Malveen shrieked with laughter. ‘I’ve never done bar work.’
‘You’ve never done work, period,’ put in Alexis. ‘All you’re qualified to do is pick locks. Look, when you’ve finished that drink shall we all go and get a coffee and a cake? There’s a new place –‘
‘Thanks, but I can’t.’ Helene had spotted Christie shutting the lid of his piano. ‘See you.’
They watched her leave with Christie. At the bottom of the stairs, he put his arm protectively around her. It was the gesture of a practised smoothie. Even so, she was glad he’d done it.
*
Up at Odile’s, Christie pressed the buzzer and the glass front door clicked open. The reception desk was empty apart from a small brass bell and a sign saying English Spoken.
Christie led the way through to what in England would be called a snug. A bar, coffee machine, cosy chairs. It was evident that Odile catered mainly for Brits. The tapestry chairbacks depicted Henry VIII and his queens. A bust of Winston Churchill presided over a collection of pottery thatched cottages and a row of Toby jugs.
Odile was small and bony with sharply cut silver hair. She was wearing black crepe trousers and a loose top exquisitely embroidered in jewel colours. Must be vintage, Helene judged. You didn’t find that sort of artistry new these days.
Odile greeted Christie affectionately, and gave Helene a friendly look that said, Don’t waste your time with him. He’s unreliable.
And Helene gave her a look back which said, Don’t worry. I know.
‘We were looking for Rory McEwen,’ said Christie.
Odile informed them that no, Monsieur McEwen was not residing with her. But he had called in earlier and told her he was staying with Valerie.
‘Not Valerie Laverie!’ Helene exclaimed.
Indeed, Odile went on, Valerie had sent him some of his shirts and in her note had been kind enough to say that whenever he was in Paris he was more than welcome to stay with her.
Well, thought Helene. What a dark horse. No wonder she was all aglow last Tuesday.
Christie stood up. ‘Think I’ll go and knock them up.’
‘Christie!’ Helene protested. ‘It’s after midnight.’
‘So what? I’m only doing what he’d be doing if he were me.’
He loped off. Odile smiled. ‘Boys! You see it all, you know, in this job.’
‘Your English is very good,’ said Helene.
‘I was married to an Englishman. Vernon. He was not,’ Odile said delicately, ‘what you might call top drawer.’
Helene had a vision of yet more tattoos, plus gimmicky wristwatches and low-slung trousers. She wanted to ask why Odile had married him, but all those years of typing up reports on divorce proceedings had taught her that when it came to why two people had got together in the first place, there was often just no answer.
‘I was thinking of running a hotel once,’ Helene said. ‘With my sister. In England.’
Odile shook her head as she poured two mugs of coffee. ‘Not England. I ran a hotel in Sussex with Vernon. It was his hotel. That’s how I met him. And you think, well this can’t be difficult. As long as you’ve got a nice view and you give them a good breakfast and a clean, comfortable room you can rest easy at nights.’
In fact, Odile explained, what she dreamed about were tulips, crowns, stars, castles and crossed knives and forks. It was before the days of internet booking and on-screen recommendations. So at that time, being listed in an official guide was crucial.
It was all so complex. You got one castle from the Preservation Trust for a central light controlled from the bed, or two castles if you had actual bedside lights plus tea-making facilities. But you couldn’t get two stars in the AA handbook unless you offered television in every bedroom, or the lounge. The lounge, to earn three crowns from the English Tourist Board, had to be separate from the bar and each bedroom was obliged to be equipped with a full-length mirror and shoe cleaning facilities, while four coveted Country Hotels Guide tulips involved writing paper, trouser presses and the all important International Direct Dialling.
You woke up in a sweaty panic, Odile said. Car park equals a tulip. Choice of menu means a knife and fork – or was it one and a half castles?
‘My sister and I, we’ve gone off the idea now,’Helene said, ‘because her husband’s mother got ill and they all have to live together. But we were thinking of specialising. Having a place, very romantic, to attract honeymooners. Southw –‘
‘Honeymooners! Dirty weekenders more like. Hot pillows they’re known as in the trade. They’re all just as bad.’
