Dial M for Merde

by Stephen Clarke

  I knew about ‘My Way’, but it was M who put me right on ‘If You Go Away’ when we were in Collioure. We’d just enjoyed our erotic bathtime and she’d found a radio channel on the hotel TV. ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ came on, and I said it was a clever translation, especially the way the French singers pronounced the extra syllable on the end of ‘quitte’ – ‘kee-ta’, to fit the rhythm.

  When she realized I wasn’t joking, M told me that Brel’s was the original version, and ran me through the French lyrics. They begin very poetically, she said. If his lover will agree not to leave him, Brel promises to give her pearls of rain from countries where it never rains. He says he’ll create a brand-new country for her, where love will be king and she will be queen.

  ‘But then he starts getting desperate,’ she said. ‘He promises to tell her a story about a king who died because he never met her, which is just plain silly. And he ends up on his knees saying that he would be content just to be near her, to be the shadow of her shadow, the shadow of her dog.’

  ‘The shadow of her dog?’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘He doesn’t sound much like a Latin lover to me.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘A typical Frenchman would tell the woman, OK, bugger off then, I’ve been shagging your best friend anyway.’

  Then she explained why the song was so untypical – Brel wasn’t French at all. He was Belgian, with a self-destructive combination of French poeticism and Flemish insecurity.

  Now, a week or so later, I was thinking back to that conversation in Collioure. I had just phoned M and told her I was coming back to Bendor to be with her. She was still a bit miffed that I’d told her not to come to Saint Tropez, and didn’t sound very keen to see me again.

  Trouble was, as far as I knew, I had no Belgian blood in me at all. So I doubted very much that I was going to be any good at begging M not to leave me.

  On the morning after the dramatic events at the bastide – the Monday – Elodie woke me up to tell me that I was to take her as near to Marseille as possible. She intended to get the TGV from there to Paris, and wanted a chat on the way. Most of the weekending Bonnepoires had either left the previous night or at dawn, so breakfast was an intimate affair, with Bonne Maman in benevolent mood, but obviously impatient for her troublesome guests to leave her in peace.

  Valéry and Elodie were surprisingly muted, and said a low-key but saliva-sodden farewell, whispering together for several minutes while I hung around. Valéry, it seemed, was staying down south to try and finalize the wedding arrangements.

  At last they managed to let go of each other, and Elodie and I were on our way along the coast road. It really did feel like cruising through one of those 1960s films when the South of France was the chicest place on Earth and the movie cameras had trouble cramming all the colours on to their tiny squares of celluloid.

  Of course, in those films, an open-top sports car zooms along deserted coast roads, overtaking only a Rolls-Royce and a comic 2CV, a manoeuvre it usually carries out on a hairpin bend over a thousand-foot drop. More mundanely, almost as soon as we left the bastide, Elodie and I got stuck behind a German campervan and a gas-bottle delivery truck, a duo that chugged westwards so slowly that we could have counted the rocks on the sea shore below.

  In the end, Elodie got too impatient with trundling along in our queue of cars and jammed her fist on my steering wheel to give a long blast on the horn.

  ‘Connards!’ she yelled. Dickheads.

  I laughed and she told me to shut up with more than her usual assertiveness.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ I asked. ‘I don’t get it. Bonne Maman gives you her permission to marry but you’re still in a mood. You didn’t expect the family to turn into angels, did you? To survive with that lot, you’ve got to do what Moo-Moo’s done and rise to their level of snootiness. You can’t expect them to come down off their mountaintop. They won’t, they only survive because they’re up there. They’re like a high-altitude breed of llama.’

  ‘You don’t understand a thing about France,’ she snapped. ‘Haven’t you noticed how they still don’t accept me? The old bitch still calls me vous.’

  ‘I thought it was a kind of respect,’ I said.

  ‘Not in this case, imbecile. If she thought I was equal to Valéry, she would call me tu. I am young, it would be a kind of acceptance in the family. Then maybe some of Valéry’s aunts and uncles would call me tu, as well. Maybe I would call them tu. Although not Moo-Moo. Yuk.’

  She was right, I didn’t understand a thing about France.

