Foreign Parts

by Foreign Parts (retail) (epub)

  But even the predators were preyed upon. George and I had noticed an estate agent’s next door but one to the Maison de la Presse. It went under the name of Sprigg Associates. A gentleman whom we took to be Mr Sprigg, dapper in a dove-grey lightweight suit, was generally to be seen loitering near the news stand, or taking an espresso in the café, from the time the Telegraphs arrived to when the last of the eager purchasers had departed. He seemed to know everyone, and those he didn’t know he quickly became acquainted with.

  ‘Touting for custom,’ George had remarked disapprovingly. ‘Is there nothing these fellows won’t stoop to?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you said we should be ready for nineteen ninety-two. Mr Sprigg should be a man after your own heart.’

  George had then spent the next half an hour explaining to me why Sprigg was not only not a man after his own heart, but an outrage, a oncer and a cad.

  This aversion of George’s to business acumen meant that we had so far avoided exchanging more than a raised eyebrow with Mr Sprigg. But from his glossy and benign appearance it was obvious that business was good, and that the fantasy of owning a rambling French farmhouse still flourished profitably in many an English breast. This morning Sprigg was hovering near the counter, a copy of the Financial Times in his jacket pocket. I suspected that it was always the same edition, kept for the purpose of identifying Sprigg as English, in the way that a gentleman on a blind date might agree to wear an orange rosebud in his lapel.

  The papers were in situ, but there were as yet no other buyers about. I didn’t particularly want to present the only target for the Sprigg sales patter, so I waited.

  Unfortunately, just as I’d ordered a second coffee, he spotted me. I began writing a postcard as though my life depended on it, but not quickly enough to miss the beginnings of a cheerful smile. Sprigg was certainly about to make his way over to the café and subject me to a prolonged fusillade of house particulars.

  ‘Dear Gareth,’ I wrote, ‘this is a lovely place, and the weather is superb. We miss you, of course, but I’m sure you’re making piles of filthy lucre. I’m sitting in a café in the local town hoping not to get picked on by a marauding estate agent who preys on unwary Brits—’

  It dawned on me that it would only have taken Sprigg a few seconds to cross the street, and he had not yet turned up. Furtively I glanced in the direction of the newsagent’s without lifting my head. A white MG convertible – the old-fashioned sort, with spokey wheels – was parked opposite, and its arrival had stopped Sprigg in his tracks. A tall, bare-chested man in a straw hat and sunglasses climbed out of the driver’s seat and entered the shop, tweaking a wad of notes out of the hip pocket of his shorts as he did so. I noticed idly that he had the sort of bronzed athletic legs not usually seen outside the international tennis circuit.

  Sprigg’s smile was now all for the newcomer, though not, I suspected, for the scandalous legs so much as the MG, the GB plates and the wad of notes. The legs and their owner disappeared to the back of the shop, ignoring the English newspapers, and Sprigg moved away from the door.

  I finished off the postcard to Gareth, put it in my bag and signalled to the proprietor for l’addition. This was my moment to nip across for a paper and be on my way while Sprigg was still fully engaged with the new arrival.

  I had paid and was about to leave the table when both men reappeared at the till near the door, chatting animatedly. The Legs had a Figaro and a magazine under his arm. He removed the dark glasses in order to peel off a note and receive his change. He smiled and laughed. A deep, crescent-shaped dimple appeared in his cheek. The girl behind the till – stout, spotty and a stranger to customer relations – blushed and bridled. And who could blame her? She was being treated to the sort of high-voltage allure that should never have been allowed out unchaperoned.

  I should know. I’d been there. And there … and there … and down there …

  I slithered out of my chair and limped and shuffled crabwise down the hill to the car like some creature but lately risen from the primeval soup.

  It wasn’t until I was turning into the drive of the Villa Almont that I realised my shoulders were winched up round my ears with nervous tension, and even then it was an effort to lower them.

  ‘Where’s the bread?’ asked George.

