One Day in May

by Catherine Alliott

  I didn’t have enough money for a hotel, so after taking Seffy for a walk down by the river – he was toddling now, his chubby hand in mine – we went back to the van to sleep. I stretched out in a sleeping bag in the back whilst he lay in his pram top beside me. I slept fitfully, parked as we were just off the market square, thinking any minute a gendarme would knock on the window crying, ‘Alors! Fiche-moi le camp!’ Happily we were left in peace.

  We awoke to a hazy pink dawn, the sun streaming through the van windows. I sat up and pushed aside one of the shirts I’d hung as a makeshift curtain. Stall holders had begun to set up trestle tables under the plane trees. Some just spread a blanket on the ground, loading it with piles of brica-brac, whilst others used the backs of their ancient Citroën vans to display their wares. Above, swinging from the trees, a huge banner bore the legend ‘23ème Fréjus Brocante’.

  An hour later the sky was sailor blue, and Seffy and I hustled to our café for breakfast. The same toothless madame beamed in delight – not at me, I realized, as she played with Seffy’s bare toes – and the bar began to fill up. Old men drifted in for their pastis or café cognac, girding their livers before a hard day’s work, sometimes in the fields, but more often playing cards outside, or a strenuous game of boules.

  The stalls were now fully loaded: pagodas of books, lamps, pitted mirrors, coronas, candlesticks and commodes wobbled perilously. Entire domestic histories, it seemed, were reduced to one table, whilst the ubiquitous Louis Quinze chairs with shredded silk upholstery – looking faintly embarrassed to be outdoors and not in a salon – stood by. As the church clock chimed eight, I lifted Seffy carefully into the pram. Happily, after a huge bottle of milk warmed in the microwave by madame, his eyes closed like a doll’s and I shot round the stalls. I bought quickly, but, I hoped, shrewdly, trusting my instinct.

  Feeling rather pleased with myself I awarded myself a break at eleven o’clock, a cup of coffee, thinking I’d earned it. I’d wake Seffy for a feed, I determined, and then have another look: make sure there was nothing I’d missed. As I went towards our usual café, I paused at a shop to buy an English newspaper. That’s when I saw it.

  FOREIGN SECRETARY KILLED IN TERRORIST ATTACK

  As I picked it off the stand I remember feeling a great throb, a rush of blood. I stared at the photograph: a wreck of a bus. Read the first few lines. But the realization that he was dead was not immediate. I felt only terror, and a desperation for the terror to end. I read his name again; ‘Dominic Forbes, 36’. I began to shake violently. My knees gave way and the next thing I knew, I was sitting on the floor. A baby in a pram began to wail beside me. My baby. But I couldn’t get up. Someone crouched beside me: a helping hand was on my arm, then another. A girl’s face, the French girl’s, Françoise, close to mine. Her voice, urgent: ‘Are you all right?’

  I couldn’t speak. The newspaper was still clenched in my hand. Consternation was intense in the background now. Large Frenchwomen were flapping around offering advice, a small crowd was gathering, gesticulating, their voices shrill. Françoise was helping me to my feet and leading me away, one hand pushing the pram, another supporting me. We went towards a café, an umbrella in the shade. I sat dumbly. She ordered me a drink, a pastis, one for her too, but I couldn’t drink. My eyes kept going back to the paper. I felt the blood drain from me, felt cold without it. I remember covering my mouth with my hand as I screamed. Françoise reached across the table to seize my arm in alarm, her eyes wide, but the scream had relieved the first terrifying pressure of the truth, the first shock of certainty. I felt both trembling hands cover my eyes as I wept noisily. I remember Françoise lifting a wailing, frightened Seffy from his pram to soothe him as I cradled my head to the table, catching my breath in great heaving sobs that seemed to come from the centre of the earth.

  I don’t remember much about the following sequence of events, except that she had a hotel room in the square, which she took me to. I lay on the bed and she let me cry on: on and on, face down into the pillows, up to the ceiling on my back, curled up in the foetal position. And then some time later, she slipped me a sleeping pill and I slept. After all, I’d been up most of the previous night.

