Not Quite Nice

by Celia Imrie

  Theresa turned.

  He was pointing down towards a pile of pink chips he was sweeping off the board. ‘Your number!’

  She looked over her shoulder. He must be talking to someone else.

  She looked at the table and saw what must have happened. Her last chip had remained in place on the corner of the board but had somehow been knocked a few millimetres from the sideline on to 18. She’d won thirty-five more chips. She’d more than doubled her money.

  On the bus home she found herself humming ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’.

  It wasn’t a fortune, but it had more than paid for her break.

  It seemed quite wrong now to go back to that hotel and pack. She had a pocketful of money – why not stop here, and find a place down on the seafront for a delicious late lunch?

  On an impulse Theresa pressed the stop button just as the bus turned the corner above the colourful fishing village she had admired on her way to Monaco.

  She got off and walked down a steep zigzag path, through ancient covered alleyways, passing quaint little shops selling pottery and a delightful-smelling bakery, eventually reaching the harbour. She took a table at a harbourside bar-brasserie and ordered a large glass of wine. What a day! The excitement of her win, the hypnotic spell of the beauty of this place and the radiant October sun gave her a feeling of exhilarating happiness.

  The waiter arrived with her wine and Theresa asked if she could see the menu. He shook his head dolefully. The French had stiff rules on mealtimes, and she was too late to get any lunch and too early for dinner. It was apéro time.

  She ordered another glass of wine and he brought a dish of little black olives and a few one-inch squares of pizza.

  Theresa leaned back, enjoying the nibbles, and savoured the wine while taking in the stunning view of the harbour.

  Right ahead of her, near the Gare Maritime, some workmen were hammering at a wooden sign.

  She polished off the snack but still felt hungry. So, reluctantly, she left her harbourside seat and went off in search of that small bakery and a sandwich.

  By the time she reached the entrance to the alleyways, the men had finished erecting their sign and were gone. The sign read ‘À VENDRE’ – for sale. Theresa peeked over the little wall, trying to get a glimpse inside the front window of the property it advertised.

  At that exact moment a woman came out through the front door. ‘Puis-je vous aider?’

  Theresa jumped back in shock. She wasn’t expecting anyone to be inside.

  ‘Oh! I’m sorry,’ she said, then remembered that she was in France and needed to try it in French. ‘Je suis . . .’ she said, unable to get any further.

  ‘English?’ snapped the woman, gripping her clipboard and pulling the front door to. ‘No problem. You want see inside? You want buy apartment?’

  Theresa shook her head, then before the agent could lock up, stopped herself saying no. ‘Why not?’ she said, instead. ‘Pourquoi pas?’

  As Theresa stepped across the threshold she heard her stomach rumble.

  The estate agent handed Theresa a piece of paper with of a list of room measurements and at the bottom the asking price in euros. She then perched on the low wall by the front door, scribbling notes on her pad.

  Theresa took the paper and walked through the cosy rooms. The flat was gorgeous – small, but with a lovely view over the harbour.

  Theresa stood by the window for a few moments and imagined herself living here.

  A wonderful feeling of calm swept over her.

  The agent came back in, pointing at her watch.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘You like?’

  Theresa felt a wave of excitement and said: ‘I’ll take it.’

  The agent raised her eyebrows and bustled back inside, flipping over the pages of her clipboard. ‘Can you come in the morning for the contract?’ she asked.

  ‘My flight home is at nine a.m.’

  ‘So, OK, let’s do it now. The office is by the station.’

  Two hours later Theresa climbed aboard the train back to Nice.

  In her handbag was a contract and a floor-plan of the flat she had just bought. She felt as naughty as a fifteen-year-old playing truant. She also felt exceedingly happy. She’d spent too much of her life pleasing other people: pleasing her parents by going to secretarial college rather than art school, pleasing her husband by turning a blind eye to all the expensive presents he bought for this secretary and that work colleague while he regularly forgot her birthday and never once remembered their wedding anniversary, pleasing her boss by always being willing to put in extra hours for no extra pay, pleasing her daughter by being constantly on call. She was almost sixty now. It was time she pleased herself for once. She had just bought a little part of paradise for herself, and why shouldn’t she?

