Izzie did what she could. The practical things were the easiest: loading and unloading laundry, stocking the fridge, helping Will with his homework, or playing with Pasco after Colette had to leave. Even answering Florence’s heartbreaking questions. This she could take in her stride.
It was how to be with Maddy that was worrying her. If they’d known each other for longer before this dreadful tragedy, she would have had a reference point. Up and down, calm and crazy, resigned and resentful—Izzie wasn’t sure which was the real Maddy. It was like trying to piece together a jigsaw without having seen the picture on the lid. She hadn’t even known Simon. All she had to go on were the photographs Maddy had shown her with such fervor. They revealed a big, confident man who was smiling in every one, from the glamorous wedding pictures, to the snaps of him buried in the sand with Will standing triumphantly beside him with a spade.
So she could give no feedback when Maddy spoke about him, speculating endlessly on what had gone wrong, on the signs she shouldn’t have missed, forensically combing through her memories of their last weeks together, reproaching herself for not being the wife he could have shared his problems with.
Izzie could only listen. She knew enough about bereavement to realize that Maddy didn’t want platitudes. The best gift she could give her was the space to feel what she was feeling and to take her as she was, day by day, hour by hour. Some instinct made Izzie believe that Maddy had an inner strength that she was only just testing, and that it would see her through in the long run. Some days, however, that belief was stretched to the limits.
It was a Wednesday when things came to a head. She had walked straight into the house, as usual, and tucked a couple of shepherd’s pies, made the night before, into the freezer. Maddy’s car—a Fiesta now—was parked at its customary rakish angle in the drive, but of Maddy there was no sign. Florence was at nursery, Pasco was grizzling, bored in his playpen in the kitchen, and the remains of his porridge were congealing on the high chair. Worried now, Izzie picked him up quickly and clutched him to her. Feeling the dampness from his nappy, she started rushing from room to room—no sign. Her heart was pounding in her chest when, from an upstairs window, she spotted a trail of footsteps on the dewy lawn. Almost crying herself, she followed the dark ribbon on the grass into the orchard, and there Maddy stood, barefoot and still in her pajamas, her hair wild and uncombed, looking up at the sky through the branches of the trees.
Mustering all the control she could, Izzie spoke quietly. “Maddy, come in now; you’ll get cold. I’ll put some coffee on for us both. Who took the children in today?”
Maddy turned, looking slightly irritated at having her reverie interrupted. “I did, of course.”
“In your pajamas?”
“I wore my dressing gown,” she replied defensively. “And it wasn’t cold.”
“Come in now,” Izzie reiterated more firmly. “It’s time to get dressed. And we’ve got work to do today. I’m going to put Pasco into his cot for a bit while we get you dressed.” Izzie cuddled him as they went upstairs together and changed his sodden nappy before settling him safely into the cot, surrounded by a ludicrous number of toys. He’ll be fine, thought Izzie, while I sort out his mother.
“Right, Maddy.” She steered her across the landing. “No more pajama mooching.”
Maddy allowed herself to be undressed and shoved under the warm jets of the power shower she had chosen with such care less than six weeks before. Izzie’s hand shot round the glass door to pass her shampoo, conditioner, and shower gel in rapid succession, and Maddy performed her usual routine bit by bit, waiting for the next command, then meekly responding.
Izzie, for her part, was struck by how similar it all was to getting Charlie to wash. “Rinse the shampoo out thoroughly, now. Have you done your feet? Don’t forget in between your toes. Is this the stuff you like?”
As Maddy let the water rinse off the shampoo, Izzie perched on the side of the bath and watched her for a moment as the water cascaded over her drooping head and down over her slim body, until the glass steamed up and obscured her view. She seemed almost childlike, passive and unresisting in her raw vulnerability. Izzie had to look away.
She scanned the room, so perfectly put together with its honey-colored walls and white and chrome fittings. Every tap, every plug, even the toothbrush mug yelled quality. No Buzz Lightyear bubble bath or foam alphabet letters here to ruin the effect. Beautifully lit glass shelves either side of the basins groaned under stylishly packaged jars of creams and lotions. Unbearably, one still held Simon’s shaving gear, silver shaving bowl and badger-hair brush; silver-backed hairbrushes; and discreet bottles of Penhaligon aftershave with rounded glass stoppers. His toothbrush stood forlorn and dry in a glass.