  Some hours later, I woke to find her on the balcony with Seffy. I could tell by the light it was early evening, and he was standing on her lap, his sturdy legs and bare feet bouncing on her thighs, as she pointed to the crowds below. The children’s carousel, its lights flying round and round, flashed patterns on the bedroom wall: the smell of chestnuts roasting drifted up.

  Later that evening when the low sun bathed the ochre roofs from our window in a warm glow, and when Seffy had been fed and changed and was asleep in his pram again, we went downstairs to a café. I felt weak, exhausted, but I finally drank that pastis. More than one, actually. And I told her about Dominic. About how I loved him, or had loved him, and how no one had ever come close to rousing such feelings in me. How my soul ached for him always, every day when he was alive, and now that he was dead… he can’t be dead. I’d stare into my drink, tears streaming down my face in blank disbelief.

  She’d reach out and squeeze my hand, rocking the pram with the other, being quiet, occasionally murmuring sympathies. Later, as I slumped back wretchedly in my chair, she told me a bit about herself. She was older than me, thirty, and she told me how she’d loved a boy for seven years. A Parisian, how they’d lived together, bought a flat in Montmartre. And then one day he’d left her, without too much explanation, and weeks later, became engaged to a friend of hers. This friend was expecting his baby in August. She told me how she, Françoise, had been unable to stay in Paris knowing the two of them were round the corner, how she’d come back to England just two months ago.

  ‘Come back?’

  ‘Yes, because I’m half-English, you see. My father was French, but my mother’s English.’

  ‘Ah.’

  I’d wondered about the London accent, not a trace of Franglais. She told me that Françoise du Bose was just her professional name to reassure punters of the authenticity of her brocante: that her real name was Maggie. She’d come to England when she was ten, when her father died, been brought up in Hendon. Not far from me, we discovered, since to my mother’s chagrin, I’d started life in Neasden. For a while, Maggie said, she almost couldn’t speak with the pain of losing Étienne: didn’t want to get involved at work, at Antiquarius, didn’t want people to get to know her, ask questions. She said that although Étienne wasn’t dead, he might as well be. And sometimes she wished he was.

  She got me to eat a bit, even though I didn’t want to, and later, made me have the bed back in the hotel, whilst she slept on the floor with a pillow, even though I insisted I was fine. I felt too weak to argue.

  The following morning I woke up and the bedroom was empty. No Maggie, and Seffy was gone. I ran to the open French window. The muslin curtain billowed dramatically, and I cast about the square in horror, eyes wild. I didn’t know this girl. Didn’t know her at all. And then I saw her. Down below in the square, on the children’s carousel: Maggie was slowly gliding round on a painted golden horse, Seffy on her lap. She waved. I waved back. Nausea rose in my throat as I remembered Dominic, but I knew, too, that moment of panic for Seffy had been worse. That he’d been the first thing on my mind as I woke and that nothing, absolutely nothing, was as strong as my love for him. It helped, a little.

  Maggie and I stayed another two nights in Fréjus. I rang Christian and told him what had happened. It was Sunday anyway, so the market was closed, and I just said, a friend’s died, I’d like to stay longer in the sun. He understood. Perhaps he knew it was more than a friend.

  Those few days I spent with Maggie were the closest I’d ever got to anyone, bar Dominic or my family. We talked and talked. The newspapers, even the French ones, were full of Dominic: pictures of him, of Letty and him, sometimes with Cassie, their infant daughter. Double-page spreads in the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, lengthy full-page obituaries. I pored over them, reading
bits out to Maggie, who’d smile, rocking the pram. I marvelled at things I didn’t know – the starred First at Cambridge, Head Boy at Harrow – I was greedy for details and devoured everything. Maggie didn’t try to take the papers away. I think she knew it was part of my grieving process.

