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‘Are you doing the soap powder tests?’ he asked, walking towards her.
‘Yes, working on lipstick stains,’ she said, wishing she had a solution for dissolving blushes.
‘What sort of lipstick?’ he asked.
‘Just lipstick,’ said Billie frowning. ‘I just went to the pharmacy down the road and bought one.’
Nick rolled his eyes. ‘Is it pearl, gloss, matte, long-wearing?’
Billie felt herself redden. ‘I don’t know, I don’t really wear make-up,’ she admitted.
‘You don’t need it,’ said Nick casually.
She reached up and touched her face, knowing she was blushing, but Nick was looking at the lipstick.
‘This is a Maybelline gloss. This has a lot of lanolin in it, so it will be more greasy than some.’
He smeared the pale pink lipstick over the back of his hand.
‘It’s a bit sickly, needs more depth,’ he said.
Billie watched him with interest. ‘How do you know so much about lipstick?’
‘I worked in a make-up lab before here, but they went bust,’ he said. ‘I actually enjoy the different compounds and ancient recipes. Some ingredients stay the same, regardless of the century.’
‘Like what?’ she asked, noting how excited he looked as he spoke.
‘Beeswax. In Victorian times, they used beeswax with spermaceti . . .’
‘What’s that?’ asked Billie, screwing up her nose.
‘It’s an organ from inside the sperm whale’s head,’ he said. ‘They would mix it with sweet almond oil and rose water and this became known as Crème Céleste or cold cream, as we know it now.’
Billie laughed. ‘I have a cousin called Celeste in France. I’m sure she’d love to know she was named after something that came from inside a sperm whale’s head.’
Nick shook his head and smiled. ‘Are you going to tell her?’
‘Oh God, no. I haven’t spoken to her in twenty-odd years,’ Billie said, as she held the lipstick up to her face. ‘I can’t even remember her.
‘Is it my colour?’ she asked, surprised at her coquettish tone.
She wasn’t usually a flirt, but something about Nick being so knowledgeable, and his compliment with no expectation attached, had her head in a little whirl. However, she took comfort in knowing she would never do anything about this work crush. Her life was simple, and love would only make it complicated. The surety of science made up for any brief love affair she might have, when she knew it was most likely destined to break her heart.
‘No, you’d look better with reds, but with a navy base,’ he said, peering at her. ‘It’s the dark hair and blue eyes combination, just like Snow White.’ He beamed at her. Then he moved and started smearing soap powder over the stains, as the door opened and the rest of the staff arrived for their day’s work.
And Billie spent the rest of the day wondering who exactly Nick Miller was and did he have a girlfriend and then Googling pictures of Snow White.
* * *
‘Mum?’
Billie stepped over the bubble wrap and packing tape that lay across the doorway of her childhood home in Carlton. It was a long terrace house, with a hallway the length of two cricket pitches, currently lined with boxes, art leaning against the wall, and ephemera from Elisabeth and Gordon’s attempt at moving fifteen years of their life.
The problem was that Elisabeth and Gordon found themselves easily distracted. Elisabeth would drop whatever she was doing to write down a poem that swam through her mind, and Gordon would find an old book that he claimed to have been looking for ‘since for ever’ and would then settle down in that exact spot to read some old volume on the history of an ancient civilisation of a far-flung country. Billie knew the only way she would get her mother and stepfather moved was if she marshalled them and assigned them tasks, overseeing the project with extreme bossiness, something she knew her mother hated.
No reply came to her call and Billie sighed, as she put her bag down on an empty armchair.
Assessing the living room, she saw plastic boxes of photographs from the shed had managed to make their way inside, but the lid had been lifted and now snapshots of Billie’s childhood lay sprawled across the wooden floors. Photos of her and her father, and her mother, photos with her and her mother’s parents, family friends, parties, but no one else. She knew nothing of her father’s past, or his family, and loyalty to her mother meant she didn’t pry into the past.
‘Billie.’ She heard her mother say her name and she pulled herself away from the photos.
Dropping the photographs back onto the table, she looked up to see her mother standing in the room, phone in hand.
‘How’s it all going?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.
‘Henri’s mother has died,’ came Elisabeth’s reply; her face went its usual shade of ivory whenever she mentioned Billie’s father’s side of the family.
‘Oh, shit. I guess she was pretty old,’ said Billie casually.
‘Don’t swear when you learn of someone’s death,’ admonished Elisabeth.
‘Why not? I didn’t know the woman,’ said Billie with a careless shrug. ‘It’s not like she made any effort to see us after Papa died.’
