Hot Basque: A French Summer Novel 2 (5 page)

So what if there was noise from the street below, so what if the entrance to his garage was usually blocked by some idiot’s car, so what if the tiny ancient lift shuddered its way to the top floor wheezing like a dying animal, occasionally giving up the ghost altogether, leaving its passengers jammed nose to nose till help arrived. These were minor irritations. As soon as he turned the key in the heavy wooden door and heard the first creak of the parquet as he stepped into the hall, he was home. And since last September, when Caroline had started her weekend visits, home had become heaven.

Next week she’d have her first job interview. He hoped with all his heart that she was successful. If not for this first interview, then for another. Not, as he had told her on several occasions, because they needed the money. As dear
cousine
Claudie was wont to say ‘you roll on ze gold, why don’t you buy your girlfriend here a rock for her finger? Pearls for her ears? Emerald bracelets?’

Then she’d look at him, look at Caroline and say ‘OK, it’s Caroline, I get it.’ He would have showered her with jewels, filled her wardrobe with designer clothes, he longed to spoil her. She didn’t need a job, she could be a kept woman. His kept woman, locked up in a chastity belt behind a drawbridge. Claudie was right, money was no problem thanks to his grandfather’s inheritance, and his own investment portfolio. But his
jolie coquine
was independent, fiercely so, stubborn, amazingly so, and with a strong sense of pride. And he loved her for it.

It was that steely core, so much at odds with the soft, compliant, trusting, vulnerable Caroline he held in his arms at night, that made her a creature of contradictions, that charmed and obsessed him. He had had to learn to keep a rein on his instinct to protect her, to shield her from all harm, make all the decisions. He had had to learn to stand back and respect her independent spirit, allow her to grow, to blossom, to become that happy, sensual life-loving creature he had glimpsed beneath the shell of reserve when they had first met. The only thing he couldn’t control was his urge to jump on her the moment he got through the door. Fortunately, Caroline was as passionate and eager as he was, another thing which had surprised him when she had arrived at the Villa Julia last summer.

Last summer. He blew out a breath of frustration.

Julian had been on the phone again this afternoon. His friend had sounded utterly exhausted. The job in Frankfurt was going well, extremely well, but the hours were punishing. And, since Christmas, Julian had a new role to fulfil, that of father to Baby Joshua. Both Edward and Caroline had marvelled at the way that Julian, big strong controlled CEO Julian, with his silk cravats and diamond-patterned socks, had become a helplessly doting father.

‘He’s just so kissable!’ he kept repeating in wonder, nuzzling the little face. ‘It’s true!’ he protested, as Edward and Caroline fell into another fit of laughter.

The baby was gorgeous. Everyone said so. Well, almost everyone. Mother Annabel simply posed by the cot in Oscar de la Renta, immaculately coiffed, smiling regally as the family cooed and tickled and made faces, firing off shots on the smartphones, adjusting the zoom on the Olympus. Annabel was not maternal by nature. She had resented everything about her pregnancy, the weight gain, the swollen ankles, the restrictions on drinking and smoking.

‘And the birth, darling, the actual...delivery,’ she had said, shuddering, reaching for a cigarette.

No-one on the planet had suffered like Annabel.

‘Just don’t except me to go through that again,’ were her first words to Julian after The Ordeal.

And of course Joshua had been put on the bottle immediately.

‘Sagging boobs, no thank you.’

Julian had recounted all this to Edward over a drink one night. The two of them had been in London for business and were enjoying a quiet get-together in a pub off the Strand. Apparently there had been a slight improvement when Annabel and Joshua got back from the clinic. Annabel had enjoyed furnishing and decorating the nursery, she liked to dress Joshua in the different designer outfits that filled the drawers of the chest in his room. But the minute he started to get restless or tetchy she would hand him over to Nadia, the Polish
au pair
who had moved into the Frankfurt flat with them. When Julian wasn’t around, it was Nadia who changed his nappies, Nadia who gave him his bath. Annabel would step in to say goodnight, maybe even give him a quick peck on his freshly bathed cheek before going out to dinner or to a concert.

