But for tonight at least, all is well. We cuddle up on the sofa to watch the first of the films from the box set – Tom’s birthday gift from Jenny. The film Tom chooses, In Which We Serve, is a military number set during the Second World War, hardly my favourite genre, but the film turns out to be particularly good. The incredibly young Noël Coward is amazing.
Afterwards, Tom clicks the TV off and we kiss and cuddle and undress each other. And then, slowly, gently, we start to make love. Tom spreads his legs in just such a way, and I reach for a condom and gel.
“We should get tested,” Tom says, “dispose with these.”
And as I roll on the condom, as I slowly, luxuriantly start to fuck him, I think, “Yes, that would be good,” and I think, “Yes, if he could be trusted, that would be great.”
“Especially up there,” Tom murmurs.
I wonder if he means because there is nothing else to do up there, or because the lack of opportunity will leave no option but to be faithful. And then I realise that my erection is fading, so I force myself to remember the scene from the Paris darkroom and it returns, only I realise that in this particular re-run Lucky Strike has been replaced by Ricardo in his fireman’s uniform.
A second before he orgasms, Tom says, “I love you, you know?” and then with those words in my ears and Ricardo’s face in my mind’s eye, I too come. And despite the fact that the crime was purely imaginary, I feel even more conflicted, even more sinful than I did after Paris.
Casting Error
The Tuesday of the meeting I’m up before nine, eating a hearty breakfast and checking the weather reports for snow on the roads to Chateauneuf D’Entraunes. Tom is a slow starter today, so I leave him to snooze as I shower and dress in my thermals. Then over three cups of coffee I re-read the list of questions we have prepared. At the point where I realise that Tom will have to get up now if he is to come at all, I also instinctively realise that he isn’t going to come. Sure enough, when I bounce on the bed and challenge him he says, “Sorry, I feel a bit woozy this morning. Does it really matter if I don’t?”
“Woozy?” I say. In a way, of course it matters; it matters a great deal. This is the last chance to meet Chantal, to ask questions about anything before the gîte becomes ours. In a way, too, I would have thought that sheer excitement about our impending new venture should cure any ill. I point all of this out as gently as I can, but as I’m feeling quite loving towards Tom this morning, I avoid making an issue out of it.
He wakes up a little more and points out that he needs to call the bank and the estate agent this morning, and adds rather cutely that he would rather see the place on Thursday, “ … just you and me, once it’s ours,” so I relent and head off leaving him to sleep.
As I head out the door, he shouts, “If there’s snow up there then take the car. It’s parked on …”
“It’s fine,” I shout back. “Eight degrees, but no snow. I checked.”
“OK, be careful though,” he says.
Out in the street, at the second I start to remove the chains, locks and alarms that have kept my seven-fifty mine all these years, my phone starts to ring, and thinking that it’s Tom, that he’s changed his mind, and that I’m now going to be late, I fish it from my pocket. But the name on the screen is, Ricardo.
I sigh and hit the answer-call icon. “Hi Ricardo. I’m just leaving,” I say. “On the bike … I can’t really talk.”
“Did you talk to Jenny?” he asks, and I realise that I owe him an apology.
“No. But Tom told me,” I tell him. “You were right. So, I’m sorry.”
“Does he know I told you?” Ricardo asks.
“No,” I tell him. “He didn’t ask.”
“Perfect,” Ricardo says. “Not to make waves in a fish pond.”
I’m not quite sure what that particular proverb was supposed to mean – it too has been lost in translation, and I don’t really have time to care.
“Can we meet?” Ricardo says. “Because tomorrow I go.”
“I’m on my way up to the gîte,” I tell him. “I’m really sorry.”
“You have to go now?” Ricardo says. “This second?”
“Right now,” I reply. “I’m late.”
“You still buy the gîte?” he asks in an amazed, irritated tone.
“I still buy the gîte,” I confirm.
“OK, forget it,” he says, sharply.
And then the phone is dead.
