Hot Basque: A French Summer Novel 2

by Laurette Long

  ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

  She bent and hugged him tightly, shocked again at the sharpness of his bones.

  He said nothing, immobile in her embrace. It was only when she stepped back that she saw the clenched jaw, the tear that was running down his cheek as he turned his head away. And then she felt her anger mount.

  ‘She’s a fool. She doesn’t realise it now, but one day, one day, trust me, Julian, she will. She’ll begin to understand exactly what she’s thrown away. And then–’ her hands curled into fists ‘–and then she’ll realise her life is just bitter ashes. She’ll have lost the best thing that ever happened to her, the very best.’

  She didn’t hear Nadia come out on to the terrace until Edward spoke, his voice over-hearty.

  ‘Ah Nadia, Jules and I were just going up to get changed. Give us five minutes and we’ll teach you the rules of the famous Villa Julia water fight.’

  He handed the baby back to Caroline, murmured ‘are you OK?’, then flung one arm round Julian’s rigid shoulders and shepherded him indoors.

  Nadia gazed after them, her face set.

  ***

  Jill had phoned to say that she’d be back late, and not to wait for her for dinner.

  ‘Has Julian arrived OK? And Joshua?’

  Caroline gave her a quick run-down, then asked if she’d enjoyed her day out with Antoine.

  ‘Great. Well, some of it was a bit emotional, we went to Guernica...I’ll tell you all about it later. Oh Caro, that man, the more I get to know him, the more I–anyway, we’re heading back to his place, he’s going to fix us something to eat and then he’s going in to the restaurant to help his Mum and Dad close up.’

  ‘Right. So you’ll be seeing the famous Arantxa pulling-pad. I hope he’s dusted and polished specially for you.’

  So, it had been emotional, thought Caroline, disconnecting. What was all that about? She was on tenterhooks to know more.

  It was almost ten when they heard the sound of a horn in the street, the clang of the villa gates.

  ‘Antoine says to excuse him but he’ll see you tomorrow bright and early in your wet suit Eddie.’

  Jill was calling out the words as she came round the side of the house and erupted on to the terrace. Her face was rosy, her red hair wild, and there was a huge smile on her face.

  She came to a halt as she saw they were all still eating.

  ‘Sorry everyone, sorry, no don’t get up, I’ll just say hello to the new arrivals then I’ll go up and get changed and join you for a drink. If I’m invited!’

  She was making her way round the table as she spoke, heading in Julian’s direction, holding out one hand.

  ‘Hello there! You must be Julian! Eddie’s best friend forever! Lovely to meet you!’

  As Julian rose to his feet and took her hand she leaned in swiftly and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  ‘Hello Jill, enchanté as they say. This is Nadia.’

  ‘Please sit down, what a lump I am to interrupt everything.’

  She leaned over with another kiss for Nadia who blushed and smiled.

  ‘So–’ she stood back expectantly ‘come on then, where’s the star of the show?’

  ‘You’re lucky. We were just going to take him up. Careful, don’t wake him.’

  Caroline led Jill into the sitting room. They could hear muffled squeals and exclamations, then Jill rushed back outside and flung her arms round an astonished Julian.

  ‘He’s adorable! He’s got cheeks like a cherub! And his little hands are all curled up into fists like Muhammad Ali! I’ll take six of him. Well done Dad!’

  Dad recovered sufficiently to join in the laughter.

  Jill seemed to have forgotten all about going to change. She pulled a chair close to Julian.

  ‘What time does he wake up? I’m going to set my alarm. Can I give him his morning feed?’

  ‘You’ll have to get in line.’ Edward was grinning. Jill’s good humour was infectious.

  ‘You can give him his two a.m. feed if you’re really keen,’ said Julian.

  ‘Even put him in your room, if you like,’ added Edward, pouring Jill a glass of wine.

  ‘Oh no, it is important for baby to have a routine.’

  Nadia, alarmed, had half-risen. Julian laughed and assured her it was a joke. ‘The English sense of humour, Nadia.’

  Her anxious expression gave way to a doubtful smile.

