne.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt you, Pol, I hope everything is OK,’ she began in a friendly voice, before clicking into Robocop mode. ‘Tomorrow morning, at eleven o’clock, you must meet me. We have to discuss about M, OK?’

  ‘OK. Where?’

  ‘At Ramatuelle. It is a village near the Bonnepoires’ chateau. You take the D93 road for Saint Tropez, and drive for about ten kilometres. You will see the signs. Meet me in the big café on the place du village, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  I went to join Elodie and Moo-Moo, apologizing for my impoliteness.

  ‘I hope, Monsieur, that you are not one of those terrible people who answer their telephone every five minutes,’ Moo-Moo said.

  I thought it was lucky she didn’t know that I was one of those terrible people whose girlfriends plot to kill the President.

  ‘I am very sorry,’ I said again. ‘It was a client. I am the traiteur for a big wedding in England next month.’

  Elodie almost squealed at this ridiculous lie.

  ‘Ah, yes, which wedding?’ Moo-Moo asked. Being a socialite, she wanted names, of course.

  ‘Er, it is for a duke.’

  ‘Which duke?’

  ‘Oh, not a very famous duke.’

  By now Elodie was preparing to leap off the balcony.

  ‘We know some dukes,’ Moo-Moo said.

  Of course you do, you snooty cow, I thought. Why couldn’t I have said it was for a millionaire plastic-cutlery manufacturer? Then she’d have been too snobbish to ask for details.

  ‘He says that his name must be a secret.’

  ‘Ah.’ Apparently I’d come up with the right answer. ‘English nobles know how to be discreet.’ Moo-Moo nodded approvingly, and I realized how much the French haute bourgeoisie idolized English aristocrats.

  ‘Anyway, the duke has given me a fantastic idea for Valéry’s wedding,’ I said, congratulating myself for seguing so smoothly into the key subject for discussion.

  ‘We wouldn’t want a second-hand idea,’ Moo-Moo cut me off immediately. ‘Even if it is for a noble English family.’

  ‘Ah no, I am thinking that you must have the opposite idea,’ I added quickly. ‘A unique idea.’ Une idée unique. I relished the sound of the phrase, mainly because I was so pleased that I was finally getting a chance to talk about my plans. Something positive to think about instead of all the police merde.

  ‘Yes?’ Moo-Moo asked, deigning to look almost curious.

  ‘Local food,’ I announced grandly. I still hadn’t found out how you say ‘carbon-neutral’ in French. If they even had a word for it.

  ‘Comment?’ Moo-Moo looked and sounded under-whelmed. I wondered why. What better meal could there be than a succession of freshly picked, caught and cooked dishes from the South of France? Perhaps, I realized, I hadn’t been explicit enough. It might have sounded to her French ears like suggesting a pizza party to a Neapolitan.

  ‘Imagine an entrée of Collioure anchois marinés,’ I said, feeling my mouth beginning to water. ‘And vegetables of the season roasted in local olive oil.’ My stomach pitched in with a loud grumble to remind me that nothing more solid than a piece of chewing gum had passed my lips since breakfast. ‘An immense barbecue of fresh sea bream, cooked with local herbs and lemons from Menton. With this, we will serve a rosé, maybe from the île des Embiez …’

  Moo-Moo cut me off again. ‘Monsieur.’ She flapped an arm across the vineyards towards the sea.
‘We produce our own wine.’

  ‘Encore mieux,’ I said. Even better. ‘We will serve your wine. With rice from the Camargue.’

  ‘We have our own rice fields there,’ she couldn’t resist saying.

  ‘Perfect.’ Her snootiness was driving her into my trap. ‘Don’t you see, Madame, it will be a banquet that will be in harmony with your family, with the region, and ecology.’

  ‘Ecology?’ It seemed I’d said a naughty word.

  ‘He doesn’t mean the Ecology Party,’ Elodie chipped in. ‘In France, Paul, ecologists are seen as people with big moustaches who think that all cars must run on sunflower oil.’ She turned to Moo-Moo again. ‘What he means is that the food will come from nearby, so it will be fresh and seasonal. There will, of course, be champagne and amuse-bouches, won’t there, Paul?’ she prompted.

  ‘Of course,’ I conceded. ‘The best champagne, with tapenade on toast grilled on the wood fire, small goat’s cheeses marinated in olive oil. And for the pièce de résistance—’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Moo-Moo was shaking her head, her hands and large areas of the rest of her body in an all-over negative. ‘Food, food, nothing but food. You think only of the pleasures of the mouth.’ She shivered, and even managed to look almost sexy for once, because it is impossible for a French woman to say ‘plaisirs de la bouche’ without performing a spectacular pout. ‘What about the tables?’

  ‘The tables?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, at the wedding of my niece Bénédicte, there was a terrible problem with the tables.’ Moo-Moo trembled again.

  ‘Ah yes?’ Now that I thought about it, Valéry had mentioned this. ‘Well, we will have excellent tables,’ I promised. ‘Uh, very solid tables, round tables?’ I trod one step at a time into this unknown world of terrible tables. ‘With, on top, white, uh …?’ I turned to Elodie.

  ‘Nappes?’ she said. Tablecloths.

  ‘Yes, with white nappes.’

  ‘It is not the colour of the tablecloths that concerns me, Monsieur.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. And if you don’t even know the problem with the tables, how can you possibly organize everything in such a short time?’ She raised her face to the skies as if she expected a team of angelic delivery men to descend with perfect dining-room furniture.