Up To No Good

by Victoria Corby

  ‘But they’re still lovely even if they are worn, and anyway that’s one of the things Min will like about them,’ I protested, wondering if I had no taste or if it was just that his taste ran to minimally furnished loft apart­ments and uncluttered brick walls. ‘She’s a great fan of the Miss Havisham style of interior design; the more tatty and distressed the better, though she draws the line at actual dirt.’

  He shrugged. ‘You know your sister. They’ll certainly make a different sort of wedding present.’ It didn’t sound as if he thought this was entirely a good thing. ‘But if you don’t mind me asking, have you thought of how you’re going to pay for them?’ He bent down to look at the price. ‘Even if you manage to knock that down a bit it’s still one hell of a lot of money to get out on your credit card, unless you’ve got a gold one.’ Of course I didn’t. And I had a nasty feeling that if I did try to make a withdrawal of that size on my long-suffering credit card, the machine would first make an embarrassingly loud raspberry, audible over the whole square, before saying something along the lines of: ‘You are already over your limit. Would you like to pay in for once rather than take out?’

  Since I’d heard Charlie refer more than once to how little his new job paid him, it wasn’t likely that he would be able to advance me anything. I was wondering whether it would be pushing my friendship with him too far to ask if he’d drive me back to the château so that I could beg Oscar for a loan when I heard a cheerful voice say, ‘Hello, Nella. I wondered if we were going to meet up with you. Oscar said you’d gone antique hunting.’

  I turned to see Janey, wearing a soft pastel printed sundress with a hat pushed on the back of her head, and looking uncannily as if she were on her way to a garden party; except that the accepted accessory for a garden party isn’t usually a pushchair containing a small and grubby child beaming seraphically through a thick covering of ice cream. She was missing something though. ‘Aren’t you supposed to have two of those?’ I asked, pointing at the filthy face.

  ‘She used to, but she gave the other up for adoption,’ said Robert from behind her.

  Janey made a face. ‘I was tempted, I promise you, but I wouldn’t have stuck with just giving away the one. They started an ice­cream fight,’ she said meaningfully. So that explained why there was liquid strawberry ice cream dripping off the twin’s ear. ‘Jed was noble enough to take Miles off to look at something on the other side of the square.’

  ‘I note that you don’t appear to possess the same degree of nobility,’ I said to Robert.

  ‘Unfortunately I don’t have Jed’s way with children,’ he said with a solemn face. ‘And Adam prefers to stay with his mother.’

  Adam’s mother didn’t look as if she thought Adam’s opinion in the matter should be taken into account. ‘But aren’t you supposed to be clad in top-to-toe white and standing ready to catch a cricket ball?’ I asked her. ‘How come you’ve been given leave to attend anything so frivolous as a foire à la brocante?’

  ‘Alas!’ Janey heaved an unconvincing sigh. ‘My place in the team was given to one of the Australians and I was so broken-hearted that I simply had to get away. In other words, I decided that if I had to hear another word about cricket I’d have hysterics so I took the opportunity to hoof it while Tom’s back was turned. Have you seen anything you like yet?’

  ‘Mm, I’m thinking about those,’ I said, pointing at the two pictures.

  ‘Oh, aren’t they pretty!’ she exclaimed and called Robert to come over and see.

  ‘I know they’re only the sort of thing that ladies who liked to amuse themselves with a little light sketching used to turn out by the dozen,’ I said defensively as he bent down to have a closer look, ‘but they’d make a perfect wedding present for my sister.’

  ‘They’re very nice,’ he said as he straightened up. ‘They might be by an amateur lady artist but she had a good deal of talent. The drawing is superb. You’ve got a good eye, Nella. I’d snap them up if I were you.’

  ‘I’m making up my mind if I can afford them,’ I said, delighted that my taste had been approved. Robert and I seemed to have come a long way in civility terms since the beginning of the week. Had he decided at last that all the scores were settled? I wondered hopefully.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asked Janey, and when I told her she said, ‘Easy as pie. I’ll pay for them and you can give me a cheque to put in my English bank account.’ Then, when I hesitated; ‘Go on - I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t mean it.’