  When he’d gone to collect it from the café I took the lilo into the pool and lay on it, face down, feeling the gentle undulation of the water beneath me.

  In spite of the heat, I shivered. Someone had just walked over my erogenous zones.

  Kostaki.

  Chapter Eight

  I coasted through the next couple of days in a dream state, part fantasy, part heightened reality. As with most dreams, I recognised it for what it was, but was powerless to escape. Nor did I want to. That one glimpse of Constantine Ghikas had indicated how fragile was my carefully reconstructed normality. While the frontage was still in place – George, our family holiday, the folksy familiarity of Down Our Street – the hinterland had been reduced, at a stroke, to a smoking ruin.

  In my lucid moments I told myself sternly that I would not be seeing him again. It had just been one of those chance sightings. He was probably not even based in this area. Ah yes, but there had been no sign of any luggage in the MG. This was a man on holiday, making a casual visit to the local town for a newspaper, exactly as I had been …

  The possibility that Kostaki might be sunning himself by some neighbouring pool threw me into an agony of frustration. I found myself peering this way and that when we were out in the car in the hope of spotting him, scantily clad and plainly in need of female company. In spite of the fact that he had always drawn women to his side like tacks to a magnet it never crossed my mind that he would be anything but available. One of Kostaki’s many charms was his continual, adorable, fatal availability. But to be available he had, alas, to be accessible.

  I knew I only had to see him once more, and approach him with ordinary civility, to become the focus of his attentions.

  Unless – ghastly thought! – he was married. But I dismissed this as ludicrously unlikely.

  So there I was, dreaming yet alert, in a state of suspended animation. On hold.

  The result was that I allowed various things over which I should normally have taken issue to go by on the nod. I scarcely noticed when George disappeared after lunch and spent the best part of two hours playing with Royston’s work centre; and when the girls, after a morning on their own in the town, announced they had bought tickets for a dance, I heard myself saying that it was a nice idea; and when George said he’d invited the de Pellegales, Royston, and ‘one or two others’ to an informal supper at the end of the week, I acquiesced like a lamb. But my meekness on this score ran so contrary to my earlier attitude that it aroused his suspicions.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. Absolutely … why not?’

  ‘No reason whatsoever!’ said George emphatically. ‘I’m delighted you feel it’s a good idea.’ He glanced at me. ‘I’ll do the shopping,’ he added, obviously still feeling he needed to build up some credit. ‘We can have something quite simple. I mean who wants to go to a lot of trouble in this heat? And we are on holiday …’ He rattled on for a bit about charcuterie and ratatouille and local goat’s cheese and fresh fruit salad. He had always been good at outlining astonishingly simple and attractive ways of entertaining. ‘After all, what needs doing?’ was one of his catchphrases. ‘Couple of bottles of wine and a vat of your nice goulash …’

  ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ he said now.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said again. I noticed he was beginning to look dangerously baffled, so I lassoed my errant brain, hauled it back into commission and forced it to formulate an intelligent question.

  ‘Who are the other people?’ I asked.

  ‘Other people?’ There it was again. Perhaps it was me. Perhaps my speech was going the same way as my brain and no one could understand me. I licked my lips and took a run at it.

&nbs
p; ‘You said you were inviting some other people, as well as the de Pellegales and Royston.’

  ‘Oh – yes!’ George seemed to feel on safer territory now he was being interrogated. ‘I thought it mightn’t be a bad idea if we diluted the Count and co. a bit, as you’re right, they are a little strange – and Royston suggested a very nice English couple who own a place down the road. Denise and Keith something or other. They sound perfectly sane and civilized.’ On recent evidence I couldn’t imagine why George should suppose these people would turn out as expected, but he prattled on happily. ‘I gather the de Pellegales have a house guest, too. Royston says he met her and she’s quite okay, and anyway it would be rude not to include her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘It should be fun,’ concluded George, a trifle lamely. He’d been anticipating a passage of arms and none had been forthcoming. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Only you seem a bit subdued.’

