Mwah-Mwah

by Chloe Rayban

  ‘Edith?’ queries Marie-Christine.

  ‘Edith Piaf!’ says Matthilde. She and her mother then go into a long argument in which the word ‘concierge’ comes up several times.

  Edith Piaf I do know about. She’s a really famous French singer who there’s been a film about. But I thought Edith Piaf was dead.

  It seems that Matthilde has won the argument. Marie-Christine leaves the car with a sigh and we all have to troop back upstairs and unlock the apartment and turn off the burglar alarm and go through the kitchen and unlock the back door and go out on to a kind of fire escape where there is a cage with Edith in it. Edith is small and really fluffy and she doesn’t look at all grateful for being remembered. In fact, she scrabbles in her wood shavings and buries herself.

  ‘Oh, a guinea pig!’ I say.

  ‘Un cochon d’Inde,’ Matthilde corrects me.

  So at last we leave Paris. Matthilde, of course, is in the front seat beside Marie-Christine because she has the longer legs. I’m squashed in the back with Edith in her cage. We haven’t gone very far before I realise why Edith spends her life on the fire escape. Like their larger relatives, guinea pigs are horribly smelly. I’m starting to feel sick before we’ve got to the top of the street.

  This isn’t helped by the way Marie-Christine drives. I noticed when she climbed into the car that she was wearing really high heels and I wonder whether this might be the cause of it – maybe her toe can’t reach the brake pedal. She is also putting on lipstick as she drives, she’s swung the rear-view mirror round so she can see what she’s doing, which I know for a fact is totally illegal. And what’s more, we’re coming up to a junction where cars seem to be entering from all angles. There is an island with a massive archway in the middle which has a load of horses and stuff on top and all the drivers are hurtling towards it, trying to be the first to get round. Marie-Christine has snapped her lipstick shut and is sending dazzling smiles to the other drivers while barging out in front as if she owns the place. She circumnavigates the archway with the skill of a Formula One driver.

  Glancing over her shoulder at me, she says blithely, ‘No right of way at Etoile. You just ’ave to go for it!’

  ‘Oh yes, right,’ I gulp as she narrowly misses a car coming in from our right.

  I don’t want to go into the details of that drive. Only to say that it took around three hours. That I wasn’t actually sick but perhaps I would have felt better if I had been. Towards the end of the third hour I was allowed to have the window down and I started to feel better.

  In fact, I began to feel quite hungry. Which is when I remembered the raspberry tart. The thought of it, abandoned under the bed inside its beautiful gold box, really got to me.

  I sat miserably in the back of the car, imagining the tart decomposing. Its wonderful translucent glaze would be the first thing to go. Gradually it would turn opaque and a mist of grey fluffy bacteria would grow over the surface. Inside it would turn to jelly, cracking and fissuring as the raspberries slowly dissolved, disintegrating into pulp and leaving a floating plankton of pips. Finally a thick white penicillin-type mould would surge up from the custard-cream layer, a bit like a volcano erupting. Then the whole lot would gradually soak through the box. At some point it would stick hard to the floor.

  Hopefully, I’d be safely back in England by the time the Poiriers discovered it.

  During the drive I had time to modify my French checklist somewhat.

  I add:

  Negatives:

  1) French driving – their logic seems to be: as long as you’re far enough in front no one can crash into you.

  2) French countryside – I think the kilometres must be longer in France or something – it goes on for ever.

  Positives:

  1) Feeling too sick to think of any.

  At last we arrived at a couple of massive gateposts which were carved with the words ‘Les Rochers’. Marie-Christine swerved off the main road. I roused myself and stared out of the window. The car crunched down a long gravel drive between an avenue of trees, gnarled into weird knobby shapes. And then I got my first sighting of the ‘house’. Oh-my-god!

  I remembered something Mum had said about Marie-Christine’s father being ‘rather grand’; he had a title of some kind, according to Mum. Dad had scoffed at this, saying all that kind of thing had been done away with during the French Revolution. But judging by the building up ahead, a few stones had been left unturned.

