Julie squealed with delight, but her husband snorted. “Arthur wants a son named after him,” she explained. “But if it’s a girl, what shall we call her?”
Ondine had already given this some thought, lying awake last night under a full moon. So she said, “You should name her Céline, after the moon goddess Selene.”
“Céline,” Julie repeated as if tasting the name on her tongue. “That’s pretty, Maman. I like it.”
She looked so confident about this pregnancy, as if it had restored her faith in the future. “I’m redecorating our house for le bébé,” Julie confided. “Now you’ll have to come see it. We’ll take little Céline down to the beach in New Rochelle as you did with me, remember, Maman? Oh, we’ll all be so happy again!”
Ondine could see that Arthur’s prosperity had made it possible for Julie to have a comfortable domestic life; and now this coming child was giving Julie another chance to love and be loved, to carve out a happier existence for herself. Well, at least she has this pleasure in her life, Ondine observed gratefully.
Arthur was still hiding behind his newspaper as if it were a brick wall, so Ondine gave up on him, and brought Julie into the kitchen to show her how she’d decorated it. And as it turned out, this was Ondine’s only moment alone with her daughter.
“I wish I’d paid more attention to your cooking!” Julie said, gazing admiringly at the impressive array of copper pots and specialty cooking pans. “Won’t you share some of your recipes with me now?”
Ondine hesitated, then pulled down the old leather-bound notebook that she’d kept all these years on her kitchen shelf. They sat together at the table, and when Julie turned the pages she exclaimed with delight over the recipes. “I must copy these down before I go home,” she said, her eyes shining with pride in her mother’s work.
“You can keep the notebook,” Ondine said, feeling the familiar, protective instinct she always had around Julie. “But take good care of it. Then one day you must hand it down to your daughter.”
Julie had become thoroughly absorbed in the pages. “All right. But which patron was all this for?” she asked, fascinated. Ondine paused, made Julie promise not to tell a soul, even Arthur, and then began explaining to the stunned Julie about how she’d cooked for Picasso as a girl in Juan-les-Pins, and that he had even given her a painting of his.
Despite her promise to Luc, Ondine felt herself on the brink of saying, Do you remember that man we visited together in Vallauris? That was Picasso, and he was your father! But before she could utter these words, Arthur called out for his wife in an irritated tone, and Julie jumped guiltily to her feet.
“We must talk more about Picasso later. But I’d better go see what Arthur wants,” Julie said, going out dutifully. A moment later she reappeared with her husband at her side, her arm tucked in his.
“Doesn’t Maman have such a pretty place here?” she said, nudging him. He allowed a nod.
Ondine opened a bottle of sparkling water, and she and Julie settled into chairs in the sitting area near the fireplace. Arthur refused a glass and remained standing. When Julie told him about all her mother’s hard work to make the mas and the café a success, he obligingly gave the big room an appraising glance. Something seemed to dawn on him, but all he said was, “So—you are the sole owner of the café and this entire mas?”
Ondine chose to ignore his social faux pas of asking a pointed question about her finances, but Julie answered earnestly, “Yes, but these days Maman doesn’t do all the cooking anymore!”
“How is your health, Mother Ondine?” he asked with a look on his face that Ondine didn’t like.
“It’s perfect,” she answered, trying not to sound annoyed. Arthur’s gaze travelled to the cane propped against her chair which Ondine carried with her since her heart attack.
“Next time we’ll bring the twins here to visit you,” Julie offered. “Perhaps for Christmas. We just couldn’t tear them away from their friends in the summertime.” She glanced anxiously again at Arthur because he was glowering at her for making holiday promises he had no intention of keeping.
Ondine patted Julie’s hand reassuringly, but their chatter remained tinged with nervousness as they waited for Arthur to settle down somewhere; yet he continued to wander around the room. He now seemed unduly interested in his surroundings, Ondine thought, as his travelling gaze occasionally rested on a prized silver vase or a valuable piece of china.
