by Hilton, Lisa
She had worn her black Chanel suit, eaten the soufflé with the air of a woman starved, thrown up neatly before Sarah brought the boys home from the Luxembourg, and dined on a fat-free yoghurt with bifidus. Armand LeSaux had a beautiful villa at Saint-Cloud, and a 1930s racing yacht at Portofino. Possible, certainly possible.
Madame Lesprats, who ‘did’ at the chateau on Monday mornings, had been conveniently voluble on the subject of the Harvey woman. Apparently she had spent a fortune on the old cow barn at Murblanc, and it was filled with boarders from May to September. Delphine was sure the cleaning woman knew precisely how much they paid, though of course she had not asked, but Madame Lesprats needed very little prompting to divulge details of Madame Harvey’s decorations, the expensive sheets that had come all the way from Lille, and the unreasonable number of bathrooms the English seemed to require. According to her, the renovated barn was a positive goldmine. Delphine was eager to meet her neighbour, since a few hard facts about the possible income from taking guests might easily introduce the possibility of imitation to her father-in-law. Once he had agreed in principle, it would not be difficult to convince him that the golf course and the Americans were entirely his own idea.
The Froggett daughter seemed very earnest and intelligent, thought Aisling, but it was a shame that the French could not be relied upon to pick up nuance, the difference say, between Jonathan’s Turnbull and Asser shirt, foxed to white thread around the collar and cuffs, and Giles Froggett’s glaring sky blue from Marks and Spencer. Wendy Froggett was not so bad, she spoke a little French and was perfectly presentable. All the same, Aisling did not wish Harveys and Froggetts to meld together in an amorphous English mass. Like many people who professed to love France, the Froggetts betrayed an innate suspicion of it, a sense of divisiveness, as though France would be better off if it admitted that it was really just England with better weather and fewer ugly buildings. Malcolm Glover, Aisling felt, was rather similar.
Aisling was in the kitchen again, preparing a chicken gremolata for the Glovers and the boys. If the drinks invitation at the chateau turned out to be just that, there would be enough over for everyone, and if not it would freeze. She grated lemon zest while the golden chicken pieces bubbled in her favourite shallow cast-iron pan and shredded parsley from the garden with a mezzaluna. She couldn’t understand how people made such mess of food. Charlotte Glover’s dire cassoulet, for instance, or the greasy navarin of lamb, really just a big Irish stew, which they had been served last time they dined at the Kendricks’. Lucy Kendrick had made such a fuss about her blasted lump of meat, but the boiled potatoes had been as raw and weepy as new cheese, and the carrots she claimed to have queued for in the market bobbed dingily in their viscous sauce. If people couldn’t cook, they shouldn’t try, was Aisling’s opinion, there were so many wonderful things to buy, boned poussins rolled with pine nuts and Armagnac-soaked prunes, fresh langoustines from the van that parked outside Castroux church on Tuesdays, charcuterie and pâtés, glistening fruit tarts from the patisserie, bottled peaches and tiny Mirabelle plums in syrup. She would much rather eat a dinner assembled from the shops of Castroux, simple and delicious, than the pathetic concoctions her neighbours insisted on boasting about. She was sure that Charlotte Glover had put tomato ketchup in the cassoulet last time.
Aisling’s mother said that one could always taste the resentment of an angry cook, and many of the Harveys’ friends seemed to bear out her description. Occasionally, they spoke wistfully of Marks and Spencer, murmuring names like chicken tikka or steak and kidney pudding, like prisoners, or exiles on a barren island recreating the lineaments of their lost city. To Aisling, this seemed feeble, yet there was a form of arrogance in the covert refusal to adapt, a kind of colonial resistance, as though fresh goat cheese and brimming, iron-juiced tomatoes were inconveniences to be endured before the next consignment of tins from the Army and Navy. Living in France might not presuppose an interest in food, but it seemed to impose one, an insincere standard to which the English community required themselves to pay homage. Each summer produced a newly fashionable bible, lavish with gluttonous adjectives, and the latest location of paradise found, the Languedoc, Gascony, the Auvergne; Aisling saw them, crack-spined on sunloungers and listened to discussions of their wonderful mysteries whilst eating food worthy of an English school canteen. The dissonance did not appear to strike with the disciples, who were seemingly unaware of the glaring dissociation of sensibility between palate and brain. Aisling’s disgust at this hypocritical lip-service was associated with the secret, spiteful remarks she wrote in her exercise book, a deeply felt, hidden anger that people who did not understand food, did not understand France, should be allowed to be here at all.
