Dial M for Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  ‘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.

  ‘An English wedding cake? I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘We English are very good at pop music and comedy films, but not at pâtisserie.’

  ‘But this pièce montée, it is your idea, no? And you are English. So will it be any good?’

  ‘The idea is by an Englishman, but it was inspired by France,’ I replied, earning a short burst of applause from Sixtine.

  Moo-Moo frowned at the poor girl, who winked at me. I didn’t think it wise to wink back.

  After dessert – a selection of fruit tarts made by one of the cousins whose names I’d forgotten – everyone wandered off with a cup of herbal tea in their hands. I accepted a mug of the rosemary that the two brothers had gathered. It tasted like soup with no salt, meat or vegetables.

  I ambled amiably around the lounge, dishing out friendly smiles, and even risked a little banter with Bonne Maman, who was sitting next to Moo-Moo on the long sofa, sipping her cup while looking at a magazine’s games page.

  ‘Ah, Sudoku,’ I said. ‘I like that.’

  The old lady almost spat her herbal tea into Moo-Moo’s lap.

  Elodie came up behind me and dragged me away. ‘Please shut up now,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Why?’ Since the boiled-fuck incident, things had gone very well, I thought.

  ‘It’s soo-doh-koo,’ she said, saying the word almost exactly as I’d done.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘No, you said the oo’s wrong. Basically, you just told her that you like to sweat from your anus.’

  That night, as I lay bent double on my bed, with my knees practically under my chin, I naturally started wondering what the hell I was doing there. Not just in my attic room, but in Saint Tropez, in France.

  Most guys would have got up, thanked the family – no, the whole French nation – for their hospitality, and got as far away from the claustrophobic situation as possible. There had to be a reason why I stayed on.

  And it was, I finally decided, nothing more complicated than friendship.

  I had friends in need of help, and whatever happened to the President, his prospective hitman, the police and M, I had to keep my old chums in mind. Right now, my loyalties lay with Elodie and Jake.

  Elodie had done some mean things to me in the States, but that had all been part of our American powerplay. It was a game I had lost, not because of her but because my own team was playing against me.

  And Jake was a complete screw-up, the world’s least readable poet and worst linguist, but he’d sent out a cry for help, and I had to heed it.

  Deciding that I’d had enough of deforming my spine on the child-sized bed, I dumped the mattress on the floor, and heaped teddy bears together as a foundation for my pillow and my feet. From this lumpy refuge, I phoned Louisiana.

  ‘Hey Pol, divine what I’m doing!’ Jake meant guess, but I wasn’t keen to do so. ‘I’m taking a coffee in the diner we visited together. You recall yourself? The one where the people had no don.’

  ‘No teeth?’ Yes, I remembered the place, a friendly little truck stop near the Mississippi, where everyone had a baseball cap grafted on to their head, and the most dentured mouth had only enough teeth for half a smile.

  ‘I have brung, uh, bringed – how do you say?’

  ‘Brought?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, I have broot my estudients here to observe the veritable life of their region and inspire their posy. We are writing some on this diner. In Frinsh, of coose.’

  ‘Well, that’s just why I’m calling you, Jake. About your posy.’

  ‘My posy?’ He sounded suspicious. In the past, I hadn’t always treated it with the greatest respect.

  ‘Yes. I have an idea where you can get your grant.’

  ‘Yeah? You have meeted, uh, mought …?’

  ‘Met?’ I said, remembering that I was paying for this transatlantic English lesson.

  ‘Yes, you have metted the Minister of Francophony?’

  No, I told him, but Valéry’s dad was with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and I was going to have a quiet word with him. I had high hopes that he’d be able to do something for Jake.

  ‘Wo, genial!’ Jake said. ‘You want that I wrote, uh, written, uh?’

  ‘Write?’

 
; ‘Yes, merde, you want that I write a mel to him? Send him some of our posy?’

  ‘No!’ In a slightly less terrified tone, I explained that I didn’t think an email was necessary. I managed not to say that I thought it would be fatal.

  ‘You want to listen at some of our posy?’ Jake offered.

  ‘No, thanks, I have to go,’ I said. It was going to be hard enough sleeping on a pile of teddies. I didn’t want to give myself nightmares as well.