  French property law differs a lot from English and, once Theresa had shaken and signed on the deal, the flat went straight into the conveyancing process, no gazumping or procrastination and, subject to survey, she was given a predetermined end date upon which she would receive the key and be able to move in.

  As winter drew in offers started coming in on her old home.

  As she sat in Highgate, filling in forms and studying guidebooks, Theresa kept the information of her new purchase to herself until the whole process was all but complete.

  Then, the night before the move, she went down to Wimbledon to pay the family a visit.

  ‘Mummy! Have you got dementia?’ asked Imogen. ‘Who’s going to babysit for me now on my Pilates nights?’

  ‘How about paying a nanny or an au pair, like I did with you?’

  ‘Oh really!’ Imogen puffed. ‘What a ridiculous idea.’

  ‘What exactly is so ridiculous about getting professional help?’

  Imogen rolled her eyes about and shrugged while casting about for a reasonable response, then said: ‘It’s just better if it’s family.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Theresa calmly. ‘It only makes the children think I’m one of your servants.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy, don’t be absurd.’

  Theresa took a stab: ‘Are you worried Michael will run off with an au pair like your father did?’

  ‘Michael and I are fine. You can mind your own business on that score.’ Imogen started frantically brushing non-existent crumbs from the shiny sofa. ‘Well, Mummy, I predict you’ll be back here in a few months, tail between your legs, begging me for help, so go.’ She folded her arms and sat back, her lips pursed. ‘I don’t care. You’ll never last out there in some horrid, strange place with no friends.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. Thanks for worrying.’ Theresa made for the door. She didn’t want to leave on a row. ‘Tomorrow will be a long day.’

  ‘Anyway, Mother, for a start, you barely speak French.’

  ‘I have a smattering, chérie. Living over there can only improve it.’ Theresa offered an olive branch. ‘I will miss you all. Promise me you’ll come over and have a holiday some time. It’s so beautiful – and the sea is right on my doorstep. It’s so lovely. Come to visit me in France, and you’ll all be treated royally.’

  ‘What?’ Imogen laughed sardonically. ‘You mean you’re going to chop off our heads?’

  Theresa laughed too. ‘Well, I won’t go that far, but I promise to lay on a feast worthy of Louis the Fourteenth.’

  ‘You’ve got to watch your weight, Mummy,’ snapped Imogen. ‘And all you think about is food.’ She stood with her hands on her hips and wearing a serious expression. Then she said: ‘You’d better live frugally out there, Ma. We don’t want you using up the children’s inheritance.’

  Theresa did not grace this parting shot with a reply.

  As she clicked the garden gate after her and walked to the tube station, she wiped away a few more tears.

  Theresa was shocked to realise that whatever she chose to do aroused this greedy disdain in her daughter. Making her way back to her now oddly empty and echoing house, she decided she must b
e resolute. Absence, she hoped, would make the hearts grow fonder.

  She slept fitfully, and woke before dawn.

  She left the key to the house with Mr Jacobs and, early that morning, flew out to Nice.

  As Theresa stepped off the plane, her London house sold, the key to her new French apartment in her hand, the first thing that hit her was the heat. Then she looked up and had to shield her eyes from the glare reflected from the sun hitting the sparkling deep blue sea. Even though it was late January, Nice Côte d’Azur Airport was bustling with people.

  She had arranged the sale of all her furniture and given most of her clothes to a charity shop, so she pulled only one suitcase from the luggage carousel. Of all her London treasures there was only one thing she had brought with her, a small painting that her mother had picked up for a few shillings back in the 1950s and which turned out to be an original Raoul Dufy. She would hang that in pride of place in the flat, and for everything else, well, she was looking forward to raiding the markets and bric-a-brac brocantes for furniture, painting it, hanging tapestries on the other walls, living the art-student life she’d dreamed of having before she’d sacrificed it to please her parents and, instead, taken the secretarial course at St Godric’s College for young ladies.