  ‘It’s hot, that’s all.’

  ‘Certainly is.’ Satisfied, George flopped back on his towel. ‘And going to get hotter according to local radio.’ Since Radio Four could only be received when entirely stationary at the top of the hill, and was sacred to the Test Scores and Ambridge, George had become a regular listener to QV Quercy, a mind-numbing stream of Franglorock, the sort of thing he would have rubbished out of hand at home. The jabbering of QVQ as we drove about in the car made him feel he was saturating the girls with idiomatic French. It also enabled him to pepper us with a small shot of local facts such as this one about the weather.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated, ‘we’ll be able to fry eggs on these tiles in a day or two.’

  You could have fried eggs on my brain. It was ironic that the more heated and turbulent I became inside, the more vacant and laid back I must have seemed to everyone else.

  I overheard George and the girls discussing me one evening. They were in the pool and had not noticed me come out on to the verandah. Neither did they realise how clearly their lowered voices carried over the water.

  ‘She’s in a really good mood,’ Clara remarked. And added: ‘I wonder why?’

  George, to his credit, took up the cudgels on my behalf. ‘I don’t know why you should say that,’ he said. ‘After all, we’re on holiday.’

  ‘But she hates holidays.’ So it had been that obvious.

  ‘No, she doesn’t,’ persisted George. ‘She just takes a long time to unwind. Creative people do.’

  Naomi, who had so far not joined in this discussion, now put in her four penn’orth.

  ‘She’s still writing here, isn’t she? I think that’s amazing.’

  She was rather a nice girl, really.

  Clara said: ‘It’s like dope. She can’t live without it.’

  ‘As I said,’ said George, ‘the creative urge isn’t something you can switch on and off. I think your mother is feeling more relaxed because she’s getting some writing done.’

  That much at least was true. Clara’s view that I was some kind of word-junkie was flattering in its way, but incorrect. I could very easily live without writing. It was pressure I couldn’t live without. And now that the pressure to finish Down Our Street had been upstaged by the pressure to find Kostaki, I doubted my ability to write another word.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Naomi comfortably, like some indulgent elderly relative, ‘she’s certainly unwound now.’

  QVQ were right. It did get hotter. It got so hot that the top three inches of the pool were like soup, and your wet footprints dried as soon as you left them as if you were a ghost. A piece of paper was delivered one morning announcing a hosepipe ban. Teazel lay against the wall at the back of the verandah, or in the woodshed, all day long, his eyes liquid yellow slits in his scorching fur. The shallow hills trembled under the heat. The sunflowers crisped and curled and hung their heads. Early ripened plums lay thick on the grass, decorated by drunken butterflies. A snake, sleek and black as liquorice, appeared on the bank by the compost heap and lay motionless in the shape of a shepherd’s crook while we admired it from a safe distance. We gazed in astonishment at our cupboards full of clothes as we slipped lethargically from one state of semi-nudity to another.

  In the early morning and the evening the sky was like mother of pearl: the rest of the time it was almost white. From eleven a.m. until six p.m. Lalutte was silent, empty and shuttered. Like the numerous lizards which kept us company we lay in the sun until the sweat had collected in warm puddles beneath us and we had built up enough energy to blunder into the cool house and fetch a drink from the fridge. Passion fruit juice, orange juice, apple juice, peach juice, Coke, Orangina, lemonade – however much we bought it was never enough.

  Yes, it was very hot. And, like a mirage, Kostaki had disappeared.

  ‘George! George! Fax!’

  It was Royston, on the verandah. He had altogether given up ringing the bell. I was lying face up on the lilo in the pool, and the girls were hiding from the noonday sun in their room. The faint sound of Soul II Soul sifted through their drawn curtains.

  ‘George!’