You had no trouble, Odile said, in telling which was which. The hot pillow girls wore glamorous, expensive undies all the time. But the honeymooners, they gave up when the silk got creased, so they slid back into T-shirts. Some of them brought their soft toys along and propped them on the pillows, prompting a coy comment in the visitors’ book: A great bed, says Teddie!
What they all insisted on was having a giggly bath together, so the water overflowed.
Helene finished her coffee. At the bottom of her mug was a sketch of Windsor Castle.
‘No, what you want is what I’ve got here,’ Odile said. ‘I do businessmen and couples who want a room for a few hours. If you fancy a quickie you come to Odile.’
‘Isn’t that rather heavy on sheets?’ Helene asked.
‘Yes, but I save on other things. Water. They don’t get a bath, just a shower. They don’t get breakfast or a welcome bottle of champagne and they certainly don’t get a chocolate on the pillow. Oh, and no minibar. I can make a profit on that, but it’s not worth it.’
As Helene stood up to go, Odile passed her a large manilla envelope. ‘This is a brochure for the hotel I used to run. I should like you to know I did not choose the décor. That was Vernon’s first wife.’
At the door she said, ‘Come again, won’t you?’
Helene ran down the steps and collided with Alexis and Malveen.
‘Who’s that, Lexy?’ squawked Malveen. She had spotted Odile standing inside the glass door.
‘That’s Odile,’ Helene said. ‘She dyes hair, on the side.’
As she spoke, Helene was considering Malveen. Had she got to invite her to Sunday lunch? Did this emaciated person actually ever eat anything?
But Alexis said, ‘Won’t be around for a bit, Helene. I’m taking Malveen to Corbières, to see the set-up.’
The vampire in the vineyard, thought Helene. The locals would have a field day.
Chapter Nine
‘You’ve been having more rough sex,’ Elodie’s thumbs dug into Helene’s shoulder blades.
‘It seems ages ago. Last Sunday. But ages.’ Helene filled Elodie in on what had happened since, VTR, the swingers, Malveen and Odile.
When she reversed to the incident about Rory McEwen and Valerie, they both exploded.
‘She looks like bread pudding!’
‘I know. She’s the sort men treat like a soppy dog.’
‘She was always sly, that Valerie.’ Elodie went on, ‘I won’t be able to come on Sunday, Helene. I’ll be packing. I’m going to Annecy on a course. Trouble is, they can only put me up for one week, then I’ll have to find somewhere else.’
Helene groaned as Elodie’s hands ran over a purple patch at the top of her leg.
‘Doesn’t Jean-Paul say anything?’ Elodie enquired.
‘No. He notices, obviously he does, and he likes to know what Alexis and I do, but he never comments on the result.’
Elodie said, ‘I suppose – did you get a lot of this Alexis sort of thing in your Life of Crime?’
‘No. First sign of any rough stuff and I was out. I never wore difficult shoes, or boots with complicated laces. Just things I could run in.’
‘But what a risk.’
‘All life is a risk. And the men I chose were genuine guys who were glad of a companion for dinner or at the pictures. The sex was just a nice extra for them. When I left, I left them sleepy and smilin
g.’
Elodie laughed. ‘They must have wondered if they’d dreamt it.’
‘No. They knew I’d been there. I always left my calling card. I dropped my black knickers on the pillow, right next to the guy’s face.’
‘Must have worked out expensive.’
‘Not really. They were M & S, not La Perla.’
‘Mon ange, you have a very uncomplicated attitude to sex.’
‘Not difficult. I’ve just always enjoyed it. Haven’t you?’
‘No.’ Elodie helped Helene down from the massage table. ‘I always thought it was irritating. Like expecting a hot bath and then finding the water is tepid.’
On the way home Helene bought Paris Match and a tabloid newspaper. Not Figaro or Le Monde. The French in them was too difficult for her, but she could make sense of the more downmarket Le Parisien.
Ripping Velcro were on pages one, five and eight, pictures of them snarling at ecstatic fans. Helene wondered how Jean-Paul had enjoyed the concert. She had a lot to tell him. It seemed a long time until Tuesday.
