‘Aaaargh!’
It was George, adding to his lexicon of exclamations previously encountered only in fiction.
I continued swimming.
‘Get off, damn you! Ouch! Piss off!’
I turned, and swam on.
The bedroom door burst open and Teazel shot out like one of those gremlins in the Spielberg film, all staring eyes, ears and fur en brosse. He did not even pause to check out the shrew, but raced to the top of the garden and disappeared amongst the fruit trees beyond the barbecue.
George appeared, stark naked.
‘What the bloody hell was that cat doing shut in the bedroom?’
I stopped. ‘Sorry. I had to rescue a shrew.’
‘Oh, well, of course that makes it all right. You know perfectly well I hate a cat on the bed, and yet you lock me in so the creature can dig his claws into my leg while you rescue a rodent which will probably die anyway.’
‘We’re all going to die,’ I said philosophically.
‘Okay.’ George held up his hands. ‘Okay.’ He examined his thigh. ‘See that? Severe lacerations.’
‘Come on in, it’s gorgeous.’
He looked huffy. ‘Someone had better go and buy the bread.’
‘Okay, but cover yourself. Farmer Giles is in the field opposite.’
‘Farmer—?’ George’s hands flew with maidenly swiftness to where they were most needed. ‘So he is.’
He jumped in and did a storming crawl up to the far end. When he got there he shook the water out of his eyes and said, ‘What’s he doing?’
‘I don’t know. Something with wire. Mending fences?’
George peered over the side. ‘Looks more as if he’s planning to blow us up.’
When I got back from Lalutte with the shopping Prince was warbling improper suggestions in the girls’ room, but George was nowhere to be found. I made coffee, dolloped apricot jam into a croissant, and carried both on to the verandah. In the field the farmer had finished unrolling his wires and was busy erecting something in the far corner. It was ten o’clock and getting hot. I heard voices from round the corner, and braced myself for an encounter with Royston, but it was George who finally appeared.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Where’ve you been? Coffee’s made.’
‘Thanks.’ George disappeared and came back with breakfast.
‘Actually Gareth rang up, and Royston came to get me to take the call.’
‘Gareth?’ I put my cup down. ‘Oh, no. What’s wrong?’
‘Why should anything be wrong? Honestly, darling, you’re paranoid. No, he just wanted to ask about our journey, see how we were. Rather a pleasing impulse, I thought.’
‘He didn’t say what was wrong?’
‘Will you stop that? Nothing is wrong. He’s probably missing us.’
I treated this unlikely suggestion with the contempt it deserved. ‘I hope Royston didn’t mind being disturbed. We only gave Gareth that number for emergencies.’
George dusted croissant crumbs off his palms, but overlooked the ones enmeshed in his chest hair. ‘He didn’t mind. Couldn’t have been pleasanter about it, as a matter of fact.’
‘Ingratiating, you mean.’
‘No, no,’ said George in the tone of one who has the patience of a saint but finds it running out. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong idea about him. He’s okay.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Researcher. In exile pro tem from the Commission writing a few reports.’
‘Reports on what?’
‘Umm … what did he say? … Training initiatives in rural areas.’
‘I see.’ In the field the farmer had now moved down to the corner nearest us.
‘He’s got a pretty smooth set-up round there,’ went on George. ‘He’s got some absolutely state-of-the-art desktop technology.’
Here were a couple of phrases which, like target towns, rumpus room and ETA, made my teeth itch.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Lucky him.’
‘Another thing,’ said George. ‘He has a glass eye.’
There seemed no possible response to this. But I was spared having to find one for at that moment the farmer completed his work, and the boom of a cannon made George spill boiling coffee over his lap.
‘I wonder,’ I said, as we sat down at a table in the town square at Lalutte, ‘whether that cat is Royston Sinclair’s other eye.’
‘Mmm?’
George was extracting the last ounce of nourishment from his copy of the Economist. I was reminded of a starving man eking out a single square of chocolate.