  We swung through the easily mispronouncable town of La Bouillabaisse, which didn’t cause Elodie to crack a smile, and she spent the next few kilometres in total muteness, only breaking her vow of silence when our snake of cars caught up with an even slower-moving tourist coach.

  ‘Merde!’ she swore. ‘Did you have to choose such a stupid road? Why didn’t you take the autoroute?’

  ‘And why didn’t you get a lift with Babou?’ I grumped.

  ‘That bastard!’

  ‘Bastide, you mean,’ I said, and at last the storm subsided.

  ‘I’m sorry to be angry with you, Paul,’ Elodie said. ‘It’s because there is something you do not know. I promised Valéry that I would not tell you, but I must. It is about the date of the wedding. It is important. Very important. And the old bitch knows this.’

  I drove, changing gears about every twenty yards, and she explained.

  ‘You see, Valéry discovered that there is a contract. One of his aunts – the wife of Mimi – revealed this to him. She was not born a Bonnepoire, so she is less, you know, faithful to the family. She is originally from—’

  ‘A contract?’ I prompted her before she could go off on a genealogical tangent.

  ‘Yes. Valéry must marry before his thirtieth birthday. If he does not, his share of a donation – a present made for tax reasons, you know?’

  ‘Yes. A lifetime gift, I think they call it.’

  ‘Yes. His share of this lifetime gift made by his grandfather to all of his grandchildren returns to Bonne Maman. The grandfather died ten years ago, and Bonne Maman refuses to make any gifts. She wants to own everything. When she dies, it will be la merde fiscale – total tax shit.’

  ‘And when’s Valéry’s thirtieth birthday?’

  ‘The day after we were due to marry.’

  I had to laugh.

  ‘So he’s marrying you for his own money? That’s a new one.’

  Now I understood. I had never been able to work out why Elodie was so cynical about marriage and yet so keen to tie the knot with this bunch of snobs.

  ‘It’s not just the money,’ she defended herself. ‘It’s the independence. The donation is enough to buy a fantastic apartment in Paris, and escape from his family’s house.’

  ‘Valéry still lives at home?’ I thought I’d been exaggerating when I said this to the cops.

  ‘He has an apartment in their hôtel particulier – their mini-chateau in the seizième arrondissement. With this money, he can be free. We can be free.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the road to check for signs of irony or cynicism in Elodie’s face, which was a pity. All I could do was ask her, cruelly perhaps, whether she was on a percentage. OK, not the kind of question you should ask a bride-to-be, but Elodie was not your average fiancée. She was the daughter of Jean-Marie. Scheming was in her genes.

  Instead of pinching my earlobe or punching me, she just started to make a sound that, if it hadn’t been Elodie, I would have mistaken for sobbing. Elodie didn’t do that kind of thing. When life hit her hard, she didn’t buckle – she hit back.

  ‘Oh Paul, this is my tragedy,’ she said finally. ‘I have become weak. I have discovered with Valéry that, underneath this tough exterior, made hard by constant battles with Papa since the age of twelve, is hidden a very sensitive woman.’

  Pretty well hidden, I thought.

  ‘You know,’ she went on, ‘I have realized that I really want to get married.
It is a romantic idea, after all, to be joined by a ring and a name, rather than just by sex.’

  Yes, very romantic, I agreed.

  ‘I’ve been single a long time,’ she said. ‘We call it les quatre cents coups. You could say the four hundred hard times, or the four hundred shags. Well, with me there have not been four hundred men.’ She seemed to be doing some mental arithmetic to make sure. ‘But it gets a bit boring, meeting someone, starting a relationship, breaking up, all that merde. I want to stay with Valéry. He’s fun, he loves me …’

  ‘He’s rich …’

  ‘Yes, OK, he’s rich, but no one can deny their background. My family is rich, too. I am not physically capable of living in poverty. I am a delicate flower.’

  ‘That needs watering with champagne.’

  ‘Yes, I am a luxury flower.’

  ‘And you don’t just want to marry Valéry to get revenge on the snobs?’

  She thought about this for a moment.

