A French Wedding Read online

  Juliette’s father gives a little laugh as though reading her mind. ‘Not the old Pere Michel. The young one. His nephew actually, we’ve spoken of him.’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ Juliette mutters, still feeling hot and uncomfortable.

  ‘He’s a lovely man. Quite young. In his late forties, I think. Maybe fifties.’

  ‘I don’t think –’

  ‘He’d love to meet you. Your mother and I talk about you all the time. He knows all about you.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can stay that long, Dad,’ Juliette says, not meeting her father’s gaze.

  ‘He has been a great support to us. Your mother has been going to church every day or two. It gives her great comfort.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Pere Michel would be thrilled to meet you.’

  Juliette stands from her chair. ‘Are you finished?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  Juliette takes her bowl to the sink, her skin warm and prickling. She does not want to meet a priest. She has missed her interview, for which there will be consequences. She is worried about Delphine. Worried about the messages, unchecked, on her phone. She wants to be in Paris, away from here. Anywhere but here.

  ‘It reminds us that there is life, you know, after,’ Juliette’s father continues. Juliette wants to cover her ears. She turns on the tap too quick, so the water gushes out noisily. Still she hears her father say, ‘It’s so easy to get caught up in things. To lose sight of the big picture.’

  She turns it hard the other way.

  ‘Christ, Dad!’

  He looks up at her, alarmed.

  ‘It’s not just a job, okay?’

  ‘I wasn’t –’

  ‘Delphine means something to me. I’ve built my life around it.’

  ‘Juliette –’

  ‘It’s doing well. It’s doing really well. It’s mine. My sweat and tears, Dad. There’s no shame in that!’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I’m proud of it,’ Juliette says, her voice trembling.

  ‘We are very, very proud of you, darling,’ he says. ‘We always have been, we always will be.’

  ‘I know.’ Juliette feels suddenly deflated. She holds on to the edge of the sink. ‘Sorry.’

  Her father brings his bowl to the sink and pats her back. They aren’t a very demonstrative family.

  ‘We love you.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘But sweetheart …’

  Juliette’s father bites his lip and frowns.

  ‘There’s only one thing you should build your life around,’ he says softly.

  *

  Juliette sends her father to bed and does the dishes. He doesn’t protest, simply kisses her on the forehead and shuffles to his room. The washing up is soothing and distracts Juliette from looking at her phone which has continued to vibrate. She cannot bear to listen to the messages and hear the panic, the thought of which makes her stomach drop. When the dishes are finished she wipes her hands and stands with her back leaning against the sink, taking in the dining room. How has it become so untidy so fast? Juliette tries to remember the last time she was in Douarnenez and is sure, for a brief, convinced moment, it was only a couple of weeks ago. But then she counts back weekends, the busy times for Delphine, that she can recall by the guests who had come in, by the ways she had found herself in the mornings – often fully dressed and asleep on top of her sheets, on her sofa, once on the bathroom floor. She counts back eight weekends and then stops counting. It cannot possibly have been that long.

  The last time Juliette visited her mother had been in the house, wiping and sorting and dusting. Maybe there had been too many things then, memorabilia and photos and those porcelain statuettes her mother loved. But during that visit the cottage seemed more ordered. Now it feels sad and old; like it is ready to give up. Juliette rubs her eyes. She cannot remember if it truly had been any different that last visit or whether it was her mother’s presence that had made it seem so. Juliette’s mother’s presence is always so bright. People assume she is in her sixties, which hasn’t been true for two decades. She goes to the library on Mondays and community yoga on Thursdays and bridge, she is acutely proficient at bridge, on Saturday mornings. Without her mother Juliette notices her father is doddery. The mumbling over the crossword, the way he shuffles when he walks. Juliette wonders when he last saw a doctor himself.