Unable to witness the desolation in the midst of this luxury any longer, Izzie reached into the shower to turn off the water and hand Maddy a towel. Dried and moisturized, she sat quietly on the bed and Izzie noticed, as she brushed the tangles out of her hair, the dark roots that would once have vexed Maddy beyond endurance. Izzie opened the wardrobe. Where to start? It was almost anal in its neatness. Like her mother, Maddy was clearly fascinated by clothes. T-shirts were piled by color; socks and tights rolled and placed in honeycomb drawer organizers; cashmere knitwear arranged by sleeve length and by tone from palest pink to deepest turquoise, like a paint palette.
“Is this the capsule wardrobe, hey, Maddy? More like a space shuttle!” Izzie laughed lightly in an attempt to lift the mood. “My cupboard’s just a lucky dip. What do you feel like wearing then?” Maddy shrugged and tugged distractedly at the tie on her toweling bathrobe. Eventually, Izzie laid out on the bed a pair of pale blue capri pants, a white long-sleeved T-shirt, and a cashmere V-neck in a deep sea green. On the smooth beech shelves, she found bras and knickers, carefully matched, and enough of them to last a month. Each one in shell pink or palest blue and more lacy and delicate than the last.
Suddenly Izzie felt overwhelmed by the intimacy of it all—she’d had to intrude too far. She went to check on Pasco, who was chewing his donkey’s ear.
She stroked his soft little head. “Fancy your mother taking Will and Florence to school in her pajamas. Just you wait—it’s the start of a trend. They’ll all be at it soon—ditching their new pastel loafers and going barefoot! I’d pay good money to see that.” Pasco gave her a gummy smile and bounced up and down on his bottom.
A puzzled exclamation had her racing back to Maddy, who was frowning in perplexity. “These trousers can’t be mine. They’re far too big.” She was right. They were hanging off her. And now that Izzie really looked, she could see that the bra was loose, and her ribs visible under the lightly tanned flesh. Maddy must have lost a stone at least.
Maddy let her head tilt right back, laughing slowly. “I’d have given anything to have lost this kind of weight six months ago. Look at me! I’ve found it! The weight-loss program that works. Roll up, ladies, it’s the bereavement and bankruptcy diet!”
Izzy had to head this off. “Come on,” she said briskly. “You’re not going to tell me that someone who loves accessories as much as you can’t find a belt! There—that’s a bit better. Now you’re the best-dressed scarecrow in the whole county. Right, come on. I’ve got big plans for us. Bring Pasco downstairs. He’s in for a real treat!”
Intrigued now, in spite of herself, Maddy obediently trotted downstairs, nuzzling Pasco’s soft neck. “What is it? What are we going to do? Are we going out?”
“Nope. Something far more innovative than that! We’re going to clean the kitchen. Now. Take me to your Mr Muscle. We’re going to get Marigolded up.”
Maddy looked around the kitchen as if for the first time. “You’ve got a point. One foot sticking to the floor, I can tolerate. But not both.”
Izzie was throwing open cupboard after cupboard. “Okay. I give in. Where’s the hoover?”
“I’ve no idea. Somewhere in the utility room, maybe?” Maddy peered inside and shook her head in wonder.
“Look at all this stuff. I may not have any money, but it looks like I’ll never want for Toilet Duck!”
Brandishing brooms and dusters, they got stuck into the kitchen. First Maddy mopped the floor, then Izzie wiped down all the surfaces and covered the floor with crumbs again. Then Maddy carefully cleaned windows with the floor cloth, leaving them dirtier than before. Izzie struggled to empty the Dyson cylinder into the bin, but in banging it, created a mushroom cloud of dust. Pasco meanwhile was busily emptying pasta shapes and posting them into Izzie’s handbag. With a shriek of horrified laughter, Maddy scooped him up and spun round with him in her arms. Now they were all laughing as they looked around at the carnage. Every surface, as well as they themselves, was coated with fine gray dust.
“Well, you’ve got to admit it,” said Maddy at last, wiping tears of laughter from her grimy face, “we’ve made a big difference. It was pretty dirty when we started. Now it’s a complete shit heap.”
