Mwah-Mwah Page 8

  The sun got really warm during the afternoon. Matthilde and Michel still weren’t back and I wondered rather unkindly whether Matthilde might be getting rather hot in her polo neck and jacket and jodphurs – which would jolly well serve her right.

  At last I heard the approach of horses’ hoofs at around four. Michel arrived first at a canter. I watched as he walked his horse slowly round the meadow. He looked pretty pleased with himself and I assumed they’d had a race. Matthilde came trotting up a few minutes later looking really hot and cross and Michel shouted something to her and roared with laughter. She slid down from her horse and threw the reins to Quasimodo and, without saying a word, went straight upstairs for a bath.

  We’d finished pruning for the day and I went and watched as Michel and Quasimodo rubbed down the horses. It was a balmy kind of evening and it felt good just sitting there watching. At this time at home I’d normally be turning on the television, zapping through the channels, trying to find something worth watching. But that evening just doing nothing seemed OK.

  Over dinner Monsieur de Lafitte turned to me and said that it was the last day of the hunt tomorrow, then his eyebrows bristled and he added abruptly, ‘But you are British, so you will not come.’

  Madame de Lafitte broke in, saying, ‘Non, Gaspard, ’Annah viendra avec moi.’ She turned to me, adding, ‘We will follow with ze pique-nique.’

  I looked from one to the other, caught between the fact that I should refuse to attend on principle, and curiosity about this ancient rite. I didn’t desperately want to be left at home again with nothing to do. But I felt a bit anxious about how we were going to follow. Maybe they had other horses, ones I hadn’t seen yet. I prayed they’d be really small and quiet and would follow nice and slowly.

  Madame de Lafitte patted my hand quite kindly. ‘We will not go near ze kill. Anyway, zey do not very often find anything to kill.’

  I tried to put the hunt to the back of my mind. I kept thinking of how I was going to bring out the tart I’d made myself – well, sort of – for dessert. They seemed to take ages over the cheese. But at last Matthilde got up and started stacking the plates.

  ‘No, wait!’ I said and came out with the phrase I had been practising all afternoon. ‘Nous avons dessert.’

  ‘Ah-hah,’ said old Oncle Charles and he unfolded his napkin again and made a big show of looking expectant.

  I went to the pantry and returned with the tart. I placed it in the centre of the table. Madame de Lafitte came out with a great stream of French. Matthilde tried not to look impressed but I could see she was. Monsieur de Lafitte wanted to know where the strawberries had come from. Michel said something in which I heard the words: ‘ ’Annah et moi. Ce matin.’ And I felt myself go hot and goose-pimply all over remembering the way he fed me that strawberry.

  Matthilde gave him a hard look and then glared at the tart. She accepted ‘un tout petit peu’ and ate it in tiny forkfuls as if it was going to poison her.

  The tart seemed to improve my rating somewhat with the others. Even Monsieur de Lafitte appeared to soften his attitude to me. Michel had bagged the biggest slice because he insisted he’d picked most of the strawberries. As he dug his fork into it, his mobile rang. Michel glanced down at it and then exclaimed, ‘C’est Maman.’

  These words produced an instant and dramatic change around the table. They all fell silent. Monsieur de Lafitte got to his feet.

  Madame de Lafitte whispered, ‘Reponds …’

  Michel got up slowly and walked away from the table. I heard him say, ‘Oui, Maman. Ouaytoo?’

  If a serial killer had walked into the room touting a gun, you couldn’t have felt more tension in the air. I watched Michel close his mobile as if in slow motion and turn back to the others.

  ‘Elle va bien. Ellevootransmaydaybeesoo.’

  This seemed a pretty short conversation for a mother.

  Suddenly everyone was talking at once. Monsieur de Lafitte went and dialled a number on the house phone. Madame de Lafitte sank back into her chair and wiped tears from her eyes. Michel started dialling another number on his mobile.

  Matthilde picked up a couple of dishes and signalled to me to follow her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I whispered once we were in the kitchen.