Billie never asked about her any more. When she was younger, she had asked a few questions, but Elisabeth’s answers were short and angry, using words such as ‘toxic’ and ‘corrupt’, and Billie, who grieved her father deeply, needed someone to blame, so her father’s family from France seemed a likely reason. She trusted her mother’s opinion and so she joined her in hating them and getting on with their lives as a form of revenge.
‘I know, but she was still your father’s mother. That accounts for some respect,’ said Elisabeth. ‘That was her lawyer on the phone. A lovely man, very kind and discreet. He didn’t ask me about Henri at all; I assume he knows what happened.’
‘OK,’ she said slowly, trying to read her mother’s face. Elisabeth seemed stressed and worried, as though things were all out of place, which they were, thought Billie, but this was more than just moving house.
‘He wants you to go to London for the reading of the will,’ she said, surprise showing on her face.
‘London? Me? You also?’ asked Billie, aware she was speaking in staccato but unable to piece together the thoughts jumbling in her mind.
‘Just you, not me. He said it’s vital,’ Elisabeth stated, clearly saddled with the importance of the message.
‘I don’t want anything of hers,’ said Billie, bending over and picking up the photographs and stuffing them back into the plastic box they had escaped from.
‘He said it was vital,’ her mother repeated, her eyes widening at the last word.
‘I doubt it. Probably some old relic she wants to be passed to me,’ said Billie. ‘I’m not interested in anything they want to give me or you.’
Elisabeth paused as though about to speak and then deciding against it.
‘Go on, say what you were thinking,’ said Billie, crossing her arms.
The house felt cold, and the dust was making her eyes itchy.
‘Billie, the thing is, you father . . .’ Her voice trailed away.
‘What about him?’
‘He was from a good family in France, they have money.’
‘I don’t need money,’ said Billie.
‘No, I know, it’s just that, well, when your father died, I changed our names to March, to try to take away the legacy of his family.’
‘So what is his name?’ Now Billie felt that everything was out of place. She was Billie March. All her documents said so, and it was her mother’s name. She had just assumed they were Marches.
‘Le Marche,’ said Elisabeth, looking ashamed.
‘OK, Le Marche. And what else do I need to know that you might have omitted from my past?’ Billie felt her arms cross and she tried to uncross them, but she felt like everything was coming at her at once.
‘The Le Marches own a successful skincare company across Europe.’
Billie stared at her mother, trying to understand.
‘They are very, very wealthy, and I think your father would like you to have what Daphné has left to you.’
‘You told me my entire life that they were next to evil in terms of family, and now you’re telling me to go there and take whatever trinket or cash they have left me? Do you realise what a hypocrite you sound like?’
‘I thought it would be good to find out what it is. It might have something to do with Henri,’ Elisabeth said in a flat voice.
Billie knew her mother wasn’t a manipulative woman, but she was also not without demands. While Elisabeth would never ask Billie to do anything she wasn’t comfortable with, there was always something around her husband’s death that made her lose all sense of herself.
But she was as selfless as she was generous, which now made Billie now feel terrible.
Since her father’s death, Billie had watched Elisabeth try to get on to the best of her ability without her beloved Henri and, to the outsider, she had succeeded. As a well-respected professor of French poetry, and a poet with a few volumes of her work published, a new husband and a daughter who had a degree in chemistry, she had done well as far as the benchmark of success indicated.
What others didn’t see was the toll that came from coping with a death she didn’t see coming, and one that she wondered every day if she might have prevented. The anniversaries of Henri’s death where Elisabeth wouldn’t get out of bed. The man missing in the photos at Billie’s birthdays and at Christmas that caused Elisabeth to shed a tear in the kitchen, where Billie had found her many times, weeping over the sink.
But now Billie was furious. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who Dad’s family are?’
Elisabeth swallowed a few times. ‘I didn’t want you to leave me for them,’ she said. ‘The lure of money can be very enticing.’
‘Did you think I would do that? God, Mum, you don’t know me at all.’
‘I’m sorry, I just hate them,’ said Elisabeth passionately, and then she burst into tears.
‘Mum, I don’t want anything from them, even if it is Papa’s. He’s gone, we’ve all got lives now that are successful away from the Le Marches.’
Elisabeth looked down at the phone in her hand and slowly nodded. ‘Of course, you’re right, I will let the man know that they can send you anything via mail, or ship it, whatever it is.’
Billie saw the disappointment in her mother’s face and she knew the real reason she wanted her daughter to attend the will reading was to see if there was a final clue to Henri’s death. Something, anything, to tell her why it ended the way it did.
‘It will be an old painting or something, Mum, honestly, they’re not going to give me anything valuable. No doubt the family would have got their hands on anything worth money by now.’
Elisabeth raised her dark eyebrows and rolled her eyes a little.
Billie felt better seeing her mother’s scorn replacing her bewilderment.
‘You’re right,’ she said, looking relieved.