  This wasn’t just a ‘house’, it was a château. In fact, it might well have been the model for all those Walt Disney imitations. It was a crumbling stone building with four towers topped by witch’s-hat roofs. Huge cedar trees on either side gave it a dark and brooding appearance. And some kind of vine or creeper had spread in an evil way, covering some of the windows. It was the kind of place the word ‘spooky’ had been invented to describe.

  The baying of two vicious-looking black dogs completed the impression. They bounded out towards the car, leaping at it as if they were going to tear our throats out the minute we opened the doors. The car came to a halt and Marie-Christine turned to me and said, ‘Mais voilà. We ’ave arrived.’

  I crouched in the back with Edith Piaf, watching in horror as with cries of ‘Sultan!’, ‘Titan’ Matthilde opened her door and threw her arms around the first dog. The other joined in and there was a great display of doggy affection.

  A tall severe-looking lady, with hair swept back into a bun, emerged from the house. Marie-Christine climbed out of the car and went to greet her. After a lot of kissing, Marie-Christine introduced me to the lady.

  ‘ ’Annah, je présente Madame de Lafitte, ma mère.’

  The lady leaned down to kiss me too, only it wasn’t really a kiss. It was the faintest touching of cheeks on either side. Her cheeks were very soft and smelt of some sort of soap, fresh and lemony.

  I followed them into a dimly lit hallway which was big enough to fit our whole house in. It had a stone flagged floor, a massive oak staircase and simply miles above us there was a beamed ceiling. The walls were hung with tapestries and dotted around were the decapitated heads of various animals – a couple of stags, something that looked like a moose and a ferocious wild boar whose glass eyes glinted angrily as they caught the light. I shivered. Inside the house it was icy cold.

  Matthilde had been told to show me to my room and I trailed behind her up the stairs as Marie-Christine and her mother disappeared into a side room deep in conversation. The door closed behind them with a dull echo. Once upstairs, Matthilde led me down a corridor flanked by doors. She threw one open.

  ‘You sleep ’ere,’ she said. I walked in. It was a huge high room with a four-poster bed with curtains round it. The walls were of an odd dark red colour and the furniture was heavy old-fashioned stuff. There was a huge fireplace with an ancient blotchy mirror above it. But there wasn’t a fire, or a radiator, or any other kind of heating as far as I could see.

  I turned to find Matthilde had left me there. It seemed we didn’t have to share. My heart sank; in a house like this sharing would have been rather reassuring, even if it had to be with Matthilde. I went over to the bed and pulled back the heavy curtains. It was the kind of bed that made you wonder if someone had died in it. Which I realised was highly probable since it looked incredibly old. I dumped my holdall on a marble-topped chest of drawers. The room had various doors leading off into cobwebby cupboards; no sign of a bathroom, which I could do with actually, after that drive.

  ‘Matthilde?’ I called down the corridor. My voice echoed eerily in the emptiness. There was no answer. I went to the stairwell and called her name again. Still no answer. So I tried each door in turn. These opened on to more bedrooms, equally cold with similarly grand beds but obviously not used – the furniture was draped with eerielooking dustsheets. In the end I found a bathroom. Inside, everything was antique too. There was a huge stained bath on legs, a giant’s washbasin and a loo with a wonky seat. It had an old-fashioned cistern with a cha
in you had to pull. The taps coughed and spluttered and reluctantly supplied me with a trickle of icy water. It didn’t look as if anything had changed since the house had been built.

  I called Matthilde again. Still no response. So I made my way back to my room and stared out of the window. It had been grey overcast weather all the way down from Paris. Now rain threatened. I looked out over the driveway and down that avenue. There seemed to be a moat at the end crossed by a stone bridge. We must have driven over it. On either side of the avenue, there were lawns of lumpy grass. Beyond these there was bleak open countryside which faded away into damp grey mist.

  I could hear footsteps on the gravel below and leaning forward I caught sight of Marie-Christine returning to her car. I watched as Madame de Lafitte followed, talking urgently. She seemed upset about something. Matthilde came into view and hovered at a distance. Then Marie-Christine kissed them both and drove off without a backward glance.

