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She picked up her case, and kissed her mother on her weather-beaten cheek. Years of being in the garden and tending the animals had created lines on her skin yet it was soft from the goat’s milk soap and cream that she made and used.
‘I will see you on Thursday,’ she said and she smiled brightly as she went to the door. ‘Wish me luck.’
‘Good luck and give my love to the Karpinskis,’ said Chantal, and then Daphné was on her way.
* * *
The bus journey to Paris was long and slow, frequently interrupted by roaming sheep, goats, and even a family of ducks, who insisted on crossing the road in single file.
Everyone on the bus thought it charming, but Daphné just wanted to get to Paris. She knew there was something waiting for her there, but what it was, she wasn’t sure.
The only highlight was a women’s magazine that a woman had left on her seat after she had departed the bus. Such a luxury wasn’t in Daphné’s budget and the trip went quickly while she read every article and studied every picture.
When the bus arrived in Paris, it was after lunch and Daphné was tired, grimy and hungry, but she knew she didn’t have time to waste. Work was hard to come by in Paris and, as Anna Karpinski had said in her letter to Daphné, only the tenacious survived, but Daphné didn’t plan on just surviving, she wanted to thrive in the city.
Of course Anna and her husband Max were tenacious enough to have survived the war in hiding and make a life in Paris, but when Daphné arrived at their tiny shop, and she saw shabby state of their establishment and how rough the neighbourhood was, she wondered if life in Paris was as wonderful as the magazines she read at the village store claimed.
‘Daphné,’ cried Max, as she opened the door to the store, her eyes adjusting to the darkness.
‘Max,’ she said warmly and let him embrace her like her father would have.
Anna and Max had moved from house to house for three years during the war and often slept in barns or cellars. They never complained, and always worried for those who were protecting them.
It was Anna who comforted Chantal when the telegram arrived informing them that Daphné’s father had died.
It was Max who suggested goats to Chantal, and Anna who taught Chantal how to milk them and make the soap. The oil they needed was hard to come by at the end of the war, so they improvised with lard but it worked, and with some sweet lavender from Chantal’s own garden, they had something she could sell on the side of road.
‘Anna, Anna,’ Max cried up the slim staircase, and Daphné looked around the store.
Dark and dreary, filled with a few cabinets of stock, and a curtain behind to separate the back room from the store, Daphné thought this was no place she would want to buy jewellery, yet she knew Max’s work and it was beautiful.
‘How is the business?’ she asked when Max turned from the stairwell.
‘You know, hard, I do what I can with what I have,’ he answered vaguely, but Daphné read his face and knew the answer.
Her thoughts were pushed aside when Anna came down the stairs in a rush and held Daphné for a long time, occasionally pulling away to touch her face.
‘And Maman?’ she asked of Chantal, who was Anna’s mother figure as her own mother had never been heard of after the invasion of Poland.
‘She is fine, worried about me and you and if the world is going to keep turning,’ laughed Daphné.
‘Of course, she is a mother,’ said Anna and her hands gestured to her children.
Daphné had met them once when they were younger, but now she saw a smaller version of Anna and Max, with the same proud face of their mother and the ingenious twinkle in their eye from their father.
‘Peter, Marina, this is Daphné,’ said Anna gently to the boy and girl who stepped forward politely to shake Daphné’s hand.
Upstairs, Anna had created a makeshift bed on the sagging sofa, but it was warm and clean and much more appealing than the shop.
The children had been sent outside to play, and Anna warmed up some vegetable and barley soup and placed it in front of Daphné with a large chunk of rye bread.
She ate it hungrily, savouring the flavours of the sour bread and the sweet broth.
‘How is the business?’ she asked as she dipped the bread into the soup.
Anna shrugged. ‘It’s hard,’ she said and Daphné thought she looked older than her thirty years.
As Daphné wiped the remnants of soup up with her last piece of bread, she thought about the store.
‘It needs to be lighter,’ she said. ‘To show of Max’s work.’
‘But there is no way,’ said Anna. ‘The only light is from the front windows, and the street is so closed in.’
‘Then you must paint it,’ said Daphné, thinking of the light that rose over the horizon on the farm.