  The more I thought about Kostaki’s absence, the more I was annoyed by the ever-present Royston. The lilo was nudging the end of the pool nearest the verandah, so he probably couldn’t see me. I wasn’t going to help him. I knew George was sharing a hammock with the Queen of Crime in the trees behind the barbecue. Indeed, he was probably sleeping with the Queen of Crime. Nothing short of rope fatigue or snake bite was going to rouse him.

  But neither was Royston easily deterred. I heard the faint slap of his footsteps coming down the steps of the verandah.

  ‘Aha, Harriet. Lying low I see – no pun intended.’

  I opened one eye and saw him crouching at the side of the pool, staring down at me.

  ‘Where’s George?’ he said.

  ‘In the hammock.’

  ‘Only I’ve got a fax for him.’ He waved a sheet of paper over my face. I pushed myself away from the side. I was not going to give him the satisfaction of asking him about the wretched thing, but a frisson of irritation with George actually penetrated my habitual daze and I promised myself that I would take up the issue later.

  ‘In the hammock, you say,’ said Royston.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Mind if I pop up and give this to him?’

  ‘Go ahead.’ I was now floating away from him towards the far end of the pool.

  I heard Royston crunch away over the dry grass. I rather hoped to hear George start violently at this intrusion, and hit the ground with a crash, but there was only a brief exchange and then Royston came crunching back.

  ‘Message delivered.’ he said. I lifted a hand. ‘I’m looking forward to our little party.’

  So it was ‘our’ little party, was it? I rolled off the lilo and did a few strokes under water. When I came up for air, Royston had gone.

  ‘I must say,’ I said, ‘I think you might have stayed away from the fax machine. We are supposed to be on holiday.’

  ‘I know.’ I could tell from his tone he was going to be all sweet reason and common sense. ‘I know, and it won’t affect that. I just like to keep in touch.’

  ‘The idea of coming here is to be out of touch, surely.’

  ‘Up to a point. But if I keep myself informed about what’s going on I don’t have the worry of getting back to problems.’

  ‘You might as well cut out the middle man and stay at work.’

  He leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Come on, darling, don’t be like that. You write, don’t you?’

  I remembered the conversation in the pool. It made me even more determined to nail him.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t go handing out contact numbers to everyone so they can badger the living daylights out of me.’

  ‘I’d hardly call one fax badgering,’ said George. But he withdrew his hand and sat back in his chair, employing a body language which unmistakably denoted guilt.

  My m
arital antennae were not at their most sensitive, or I might have picked up on the reasons for the guilt. As it was I misinterpreted them.

  ‘So what was the message, anyway?’

  ‘Oh … nothing. They’ve struck a bit of a hitch on the London Recruitment and Training Seminar.’

  ‘And they can’t possibly manage without dragging you into it?’

  I knew how strangely I was behaving, especially as it really didn’t matter to me at this moment whether George spent the entire holiday organising residential conferences in London. What he did had become of minimal interest and importance to me. I was simply jealous because he was doing what he wanted, and I wasn’t.

  George’s manner became one of studied patience. He gave a sigh. ‘Eloise was bright enough to pick up on a small lacuna in the plans. Since the plans were originally drawn up by me, and she had the number—’

  ‘You gave her the number.’

  ‘—correct, she had the common sense to contact me. It’s nothing that can’t be sorted out down the line.’

  Eloise was George’s PA, a smart, single, independent woman in her early thirties who thought the earth circled George’s backside. She managed to make the most flagrant brown-nosing appear like sound judgement tempered in the white heat of the workface.

  ‘He’s quite simply a first-class man, Harriet,’ was one of her most frequent remarks to me. ‘He’s been positively inspirational to middle management. Since he’s been in that job an unprecedented number of really bright people have come good in the jobs that count. His influence has been catalytic.’

  I had often thought that if this kind of testimony were even a pale copy of what George received most working days in the office it was no wonder he was given to occasional flights of pomposity and self-satisfaction. Eloise on song would have swelled the massed heads of the Little Sisters of Humility.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘Let’s hope it’s a lacuna you can cope with.’