  4

  A blond boy was sobbing in my doorway, wiping his runny nose on the long leg of the girl standing next to him. It was Sixtine, who was laughing and telling the kid not to cry. She was wearing pyjamas that she’d probably had since she was about thirteen. She’d grown slightly in the intervening five years, especially in the hip and chest areas, so that the fluffy pink T-shirt reached only down to navel level. The trousers, meanwhile, were short and tight, and perched on her hips so that the waistline dipped perilously low. I had to stop myself yelping at this dawn vision. I’d been afraid of nightmares and woken up to a dream. A very dangerous one. I reminded myself of the need to stick to loyalty-based priorities.

  ‘He’s jealous,’ Sixtine said. ‘He usually sleeps in this room with all the teddies. But he had to sleep with me.’ Too young to appreciate his luck, I thought. ‘Come, it is time for breakfast. You must be quick, you know.’

  I thanked her and took a moment to compose myself before getting up and slinging on some clothes.

  Hunting for the breakfast room, I came across Valéry, also in under-sized pyjamas, apparently offering a jam pot to Bonne Maman as a peace offering. She was swathed in a shapeless dressing gown, a pair of cork-soled sandals on her feet, and although she was a good two feet shorter than Valéry, he was the one cowering as they argued.

  They were in the ante-room dominated by the picture of the tortured saint, and didn’t notice me in the shadowy stairway.

  ‘Where did you meet her?’ Bonne Maman asked, clearly referring to Elodie.

  ‘I told you – while renting a Vélib.’

  ‘While doing what to a what?’

  Valéry had a quick go at explaining Paris’s communal bike rental system, shaking the jam pot as he searched for the right words. He’d come down from Planet Coke, but it had obviously been a bit of a crash-landing.

  ‘Well, Valéry,’ Bonne Maman replied. ‘I don’t know what your dear grand-père would have thought of that. For a start, he would not have understood why you should need to sit in or on any means of transport that does not belong to a member of his family. I mean, how many other people use these, these fetid?’

  ‘Vélibs, Bonne Maman. It’s short for vélos libres. They’re for the general public.’

  ‘How disgusting. Public bicycles? Surely your ancestors worked hard enough to ensure that no member of their family should ever be reduced to taking a means of transport with fewer than four wheels?’

  ‘What about Babou’s yacht? That has no wheels at all.’

  It was a feeble comeback, and Valéry knew it. Bonne Maman gave him a look that would have sunk a battleship, never mind a yacht.

  ‘Valéry may rhyme with repartie,’ she concluded, ‘but it also rhymes with appauvri, don’t forget that.’

  With this she swanned regally away, leaving Valéry looking ten times more pissed off than the pin-cushioned saint in the painting.

  I went and propped him up. ‘What does appauvri mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Poor. Very poor,’ he groaned.

  ‘Ah.’ Bad news. ‘By the way, there’s something else I need to talk to you about if you don’t want to be poor – and behind bars.’

  ‘What?’ He looked the picture of saintly innocence.

  I leaned in close. ‘Don’t go into Saint Tropez for cocaine. The police are cracking down. They’ll catch you.’

  Valéry opened his mouth to reply.

  ‘Listen to the Englishman, Valéry. For once he has said something sensible.’

  It was bloody Bonne Maman. She’d reappeared behind us, and her sandals must have been fitted with silencers because we hadn’t heard a thing. We both stood gaping at her.

  ‘Come to the table,’ she said. ‘We need that pot of jam.’

  Various generations of the family were sitting at breakfast, all in their nightclothes. And all of them, except the youngest, had regressed about twenty years.

  Babou, Dadou and Ludivine the spokeslady looked like wrinkled students. Valéry’s generation were all in their early teens again, and the teenagers seemed to have mislaid their dummies. It had to be the effect of getting together as a family, and of Bonne Maman’s tyrannical presence. They were all reduced to a state of passive infancy.

  There wasn’t enough room for everyone in the rustic breakfast room, where family photos of all sizes and ages hung crookedly on the pastel-yellow walls. The long table was covered with pots, jugs, bowls and crumbs, and everyone was indulging in a free-for-all of bread-slicing and coffee-or chocolate-pouring. As soon as one person had finished, they got up and left. Valéry and I slid into two seats left by a pair of departing Hitler Youth.

  ‘You will be coming to Mass, won’t you, Valéry?’ Moo-Moo asked, from the end of the table. If the long-sleeved, high-collared garment she was wearing was her night-dress, it was pretty amazing that she’d had any kids at all. It was as grey and forbidding as a Scottish castle.