‘Paint it? What colour?’ asked Anna, her face bewildered.
Daphné looked around at the utilitarian space. Anna didn’t have the time or money to think beyond the practical and everyday survival. ‘Why?’
Daphné picked up her bowl and plate and took them to the small tin tub that Anna used as a sink and put them in the water to soak.
‘Blush,’ she said, ‘The colour of make-up powder you see in the magazine.’
She took went to her bag and took out a magazine, flicking to a page and finding an advertisement, showing Anna.
It was a drawing of a woman holding a glass of pink champagne, her face beautifully contoured in shades of pink.
‘Pink lightens the skin, it takes away the age lines,’ read Daphné and she looked up at Anna and smiled. ‘And it’s pretty,’ she said.
‘What sort of pink?’ asked Anna suspiciously.
‘The sort of pink you see in a woman’s face when she’s happy, when she’s been outside in the sun, but she’s not sunburned or hot, she’s warm, inside and out,’ said Daphné thinking of Chantal. Her mind wandered as she kept speaking. ‘The rose in the sky at the end of the day, that looks like old paintings of heaven.’
Anna smiled and touched Daphné’s face. ‘You mean the afterglow,’ she said.
‘Is that what it’s called?’ asked Daphné, surprised there was a name for what she was describing.
‘It’s also the colour in a woman’s face when she falls in love,’ said Anna with a smile and Daphné bit her lip in anticipation. She was ready to fall in love, have an adventure, and to bathe in the afterglow of the world.
But first a job, she thought, as she washed her hands and combed her hair, and applied a little goat’s cream to her face.
‘I am off to find work,’ she said to Anna and, after picking up her bag, she headed out the door, waving to Max as she left the shop.
Paris wasn’t so hard to navigate. She and her mother had been there before, but this was her first time alone.
She paused and thought out the arrondissements in her head and got her bearings. She needed to cross the river to get to Montparnasse, where the cafés were. She could become a waitress, she thought, as she walked with purpose across the bridge and through Saint-Germain.
Jazz musicians busked on the streets, and tourists wandered with cameras about their necks. American accents mingled with the French and Daphné wondered why on earth she thought she could have stayed in the village. Paris was the only place for her, she could feel it in her soul, and she started her job-hunting in earnest.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_ef6fb0e7-a90b-5b7a-9b8d-3f3eea19805d)
Robert
Paris never looked more beautiful than in the autumn, Robert Le Marche decided as he drove under a golden canopy of magnificent beech trees.
Everyone always went on about spring in Paris, but autumn was sublime, with the leaves changing and people looking so chic in their coats and boots.
Robert parked his navy Bugatti on rue de Grenelle and jumped out as two attractive women walked towards him. Just as they passed, he pressed the key to lock the car, making them aware that the machine was his.
The women strolled by in deep conversation, ignoring Robert and his car, much to his chagrin. He had twisted his back getting out of the car gracefully and all for nothing, he thought, cursing the women but not the car that was as low to the ground as a snake on roller skates.
He pressed the security code next to the ornate iron gates and then pushed them open and walked inside, entering the private garden. He ignored the last flush of melon-coloured tea roses that stood proudly in their immaculate beds and an espaliered orange tree ran across the ancient brick wall, bearing the last of the fruit while orange and white poppies waved in the sun.
He could never understand his mother’s obsession with the colour orange. She was like Monet, always chasing the light, looking for that ‘dernières lueurs’.
He had stopped listening to her ramblings of the search when he was a boy, but Henri had always listened, even encouraging the pursuit, delivering hand-dyed tangerine silk woven with gold thread from Varanasi, amber beads from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, even a jar of antique buttons in her favourite shades of apricot and candlelight peach from the Camden Markets.
Henri was always such a sycophant, he thought, as he put the key in the lock of the front door and pushed it open.
The marble foyer and wrought iron staircase met him and he sighed, as he looked upstairs. Why his mother wouldn’t get an elevator installed in the place he could never understand. She had the money, but she refused, claiming it was sacrilegious to install such modernity in such an old home.
