Not Quite Nice

by Celia Imrie

  When the waiter came with the bill, Theresa offered to pay for both of them. The machine was brought to the table and she put in her PIN.

  The waiter shook his head.

  He spoke rapidly in French and Theresa couldn’t catch the gist of what he was saying.

  William lowered his voice. ‘He says the machine is saying “no funds”.’

  ‘No funds? But . . .’ Theresa’s heart skipped a beat. Her saliva dried up. Her thoughts came quickly: her turquoise pen; Brian staying in her house; Imogen’s cloned card; his leaving with Carol; her own bank details kept ‘safe’ in the paperwork drawers in the living room and on her laptop, where Brian could easily find them.

  She realised, with a sudden awful certainly, that she knew exactly what Brian had wanted from her.

  ‘We’re all famous!’ cried Zoe, lurching along the seafront, waving a newspaper in the air.

  ‘You’re back!’ said Sally, coming along the quay from the other direction. ‘You Jezebel.’

  ‘No,’ grinned Zoe. ‘Jezebel wrote the wicked words. Welcome to the Freakshow! Sodom-and-Gomorrah-sur-Mer.’

  ‘You’re drunk!’ said Sally.

  ‘And you’re fat,’ said Zoe. ‘But in the morning I shall be sober.’

  ‘So now you’re stealing your jokes, Zoe, as well as people’s sons. That was Winston Churchill’s quip. And I’m not that fat.’ Sally stood with her hands on her hips, blocking Zoe’s way. ‘Zoe? Where is Tom?’

  ‘Oh, Tommasso le Grand. Yes. The little adorable thing.’ She looked round as though expecting to see him. She shook her head and shrugged. ‘I gave him my body, and he was satisfied. No, he’s not here now. He needs time alone to touch himself up . . . I mean touch me up . . .’ She cackled and lurched a few steps onwards.

  Sally took hold of Zoe and shook her by the shoulders. ‘Where is my son?’

  Zoe wriggled out of Sally’s grasp.

  ‘He’s in Villeneuve Love-it . . . Villeneuve-Louvet . . . Loubet, looby dooby doo.’ Zoe staggered across the road, narrowly missing a collision with a passing cyclist. ‘He’s in a tent. I need to sit down.’

  She threw the newspaper down on a seat at the back of the terrace outside the bar, flopped down on to the seat next to it and lay her head on the table. Within seconds she was asleep and snoring.

  One of the waiters shrugged. It wasn’t the first time he’d had Zoe collapse, drunk, on one of his tables. But she was a good customer of long standing, and she always gave very good tips. So he put a glass of water on the table in front of her, and tidied up a little.

  The scrappy, tattered old newspaper, which fell to the floor from the seat beside her, he took away and tossed into the bin.

  Theresa spent the rest of the afternoon in the bank and later at the police station.

  It turned out that, on the day he left with Carol, Brian had taken a substantial amount of Theresa’s money. After all the work on the Cookery Club she was back to square one. It was soul-destroying.

  She now had a long wait while the bank decided whether or not to reimburse her. The fact that the man had been, in their eyes, cohabiting with her would not help her cause.

  Going through the accounts minutely with the manager Theresa saw that although Brian had always paid the rent on the dot, and paid in the Cookery Club money, he carefully removed small amounts of money at the same time.

  What an easy ride he had had with her.

  When Theresa got back to the seafront in Bellevue-Sur-Mer she saw Zoe, passed out on a table in the bar, and remembered the first morning here, when she had seen her in a similar position, passed out in the café–tabac.

  Sally was at another table nearby, keeping her eagle eye on Zoe.

  Theresa gave her a wave and went across to join her.

  ‘I want her to wake up and tell me where she’s left Tom,’ said Sally. ‘Before she hit the deck she tried to imply that he had joined a circus.’

  ‘I’ve been such a fool,’ said Theresa, slumping into the chair opposite. ‘Brian’s cleaned out my bank account. But now I have to say I feel really sorry for Carol.’