She considered taking in a movie but somehow, hanging around in a cinema queue was all too redolent of her previous existence. She had realised what Elodie was hinting at regarding her Life of Crime and the answer was no. She had Jean-Paul and she had Alexis. It was enough.
But she needed more friends. Probably, despite Jean-Paul’s opposition, she needed a proper job. But what?
Apart from her secretarial certificates, Helene was aware that she had no qualifications. Yet did that matter? These days, it seemed you could get a qualification in anything. Blackboard Monitor. Selling kitchens. Getting chucked off a jungle reality show.
Whatever. Your doctorate was in the post.
Lying on the sofa that afternoon, Helene decided one career she was not opting for was hotelier. Odile had said enough to put her off, but the brochure from Odile’s English hotel put the lid on the idea.
It was called the Mermaid. The cover showed a painted sign of a mermaid prinking into a looking-glass fashioned from a shell. The bedroom suites had names like Silver Sand and Pearly Dawn. There was a colour photo of Coral Bay. It had an ember-red carpet and deep peach wallpaper patterned with tiny tangerine dolphins. There was also a visual of Blue Lagoon, which Helene thought would have made you feel you were sleeping at the bottom of a toilet bowl.
On the back of the brochure was the Cavern Bar, a riot of fishing nets, lobster pots and varnished shells aglow with pink and green light. They reminded Helene of the illuminated shell grottoes in the souvenir shop her mother worked in.
It felt strange on Sunday not having anyone to cook for. Helene put a jacket potato in the oven and went round to Odile’s, intending to return the brochure. But she had chosen a bad time. Odile was busy with departing guests.
‘Come back later. Around six. Quieter then.’
After lunch she checked her emails.
‘Rory update!!!
‘He has just been to collect Tweed. Was sorry to have missed you in Paris. And as a thankyou for Tweed-sitting he wants to do a portrait of Megan. At the time, she was careering round the garden pretending to be a Spitfire (I will kill mum, taking her to see the Red Arrows) so I said but Rory, how will you get her to sit still and he said he could do it from a photo. So he’s coming back to take some. Megan is now insufferable, making noises like seagulls do when they knock five other birds off the roof.
‘Mum has been up for a few days. Olly met her off the train at Darsham. It’s so maddening not having a direct train to here. He was a bit confused because she arrived with a bowl of beetroot. Didn’t want it to go to waste! She says the Eastbourne summer season has started and she’s dreading it because although the place is heaving with public loos, what happens is parents dragging kids into mum’s shop and asking to use her ‘toylit.’
‘Anyway, I confided to her that I wanted another baby, if nothing else to stop Megan being so selfish but that Olly won’t let me in case it’s twins. Not enough room in the car! And you know what? Mum sided with Ol. Actually, she always does side with him, now I come to think of it. Then came a horror story about the awful time she had having you and me and how a woman’s body is only designed to carry one child, not two.’
When Helene went back to Odile’s, a sullen girl was running the front desk. In the snug Helene was greeted pleasantly by two British men. One of them introduced himself as Dawson, in Paris for a few days, then on to Frankfurt. He was ‘in’ luggage.
‘I was just sounding off to my new friend here about my kids. Communication. Lack of. I mean, in my day, you had to do one and a half pages every week. Proper sentences. Proper paragraphs. And any demands for more pocket money got the blue pencil from Matron.’
‘Oh yeah, absolutely.’ The other guy winked at Helene. From his accent she suspected he had been to neither prep school, kindergarten nor council minder, and didn’t give a toss.
‘But these days, all they do is pick up a phone. At least the school’s had the sense to ban mobiles, but it means a reverse charge call, usually when I’m driving home from work, Hyde Park Corner, dicing with death. No how are you and please thank mummy for her letter. Oh no. Just a continual whinge for more cash, more batteries and will I write to the housemaster supporting fridges in the dorm. It gets so hot they need cool drinks. Unbelievable. In my day the dorm was so cold the inside of the windows used to ice up.’
No, thought Helene, running a hotel is definitely not for me.
‘I like this place,’ the man in luggage told Helene. ‘No frills or fuss. You staying here?’