  ‘OK,’ she said, ‘I do more than ever want to defy them. But we want to get married. It is very simple. And if we can get Valéry’s money, too, why not? It is a lot of money, a very good wedding present. The sort of present that can last a lifetime, even for a girl like me with a platinum credit card.’

  We were on a stretch of road that curved around a bay lined with dreamy villas. With their balconies overlooking the Med, and little staircases leading directly from their gardens down to the sea, they looked like very good reasons to get rich. I could see Elodie’s point. Especially because, if what she said was true, she was going to get true love into the bargain.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘So we have to think of a way to stop Bonne Maman changing Valéry’s arrangements. A way of forcing her to let you get married on the right date.’

  Elodie laughed. ‘That is as simple as forcing Moo-Moo to get “fuck me here” tattooed on her ass,’ she said, a remark which very nearly ended both of our lives.

  ‘No, no, there might be a way,’ I said, swerving back on to the right side of the road again. ‘I think we need to have a word with your dad.’

  ‘Papa? No, please. If you tell him about the money, I will lose it all.’

  ‘We have to tell him about the money. It’s the only way. Get him on the phone,’ I said.

  Moaning loudly, she did what I asked.

  2

  I pulled into the lane leading to Bandol’s cute little railway station, and stopped in the tiny car park. It felt almost like a homecoming. Only – what? – three or four days earlier, I’d arrived here with M, thinking that my biggest problem in life was how long we would have to wait for the ferry to Bendor. Things had changed slightly since.

  ‘There are trains about every twenty minutes. It’s half an hour to Marseille,’ I told Elodie.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll help you with your bag.’

  ‘Hmm.’ It was as if she’d had her tongue pierced and couldn’t talk for the swelling.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  She looked suddenly mischievous. ‘Why don’t I get a later train? I want to meet M.’

  ‘But you’ll lose your reservation on the TGV.’

  ‘I can change it.’

  ‘Are you sure? Some TGV tickets are non-exchangeable.’

  ‘You’re forgetting I have a platinum card.’

  I tried to think how to tell Elodie that her meeting M was not a good idea. My reunion with M was not just boyfriend and girlfriend meeting up after a short separation. There was no room for Elodie in the game of I Spy that I’d been ordered to play.

  ‘What is it?’ Elodie asked. ‘You want to keep her secret? Don’t tell me she’s ugly.’

  ‘No, she’s not ugly.’

  ‘She’s bisexual.’

  ‘She’s not bloody bisexual. Well, not as far as I know.’

  ‘Well then, come on, let’s go and say hello.’

  It wasn’t Elodie’s fault, I reasoned. For once in her life, she had no idea what was at stake. And there was no way I could explain.

  Trying to banish negative thoughts from my mind, I started the engine and steered us downhill into town.

  M had moved off the island and taken a room on the mainland, at the hotel overlooking Bandol’s anse. She said it was more low-key here. She didn’t know, of course, that binoculars, cameras and microphones were being pointed at her from all around the bay.

  We found her in the garden, reading a French political magazine. She was lounging on a teak armchair, with her feet up on the rail overlooking the beach. I wondered how many cops were staring up her skirt.

  I hadn’t warned her that Elodie would be tagging along, so M’s first reaction was a questioning frown that could almost have been jealousy. Perhaps she really did care about me, I thought. But her look could also have been plain distrust. Who was this strange woman, and what was she doing, hanging around with me?

  Elodie did her usual thing of giving new people a long, frank stare of sexual assessment. I would have liked to know her conclusion.

  ‘So you couldn’t stay away from me, after all?’ M asked me, keeping her eyes on Elodie.

  ‘Only long enough to get the wedding fixed up,’ I said. ‘This is Elodie, by the way, the bride-to-be.’

  M looked relieved to hear the name.

  The two girls gave each other a polite bise. They could almost have been sisters, despite the apparently different courses their lives had taken. Elodie had leapt on to the rich-kid, fast-money corporate bandwagon, and M had opted for an only slightly less aggressive career in political assassination.

  ‘It’s good to see you again,’ I told M, though it was less than half-true. I was pretty sure I would have got the hell away from her as fast as possible if Léanne hadn’t ordered me to do otherwise.