That was another reason for Julian’s exhaustion. Work, the baby, but also the unremitting social life that Annabel insisted on.

‘Does she realise what she’s doing to you? The toll it’s taking on you? Christ Jules, you had me worried for a minute there when I saw you come into the pub. No offense mate but you look like Dracula. Have you tried sitting down and talking about it with her?’

Even as Edward said the words he knew they were futile. Julian shrugged, took a long pull at his beer.

‘It’s always the same answer. ‘You brought me here, you were the one who wanted to live in Germany, you were the one who made me give up my job with the magazine, you promised I could have everything I wanted!’’

He gave a mirthless laugh.

‘And the bugger of it is, she’s right Eddie. She tells me ‘What am I supposed to do, sit at home alone all day and then watch TV in the evening with you snoring your head off on the sofa?’ So...we go out.’

They were best friends, had shored each other up through many a crisis, but Edward knew as far as Julian was concerned, Annabel was his blind spot. She had been able to wrap him round her little finger from the word ‘go’. Had treated him abominably. And yet Julian persisted in trying. Although, Edward had thought that night in the pub, eyeing his friend over the rim of his glass, there was maybe, just maybe, the beginnings of a change. Julian was becoming less of a besotted lover, more of a doting father. Maybe the day would come when Annabel was in for a big and unpleasant surprise.

And his suspicions had grown today during the phone call from Julian when he’d switched from shop talk to home talk. Baby Joshua this, Baby Joshua that. Scarcely a word about Annabel. He’d been strangely evasive come to think of it. Something was going on, Edward was sure. He’d ring him back next week, try to get him to open up.

A horn blasted behind him, interrupting his reverie. A gesticulating madman appeared in his rear-view mirror. Resisting an impulse to leap out of the car and cram the madman’s tie up his nose, Edward waggled his fingers amiably and crawled forward at the speed of a tortoise. Ten more minutes, then he’d be off the
Rocade
, heading home to his honey and Friday night.

Jill stepped out of the cubicle, tugging down her swimsuit, and came face to face with the full length mirror at the end of the ladies changing rooms. She barely repressed a gasp of sympathetic horror. Jesus if that’s what these aquagym folks looked like she was certainly going to get a boost to her ego. She turned round as casually as she could for a closer look at the poor freak behind her.

The changing room was empty.

She swung round in the direction of the mirror again, leaned forward, blinked, and leapt back. The freak was herself!

Surely she hadn’t looked like that when she tried on her swimming kit in the bathroom of her flat a couple of weeks ago? Of course, her mirror wasn’t full length, and it was one of those rather flattering ones, the same sort they had in expensive boutiques, the ones that persuaded you that your
derrière
had shrunk to Kylie Minogue proportions thanks to that cute little black number you’d just tried on, the one with the four-figure price tag.

She advanced cautiously, turned to the right, then to the left. She was positively bulging out of her Speedo swimsuit! She really had to cut down on the G and Ts. And the chocolate biscuits. She turned full face again. An alien with the head of a fly had been grafted on top of her shoulders. No wonder she’d had all that trouble in the changing room, pushing and shoving to get her thick mop inside the small slithery rubber cap that kept shooting off one side of her head as soon as she’d managed to tug it down on the other. A bit like one of those old fashioned diaphragm thingies that women used to wear for contraception. She’d actually come across one at the back of her own mother’s drawer, shock horror, all dried up and yellow with age. Well it would be, she supposed it had been a while since Kathleen O’Toole had been needing it. Five strapping boys and finally the hoped-for girl. Her mother had been forty-five when Jill was born and on the point of giving up. She supposed the diaphragm had been chucked into its box as soon as Kathleen had got out of hospital and told Jerry O’Toole that if he didn’t get the snip Kathleen was going home to her mother in Dublin. Forever.