  Theresa rode the bus out of Nice, past the port (where she saw many enticing antique shops and signs indicating a flea market), up and over the hill, then along the coast, to the small fishing village which was to be her new home.

  The views were stunning.

  No wonder they called it the Bay of Angels.

  It was coming up to noon when Theresa let herself in to her bright front door.

  SALAD NIÇOISE

  Ingredients

  Jar of fine albacore tuna in olive oil

  Small plum tomatoes

  1 stick celery

  Lettuce – cos or little gem

  Spring onions

  Fine green beans (blanched)

  Black olives (naturally, Niçoise if possible)

  Anchovies

  Hard-boiled eggs

  Dressing

  Olive oil

  Balsamic vinegar

  Salt (fleur de sel, if possible)

  Black pepper

  Dijon mustard

  Honey

  Method

  Dip the fine green beans in boiling water to blanch then immediately run through with cold water.

  Lay the tuna in the centre of the plate, and layer on chopped celery, lettuce leaves and quartered hearts, halved tomatoes, green beans and chopped spring onions. Lay small black olives on top, and place quarters of hard-boiled eggs alternating with anchovies in a circle on top of the prepared salad.

  Mix the dressing and pour on just before eating.

  3

  It was nine years since Sally Connor had moved to Bellevue-Sur-Mer.

  When she bought her house, nestled in the heart of Old Town, she was told that it had once belonged to a dancer from the Ballet Russes of Monte Carlo, and that, according to legend, he had entertained Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Isadora Duncan and Mata Hari in his dining room. Though no one knew whether this was at the same time or on separate occasions.

  Not on the same level, obviously, but Sally herself had once been famous. Back in the 1970s she had been a TV presenter on a very bumptious Saturday morning kids’ TV show, and for a few loud years had had her face plastered over every magazine cover on the supermarket shelves.

  On this bright January afternoon, a few months short of her sixty-second birthday, Sally came out of her little house in the milky winter sunshine, a canvas bag slung over her arm and strode along bound for the market down on the quay.

  Today Sally had guests for dinner.

  Outside the boulangerie, Monsieur Mari was chalking up the sign for his ‘Sandwich du jour’. Sally gave him a smile and a wave. She’d stop to buy the baguettes for dinner on the way back, thereby catching the latest warm batch.

  Sally liked to think that her home was the hub of the English set. Only Zoe Redbridge had lived here longer, but as she was that much older than Sally, she felt Zoe didn’t count.

  She shivered as she plunged into the cool darkness of the alley which zigzagged down to the harbour.

  Sally had been to the best-known ballet school, Elmhurst where, a few years before her, Hayley Mills had been a pupil. After this she had gone on to study at RADA and for a few years a successful career in the theatre followed, where she played leading roles in repertory companies from Dundee to Exeter.

  When offered the TV presenting job she accepted for one reason only: the irresistible lure of money. She planned to save up, put aside a nest egg ‘to fall back on’, then, when the show finished, go back into proper acting, only with a slightly raised profile.

  However, things didn’t work out like that. The show made her very famous, and the image of her in spotted, baggy dungarees, throwing buckets of brightly coloured goo over visiting stars, overshadowed any serious chance she had of establishing herself in roles like Hedda Gabler or Lady Macbeth. When her name was suggested directors in repertory theatres sneered. Only companies that spent all their time working with children or touring schools, were interested in using her.

  Sally’s years of fame had not lasted long, but her renown did attract a handsome husband in the form of Robert, an insurance broker. Due to her celebrity, their wedding was reported, with photos of the grinning couple, in all the women’s magazines.

  During the first few years of her marriage, when filling in forms, Sally still styled herself an actress, even though she had no professional engagements. But, after her first baby, a bouncing boy, Tom, came along, she started telling people that she had left the stage for the moment to concentrate on bringing up her family.

  A few years later she gave birth to a daughter, Marianne.

