Something Stupid

by Victoria Corby

  ‘How far away from Bordeaux are we going to be?’

  ‘About forty kilometres, in the depths of the country. I’m afraid you’re going to be dreadfully bored.’

  ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ she replied. ‘I’ve got my driving licence with me so I can take the hire car while you’re working and explore, but do you think the people at Freddie French will mind my coming along?’

  Fifty percent delighted and fifty percent ranging from not very to highly displeased, according to their sex, I expected. The last thing I’d intended was to take Cressida with me to the conference. Even if she’d agreed to it I didn’t want her to return to England without making sure that she told Stefano the truth about James so I’d been thinking along the lines of leaving her safely in Paris under Mum’s wing; she could have moved into the tiny spare room, and Mum could have gently bullied her into doing the right thing. Mum and Cressida had loads in common, primarily a passion for shopping. In retrospect it would have been more sensible to suggest to Mum that she have Cressida to stay before we had a drink with Hervé, the weekend half of Mum’s liaisons. She looked at me with raised eyebrows and said, ‘Darling, you know I would do nearly anything for you, but no. Not this. Definitely no.’

  I have to admit that it was the first time I’d ever heard a man say ‘Enchanté’ and sound as if he meant it with all his heart. ‘I can control Hervé,’ Mum went on with a touch of grimness, ‘but Christophe is very susceptible. Frankly, darling, I don’t need that sort of competition. And from someone twenty years younger than me.’ Nearer twenty-five I would have said, but who am I to challenge my mother’s mathematics? So Cressida, with that sweetness and pliability of temperament that she seemed to show about everything other than contacting her husband, readily agreed that a few days in the south-west might be fun. My initial plan had been to park her in Bordeaux and leave her to sight­see, but that was scuppered by the Gold Card debacle. Even my mother, who had been watching Cressida’s shopping progress with an envy tantamount to awe, agreed it was quite impossible to leave someone of that profligate tendency alone if one was going to have to pick up the bill at the end of the week. So lucky Cressida was coming with me to the Moulin des Deux Ponts and I hoped, much more fervently than her, that the Freddie French contingent weren’t going to be too displeased. I was hoping even more fervently, but I feared hopelessly, that this wouldn’t get back to Darian either. I’d worry about that later.

  As the train trundled slowly over the bridge and into the station in Bordeaux the sun came out from behind lowering clouds, bathing the buildings along the curve of the river front in a yellowish light. Church spires pierced the skyline, towering over elegant eighteenth- century houses that had changed little in two hundred years. If you half closed your eyes to block out the stream of traffic going both ways it was possible to imagine that you were looking at a scene from ages ago. Cressida craned forward, staring with round eyes. ‘It’s like Stefano’s picture, isn’t it?’ she asked in a voice that had a distinct wobble to it. ‘I don’t think he’s ever been here, he’d love this.’

  I reached out and patted her hand comfortingly. ‘You’re obviously terribly unhappy without him. Don’t you think that perhaps...’

  My voice died away as she shook her head, but I thought with perhaps less vigour than she’d used previ­ously. Mum had said bluntly after dinner that first evening that the sooner Cressida was persuaded to go back to her husband the better. Anyone who talked so endlessly about someone was obviously completely potty about them. I hadn’t agreed with her then. Twenty-four hours later of hearing his name every second word I was coming around to the idea. But before I could start persuading her to go back to him I needed to find out why she seemed to be so alarmed about contacting him. I’d tried to call her bluff when she declared she was sure he’d refuse to speak to her by saying that I’d ring him myself and then hand the phone over to her. She said it would make him even more angry with her if he discovered he had been tricked. It sounded completely reasonable; so reasonable, in fact, that I was still not absolutely sure if she was pulling a fast one or not.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow when you’ve tried him at his office?’ I said.

  She nodded dismally. ‘But it’s no good, I can’t go back. You don’t understand. Things are too bad. And he wants ... Oh, I can’t tell you this now,’ she said with a sigh. ‘We’re arriving.’