‘Of course I’m right, I’m a realist,’ said Billie. ‘You can try so many different ways to get a different result but often end up with the same outcome. That family is exactly the same. No matter what you do, they will always be self-interested, selfish and toxic, the best thing you ever did was move us to Australia. I feel sorry for them all stuck in the past. Now let’s get you moved, I’m feeling very organised.’
‘God help me,’ laughed Elisabeth, as Billie picked up a flat carton and started to assemble it.
But, as Billie worked through the rest of the day, packing and sorting, labeling and lifting, she couldn’t help but wonder what on earth Grand-Mère had left her and would it be worth something. If it was, she would give the money to her mother; that was the least of what she deserved after what she had been through. Losing a husband so young, starting a new life with a young child.
Her mother was the bravest person Billie knew and there wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to let her mother get caught in the Le Marche web again since she spoke so badly of them. She always said her heart was broken after Henri died, and Billie knew they were somehow to blame. Why else had her mother cut all ties?
That night, when she lay in bed in her own little apartment, Billie looked at the framed picture of Elisabeth and her father from their wedding day in Paris.
Her mother was wearing a white shift dress with daisies in her hair, and her father a broad grin. They looked so happy, she thought, so why then did he decide to take his own life?
Chapter 3 (#ulink_0ac54085-f658-5d60-b70b-f71c0b1eb31c)
Daphné, 1956
Daphné Amyx was eighteen and had two options available to her. Marriage or work. Marriage was possible in the village of Calvaic, but she didn’t want a pig farmer with his rough hands and crude tongue. She wanted a man like Jean Gabin, or the American actor, Jimmy Stewart who she saw in the movies at Saint Cere; and she knew that wasn’t someone she wasn’t going to find in the village.
Not that she had met the man yet, she just knew there wasn’t anything for her in the village any more and, as much as she regretted leaving her beloved mother Chantal, she knew it would be better for them both if she earned money in Paris while looking for a husband.
The day she had chosen for her reconnaissance to Paris was going to be beautiful and, as the light rose with the dawn, the garden had never looked as pretty in the growing kaleidoscope from the sunrise. Daphné felt the rising sun on her shoulders as she hung the washing on the makeshift clothesline in their back garden. Her mother’s sunflowers were facing east and sweet peas were climbing up the fence, as though greedily trying to get as much of the light as possible.
The morning and evening light was the best, she thought, as the kids danced next to their mothers in the field next to them, their little goat antics never failing to make Daphné giggle.
For a moment, Daphné felt almost nostalgic and then noted the beautifully mended holes in the nightgown she pegged to the line and let go of her sentimentality.
Rural life was hard enough, let alone for a mother and daughter who made a living from the land and making handmade soap from goat’s milk and selling it on the side of the road to the occasional tourist. Lately business had been good with the Americans who passed by. They liked the sweet little labels that Daphné had made and pasted onto the jars. She had even added some pretty linen over the lids and tied them with pink ribbon to really appeal to the customers. But then Daphné, ever the realist, pulled herself from her musing and focused on the day ahead. There was no time to be pondering the light when food needed to be put on the table.
She finished her task and walked back inside the small stone cottage, where her mother sat mending a linen sheet. The cottage was neat as a pin, and everything was polished and folded in perfect order, thanks to Chantal, Daphné’s mother.
The bus to Paris would be arriving soon, and Daphné checked her small case of soaps and lotions she and Chantal had made. If she couldn’t find a job, then she would sell the stock on the streets of Paris and return next week to try again.
She had a small overnight bag of a change of clothes and a coat belonging to her mother and would stay with the Karpinskis, who had fled Poland and had hidden in their village during the war, finding themselves unable to make their way to London.
The couple now had children and a small jewellery store in Le Marais, which they lived above and where Daphné would stay.
She picked up her case and smoothed her dark hair. ‘Mama, I’m going,’ she said to the back of her mother who stood at the kitchen sink.
Her mother turned and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Be safe,’ she said and Daphné could see the worry in her sad eyes. Losing her husband in the war meant she had little faith in the world to care for her beloved daughter. If Chantal had her way, Daphné would stay at home for ever.
‘I will be fine, Maman,’ said Daphné sincerely. She was smart, resourceful and brave and a two-day trip to Paris alone didn’t worry her like it did her mother.
‘You look very pretty,’ said her mother, admiring Daphné’s figure in the peacock blue dress which Chantal had made from fabric she had saved from before the war. Nipped at the waist, with a full skirt, the shape showed off her tiny waist and the colour complemented her sultry looks.
While Daphné wasn’t a beauty, she had an appeal that seemed to make men look twice at her. At seventeen, she knew it was sex appeal but was too shy and far too inexperienced to know its power.
