Not Quite Nice

by Celia Imrie

  And so Sally knew that if those tablets had reached Alfie’s abdomen he would have been doomed, and a few weeks afterwards would have died of total organ failure. Only if he had had his stomach pumped within an hour of taking the overdose would he have survived. But the way he had told it, he would not have had a chance. Therefore Sally could only surmise that the episode had never happened.

  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.

  TOMATO TARTE TATIN

  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.

  Part Two – Bagna Cauda

  BAGNA CAUDA

  (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’.

  14

  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.

  The new girl, Jessica, told everyone she was having an extended stay in the town while recuperating. She never told anyone what she was recuperating from and no one believed her anyhow. When pressed further, by Zoe, naturally, Jessica simply said that she had had a lung infection – the modern term for a bit of a cough. She was a writer, she told them, working on a small picture book about the Rolling Stones’ album, Exile on Main Street, which had been recorded a few miles along the coast on the edges of Villefranche-sur-Mer one stoned summer.

  No one really believed this either. They were all certain she was working for Sian as her mole. Sally was the first to come to that conclusion and she told Theresa and Carol as much. As a result, all three woman kept a sharp eye on her, especially when she was in Ted’s company. Ted did appear to be quite taken by her, and they all noticed little intimate moments of familiarity between them. No one dared to warn Ted that Jessica was a spy just in case they were wrong, and also because they knew the heat of Sian’s wrath. Anyhow, the only thing that really could be pinned on her was that, while at Theresa’s Cookery Club meetings, Jessica always took copious notes in a little red notebook. Theresa even made a joke one evening, asking Jessica if she was going to publish a book of her recipes. Jessica laughed and explained that her memory was very bad, and she certainly wanted to make these things again, on her own, at home and how on earth could she do that without notes?

  Faith had moved into the old Molinari house and, since the move, seemed entirely composed, and no longer the nervous, timid woman who had so feared becoming an inhabitant of Bellevue-Sur-Mer. She was frequently seen in the bistro, taking dinner, alone with a book, or waiting at the bus stop all prepared for a day out exploring somewhere along the coast. She had even spent a night at the opera with Zoe, seeing La Ballo in Maschera, and including a late-night drink in a cafe in the bustling Cours Saleya after the final curtain. When Zoe had suggested they go on to do a bit of dancing in a fabulous little gay disco club in the Ponchettes along the way, Faith had drawn the line and found a taxi to take her home.

  Faith spent a fair amount of time with Sally, because Sally had helped her out with the move, and particularly in handling and dealing with all the legal complications that she had so feared. Sally knew all about buying property out here and the pair of them had contrived an excellent contract, which would be to their mutual benefit. Sally had in fact invested in the house, leaving Faith enough money to enjoy life, and alleviating Sally’s own worries about leaving her money in the bank.

  After a rough ride with her tutor at the sea school, Sally had finally got her certificate in power-boat driving, and was now looking out for a small boat to buy. Ted had been unable to join her in taking the course, but he had decided that
he was going to buy the boat and register it in his name, with Sally as his certificated skipper. Sally spent most days helping him in his search, the pair wandering round local marinas, and occasionally taking a boat out to sea for a test run. So far nothing had met their fancy. Sally was attempting to teach Ted all the things she had learned at sea school, but Ted’s attention span was not great, and Sally found his eyes were more often roving to inspect a gaggle of passing tourists, than paying attention to the details of making a round-turn knot with two half hitches. His knowledge of engines on the other hand was, to Sally’s surprise and delight, supreme.

  Sally frequently thought and worried about him. Sian’s girl spy was surely the enigmatic Jessica, who didn’t ever have much to say, but spent much time cosying up to Ted at Theresa’s Cookery Club sessions, which Sally enjoyed attending, now that she had passed her power-boat test. There was no other new woman in town who could possibly fit the bill. She still wasn’t sure whether or not to warn Ted. Would that be interfering in his marriage and bring Sally a visitation from Sian in dragon-mode? It was best left alone, she decided.

  The only cloud on the horizon was a spate of burglar­ies in the town, though, it must be said, that none of them were very serious. There was never any violence, and mostly it happened when people were out for the day, or away on holiday.

  Understandably, the victims did feel unnerved to get home and find their front doors open and all their cash and the TV or a digital radio gone, but everyone was insured, and the actual damage done never amounted to much beyond a new lock or window, so it was more of an inconvenience than a tragedy.

  Zoe Redbridge had been the first to have been burgled. She arrived home from her ‘skiing’ trip to Montreux, the skin round her eyes and neck tauter than ever, her lips inflated to three times their normal size. The door had been propped shut, the lock picked. Someone had broken in and taken her costume jewellery, only the pieces she had left behind when she went to Switzerland, which wasn’t that much, and a jar of petty cash in the kitchen. But, as she was obeying the clinic’s orders and resting her face after the treatments, she didn’t want to make a huge fuss, just thanked the Lord it had happened while she was out of town. If she had been in residence, she told people, she thought she would have died of fright. ‘Can you imagine what a shock it would have been, just for the sake of a few measly euros and a couple of really unattractive brooches?’ she said to anyone who would listen. ‘Waking up and finding a man rummaging around inside your drawers?’