  She told Sally about the withdrawals from her bank and how the same thing must have happened to Imogen. While in the bank she had consulted her diary and realised that Brian must have copied Imogen’s card the day he pretended to come back looking for his passport, and then had had the cheek to use it to pay for all those drinks and the bottle of champagne.

  Theresa also shared her suspicions with Sally that Brian was working in tandem with the man who robbed her, the same man who sold drugs to Benjamin.

  ‘I wish we could contact Carol, and tell her,’ added Theresa. ‘She needs to be warned.’

  Sally told Theresa that she had already tried many times, but Carol’s mobile phone constantly went straight to answer-phone.

  ‘They can track people down these days by your mobile phone,’ said Sally. ‘Maybe she thought David would find her and drag her home.’

  ‘Pity he doesn’t,’ said Theresa. Then it dawned on her. ‘Perhaps Brian realised that the phone could be used to trace him, and so he dumped it.’

  Both women gasped.

  Two large middle-aged men sitting at an adjacent table turned and raised their glasses.

  ‘We’re also from England,’ said the shorter one, starting to stand up. ‘Can we join you?’

  ‘No,’ snapped Sally and Theresa in unison.

  The men each pulled a face at one another and turned away.

  Within moments of having repelled the advances of the two Englishmen, Sally looked up and saw Alfie standing on the edge of the terrace, staring at her.

  ‘Oh God,’ she murmured to Theresa. ‘Don’t leave, please.’

  Theresa spun round, saw Alfie and said quietly but firmly: ‘I won’t.’

  Alfie swaggered over and pulled out a seat.

  ‘How is your mother?’ asked Sally.

  Alfie let out a long tired sigh.

  ‘She seems a lot better this evening.’ He ran his fingers through his tousled hair as he spoke. ‘The doctors seem more hopeful, anyhow.’

  ‘But she’s still unconscious?’ asked Theresa.

  Alfie nodded.

  ‘The doctors told me to leave her for tonight, come home, have a good rest and prepare to be there tomorrow. They seem hopeful that she might wake up soon.’

  Sally’s foot was pressing hard down on Theresa’s.

  ‘The police let you go then?’

  ‘They had to. I had nothing to do with it. I was miles away. And it was easy to prove. Passport control.’

  Sally’s foot pressed harder.

  ‘But I am going to find whoever did this and I am going to . . .’ He licked his lips. His mouth seemed dry. ‘Well . . . I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just hope the police catch them and put them away for a very long time.’

  He gazed down at the table for a long time then said, ‘Sally, Theresa, might I ask if you could lend me a little money. To tide me over, you know, while I look after Mum?’

  Theresa went to bed but couldn’t sleep.

  So many things went round in her head.

  The nerve of Alfie asking her and Sally for a loan. Wasn’t he supposed to be some financial whizz-kid? Or was that just Faith’s parental pride boosting his reputation up a notch to impress them?

  The thought of Carol, away, out of contact, entirely at the mercy of Brian, who might do anything to her. Theresa kept picturing Carol’s mobile phone, sitting in a bin somewhere, ringing out to nobody.

  The realisation that her own finances were now in a worse state than when she first arrived here in Bellevue-Sur-Mer.

  The powerlessness of knowing that Brian was to blame for it all, but having no path of action against him. Theresa wondered whether his drug-dealing, handbag-snatching friend would be shadowing Brian and Carol wherever they had gone, or now that Brian had left, had he gone home to England, or Scotland, or wherever he was from?

  The police still seemed very cool about
the whole matter, as though this was the kind of thing that always happened here, and there was nothing they could do about it.

  It wasn’t at all like those TV shows where the police all spring into action.

  But then, Theresa realised, the TV shows only showed the police jumping to after a murder, not something like this, which would only be classed as petty crime: theft and embezzlement.

  She wanted to grab that tobacco-stinking bloke and fling him down some stone steps and see how he’d like it.

  Her thoughts strayed next to Ted, wondering where he was now, and if he was happier being single, or maybe now he was away he might miss Sian . . .

  Then the phone rang.