And they all started laughing again, Pasco delightedly sticking his grubby fingers into his mother’s mouth.
After a damage-limitation exercise that involved a cursory hoovering up—nothing they could mess up too much—Izzie went to tidy up the papers in the hall while Maddy took everything out of the fridge and wiped the shelves.
“I’ve only dropped one jar and I’ve found a yogurt that expired in September,” yelled Maddy from the kitchen. “Not bad, eh? Think I dare risk making a cup of coffee?”
“Live dangerously, girl,” replied Izzie, and tidied away some coats from a heap by the front door. Under them, she found a large wooden wine crate and, deciding it wasn’t her place to look inside, took it with her into the kitchen.
“I found this under some rubble. Is it something of yours?”
Maddy stared blankly for a moment, then seemed to remember. “Wow! I’d forgotten about that. It comes from my grandmother’s apartment. Let’s have a look.”
Izzie set the box on a chair and lifted Pasco out of his mother’s arms. Carefully Maddy placed the wine crate onto the table, treating it like some kind of exhibit at Sotheby’s. Izzie watched as she flexed her fingers, like a pianist about to perform a concerto, and ran her hands over the smooth mellow wood. “What have we here?”
With one hand, Izzie quickly piled up the detritus that covered the table, so Maddy could spread out her finds, and took off the kettle. This was important, an event that merited a plate of biscuits too. For the first time in weeks, Maddy seemed to be taking an interest in something; a vague flush of color tinged her cheeks, and Izzie didn’t want to destroy the fragile moment.
Maddy couldn’t be sure, but the box must have arrived in a packing case with the furniture sent over from Paris when Mémé had died three years ago. She’d obviously taken one look at the dusty, yellowing newspaper on top and condemned it to the loft with Simon’s old school trunk and the oddments she could find no place for in their house in London. Maddy had only been able to make a flying visit for her funeral—Florence had been very tiny—but Giselle had stayed behind in Paris with her sister, Claudette, who lived in Antibes (though was careful to stay out of the sun), and the two of them had gone through the ghastly process of clearing their mother’s bits and pieces.
Maddy had started halfheartedly to do the same with Simon’s, but she had stopped after lifting out an armful of his clothes from the wardrobe and burying her nose in them to take in the smell of his body. It was too soon and too final. Only yesterday Will had come plodding out of the cloakroom like Christopher Robin wearing Simon’s wellies, which came up to his thighs, but Maddy had snapped at him and told him to put them back straight away. Then, seeing his face begin to crumple in confusion, had relented.
As she now lifted off the paper from the top of the box—a front page from Le Figaro—it revealed a piece of Chantilly lace, folded and stiffened from being there so long.
“Oh that’s beautiful.” Izzie took the delicate filigree from Maddy’s hands and unfolded it carefully, keeping it out of Pasco’s reach. “This is the sort of thing you pay a fortune for in those brocantes places. I remember we went to one on a Sunday once when we were on holiday in Provence, oh eons ago . . .” Maddy could sense that, by her jabbering, Izzie was trying to encourage her to keep going through the box, and suddenly she loved her for her enthusiasm and interest.
“It’s funny really—Mémé wasn’t big on lace. She was incredibly elegant, in a fifties sort of way. Always dressed to the nines in case someone called unexpectedly—you can see where my mother got it from. She was all Chanel and pearls, and she smelled divine.” Maddy paused, but Izzie stayed silent and waited. “When I was little I used to fiddle the whole time with the things on her dressing table, trying on her rings and her necklaces. I’d prance about in her dressing gown and high heels, smother myself in Guerlain until I stank. She was such a lady—surprising really ’cos she wasn’t born to it.” Maddy stopped and put her hand back into the box.
“Really?” Izzie prompted. “I sort of imagined she was French aristocracy.”
“Oh no, no, no.” Maddy smiled, lifting out a pile of curled and faded papers. “Real peasant stock from further south.” She narrowed her eyes, thinking. “She went to Paris in the thirties to look for a job at a couturier—she was always mad about fashion. I think she was one of those girls who modeled the collection for the smart ladies who come for a private fashion show. All very Vogue.”
