Escape to the Riviera

by Jules Wake

  Nothing. ‘You alright?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Jade, clearly bursting with some intelligence. ‘I need to go to the loo.’ She jumped up and almost ran to the toilets at the back of the room.

  Angela shook her head. ‘I think Eliza’s got a new boyfriend. It’ll be some juicy bit of gossip.’

  ‘Doesn’t Eliza have a new boyfriend every week?’ asked Carrie.

  ‘I’ve lost track. To be honest, I don’t pay that much attention. Just nod. I’ve learned that if I do show much interest I’m doing the wrong thing and if I don’t show any, I’m still in the wrong. It’s best to keep things vague, not offer an opinion.’ Angela shrugged. ‘So far the strategy’s working.’ Angela let out a long-suffering sigh. ‘I think I’m doing it right. It’s a shame they don’t come with manuals.’

  ‘Hey, you’re doing a great job. She’s a pain in the arse but she’s supposed to be. Perfectly normal and she has her good points.’

  ‘Remind me of one. Three days we’ve been here and her room is trashed already. I was mortified when the maid turned up yesterday. I would have made her tidy up.’

  Carrie giggled. ‘That’s the whole point of having a maid. To do that for you.’

  ‘Well, she’d better not get used to it. Marisa had folded all her clothes, put them away in drawers and unpacked the rest of her things.’

  ‘I suspect it was because she didn’t have anything else to do and felt guilty being paid.’

  Marisa, the maid, appeared the day before to change the sheets on the beds, provide fresh towels and to clean up as well as to check on the provision situation in the fridge. A diminutive whirl of energy, she’d roared up the drive in a very battered Peugeot, bounded into the house with a pile of white, pillowy towels nearly as tall as she was and carrying several bulging carrier bags. Introducing herself in perfect but very heavily accented English, she proceeded to whip through every room at an astonishing pace, gathering towels and sheets, to Angela’s horror.

  ‘We only slept in the beds two nights and she changed them. We’re very spoilt,’ said Angela.

  ‘I love being spoiled,’ said Jade, returning to the table. ‘Can I ask you a question, Auntie Carrie?’

  Carrie scrunched her face up. ‘Like what?’

  ‘So you and Richard Maddox. Are you really Carrie Maddox, then?’

  Carrie closed her eyes, she didn’t want to talk about this. ‘Officially yes.’

  ‘What, you got properly married, in a church and everything?’

  ‘Register office.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘June 28th,’ said Carrie, with a long-suffering sigh, hoping it might stall this line of questioning.

  Thankfully the waiter arrived, bearing three plates.

  ‘Phone away, please.’ Angela nodded at Jade, who ducked down as if to put it in her bag under the table but Carrie caught her sliding it under her thigh on the chair. Like every other teen, totally attached to her phone. Rather sobering to see how dependent they all were on them.

  ‘Jade, put the phone away.’

  With a sulky pout that she’d been caught, Jade slid it back under her leg. Carrie raised an eyebrow but Jade stared back with a defiant glint in her eye.

  Jade wasn’t her daughter. She let it go. She was Angela’s problem and sometimes it was best to pick your battles. Going head to head over a phone was the equivalent of a declaration of all-out war. Not worth the aggravation.

  Carrie and Angela chatted together over dinner, while Jade stared off into space in between checking her lap was still there.

  ‘Jade,’ Angela, tapped her plate with her knife, ‘if you get that phone out once more, I will take it away.’

  ‘You can’t, it’s my phone.’ Jade clutched it protectively to her chest and Carrie was hard pressed not to laugh.

  ‘I can and I will if I have to. I’ve told you umpteem times. No phones at the dinner table.’

  ‘This is lunch.’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. Now put it away before I get cross. Honestly, what is so important that you have to keep checking it.’

  ‘Nothing.’ This time Jade put her phone in her bag but as she ducked her head, Carrie caught a sly smile on her face. Carrie was very glad she wasn’t her daughter. She was definitely up to no good. No doubt plotting something with her girlfriends as there was little she could do out here. She didn’t know anyone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The smash of glass on tiled floor startled Carrie as she lay by the pool the following morning and she jumped up to go and help. Angela’s grip was precarious at the best of times and at home there were various rubber grips and tools designed to help remove the lids from jars and tins.