  M pulled me down to give her a kiss, and held on to me for several seconds when I tried to break away. Elodie raised her eyebrows, impressed by this show of passion.

  ‘So they call you M because of the James Bond films, right? Are you a spy?’ Elodie laughed, not noticing that M was reddening.

  ‘No, I was just the bossiest in my office,’ she replied, deadpan.

  ‘And with Paul, do you have to dominate him? Is he a typical cold Englishman with you?’

  ‘Only when he’s had too much Muscat on an empty stomach,’ M said, meaningfully.

  ‘Well, you can be assured he was a good boy in Saint Tropez,’ Elodie said. ‘Despite all the temptations in his bed.’

  M shot me a questioning look, and I did my best to shrug my innocence.

  ‘Teddy bears,’ Elodie finally said, enjoying the effect she’d created. ‘Paul was forced to share a bed with about a hundred of them. It was like an orgy in a Disney movie.’

  M laughed. ‘So you’ve sorted out the wedding, have you?’ she asked Elodie. ‘And you’re sure you want to hire Paul to feed your wedding guests?’

  ‘I’m hoping he’ll poison some of them,’ Elodie answered.

  Again, only I noticed M’s blush. One more gaffe like that, I thought, and she’ll smell a rat. I was going to have to get rid of Elodie, and fast.

  Elodie insisted on treating M and me to lunch, and we walked along the coastal path to a restaurant nestling in a rocky inlet.

  More fresh fish and more pale rosé, at a table that you could have used as a diving board to jump into the crystal-clear sea. These southerners sure knew how to live, I mused, as I savoured the taste of a crème brûlée perfumed with orange-blossom essence.

  Elodie, however, decided to sour the sweetness in my mouth by carrying on with her seemingly endless series of allusions to killing people. She outlined her plans for guillotining the snootiest members of the French upper classes, and then segued straight into asking M about her work, as if the two subjects might be related.

  Was there really money to be made from oceanography, Elodie wanted to know. Was black-market caviar as good as the legal stuff, and where could she get some for her wedding?

  M laugh
ed, fortunately, and gave Elodie her standard speech about sturgeon extinction.

  ‘You are wasting your time with this fish ecology,’ Elodie lectured her. ‘You should go into a real business where you can make big money. Paul, why don’t you go into partnership with M?’

  I already am, I thought. I’m the pilot fish, glued to her as she sharks her way towards her target.

  ‘Paul’s a good partner to have on your side in times of crisis,’ Elodie went on, and cajoled me into giving M a blow-by-blow account of how I’d saved the Bonnepoires.

  ‘Quite the undercover operator, aren’t you?’ M teased me. I shrugged as modestly as possible, not wanting to appear too much of a man of action in her eyes.

  ‘He does diplomacy, too,’ Elodie added. Was she trying to marry me off to M or what? ‘If Paul was not here, I would be dealing direct with my father. Agh!’ She gave a silent-movie scream of horror.

  ‘Elodie and her dad don’t exactly get on,’ I explained to M. ‘When they’re not shouting at each other, they’re throwing fruit.’

  ‘You should make the most of him, Elodie,’ M blurted out. She seemed to regret it instantly, but Elodie was on to her like a flash.

  ‘You mean your father is …?’

  ‘Yes,’ M said. ‘When I was three.’

  ‘Oh.’ Elodie put a consoling hand on her shoulder, but couldn’t resist fishing for info. ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘An accident.’

  ‘A car accident?’ Elodie asked.

  ‘No, boat.’

  ‘Was he a fisherman?’ I asked. ‘Did he have a yacht, or what?’

  ‘Honestly, Paul, can’t you see you’re upsetting M?’ Elodie had suddenly morphed from chief interrogator into M’s protector. Damn her, I thought, it was practically the first time M had revealed anything about herself.

  And then Elodie made things even worse.

  ‘This is a fantastic place,’ she sighed. She took a deep breath of olive-scented sea air and smiled out across the sunlit sea that was as smooth as a mirror. ‘I think I will stay here tonight. Do you think they can put an extra bed in your room?’