Why, he’s assessing their worth! As if he’s got an adding machine in his head, she thought indignantly. It’s like having a vulture circling around, just waiting for me to drop to the ground. I’m only sixty-four years old. These days, that’s not exactly ancient!
“Interesting paintings,” Arthur said abruptly as he stopped his pacing before the wall of framed pictures in the dining area. “Are these artists anyone I’d have heard of?”
“I doubt it,” Ondine said dryly, outraged by his audacity.
“So when do we get the royal tour of the mas?” he asked, acting friendly now. “We’ve hardly seen much of it.” Ondine was glad to hear the delivery truck from the café pull up in the driveway.
“That will be our dinner,” she said firmly. She reached for her cane and rose to her feet.
“Let me help you,” Julie offered, rising quickly.
“The wind is dying down, after all. Let’s dine on the terrace. Why don’t you two take these things outside and set the table, all right?” Ondine said, filling their arms with trays of linen, china and silver. She saw the gleam of the flatware catch Arthur’s eye. Really, it was intolerable to watch.
Ondine opened a side door to let in the waiter who’d come to serve the meal. She gave him his instructions, then slipped out of the kitchen and went into her bedroom. The nagging feeling she’d had all day had become a full-blown presentiment. The painting was still here, but now Ondine didn’t need Madame Sylvie to interpret Picasso’s warning in her dream.
She knew what she must do. With one decisive gesture Ondine yanked her portrait off the chest of drawers. “Oh, where can I hide it so that awful Arthur will never look?” she whispered, her heart fluttering worriedly in her chest. “Him and his ‘royal tour’, indeed! If he tells Julie to peek in my bedroom closets and drawers for anything valuable, she might just obey him. I must find a place he’ll never think of.”
Ondine carried the painting back with her into the kitchen. The waiter had gone outside and was consulting with Julie and Arthur. Ondine went into the pantry, assessing it for a potential hiding place.
But then she heard her guests’ voices returning to the house. The pantry shelves were useless; they were too narrow. Ondine glanced around her own familiar kitchen, overcome by an uncharacteristic panic inspired by Arthur. Wildly, she searched for a temporary solution.
“Maman?” Julie called out, her voice closer still. “Dinner is served. Where are you?”
Ondine’s desperate gaze fell on the dumbwaiter. It was big enough, and it could ferry the painting down into the old wine cellar which she no longer used. A stack of old crates were piled up against the door of the dumbwaiter down below, so Arthur wouldn’t even know it was there. The cellar was just an empty, uninviting cave with an unfinished earth floor and lots of spiderwebs.
“I’ll get it back later, when Arthur is off to one of his business meetings in Cannes,” Ondine decided hastily, opening the dumbwaiter’s door. She reached inside it and deposited the painting in its temporary hiding place within. Closing the door of the dumbwaiter, she pressed the button, and listened to its reassuring rumble, waiting until she heard the soft thud of its landing.
A moment later, Arthur walked in.
Céline and Gil in the Kitchen, Mougins 2014
GIL CAME ROARING UP ON his Ducati, not stopping when he reached the gravel parking lot. He rode right across the impeccable grassy lawns and headed straight for the renovation site of the mas.
The effect on the workmen was immediate. They were so astonished that they simpl
y stopped what they’d been doing, and we all watched, dumbfounded, unable to take our eyes off Gil as he madly vroomed right up to the construction site, then careened to an abrupt stop right where we were standing.
Meanwhile, Aunt Matilda and Peter had arrived back at the mas, hungry for lunch. They discovered Martin on the terrace, who told them where I was. The three of them came over to fetch me to lunch, and I hastily took Aunt Matilda aside to tell her what I’d discovered—maybe.
But now I experienced a familiar pang of doubt—Lord, what if I’m completely wrong about this? My batting average so far had been spectacularly bad. Then as Gil jumped off the bike and hurried toward us, I felt a strange, defiant sense of confidence. Something that Madame Sylvie had told me now popped back into my head: Ondine didn’t do anything in the usual way. She was fearless about trying the unexpected, putting this-with-that. It not only made her a great chef; it made her a “femme très formidable”.