And now here was Jill, no longer a cute baby but a hefty thirty-something, ready for her first aqua gym class, wearing her mother’s old diaphragm on her head and a swimsuit two sizes too small. She tugged the Speedo up, then down, trying to cover her buttocks and her boobs. It became obvious she’d have to accept that one of those two areas was going to be on display. Better the buttocks, she decided, after all they’d be under water for most of the time whereas if her boobs were popping over the top she’d probably put the men off their stride.

Men...were there any men in the class? She suddenly realised there was no one else in the changing rooms, that was funny. Maybe there were no women in the class, just her and a group of hairy males all having the same problem trying to get their bits inside their Speedos. Did they have to wear the funny hats too? Perhaps there’d be some prime specimens, all sleek muscles and washboard abs, like that Florent what’s his name, the one in the Olympics with the cute dimples.

No Jill, enough of that, she told herself sternly. Antoine is waiting for you, in his wetsuit, with his smouldering eyes and sexual techniques known only to the Basque nation.

In spite of her Nordic hill walking and her sessions at the gym, she had decided that more drastic measures were needed if she was going to be the Belle of Biarritz in June. She needed toning, as well as developing her heart and lungs, which both seemed to be in pretty good shape, especially her lungs, she thought, yanking at her swimsuit again. Apparently aquagym was the answer. Lots of stretching and tightening up those flabby thighs and bingo wings, twirling those funny pink and blue foam thingies that looked like giant noodles. It would be fun! She’d rummaged round until she found her old swimsuit from college and popped into Aquasports R Us to look at swimming caps. The snotty young assistant had said no, the cap with devil’s horns would not go down well at an aquagym class. These young ones, no sense of humour. Miss Snootyface had informed her that what she needed was a slippery scrap of rubber which was the only device tight enough to prevent the least drop of water getting onto her hair and ruining its colour. Did she by any chance want to stop being a red-head and opt for green hair the texture of a horse’s dinner? Of course she didn’t.

Snootyface had omitted to mention that it needed ten minutes and steel talons to snap the thing in place and that not only did it keep the bloody chlorine out, it also, in a reverse or perverse action that probably had something to do with thermodynamics, was so eye-wateringly tight that it forced every brain cell downwards to the chin area making the wearer resemble Benny Hill.

She became aware of a sudden loud, regular tick. The clock over the door said 12h40. Fast, obviously. The class started at 12h30. But in that case, a small voice inside her head told her, why was the ladies changing room empty except for her?

She was late for her first class. Sweat broke out. Perhaps she could just sneak in, slide into the pool without anyone seeing? She pushed open the door into the shower room, hurried along to the end.

Uh oh. She could hear the voice of the instructor going on about ‘drop that head down, feel its weight, now turn slowwwwly to the left, now slowwwwly to the right...’

They’d started. She’d probably get a belt with a rubber hose or something. She hurried out into the pool area, tottering down the wet steps, careful, don’t want to fall smack on your increasingly exposed buttocks now, do you Jillian Benedicta? There seemed to be rather a lot of people down there in the pool. She got to the bottom of the steps, was making her way as unobtrusively as possible to the water’s edge when a voice rang out:

‘Shower!’

What? Was someone talking to her? The class had come to a standstill in the water, all eyes were on Jill in her Speedo and her diaphragm. The instructor had turned, hands on hips. And what hips! Jill couldn’t help marvelling at those toned slender meercat items dropping down to equally toned slender thighs and going up to, well she didn’t have much in the boob department, but Jill supposed that was what you looked like if you were a sports fanatic.

Or maybe it was the lycra. Her eyes, fascinated, got stuck on the instructor’s outfit. Pure, poured-on lycra. You could even see, well, she didn’t want to linger on the bit between the instructor’s legs, frankly it left nothing to the imagination, she wondered how anyone could have the nerve–

‘Shower!!!’

‘Pardon?’

Jill lifted one side of her diaphragm.

‘You obviously haven’t been through the showers. Your swimsuit–’ the instructor gave a little sneer ‘–is bone dry. Didn’t you read the instructions?’