‘No.’
He nodded. ‘My wife wouldn’t go for it. She won’t stay anywhere unless she gets a courtesy bathrobe and Molton Brown shampoo.’
To Helene’s relief, Odile appeared and got rid of them: ‘The towels are up in your rooms now. And there’s plenty of hot water.’
When they’d gone, Odile told Helene that Valerie hadn’t delivered all the laundry, so she’d had to nip across to the hotel over the road to borrow some.
‘We all help one another. We have to. One August, all the laundry people were on holiday, or on strike, and Paris ran out of sheets. You could not buy a sheet anywhere. But we managed.’
She poured Helene a Scotch. ‘Now what about you, ma petite. Have you a boyfriend?’
‘Sort of.’
‘So he is married, yes?’
‘Very.’
‘And if he were free, if he were widowed, would you marry him?’
Helene considered this. Then she said, with a smile, ‘You know, I don’t think I would. I think Madame would be a hard act to follow.’
‘And he would be set in his ways,’ declared Odile. ‘I made that mistake with Vernon. Women and men, we age in different ways. Look at the number of funky grannies you see, tearing around in baseball caps and fast convertibles. And the men, the widowers, they have turned into old women. I hear them. They say, Oh, I always shop at the same place at the same time every week. I always have my lunch at one, and then tea and a biscuit at half past four. I like chocolate digestives. Milk chocolate. That dark stuff, it unsettles my stomach. My wife, she used to say, it’s what I’m going to put in your coffin. Chocolate biscuits. But of course, she went first. Funny old life.’
Helene remembered her saying that Vernon’s first wife had been responsible for the décor of the Mermaid. She passed back the brochure. ‘Quite some place.’
Odile laughed. ‘Poor Vernon. He tried so hard to make it what he called refined. Pink doilies, napkins tied up with satin ribbon, dear little mermaid ashtrays for the punters to steal.’
‘Don’t you mean for them to take home as souvenirs?’ suggested Helene.
‘So then after all this effort, poor Vernon would go down the pub and the locals would say, Hi Vern, how’s the knocking shop?’
‘Lovely views it’s got,’ said Helene.
‘Had. It was on top of a cliff. And it fell in the sea!’
Helene was about to leave, when
she remembered why she’d come. Elodie. Her course. Would Odile know of a medium priced hotel in Annecy?
Odile said immediately, ‘Tell her, the Hotel Bristol.’
‘Great. You know it?’
‘No, I have never been to Annecy. But all over the world, every large town has a Hotel Bristol. It’s like in every mini-bar, you will find whisky that is never your brand, and two bars of Toblerone. How disgusting is that?’
‘How was the concert?’ Helene asked Jean-Paul.
‘Diabolical.’ He drained his champagne and laughed at all the newspaper pictures of Ripping Velcro scowling. ‘Actually, they’re from very good homes. Nicely spoken.’
The best part of the evening, he told Helene, had been before the concert, having dinner alone with his son.
‘The Situation seems to have resolved itself. Madame is most relieved.’
‘You mean he has got a girlfriend?’
‘Evidently so. But he says it’s very early days so that’s why he hasn’t brought her home.’
And he didn’t need Madame, with her formal French politesse, intimidating her, thought Helene.
‘I told Madame and she said at once that we must leave him alone.’
Thank heavens for that. Helene poured the rest of the champagne. Now she could stop assessing every female she met as a possible for Marc.
They went to bed. Jean-Paul was especially loving. She whispered, ‘Where did you learn? Not at the brothel. You were too terrified. So how?’
‘The way you do. Bit by bit, girl by girl. At first I couldn’t get the hang of romancing a girl and getting her to want me.’
‘But Jean-Paul! You’re a very attractive man.’
‘I was gauche. And the whole technique I found a trial. It was like learning to windsurf … enduring weeks of being slapped off the board into the water, having to haul yourself back up, thinking you’d break your back before you got the hang of it. And then for the first time, the wind catches the sail, you get your feet right, your balance right and you cling on and you fly, oh you fly across the water…’
‘I didn’t know you could windsurf.’
The Price of Love Page 10