by Faith Wolf
French Kiss
By: Faith Wolf
Copyright © 2013
Blue Ribbon Books
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
For questions and comments about this book, please contact us at [email protected]
Chapter 1
Charlotte was about to hear the most frightening sound in the world. Not a lion roaring in the jungle, not a train rumbling along the tracks, but the sound of her keys, posted back through the letterbox.
She hesitated for a long time with her rucksack on her back and her wheelie bag leaning up against the wall. She knew she had to be quick, because, having heard her door slam, Mr Hinton, the old man from number 42 would stick his head around his door and ask her to pick up some milk or a newspaper or a bag of 'spuds'. She wasn't going to the grocery shop at the corner of the street though. She was going to the airport. If things went well, she would never be back.
The spring of the letterbox was making her hand ache, but she couldn't bring herself to let go of the keys. Not, that is, until she really did hear footsteps from number 42.
She separated her finger and thumb, the key hit the mat inside with a soft thud and then she was half-walking half-running along the corridor, dragging the squeaking wheelie bag behind her. She turned a corner just as the door to number 42 opened up.
“Charlie?” Mr Hinton said. “Charlie?”
~~~
As she sat on the tube, trundling from station to station, she wondered at what point she would be considered truly single or whether in fact that had already happened. Did it happen last week on that morning when she could hardly get out of bed because of too many glasses of wine the night before, or was it this morning, the moment she pulled down her old travel case and rammed it full of clothes, some shoes, all the money she had in the world and her passport? Was it possible to become single while hailing a taxi or running for the airport bus and missing it by twenty seconds and then sitting in the departure lounge, biting nails and thinking: This is really happening this is really happening; I'm doing it.
As the plane thundered along the runway, Charlotte noted that her boyfriend would just be getting home. He'd call out to her in his distracted way, but instead of seeing her watching EastEnders on the sofa or stirring macaroni cheese or simply pretending to sleep, he'd soon realise that he had come home to an empty, silent house.
Her note on the table said: “I tried to tell you. I can't do this anymore. C.”
It shouldn't come as a surprise, but she suspected that it might. For many years, she had been part of a world where people said that they were going to do things and, for one reason or another, they never happened. They had talked about getting engaged, then getting married, even the possibility of having children. All they had succeeded in achieving was buying a bigger television set. What it came down to was that she didn't want to be engaged to him anymore. Like the TV set, it was like being on standby. A permanent state of alert in anticipation of something that they both knew was never going to happen.
“Let's talk about it tomorrow,” he always said.
It had taken her a year to realise that tomorrow never comes. Today was all she had and she intended to use it.
~~~
The plane's wheels bumped against the runway in France and there were gasps from the other passengers. Talk about coming back down to earth.
A tractor carried their luggage from the plane to an airport the size of a large shed. As she descended the steps down to the runway, she saw her scuffed, black bag, a red ribbon tied around the handle, on top of the pile of bags from the plane's hold.
“Now,” she thought, talking to the bag in her mind. For too long it had been relegated to living on top of the bedroom wardrobe or under the bed itself. “Our new life starts now.”
The airport was as much like a shed on the inside as it was on the outside. The passport control area had been divided into rows using red ropes and moveable silver poles, but this was nothing compared to negotiating the local express supermarket outside London Bridge. Within five minutes, she had confirmed that she was indeed who she claimed to be and she was out in the warm, late-afternoon sun.
She felt a pang of sadness that there was nobody on the other side of the doors waiting for her. All around her, children were hugging their parents, friends were shaking hands and slapping each other on their backs, lovers were reunited. It was sweet, but she felt more alone than she had done in weeks. Still, she was glad that Mark wasn't there. There was nothing worse than sitting opposite him in a restaurant and discovering that neither of them had anything to say to each other. Taking the restaurants out of the equation hadn't helped. She had taken herself out of the equation instead.
“This is a new life,” she reminded herself. “I'm going to be making new friends. Left and right.”
She checked her phone. It was receiving a signal and she had a message. She was excited and afraid, but it turned out to be a text from the French network, welcoming her to France.
“New beginnings,” she reminded herself. “This trip is about new things.”
Fortunately for her, the word for taxi was the same in French as it was in English and she found herself heading directly for the only car at the tiny taxi rank, a silver saloon.
“I need to get to ...” she showed the address to the driver, who was sitting on the bonnet of his car.