  Gathering up tiny chunks of broken glass was often beyond her twisted fingers, although it didn’t stop her trying. Carrie admired her fortitude but found it equally frustrating because inevitably Angela would cut herself.

  Picking up her pace, she hurried into the kitchen to help the clean-up operation.

  ‘How could you?’ Every scrap of colour had leeched out of Angela’s face as she stood there, facing her daughter, hackles raised like a dog about to leap in to the fray. Carrie stopped dead, not wanting to intrude but as she arrived both Angela and Jade turned towards twin expressions of guilt and horror on their faces.

  At Angela’s feet lay a smashed jar of olives that she’d made no attempt to tidy up.

  ‘I was trying to help. You’re always going on that people should talk face to face about things. Not rely on texting and stuff,’ said Jade defiantly.

  ‘This is totally different. And you know it. Plus, you certainly didn’t have to take it this far and invite him here,’ said Angela, her face taut with fury, slipping a sidelong glance at Carrie.

  Jade didn’t answer, looking stony-faced at the floor.

  It sounded like one of those arguments about Jade’s dad. Periodically Jade would start up, about wanting to meet her father. Although Carrie would rather have left them to it, she needed to tidy up the mess. She ducked her head and grabbed a roll of kitchen towel.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Carrie, leave it,’ snapped Angela. ‘I don’t need you tiptoeing around me.’ She glared at her daughter and Carrie. ‘Jade can do it after she’s told you what she’s done.’ Angela folded her arms, uncharacte‌ristically militant.

  Jade peeped up at Carrie from under her brows, head ducked down, as defensive as a turtle about to tuck back into its shell.

  ‘It’s fine, I’ll leave you guys to it.’ Carrie held up her hands in surrender and backed out.

  ‘Jade!’ Angela snapped. Carrie didn’t think she’d ever seen her sister quite this cross. What on earth had Jade done?

  Jade, every bit the naughty child, couldn’t meet Carrie’s gaze. She swallowed hard and tears began to well up in her eyes. ‘I thought … it would be nice … that if you saw him … you.’

  ‘I saw him?’ Why would she want to see Jade’s father? She’d met Clive many years ago. He was considerably older than her.

  ‘She’s only invited Richard Maddox here for dinner. Tonight.’ Exasperation rolled off Angela in waves, as she bent to start picking up the debris from the floor. ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘You did what?’ There was a rushing in her ears.

  ‘I invited him. For dinner.’ Jade lifted her chin and met her aunt’s eyes.

  Carrie repeated the words as if that might make sense of them. ‘You’ve invited Richard Maddox. Here. For dinner.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jade warily but without any discernible sense of shame.

  ‘And what? He said yes?’ Sarcasm permeated every syllable of Carrie’s words. She could strangle her niece. What a bloody stupid thing to do, although Richard Maddox probably received thousands of far more salacious invitations on a daily basis. It was highly doubtful he’d even noticed Jade’s amongst his fan mail.

  ‘Actually he did. Said he’d be delighted. He’s coming at seven-thirty.’

  ‘What!’ screeched A
ngela frantically, looking around the kitchen. ‘You didn’t tell me that. Seven-thirty, tonight? Here for dinner?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jade spoke with a touch of pride. ‘I sent him the address.’

  In a daze, Carrie sank into the nearest kitchen chair, trying to get her head straight. This couldn’t be happening.

  ‘You invited Richard for dinner and he’s agreed?’ Carrie lay her head on the table, wanting to pound it with her fists. ‘That’s … ridiculous.’

  Jade smirked.

  ‘What the hell did you say to him that made him agree?’

  And how come she managed it so bloody easily? Talk about galling. Carrie had done weeks of research on the internet trying to track down his sodding agent or management company.

  Jade tilted her head with a touch of cockiness. ‘I tweeted him. Twitter. Said I had information about the significance of 28th June and for him to DM me.’

