A blush appeared on her cheek, refracted through the beaker of rosé. A glow of happiness, he hoped.
When she didn’t reply, he said, ‘I’ll drink to us, but the decision is yours, Maggie.’
Her ladyship had departed, with an army of suitcases, bound for Calais, then across to London, where she had accepted an invitation to attend a cocktail party in celebration of the recent independence of India. From London’s Waterloo station, she was booked the following morning on another train steaming to Southampton docks where a luxury cabin on the Cunard White Star Company’s transatlantic liner RMS Mauretania, making its first sailing out of Southampton to New York, awaited her.
Marguerite had assisted with the bookings, seen her off at the station, struggling with a kindly porter over the boarding and stacking of such an abundant amount of luggage. Lady Jeffries’ words on departure to her, after a warm embrace, were: ‘Marguerite, you are to feel assured that there is a bed for you at the villa if you require it. Don’t go running headlong into anything you fear you may regret later. I hoped you might confide in me, that I might have found a way to help you, guide you through this – this disappointment, which has so undermined you, and … Charlie is at heart a good man. However, sometimes the ear of another woman who has seen a little of life can work wonders. I will see you in April when I return from my lecture tour.’
Marguerite’s treasured room, where she was standing now, was to remain vacant until the spring. The appointment of her replacement would not be addressed until after April when Lady Jeffries had settled back into her daily routines on the coast. Marguerite could stay if she needed to, along with the kitchen girls, as a member of the permanent team.
‘The choice is yours, Marguerite.’ Lady Jeffries’ valediction.
The decision is yours, Maggie. Charlie’s proposal.
Marguerite clasped a jar of skin cream, pressing the curves of the cold opaque glass against her cheek, rolling it backwards and forwards. The long white muslin curtains were blowing, their hems circling in the breeze, a mere movement of air, dusting against the stone tiles. This room had been her safe haven. For months, its cool whitewashed walls had enclosed her, embraced her, shared her aspirations and her calamities.
She replaced the jar of Ponds Vanishing Cream on the dressing-table and scooped up a long row of faceted, sapphire-blue glass beads inserted with tiny specks of black rondels. She twirled them between her fingers, listening to the clink and spin of the small cuts of glass. A parting gift from Lady Jeffries, which she would be taking with her. She threaded them over her head. Gazing at herself in the mirror she saw they hung to her navel. She bent her head and doubled them over. Next, a crimson half-empty nail varnish. To pack or abandon?
She was grateful for the safety net Lady Jeffries had offered her, for she knew that the path she had elected was not going to be an easy one. Her small bag, deposited on her neatly made bed, was bulging. After seeing Lady Jeffries off at the station, she had strolled through the streets of Antibes back to this room for possibly the last time. She spun away from the dressing-table and perched on the edge of the mattress in silence. As she did so, the beads round her neck clinked and chimed delicately against one another. Their blue glinted in the light and reflected against her fingers. The windows were wide open, letting in slabs of bronzed autumn sun and the musky scents of the changing season.
On her dressing-table there remained a regiment of bottles, tubes and jars, creams, tints, rouges. The sum total of her earnings. Her investment in a career that had died before it had taken off. Would she carry them with her or abandon them here? Of what use could they be to her in the fields, in a situation of simple rustic living? Would the kitchen girls be grateful for them or scorn her for her foolishness, deride her for her haughtiness and overblown dreams?
Marguerite would be boarding the train north herself, for a brief visit to her parents, assuming the current nationwide strikes did not delay her. Afterwards, back to the south. A return ticket. She had accepted Charlie’s proposal of marriage, although in her secret heart she would have preferred to reside within a less formal arrangement. ‘Why marry? We don’t need to.’
Charlie had responded with a guffaw, a mock-scandalized expression on his face. His grey-green eyes were dancing with happiness at the prospect of their future together. ‘If anything should happen to me, and we’re legally bound, the land is yours.’
‘Don’t be foolish. What’s going to happen to you?’
I’m a wanted man, Maggie.
But now was not the time for confessions. Later, one day, when they were securely settled, he would confide the truth to this delicate young woman who was soon to be his wife. For the present, he changed tack. ‘Our neighbours, the Provençaux, the villagers and farming community, Catholics one and all, will not look kindly on us if we are a couple living in sin.’
She had laughed at his argument. ‘No one need know, Charlie, but us. And for what could they possibly judge us?’
Their relationship was celibate. He was the brother and she the sister she had so often painted them as.
‘I hope it won’t always be so, my darling Maggie.’ He had been puzzled, wounded and confused by Marguerite’s inability to consummate their love after her acceptance of his proposal. ‘Did I hurt you the first time, frighten you?’ he quizzed her.