Robert hadn’t argued with his mother because he would never win. He learned that years ago, but now, as he stood in the foyer of the four-storey family home, he felt nothing. He thought he would feel some sort of relief, even some satisfaction that she was gone, but there was only silence in his heart and in the house.
He walked up the stairs slowly, stopping at each level to catch his breath, and silently cursing his addiction to cigarettes.
Finally, he reached the top level and loosened his tie from his neck. He was once a handsome man, but a lifetime of sunbathing, smoking, drinking and eating rich food had ruined his fine features and had turned him into a doughy version of his former self.
He crossed the room, with its heavy, ornate furniture, and opened the drawer of the Louis XV desk. He pulled out a kidskin file and opened the gold lock with a small key that hung on his key ring.
He rifled through the papers inside and then, not seeing what he wanted, pulled them all out and spread them across the desk.
Birth certificates, the marriage certificate, deeds to the houses and other items that Daphné had deemed important were inside. Everything except the one thing he wanted.
He pulled out his phone, dialled a number and waited.
‘Edward Badger please, Robert Le Marche,’ he said, as he checked the papers again.
‘Edward speaking,’ came the crisp English accent.
‘Where is the will and the formula?’
‘Let me first offer my condolences on the loss of your mother,’ said Edward smoothly. ‘She was a remarkable woman.’
Robert had never liked him. He tried too hard to be Henri’s replacement.
‘Remarkable is one word,’ said Robert drily. ‘I’m at rue de Grenelle, the documents aren’t here.’
‘The formula is in the bank vault, and the will is in the office, as per your mother’s instructions before she passed.’
Robert felt his blood pressure rise. ‘She wrote her will three years ago,’ he said.
‘No, there was a codicil the night before she died,’ said Edward.
‘A what?’
‘A codicil is an amendment to a will,’ said Edward.
Patronising prick, thought Robert.
‘I know what a fucking codicil is,’ he snapped, walking around the top floor, staring unseeingly at the view across Paris. ‘When can I see it?’
‘We have some details to attend to, and then we will read the will. Madame Le Marche expressed very firmly that it should be after her funeral.’
Robert clutched the back of a gilt-edged chair.
‘I need to get things moving,’ he said, trying to control his voice.
‘Yes, I can understand that,’ said Edward and then he paused on the end of the phone. ‘We have to wait for Sibylla’s response,’ he said.
‘Sibylla? Henri’s child?’ asked Robert. He now circled the chair and sat on its overstuffed silk cushion.
‘Yes, she’s in the will,’ said Edward.
‘What did Daphné leave her?’ Robert ran through the list of chattels and houses. The château now used as a wedding venue, the house he was sitting in, the apartment in London where she died? Perhaps it was some art? Robert could accept some art going to the girl, she deserved that much, and a flush of guilt ran through his body, causing a cold sweat.
‘Why do we need to wait for her? If it’s an item, we can ship it over, can’t we?’ Robert’s voice betrayed him as his desperation rose.
‘That’s not going to work,’ said Edward. ‘Now if you will excuse me, I have more details to attend to, as I’m sure you do also, for the funeral will most likely be enormous.’
Robert sat in the chair, staring at the wall.
Sibylla Le Marche. He barely thought of Henri’s child nowadays. How old was she when he died? Nine or ten? He searched his memory for the girl who had played with Celeste while he and Matilde pointed blame at each other for Camille’s death.
She was more like her mother Elisabeth, he remembered, dark haired and quiet, in contrast to Celeste’s boisterous beauty.
Just thinking about the past gave him a headache and he decided he needed two things. A strong coffee and blowjob from one of the escorts he used for such purposes.
He dialled a number and waited. ‘Anika, it’s Robert, can I see you?’
‘Darling,’ she purred in her German accent, ‘I’m in Cannes.’ She laughed and he could hear the sound of laughter in the background.
‘Why are you in Cannes?’
‘I’m with a sheik I met at the festival, who offered me an obscene amount of cash to stay for a while. We’ve been all over the Mediterranean, and we’re just coming back into Cannes now.’
Her voice hushed to a whisper. ‘I can pay my apartment off with this trip,’ she said.
Robert wasn’t sure if he should congratulate her or call Interpol in case she went missing.