  Blast it! I’d been impatient for this journey to end for the last two hours and now it had done five minutes too early, I thought in irritation as I started getting our bags down from the overhead rack. Who knew when Cressida was going to be in a confiding mood again?

  Certainly I wasn’t in the mood for an exchange of confidences once we got into our hired Renault Twingo. Cressida, who was supposed to be map reading, was rubber necking in every direction, saying, ‘Look at that! Isn’t that pretty?’ then taking a quick look at the map and saying in a vague voice, ‘Oh, I think we go down that road on the left. Oh, sorry, I didn’t see it was a No Entry. What do you think that building with the roof like an onion is?’

  My head was jerking backwards and forwards like a petrified turkey while I practised driving on the wrong side of the road in four lanes of traffic where even elderly women in rusty 2CVs were switching lanes at high speed and cutting me up. I surrendered any idea of taking even part of our journey on the autoroute and instructed Cressida, in a voice clipped by terror, to find a way cross country. Just as I was about to threaten to strangle her, she concentrated for long enough to direct me on to the right bridge over the river and roughly towards where we were supposed to be going. We came up behind a huge agricultural vehicle that looked as if it had just left a sci-fi movie and was going at about twenty miles an hour. It was too wide to pass safely so I had a reasonable excuse to slow down and let the sweat dry off my hands.

  The sun had disappeared as soon as we got out of the train and fat little raindrops were beginning to leak out of the sodden grey sky. I hoped this wasn’t a portent for the next four days but I had a nasty feeling that the weather forecast I’d glimpsed in someone’s paper on the train had had large black clouds with lines coming out of them plas­tered all over this part of France. ‘It’s a good thing I bought myself that raincoat in Paris,’ said Cressida, echo­ing my thoughts. ‘I’m probably going to need it.’ She glanced down at the brochure on her lap. ‘I wonder if there are any decent walks near the hotel. It looks really pretty.’

  It was. It was a converted watermill right on the edge of a fair-sized river, built of newly restored and cleaned honey-coloured stone, with red wooden shutters at all the windows. It would lovely to sit in the shade of a large tree at one of the wooden tables dotted around the lawns, sipping a glass of the local wine and watching the gentle river, while fishermen sat in one of the huts on the opposite bank, gossiping and enjoying the occasional Pastis. In the summer. Right now the rain dripping off the leaves meant you’d need a full scuba diving outfit to sit anywhere and any self-respecting fisherman was going to be ensconced in the nearest bar talking about the one that got away.

  But even in winter it was still pretty, if a little damp. We parked the car and made a dash for the door, dodging the puddles spreading over the tarmac. Luckily, despite Cressida’s map reading, we were the first to arrive. Darian had been very insistent that I help everyone settle in. I didn’t believe that twenty-three of the country’s finest sales reps really needed me to babysit them but I wasn’t going to dispute orders, not openly anyway. Perhaps the others had had as much difficulty as we did in finding the two-kilometre chemin rural to the hotel which led off a minor road that led off another minor road. The hotel had included a helpful map. Unfortunately that had neglected to include one of the minor roads.

  The assistant manager who “spoke English” had departed on Friday on maternity leave. The manager had been so overcome at the thought of the money he could make from the thirty or so English eccentrics who were mad enough to come and stay when the hotel was nor
mally closed for the off, off season that he’d persuaded himself he would do as a stand-in English speaker. He was wrong. His English bore little resemblance to any language I’d ever heard before. Knowing that the responsibility for this would somehow be laid at my door, I thanked whatever deity it was up there who had influenced my mother into refusing to give Cressida a billet for the week. I might even be able to get away with bringing her here after all, I thought hopefully, as I enrolled her as chief interpreter. She seemed pleased about it, saying that having something to do would take her mind off things. Putting her to work almost made up for having to share a room with her, not that I disliked her or suspected her of any dubious personal habits, just that with someone else there I wouldn’t be able to be my usual incredibly untidy self.

