‘So long as it has a bog,’ said Clara.
I turned, smiling brightly. ‘How are you doing, Naomi?’
Naomi removed her headphones for a second. ‘Sorry?’
‘How are you doing?’
‘Surviving.’
She replaced her earphones and closed her eyes. I recollected dimly how I had behaved at sixteen when being taken on holiday by the family of a friend. Slavishly, humiliatingly polite, painfully enthusiastic about everything, never allowing a word of complaint or dissent to pass my lips even when my friend’s younger brother was sick over me on the ferry. How times had changed. The thought of three weeks exposed to Naomi’s air of taciturn censure froze my blood.
‘Here we are,’ said George. ‘Just the job.’
We climbed stiffly from the car. The place was a large wooden roadside chalet with a verandah and a metal sign advertising Pschitt! and cold beer, neither of which was a very appetising prospect at seven in the morning. It would not have surprised me to find a couple of cross-eyed, gap-toothed hillbillies sitting on tipped-back chairs chewing quids of tobacco.
‘Where are the loos?’ asked Clara.
‘We’ll ask. Sois calme,’ replied George.
Naomi suddenly became animated. ‘I’m going to have brioches and hot chocolate,’ she announced. ‘And a nice French ciggy.’
‘Damn,’ said George, ‘I’ve left my Economist in the boot.’
We got as far as the steps when a girl about the same age as Clara and Naomi, and of about their combined weights, emerged from the door and indicated that the café was closed.
‘Nous voudrions le petit déjeuner,’ explained George, as if that were likely to make any difference. He tapped his watch. ‘Il est sept heures.’
‘Non.’ The girl shook her head. The rest of her quivered like a great, greasy duvet. ‘Sommes fermé.’
‘Come on,’ I muttered, thoroughly intimidated. ‘Let’s find somewhere else.’
‘But it’s ludicrous,’ protested George. ‘Apart from anything else, where’s their business sense? Think of the passing trade they must be missing by not opening at a respectable time in the morning.’
Naomi came forward. ‘Avez vous des toilettes s’il vous plait?’
‘Non!’ The huge girl looked murderously at the perpetrator of this solecism. ‘Sommes fermé!’
‘Pardon us for living,’ said Naomi, and led the way back to the car.
‘You’ll have to go behind a bush,’ said George, the edge of his pleasant mood now well and truly blunted.
‘Thanks a bundle!’
‘Everyone does in France,’ I said. ‘They’re far more relaxed about that sort of thing.’
A mile or so further on George pulled into a lay-by bordered by trees. The girls surveyed the terrain suspiciously, but I was out of the car like a shot.
When I returned, sunny with relief, the girls were still surveying the lie of the land while George fiddled with the knobs of the car radio.
‘Get a move on,’ I said. ‘Breakfast calls.’
‘Okay, okay!’
They began to move in the direction of the woods, but at that moment half a dozen French youths on motorbikes roared up the road and snarled to a halt in our lay-by. The atmosphere changed in an instant from one of womanly intimacy to one of twanging sexual tension. The youths dismounted and formed a loosely-knit group, leather collars up, hips cocked, hands in the back pockets of their 501s. Cigarettes were passed and lit. Comments were made. The girls’ eyes glittered and their bodies underwent those subtle alterations that denote acceptance of a challenge.
George switched off the radio and leaned out. ‘Girls, are you going to stand there all day or what? I want my coffee.’
Clara and Naomi lit up rival cigarettes, dragging and puffing like a couple of old tarts in a drinking club.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘To the woods.’
They didn’t even deign to reply. It was a lost cause. The early morning air quivered with the throwing-down of gauntlets and the emission of rogue pheromones.
‘Okay.’ I admitted defeat. ‘Back in the car.’
I returned to my seat. The girls remained where they were, but then the leader of the pack separated himself from the group and advanced on them, sending them scuttling for cover like a couple of terrified rabbits.
‘That was a prize waste of time,’ commented George.
Clara sighed heavily, but happily. ‘What a bunch of chronic posers!’