  Theresa looked at the clock. It was after midnight.

  She leapt from her bed and answered.

  ‘It’s Imogen.’

  Theresa’s heart beat frantically. What could have happened that she was calling so late?

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  Imogen cleared her throat. ‘No. Of course it isn’t.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I just don’t enjoy having a famous clown for a mother, that’s all.’

  ‘Imogen?’ Theresa asked, sitting back on to the edge of the bed. ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘I had a glass or two, yes, but only to help me cope.’

  ‘Cope with what? Is it Michael again?’

  ‘No, Mother, it is you. You and your inane friends. I have had the world and his wife on the blower now for two solid days, and I’ve had enough.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Imogen,’ said Theresa in as calm a voice as she could muster. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The Daily Post,’ said Imogen.

  Theresa remained silent.

  ‘“Freakshow-on-Sea: the bizarre Riviera lives of British ex-pats”?’

  ‘Imogen. If you have something to say, could you just spit it out.’

  ‘It was that coy little blonde, of course. I never trusted her. I was surprised that you allowed her into your flat.’

  ‘Imogen, please . . . Fill in a few dots for me here. I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  But as Imogen started to speak, Theresa suddenly had an inkling . . .

  She scrabbled about in her bag and pulled out the English newspaper, which she had carried about all day but never read. She spread it out on the bed and flicked through the first few pages.

  About halfway through, there was her picture. And Sally’s. In fact they were pretty much all there, sitting on the terrace of the brasserie, with Brian rising, ready to move away with Carol.

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ said Theresa, placing the phone back in its cradle.

  Her heart thumping, she read the double-page spread.

  It was all there in black and white, and though it was technically true, on the page it looked so false and awful.

  Theresa was the ‘fat queen of costume jewellery’ who ran a pathetic cookery school for bored alcoholics like antediluvian dipso wasp Zoe and faded, long-forgotten Z-list TV celebrity Sally ‘of the coloured gunk and polka-dotted jumpsuits’. According to Jessica’s article, Sian was a successful businesswoman by day and a screeching, malicious termagant by night, while William and Benjamin she called the camp answer to Tweedledee and Tweedledum. She even referred to ‘Dee’ being a father figure to the much younger ‘Dum’, who had an expensive coke habit. Carol was depicted as the swanky Yank with a droll but sarcastic tongue, who lugged around her cowed husband David, a man who was there only to write the cheques that maintained her expensive Riviera lifestyle.

  The only person who came out of the piece with an ounce of dignity was Ted, the sadly neglected poet with no publishing deal, who ‘ought to be up there with the greats’, not living in a tired tourist town in the middle of nowhere, smothered by a load of failed ex-pat hicks. Jessica even told of Ted’s plans to get back to his Australian roots, and talked about how she hoped one day to catch up with him again.

  Theresa read the whole article again, while taking deep breaths.

  The byline, she noted, was Jessica Truegold.

  Truegold! Theresa was glad now that no one had ever trusted Jessica, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. The sneaky little bitch, sucking up to them all for support, while compiling this hateful piece behind their backs! The hidden recording device had certainly come into its own, Theresa saw, as, in the article, much of the dialogue from the disastrous night of the pissaladière cookery evening was reproduced verbatim.

  Theresa poured herself a whisky. There were times when a glass of wine wouldn’t hit the spot. She picked up the phone to dial Imogen, but instead found herself ringing Sally.

  She read the whole piece aloud to her.

  ‘I’m coming over,’ said Sally when she had done. ‘You don’t mind me arriving in my pyjamas, do you?’

  25

  Faith regained consciousness next morning. But it was a week before she was discharged from hospital. She was adamant that Alfie had had nothing to do with the attack, although she could not truthfully remember anything about that afternoon. The first time she realised she had been attacked was when she woke up in hospital several days later.

  There was no word at all from Carol. Theresa and Sally wondered whether she had yet discovered that Brian was not in fact the servile, well-mannered British gent he impersonated, but a vile, swindling conman.