  She goes to the dining table and picks up the paper her father left on the top of the pile. For Sale. Bakery. She tries not to scoff. It is cruel to scoff. Stephanie Jeunet worked day in, day out, in that place and there is no shame in work like that. Baking had been Juliette’s first curiosity and introduction to cooking. The experience of making kouign-amann, of cooking the breads and cakes for the Saints Days, birthdays and Christmas. At fifteen Juliette took orders for her Bûche de Noël, Yule log, and large gingerbreads made with honey and delivered them to neighbours’ houses on Christmas Day, wrapped in cellophane with big, red bows. But now Juliette has Delphine. Delphine is hers. She is Delphine. Juliette glances at her bag, left by the top of the stairs. Inside her phone is filled with messages. She still owes the bank a lot of money, Delphine isn’t really all hers yet, and a good Gault et Millau review is critical to the restaurant’s ongoing success. Juliette looks back at the paper in her hand. There is only one page for job vacancies and businesses for sale in Douarnenez. Juliette scans the listings again – Bakery, Mechanic Shop, Children’s Clothing Store. Waitress, apprentice plumber, the cook/housekeeper position she’d noticed earlier. She screws the paper up in her hand, balling it, making the words inside disappear, before dropping it to the floor. Stupid tiny town. She hates it. There are no jobs, no growth, everything and everyone is in a state of disrepair and deterioration. It makes her feel unsteady. It makes her feel as though it might be contagious, that she needs to get out, fast, or she’ll succumb to it, too. She’ll slow down, she’ll start decaying, her life tipping rapidly towards death.

  Juliette moves quickly to the sink and reaches for the roll of grey rubbish bags her mother keeps on the shelf beneath. She takes one to the dining table and sweeps papers into it. Then steps back. On the table is a bare patch, free from dust, where the papers were piled. She grabs a stack of letters and bills by the phone and thrusts them into the bag too. A line of photographs, mainly of Juliette as a teenager – sullen and unsmiling – go in. Magazines, old newspapers, plastic lids, a blurry photograph of their cocker spaniels both long-dead, loose coins, a pair of broken scissors, trousers with a tear in the pocket and a needle waiting in the fabric. Juliette fetches another rubbish sack. And on and on and in it all goes till the space looks five times bigger and clear and Juliette can breathe better. The clock on the wall ticks audibly, it is now close to midnight. Juliette is panting a little. Finally she sees the paper she screwed into a ball on the floor and she pushes that in and ties the top of the sack. It takes all her strength to drag the bags down the stairs, nearly hooking her handbag up with one of them, and out the front door. She can feel the soft weight of the magazines and the glass-and-wood clatters of the photo frames as she bumps them along to the edge of the kerb. When she straightens, the cool, night air fills her lungs. Above her hundreds of stars glitter in the black palm of the sky. Juliette stares. The night sky never looks that way in Paris.

  *

  When Juliette wakes it takes her a moment to remember where she is. She stares at the blue, floral pillowcase and then the thick brown carpet and, on it, her handbag, the top spread open, her phone facing up to her. She picks it up and scrolls through the messages. Fourteen of them, mostly from Louis, none from the person who had been in her dreams. The one that makes her feel warm and misplaced and guilty, as though she shouldn’t have those kinds of thoughts in her childhood bedroom, except this is exactly where those kinds of thoughts had first begun. Juliette sits up and puts her feet agains
t the carpet, taking a moment to absorb her surroundings. Her parents have kept the posters she put up with gold thumbtacks when she was a teen. The British bands she had loved – Duran Duran, Joy Division, The Smiths – and a large close-up of Kate Bush, looking misty and faraway and beautiful. There is a white chest of drawers in one corner with an oval mirror on the top and a shell-covered treasure box containing badges and earrings and hair ties.

  Juliette had collected the shells and made the box with her father. They had gone together to the secret beaches, the ones that pirates had berthed in centuries before, burying their gold and jewels, tyrannising the locals. They had walked the lengths of those coves many times to find the loveliest shells in browns and pinks, colours of sunrises and skin and hens’ eggs. They had chosen shells that were unbroken and strong, with lovely thick ridges to run fingers across. They hunted, too, for coins that pirates may have left behind, upturning rocks, flipping over clumps of seaweed and sliding fingers into crevices. Juliette’s father told her of the legend of Ys, the most beautiful city in Europe, before it was destroyed by storm and sea, vanishing somewhere in the Douarnenez Bay, and though it was probably just a myth Juliette had been convinced she’d find evidence of it, too. A hairbrush of Dahut’s or Gradlon’s stolen key, some gem or rubble. On the way home they’d stop in at a bakery and pick up a still-warm wedge of kouign-amann or a generous square of gâteau Breton filled with a dark, sticky, sweet prune paste. Juliette’s mother would be waiting for them at the kitchen window with one finger stuck in the pages of a book and the other hand waving furiously. She’d lean out and call to them too brightly as neighbours in dark dresses glanced up at her and Juliette felt heat come to her cheeks.

