One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [97]
‘We might have it at lunchtime,’ I promised, managing to suppress a smile as I made for the door.
‘Really?’ He brightened.
‘Possibly.’ I reached for my door key.
‘It’s only fair to warn you, it’ll be very hard by then.’
‘That’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’
He sighed; hauled himself off the bed, tossing the bread stick behind him.
‘Heartless wench. All right, lead on Macduff. Where are we going, anyway? I mean out, obviously, which I consider an entirely retrograde step when I could be cuddling up to your delectable self in here, but which of the teeming, heaving eateries out there do you favour?’ We clattered downstairs as he grumbled on. ‘As opposed to a morning of splendid isolation, spent in that dear little lit bateau, with yours truly?’
I linked his arm as we emerged in the sunshine. ‘We’ll play it by ear.’
In the event we plumped for the smallest, quietest café in the corner by the church, where we sat in the dappled shade of a plane tree. Ivan chatted about his acquisitions in Montpellier – pretty good, considering there were still so many tourists about paying ridiculous prices for things one would normally get for a song, and also he’d done particularly well in the flea markets of Nice.
‘Exhausting, though.’ He slumped back in his chair and ruffled the back of his blond head, looking tired. ‘Too many people, too many rip-off hotels, and a great deal of tat. But happily, one or two finds.’
‘Such as?’
‘An Aubusson rug in St-Paul-de-Vence?’
‘Sounds good. Needs work?’
‘A bit, but I know a man who can. Oh, and a secretaire from St-Maximin, which I’ll French-polish and restore myself when I get home.’
Ivan was a bit of a craftsman on the sly. He secretly dreamed of a workshop: a sawdusty, sunbeam-lit environment with a bench full of lathes and tools, restoration projects always on the go. I’d never seen anyone drool quite so lasciviously when he came upon an exquisitely tooled drawer, or a piece of inlaid marquetry, and although he trawled the French markets for fashionable, shabbychic treasures like the rest of us, England was where his heart really lay: in the solid cabinetmaking of his homeland, where his hero, Chesterfield, had planed and lathed. In a bygone era Ivan would have been a cabinetmaker himself; in this era, where no one had the time or the patience to wait a year for a piece of work, he flogged them. I always thought it was a shame he hadn’t gone to college and learned the trade properly, and for his birthday – no, I don’t know which one – I’d bought him an antique plane. He’d been speechless.
Baubles, however, as he disparagingly called them, were what sold on his particular stand just off Camden Passage – he only had space for one piece of furniture on which he spread the jewels – and in St-Maximin, he’d had a lucky find. A fabulous old garnet ring, which he was convinced was Louis Quinze.
‘What d’you think?’ He drew it out of his pocket and we peered at it in the dappled sunshine.
‘Could be,’ I agreed, holding it out to catch the light. ‘The gold certainly looks old enough, and it’s got some sort of mark inside too.’
‘Ees come out of a cracker!’ wheezed a fellow trader, Ricard, who’d come to join us. He pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. ‘Twenty euros from Monsieur Devreaux in Rue de la Concorde. Am I right?’
‘You’re wrong, actually, Ricard,’ said Ivan, pocketing it. ‘But how lovely to have the pleasure of your unsolicited company. Will you be sharing our repast as usual?’ He offered him the croissant basket. ‘But not the bill?’
Ricard roared with laughter, skin like that of an old rhino, and, stretching across, helped himself to a cup of coffee. One of Ivan’s Camden Passage cronies, Ricard was a character to be tolerated: he was also a competitive little Frenchman, and ignoring Ivan, whom he regarded as small fry, leaned in to quiz me mercilessly on what I’d found so far, pooh-poohing everything as junk, but his beady eyes giving him away. Particularly