  Cressida was right about having something to do. Within half an hour she was embroiled in discussions - well, disputes actually - with the manager over those who claimed that they had booked a single room and were being made to share, too bad, there were no more rooms as we’d already discovered, those who insisted that a sit up hip bath didn’t count as a proper bath, the grousing about the lack of blankets, the bolster pillows, and the slight smell of damp which hung over everything despite the brow-mopping level of the heating. Those grumbles were nothing compared to the howling level of complaint that arose when one of the wives, who had come along for a nice holiday in France and was furious to discover that it was raining, glanced at the menu for dinner on the wall and saw there were no vegetarian options. These were demanded but the chef considered himself an artiste of la cuisine du terroir and since vegetarian options don’t feature in the cooking of the Grand Sud-Ouest he had no intention of providing them. Neither was he prepared to do low-cal meals for the two dieters who insisted these were now quite normal in any conference hotel in England. This provoked some impressive Gallic shrugging and muttering about Sacrés rosbifs and other comments on the state of British cooking which Cressida declined to translate. He was in such a state of offended culinary sensibility that it took her quite a quarter of an hour of eyelash fluttering and assuring him that his paté maison proved he was indeed a master of his craft before he calmed down and graciously agreed to provide omelettes and undressed salads for those who were mad enough to want them.

  ‘You’re worth your weight in gold,’ I said to her gratefully once we’d managed to make our escape and were slithering up the stairs towards our bedroom before we could be embroiled in another dispute. ‘I don’t know what I’d have done on my own.’

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ she said, going pink with pleasure. ‘I was so afraid that I was being a real pain in the neck hanging around like this. I’m just glad I can do something useful.’

  Of course I immediately started feeling guilty- I knew I hadn’t been particularly gracious about having her with me all the time, and she was making me feel even worse by being so nice about it. I was going to have to make a bit more of an effort, and not let it show when I got irritated with her indecisiveness over whether she could ring Stefano just now, there was always some good reason why she shouldn’t, or perhaps it would be better if she were to talk to her mother or one of her sisters and get them to ring him instead? There was always a good reason why she shouldn’t do that either. It was now nearly six days since Stefano had burst into my office vowing vengeance on James and so far all he had to go on was my assurance that James had had no part in it. I couldn’t see my word satisfying the patience of a volatile Italian for long. It hadn’t, had it? Look at the detectives. But if Cressida continued making excuses to avoid speaking to her husband I wondered how long it would be before he cracked completely, especially if that journalist went on trying to embroider a completely ficti­tious story. I looked at Cressida as she flung herself on her bed and lay down with a sigh of relief, and wondered exactly what had gone on.

  There had to be more than just a desire to find herself and be her own person. From what I could see Cressida didn’t particularly mind not being her own person, she was essentially a pliant personality and quite happy most of the time if someone else led the way. So what were these annoyingly close-mouthed references to Stefano’s ‘demands’ about? My irrepressible imagin­ation had already created several unlikely scenarios, but I couldn’t believe that the ‘unreasonable demands’ were of the type my great-grandmother would have referred to in a hushed voice when she was safely alone among her married female friends. Maybe our sharing a room would be a bonus after all, there’s nothing like an after lights out chat for extracting confidences. I began to unpack and, out of contrition for my former snappishness, allowed her to have three of the five coat hangers.

  ‘Do you think I should change into this for dinner?’ asked Cressida, holding up a lilac dress made of jersey so fluid and fine it seemed to drip through her fingers like water.

  I thought of how she’d looked in it when she’d bought it yesterday, the material clinging to and flattering every curve, and shook my head decisively. ‘No.’

  Her face fell. ‘Yes, I suppose I have put on a bit of weight recently. I can’t think why, I haven’t been eating much.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that! Half the wives are in a bad enough mood already due to being miles from any decent shops, not to mention vegetarian Mrs Bayliss and her gripes. The last thing they need is you walking in and knocking the spots off the lot of them. I know it’s not possible for you to look plain but can’t you choose something that makes you a bit less stunning?’

  She giggled. ‘Well, you don’t exactly belong with your head in a paper bag yourself, and I can’t see you bringing out the sackcloth and ashes.’