I sigh and stare at it for an instant. I’ll fix it later, I think. I’ll send him an email or something once he’s far away on another continent. Another continent! A pang of some unrecognised emotion sweeps through my body. I sigh again and freeze the thought by swinging a leg over the bike and starting the engine.
Because I’m not working, and because I’m riding up into the mountains – almost exclusively my Sunday pastime for the last few years – I’m initially surprised at the density of traffic. But then a brief bumper-to-bumper queue of sad looking people trying to get into the hypermarket reminds me that it is in fact a weekday, not a Sunday. An advertising hoarding tells me that the temperature here on the coast is a reasonable nineteen degrees, (in all the gear I’m actually overheating a little) but I know it will soon get colder, I look forward to that crisp mountain air.
Sure enough, as I leave town and the altitude increases, the temperature drops significantly, not gradually but in steps, dropping five degrees half way around a bend, and then another five for no apparent reason in the middle of a bridge. My ears pop and the road starts to wind more sharply as it hugs the contours of the Alpine foothills. I drop the bike into the first bend, and then into the second, and my nose tingles at something in the air – the smell of snow perhaps – and then the bike rolls, seemingly of its own accord into the next bend and I’m away: I’m in the flow. I have no idea why, but there is no activity on Earth – and I mean not even sex – that absorbs me so entirely, that silences internal dialogue so completely. The destination is forgotten, it’s just, as a corny advert used to say, man and machine in perfect harmony, now braking, now tilting, rolling, and now straightening up and accelerating up and out and into the straight with an adrenaline rush.
In what feels like a couple of minutes, I’m slowing down to cross Guillaumes – a ghost town today. In fact, Guillaumes looks like some nuclear plant may have leaked nearby causing the whole town to be evacuated, though of course French nuclear plants never leak, and when they do there is never any danger, never any need for evacuation … I think, “Humm, so this is the nearest town, huh?” and then as I reach the other side and power away up the next hill, I shrug and think, “Who cares? I just get to ride the bike even further.”
At the junction to the narrow road that climbs to Chateauneuf D’Entraunes, I remember the loose gravel and slow to walking pace. It’s just as well that I do because, as I take the blind bend, I come upon a parked car blocking two thirds of the narrow tarmac. I slowly squeeze through the gap, and wondering who would be stupid enough to park here, I pause and steal a glance at the driver. Shamefully, I’m assuming it will be a woman, an old woman. I physically jolt in surprise when I see Ricardo’s face looking back at me.
I slam on the brakes and the bike slews to a halt on the gravel. Ricardo winds down the window.
“What are you doing here?” I say, then, “That’s not your car.”
Ricardo smiles weakly at me and shrugs. “I hire it,” he says. “I sold mine already.”
“How did you get here before me?”
“I was half way,” he says. “I take some thing to the storage place on the 202. So I was halfway already.”
I nod and frown. “OK … why are you here?” I ask him. I realise that the smoke drifting from his window is dope scented. Though I knew he smoked, I have never actually seen him with a joint before.
He shrugs. “If the mountain won’t go to Mohammed,” he says obtusely.
I nod. “Right,” I say, glancing up the hill and then at my watch. “Actua
lly, look, I’m sorry. I’m late as it is.”
Ricardo nods and waves his joint around as he says, “I can wait.”
I sigh and shake my head. “I’m sorry Ricardo,” I say. “I’m not … it’s just, I really don’t know how long I will be.”
Ricardo shrugs. “So I come with you,” he says, matter of factly.
I’m sure Ricardo shouldn’t be coming to the gîte with me, but the truth is that other than the fact that the gîte has nothing whatsoever to do with him – a reply so rude I can’t say it to his smiley, stoned face – I can’t think of a single reason. “I’ll meet you at the top,” I say with a sigh, already pulling away.
The gîte looks alive, perky even if such a thing can be said of a building. At any rate, with the shutters open revealing sparkling windows; with swept flagstones and with bistro tables and chairs dotted around the courtyard, it certainly looks different from when I last visited.