  ‘I’ve got five brothers, Julian,’ said Jill. ‘I’m a total expert on boys. Mind you, they’re all older than me. I was Dad’s last chance, as my mother said. He got banished to the spare room and fed on bromide after I was born, oops, only kidding Nadia, oh you probably don’t know what bromide is anyway, forget it, just ignore me, I’m a bit of a chatterbox, has Caro told you? Well of course she has, so anyway, was your flight alright, with the baby and that?’

  Julian was looking happily bemused.

  ‘Here Jules, make sure that the ladies’ glasses are topped up while Caro and I clear away and get dessert. No Nadia, you are not allowed in the kitchen. You’ll have some dessert, Jill?’

  Jill patted her stomach, rolled her eyes, said sod it she was on holiday.

  Nadia said she’d take the baby up, get him settled for the night, then turn in.

  Caroline glanced over her shoulder as she followed Edward indoors. Julian and Jill were alone on the terrace. In the waning light the trees and shrubs in the garden were melting into dark amorphous shapes lit here and there by solar lamps. Towards the west, where the sky was brightest, individual branches stood out in silhouette in the purple dusk. There was not a breath of wind; not a leaf stirred, not a needle in the pines.

  ‘Verdict?’ said Caroline, closing the kitchen door behind her.

  ‘He’s looking more relaxed, isn’t he? Eating well. Hitting the booze, but that’s understandable.’

  ‘If we can just get him to take things easy, forget about Annabel for a bit, at least put her to the back of his mind for a few days, get a bit of perspective. I’ve never seen him so wound up. You knew how bad it was, didn’t you?’

  ‘Mmm. Sorry. Didn’t want to worry you. I think we’ve got to be prepared for the worst. Even if Annabel’s not having an affair, Jules has reached the end of his tether. They have no life together as a couple, it’s all socialising with a mob of other people, they don’t even have the baby to bring them together.’

  He shook his head

  ‘But what’s going to happen to Joshua if they split? It will finish Julian off if she decides to take the baby.’

  ‘That’s one problem I don’t think he’ll have to face. There’s no way Annabel is going to want to be saddled with a kid. Especially if she’s seeing somebody else.’

  ‘Oh Edward, it sounds so callous.’

  Caroline sat down, shoulders slumped. Edward came up behind her, kissed the top of her head, massaged her neck.

  ‘She just manages to spoil everything, doesn’t she? When we were here last summer, and now again, even though she’s miles away. I’m so sorry Edward.’

  ‘Why are you sorry? Your sister is responsible for her own actions. Cheer up darling, we have to make an effort for Jules. And Jill too, don’t want to cast a gloom on her holiday as well.’

  ‘You’re right. Poor Jill. Well actually...not so poor Jill, don’t you think?’

  She twisted in her chair, looked up at him.

  Edward raised his eyebrows, looked innocent.

  ‘Did I miss something?’

  ‘Come on! I saw how you reacted!’

  ‘How I reacted?’

  Caroline gave him a poke.

  ‘Stop echoing. And don’t kid a kidder. When she arrived, looking all–you know. You had saliva running down your chin.’

  ‘Saliva? Must have been the lamb. Did I tell you how delicious it was, my sweet? Succulent, melt in the mouth, mmm...’

  ‘She had The Glow. You saw it, you drooled.’

  Edward grinned.

  ‘The hot Basque strike
s, you think?’

  Caroline smiled at him sweetly.

  ‘Methinks. When I find out the details, I might tell you. Providing you promise to keep your saliva glands under control. I’ll put the thumbscrews on her as soon as I get a chance. Now, where’s that dessert?’

  When the two of them stepped out on to the terrace with a bottle of champagne and Caroline’s queen of summer puddings, they came to a standstill. Jill and Julian had their heads together in intense conversation. Then Julian’s laugh rang out, he was nodding and smiling, cares momentarily forgotten. The O’Toole magic was working like a charm; The Glow was lighting up the terrace like a supernova.

  ***

  It was after midnight when Caroline and Edward made their excuses and left Jill and Julian in the middle of a passionate discussion about Monet and his water lilies. Their departure hardly registered. Julian threw a brief ‘Bonne nuit!’ over his shoulder and Jill gave a distracted wave as she leaned over to pour the last drops of champagne into Julian’s glass.

