‘Might have, I almost hit that cyclist.’
Jade shrugged. ‘You’d have driven straight past it, if I hadn’t.’
Why saying in a normal voice, ‘there’s a car park over there,’ wouldn’t have worked perfectly well, Carrie didn’t know.
‘Isn’t this lovely?’ Angela kept stopping to examine the flowers overflowing and trailing down from window boxes perched on the stone stills of sun-baked houses and peering up at the vines growing from pots that crowded into the narrow streets. The lush greenery tracing its way across the walls with fingers of ivy and tendrils of wisteria was thrown into vibrant contrast by the warmth of old brick and peach washed stone.
They wandered up the hill, their shoes slipping slightly on the smooth old stones, along the streets that held an air of otherworldliness with their secretive recessed doors opening onto geranium pot-filled steps and tiny windows, with painted shutters like wings on either side. Carrie imagined that if you picked up a pot you might find a trefoil curved copper key to unlock one of the wooden painted doors and transport you to another world.
‘How much further’? Jade stopped and rubbed at her toes. ‘I’m getting a blister. The signal here’s rubbish. Can’t even send a text and there’s no 3G.’
Carrie closed her eyes and counted to ten. It would be pointless trying to point out to Jade that she hadn’t been invited in the first place.
‘Maybe there’ll be an internet café, where we can stop later,’ said Angela. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can find a baker.’
As if the fairies in the elaborate tracery of plants had been listening, the artery of streets joined a larger one and suddenly they were in a street of cafés and touristy shops.
‘Time for a coffee and a sit-down,’ declared Angela, with a telling look Carrie’s way. ‘And we might be able to find some plasters for your toe, Jade.’
‘And while you’re doing that I’ll see if I can find the tourist office and get a couple of maps of the area.’
‘Great idea,’ said Angela, almost bundling her away.
Abandoning them, with Angela musing over what coffee to order, Carrie hurried off before Jade could decide she might be missing out on something and decide to limp after her.
Following the directions, the owner of the coffee shop had given her, after a few false turns, she turned down what should have been a dead end and suddenly pitched into the noise and bustle of the market.
Striped canvas roofs covered stalls piled high with food so bright and colourful, her mouth watered. Angela would be in seventh heaven. The nearest stall exploded with a cornucopia of fruit and vegetables, displayed with artistic precision. Ruby-red fat strawberries squatted next to scarlet redcurrants and white-blushed blueberries, while grapes, red and green, jostled together in between rows of shiny plums.
Across the way a stall stacked high with salamis like Jenga caught her eye. What if you removed one and the stack stayed upright, perhaps you could have it for free? The thought made her smile. And if you sent the pile tumbling to the floor, you had to buy the whole lot.
Next to them were baskets filled with a variety of cured meats from linen-wrapped Bayonne hams through to the local thinner sticks of meat, Bistouquette Provençale and then short fat salamis available in different flavours, Sanglier, Piment, Canard, Chèvre, Fumé or aux cepes priced at four for ten euros.
It would have been nice to have her own basket and she could fill it with all the amazing goodies, like the other French women scurrying along, weighed down with bags, haggling with stall holders and exchanging ribald banter.
The crowd, busy with purpose, jostled and pushed, propelling her along as part of the tide of shoppers. She didn’t mind. For the first time it felt like she was in France proper, stepping into another world with the smells, the sights and the sound of French spoken at a machine-gun-rattle pace, the guttural consonants flowing into each other – a stream of incomprehensible words.
When she reached the end of the row and turned into the next one, the throng of people slowed its pace, like liquid wax cooling, and the path through the market steadily became more congested. Whispers and nudges, nods of ‘come see this’, rippled through like a Mexican Wave. It was difficult to see what was going on but as she craned her head, she spotted the unmistakable fluffy torpedo of a boom mic.
With a gulp, she swallowed hard and smoothed down her skirt. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Happy, no, convenient, coincidences happened in films and books, not in real life. When she’d set out this morning, in her heart of hearts, she hadn’t expected to find the film crew. It had been one of those deliberately fooling-yourself moments that you’re doing something positive when you know it’s no such thing because it’s never going to happen. Now it had and she was totally unprepared.
For a while she stood, happy to hide in the crowd, far too scared to worm her way forward because she hadn’t the foggiest what she would do if she got to the front and spotted Richard. With the inevitability of the ebb of the tide, as people became bored, they relinquished their place and Carrie found herself sucked to the front of the crowd, two rows back. Artificial light cast from several arc lamps lit up the shaded market stalls on the right-hand side and beyond them, a row of vans and trucks lined the road.
The butterflies, she told herself earlier not to get in a tizz, suddenly took flight in a frenzied rush, bouncing around her stomach, leaving her breathless and wide-eyed. She’d never imagined she’d stumble across the filming, although she’d made a massive assumption about it being the right film and that Richard might even be here. The dammed butterflies didn’t give two hoots about that. They were making a do-or-die attempt to escape right through her stomach wall.
There was no sign of any filming taking place, although quite a lot of people buzzed about, zipping backwards and forwards, looking terribly busy and important. A girl with a clipboard and headphones was nodding urgently with two men, both of whom looked as if they’d been sleeping rough in the streets for the last couple of nights. Over in the corner, a cameraman was laughing with a small group of people who had to be extras and the soundman was dismantling the long pole of the boom.
Carrie squeezed behind two women of indeterminate age, who were excitedly whispering to each other in English. Both were dressed as if they’d recently stepped off a golf course, in smart chino shorts, matching T-shirts and peaked sun visors. One was slightly taller than the other and Carrie heard her addressed as Hilary.
‘That was definitely him.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, no, but it might be him,’ said Hilary.
‘Excuse me?’ The two women swung round. ‘Do you know what they’re filming? Or who’s in it?’
‘Shh, you have to be quiet,’ said Hilary nudging her and nodding towards one of the two scruffy men. ‘The director keeps getting shirty because we’re making too much noise. He keeps threatening to move us on.’
‘Hmph,’ said the other woman with a disdainful sniff, ‘I don’t know why. It’s a public place. What does he expect? And, quite frankly, he looks as if he should have been moved on. A good wash and scrub wouldn’t do him any harm.’
‘Apparently,’ said Hilary, in a confiding whisper, ‘it’s an American film. Hollywood. Blockbuster. Big names.’ Her eyes widened with each phrase making Carrie wonder whether she might dislocate something.
‘Is it anyone famous?’ Carrie asked, her words almost sticking in her throat.
‘Famous? Oooh yes! It’s that fella from,’ Hilary turned to her friend, ‘what’s that film he was in? You know thingy.’
‘Oh, that one. Yes. The one where he drove that—’
‘—silver car.’