  So I approached the stall-owner to ask him in my rather indifferent French if that was his best price, my fluency, or lack of it, not helped by the three listeners to my atrocious accent. The stallholder must have been a very bad judge of character, or unduly influenced by Janey’s garden-party attire, for he decided in spite of all evidence to the contrary that I must be a feelthy riche Anglaise, and unblushingly put the price up. Well, I suppose it was a better price for him. Ten minutes later I’d managed to convince him that I wasn’t a dot com millionairess, or that even if I was my pockets were sewn up very tightly, and the price began to inch down slowly. When we eventually agreed an amount he began to address Charlie in a torrent of machine-gun-like French of which I could only understand a few words, but the gist was that Charlie’s girlfriend was a hard woman and that he hoped for Charlie’s sake she was as efficient in the kitchen as she was in depriving a poor working man of his right to a modest profit. Charlie and I looked suitably unmoved by this pathetic tale and the stallholder sighed dramatically, grinned hugely and shook my hand, so I gathered that he hadn’t made such a disastrous loss after all.

  ‘Oscar said you’re going back on the train,’ said Janey. ‘How are you going to manage with those?’ The stallholder was wrapping the pictures up in several sheets of the local free paper and making two unwieldy parcels that wouldn’t be easy to carry comfortably.

  ‘I’m sure Oscar won’t mind taking them back for me,’ I said with a little more certainty than I actually felt. The pictures were quite large and Oscar’s car was small and he’d already agreed to take the suitcase I didn’t need at the party for me, so he might not appreciate a whole lot of extra luggage. However, Janey’s attention had been seized by the stallholder who was trying to convince her that as she was paying by cheque he was obliged to add VAT to the price.

  ‘What’s this about leaving early?’ Charlie demanded in a low voice and with a flattering degree of regret. ‘It’s not anything to do with Phil, is it?’

  I laughed. ‘You don’t really think I’m spineless enough to let myself be driven away by him, do you?’

  He smiled. ‘Not Phil, but Maggie, possibly. Are you getting out of the line of fire?’

  ‘No, it’s nothing to do with that. It’s my grandparents’ diamond wedding anniversary, and they’d be terribly hurt if I didn’t make it back for the party.’

  ‘At least you’re cutting your holiday short for a fun reason, not for something like a pressing problem at work.’

  ‘If I’d obeyed instructions and furnished myself with a mobile so I could be contacted “just in case”, I daresay I’d have been told to hotfoot it back to London already,’ I retorted. ‘My boss doesn’t approve of his subordinates going on holiday.’

  ‘Sounds like exactly the same reason I don’t check my messages,’ said Charlie with a smile of shared complicity. ‘So when are you leaving - Friday?’

  ‘Thursday. The party’s in the Lake District and as it’s a long way to go we’re making a real weekend of it. I’m going straight to my parents’, and then we’ll drive up together on Friday morning.’

  Charlie touched my arm softly. ‘What a shame,’ he said. ‘I’ve been really enjoying myself and-‘

  Whatever else he was going to say was cut short by Janey turning around and telling me I could now take possession of my purchases. The VAT question had been sorted out to her satisfaction and she’d also successfully fielded an attempt to put an extra 2 per cent on the price for bank charges when cashin
g the cheque. She fixed the stallholder with a stern eye and suggested he change banks since hers didn’t charge for cheques. Unabashed, he grinned and pressed his card into her hands, telling her to come and see him at his shop where he had many more beautiful things and what a pleasure it was doing business with two such lovely ladies. She nodded some­what perfunctorily, muttering that Jed had said he’d only take Miles off for five minutes and they’d been gone for much longer than that. ‘I don’t normally find anybody keen to hang on to either of the twins longer than strictly necessary,’ she said, looking worried. ‘I hope nothing’s happened.’

  ‘Doubt it,’ Robert said easily. ‘They’re probably laying waste to the sweetie stall, the one with the saucer-sized lollipops over there.’ He turned to look with professional disapproval at my untidily wrapped packages, ‘Those frames are much too fragile to be wrapped only in newspaper. I’ve got some spare cardboard sleeves for transporting pictures in the back of my car. You can have a couple if you like.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s really kind of you.’

  He shrugged, eyes wandering around the crowd. ‘I hate to see nice things being damaged,’ he said in an offhand voice as he waved vigorously, and Jed, on the other side of the square, lifted a hand in response.