Maddy started browsing through the curling papers in her hand, the dust getting onto her fingers. They looked like old photographs. “Anyway, she met Grand-père when he came to the couturier with his mother to buy her some clothes—now he was top drawer. Really posh Parisian banking family—and it was a coup de foudre, la grande passion—apparently he came back and waited until she knocked off work that evening—Mémé used to tell me all this with glee, really playing up how smitten he was—the French are so fucking pleased with themselves—anyway the family was horrified and all that, but she charmed the pants off them . . . Oh look, here’s a picture.”
She handed Izzie a black-and-white photo of Mémé in a coat with a thick fur collar, her hair neat and bobbed, on the arm of a devastatingly handsome man whose chest was puffed out with pride. Izzie giggled. “They look so young but so sophisticated.”
“Here’s Mémé in about nineteen eighty—must have been in Nice or somewhere.” The photo, in color this time, showed an old woman in a wicker chair on some kind of terrace, and you could tell from the light it was taken beside the sea. She was wearing a large straw hat and a sort of greenish caftan.
Izzie gasped. “God, she’s the image of you! Your mum was right—better get off the fags if you want to look like that at fifty odd.”
“Oh don’t you bloody start.” Maddy laughed. “And anyway she smoked like a chimney with a long cigarette holder!” Suddenly she shrieked with laughter. “Look at this—oh my God! This is one of me in my teens—must have been about fifteen—when we went to stay with Aunt Claudette in Antibes.” A group of teenagers, nubile bodies in swimsuits, were all leaning against each other, laughing and holding up glasses of wine as if in a toast. Izzie took the picture from Maddy. “Your figure was great even then, you cow. You all look so bronzed and carefree.”
“And rich,” added Maddy wistfully. They had been spoiled. Villas, maids. It had been idyllic.
“Well, I didn’t want to say it. But money obviously didn’t do anything for your taste in haircuts. Look at you all! I had a boyfriend once with hair like this guy here—horribly early eighties and New Romantic. Didn’t that much hair gel cause an oil slick in the Med? Who is he?”
Maddy looked up from the other pictures, hearing the end of Izzie’s question. “Oh, that’s Philippe, my oldest cousin—he’s a surgeon. That’s Adèle, his younger sister—she eloped with the boy next door. She teaches English. They’ve just adopted a little girl from Senegal.” She hoped she wasn’t boring Izzie.
Izzie peered closer. “And who’s this skinny one? He’s cute too, in
a callow kind of way.”
Maddy looked again at the photo. “Oh that’s Jean Luc, another cousin. He’s my aunt’s son and he runs a farm in the Cévennes now. Isn’t he lovely? He’s one of my favorite people. Thank goodness he’s shaved off that mustache though. He was doing the moody student thing—writing poetry, playing the guitar. I was madly in love with him in those days, but then so was half of Nice.”
She looked down again. “Look at this—here’s my mum and my dad.” The picture must have been taken soon after he and Giselle were married—they were both wearing sailing clothes and were holding onto each other as only newlyweds do; the wind had caught their hair and they were both laughing at the camera. For once her mother looked carefree and disheveled. Maddy’s eyes filled up with tears, but they didn’t feel like the tears she’d shed over the last few weeks. Not angry and desperate, just sad. The sort of tears that come when your memory’s been stirred and you realize how much you miss the time when life was perfect and uncomplicated.
Izzie looked closely at it. “I can see why she fell for him, but somehow I imagined someone dapper and distinctly Continental . . .” She paused. “Well, I don’t really know your mother but . . . no offense.”
Maddy sniffed and laughed. “None taken. Dad was very English. Almost aristocratic really, public school and all that. Can’t imagine how they were ever compatible. The rest of the pictures are of long-lost cousins.” Maddy made a pile on the table and then delved into the box for more. “Good grief, I remember this.” She pulled out an old clockwork toy, a monkey on a bicycle, and gently placed it on the table. As she turned the key, the monkey’s legs began to move up and down and its head clicked from side to side. Pasco clapped his hands with glee.
“Don’t touch, sweetheart,” said Izzie. “They’re quite valuable, you know. You ought to hang onto it for the children when they are older.”
Goodbye, Jimmy Choo Page 7