  On our final evening I managed not to talk about him. Instead I listened as she outlined an idea she had, for a shop, an idea she’d had for some time. She had a bit of money, and wanted to take out a lease, sell only French artefacts. She wanted to come to the brocante fairs not with a van, but a lorry – a ruddy great one – and take back not tea sets, but furniture: rococo consoles, armoires, mirrors, sets of chairs, sièges courants. Back in London she’d arrange them in vignettes – ‘like in a room set, you know?’ She’d accessorize them with candlesticks, piles of books on tables, huge lanterns above, a trumeau mirror on the wall. ‘D’you see, Hattie?’ I’d nodded. She said how she had to be quick, though, because other people were doing it. A shop called French Home had already opened in Clapham; another, Le Français, in Putney. Oh, it wasn’t original, but she thought she could do it better. Thought Fulham, Munster Road, would be ripe for it – all those terraced houses being gentrified – and she’d seen something suitable, tiny but central. We’d have to be quick, though. These shops went fast.

  ‘We?’

  Oh. Didn’t she say? She wondered if I’d go in with her. She’d seen what I bought, what I liked, thought we’d work well together. Complement one another. My eye for detail, hers for the huge statement. And with her experience – she’d been dealing for six years and spoke the language – and my beginner’s luck – like Christian she’d been secretly surprised at the Limoges bowl: ‘C’est magnifique,’ she told me now – we couldn’t fail.

  ‘But I’ve no money.’

  ‘No, but I’ve got a bit, and you can pay me back. And we can get a loan too.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘From the bank, of course. How d’you think small businesses start?’

  ‘Oh…’ I said slowly, no idea about anything. ‘But… what about Christian?’

  ‘I know, I thought about that. But we can sell his stuff from the shop, it’s not a problem. He’ll sell more from us, in a proper shop, than he does in Antiquarius. And you can still source it for him. What d’you think?’

  I remember looking at her over that gingham tablecloth under the awning outside that café in the starry night, her dark eyes keen and eager. She was trying to disguise the eagerness, though: it was the guarded look of one who’d been hurt before. I gazed beyond her then, so as not to be influenced by her vulnerability; by the wine, the warm night air. After all, I had my grief to nurse and nurture; I’d be busy. And I’d only just met her. But I do remember thinking too, as the stars twinkled back at me, that although something had died out here, something could be born. The beginning of me as someone else: someone whose life wasn’t going to revolve around being in love, around a man. It was perhaps the birth of the career girl in me, channelling passion into something I could control.

  I took a deep breath. My eyes came back to hers. ‘Why not?’

  12

  Ralph de Granville burst into the Abbey kitchen on a blast of fresh air as the Carringtons sat around the table in various stages of soporific Sunday morning stupor. At least, some of us did: the elder teenagers were still in bed, it being only nine thirty, but Daisy was amongst us, gazing dreamily into space in her dressing gown. Mr de Granville, all svelte good looks and resplendent in a lime-green silk coat with mandarin collar, voluminous white trousers and thonged sandals, seemed to have been beamed down from another planet as he suddenly appeared in our midst. He smiled delightedly, hands clasped, as Hugh, who’d gone to the back door thinking it was his gamekeeper, introduced him apologetically.

  ‘Um, darling it’s Mr de Granville. He’s a bit early because—’

  ‘Because a fiendishly difficult client in Henley wants me to pop in later and adjust her curtains before I go to Italy, would you believe?’ He swept back his floppy dark hair and adopted an almost balletic pose, centre stage. ‘So I popped in here first. Says she doesn’t trust herself to touch them, I’ve arranged them so beautifully, but as I said to my assistant, it would take more than a curtain twitch to ruin that room. It’s symbiosis is pinkie perfect, if I say so myself. “Twitch away, madam, twitch away!” I told her on the phone. But she’s the sort of woman who doesn’t trust herself to pick her own nose, if you know what I mean.’ He made an arch face. Then beamed. ‘How d’you do? Ralphie de Granville. How d’you do, hello, hello…’ and around the table he went, shaking every single astonished hand, including Charlie’s, who had to transfer his boiled egg spoon to receive him.

  Laura was on her feet now, pink-faced, following him and doing the introductions as he worked his way round.

  ‘My daughter Daisy, my son, Charlie, my mother—’

  ‘Mr de Granville, what an absolute pleasure,’ beamed Mum, recovering first. She almost bowed: almost kissed his hand. ‘I’m such a fan.’