“Train,” he said, not moving.
“Can't you drive me?”
“Cheaper on train,” he said.
She was about to say that she didn't care, but Mark wouldn't be on hand to bail her out when she ran out of money and she'd left it to him to be the breadwinner. What little money she had saved was going to run out in under 24 hours unless she was extremely careful.
“Where is the train station?” she asked.
The man slid from the bonnet and opened one of the rear doors with a little bow.
“Ten minutes,” he said. “I take you.”
Once successfully on the train, she realised that her journey to the village of Lillac itself would take much longer than she had predicted, but all signs pointed South to Sarlat and as she neared that focal town, she knew that she would soon be only 30 minutes from Lillac itself, her home for the next 30 days or 30 months, depending on how it went.
On the train, she glanced at the other passengers in the carriage and wondered how many of them suspected that this was the first time she had travelled alone to a foreign country. She'd accompanied Mark to Paris a couple of years ago, but that had been a horrible experience. He'd been on a work trip, so he'd dumped her in a hotel and she'd had to entertain herself. She had managed to get lost on the Metro, had walked for hours until her feet were blistered and had ended up taking in a performance of Singing in the Rain that was entirely in French, except for the songs, and thus, largely unintelligible to her. Rather than being pleased to see her when she finally made it back to the hotel, he had been furious. How was he supposed to concentrate on work, he had said, if he didn't know that she was safe.
In the process of getting to Paris, however, their train had halted several stops early and they had been expected to make their own way. Seeing that they didn't have a clue what to do, the station announcer himself had driven them forty-five minutes to Paris, without charge. It was that level of kindness and familiarity that Charlotte was now seeking. She hoped that she wouldn't need to be rescued, but she would appreciate a few kind faces along the way,
rather than the glazed eyes to which one became accustomed in a big city.
Lillac was a village community. According to the website, it was charming, friendly and picturesque. As long as they spoke slowly, she would understand enough French to get by. She was free. Mark was not here to tell her what to do or to tell her that she was getting things wrong. She was exhilarated and terrified in equal measure.
She kept thinking about what had happened when Mark got home and found her … not there. She didn't want to upset him, but part of her would have liked to have seen his face. If she could have been a fly on the wall, that fly would have said:
“See!? She did it. Now what are you going to do?”
He'd laughed every time she'd said she wanted to leave and now she had done it, in spectacular fashion!
She had organised her flight, alone, and she had made it to France, alone, and now she was travelling cross-country, alone, missing her stop, alone …
“Shit,” she yelled and ran for the doors before they could trundle shut.
The evenings were long and light, but by the time she got to Lillac it was almost fully dark. Fortunately, she met a second taxi driver and managed to persuade him to take her to her cottage rather than go home to dinner. He looked unmoved until she mentioned the name of the cottage: Le Pech Noir.
He told her that she would be the first person to stay there since the occupant had moved away and decided to rent it. It was a beautiful place, he said. He was animated suddenly, but, if Charlotte read his body-language correctly, he was also somewhat saddened.
Charlotte told him that she was sure she would like it.
He didn't seem convinced, but he said that it was a sort of honour, nonetheless.
She tried to get more information from him, but she couldn't follow his accent and once he was behind the wheel he lit up a cigarette and opened the window, so the roar of wind and the engine served to drown out what he was saying. She made out a few words here and there. He seemed to be attempting to help her along her way, pointing out things that he thought would be useful, having understood that her stay might be long-term, depending on the success or failure of her first month.
“... carburant ...”
“I don't have a car,” she said, slipping into English and hoping that he understood her. She was too exhausted to think and wanted nothing more than to slide into a warm bed.
Alone.
“... L'ecole ...”
It was a pretty building with green shutters and finger-paintings in the windows.
“I don't have kids,” she replied.
The driver navigated a roundabout.
“Les magasins,” he said. “You have a mouth, n'est-ce pas?”
“Oh yes,” she said and noted the location of the bakery and café in particular. She'd heard a lot about the French pain au chocolat and was determined to try one – or two - at her earliest convenience.
The driver also pointed out the river, as they crossed it, and the mairie or town hall.
“You will meet the mayor,” he said.
“Really?”
“Everybody does,” he said. “But don't expect great things. He helps nobody unless he is helping himself.”
“I know people like that,” she said. She tried not to keep thinking badly of Mark, but she couldn't help it. She was so glad to be away from her situation at last. It seemed that only now could she get some perspective and see where she had been, what she had become. She suspected that she would not like what she discovered.