  True to Robert’s predictions, Janey’s missing fledgling was returned sucking a lollipop half the size of his face. Jed can’t have been as ignorant of children as he claimed for he’d avoided war breaking out by buying a similar one for Adam. Janey celebrated his safe return by buying a jug shaped like a duck which made a glugging sound when the water was poured out. ‘Though I’d better not tell Tom I’ve bought it just yet,’ she said to me as the jug was being wrapped up in layers of paper. ‘He’s being so tiresome about money at the moment. I hope it’s only taking this wretched cricket match too seriously that’s the matter and not something to do with the bank. Not that he’d tell me if it was,’ she added in such a sour voice that I couldn’t help staring at her in surprise. ‘One of the problems of marrying a man with a daughter virtually your age is that he tends to treat you both the same when it comes to doling out the pocket money. And he’s about as informative about the mechanics of the business as he would be to a six year old too. “Don’t bother your little head about this, darling. Leave the hard stuff to the grown-ups.” What makes it even more annoying is that I know consider­ably more about basic finance than he does. I filled in my own tax returns for years, so at the very least I could take an intelligent interest in what’s going on, if not actually offer him a bit of advice.’ The stallholder touched her arm handing over the parcel, and she smiled ruefully. ‘Still, all things considered, I infinitely prefer a man who is over-protective to one who thinks he ought to stay in bed all day while I earn the money, like Tom’s predecessor did.’ She looked around. ‘I wonder where the men have got to? The beer stall, I daresay.’

  She was right, though as they’d had the consideration to take the twins with them she declared they were forgiven. ‘The final straw which drove Tom’s stress levels to the point where I was about to ring Dr Dupont and demand valium - for me, though I might have allowed him some too - was when Delphine announced this morning that she thought she might not be able to work tomorrow. Some family crisis or the other. I thought Tom was going to explode. Luckily it’s all been sorted out. I couldn’t cope with having to take the twins to Solange’s - it isn’t a child-friendly sort of place. You’ll see what I mean tomorrow.’

  ‘I still don’t think I should be going,’ I said. I had a nasty feeling that Oscar had done nothing to disabuse George from his notion that I was desperate to get my mitts back on his person again. Turning up to watch him do his bowling magic certainly wasn’t going to help throw cold water on that particular idea. And as far as entertainment went I’d rather watch a lawn-mowing contest than cricket, though I had sense enough not to mention this to Tom, or Oscar, or any of the other cricket fanatics who had recently emerged from the woodwork. The final niggle was that I felt sure that, with two cricket teams and their partners to feed, Solange had quite enough guests already without adding extraneous hangers-on.

  That particular objection was unsurprisingly ignored by Janey, who wasn’t in the least troubled about the thought of Solange being put to extra trouble. I could see I was on a losing wicket here, and said so.

  Janey aimed a mock punch at me. ‘That was a terrible pun! For that you’re definitely coming - and no excuses!’

  CHAPTER 14

  Venetia had given us instructions for her special route to Château Vielleroche which she swore was much quicker than the one on Oscar’s touring map of France. Perhaps it would have been - if she’d remembered to say we were supposed to turn right by the church with the separate bell tower. We were already late because Oscar had caught sight of his reflection kitted out in Tom’s second-best cricketing trousers, and had a sartorial crisis of an intensity that would have done justice to any teenager going to her first proper party. With a skill honed by several years in advertising, I’d lied through my teeth and eventually managed to persuade him he looked fine, though I’d had to threaten Charlie and Jed with disembowelling if they dared to mention that the trousers were too short as well as being too wide - a detail that seemed to have escaped Oscar’s attention so far.

  Thanks to Venetia’s instructions we’d gone on and on down a road that gradually became narrower and narrower, then turned into a semi-rutted track before it ended in the back entrance to a farmyard and some surprised chickens. Naturally the back-seat passengers knew much better than either the official map reader (me) or the driver (Oscar) how to retrace our steps and find Château Vielleroche, and tempers were beginning to get just a little frayed by the time an elderly lady on an even older bicycle was able to give us proper directions.