  The decorator squirmed delightedly.

  ‘I’m always in your shop at Chelsea Harbour, aren’t I, darling?’

  ‘You certainly are,’ agreed Dad, getting to his feet. ‘See my credit card on this one.’

  As he took Dad’s hand, Ralph’s heels snapped together and he lowered his head with a deferential, ‘Sir.’ My father’s mouth twitched.

  ‘And, um, my sister Hattie,’ Laura finished, flustered. ‘And her partner, Maggie du Bose.’

  ‘Du Bose?’ He reared back a bit, hands spread on his chest, fingers splayed. He glanced from Maggie to me, eyes wide. ‘The French Partnership?’ His smile didn’t waver: only froze a little.

  ‘That’s it.’ Maggie smiled thinly.

  ‘But I saw your spread in the Standard only last week! Marvellous what you did with that poky little house in Tooting. All those dado rails and ghastly cornices. Quite a challenge.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Maggie inclined her head politely, not easily flattered.

  ‘Were you given carte blanche?’ He shot out immaculate green cuffs and folded his arms, head cocked interestedly.

  ‘Not entirely, but we had a very sympathetic client. We worked well with her actually. She had some good ideas.’

  ‘Really?’ Ralph blanched: sucked in astonished cheeks. ‘Personally I only take commissions these days if I’m given total control, but then I explained that in my email, didn’t I?’ He reached out and touched Laura’s arm lightly with his fingertips. ‘I can’t be doing with putting up an expensive studded suede headboard only to find some hideous floral bedspread has been flopped beside it.’ He shuddered. ‘Not that you’d do that, of course.’ He touched Laura’s arm again, whilst Hugh, looking aghast at studded suede headboards, sat down heavily.

  ‘Well, quite. Although I’m afraid you won’t have total carte blanche here,’ said Laura rather bravely, swallowing. ‘Hattie and Maggie are here to, um, have a look at the more informal, family rooms. The playroom, the kitchen – that kind of thing.’

  ‘Oh?’ His eyes widened in surprise; darkened too, as he realized he had competition. I was grateful to Laura for spelling it out early.

  ‘But obviously you’ll have control within your own space,’ she soldiered on.

  ‘Obviously,’ he purred.

  ‘Given that we accept your quote,’ said Hugh, firmly. He crossed his legs and folded his arms.

  ‘Naturellement!’

  My father, I could tell, was enjoying this hugely. He sat back with a small smile and a Mr Bennet air about him. Ralph de Granville strutted across the room to the Aga, executed a little pirouette, and turned to face us again, one hand on the rail.

  ‘Well, you’ll have a field day in here, won’t you?’ he drawled, eyes roving around the kitchen. ‘Marvellous proportions… lovely tall windows, too.’ He strolled across to them, the better to peer out. Then he turned and cocked an eyebrow at Maggie. ‘It could take some really dramatic colour, don’t you
think? A Russian red. Or a vibrant jade, perhaps? Mouse on the doors and windows, of course… skirting boards too…’ he mused, ‘and then some fabulous steel cabinets along here…’ His eyes narrowed professionally as he ran a hand horizontally across an imaginary work surface. ‘American fridge here…’ he went on, strolling to the corner, ‘and maybe just one solid glass curtain rail, as a statement…’ he gazed above the window, ‘up there…’ He put a reflective fingertip to his lips.

  Maggie cleared her throat. ‘Actually, we thought we’d leave it pretty much intact. The walls we’ll take back a shade to catch the morning sun, but the freestanding furniture will stay, although we’ll distress it so it’s less uniform. We won’t need a pole at the window because we won’t be dressing it. And the fridge is in the pantry. Where it will stay.’

  Ralph turned slowly to face his informant. Maggie’s eyes were steady: her famous hundred-yard stare.

  He blinked. ‘Is that so?’ he said softly. ‘Well, I’m sure that will work equally well too. In a…’ he smirked, searching for the word, ‘traditional kind of way.’

  ‘I’m a traditional kind of girl.’