  Bloody hell, the little toad had tucked that fact away quicker than a hamster hunting down the last sunflower seed in captivity. A vision of her and Richard laughing and kissing on the steps of Kensington and Chelsea Register office after they’d come out of the ceremony ran through her head. With a pang, she wondered where he’d been on their last few anniversaries.

  ‘You asked him to direct message you? And he did?’

  ‘Yeah, straight away. I was gobsmacked, to be honest.’ Jade gave a modest shrug, as if to be congratulated on her cleverness. ‘I wasn’t sure he would.’

  ‘Bloody brilliant!’ snarled Carrie.

  ‘Well, I thought it was.’ Jade folded her arms.

  Carrie shook her head. ‘What did you say?’ She almost didn’t want to know. Could this get any worse?

  ‘I told him who I was, that we’d seen him in Ramatuelle and that you were my aunt and that he should come and have dinner. He said it sounded a great idea.’

  Carrie glared at her niece, relaxing a touch. ‘He agreed to come have dinner with someone who could be anyone. I don’t think so.’ She could breathe easy again. ‘Someone’s having you on.’ Of course it was a wind-up. Richard’s Twitter account was doubtless managed by some PR person or some digital agency. They were used to this sort of thing.

  ‘I’m not stupid.’ Jade turned her nose up and rolled her eyes. ‘I asked him for proof that he knew you.’

  Carrie sighed, a horrible sense of foreboding weighing over her. ‘And what did he say to that?’ She crossed her fingers behind her back.

  ‘You’ve got long curly hair that’s always in your face,’ Jade pulled a face, as if less than impressed, ‘and your eyes are sometimes hazel and sometimes green, depending on your mood, but when you’re cross there’s a little vertical frown line that appears right in between your eyebrows.’

  Carrie froze, her stomach turning inside out.

  Shit. It really was Richard.

  God, he used to tease her. She remembered him stroking the little line with his index finger, coaxing her back into humour. He called it her cross patch. Which had been bloody annoying as half the time it was him doing something silly or crazy that had put it there in the first place. It was impossible to stay cross with him for long, though. There was never time. There was always so much going on, cramming every minute with living, that there wasn’t time to waste being cross. They’d lived life at a breakneck pace, desperate to sample all the good things as quickly as possible.

  Queuing for cheap seats, seeking out hole-in-the-wall dives, hosting experimental theatre, rehearsing themselves, auditioning, performing, cycling, pell-mell and crazy, through London in a constant, fun-filled battle against the clock.

  The memories spawned another and another until she thought her head would explode with all the poignant images cramming their way in.

  ‘So, you did what, invited him here?’ Carrie blinked, gnawing at her lip, ‘What exactly did he say?’

  ‘That he’d be delighted to accept the invitation and he was very much looking forward to meeting me and seeing you again.’

  ‘That’s it. Nothing else.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Seven-thirty.’

  Richard was coming here. Tonight.

  Carrie rolled her eyes at Angela, who gave a weak shrug.

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  ‘I thought it would be romantic. Meeting again. You’re still married so you must still like him. And he hasn’t divorced you, so he must still like you.’

  Carrie exhaled noisily, wondering at the simplicity of Jade’s thinking. That’s what had got her and Richard into this mess in the first place. ‘And it never crossed your mind that there might be other reasons for us never getting round to divorcing, like the publicity that it would cause. That it might damage his career. That we were perfectly happy not having anything to do with each other.’

  Jade shook her head. Although why Carrie even bothered, she didn’t know. Jade had never yet admitted to being wrong.

  ‘I’m happy to cook something,’ volunteered Angela, as if that would help break the stalemate.

  God give her strength. ‘He’s not coming. Jade’s going to have to cancel him.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jade petulantly.

  ‘Because I don’t want to see him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Angela held her gaze.

  ‘Because …’ and suddenly she couldn’t think of one good reason.

  She stalked out of the kitchen and up to her bedroom.

  Leaning on the balustrade, looking out to the sea, she half-laughed to herself, trying to imagine Richard’s reaction to a text from Jade. Why had he agreed to come? What would he have thought? The whole evening had disaster written all over it in screaming capitals. It would be better to cancel him. Tell him not to come. Except, would that look like she cared one way or the other?