‘I think it spies on us and reports back to the annexe.’
‘Probably.’
It was very hot. We had parked the car in the lower reaches of the town and trudged up through the narrow mediaeval streets to the square, which crowned the hill. The girls had stopped off at a less picturesque café on the way to take iced Coke and a reviving fag.
‘You want to stick with us,’ George had told them. ‘It’ll be marvellous up in the old part.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Clara. ‘We like it here.’
‘So what will you do?’
‘Wait for you to come back down.’
The café where we left them had speckled metal tables, a mass of rusty advertising signs and a condom machine near the door. Inside in the gloom two or three locals in flat caps and braces kept their smeary glasses company at the long bar. The patron was pale, dour and exhausted-looking, with hair brilliantined straight back a la Valentino, and plimsolls. It was difficult, from looking at his premises, to deduce what he did that wore him out so.
‘Please be sensible,’ I said as we left them.
‘Certainly not,’ said Clara with leaden sarcasm. ‘We’re going to drag those hunky Frenchmen off their stools and indulge in perverted practices with them the moment your backs are turned, isn’t that right, Nev?’
The town square was worth the climb. A cobbled expanse surrounded by buildings of such enchanting, crooked antiquity they might have come from a Disney film. Shutters, windowboxes, a cool, paved cloister with one or two interesting shops. A stone church with a great black bell hanging beneath a red-tiled campanile. And two cafés.
We had chosen to sit in the one with the most shade. A blackboard suggested various spécialitiés de la région, and a set lunch for a price which, George pointed out, was almost laughable.
‘We’ll have to come here to eat,’ he said. ‘Real French bourgeois provincial cooking.’
‘It’s awfully quiet,’ I said.
At this point a door at the rear of the café banged open and a pack of dogs raced out, hurtling between the tables and knocking over chairs in the process. Once in the square, a dachshund settled down to defecate in the middle of the cobbles and a great Dane with cropped ears like Scooby-Doo allowed itself to be mounted by a long-haired Alsatian.
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘Everywhere we go.’
George put down the Economist. ‘But it’s typically French. People talk about the English obsession with pets, but the difference is we keep them properly under control. Au continent they’re either chained up and kept at boiling point, or rushing about everywhere creating a health hazard.’
He seemed quite satisfied with this analysis of a state of affairs which in Basset Magna would have had him firing off choice letters to the Parish Council, the local paper and the police. ‘Ah,’ he added. ‘Here comes someone.’
A tall, bony young woman, a-flap with Indian drapes, approached the table. Like the patron of the girls’ café, she had the deep pallor of someone long disenchanted with heat. Her hair was a khaki-ish blond, and her big dirty feet had trodden down the backs of her whiskery espadrilles.
‘Good morning, what can I get you?’
George grinned. ‘Non, non! Parlons français.’
‘If you insist.’
‘But you’re English, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘It takes one to know one.’ She held out a huge hand c
overed in elephant’s hair rings. ‘Priscilla Shaw.’
George stifled his disappointment and ordered citron pressés.
‘Would you credit it,’ he said as she went to fetch our drinks, ‘all this and we’re being served by an English girl.’
The Alsatian had transferred its dishonourable intentions to the dachshund, and was thrusting absentmindedly at the air several inches above the little chap’s back as it nosed round a plant tub.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘She’s bringing up her dogs in the great Gallic tradition.’
Priscilla returned, put the glasses, sugar and lemon juice on the table, and then banged the tin tray vigorously with the heel of her hand, shouting: ‘Heinz! Pedro! Zac! Here!’
The dogs cantered back and leaped on to a painted metal park bench that stood against the café wall.
‘Sorry,’ she added. ‘They think they own the place.’ She had a plummy voice with a clipped, rather offhand delivery. I had heard such voices ringing out from the collecting rings, tea tents and Volvos of a score of village gymkhanas.
