Not Quite Nice (17 page)

‘
The
Heinz?’ asked Faith. ‘Heinz of Pennsylvania?’

Carol shrugged.

‘How did I not know that?’ said Zoe.

Brian smiled, and bent low over his chopping board.

‘You don’t have children do you, Carol,’ asked Faith.

Carol shuddered. ‘Allergic, I’m afraid.’

David took a deep breath.

‘You cannot be allergic to children, Carol,’ he said. ‘You’re just not adult enough to take on the responsibility.’

Carol rolled her eyes and said flatly: ‘Joke!’

‘That’s a lovely painting on the wall, Theresa,’ said Faith out of nowhere.

‘My mother left it to me,’ she said. ‘It’s a Dufy.’

‘It’s sweet,’ said Faith.

‘Do you know, Theresa,’ William called across the kitchen, ‘we come here week after week, and I have never yet asked you where you found this fabulous glass table?’

‘I thought I’d told you weeks ago,’ yelled Theresa. ‘I adore it. It was from that furniture cave down near the port.’

‘The one near the flea market?’ asked William.

‘You must go there,’ said Theresa, as she helped Jessica pour her mixture into the blender. ‘It’s a treasure house.’

‘Didn’t you know? It’s been shut down,’ said William.

‘No?’ said Theresa, scraping the last pieces into the jug.

‘Oh yes,’ replied William. ‘The owner was a crook.’

Theresa couldn’t help catching eyes with Benjamin, who looked immediately at the floor.

‘My glass is empty,’ he said, adjusting his bow tie. ‘Carol, dear, be a poppet and pass me the red.’

When Benjamin looked up again Theresa caught the fleeting glance, which was more of a glare, ordering her to drop the subject of both the table and the furniture cave instantly.

Theresa pressed the button on the blender, successfully drowning out any further opportunity at conversation for anybody in the room.

Once they had all pulverised their cooked ingredients, they stood round the table pouring the finished product into jars to take home for later, while Theresa served up a large tureen of the soup, so that they could all gather round and eat it.

Just as the last bowl had been filled with steaming green soup and they all reached out for a spoonful of cream and a sprinkle of paprika and piment d’Espelette, there was a hammering on Theresa’s front door.

‘Oh no,’ murmured Theresa, immediately imagining Sian standing at the other side of the door with a raised axe.

Ted and Carol obviously thought the same thing, for he ducked down under the table, while she rose from her seat and took a few steps towards the door, before Theresa stopped her.

‘Don’t worry, Carol,’ she said. ‘This time I can handle it.’

The hammering continued.

‘Calm down,’ said Theresa, rubbing her hands down her apron, before reaching for the latch.

She took a deep breath and opened up.

Standing on the step was a gendarme.

‘
Je cherche
Madame Connor,’ he said. ‘
Elle est ici?
’

Sally’s face blanched as, hearing her name, she rose and moved slowly towards the open door.

‘I’m Sally Connor.’ She spoke to the policeman in French. ‘Is there anything wrong?’

The policeman burst out laughing and stepped aside.

From behind him stepped a tramp – a tall man with long matted hair, a straggling beard and ragged clothing. From where she stood Sally could smell him. It was not pleasant.

‘Eez zat ’er?’ said the gendarme to the tramp, who nodded. He turned back to Sally and said: ‘Madame Connor,
je vous presente un cadeau
. I ’ave a present for you.’

The tramp smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. He rushed towards the open door, as Sally staggered away from him.

‘Thank God’ said the tramp, in perfect English. ‘I’ve been searching for you for ever.’ He put out his arms and took another step towards Sally, who now stood still, agog, with her mouth open in surprise.

‘Mum? It’s me. Tom.’

When the gendarme had left and Sally had scooped up her son and taken him away home, the Cookery Club meeting continued.

No one spoke for a considerable time. They stood staring at each other, pop-eyed.

Inevitably it was Zoe who broke the ice.

‘I’ve always said there are two mistakes no one ever admits to, and one is having had children.’

There was a long pause, till Jessica asked what the second was.

Zoe gave an insouciant shrug. ‘Having a sex-change operation, of course.’

‘Do you really think he’s the burglar?’ said Carol briskly.

‘In my humble opinion thieving bastards are lower than a snake’s belly,’ growled Ted.

‘Scum of the earth,’ said David.

‘Piece of shit,’ said Brian.

‘He certainly smelled like a sewer,’ said Zoe, laughing. ‘It is funny really when you think how pristine Sally always is.’

‘I’m sure there’s a good reason behind it all,’ said Theresa, as she poured wine into every glass. ‘
Bon appétit, mes amis
.’

As they quietly supped they all heard footsteps again, coming up the path.

Everyone held their breath, each imagining it would be Sally back with explanations.

There was a sharp rap on the door.

‘Uh oh!’ Ted winced, knowing that that was not Sally’s knock. ‘Please not chapter two.’

‘But of which problem?’ Theresa wiped her mouth and stood, ready for the fray.

‘Let me,’ said Brian, moving briskly towards the door and opening it. ‘Hello,’ he said, gruffly. ‘Can I help you?’

Everyone knew from his tone that, whoever stood behind the door, it was no one he knew. Theresa came up beside him and peered out into the dark, at the outline of a person in the gloom.

‘For goodness’ sake, Mother,’ snapped the woman in the shadows of the doorstep. ‘It’s me. Imogen. The children are tired and hungry, would you kindly get this man out of the way so that we can come in?’

WATERCRESS SOUP

Ingredients

1 small onion – chopped

Bunch watercress – stalks removed

Handful of spinach

Butter

Salt and pepper

Ice

Cream or crème fraiche

Paprika and/or piment d’Espelette

Method

Gently fry the onion in the butter till translucent.