  It would be weird seeing him again after all this time. She’d changed so much; he was certainly bound to have done.

  Dragging the wicker chair to the front of the balcony, her knees touching the railings, she sat down, her thoughts pushed and pulled by insistent memories that refused to be shut out.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a tentative knock.

  ‘Yes.’

  Jade peered around the door. ‘Can I come in?’

  Her eyes were suspiciously bright, although her mouth held a touch of defiance tinged with doubt. Carrie knew the look well. It was that crisis of confidence when Jade’s absolute certainty that she’d done the right thing suddenly came crashing down.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Jade, loitering in the doorway.

  ‘I’ll live,’ said Carrie, her jaw tightening. Her fury had died away, replaced with dull acceptance and a burgeoning curiosity.

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought it was dead romantic and I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t want to see him again. I mean, he’s one of the most gorgeous men on the planet and he’s your husband.’

  Oh to be a teenager again.

  ‘I realise now, it’s probably awkward. Rather like, that my mate fancies you but she’s too scared to say anything.’

  Carrie sighed. That hadn’t even occurred to her. She’d need to make it clear to Richard that this had all been Jade’s hair-brained idea. In some ways Jade was still so young.

  ‘Well you can apologise to him yourself. That’s your penance. I want you to explain that what you did was without my permission or my knowledge.’

  Jade swallowed. ‘I will,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I am really sorry. Do you think he’ll be super-mad too, when he realises that you didn’t invite him?’

  ‘I suspect he already knows that, which makes me cross with him. He’s taken advantage of the situation. He shouldn’t have responded to you and made arrangements, knowing that you were a minor.’

  Which confused the hell out of her. Why on earth had Richard agreed to come? He had the whole of the Riviera jet set to play with, why would he want to come and slum it with them?

  Jade’s bottom lip quivered. ‘I am really sorry.’

>   ‘You’ve sort of done me a favour,’ at the brightening of Jade’s expression, she added, ‘but don’t get carried away. I’m still furious with you. You should know better. Interfering like this. I’m resigned to seeing Richard tonight and maybe it is a good idea to face him and get it over and done with, but I’d rather have done it my way than been forced into it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Hmph,’ grunted Carrie, crossing her legs and leaning back into the chair. ‘If you ever pull a stunt like this again, I’ll post that picture of you on Facebook when you were five with the pudding-bowl haircut.’

  Jade gave a ghost of a smile. ‘I promise I won’t. I am really, really sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘Come here,’ Carrie shifted in her seat, allowing Jade to squeeze in next to her. Carrie put her arm around her shoulders and pulled her niece in to her.

  ‘What’s he like?’ Jade asked quietly.

  ‘Richard?’ Carrie stilled. ‘You don’t remember, but when you were little he was around quite a lot. He came to your seventh birthday party. He’s likely to have changed since I knew him, but then,’ she smiled, ‘he was brilliant fun. Full of energy, get up and go. Life was one big adventure and we weren’t missing out on any of it.’ They’d been so impulsive and ready to embrace all life had to offer. ‘I remember, on the spur of the moment a friend of ours inviting us to see a play he was doing at the Fringe in Edinburgh. We got on the next train, even though the city’s notorious for being ‘no room at the inn’ that week,’ Carrie laughed. ‘And the director invited us to stay at his parents’ place, which turned out to be a proper Scottish castle with turrets and everything.’ They’d stayed for a week, with Richard charming the Laird and his wife. ‘I even tried fly-fishing.’ Carrie shook her head. ‘We were always doing things like that. We lived in a tiny flat in Brixton. A real dump, not that it bothered us. It was handy for the Tube and there was always a party to go to, or friends kipping over.

  ‘Is he as good looking as all the pictures?’

  Carrie wanted to say no. That he bore a passing resemblance to the Hunchback of Notre Dame when he woke in the mornings, was as hairy as a gorilla and had webbed feet as well as belched and farted like a trooper. It would have been good to tell her impressionable niece that film stars weren’t God-given handsome in real life, that their looks were attributable to hours in make-up and their svelte figures achieved with the help of personal trainers, nutritionists and photo-shopping.