‘Working here for the summer?’ asked George.
‘No, actually. I own this place.’ She was unsmiling, obviously used to this question and a touch tired of it.
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘Ten years.’
‘Did you have any connections before that? I mean, friends in the area or anything?’
‘No, but my then-lover did,’ boomed Priscilla.
‘We were on our way back from Nepal and we stopped off here. When he moved on, I stayed.’
‘I suppose,’ said George, ‘that property was cheaper then.’
She shrugged. ‘Possibly. Cash wasn’t a problem, actually.’
She loped off into the interior and the dogs jumped down and followed her, their paws rattling on the lino. I was left with the impression we had been put in our place.
‘What a caution,’ I said. ‘Straight off the hippie trail.’
‘Anyone who uses that word in all seriousness,’ said George, stirring his lemon, ‘is suspect, in my view.’
‘Hippie?’
‘No, lover.’
We picked up the girls on the way back. They had moved inside, and were perched at the bar at a safe distance from the men in caps.
‘What’s in those glasses?’ asked George suspiciously.
‘Chill out, Dad, we moved on to the Orangina.’
The patron, studying a folded newspaper at the far end of the bar, gave us a nod as though we were collecting empties.
‘So what was it like at the top?’ asked Naomi generously as we walked to the car.
‘Lovely,’ I replied. ‘Very pretty. Very old.’
‘Very French,’ said George, conveniently overlooking Priscilla Shaw.
As we turned into the drive of the Villa Almont we encountered Royston, who was walking down from the post box with a handful of letters and a screwdriver. He waved them at us and George drew to a halt.
‘Good morning! Want a lift?’
‘Good grief, thank you but no, this is practically the only exercise I get,’ said Royston. He wagged the screwdriver. ‘Darn thing’s broken. Morning, girls!’
‘What a lot of mail. That’s working from home.’
‘That’s the reason I flagged you down. You’ve got one.’
‘A letter? For us?’ said George in his TV-play mode.
Royston passed it through the window. ‘Nothing very exciting, I’m afraid. It’s from the agency.’
George dropped the letter on my lap as though I were an in-tray. Royston peered into the back. ‘By the way, girls, I hope the bird-scarers aren’t disturbing your sunbathing too much.’
They looked blank. ‘I don’t know anything about them,’ said Clara. ‘Do you, Nev?’
Naomi shook her head. Royston made a silly face with his eyebrows raised. ‘What? You haven’t heard the cannons going off every ten minutes?’
‘They have music on,’ I explained.
‘Perhaps that’s as well,’ said Royston. ‘Guy de Pellegale is always on at Rindin about his cannon, but it does no good. Your French farmer is nothing if not a free spirit. The next thing will be the all-night pump from the pond so he can water his wretched melons.’
The letter turned out to be a pro-forma communication, obviously sent out by Rutherford-Pounce to all his tenants on a certain date, which explained its early arrival.
‘Dear—’ (and here our names were filled in in ink). ‘This is to inform you that it is the policy of France Vacances to inspect its properties on a regional basis each year. This summer we are trying to cover the area south of the Dordogne, which includes Tarn et Garonne, and the property where you are staying,’ Here ‘Vila Allmont’ was filled in. ‘These inspections are for the benefit of all our clients, both present and future, and we do hope that the visit of our representative will not inconvenience you in any way.
‘May we take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday with France Vacances, Yours sincerely, Crispin Rutherford-Pounce, Managing Director.’
‘What is it about us,’ asked George rhetorically, ‘that we come to a paradise in the sun only to be plagued by the proverbial mad dogs and Englishmen?’
There was a sharp report from the hill opposite and Teazel exploded from the hedge behind the compost heap, a rodent draped between his jaws.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘You’ll be able to lodge a complaint about the cat.’
Chapter Five
That night I lay awake long after George, and even the girls, had gone to sleep. I was suffering from that curious sense of overview that happens when you’re away from home and can observe your circumstances without the usual smokescreen of day-to-day responsibilities.