We stopped half an hour later at another wayside establishment, which was open and which had all the usual offices. George dug out his copy of the Economist from the large case in the boot and we sat at a window table. We were the only customers. The girls returned from the loos with whitened faces.
‘What’s the matter with them?’ complained Clara.
‘Nothing,’ said George. ‘They’re the most civilised nation on earth.’
‘They don’t care about their toilets,’ said Naomi self-righteously. George gave her a withering look, and then beamed brightly at the patron, whose villainous moustaches now hung over us.
‘Petit déjeuner pour quatre,’ he said.
‘M’sieur.’
George turned back to Naomi and Clara. ‘The French have perfected the art of living. It’s simply that the British have an obsession with bodily functions. We like to pretend they don’t happen.’
‘My own I can put up with,’ said Clara. ‘It’s everyone else’s I have a problem with.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘do you think we could drop it? I want to enjoy my breakfast.’
This turned out to be a forlorn hope. It seemed we had hit on a stray pocket of French who had not matriculated in the art of living. Chipped mugs containing grey and gritty coffee, or in the girls’case tepid chocolate, were accompanied by hunks of desiccated bread, tiny cartons of the sort of highly coloured jam usually immured in a doughnut, and no butter. George pretended it was all good peasant fare, but it wasn’t. It was outstandingly nasty. And on top of everything else a huge, scrofulous mongrel appeared from behind the bar and sat watching us at close range, emitting warm waves of halitosis.
‘Poor thing,’ said Naomi. ‘It doesn’t look well.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said briskly. ‘I bet it eats a lot better than the customers. Half a horse a day by the look of it.’
At this the dog stood up and shook violently, its great tatty pelt shuddering and flapping and sending out clouds of grizzled hair and grit. As it settled down once more, Clara peered closely at it.
‘It’s got the most awful eye bogies.’
We left soon after.
Chapter Two
By eleven a.m. we were approaching Cahors and were within an hour or two of our objective. George announced that he was handing over the wheel to me.
‘You should be fine,’ he said grandly. ‘We’re on the home straight now.’
‘Except for actually finding the place,’ I pointed out.
‘You’ll be okay.’ I noticed there was no question of a ‘we’ this time. ‘You’ve got that letter with the details, haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then.’ He settled himself comfortably in the passenger seat and closed his eyes. ‘We’re home and dry. Wake me up if you have a problem.’
I glanced over my shoulder at the girls, but there was no comfort there. They were both plugged into their stereos. I negotiated Cahors in a sweat of anxiety in case the furious shouts of the indigenous drivers should wake George. When I finally emerged, I pulled over at the first lay-by and consulted the agent’s instructions.
‘The Villa Almont,’ I read, ‘is a miraculously restored farmhouse with many features typical of the Quercy area …’ I skimmed to the second page. ‘… As you approach from the main southbound autoroute from Bordeaux—’ Well, here was a problem for a start. Because of the traffic and George’s desire to take breakfast at a pleasant provincial café we had opted for the A road and were consequently ap
proaching from the opposite direction. I checked the name of the nearest small town: Lalutte. If I could get that far I could turn left instead of right, and then I’d be on course.
I wasn’t over-confident. Still, this was a country road, we were closing on our destination and for the first time I began to feel I might enjoy the holiday. I am not one of nature’s holiday-makers, being one of those who take a week to unwind and another week worrying about the return journey. But on this occasion I had taken the precaution of bringing along the work in progress to ease the strain.
After my flirtation with the serious novel, Down Our Street marked my return to popular fiction and the warm approval of my publishers, Era Books. But it was no bodice-ripper. My agent, Lew Mervin, had pointed out the unwisdom of going back to where the tights bulged and the rapiers flashed.
‘That’s had its day,’ he told me. ‘You’ve only got to see how many there are on the shelves. Every housewife in the land is dusting off her hot historical and the result is the shops are stuffed with quasi Blairs, and they’re truly dire. It may be the sincerest form of flattery, Harriet, but it sure as hell means it’s time to move on.’
‘Well what,’ I asked, ‘would you recommend?’