  After this, when people asked, Sally styled herself a ‘stay-at-home mum’.

  Soon after both children were settled in school, Sally made another feeble attempt at getting acting work. When she failed to land anything except a few unsuccessful auditions for tiny parts in regional TV soaps, if people asked her whether she still worked she would shrug and tell them ‘No, she didn’t have the time any more.’ As a full-time wife and mother, she said, she had a far more fulfilling life than any glittering acting career could have given her. Every time her children had a birthday party, to Sally it was equivalent to another first night, every exam they passed was as though she had won an award.

  At around the time the menopause hit her, both kids left home. Tom, having dawdled around ‘finding himself’, rather than going to university, took himself off on what he called a gap year. But once he arrived in Goa he found some kind of nirvana and never came back home, just kept wandering aimlessly round the world, painting, playing instruments and living, as Robert put it, ‘like a lazy, useless, money-sucking hippy’. Tom never asked his parents for cash. But he had no ambition in the financial world either, almost in opposition to his father’s obsession with money.

  Robert had made a major event of disowning his son. He cut him off and refused to have any communication, while devoting all his energy towards helping Marianne succeed in her brilliant academic career. Tom’s ‘gap year’ lasted more than a decade.

  Publicly, Sally gave a show of support for her husband, but secretly she kept in touch with her son, sending regular emails from computers in Internet cafes to Australia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.

  Marianne finished university with flying colours and immediately took a management job with an international oil company in Aberdeen. She was following in Daddy’s footsteps, aiming high in the business world.

  Empty-nest syndrome shook Sally hard. She hated being alone. And now, with the kids gone, she only had Robert, who became more preoccupied with work and seemed to lose all interest in her.

  Sally suspected he was having affairs, but could never prove it. Then one day he was found dead in his secretary’s bed.

  All it took
was one lone tabloid journalist, who worked out that the errant corpse’s widow was Sally, the beloved star of the old Saturday morning television show, and suddenly all the newspapers and magazines remembered her again. The story made vivid headline news.

  It didn’t take long either for it to become clear that her husband had not been the financial whizz-kid he always boasted of being. He died in debt, having blown not only all of his own money but also every penny of Sally’s TV nest-egg.

  At his funeral a number of women turned up, none of whom Sally recognised. They all wept profusely.

  At the age of fifty-three, alone, broke, embarrassed and humiliated, Sally sold up and, using every penny left from the proceeds of selling the house, moved to Bellevue-Sur-Mer. No one in France had ever had the vaguest idea who Sally had once been, and now that her dark brown hair was streaked with grey, even the visiting English package-tourists who piled out of cruise ships no longer recognised her.

  As she swung out into the warm sunlight of the harbour Sally’s eagle eye was alerted to some men removing the ‘For Sale’ sign in front of the ground-floor flat of the old apartment block near the Gare Maritime. It had had a slash across it saying ‘VENDU’ – sold – since the day it went up.

  When local properties bore a sign reading ‘á vendre’ – for sale – English eyes watched keenly to see whether their number would swell with a new couple from Surrey or Kent going into retirement, or maybe something exciting like a writer, following in the footsteps of Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, moving out here to concentrate on writing a new book . . .

  This sale had been presented and snapped up without a by-your-leave. What was going on?

  Sally had more reason than the others for watching out for these property sales.

  Last year her parents had died in quick succession and the money from their house was now sitting in a bank. Like everyone else, Sally was very aware of the precarious banking situation and was keen to get the money tied up in property, rather than risk it vanishing overnight in a surprise bank collapse.

  On top of this her daughter Marianne had told Sally she was looking to buy a holiday home. She hadn’t actually talked about buying here in Bellevue-Sur-Mer, and was actively looking in the Dordogne and Tuscany, but Sally felt that if she could show her something lovely here Marianne wouldn’t be able to resist and that would mean that, hopefully, Sally would see her daughter now and then. A few days ago, Marianne had phoned her mother to tell her she might drop in on her very soon for a weekend between business meetings in Zurich and Rome.