Chantal is still in the process of sweeping the yard. She looks up, waves and smiles as I pull into view. By the time I have parked the bike she has propped the broom against a wall and crossed the forecourt to greet me.
“En moto!” she says. “Trés courageux!”
I laugh and pull off my crash helmet. “Cold,” I tell her, gesticulating at the snow capped mountains to the north, “But beautiful!”
As the Clio pulls into view, Chantal frowns. “Tom?” she asks, nodding towards the car.
I shake my head. “A friend,” I tell her. “He’s come to see our new house.”
Of course there is, I now realise, a very good reason that Ricardo shouldn’t come to this meeting with me: he’s the wrong person. It’s a casting error. Tom should be here instead. Ricardo’s presence is weird, unnerving even.
Chantal gives us a tour of the house and then the outbuildings, showing us what furniture she is leaving (thankfully most of it) explaining little idiosyncrasies of the place – how to lift the door to the attic as you close it, just so, where to put rat traps in the springtime, the best place to sit if you want to shoot at the dormice that scale the walls in summer!
And then we sit in the public dining room in front of a smouldering log fire and I run through my vast list of questions on occupancy and advertising, on tourist offices and food shopping, and I note as many key points as my cold hands can manage from her voluminous, rambling replies. Ricardo sits silently, smiling vaguely, an expression I know only too well as stoned. Every now and then he catches my eye and manages to send me a discreet wink.
His presence here feels truly bizarre, not least because it feels so entirely natural. And when I reach the end of my batch of questions and Ricardo, as if newly switched on, launches into his own list, things get seem even stranger. For Ricardo’s questions are just as logical, just as essential as the list Tom and I put together: where is the fuse box (hidden behind a secret panel below the stairs); where does the sewage go (to a septic tank which needs emptying once a year); on and on it goes.
As I listen to the answers to these essential questions I entirely failed to ask, I have to remind myself that I am not buying the place with Ricardo but with Tom, and there is something surreal about that thought, as if my brain has now confused the two of them entirely.
Yet despite Ricardo’s stoned cool, and in spite of his natural reassuring manner, where Chantal answered my own questions charmingly, her replies to Ricardo slip through thinned, suspicious lips, as if she can’t quite believe he has the nerve to ask her such a question. Or perhaps, as if she is as confused about his presence as I am.
One question in particular really seems to fluster her – Ricardo’s, “So, where are you moving to after the sale?”
Chantal blushes, then stumbles, then pales, before muttering, “My mother’s place … in Limoges.” At this point she cocks an ear and stands, saying, “Excusez-moi, le petit pleure …” – “Sorry, the little one is crying.”
We watch her bustle from the room, and then Ricardo turns and stares at me; stares through me.
“Did you hear a baby?” I ask.
Ricardo shakes his head. “No,” he says.
“No,” I say. “Nor me. They were good questions though, so thanks. Without you I wouldn’t even have known about the septic tank.”
“No,” he says again, a puzzled expression on his face.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
He shrugs. “She’s lying,” he murmurs.
I nod slowly. “Yeah,” I say. “I saw that. I thought it was just me being paranoid.”
He shakes his head slightly. “No,” he says. “Intriguing.”
Chantal bursts back through the door with her little girl in her arms, and it is immediately clear that the interview is now over. She jiggles the girl, who appears to me to be asleep, but who, upon being so energetically jiggled starts to cry. “Désolé,” she says. “Les enfants hein!” – “Sorry. Kids huh?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Is that all then?” she asks.
I shrug and stand. “I suppose,” I say. I nod at Ricardo.
“I guess so,” he agrees. “Anyway. He can call you afterwards if he has any questions, I suppose. If you’re only in Limoges …”
Chantal chews the inside of her mouth and shoots Ricardo the beginning of a glare, which quickly vanishes only to be replaced by a sugary smile. “Of course,” she says, then to me, “I’ll give you the number on Thursday.”