Since her arrival at Murblanc, Aisling’s enthusiasm for cooking had deepened to a point of such private sensuality that she now barely spoke of it to anyone. Like most truly excellent cooks, Aisling was not greedy, she was inflamed by taste, not satiety. She did not attempt to explain to herself the source or nature of the satisfaction that came from her food, but felt it in a sense of stillness or peacefulness that was with her more and more often, as she worked in the garden or pottered in the market, touching and smelling, as she stood silently at the top of the orchard, watching the sunset behind the tower of Castroux church, holding a basket of velvety plums. Last autumn, she had risen at five whenever it had rained and followed a tiny, ancient path along the base of the Esceyrac hill, passing a little hidden shrine with a startlingly crude wooden statue of the Madonna, wilted flowers at her feet, to gather ceps and chanterelles for frothy omelettes and deep, woody sauces. Aisling learned the pleasure of patience, of anticipating the appearance of the first thick spears of creamy asparagus, the tiny, nutty potatoes whose seed she had sown herself in drenching January rain, the brief rosy season of quinces. She felt she understood now the slow balance of the seasons, the rainbow delight of summer fruit, the rich luxury of winter game. She was less and less inclined towards the elaborate dishes she had prepared in London, felt no regret for chillies or lemon grass, no desire for papaya or Turkish sweets; the exotic was mussels and oysters from Brittany, black truffles from the Périgord, wild garlic or the May acacias, so surprising in batter. She was surprised at first when this sufficed, at her own willingness to repeat the same dish twenty times to perfect the method, even something so simple as a chicken roasted with butter on a plate of the watercress that she could gather in the broad trout pools of the Landine, where the little river flattened out by the abandoned watermill below Saintonge. One afternoon, she had seen otters there, two old Chinese philosophers with thin, ponderous moustaches.
‘I still don’t see why we have to go,’ said Wendy Froggett at seven o’clock. She felt hectored. This was their holiday after all, they owed no social obligations to the Harveys, and she did not see why she should waste her precious evening making conversation with people she didn’t know.
‘It’s just to be polite,’ said Giles wearily. They had been having this discussion ever since Aisling had popped down to La Maison Bleue to tell them of the invitation. Wendy had been furious that he hadn’t made up an excuse, but since they were clearly going, now, he didn’t see the point in arguing about it.
‘And what about Caroline? It’s not fair to leave her on her own.’ Wendy was not going to let up until he admitted that it was all his fault for trespassing in the first place.
‘I think Caroline’s quite happy to have an evening with those boys. They seem to get on.’
‘This is supposed to be a family holiday. Alice will probably want to do her own thing next year, with university, it’s just a waste of an evening.’ Wendy was putting on her lipstick all the same, Alice was lolling downstairs, ready. It couldn’t last much longer.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Giles, ‘it’s my fault, I know. Look, we’ll have one drink and then we’ll go to that bar in the village and get a meal. Caroline’ll be fine.’
Giles was pleased to be going. It wasn’t every day you got invi
ted to cocktails in a castle, and Wendy was deluded if she thought either of their daughters gave a stuff about family holidays. Caroline was no doubt dying for a chance to snog with young Richard Harvey, and Alice could accuse someone else of being bourgeois for a change. Giles hoped that the prospect of some genuinely dissipated aristocrats might incense her to the point where she stopped lecturing her parents about Marx for a couple of evenings. Secretly, Giles thought it was hard cheese to spend his holidays dealing with sulky teenagers when he had them all year at school, and he was looking forward to a bit of adult conversation.