  ‘Well!’ said Caroline as they went upstairs. ‘Old Jules seems tons better. It’s wonderful.’

  Her beloved agreed. The change was striking. The haunted look had temporarily disappeared from his face. From time to time his eyes had lit up with genuine pleasure, and his laughter was natural and unforced. It was like getting a glimpse of the Julian of old.

  He’d first started to relax during the silly half-hour in the pool involving beach ball bombing and a water-pistol fight. Then he and Edward had watched a DVD of The England Cricket Team’s Finest Moments, nursing bottles of beer and explaining the trickier points of LBW to a fascinated Joshua, lying on the sofa between them and practising throwing his favourite rabbit on the floor.

  Dinner had been a great success. Both Julian and Nadia had adored the lamb thank goodness and just when everyone was blinking and yawning and starting to think of bed, along came Supernova O’Toole, and the party got going again.

  When Caroline leaned out of the bedroom window to close the shutters, she saw that Jill had her sketch book out, and was showing something to Julian, her feet perched on the rung of his chair, the pair of them with their heads close together. She beckoned Edward to her side, putting a finger to her lips and they both tried not to giggle as they looked down at the intimate little scene on the terrace, illuminated by the soft glow of lamplight.

  ‘Well, well. Not sure what the Big Bad Basque would think if he saw that,’ Edward remarked.

  He was stripping off his clothes and practising basketball shots into the open hamper.

  ‘Oh that’s just typical Jill. She’s one of those people who can get anyone to open up. She only has to get on a bus or a train, and that’s it. Little old ladies clutch her by the hand and tell her all about their horrible daughter-in-law. City gents in pinstripe suits confess they’re in love with their secretary but agony, dilemma, how could they possibly leave their wife of twenty years and mother to their five adorable children? The stories she’s heard, she could write a book.’

  ‘You’re right, she does have that kind of effect when you meet her, you get this irresistible urge to confess. Maybe she should have taken holy orders.’

  ‘Her point exactly.’ Caroline was massaging cream into her neck. ‘She’s always said she should have been a nun. Or a shrink. Says it’s her warm caring honest Irish face and the sympathetic tear in her eye.’

  She’d also gone on to tell Caroline that was maybe the problem as far as her love life was concerned.

  ‘They start off all excited with their tongues hanging out, eyes glued to the old boobs then somehow end up thinking I’m their mother. Somewhere in the middle things start to go wrong. I need to work on my image, change my tactics, stop listening to their sob stories and get my whip out instead.’

  Cleaning her teeth in the bathroom Caroline wondered how that was going with Antoine. Had Jill finally got her whip out, was that the reason Antoine was behaving like a lovesick calf? She hadn’t managed to get Jill on her own for a single minute. There were all these mysterious hints, Jill sighing and looking all misty-eyed, promising to ‘tell everything, later’. She was dying to know what exactly she and Antoine had been up to these last couple of days, shooting off on that big sexy bike and not re-appearing till after dark.

  Caroline spat out the toothpaste and rinsed. Now, if she could just corner Antoine, get him on his own, that would be a different story. She knew she could make him crack. He’d spill the beans to la rose, no doubt about it. The two of them shared a complicity that had started the previous summer. Antoine had confided in her and she had confided in Antoine. And if she hadn’t met her own gorgeous to-die-for fiancé and fallen head over heels, who knew what that complicity might have led to?

  It was all so complicated the whole sex/love/relationship business, so mysterious she could hardly believe that, in her case, she had finally got it right. For years she had been with a Controller. That was the term she had come across in the self-help literature she had turned to after her break up with Liam. The moment she’d seen the expression she’d been hit by such instant recognition she wondered why she’d been too stupid to work it out for herself. Never good enough, never up to scratch, in spite of the way she tried, in spite of the changes she made. Because–she now understood this about herself–Caroline was an instinctive ‘pleaser’. Working hard in school, never getting into trouble, always trying to keep the peace. Even at work she had tried to win the approval of her team. Her deadbeat, totally uninterested team.

