‘I haven’t taken anything else. I had a nice cool shower and then that support bandage did the trick. My knee is feeling far less painful and I’m perfectly okay.’
‘I’m trying to get Anna to tell us what we are supposed to be doing this evening and she is being silly about it,’ I said.
‘We could always do “How Much is That Doggie in the Window”. I was good at that. It wasn’t my fault there was a coach trip from the Coventry Cat Lovers Club in the pub that night. They got really fierce too.’
Anna reached into the paper bag and pulled out three square cotton scarves printed with the French flag.
‘One each. We are going to be brilliant.’
‘And the Doggie would have a good home,’ Harriet sang. ‘You see, I bet I still know all the words.’
* * *
The basement bar of the Hôtel Mer de Bleue was crowded when we got there, and it was only seven thirty, so it wasn’t as though we were particularly late. We were given a numbered ticket so we would know when to get onto the little stage and found a table quite near the front and I ordered a large bottle of mineral water. We were going to need all our wits about us, and it was not the time for alcohol.
Proceedings were underway soon afterwards. Arturo, now looking very lean in a black T-shirt with Johnny Halliday printed across the front, was our compere and he might have been from Louisiana but he spoke perfect French. Very loud, very excited and fast. I missed most of what he was saying, but the crowd obviously loved it. Perhaps we had stumbled into one of the highlights of the Nice season? Maybe at last the three of us were mixing with cool people?
‘Alors, numero uno,’ Arturo yelled.
We looked at our ticket again, just to make sure. We were number fifteen.
A tall man in a DJ came forward and started crooning in the style of Sinatra. He was quite good actually and gave a very passable rendition of ‘Come Fly With Me’, much to the delight of a lady in a voluminous pink caftan who was sitting by the stage, mouthing the words along with him, so she might have been his wife, or at least hisbel ami. He left the stage to loud applause and some piercing whistles from his enthusiastic fan.
‘He’s very good,’ Harriet shouted over the noise. ‘I bet he wins.’
I nodded, feeling rather worried. I’d never imagined we would be any good because we were not at all glamorous and we were definitely under rehearsed.
Number two was a scruffy and sulky-looking young man who glowered at us as Arturo announced he was going to sing ‘Le Pénitencier’, and we looked rather blank until the music started and realised he was actually going to sing – or, more accurately, growl – ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in French. He ended in a clenched heap on the stage, one fist raised in the air. His anguish was so great and for a moment we were concerned about him, but then he sauntered off back to the bar fully recovered.
‘I need the loo,’ Anna said. ‘Perhaps knocking back half a litre of San Pellegrino was a mistake?’
‘You’d better jolly well come back,’ I said, just for a moment wondering what we would do if she simply left.
Of course, then the two of us wondered if we needed the loo too, so what with the wondering and fretting and waiting, we couldn’t concentrate of the next part of the evening, but I remembered there was a duo who came up to sing a slow, sad song about a girl on the sand in the rain. The audience was caught up in this and quite a few were waving their hands in the air, so they went down quite well. Then I went off to the loo and apparently missed an older lady swathed in trailing garments who sang ‘Non, je Regrette Rien’, in a passable imitation of Edith Piaf. This also was much appreciated by the audience, even though Anna said the woman couldn’t hold a note in a bucket.
Time was marching on and the stage was filled with several younger people singing a selection of French pop songs none of us knew, but all of which were slow and miserable. Arturo did his best but the mood in the room was definitely faltering.
It was enlivened once more by a terrifying woman dressed in a gold fringed dress as Tina Turner who did ‘Simply the Best’ in French, and she was excellent and had the audience clapping along in time with her and waving their arms in the air.
This was followed by a man with a banjo who sang something in Spanish about his dog dying, and the mood of everyone wavered again.
‘Can we just not do this?’ Harriet asked during a brief pause.
Arturo gave a little speech in French, Spanish and English about how marvellous everyone was, and please could everyone remember where the fire exits were because he had forgotten to point them out earlier.
At last number fourteen was called and the three of us sat mute at our table, knowing we were next. Anna tied our French flag scarves around our throats and reminded us we were leaving in the morning and would never see any of these people again in our lives, so it didn’t matter if we were good or not. It was just a bit of fun.
It didn’t feel like fun. By then a lot of the audience had evidently lost interest and were crowding around the bar at the back of the room.
The act preceding us was a young man with a feathered head dress and tight satin trousers who looked as though he should have held off from the alcohol a bit longer, and after a lot of hip wiggling and one verse of ‘Copacabana’, fell off the stage.
There was a good deal of yelping and complaints from the poor chap, and the resulting commotion meant that everything ground to a halt while he was helped off and probably into the back of an ambulance.
So, it was our turn, and surely, never had three older women faced such a lukewarm audience before.
We shuffled up onto the stage, pulling at our French flag neckerchiefs, and waited for Arturo to find our accompanying music.
He looked across at Anna with an enquiring gaze and a frown, and she nodded firmly back at him.