  I sighed. ‘I might not be in the mirror-cracking league, but whichever one I’m in no one’s tongue hangs out when I go past. And if you wear that several will, I can promise you. That dress is strictly X-certificate.’ I made a pretence of arranging the contents of my make up bag - for the first time in its existence - and said casually, ‘It’s the sort of thing you’d put on if you wanted to get back with someone. No man could resist it.’

  There was silence and I began to wonder if I’d put my extra large foot in it. Then she said softly, with a catch in her voice, ‘Yes, Stefano would love it,’ and laid it down gently on the bed. I felt like a real heel when I saw the brightness of her eyes but perhaps it was no bad thing if she was reminded from time to time just how much she was missing him. She was very quiet as she put her hair in a single thick pigtail and got out a suede skirt and a russet-coloured jumper that did nothing to disguise the fact that she was a thousand times prettier than it was fair for anyone to be, but at least she didn’t look as if she was actively on the prowl.

  I could feel the atmosphere simmering with discontent as soon as we set foot downstairs. Everybody was tired after a long journey and wanted a drink and then dinner. The beer drinkers were put out because the lager was thin European pigswill - actually the term they used was considerably ruder - and the local dry white wine didn’t go down well with those who fancied a glass of German Riesling. And the chef, who was still sulking over being asked by culinary barbarians to be a traitor to his art, had tossed his blow dried locks and declared that the work involved in taking the crispy bacon lardons out of his salade composée for the vegetarians meant that he was going to have to put back the serving of dinner by at least an hour if not more. The bar didn’t sell crisps or peanuts. The shopping contin­gent had discovered that most of the shops in the local town were closed on a Monday and if they wanted to do any serious spending of money tomorrow they’d have to go to Bordeaux.

  ‘As if I’d dare go on any road where there are French drivers,’ sniffed one. ‘You can’t tell what side they’re going to be on.’

  Only the sales director was full of vim, vigour and in a generally good mood as he had every reason to be. He’d only travelled for about an hour, he’d watched a splendid rugby match yesterday and his team had won. He’d detoured via a local château on the way and was already halfway down a bottle of thei
r perky little red while he made up his mind whether it would be worth buying a case or two to take back to England. I despatched Cressida to the kitchen to go and flirt with the chef and see if she could persuade him to hurry up, and after arming myself with a large glass of wine did my duty and went and joined several stroppy-looking men and women who were huddled ostentatiously around the large stone fireplace, holding out their hands to the blaze.

  ‘Whose flaming idea was it to come to bloody France?’ asked one of the disappointed beer drinkers. I kept discreetly quiet, fearing lynching. ‘Blooming stupid if you ask me. We’d have been better off in Torquay like we planned originally. At least you’d have been able to get something decent to drink.’

  ‘And it’s not what I’d call cosy either,’ said a sharp-­nosed woman. ‘All these stone floors. You’d think they could afford a decent bit of carpet at least.’

  ‘I think they have the stone floors to keep the place cool in the summer,’ I explained.

  ‘But it isn’t the bleeding summer, is it? Unless we’ve gone to the South Pole by accident,’ said another, chor­tling loudly at his own wit. Someone had to, no one else was.

  Cressida returned with the welcome news that Alexandre had graciously conceded that perhaps he could have dinner ready in half an hour, providing that no one else made unreasonable requests that disturbed the flow of his creativity.

  ‘Alexandre?’ I queried with raised eyebrows. ‘Quick worker, aren’t you? He’ll be naming a dessert in your honour soon.’

  Cressida grinned. ‘We’re having it for lunch tomorrow,’ The sales director had at last wrested his attention from sampling Château Gonzan for long enough to realise that his troops were becoming seriously discontented and began to devote himself to jollying everyone up. Since he hadn’t risen to be head of sales without a talent for getting on people’s right side he did it pretty well. He radiated bonhomie and insisted that everyone had another drink. After all, this was the first evening, we were all entitled to treat it like a holiday, we could work tomorrow (even if we had to do it through crippling hangovers). As a final mood sweetener he announced the company would pick up the whole of the bar tab tonight. Twenty-three sales reps set about getting drunk with a vengeance.