‘Clogs and shawls,’ he replied. ‘Mills and gloom.’
I demurred. ‘I’m not sure it’s me.’
‘No one thought a literary novel was you,’ said Lew. ‘But look what you achieved!’
I looked, and in truth it wasn’t much, but it was always nice being hosed down with Lew’s admiration.
‘I suppose so. I just feel – well, those sort of novels are so clannish. So parochial.’
‘Can’t you locate even the tiniest dash of northern blood?’
I thought about it. ‘Sorry.’
‘Personally,’ said Lew, ‘I think that’s all to the good. Your speciality has always been bringing a freshness to established genres.’
So I had resurrected my impetuous, headstrong, not conventionally beautiful heroine, divested her of chemise, laced bodice, pannier and hoops, draped her in a plain wool skirt and black shawl and renamed her Mattie Piper. Thus equipped she had begun a new existence in the mean, cobbled streets and rain-lashed moorlands of Marsdyke, an apocryphal northern town where men were men, women were women, and old passions ran deep as the coal face. But the black shawl covered shoulders white as milk and hair the colour of burnished copper; and woe betide the man who by his importunings caused Mattie’s eyes to flash green fire. I had lobbed in a spot of doubt as to Mattie’s parentage, and a couple of suitors, one blond, ragged and of humble stock, the other suave, dark and moneyed, son of the local mill owner.
The presence on board of Down Our Street, snug in its box-file in the boot, was a great comfort. The smouldering resentments and quickening affections of Marsdyke would bear me company through the uncharted wastes of the holiday like old and trusted friends.
Lalutte was now only a few kilometres away. To left and right little lanes scuttled off between the dense crowds of watching sunflowers, and roughly painted signs beckoned to local auberges, and dégustation de vins régionaux, and vente de melons. Rustic pigeonniers, with charming timber frames and pointed roofs, stood in fields where fat white cows grazed like becalmed yachts. I was glad the others were asleep. I pictured rousing them cheerily as we pulled in at our destination, able to fill them in on the pleasant detail of the area which I had noted as I cruised independently along. When Lalutte appeared on the horizon – a clock tower, a wall and a jumble of red rooftops on top of a sugarloaf hill – I was almost lightheaded with exhilaration. I pulled over again and consulted the instructions.
‘Turn right opposite the Lalutte junction,’ advised Crispin Rutherford-Pounce, the English chargé d’affaires of France Vacances, from whom we had rented the Villa Almont. That meant I must turn left. I hummed along until I reached the foot of the sugarloaf hill and, yes, there was a narrow white road leading up to the town. And here a left turning with a small bridge over a stream, also mentioned by RP.
‘Follow this road up the hill, passing the double-fronted farmhouse and the track signposted Forge. Over brow of hill take hairpin left and watch out for driveway entrance marked with John Bull teatowel.’
Piece of cake. I zoomed up the hill, marvelling at the view, the sunshine and the lack of traffic. Here was the farmhouse. It was a little further than I thought to the track. There was a sign, though I couldn’t read it. But several kilometres went by and there was no hairpin left. I had already, as I thought, driven over the brow of the hill – there was yet another patchwork panorama shimmering before me to prove it. A small worm of doubt nibbled at my confidence. I pulled over and switched the engine off.
Rutherford-Pounce’s map was rendered in a series of geometrically straight lines and crisp angles. This made it look wonderfully simple, but bore absolutely no relation to the curving, untidy, rural reality in which I now found myself. I stared fixedly at it, trying to relate my current position to some point on the neatly annotated graph.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Clara, now awake, ‘we’re lost.’
I smiled brightly without lifting my eyes from the map. ‘No, we’re not lost. I’m just getting my bearings.’
‘So where are we?’
‘Virtually there. In fact I think we’re probably within a couple of hundred yards of the villa.’
Clara wound her window down and peered about. Naomi woke up and Clara filled her in on the bad news that we were more or less there. I felt it incumbent on me to make a move. As I started the car George regained consciousness with a sound like a cat coming in from the rain.
‘I say, this is jolly nice. Where are we?’