‘Oh. Er. Sorry. Sorry. ’

Jill fled back up the steps, turned on the cold water and gave herself a vigorous soak adding a few loud gasps for authenticity.

This time when she ventured to the edge of the pool she was able to step delicately down the steps and join her fellow aquagymers.

They were obviously regulars. The warm-up had finished, they were all leaping up into the air like Icelandic geysers, arms rigid at the sides, pushing down the water with their flattened palms. Jill joined in, jumping as energetically as she could ‘and push that water and push that water...’ She felt a kick in the back of her leg, turned around. A senior citizen in a cap covered in fake roses was glaring at her. Where was her diaphragm? In fact there were quite a few non-diaphragm pieces of headgear, now she looked. She’d have been better in the devil’s horns. Rosebonnet was saying something, over the sound of splashing.

‘Forward! Move forward!’ she hissed, in between jumps.

‘Oh sorry,’

Jill realised her energetic leaps had been taking her towards the back of the pool. She waded forward, gave another leap, then realised the exercise had changed, now they were all swinging their upper body from left to right, arms extended. Was that a snigger she heard from Rosebonnet? A knobbly finger gave her a karate chop below the ribs but the woman next to her had already swung round the other way. They were feral, this lot. Jill hopped a bit further to the left, started swinging, feeling her waist muscles give a nice satisfying tug.

Ten minutes later she was definitely getting the hang of it. It was a bit tougher than she’d thought, she’d asked the girl at reception what sort of level she ought to start with, intermediate or advanced? But the receptionist had smiled sweetly and suggested that maybe she could try ‘Beginners’, she could always move up to Intermediate and Advanced once she saw how she got on.

Beginners! Jill had capitulated, with bad grace. Now, in the brief moments when they were relaxing and deep-breathing she had time to do a quick recce of her fellow aquagymers. They were all, with one exception, senior citizens. And all, with one exception, female. There was one ancient wheezing grandad at the back, with sagging breasts and a gold necklace. The only other person who looked to be remotely Jill’s age was at the front of the class, under the watchful eye of Lycra-woman, and was heavily pregnant.

‘OK, floats!’

‘Ouch!’

A pink noodle hit her on the head, then a blue one, good job they were made of foam but still she’d sensed a certain hostility in the way they had been hurled in her direction by a wizened old prune of ninety.

‘Everyone on their backs, legs together, flex those feet, now to the count of eight, scissor those legs, keep your back straight, tummy up, feel those tummy muscles working.’

Oh they were working alright. By the time she’d done two sets of eight Jill was puffing and panting like a steam engine. Around her the grannies carried on, scissoring fit to cut a rug, flashing their false teeth at Lycra-woman.

‘That’s wonderful Gladys! Keep going! Excellent Phyllis, those legs are really straight.’

But if she’d thought the scissors thing was bad, by the time they got to the abdo curls Jill was sure she was going to die. Not only that, either she kept drifting into other people’s ‘space’ or they kept drifting into hers, causing a lot of collisions and submersions and hissed insults.

As the lesson finally drew to a close Jill watched them emerge slowly from the buoyant water, totter up the steps like newborns, arms and legs like sticks, and putter off to the showers like arthritic tortoises. She could scarcely believe this bunch of pathetic creatures were the same lot of beasts she’d spent the last forty minutes with, exchanging sly kicks and punches under the water. She was going to be black and blue tomorrow. And her stomach muscles were on fire.

‘Ouch!’

She was hauling herself out of the water and up the steps when she felt a pinch on her bottom. A decided, deliberate, old-fashioned, good-handful-of-flesh pinch. She turned round, outraged, ready to sock this fighting gran right out of her rose-covered bonnet.

Grandad was grinning up at her, gap-toothed, gold chain glinting in his grey chest hairs.

‘Welcome to wor class, lassie. Fair got a wee stiffie on me just watching yer do them jumps!’

He gave a leer and a wink as she shot up the final steps and made for the showers. What could she do, report him for sexual harassment? He must be at least a hundred and four. He’d never make it to the police station.