She shook her head, her mouth shut tight. On this topic she would not be drawn. On occasions when he had pursued the subject, badgered her just a little too virulently in spite of himself, pressed himself too close, hard with longing and love, she had clammed up completely, barely uttering a word for hours, even days, on end. She curled up on his mattress, or metamorphosed into a curved shell, hands balled into fists pressed up under her chin. He watched her sleeping. For hours he would study her, every line and curve of her, as though he intended to paint or sculpt her, her tiny frame sunk within a trauma he was not equipped to mine.
He had urged her to go north for a few weeks while he readied the cabano, which he intended to prepare as a form of temporary habitation for them both. He never expressed what was in his own heart, that if he could have visited his own mother and given her peace of mind he would have done so. For him, it was an impossibility. He was a wanted man. A deserter. He never forgot it. Prison would await his first footfall back in England, but Maggie could bring some reassurance to her parents and he encouraged her to do that.
Charlie wanted children, a barn full of animals. He craved a family. He dreamed of his own brood running free on the land, wild and liberated, in his role of father piling them into the truck, driving them on outings to the seaside, their daily lives intertwined with the lives of the plants and animals, all together: indigenous wildlife and domesticated pets, interweaving with the rhythms of nature. He would work his backside off, happily, to build them a natural paradise, a haven for himself of equanimity, far removed from the mental horrors of war, which still tormented him. The war and the ghosts of friends that squatted in his brain still woke him up, sweating and beleaguered. It was a requisite, had become a physical urgency for him, to settle here with Marguerite. Here, the perfect pairing, here in a place they would grow fond of, alongside one another, more idyllic than anywhere else on earth. La Paix.
How could he know what was haunting her? She had no knowledge of what had driven him to seclusion in this rural idyll. He let her be for the moment, surmising it was connected to her brother, and a visit to her home might well ease that loss, but once the house was fully constructed, with its fine roof of terracotta tuiles in place and the flowers were offering their first season’s delicate pink and white petals and an income was trickling their way, he would persuade her and they would be lovers, then parents. For the time being, he accepted his lot. Although it was a bitter pill to swallow, with Marguerite as his wife at his side, her daily presence close by, it sufficed. She brought him joy and reprieve from the horrors that still harangued him.
Dawn, Paris, 14 November 2015
&nbs
p; Kurtiz was pouring coffee for herself and Marguerite, who was looking worn out.
This was her third cup in less than an hour. Her head was reeling with fatigue and unanswered questions. She was listening to Marguerite but all the while worrying about Oliver. Why had no one got in touch with them? And she was sick with concern about Lizzie, out there somewhere in this besieged city. Twenty years old. She had been fending for herself, as far as Kurtiz and Oliver were aware, since she was sixteen. Might she also have married? Might she have turned to a boy, someone as kindly as Charlie, who had treated her in a considerate manner, who had loved and protected her? The scenario of her daughter having married was one that had simply never crossed Kurtiz’s mind. In her thoughts and all her imaginings of Lizzie’s life beyond home, her daughter had remained her innocent teenage girl. It was ludicrous, of course, even when every year on Lizzie’s birthday, she had sat alone on the single bed in her daughter’s room, looking at her posters on the walls, rummaging through her possessions for the millionth time, burrowing for an answer to the only question that mattered: where have you disappeared to? Contemplating options, she had always attempted to picture her another year older. Had she cut her hair? Grown it, dyed it? What of her figure? Was she fuller-bosomed? Still obsessed with dieting? Was she taking drugs? No, no, not that, please, not fallen into bad company.
Kurtiz had never accepted for one moment the possibility, barely voiced, that her little girl might be dead. What had Lizzie lived through since she’d left home? Would they ever know the answer? Back in the post-war days when Marguerite had run away, what anguish had her poor mother suffered? In the days before the internet, before social media, when a telephone line in the home was a rare luxury, what hope had those parents had? To wait each day for the post, for news. And what rushes of joy, relief when Marguerite had sent a letter and then returned, at Charlie’s bidding, to Reims to visit them.
Why had Lizzie never thought to do the same? If she was safe and alive – and Kurtiz remained convinced that she was – why had she never sent them a message?
Marguerite and Charlie, La Côte d’Azur, May 1953
Sweet was the scent that floated across the hillsides. This was the plant’s odour, its ester, given out to attract pollinators; the bees, the bumbles and honeybees, would soon be buzzing and scooping greedily. The roses of May, Rosa centiflora, the rose of the hundred leaves, the same variety as those that had been growing on the Grassois hillsides since the sixteenth century. Charlie’s roses were opening, coming into bloom, promising a magnificent crop.
It was early in the morning soon after first light. Five years married now, Charlie and Marguerite were outside, drinking their coffee on the tiled patio Charlie had laid for them the previous summer. Its semi-open roof was a railway line of wooden beams, and in summer those beams would be pendulous with sharp green foliage and the darkening skins of ripening grapes. Droplets of dew, miniature translucent globes, clung to the pale pink rose heads, accentuating their perfume. The temperature was chilly and would be till the sun rose above their hillsides and shone from high above them.