  Venetia had begged us not to be late. Daddy’s nerves wouldn’t be able to stand it, she reported, nor hers for that matter, given the mood he was in. The advent of the Australians hadn’t been an unalloyed success. Carlton, who was supposed to be such a cracker at cricket, had been suffering from co-ordination problems due to the number of tinnies he’d necked the night before and had not acquitted himself with honour, though Tom had grudgingly admitted that at least he knew how to hold the bat properly. Matt, the perpetual student, just wasn’t terribly good and Carlton’s rugby-playing brother Oz’s game was... rugby. But at least they were better than Janey, and it meant that Tom could field a full side, even if we all wondered whether this match was going to be a defeat, a walk-over or a complete rout.

  Château Vielleroche was as exquisite and well cared for as Solange herself, straight out of a fairy tale with its pointy roof, mullioned windows and double set of stone steps that curled up to a huge black oak front door. At any moment you expected to see Rapunzel lean out of a window at the top of one of the towers and let her hair down to her waiting prince, and even the high hedge on either side of the elaborately curlicued iron gates could have been the one that kept Sleeping Beauty safe from all those predatory suitors until the right prince came along.

  We followed the noise around to an immaculately tended garden at the back, and I could see straight away why Janey had been nervous about letting the twins loose in such perfection. Even the weeds looked as if they’d been pruned into shape. About thirty people stood around on the billiard table-smooth grass chatting; the men, naturally far outnumbering the women, wore a variety of clothing that sometimes bore only the vaguest resemblance to normal cricketing gear. Oscar looked positively immaculate compared to one man whose stomach attested to his love of good food and stuck out proudly over a pair of originally white Bermudas, or to Carlton and Oz, sporting garments more suited to surfing at Bondi than cricket at a château in France.

  While Jed went off to take photographs for the story he was doing on the match for one of the colour supplements, George bounded forward to give me an unwanted kiss on the mouth and Napier followed, saying in a genial voice, ‘Glad to see you all at last. Tom wa
s getting quite worried, you know. Thought you might be a no-show and I gather he certainly can’t afford to be without you, Oscar.’ Napier smirked with the air of someone who knows he’s already got every­thing sewn up. That probably meant the man in the Bermudas was on our team. (He was and, as he told me later, had never yet managed to hit the ball, though he claimed to be quite useful as a fielder.)

  ‘Poor old Tom. He’s had a bit of a problem getting a team together this year, so I’m glad he’s got at least one player he can rely on,’ Napier went on insincerely, grinning like a crocodile as he doled out glasses of wine to Charlie and Phil who fell on them as if hairs of the dog were going out of fashion. They’d had an enthusiastic session last night sampling Charlie’s liquid purchases from the foire. It would have been positively unfriendly, they claimed, not to have had a farewell drink with Jed who was leaving for somewhere on the Loire right after the cricket match.

  Napier looked slightly startled when their two glasses were held out for refills before he’d finished hand­ing out the firsts. The wine was much better than Tom’s somewhat liverish comments had led us to expect, but I daresay those two would have downed it in one even if it had tasted of petrol. ‘Well well, you two aren’t playing so I don’t suppose Tom can accuse me of trying to nobble his team,’ he said with a chuckle that clearly implied he didn’t need to bother and wandered off to attend to some of his other guests.

  ‘Presumably Hugh decided against telling Napier that Solange was having an off-the-menu appetiser at lunch the other day?’ I said as she touched Napier’s arm in the time-honoured way of the wife who has absolutely nothing to hide.

  ‘Well, of course,’ George said seriously. ‘You can’t worry the captain just before a match. It might put him off his stroke.’

  Mm, well, I could think of a few other good reasons not to tell a husband about his wife’s misbehaviour but there you are. The result was the same. Napier was wandering around as if he didn’t have a care in the world and distributing bonhomie like a man who reckons that he’s already got the match in the bag. Meanwhile, Solange flitted about like a bird of paradise in a vividly printed dress that clung to every one of her well-maintained curves like a second skin, though it was noticeable to everyone, except apparently her husband, that the perch she chose to alight on most frequently was Tom’s. For once Tom had his mind on more important matters than flirting and was keener to discuss the final batting order with his number two bat than to whisper sweet nothings in Solange’s ear. Eventually she flounced off, and could be heard a few minutes later venting her frustration on one of her army of helpers who were streaming like a line of soldier ants from the kitchen to the tables with dishes for the first course.