I have just picked up my pad and pen, so I flip the cover over and say, “Oh, I might as well write it down now.”
“I don’t have it,” Chantal says. “But I’ll bring it Thursday.”
Ricardo narrows his eyes and smiles broadly at her. “You don’t know your mother’s number!” he says. “Shame on you.”
Chantal shrugs and moves to the front door. “She changed it. I can’t remember. On Thursday … You can have it on Thursday.”
And then we’re back on the flagstones and the front door is locked, and loudly bolted, behind us.
Stepping from the interior out onto the forecourt is stunning, as if, when inside, you forget the snow-capped peaks surrounding the place.
Ricardo notices it too. “Wow!” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “Wow.”
We walk over to our vehicles, and Ricardo opens his door and then hesitates. “She’s not going to Limoges,” he says.
I glance back at the gîte. Chantal is lurking in the shadows behind one of the windows watching us leave. “Not here,” I say.
“I’ll meet you at the bottom,” Ricardo says, sliding into his car.
“No,” I say. “In Guillaumes. At La Provençal.”
Ricardo nods seriously. “OK,” he says. He slams his door, and then unintentionally showering me with gravel, he accelerates off down the hill.
If Things Were Different
When I first enter La Provençal the bar is perfectly empty. A single, illuminated “33” beer sign reveals that the place might be open. I step back outside and walk to the other end of the square before doubling back.
Everywhere else is closed, probably for the entire winter, and Ricardo’s rented Clio is parked outside. I re-enter the bar. This time, not only has a waiter appeared – a spotty adolescent in a ski jumper – but Ricardo is seated at a table.
I shoot him a double-take kind of a glance. “So were you here ten seconds ago when I last looked?” I ask.
He smiles weakly and points to the rear of the bar. “Toilet,” he says simply. “I ordered you coffee, is that OK?”
I nod, pull out a chair and sit. “Yeah,” I say. “Thanks. Coffee’s great.”
“Your friend is a strange one,” Ricardo says. He seems deflated, as though his ordinary batteries are finally expiring.
“My fr … Oh! Chantal! Yes. I’m just noticing that.”
“As long as you don’t expect too much – how do you say, service après vente en anglais?”
“After sales service,” I say.
“Of course,” Ricardo says, his voice
unusually monotone. “I don’t think you will get so much.”
“No,” I say. “I wonder where she’s going.”
“Not to Limoges,” Ricardo says.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to give me the number. Maybe there’s some terrible structural fault with the place and she doesn’t want us to be able to hunt her down.”
“If there is, you can cancel the sale,” Ricardo says. “Even afterwards. It’s called Vice Caché.”
“Hidden faults,” I say. “Right … Well, yes. There’s always that.”
“But I don’t think it’s that,” Ricardo says. “I think is something more sinister. Maybe her husband is dead. Maybe she push him in the shit tank.”
“God, don’t!” I say. “Hey, I just realised … she isn’t coming on Thursday, so all that stuff about giving me the number on Thursday was bullshit too.”
The ski-jumper kid brings our coffee, so there is a brief interruption whilst he hands us the cups and the bill. When he’s gone, Ricardo sips his coffee and mutters, “One hundred percent Robusta. Yuck.”
I laugh lightly. “I suppose Colombians know their coffee,” I say.
“Oh yes,” he says, putting down the cup. “Like the English and their tea.”
I shrug. “Actually though the English drink a lot of tea, it’s mainly just basic cheap stuff. We’re rarely snobby about it.”
“So you don’t think she kill him?” Ricardo says.
I laugh. “Nah,” I say. “Maybe he’s still alive though. Maybe it’s a life insurance fraud and she’s going off to meet the husband. Like that Anne Darwin character.” It’s the first time I have clearly formulated the thought, but as I say it, I think, “Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly what she’s doing.”
Ricardo frowns, so I explain the story of Anne Darwin and her husband who “died” in a canoeing accident, only he was really living in the house next door; I tell him about Egypt and Chantal’s strange over-reaction.
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