  I watched the car disappearing from sight. Was Marie-Christine going off for a secret rendezvous with her dark and handsome stranger? Why was everyone so upset? But whatever she was up to, it seemed I had been left here, with a snooty French girl and a strict old lady in a house that was huge, cold and, worst of all, probably haunted! The sound of the car wheels crunching on the gravel grew fainter and fainter and then faded away into silence. I stood staring out of the window. There was no wind in the trees. Nothing moved in the garden. The house was eerily still.

  I slumped down on the bed and, reaching for my mobile, I dialled up Mum. A good moan at her might make me feel better. But her phone was on answerphone. Then I dialled up Jess. She wasn’t answering either which made me feel really down. I left her a text:

  abandoned in

  haunted house

  eeeeek!

  me x

  I sat on the bed for quite a long time after that, wondering why Jess wasn’t answering. And then I realised that everyone would be round at Angie’s right now, having a girly time getting ready for the party. Her mobile was probably buried under a load of coats. Or maybe they had the music on really loud and she couldn’t hear the ringtone. At any rate, she was clearly too busy enjoying herself to bother about me.

  At that thought I felt really sorry for myself. I went back to the window. Darkness was closing in. Grey fingers of mist were drifting in across the lawn. The avenue of trees stood out against it like a row of spooky figures, their knobbly branches reaching down as if they were waiting to trap you if you tried to escape.

  Abruptly the silence was broken. Something had startled some evil black birds; they flew up angrily circling the far end of the park, their hoarse cries echoing harshly in the stillness. One of the dogs bayed somewhere down below. I shivered. If this was in a film, it would never’ve got passed for PG.

  I turned my back on the window. The furniture looked dark and lumpy in the twilight. Fleetingly it reminded me of something. The red room! The room Jane Eyre had been locked in by her horrid stepmother. When we’d read it at school, I’d thought that Jane was making a childish fuss over nothing. But now I knew just how she felt. I went to the light switch and turned the light on. There was a single central light with a heavy fringed shade; it lit the room dimly, making the furniture cast long shadows. How was I ever going to sleep here alone?

  My door was flung open at that point.

  ‘Poorkwatoonedescend?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Grandmère ask why you no come down?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t know I was meant to.’

  Matthilde shrugged in non-comprehension and swept out of the room, so I followed her. She led me down the stairwell and across the hallway to a great oak door which opened with a traditional ghost-story creak on to a large dining room.

  ‘Voici!’ called out Matthilde.

  I paused, taking in the room. The ceiling had huge oak beams like an old English Tudor house and the floor was made of great slabs of stone. There was a stone fireplace big enough to sit in with a coat of arms carved in the centre. A fire of giant logs was burning in it. The dogs were stretched out in front of the fire as if trying to soak in its warmth before it escaped into the room. A long oak table was laid for four people. I was just wondering who the fourth could be when I heard an unnerving kind of tapping and dragging noise coming from the hallway. The door slid open and an old gentleman came into the room. He was short with bright white hair and a moustache. He was walking carefully with a stick. He looked far too old to be married to Madame de Lafitte.

  ‘Ahmondiuh!’ he said, catching sight of me and stopping in his tracks. ‘Caroline!’

  ‘No,’ I said, shaking my head as he lurched forward to greet me. With sudden inspiration I came out with one of my few reliable French phrases: ‘Je m’appelle Hannah.’

  ‘Maynon,’ he said, looking confused and staring at me hard. ‘Comtooresemble Caroline!’

  ‘I’m Hannah,’ I said. ‘I’ve just arrived from England.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘It is a long time since I hear English, Caroline.’

  I was surprised to hear that he spoke English so well, and oddly with an American accent. He signalled to the table and shuffled towards it. I followed as he sank with a sigh into his chair.

  At that point Matthilde’s grandmother came in. She was carrying a heavy white tureen with a checked cloth wrapped around it.

  ‘MayGeraldine, toonarianditdelarrivaydeCaroline?’ I heard him say.

  Madame de Lafitte placed the tureen on the table and sat down saying, ‘Maynon, Charles. Senaypas Caroline. Elle s’appelle ’Annah. A table, mes petites.’