Bring up the heat and add the watercress and spinach and cook till it wilts.

Add 2 cups of boiling water, salt and pepper and boil for a couple of minutes.

Pour mixture into bowl containing ice cubes to stop cooking and retain green colour

Put into a liquidiser and whizz till smooth

Reheat in saucepan, season to taste and serve.

Put a daub of cream on top and sprinkle with paprika or piment d’Espelette.

15

Sally sat outside the bathroom, firing questions at Tom while he took a long shower.

‘I don’t understand why you didn’t ring me or email me?’

‘I told you, Mum, I was robbed. I kept in touch with you until I couldn’t. I managed to get all the way from Jaipur to Stuttgart, on the train, without a mishap. I came safely through Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Romania, sometimes on real rattle-buckets and cattle-trucks. Then I fell asleep on a fancy commuter train from Germany to Zurich and while I was snoring in the warmth some bastard ran off with my case.’

‘But you could still have phoned me, Tom.’

‘Well, yes, I could have done
then
, but I wanted it to be a surprise.’

Sally could hear him splashing about, before he turned the shower taps off.

‘I was so looking forward to seeing you. How was I to know I’d get mugged in Genoa?’

‘Mugged?’

‘I was waiting at some horrid little station under the principal terminus, trying to get a late local train to Ventimiglia and a vile gang of kids held a knife to me while they took my coat, my wallet, my trainers, my phone, my tickets, everything and scarpered. Your address, your phone number, your email, it was all on that phone.’

‘Have you got enough towels?’ Sally asked, pulling another one from the linen cupboard behind her and fluffing it up. ‘I still don’t understand how you ended up here, swearing at people, Tom? It’s just not like you to be abusive.’

‘I wasn’t swearing.’

‘You were. Everyone heard you. It was the talk of the town.’

‘I was calling your name.’

Sally hesitated before replying. Was her son all right in the head, after his tribulations?

‘Work it out,’ he yelled through the door. ‘The policeman explained it to me. It’s very rude apparently. But I don’t speak French, so I don’t know.’

‘Sally? Sally? Sally?’ repeated Sally.

‘I don’t call you Sally. You’re my mum.’

‘You were calling out “mum”?’ Sally tried out saying the word to herself a few times.

‘Nooooo,’ said Tom. ‘I was yelling Madame Connor. Slowly, with a pause. Madame. Connor. I just wanted someone to say “Oh yes, I know her; she lives over there or up the road.”’

‘Madame Connor? Madame Connor?’ repeated Sally.

Then it dawned on her. The French shoppers had thought Tom was saying Connard, or even Con, both of which were pretty racy words, certainly not spoken in polite society or yelled at women coming out of shops. The ladies must have thought he was calling them Lady Motherfucker, Mrs C--t! It had never entered Sally’s mind before, but in France her name was a liability. She couldn’t help but laugh.

‘Oh, Lord, Tom. Oh dear!’

‘Anyway, I tried a train without a ticket and was chucked off at San Remo, and walked along the coast from there, sleeping in doorways, and I got here. People threw me pennies and some gave me bits of bread and cups of coffee. Then when I finally reached Nice, I realised that, although I knew you lived just outside the city, I had no idea in which town or village. I thought it might have a B or V, but so do lots of places, and there are so many with a Sur-Mer tacked on. The only thing I knew for certain was that from your window you could see the sea.’

Sally could hear the scissors chopping. He must be cutting his beard off.

‘So I went to every little Sur-Mer town radiating out from Nice and looked for a likely place, calling out your name, and looking through windows.’

‘Poor darling,’ said Sally. ‘So how long have you been so near me, without my knowing?’

‘About four weeks.’

‘Four weeks!’ Sally felt her heart stab, thinking of how many times they might have been a few hundred yards away from one another, round a corner, and not known it.

The door opened and the real, recognisable Tom stood before her. Wrapped up in Sally’s white towelling robe, his beard and hair roughly chopped, he looked so sweet and lost.

‘I’m going to take you up to the barber’s in the morning. Then we’ll go into Nice and get you a set of clothes,’ said Sally. ‘But now let’s go downstairs and I’ll make you a square meal, while you tell me everything.’ She laughed and slipped her arm round his waist. ‘You know, Tom, now that I think about it, if you’d called out Sally they’d have thought you were up to no good too. It means salted, or, depending on the word that comes next, exactly what you were when you arrived at Theresa’s – dirty!’

The Cookery Club meeting had dispersed pretty quickly after the arrival of Imogen.

Never had a roomful of people slurped up a bowl of soup and tossed down a glass of wine with such speed.

When the door slammed after Zoe, always the last to go, Brian slipped quietly into his room.

‘Who is
that
?’ hissed Imogen. ‘You didn’t tell me you’d taken a lover.’

Theresa made a sshh sound. ‘If you must know, he’s my lodger. His rent brings in a bit of money.’

‘Fine,’ said Imogen, watching the children tearing at bits of bread and cheese left on the table. ‘So where are our rooms?’

Theresa was at a loss.

‘I had no idea you were coming, Imogen, or I’d have got something sorted.’

‘I phoned ahead from Gatwick. You’ve had all evening. If you weren’t so busy carousing with your friends.’

Theresa looked at the red flashing light on the answering machine. Well, there was that query answered. The message must have been from Imogen.

‘For goodness’ sake, you’re always inviting me here, Mother. It’s Easter. Last time we spoke you said “Come at Easter”. So here we are!’

‘But I . . .’

Theresa didn’t know how to tell Imogen that, apart from Brian’s room, there was only her bedroom and it had only one bed. If she’d had warning at least she could have got some little put-me-ups for the kids.