It was still very hot when the Harveys and the Froggetts decamped from two cars on the circle of weedy gravel in front of the chateau at half past seven. Jonathan had been for walking, but Aisling didn’t want to arrive looking tousled from the climb through the woods, although she said that they ought to drive just in case the dogs were on the prowl again. The Froggetts’ Mondeo followed the Harveys’ dusty Saab down to the little bridge over the river and then right along a white unmade road on the opposite bank. Aisling swivelled around in the back seat and pointed enthusiastically to La Maison Bleue, which was just visible on its rise above the tall poplars that flanked Murblanc land. Giles and Wendy turned their heads too late and nodded politely. They crossed over again, a more impressive stone bridge with columns at the corners, which gave on to the avenue. Tall wrought-iron gates, with a large ‘Proprieté Privée’ sign, stood rustily open.
Aisling had walked here many times, hovering nervously halfway across, alert to the sound of approaching terrible barks. Though she had never dared to step beyond the bridge, she felt almost proprietorial about the avenue, pleased that it sustained the beauty it had held in her memory, pleased at the reaction it drew in Claudia and Alex. In the high growth of August, the avenue was a green nave, cut dead straight through the woodland, rising beneath the yellow barked, summer-asperous horse chestnuts in a clean perspective cut off at the summit of the hill by what seemed to be the doors of the chateau itself, black inside a white stone archway.
They stood about on the gravel, uncertain if they should look for a bell, no one taking a lead. Aisling wore a white tunic and loose navy trousers, as she didn’t want to look as though she had tried. Claudia was in an expensive-looking linen shift in a sludgy greeny-bronze that would have looked horrible on anyone else. Wendy Froggett wore frosted pink lipstick, unfortunate with the ruddy beginnings of her tan, and a white T-shirt tucked into a drooping floral skirt. Giles Froggett was still wearing his shorts. Alex tugged at the waistband of his chinos and wished that Claudia didn’t have views on shorts. The Marquis appeared from under the stone archway at the side and shouted ‘Welcome’ in English, so they trooped the length of the eighteenth-century façade, fourteen windows long, as though they were on a school trip.
‘How pleasant to see you again, Madame Harvey,’ said the Marquis, bending over Aisling’s hand. Wendy Froggett was next. As he dipped his face to her knuckles she suppressed an absurd desire to curtsey.
‘And this is Claudia,’ announced Aisling.
‘Hello, Marquis,’ said Claudia, confidently, in French.
‘Claudia, what a surprise! How are you?’ The Marquis kissed her on both cheeks, laughing, ‘What are you doing here in the middle of nowhere?’ He continued to hold her hand.
‘This is my fiancé, Alex …’
‘How do you do?’
‘… who is Jonathan’s brother, that is Aisling’s husband Jonathan, here.’
‘How do you do?’
‘We’re staying at the house, with Wendy and Giles, of course. And their daughter, Alice. I believe you and Giles have already met?’ Claudia smiled as though she had executed a conjuring trick, her hand still lying familiarly in that of the Marquis. ‘I’m an idiot, I didn’t think,’ she continued, ‘but then I don’t think Aisling told me your name. You were just the mysterious Marquis on the hill.’
‘Well, what a wonderful coincidence. Delphine will be pleased. Please, everyone, we thought we would have drinks outside, where it’s cool.’ The troop filed off. The Marquis led the way with Claudia.
‘How enchanting!’ exclaimed Aisling, a beat too quickly, since she really couldn’t see anything but Jonathan’s back. To Giles, the arrangement on the lawn seemed not to have shifted since the previous day. He could see the path through the woods beneath the big tree where he had emerged with Charles-Henri, and had an odd sense, now, of being inside the composition that had been waiting so placidly as he had staggered bleeding into the light. The back of the chateau seemed older than the front, more romantically irregular, with a slim, round tower, cone-tipped in grey slate as for a cartoon princess, completing the wing at the left. In the centre, a broad flight of worn steps led from a terrace to the round lawn, where the white furniture was grouped around the table and the Comtesse was rising to greet them.
‘Look!’ cried the Marquis, ‘here’s Claudia!’
