‘BONJOUR, MONSIEUR BOURBON.’ I shook the proffered hand and did my best to look as if I was worthy of having sex with his daughter in his holiday home. I’d put on a clean T-shirt and my best swimming shorts.
‘Bonjour, Paul.’ He pronounced my name correctly, which I appreciated. So few French people bothered.
He was a very good-looking man for his age, a kind of veteran Bollywood film star. He had perfect skin, much darker than Florence, and looked as if someone had just spent hours shaving his chin and cheeks to total smoothness. Unlike his son, he wasn’t balding, and his thick black hair was cut in a mid-nineties Hugh Grant. Artily floppy. He was fifty-something but dressed twenty years younger, in impeccably faded jeans and a loose, plum-coloured shirt that covered his affluent little paunch. He was sockless in sailing sneakers. An instantly recognizable rusty-bike rider, although he’d just arrived in a La Rochelle taxi.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ He shook my hand warmly. ‘Especially your talents with herbal tea.’
‘Oh oui, I’m very sorry.’ I tried to look guiltstricken.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ He chortled, as if it was the kind of thing that happened all the time to Brigitte, which it probably was.
‘And I’m terribly sorry about the car.’
His laugh died as if it had been hit by a Korean off-road vehicle.
‘The car?’
Oh shit, he didn’t know.
‘Florence?’ both of us asked.
She gave an ‘uh’ of irritation and reeled off a brief explanation of how it happened, which, to my mind, didn’t make it clear enough that I was completely blameless.
‘You demolished my car?’ His dark-brown skin had turned red around the chinline.
‘No, a man crashed in me. To me. With me.’ I defended myself in my best approximation of lawyer’s French.
‘So his insurance is paying for the repairs?’
‘Well . . .’ If I’d known I was going to have to make this speech, I’d have prepared a short Powerpoint presentation to put my case. But my look of discomfort might as well have said, ‘No, mate, you’re paying.’
My new father-in-law put his well-manicured hands on his hips and unleashed his fury. Coming from the volcanic island of La Réunion, he really knew how to blow his top. Everyone from the post office to the surfing beach must have heard what he thought of me and Florence – our ingratitude, incompetence, lack of respect, lack of manners, lack of driving skills, lack of anything that might raise us above the level of baby chimpanzees.
Then just as abruptly, he stopped yelling and clomped upstairs to throw luggage and furniture around.
‘Don’t worry,’ Florence whispered, after we had observed a minute’s silence for the passing of our peaceful holiday. ‘He will calm down very quickly. He always shouts like that, but if you don’t contradict him, he forgets all about it in a few minutes.’
‘I don’t think he’ll forget about his car getting wrecked. Didn’t you tell him?’
‘Noh,’ she replied, a ‘non’ with an in-built puff of indifference.
Here was that infuriating passivity again.
‘What, it was like me with Henri’s field? You didn’t think it was worth mentioning?’
‘Oh, Paul, please, don’t start.’
She was right, I suddenly realized. There was no point starting. Because she wasn’t really interested in what I was going to say. The crashed car was a long way away, in the past and in Corrèze, and as far as she was concerned it could stay there. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that she was incapable of facing up to problems.
She was going to be in for quite a shock at the café, I thought. If we didn’t get things back on schedule, our problems weren’t just going to bawl us out as her dad had done, they were going to march right up and punch us in the teeth.