  ‘Eez Michel’s mother,’ she whispered back. ‘She ’as left ’eez father. They no know where she eez.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. No wonder there had been so much drama. ‘But that’s awful.’

  Matthilde tossed her hair. ‘She will come back. Eez not the first time.’

  ‘Really?’

  Wow. So, I was right about French people. I had a sudden flashback of Marie-Christine with that man in the café – French women seemed to be worse than the men!

  When I went back to clear the table, the others had all gone into the sitting room. The plate with Michel’s portion of tart lay on the table with his fork beside it. He’d disappeared upstairs. He hadn’t even touched it.

  I went to my room after that feeling really peed off. There I was making a really big effort – I mean even cooking. And what happens – another drama. It was like living in a perpetual French film – all those big eyes and exaggerated gestures – and without subtitles. What I needed right now was a really nice normal girly chat. In a civilised language for once – like English. So I relented and called up Jess.

  ‘Hi!’ she answered right away.

  ‘You haven’t called in ages,’ I said.

  ‘Nor have you.’

  ‘It costs a fortune from France,’ I replied.

  She made out that this was a feeble excuse.

  ‘Anyway, you haven’t called me.’

  ‘I texted you.’

  ‘I texted back.’

  She was being really off with me. She was obviously feeling guilty about Mark and this was her way of covering up. So I came straight out with it:

  ‘Angie said you and Mark left together the other night.’

  ‘So?’ she replied.

  ‘So? Are you going out together?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘You can tell me. I don’t care any more,’ I prompted.

  ‘I thought you were really keen on him.’

  ‘No. Not any more.’

  ‘So what’s changed?’

  I was about to blurt out to Jess about Michel. Not that there was much to tell. I mean the offering of one very small and not terribly ripe strawberry hardly amounts to a relationship. But something stopped me.

  ‘I don’t know. Just changed my mind, I guess. He’s a bit young.’

  ‘He’s the same age as us.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, if you must know. Don’t break your heart over it. His dad picked him up so I got a lift home. We live in the same direction.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said maybe we should meet up some time and he took my number.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He hasn’t phoned.’

  I tried to suppress a tiny surge of triumph. I know I shouldn’t feel like this. But it was a relief to know that someone else’s love life was as uneventful as mine.

  After that we had a good old goss in spite of the cost of the call.

  I rang off wondering what I had been fussing about. You could forget Mark. Let him call her up, she was welcome to him. It was as if the whole Mark episode had been recorded over. I’d moved on. It was gone. Erased. For ever.

  Later that night when I was trying to get to sleep, I heard Michel strumming moodily on his guitar. I opened my window to hear better.

  His room was in the tower, up one floor above mine. The light shining from his window made a bright patch on my wall. From time to time, when he leaned into the window or something, his shadow loomed across it. It felt strange watching his shadow like that, close enough to touch, when he didn’t know I was there.

  Gradually, he seemed to calm down. He played really well. I listened as he played and sang a couple of songs. His voice reminded me
a bit of the lead singer in Naff. Naff was a band Jess and I had come across by chance, fringe stuff not many people had heard of. But the lead singer had this voice that really sent, like, electric vibes through you.

  Michel was singing in English and got a lot of the pronunciation wrong. But the way he was playing made me go tingly all over.

  Thought for the day

  Negatives:

  1) The French are far too emotional – they can’t be simply pleased or sorry or put out – they have to be ‘ravi’ or ‘désolé’ or ‘derangé’.

  Positives:

  1) All that fuss they make about cooking – actually it’s worth it.

  2) The sound of a French boy trying to sing in English. Sigh.

  Chapter Six

  The following morning I came down to find the hunters had already left with the horses. Madame de Lafitte was busy with Florence, packing a huge wicker picnic hamper. I watched as jars of pâté and gherkins, a whole smoked ham and a cooked chicken were piled inside. It was going to be some ‘pique-nique’.

  Florence took the hamper out and stowed it in the boot of Madame de Lafitte’s car. At the last minute Madame de Lafitte made a big fuss, insisting I got kitted out in gumboots, warning me that it was going to be a hard day.

