A friend of my cousin’s has a house on a cliff in Normandy, not far from La Havre. There are steps carved in the cliff going down to the sea. I was there once, twenty years ago. I remember thousands of seagulls and dark ocean waves breaking on the cliff. I was there with my cousin and her friend. This was before I married Alex, when I was still going out with Benny, who I married afterwards and divorced three years later. There was a lot of publicity at the time in the gossip columns. They said he cheated on me, and I kept repeating that we didn’t get on, and that was all there was to it.
I don’t remember having a whole lot of fun on that visit to Normandy, except for before we arrived back in Paris when my cousin suddenly let out an exclamation of alarm and cried: “The fish! I forgot the fish in the fridge! Boy, will that fish stink in another day or two. Will it stink!” After that we laughed for a kilometer or two.
I phoned her. She’s my age, still with the same boyfriend, and I asked her about the country house in Normandy. She said she had no problem with letting us stay there, we didn’t even have to come through Paris to pick up the keys, we could go straight there, and she described the hiding place under the big flowerpot standing at the entrance to the house.
What was left but to pack, say goodbye, issue instructions to the girls, and fly.
We hired a car at the airport and a few hours later Alex was already moving the flowerpot. We turned it over, we crumbled clods of earth to powder, we dug up the flowerbeds, our hands and clothes were full of the brown dirt. It was a real drag.
“It’s a scandal,” I said. “Go rely on your family.”
“Yes,” agreed Alex.
We returned to the village and phoned my cousin.
“Under the flowerpot, under the flowerpot,” she kept repeating.
“But there’s nothing there,” I said.
“How can that be? Jean-Piere Jean-Pierre!” she called her boyfriend. “Where are the keys to the house? Under the flowerpot, right?”