“Céline,” Gil said, sounding both alarmed and yet impressed by the sheer audacity of the situation, “what the hell? We’re going to break into a wall because—why?”
“Look at this cupboard. Your workman say it’s unusual, because although it’s made of wood, its interior seems to be lined with aluminum. They discovered this when they ripped off some old wood at the very top—the ‘roof’ of it, so to speak—which was badly deteriorated. That’s when they found the aluminum lining beneath it.” This, I’d realized, explained why the rain made music when it struck the exposed metal; and now the sunlight was reflecting off it.
“Odd,” Gil agreed.
“And look,” Martin piped up, scratching with his fingernail to flick off a chunk of white paint. “There’s blue paint underneath! Céline says she’s been looking for hidden treasure in a blue cupboard.”
Now I was embarrassed, but I soldiered on, saying, “Well, the point is, the whole thing is very intriguing. See right here—somebody sealed up the door of this cupboard ages ago with cement or something, the way you close up an old fireplace. So it hasn’t been used in years. Gil, I’ve just got to see what’s inside!”
But the foreman of the crew exhibited his displeasure by rapping sharply on the cupboard so that Gil could hear the hollow, empty sound behind it. “Rien. Nothing’s in there!” the man objected.
Gil looked from him to me, then made up his mind to get this over with quickly, so he crisply ordered the foreman, “Break it open.” The workman raised his eyebrows, but Gil nodded firmly.
“Carefully!” I warned. “Don’t let them just hack into it and hurt what’s inside!”
“Très doucement,” Gil told the workman who’d picked up his tools to force it open.
Seeing the resolute look on Gil’s face, the man began to carefully chip away at the sealed edges of the cupboard’s outer frame where it met the door. I watched as the wood trim splintered and gave way. Then there was some discussion about whether the men ought to break off the hinges of the door or just try to swing them open. But while they were deciding, one of the workers discovered that the wooden door was already crumbling away from the hinges, so he was able to pry it off with his crowbar.
We all stared at the interior of the cupboard, which indeed appeared to be an aluminum shaft. It didn’t really look like a cupboard at all, because it had no shelves.
“C’est vide,” the foreman said in a tone of perplexed satisfaction.
Empty, yes. No pots and pans. No leftover canisters of salt and pepper. No mops and brooms.
And no Picasso.
Gil grabbed a flashlight from a workman and shone it at the interior. I glimpsed some ropes and pulleys, until Gil suddenly blocked the whole thing with his body as he stuck his head right into the cupboard and flashed his light down it. When he spoke, his voice sounded muffled.
“Ceci n’est pas a cupboard,” he said positively. “It’s a professional, restaurant-sized dumbwaiter.”
“A dumbwaiter!” I echoed.
He withdrew his head and scanned the exterior again; then, he ran his fingers along the frame until he found what he was looking for—an embedded stainless-steel square button that had also been painted over. He pressed the button and paused expectantly, like a man waiting for an elevator.
Nothing happened. “An early electric model,” he said, sticking his head back in it, shining his flashlight below. “Nicely insulated, though.”
“If that thing starts moving now, you’ll get guillotined,” I warned.
Gil remained where he was. “It’s stuck down there. The dumbwaiter goes all the way down to the old wine and root cellar. I can see the cab sitting there at the bottom of the shaft,” he reported.
“Il s’est déplacé!” Aunt Matilda said suddenly to me. “That’s what Madame Sylvie told you. Maybe, when she passed her hand over her face and said those words, it wasn’t that a ‘cupboard’ had ‘moved’ away from the premises, as we thought. Maybe it was a dumbwaiter that had simply moved on its track, from up here in the old kitchen, down to the unfinished cellar below,” she added, nodding sagely.
“Who the hell is Madame Sylvie?” Gil pulled his head out of the dumbwaiter shaft and now stared at the two of us as if we’d completely lost our minds. I shrugged off his question.
“Never mind. We’ve got to get down there and check it out!” I insisted. “Now.”