  One thing was clear. I was NOT going to spend the day squelching round in a pair of oversized wellingtons while Matthilde put herself about looking like something out of an ad in Horse and Hound.

  I made a dash upstairs and took the new boots I’d bought for Angie’s party out of my holdall. They were still wrapped in their tissue paper and they smelt deliciously of new leather. They were absolutely pristine, even the soles were still shiny. I’d only tried them on in the shop. As I slipped them on, I thought regretfully how they’d never got to the party in the end.

  Madame de Lafitte frowned when she saw the boots and mumbled something I didn’t understand. But I ignored this. As I climbed into her car, I wondered once again if I should have insisted on staying behind at Les Rochers as a protest. A voice in me that was sane and British and politically correct said I should. But there was this other voice that was arguing the other way. It had to do with traditions and all that stuff that Dad said was dying, and would only be in the history books and would never come back. And there was a third voice too, which said I jolly well wasn’t going to be left behind again while Matthilde went off with Michel.

  The road soon turned into a forest. The forest was vast, there were tall trees with straight trunks as far as the eye could see. Eventually Madame de Lafitte took a left turn down a dirt road which was rutted by car tracks. As we squelched through the puddles, I spotted a sign saying:

  DANGER

  Chasse à Cours

  I sat in the car preparing myself mentally for the hunt. I tried to see things from the hunters’ point of view – after all foxes are terribly cruel. They kill lambs – and you hear stories of them going through chicken runs savaging every bird in sight.

  ‘I suppose it’s a good thing to kill foxes,’ I ventured to Madame de Lafitte.

  ‘Foxes?’ she said.

  ‘Reynards?’ I tried. I’d looked the word up in my dictionary.

  ‘Oh, we do not ’unt foxes,’ she said. ‘We shoot zem. We ’unt deer and sanglier – wild pigs,’ she said in a matter of fact way.

  I stared at her in horror. I’d never quite recovered from that bit at the beginning of Bambi, when his mother got shot. And as for killing lovely stripy wild pigs – it didn’t bear thinking about.

  I stared out of the car window, my mind conjuring up noble visions of myself – standing arms outstretched defying the huntsmen. Or chaining myself to a tree in protest. Or lying flat out on the ground ready to get trampled on – this last one wasn’t quite so appealing. I should have stocked up on liquorice – I could have laid a false trail. And then I imagined being found out by Monsieur de Lafitte and shamed in front of everyone and being sent back to England in disgrace.

  We’d arrived at a clearing which was filled with cars and horseboxes. Men dressed in long green riding coats were clustered together. I spotted Monsieur de Lafitte smartly dressed in boots and riding breeches complete with a snowy white cravat with a pin with a crest on it. A man was letting a yelping seething mass of hounds out of a lorry.

  The de Lafittes’ ancient Land Rover was standing with its horse box open with Quasimodo backing one of the horses down the ramp. I caught sight of Matthilde already mounted, dressed immaculately as I’d predicted, in a tight fitted black jacket and a cravat like her grandfather’s. She had her hair swept back into a neat little net under her riding hat. I noticed with some satisfaction that this time she was having quite a job controlling her horse, which was doing nervous sidesteps in its excitement.

  Following Matthilde was another horse ridden by … Could it really be Michel? My heart did a wobble and turned over with a thump. He looked so tall on his horse, so gorgeous in his green jacket, although his cravat wasn’t tied properly – it was practically hanging off actually – and his jacket didn’t fit and was obviously borrowed from his grandfather, but he looked totally, totally yummy. He was like a younger version of those heroes of period dramas – kind of a clean-shaven Braveheart with Heathcliff overtones.

  Madame de Lafitte, meanwhile, was drawing my attention to the hounds. They were arranged in a semicircle with four burly men standing in front of them. A man who Madame de Lafitte said was the Chief of the Hunt came out to the front. She explained that the four burly men were foresters – they’d been out since dawn checking for signs of animals and they had a special language for telling whether they had seen tracks or animals and where to find them. The hounds sat in their semicircle silently and obediently, ears cocked as if they were listening too and making a note of which direction they should set off in.