  Tom was still absent, though he phoned to tell Sally to put a date in her diary, and to tell everyone else to do so too. He had booked a minibus for her and all their friends, to bring them up to a special birthday treat for her. He couldn’t see her till that day. When pressed further about Zoe, Tom clammed up and told her it was not Sally’s business, but, yes, he was still seeing her. She was his muse.

  ‘That’s a new word for it,’ said Sally.

  Tom hung up.

  Theresa spent hours on the phone, making lengthy calls to her insurance company and the bank. She also consulted Mr Jacobs about her legal rights, and it did seem that, by letting Brian stay in her flat, she had somehow colluded with him, and that unless he was picked up by the police and found guilty of embezzlement and burglary or anything else criminal, she would not have much chance of ever getting her money refunded.

  After much thought, Theresa knew the only thing left for her to do was to try and sell the Raoul Dufy painting which her mother had left her. She would not get the money right away, but she could certainly show the bank that the money would certainly come. With a heavy heart she took the painting from the wall, and carefully wrapped it up in newspaper and bubble wrap, then she took an old towel she usually used for dyeing her hair, wrapped it round the parcel, put it in a plastic carrier bag and slid it under her bed, ready for the day she could get an appointment with a professional valuer.

  Sally spent a lot of time up with Faith, making sure she was well cared for, and even she had to admit that Alfie did appear to be doing an excellent job.

  Once when Faith was taking a snooze Sally sat him down in the kitchen with a pot of coffee and interrogated him. She wanted to know what he was up to.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. But, as they say, he would, wouldn’t he?

  ‘Why were you so keen for your mother to buy this house?’ she asked casually. He still did not know that Sally had actually made the purchase.

  ‘Because it’s lovely, and she is old,’ was his reply.

  ‘Yet you are always asking her for money . . .’

  ‘Not any more. You haven’t heard me asking for money, have you?’

  ‘You asked me for money.’

  ‘That was while Mum was ill.’

  Sally noted that that in itself was tantamount to his admitting that he did ask his mother for money.

  ‘What is the great drain on your funds, Alfie, that you always seem to need money?’ she asked. ‘Are you on drugs?’

  Alfie replied with a loud and outraged ‘No!’

  ‘Have you lost your job? Is that it?’

  Alf
ie shrugged. ‘I move about a lot. There are gaps. Everyone at this time is having a bit of a setback in the world of finance.’

  Now that his mind was on another tack, Sally came right out and asked him: ‘Did you attack your mother?’

  ‘I did not.’ Alfie looked down at the table for a few moments. ‘Why would I? It would be too easy to be caught doing something awful like that, and then I would be automatically cut out of my inheritance.’

  What a defence!

  Sally had to repress a gasp.

  Theresa was set on catching Brian and his mous-tachioed companion. But first she needed to discover whether the despicable drug-dealing thief was still in town.

  She spent much of her time sitting on the terrace of the bar in Cours Saleya, watching every new arrival. She had no luck.

  The rest of the time she patrolled the upper alleyways of the Old Town, hoping to get a glimpse of the man there.

  Nothing.

  On the third day she went to see William.

  ‘I have a proposal to put to you . . .’

  William asked what.

  ‘Could you get Benjamin to go out and search for his old drug dealer, so I can see if the man is still in town?’

  William’s face did not move. He took a couple of deep breaths and then told Theresa to fuck off.

  As she walked away from his front door, Theresa realised that William had been right to be so rude.

  But her own worries had eclipsed the thought of his own.

  Having put Benjamin into rehab, why would William want to tempt him back to the world of drugs in any way?

  She went back into Nice alone, and spent the afternoon sitting at the terrace of the gay bar, taking coffee and lunch there.

  When the evening bowls of crisps and olives came out, she was still sitting there.

  Another woman who had been sitting in the bar rather a long time too, sat and stared at Theresa, then got up and asked if she could join her.

  Theresa looked around at all the other empty tables and realised she was being picked up. She smiled and blurted something, which, instead of repelling the woman, made her smile and take a seat.

  Oh God.