  Juliette stands, glancing down for a moment at the old t-shirt and leggings she had pulled on in the dark in lieu of nightwear.

  ‘Dad?’

  There is no reply. Juliette knocks gently on the door to his room. The door is unlatched and swings gently open. The bed is unmade. Juliette steps inside. The bed is covered with a nubbly, dark pink bedspread, not a duvet. The bedside cabinets, which were wedding presents, have one drawer each and gold feet. On her father’s side there is a glass for water and a handkerchief. Juliette goes to her mother’s side and sits on the bed. She opens the tiny drawer in the cabinet. It used to be filled with photographs and Juliette’s school newspapers. Now it is cluttered with bottles of pills. She slides it shut again. There are two books on the top of the cabinet – the bible and a copy of ‘Tristan and Iseult’. Juliette picks up the latter and runs her fingers over the cover. It’s dark green with gold embossing, dust gathered in the dips and ripples. A man and woman embrace in the illustration, the gold of the woman’s silhouette worn thin, probably from Juliette’s fingers as a girl. Tristan and Iseult is the tale that led her mother, enchanted, to France, to this village, with a young husband in tow. Juliette lifts the book to her nose and breathes in, hoping to find a scent that reminds her of her mother, but the smell of the pages, though comforting, are not her. They are not cold cream and laundry powder and perfume scented like violets. If Juliette looked in the ensuite bathroom, she could probably find a bottle of her mother’s perfume; she always bought it in threes. One for now, one for later, one for just in case. It was in a mauve-coloured glass bottle with a green lid.

  Lavender’s green, dilly dilly …

  Juliette replaces Tristan and Iseult and picks up the bible. It is old, too, with a maroon leather slipcover declaring ‘Family Bible’. It didn’t used to be in here. It used to be in the kitchen underneath the telephone book, brought out for the occasional quiz question or prayer, thumbed through on nights when Juliette’s father had waited for Juliette to come home from a party or date.

  ‘Dad?’ Juliette calls out again, bible in her lap. She wonders if her father has gone to church, to see Pere Michel. Or perhaps to the market to get food. He would do that if he thought it might make her stay longer. He would buy her favourite fruits, fetch a fresh loaf of bread and collect a broad, sticky wedge of kouign-amann in a brown, paper bag. He’d even buy new coffee grinds, though Juliette was the only one who drank coffee and there were three packets already in the pantry she had noticed last night. She pauses a moment and then opens the cover. On the inside is her mother’s name: Pamela Evans. Juliette peers at the name scrawled underneath, in fresher ink and an unsteady hand. A name she has never noticed written there before.

  Violette Evans.

  In a dizzying rush of memory Juliette sees her mother, at a time when her hair was dark and her skin smooth, sitting where Juliette sits now. Singing a lullaby. Crying. Pressing something to her chest. Something small and knitted. Juliette, the girl, watching from the door.

  ‘Maman?’

  Juliette closes the book quickly on her finger and yelps with fright when the phone in the kitchen rings at the same time. Putting the book back hastily she runs towards the sound. The phone once cream has aged to yellow. Juliette presses the receiver to her ear.

  ‘Bonjour?’

  ‘Juliette?’

  ‘Oui. Is that you, Dad?’

  ‘Oh good, you’re still there.’

  Juliette feels a stab of guilt that he assumed she might have already left; escaped. In the short pause Juliette hears the sound of the rubbish trucks grumbling up the narrow lane towards the cottage. It must now be late morning.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m … I’m at the hospital.’

  ‘With Mum? Why didn’t you wake me?’

  ‘I went early. I got a call. I didn’t want to wake you. You seemed so tired.’

  ‘Dad. You should have –’

  ‘Juliette?’