‘Almost there.’
‘But not quite,’ put in Clara. ‘We’re lost.’
‘Don’t be so silly,’ I said testily. ‘I know exactly where we are. It’s merely just a case of pinpointing the villa.’
‘Hm.’ George pulled himself up in the seat with an ‘if you want a thing done you’d better do it yourself’ expression which I found totally enraging. He held out his hand. ‘Let’s have a dekko at RP’s instructions.’
I turned the engine off again and silently handed him the sheet. He studied it, looked out, gazed round, looked at it again. Then said dully: ‘It’s at times like these I wish I hadn’t paid the full rental in advance.’
‘What on earth are you implying?’
‘Nothing, nothing at all.’
‘You’re thinking it doesn’t exist, aren’t you?’ said Clara with a quaver in her voice.
‘I never heard such nonsense,’ I said, with greater firmness than I felt. ‘No one could look less like a crook than Rutherford-Pounce.’
George frowned at the map. ‘But what does a crook look like? The days are long gone when the criminal fraternity obliged by wearing black masks and striped pullovers.’
‘I think we should drive on down here a bit,’ I said. ‘It does say ‘‘over the brow of the hill’’ and we haven’t gone that far.’
‘I agree,’ said George, surprisingly, adding, ‘Any movement is better than none.’
I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that for the first time Naomi appeared a shade tense.
Perhaps this was what made me over-eager to identify something – anything – as a hopeful sign.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘down there.’
They all looked dutifully. ‘What?’
‘That could be it.’
A grey roof and a glint of window was just distinguishable among the trees on the hillside. Almost at once we came to a gateway – or at least gateposts, there was no gate – from which an unmade drive led to a large house. A square of material hung from the branch of a tree.
‘Here we are!’ I cried.
‘What about the hairpin left?’ said George, but I’d already turned in.
We were on what must once have been an open forecourt, now a sweep of grass, gravel and stone spiked here and there with leggy weeds. Str
aight ahead was the house, an enormous off-white building with rows of shuttered windows and a whimsical hexagonal tower at one end. To the right was a ramshackle wall with an archway leading into a large courtyard, also grassy and weed-strewn. There was no sign of life, no vehicle, no animal, no sound. An air of romantic dereliction hung over the whole place.
‘Amazing,’ said Naomi.
‘Yes, it certainly is,’ said George.‘And not a bit like its photograph.’
‘You can’t go by that,’ I pointed out. ‘They take photographs from funny angles.’
I switched off the engine. Clara got out and wandered away from the car, lighting a cigarette as she did so. In spite of the many windows I did not feel that we were being watched. The three of us sat there in silence, stupefied by the heat, and the sudden silence, and the long, long drive. Was this it?
‘Hey Nev! Cop the pool!’
Clara was now at the far end of the house, looking at something beyond and slightly below it. Naomi baled out and walked over to join her.
‘See that?’ murmured George. ‘Her backside winks at you.’
It was true. The crease beneath either pneumatic, denim-clad buttock opened and closed rhythmically as Naomi swayed away from us.
‘Did Clara say she’d found the pool?’ George asked.
‘I think so.’
We got out of the car and strolled through the stunning heat to where the girls stood.
‘Some pool, huh?’
It was if anything even bigger than the fifty feet mentioned in Rutherford-Pounce’s brochure. And it was surrounded by a paved area between the stones of which wild flowers, moss and weeds grew in abundance. At the far corner was a small, single-storey rectangular building with transom windows set high in its brick walls, and wooden swing doors like those of a western saloon.
‘I suppose it really is a swimming pool …?’ said George.
‘Of course it is,’ said Clara, ‘it’s got those little ladders.’
‘And measurements on the side,’ pointed out Naomi.
They were both enjoying the joke. And indeed George could be forgiven for his doubts, because it must have been years since this pool had been used for swimming. The light blue tiles with which it was lined, and the measurements to which Naomi referred, were coated in spinach-coloured slime. And in the water which half-filled it, villainous-looking giant carp slunk and loitered beneath huge lily-pads and a green canopy of algae.
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