  Then she turned to me. ‘ ’Annah, jeteprésente Oncle Charles.’

  ‘Bonjour, monsieur,’ I said as I took my seat.

  ‘Bonsoir, Oncle Charles,’ said Matthilde and went up and kissed him on both cheeks.

  I wondered who he was confusing me with. And also why he spoke English with that accent. It was all very strange. Madame de Lafitte took out the old man’s napkin and shook it then tucked it into his collar. Then she ladled soup into shallow dishes and Matthilde passed them round. It was a strange thin soup that had strands of some vegetable in it that I didn’t recognise but it was hot and warming. The old man slurped every spoonful, he had two bowls full.

  It was a rather uncomfortable meal. Matthilde’s grandmother sat on the edge of her seat with a poker-straight back. She seemed lost in thought and served us with a distracted air. I noticed that Matthilde answered her only when she was spoken to and in a really polite fashion. As we ate, the only sound, apart from the solemn ticking of a tall clock in the corner, came from old Oncle Charles. We had boiled fish after the soup with a lumpy sauce and mashed potatoes. Then Madame de Lafitte brought out a bowl of funny white cheese that tasted like yogurt. It wasn’t too bad with sugar on it.

  As I ate, my mind kept returning to Angie’s party. Angie’s dad had cleaned out their double garage for it. He’d hired some disco lights and said he’d do something about the funny car smell. People would be arriving right now. Mark wouldn’t be there yet. He probably wouldn’t turn up till quite late. He’d notice I wasn’t there, of course. He’d ask where I was and Angie would say, ‘Oh she’s in Paris,’ as she’d been primed to, hopefully making it sound really cool and grown-up. And he’d be intrigued, picturing me in some smart Parisian café surrounded by drop-dead-gorgeous people. Instead of me sitting here in the middle of nowhere with Matthilde and her strict grandmother, eating boiled fish and mashed potato with an old man who thought I was someone else and was obviously completely dotty!

  After dinner old Oncle Charles got up wearily.

  He said ‘Bonne nuit’ to everyone and then he turned to me.

  ‘So long, Caroline. Maybe we can chew the fat tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, wondering what this weird expression meant. ‘That would be nice.’

  To complete the perfect evening, it seemed Matthilde and I were expected to clear away. You’d think a house like theirs would have had l
oads of servants. And it probably did once. But clearly the de Lafittes had seen better days. When you looked at things closely, you could see how shabby they were. The tapestries were all motheaten and the rugs all threadbare and most of the furniture was worn right down to the stuffing.

  Matthilde and I had to wash up in this huge kitchen. Needless to say they didn’t have a dishwasher. The kitchen didn’t have units or worktops or anything, just open shelves and a long scrubbed wooden table down the centre. There was a fireplace with a heavy semicircular iron door which Matthilde said was an old bread oven but they didn’t use it any more. And there was a stove that looked like it dated back to before the Second World War.

  We washed up in a big chipped sink and stacked the plates in a wooden rack. Matthilde left me to wash, while she faffed around drying and stacking things in a haphazard fashion.

  ‘Who does your uncle think I am?’ I asked her. ‘Who is this person Caroline?’

  She shrugged. ‘ ’Eez like that. Eez because ’eez very old.’

  The dishes and the tureen we’d had the soup in had to be put away in a back kitchen in a huge oak cupboard with carved doors. Matthilde showed me where the cheese was kept in an icy pantry down a flight of stone steps. It was lined with shelves stacked with bottled fruit and pots of home-made jam and it had a strange smell all of its own, a mixture of damp and wine and cheese and pickles.

  While in there I was struck by the idea that – apart from the fact that both of us were dressed in jeans and stuff – we might well have slipped into a time warp and I’d wake up next day and find it was, like, hundreds of years ago. And I’d be trapped here working like some skivvy in the kitchen for ever. I decided to write this idea down for Dad too and give him a description of the pantry and the bread oven because that was the kind of detailed stuff he liked. Then I remembered that I hadn’t even had time to buy postcards in Paris.