  The tone of her father’s voice, the urgency, does something to Juliette’s inner workings. Her breath catches in her throat. The sudden silence stretches thin and brittle, like toffee, about to shatter.

  ‘What is it?’ Juliette whispers.

  Now Juliette hears everything. The rubbish trucks growing louder, her breath, the sounds of the hospital in the background, beyond her father’s laboured breathing, the sound of her own heart beating.

  The rubbish trucks.

  ‘Darling …’

  Juliette drops the phone so it bounces on its cord and races down the stairs. Photographs of herself, her child self, her young self, watch as she passes, a blur of unbrushed hair and too-big t-shirt and leggings that sag at the knees. Juliette yanks at the door and bursts out onto the street. The men look at her, momentarily distracted, gloved hands gripping grey and black plastic sacks.

  ‘Arrête!’

  Juliette tumbles onto her knees.

  ‘Pardon?’ one asks.

  ‘Arrête!’ she begs again, lifting up her palms, grazed and starting to bleed. And then in English, ‘Stop! Leave them! Leave the bags!’

  The two men glance at one another.

  ‘It’s not rubbish!’ Juliette sobs, still in English. ‘Leave it. Please leave it.’

  The men lower the bags, placing them beside her. They stare. Juliette covers her face with her blood-flecked hands and cries.

  ‘It’s not rubbish … It’s not rubbish …’

  Friday – vendredi

  Chapter 1

  Max

  He is probably driving too fast. Too fast considering he isn’t on an AutoRoute, but he likes these back roads better. And he likes driving too fast. He likes the thrum of the engine coming up through the soles of his feet, through his legs, into his crotch. He likes gripping the steering wheel with just one hand, the wind biting the elbow of his other arm, hanging out the window. This car, slick and red as lipstick, purrs.

  Max is going to be late. The others will all be there soon, just as he had asked them to be. Waiting for him. He can see them on the lawn, staring back at his house, Juliette fetching them long, cool glasses with fresh garden mint stuffed in. They will be travel weary. Impressed. Eddie a
nd whomever he’d said his new girlfriend was, the American one – Betty? Nina and Lars, bless them. Their kid, though she probably wasn’t a kid anymore. Hot Rosie and her awful husband, Hugo …

  Helen.

  Max had missed her earlier call but listened to the message. The deep, soft whir of her voice, edged by the effects of cigarettes and New York. Saying she was looking forward to it, that frankly she needed a break. Telling him she’d be there by nightfall and that later she’d be picking up her sister, the half-sister technically, Soleil. Max found it hard to pay attention to the details. Something shifted inside him at the sound of her voice. Something uncoiled.

  Max rubs his eyes. He has been touring too much and drinking too much; operating on about five hours of sleep a night and it is no longer enough. The cocaine just takes the edge off and keeps him awake but he’ll lay off it after today; he has promised himself. His eyes, tired and bloodshot, those strange khaki-coloured eyes, the colour of dark bay leaves, of swamp water, are his father’s eyes. Not that he ever tells anyone that.

  Max turns the music up even louder till he feels the blood pounding in his ears. Don’t think about him.

  Helen is the only one of Max’s friends who knows about his father, his family. The whole lot of it. He can count on one hand the number of people who know much about his childhood. Him and his dad, Helen – that’s already three fingers. The other two are for social workers.

  It never works to try not to think of something once you’ve started thinking about it. Max knows that from thinking about Helen every single day of his life since he can’t even remember when. Actually, that isn’t true. He does remember. It was summer. Helen was sitting next to Rosie on the grass in the common area outside one of the lecture blocks. She wore a long skirt hitched up to her thighs and she was laughing. Rosie’s hair was white-blonde and cut just like Debbie Harry’s on the Blondie record Max’s dad owned, while Helen’s was long and tangled at the back, dark as Christmas pudding, the kind other people’s families ate. She wore swingy earrings that moved when she did. Her thighs were the colour of cream. Max watched her for longer than was socially acceptable. She must have felt his eyes on her. He remembers her getting up and walking over. She was barefoot. He remembers not being able to look away, and grinning like a young boy, which he never did. Especially not when he was a boy. She asked him for a light and he pulled a green plastic lighter from his pocket. ‘I’m Helen,’ she said.