  As soon as the foresters had finished their report some huntsmen with long hunting horns played a tuneless kind of fanfare and then, at a signal from the Chief of the Hunt, the hounds set off in a huge barking wagging mass with the horses hot on their heels.

  I watched as Matthilde swept by without a glance in my direction. Michel was close behind her. I felt very small indeed. I wasn’t dressed for the hunt. I was a lesser mortal in ordinary jeans and a Top Shop T-shirt. And at any moment I was going to have the humiliation of being forced to ride some pathetic clapped-out pony which I’d probably fall off.

  Madame de Lafitte led me towards a smaller horse box. She opened it and I stood back expecting a furious snorting red-eyed pony to come charging out. But inside there were two bicycles.

  OK, so I only had to follow the hunt on a bicycle. But you try pedalling on stony roads covered with slippery mud and a mush of dead leaves. My thigh muscles were soon screaming at this unaccustomed exercise.

  As we rode, we could hear the hounds baying this way and that through the forest. We tried to keep up with the horses, cycling an odd circuitous route. There were a lot of about-turns from the huntsmen as they kept track of the hounds. Various different sounds rang out from the hunting horns, each – according to Madame de Lafitte – giving a specific message as to whether they’d sighted an animal or a broken branch or merely tracks. She cycled on in a stalwart fashion with me huffing and puffing behind to keep up. Horses are designed for slopes in a way that bikes aren’t and we were forever going up and down. At one point Madame de Lafitte suggested we took a short cut to avoid a particularly muddy ditch. I agreed readily – anything to cut down on the thigh work. Big mistake! Madame de Lafitte’s short cut was up a mini-mountainside. It was so steep we had to carry the bikes. Our feet slid helplessly on sticky clay and I kept losing my grip, descending with avalanches of loose pebbles.

  I’d long ceased to worry about my leg muscles. It was the way my boots were suffering that really hurt. These boots had been designed for posing at parties (like Angie’s) or maybe a quiet Saturday saunter down the mall. Instead they were getting gouged, deeply and painfully, by nasty jagged rocks. Mud was stain
ing their nice natural calf colour a nasty cowpat brown. Brambles were adding the final touch, giving them an arty sort of cross-hatching from toe to knee.

  At last we got to the top. Madame de Lafitte put down her bike, brushed herself off and patted her hair into place.

  ‘Voici!’ she said. She was barely out of breath. I was boiling hot and covered in mud and, what was worse, we had an audience. We’d arrived in a clearing and the huntsmen had got there before us. Most had dismounted and they were looking in our direction in cool and collected manner with not so much as a cravat out of place.

  I felt every eye rest on me. Even the horses were staring at me in that haughty down-the-nose way of theirs. I shoved my bike behind a bush and tried to look as if it didn’t belong to me. I could feel my fringe sticking to my forehead from sweat. I didn’t dare look at my boots.

  To my relief, neither Matthilde nor Michel was anywhere to be seen; they obviously hadn’t arrived yet. Maybe I’d have a chance to get my breath back and run a comb through my hair before they appeared. No such luck. There was a quick exchange between Monsieur and Madame de Lafitte with the result that we had to cycle all the way back to get the car and fetch the picnic.

  By the time we returned to the clearing, other cars had turned up and rugs were being laid out and little camping tables and chairs set up. Lunch it seemed was a serious matter. As I helped lay out the plates and knives and forks, I wondered miserably if my boots would ever recover from this terrible ordeal. It was difficult to tell what the damage was underneath all the mud.

  Matthilde and Michel pitched up at that point and tethered their horses. Matthilde came over and threw herself down on a rug at some distance from us.

  ‘Comjesuis fatiguée,’ she groaned. Which I understood. ‘Fatiguée’, like fatigue, meaning tired. She was tired and she was actually on a mount which had four legs and was doing all the work for her – not two wheels and a rather rusty chain like me. I could hardly stand!