Dial M for Merde

Author:Stephen Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 2008-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

2

It felt like riding through the streets on the back of a cart, taking in every detail before I arrived at the scaffold.

Filling an ante-room was a gilt-framed painting of a semi-naked young saint getting arrowed, his attacker shooting at him from no more than half a yard away. The archer was a pretty bad shot, too, because most of the arrows were embedded in the legs and arms, with only one hitting the torso, provoking a faint trickle of blood on the porcelain-white skin. Amazingly, the saint was looking only mildly pissed off with the guy taking pot-shots at him. I would have been furious myself. But I guessed that was why he was a saint.

Elodie stopped below the painting to put the finishing touches to her pep-talk.

‘Now you must remember this,’ she whispered. ‘Bonne Maman, the bitch grand-mère, doesn’t want the marriage, right? And Moo-Moo is always agreeing with her because she wants her part of the family to be the main – you know – héritiers.’

‘Heirs?’

‘Yes, and also because she is a bitch.’

‘And what about the rest of the family?’ I asked, looking around the walls at old framed photos of whiskered men and bonneted ladies, the ancestors keeping an eye on things.

Valéry’s dad was always called Dadou, Elodie told me, though his real name was François-Louis, ‘or some other royal combination’. There were three aunts, she thought, including one nun. A sizeable proportion of Moo-Moo’s generation would be here at some point during the weekend, she said, because as soon as they had a spare moment they seemed to gravitate together, unlike Elodie’s family who avoided each other as much as possible. It was, she conceded, the reason for their success as a clan, and as a class.

‘And what do they all do?’ I asked. ‘Apart from banking and nunning.’

‘Oh, Dadou is a director at the bank and has a post in the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères. Mimi is a director in the bank and with Total Fina Elf. Babou has a company that installs tennis courts. He is the richest but they snob him a bit.’

‘What about the women?’ I asked. ‘Are they all nuns or President’s girlfriends?’

Elodie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. The married women stop work as soon as they have a baby. Now come on, we must go and face them.’

She opened a warped door and let loose a babble of conversation and a smell of coffee and enclosed warmth.

I expected a polite silence when we walked in, but life went on as usual, and I got a good chance to study the crowd before we were noticed.

Moo-Moo was sitting on a bulky old sofa with her back to us, looking out towards the garden. She was nodding frantically, as if agreeing with every word uttered by the person next to her. I couldn’t see who this was, because a girl with a rather attractive backside was bending over the back of the sofa, hugging someone who was hidden from view.

Two almost identical men standing by the French windows had to be Valéry’s uncles, Babou and Mimi.

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