  When it had finally ended with Liam, the blow to her self-esteem had been so damaging that she had almost gone under.

  And, she remembered, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, it was thanks to Mother Teresa out there on there on the terrace with Julian that she had finally begun to emerge, finally been able to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

  ‘I’m feeling very lonely all by myself in this big bed.’

  Edward’s plaintive voice cut short her reflections on love, life and the universe. She gave a final tweak to her new nightie, her short, lacy, Red Passion, Cassandra baby doll nightie.

  The one that was sure to bring a big smile to the lips of her beloved as she swayed out of the bathroom in a cloud of ‘For Her’. Thank you Eberjey. Thank you Narciso.

  18 BIARRITZ, FRANCE. JUNE

  The next morning Caroline Jill and Nadia settled in for a leisurely breakfast in the kitchen so that Madame Martin could coo over the baby while she prepared the lunchtime quiche.

  ‘I’m doing cherry clafoutis for dessert,’ she told Caroline privately. ‘Something substantial. And a potato salad with the quiche. Monsieur Julian has lost so much weight, he’s working too hard in my opinion. So, where is Mademoiselle Annabel, did you say?’

  Her tone was innocent but Caroline didn’t miss the downturn of the mouth. Although she and Edward had been vague about the reasons for Annabel’s absence, Madame Martin was a shrewd cookie, and there was little that she missed. She’d arrived early that morning to make sure the surfers got a good hot coffee and fresh baguette inside them before heading for the beach. On seeing Julian, she’d just managed to repress a gasp, then recovered herself to give him a beaming smile and a warm embrace.

  Although she loved little Claudie, secretly Madame Martin had always had a soft spot for ‘ses garçons’, her boys, as she called them: Edward, Jean-Paul and little Antony, galloping through the villa like a herd of buffaloes, leaving trails of sand in the corridors and mummified marine life under the beds, charging into the kitchen to tug at her apron and beg for warm madeleines, ‘s’il vous plaît Madame Martin, ça sent si bon!’. Every summer she had filled them up with fresh salads from the garden, tarts made from the cherries and apricots picked from the trees behind the villa, good local lamb and the fishmonger’s best catch. She had watched their cheeks fill out and their skin turn golden. When Edward, a gangly affectionate adolescent, had brought his friend Julian to stay one summer, another ‘garçon’ was adde
d to her little band of favourites and fattened up along with the rest.

  And now, much to her delight, there was yet another miniature ‘garçon’ perched in his tarted-up 1970s high chair, dominating the proceedings, and doing body art with the apricot jam.

  Jill, in spite of her pleas to give him his morning feed, had slumbered blissfully until 9 o’clock then hurtled down to the kitchen apologising profusely. She was making up for her tardiness by playing ‘catch a toe’ and ‘tickle a knee’, much to Joshua’s delight. All the women had become instant baby groupies, dancing attendance on the young master, talking to him, patting him, agreeing on his general superiority to all other infants in every possible way. Less than twelve hours had passed since Julian and his entourage had arrived at the villa, but the entire household had shifted into ‘baby’ mode. Maybe we’re just at that age, Jill and I, mused Caroline, glancing at her friend. The hormones are telling us to get a move on.

  One thing was sure, Jill’s hormones were definitely telling her something. And everyone else as well. There it was again this morning. The Glow, bright as the star over Bethlehem. There was no mistaking its meaning, she might as well have had a cartoon bubble over her head saying ‘Hey folks! I’m sexy and desirable, and I’m getting it!’ When she’d skipped on to the terrace last night in a flurry of perfume, mussed-up hair and plump lips, both Edward and Julian had raised their heads like lions scenting a nice juicy antelope. Yes, even poor old Jules, with all his problems.

  An ear-splitting yell broke into her thoughts. Baby Josh seemed to be indicating that he’d had enough of body art and wanted to try some surfing with the big boys.

  Caroline had told Edward they’d walk down to the beach during the morning to watch them ride the waves.

  ‘So, what do you think? Shall we take the little man to see his first Atlantic roller?’

  ‘Great idea! Give me five minutes to put on my surf-watching outfit!’