The driver gestured angrily to some buildings that looked like they were about to be torn down and some empty fields raising nothing but long grass.
“Je loue,” he was saying, over and over. Je loue this and je loue that. She thought 'louer' was something to do with renting, but when she asked him to explain, he just repeated the words more loudly.
“Je loue!” he said. “Je loue de bat.”
Tired, no, exhausted, Charlotte finally allowed her eyes to close and drifted off as the car wound up and up the hill, under a bridge that no longer supported a train track, and on towards her new home, the driver continuing his vehement rant.
“Je loue de bat … je loue de bat ...”
By the time she reached the little cottage it was fully dark. It was raining too and so she paid the driver and hurried to get inside with her bags. According to her email from the landlord, the key should have been waiting for her underneath the plant pot beside the door.
“I've come all this way,” she realised, “because someone said that the key would be under a plant pot. What if it's not there?”
She lifted the plant, squinting because she was afraid to look, and there it was.
She turned the key in the lock, waved to the taxi driver who began reversing back up the drive and she went inside.
The main room was visually stunning, if a little small. Mark would have said that it was pokey, but she thought it was nice. She liked it, because it was unlike his sprawling apartment, in which he had had two walls knocked through to provide more space.
“More space for what?” she had said at the time. “Not me.”
It was cold in the cottage, however, and she would have to find the heating quickly or have a very uncomfortable first night. As she thought that, she saw the fireplace. A fire had already been prepared and she only had to light it, but that was somewhat daunting and she decided that she might get to that later. Perhaps much later. First, to explore.
The cottage had two bedrooms, the first of which could also have served as a study, and the second would have been considered the master bedroom. There was a double-bed, neatly-made, with a very firm mattress. Austere, she thought, but she was so tired that she could reasonably have envisioned herself sleeping on the floor.
After a few minutes of walking from room to room, she realised that she was holding her breath. There was something show-homey about the place that made her feel anxious. She wondered how long it had been empty. The only touch of personality was the arrangement of flowers on the large, kitchen table. Roses, carnations and lilies were reflected in the polished surface of the table, but their position within the vase was somewhat haphazard, as if it had been done in a hurry. Nothing else about the preparation, she considered, had been done in such a hurry. The windows gleamed, as did the table in the main room, probably an antique. All the furniture smelled of polish. It was lovely, if a little creepy.
The first bedroom had a single bed in the corner and she thought she might sleep in there, but then she scolded herself, because that was the old Charlotte thinking, not wanting to make waves, not wanting to make a fuss.
“I did this,” she said suddenly. “I made it. I deserve to enjoy it.”
She returned to the main bedroom and attempted to admire an enormous oil painting of one burly woman washing a slender woman's feet while she stared pensively out of the painting and into the room. She shivered.
“Enjoy that,” she dared herself.
Despite her inner monologue, sitting on the bed made her feel guilty, because everything really had been prepared so carefully. The stay was worth much more than she had agreed to pay for a month and she wondered why it was so cheap. She supposed that it was not yet summer and the tourist season was not yet in full swing. Perhaps he had been in a hurry and she had simply been lucky to see the offer first. Maybe her desperation had coincided with that of her landlord.
Kneeling in front of the fireplace, she removed the fire guard and saw that the fire was stacked with small twigs, branches and three, thick logs. Several logs of equal size were leaning up either side of the fire too. There was certainly a chill in the air. Ironically, a draft seemed to be coming from the fireplace itself, and she thought that it would have been lovely to have a log fire, but she wasn't sure how to go about doing so. Did one really just light it with a match and let it go? 'Letting it go' didn't sound like language that should be associated with lighting a fire. What would happen when the flames leapt the fireguard an
d set fire to the rug – it looked expensive – and where was the fire extinguisher?
There were so many things that she had never done before and she was always so scared.
She sat on a bench next to the table and heaved a sigh. She'd put on her shawl instead. In fact, she'd have a shower – the shower was new and gleaming and not at all in keeping with the rest of the cottage, for which she was secretly thankful – and she'd get an early night. In a minute.
It was so quiet that she hardly dared to breath.
It wasn't long before she was crying as quietly as she could in the middle of the room.
~~~
Early the following morning, Charlotte awoke to find that the sun was casting a glow over the entire room.