  ‘Oui, Moo-Moo,’ Valéry piped.

  ‘And you, Monsieur West?’ she asked, arching her eyebrows. The small crowd of Bonnepoires at the table stopped munching to hear my reply.

  ‘Er, no,’ I said. ‘I am Eglise de l’Angleterre.’ Being Church of England is such a great excuse for never doing anything religious.

  ‘Ah. Perhaps there is an English church in Saint Tropez.’

  ‘It’s OK, thank you. I can listen to the ceremony on the BBC.’ I commandeered a passing baguette, smothered it in butter and Valéry’s apricot jam, and then got up.

  ‘You are going to listen to the radio already?’ Bonne Maman asked.

  ‘No, excuse me, I would like to eat in the garden – er – park, if that is OK. The weather is so magnifique.’

  ‘Good idea,’ she said. ‘We will be needing your seat for one of the family.’ Putting me in my place again.

  In fact, I’d seen Dadou leave the table, and had decided to do something practical about helping my friends. I caught up with him in the courtyard as he was lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Are you going to the golf course?’ I asked.

  ‘Not in my pyjamas, no.’

  ‘Ah, no, of course not,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to tell you that I … I have a friend.’

  ‘Lucky you.’ He smiled, obviously enjoying knocking my conversation gambits into holes.

  ‘He writes poems.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. He lives in Louisiana.’

  ‘How very interesting,’ he lied.

  ‘And he needs money.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean a – how do you say? Yes, une subvention. A grant. Perhaps you can pass his request to the correct person in Francophonie? That department is in your ministry, n’estce pas?’

  ‘Yes.’ Now he was looking pissed off at my overt begging.

  ‘What’s your email?’ I asked. ‘I will send you his coordinates.’ That’s what the French call addresses.

  ‘My email address?’

  ‘Yes.’ I stood my ground, not even acknowledging the possibility of a refusal, and he dictated it to me.

  ‘Merci,’ I said. ‘Bon golf.’ As I walked away, I could feel him watching me, wondering what the hell had just happened.

  Now all I had to do to finish my morning session of loyalty to my chums was find Elodie and convince her to tie Valéry to the bedpost so that he wouldn’t go into Saint Tropez and get himself arrested. And I knew from personal experience that anything to do with the bedroom was no problem for Elodie.

  I tracked her down on the terrace. She was clicking thro
ugh her text messages.

  I looked around to check that Bonne Maman wasn’t lurking anywhere nearby, and in my most discreet whisper, begged her to keep Valéry in check today, especially if, as he said, he was not only buying but dealing.

  ‘Dealing?’ she shrieked. ‘Who told you that?’

  I told her what he’d said about it being the only way to support his family.

  ‘Oh, you idiot,’ she laughed. ‘Support doesn’t mean support. It means stand.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Supporter sa famille. Stand his family. It’s the only way he can stand them. When he’s …’ She lowered her voice again, ‘high on something. A dealer? Pah! Anyway, how do you know all this stuff about the police? Is M a dealer? Has she been arrested? Is that it?’ Elodie’s eyes were sparkling. She thought she was on to a juicy secret.

  If only she knew, I thought, if only she knew.

  There are some opportunities in life that you would be an idiot to miss. A free trip to the moon. An invitation to tell the G8 leaders what you think of them (with a guarantee that you won’t be arrested afterwards). Time travel anywhere.

  Well, swimming with one of the most luscious human beings on the Côte d’Azur was one of those opportunities, and yet I turned it down. I was obliged, I told Sixtine, to go out to an important meeting. Her pout of disappointment alone was the most sensual experience I’d had for days.

  And so I drove, inwardly sobbing, down the tarmacked drive and away from temptation. It was time to go and see Léanne.

  The road to Ramatuelle was a dizzying snail shell of a ride. The village was one of those hilltop postcard places, a gaggle of tall beige houses perched so high on a pinnacle that you wondered whether the original inhabitants didn’t choose the spot in an attempt to discourage their in-laws from visiting.

  I guess it is the fate of anywhere like this to be turned from a farming community to a command post for the local tourist industry. But on this off-season Sunday morning, the village-square café was quiet, and I estimated that a good quarter of the people sitting on the olive-shaded terrace were French. The waiter even had a strong local accent, which was a change for me after the posh Bonnepoires.