With all the construction going on, the cellar below was a formidable, gaping black pit. The foreman warned, “The old staircase, it is not safe for you to walk on.”
“Then we’ll use that ladder over there,” Gil said decisively.
The crowd of workers parted as we reached the ladder. All the while, perhaps because of their skeptical faces, a voice in my head kept warning me, “But why would Grandmother Ondine have thrown a priceless Picasso down there?”
Céline and Gil in Mougins
GIL GALLANTLY CLIMBED DOWN THE ladder first, into the cavernous pit that had once been Grandmother Ondine’s old wine cellar. Then he held the ladder as I followed cautiously. When I reached the bottom I stepped gingerly on the irregular floor that had patches of muddy dirt, rock, sawdust. Gil took my arm to steady me and he shined his flashlight ahead so we could dodge old wooden wine racks, empty green bottles and broken glass shards. We picked our way carefully toward the area where we calculated that the cab of the dumbwaiter should be.
We were faced with a tower of heavy, decrepit, wooden crates that looked as though they’d been there forever and had to be removed one by one. My hands were quickly covered with dust from the splintered wood. But our efforts were rewarded, for behind it we found the bottom part of the dumbwaiter. Gil had brought some tools with him, and now he carefully pried open its door.
The cab was sitting right there in its tracks. Gil crouched down and aimed his flashlight in every corner. Impatiently I peered over his shoulder but couldn’t see much. Finally he straightened up, stepped aside and dusted off his hands.
“Nothing inside there,” he announced, sounding irritated now. “It’s empty.”
I moved closer and squatted beside it, running my fingers along each corner of the interior space, fruitlessly searching, as if my hands themselves could not accept the truth.
Gil turned to the two construction men who’d followed us down here. “Back to work,” he said tersely. They mumbled what was probably the French version of We told you so—why do you listen to this crazy woman? But the look in Gil’s eyes brought a swift end to their grousing. The silence that followed was, in a way, worse.
“Let’s go, Céline. We’re just in their way now,” he said. He was starting to look truly pissed off. I didn’t care.
“She did have her little hiding places,” I repeated aloud, more to myself. I heard Gil’s exasperated sigh as he walked away. My fingers were still idly exploring the floor of the cab, feeling the cool, dusty surface. I murmured a plea to Grandma Ondine, whose face I could conjure up clearly, thanks to that photo; and now her image in my mind was so sharp that I felt as if she were abou
t to speak to me.
That was when my index finger found a hard bump on the floor of the cab. It was like a dried-out pea sitting in the far left corner. I pressed harder to see what it was. A little button.
Immediately the dumbwaiter responded just as if I’d said, Open sesame, for the floor of the cab slid aside on its spring, revealing an insulated compartment. I dipped my hand inside and brushed it against something with a slightly rough surface. My fingertips seemed to know what it was even before my mind could catch up, because my skin thrilled to the touch.
“Gil,” I gasped, then halted. I tried again. “Give me your flashlight!”
He’d stepped aside to check his phone for messages, but now he came hurrying back and handed me the light. I pointed the beam inside the dumbwaiter’s secret compartment.
The image of a woman’s face stared right back at me. “She’s in there!” I exclaimed, suddenly light-headed. My hands were trembling so much that I stood up, backed away and had to steady myself against the wall.
“Who’s in there?” Gil asked in astonishment. “The painting?”
“I’m afraid to yank it out and damage it,” I whispered, awed. Behind him I saw the startled, wary faces of the workmen who were now frozen in place, not knowing what to do.
Gil moved closer. “Let me do it,” he suggested. I watched as he diligently worked to ease the painting from its hiding place. I remained rooted to the spot, like an awestruck explorer who’d made a climb to the North Pole and was now frozen in time at the top of a silent world.
“Got it,” Gil said softly as he carefully lifted the canvas out of the dumbwaiter. The renovation crew, still unsure about the significance of this, understood that something lost had been found, and they broke into spontaneous applause.
Gil said in a low voice, “Come on, let’s get this upstairs where we can really see it.”
Cooking for Picasso Page 37