On the whole I was optimistic. George and I seemed to have settled into a relationship very like that we had enjoyed pre-Kostaki, but with a not unpleasant edge. This turning back of the clock was enhanced by my own return to the fictional form in which I had first succeeded. The children were growing up. Clara had mercifully lost interest in horse-dealing, and Gareth had got a place at Bristol for the autumn. There were occasional flashes of maturity and amiability, like the lights of a car on a distant motorway. It was becoming possible to envisage a time when George and I could flee Basset Magna and its works and live in a place of our own very like the Villa Almont, but perhaps nearer the sea … We would look back, as they say, and laugh …
Suddenly, I heard something – I wasn’t quite sure what – that snapped me out of my reverie like a bucket of cold water. Come to think of it – it was water. The clop, clop, clop of water being drunk noisily by someone, or something, with a large tongue and a stupendous thirst.
I froze. I was suddenly aware of the fragile glass-panelled door that stood between our bed and the outside world. We were in deep countryside. We didn’t even have a telephone in the house. Had I locked the verandah door? And would holiday insurance cover attack by a cross-eyed, thirst-maddened Anglophobe armed with a pitchfork?
I was so rigid with anxiety that my teeth ground together with a noise like chalk on a blackboard. George moaned and rolled over with a great lurch that rocked the bed. He was an untidy sleeper, but a notoriously deep one. Many was the night he had snored tranquilly through bouts of infant sickness, cat fights, the death of pets, and teenage soul-searching: nights when the entire household, both human and animal, converged on our bed to air its problems and afflictions, and he had never stirred. A little thing like the Missing Link stalking the garden of the Villa Almont with murderous intent would scarcely make his eyelids flutter. I was fearful of shaking him too hard in case he woke with a trumpeting snort and advertised our whereabouts to the putative assailant.
Very, very gingerly, I folded back my half of the sheet as though it were made of some unstable substance, and swung my bare feet – poor bare, unprotected feet – off the bed. As they touched the floor there was a tremendous, crashing splash – no ordinary
splash but an explosive displacement of water such as could only be made by the Creature from the Rue Morgue doing a honeypot into our pool.
The splash was followed by a brief silence and then the muted gloops and hisses of limbs moving in the water. Trembling with dread I crept to the door and moved the edge of the provençal print curtain aside with my finger. In the moonlight I could make out the gleam of the cannons in the melon field … the glimmer of the dewpond in the spinney below the compost … the rippling silver of the swimming pool broken by great dark shoulders, and a shaggy head making a bow wave as they forged towards the far end—
I leapt back into the bed and pressed myself cravenly against the back of the sleeping George.
The steady swimming continued for another minute or so, and then there was the slosh, slosh of the creature emerging via the shallow pool steps. It must have cut across the grass, for the next thing I knew there was the pad of footfalls on the verandah, not three feet from the window by the bed, and the sound of heavy breathing. This was followed by a brisk slapping sound, and then the footfalls moved away.
I must have remained completely motionless for about five minutes, for when I did decide to rouse George I found my arm had gone to sleep.
‘George! George! Wake up! There’s been an intruder!’
‘Sorraworrawossamarrerwothewhotimeisit?’ said George.
I explained. He was not impressed. ‘Steady on, love, it’s only some animal or other.’
‘But it was huge! And so close!’
‘Like me, eh,’ said George.
Following an interlude which, in fairness to George, put all thoughts of the marauder quite out of my mind, he fell back into the deep, untroubled slumber from which he’d emerged to such good effect. But as the sky began to lighten, I was still awake. And to make sure I didn’t drop off, there was the dull drone of machinery starting up in the hollow: the farmer’s drainage pump.
I knew it would be hours before the others were on the go, so I got up, let in Teazel who was glaring sphinx-like through the (yes, unlocked) verandah door, and went up to my table in the atelier.
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