Claudia was a good liar in the main because she had an excellent memory. All the time that introductions were being made, the guests settled into chairs and the circumstances of Giles’s adventure recounted with determined hilarity, she reviewed the occasions on which she had met the Marquis and Delphine in Paris. The first time, she was sure, Sébastien had taken her to a small drinks party, a vernissage, in the Marais, where people stood in the hot street with plastic cups of white wine and talked to one another without bothering much with the exhibition in the little beamed gallery. Sébastien had introduced the Marquis d’Esceyrac, explaining that he had been so kind as to allow him to look at two Bonnards he owned for his last book. Claudia recalled the oddly deprecating language buyers selfconsciously use about pictures, ‘rather lovely’, ‘very pretty’, as though discussing some domestic acquisition, like flowered china rather than things that hang in museums. Claudia knew the right language, and had been confident at the time that Sébastien was pleased with her, though now she doubted honestly whether he had even noticed.
The second occasion, she had seen Delphine, elegant in that fussily skinny French way, at a guest lecture in the Christie’s education building, the Hotel Salomon de Rothschild. The Marquis had invited her to sit with them whilst Sébastien spoke, and afterwards, when she saw how insistent Delphine was to emphasize the length of her own acquaintance with her lover, Claudia had felt a little vicious stab of pleasure that she, and not this perfectly finished Parisienne, should be leaving with him. The third time, Sébastien and a guest had been invited to a dinner at the Marquis’s St-Germain apartment. Claudia swiftly ran through the details. She was certain that there was nothing in any of these meetings that could give her away, nothing to suggest that she had been ‘with’ Sébastien in any sense other than that of a friend visiting from London who worked in the art world. Of course, she would have assumed, herself, that they were together – they arrived and left together and seemed to know one another well. She was protected, she thought, from an accidental betrayal by the distance of French social conversation which, to her, was less personal and individual than what one expected in London, and by the fact that Sébastien had never gone in for that cubbish physicality (which Alex, arm slung around her shoulder, was displaying now), which marked newish couples in England. And then Alex was aware that she was friends with Sébastien, she had made no secret of having seen him, at least occasionally, on her trips to Paris. Alex seemed incurious, though unflatteringly it was not wisdom, she thought, that prevented him from asking questions, but indifference to her life except insofar as it related to himself.
Claudia accomplished this analysis while a woman in a black skirt and white blouse poured white wine and offered tiny square linen napkins and dishes of olives, chunky local sausage and rounds of ficelle spread with terrine.
‘Bought,’ thought Aisling. The conversation was taking place in English, in consideration of the Froggetts and Alex, though Aisling had greeted Charles-Henri and his brother Jules in French and said pointedly that it was all the same to her and
Jonathan whichever language they spoke. Sarah Ashworth took the boys away to their supper.
There was a pause. Wendy Froggett stared quietly at the view. Alice was running a belligerent eye over the chateau, as though calculating how many cringing serfs its cellars contained. Jonathan and Alex swigged at their wine. Neither the Marquis nor his daughter-in-law seemed inclined to speak, though they smiled pleasantly.
Aisling felt sweat dampening the armpits of her tunic. ‘Well,’ she said brightly, ‘how kind of you to ask us.’
‘Not at all,’ replied the Comtesse graciously.
Alex reached for a lump of sausage. Aisling felt murderous towards the Froggetts.
‘Delphine,’ said Claudia smoothly, ‘I remember last time we met you were thinking about an English school for the boys. Aisling’s sons board in England, I’m sure she has heaps of advice.’ She turned energetically to the Marquis and asked him whether he had seen anything ‘nice’ at the rooms lately, keeping at it until the conversation creaked into life, with Aisling comparing the merits of various public schools, Jonathan and Alex chipping in with recollections, and Giles Froggett explaining about league tables. Even Alice ventured a remark on the odd difference between public and private. No one minded Wendy, until she said, ‘So how do you know Claudia?’
‘Oh, we were introduced by a celebrity,’ replied Delphine. Claudia suddenly felt very hot, and prayed she wasn’t blushing. Delphine, in her achingly plain black silk dress, was transformed into an allegory of malice. Claudia had feared some unintentional reference, easily explained away to Alex, but she was quite aware that Delphine had been waiting for the chance to make trouble. But she did not interrupt.
‘Sébastien Marichalar, the art critic. I believe he’s very well known in your country? Tell me, Claudia, how is Sébastien?’
‘Do you know, I haven’t seen him for ages? I’ve hardly been in Paris, and then he’s so busy. Such a shame, I haven’t had the chance to introduce him to Alex yet.’ That was the best she could do, Claudia felt.