They sat in their working clothes, wrapped in jackets and boots, sipping coffee, sweetened with local honey for Charlie, and a simple black for Marguerite from faience bowls. When they spoke, their words few at this early hour, their breath came out of them like distilled smoke. They ate soft white cheeses and creamy Brie spread like butter on cuts of baguette, dishes of olives and fruit. Confitures, from the produce on their land: apricot, peach, citruses, fig, cherry, strawberries, almonds. Marguerite had learned the art of preserve-making from her mother, boiling up the sliced sugared fruits in a heavy pan, taking pleasure from the task. From the local wives she had learned Provençal plates and dishes. Tapenade, a black or green olive paste steeped with anchovies and capers; delicate canary-yellow courgette flowers plucked and fried in batter; the staple vegetable ratatouille; Mediterranean chicken roasted with lemons and garlic, sprinkled and stuffed with dried herbs that hung from the ceiling in the kitchen and fragranced the lower floor of their stone and wood home …
Cooking, time in the kitchen, pleased Marguerite greatly, more than the backbreaking land labour, except during harvest time. The two harvest months Marguerite loved with a passion, with a girl’s enthusiasm. These were the periods in the year when she and Charlie worked in tandem, both out in the fresh air. He guided their pickers from one floral bed to the next; she delivered empty baskets for filling.
Exulting in the fragrant warm air, Marguerite recalled the first occasion he had shown her – his damp earth-coated hands covering hers – how to lift the petals from a rose. ‘Press your fingers over the open flower,’ he had instructed, standing close behind her, his arms wrapped about her as though they were hers. ‘Tug gently on all the petals and, if it’s ready, the rose will release them.’
The showering of soft pale petals, the discharge of the heady perfume, it had been a baptism. She had cried with joy. The happiness was washing her clean, erasing the bitter memories and shame. She found great joy, too, in listening to the Italians sing as they worked. Mountain songs of love and war, sometimes heartbreak. She could not follow the meaning, even though she had learned a few phrases of their language.
Five years in occupancy here, the first harvest of this year was upon them: the May rose. A pink spring beauty. This morning, she and Charlie were preparing the barn, making ready the makeshift beds for the pickers, who were en route from Italy and, with luck, should be there before sunset. They journeyed through the mountains, negotiating the Alpine passes, in a convoy of open-backed trucks. It was the same team, give or take one or two, every year, every season. Two lorries came to Charlie’s farm, carrying twenty-three or -four pickers. Others were hired elsewhere. Along with them, they brought their picking baskets, usually lined with hessian, and the women were each clothed in a generous white fabric apron with great gaping pockets in which they stored the delicate blossoms before transferring them to baskets.
One or two of the older women, mothers, even a grandmother of the younger females or the farming lads, chose to assist Marguerite in the kitchen. They were getting too stiff in the limbs for the bending and rising, the hill climbing, and their hands, their fingers were less steady for the picking. Marguerite was glad of the extra help when she was preparing repasts for between twenty and thirty hungry mouths. Together, they would transport the steaming food from Charlie’s house (she still thought of it as Charlie’s house), traipsing through the grasses, singing, humming, along the dust paths to the shade of the twisted olive trees, gnarled and stunted by time and wind. Multicoloured cloths were spread on the ground and the great clay pots were carefully placed there, out of reach of the thieving dogs, the long-bodied wasps, ants or swooping greedy gulls. Many of the dishes they could eat with their fingers, but not the plates of grilled mullet or the vegetable stews for which they needed hunks of bread and spoons. The wine flowed as they laughed and ate, and Marguerite sat proudly, while husband Charlie presided over the proceedings.
She had news to confide to him, a favour to beg of him when this rose harvest was over. But now was not the moment to approach the subject.
Before their evening meal, at the end of their shift, which was mid-afternoon because they had begun work at dawn, came the climax of the day: each of the Italians stood in line outside the barn, rings of sweat under their arms, scarves damp and hair frizzed from exertion, exhausted, yet full of anticipation for the weighing of their petals. Each took his or her turn to pour their day’s fragrant pink beauties on to Charlie’s scales. A fierce sense of competition arose. Pride, sometimes tears and disappointment or even anger ensued when the weight was announced, spoken loudly and clearly by Charlie for all to hear. He had meticulously oiled and polished his scales, confirmed their accuracy, so that at the end of each afternoon every picker, man, woman and child, knew to a split-portion of a gram how much their nifty fingers had gathered and what they had earned. An experienced picker would deliver
somewhere between five and eight kilos an hour. In a six- to seven-hour working day, those women, for it was usually the women whose fingers were most nimble and deft, delivered an average of fifty kilos of petals.
The figures were painstakingly noted down by Marguerite, with perfect neatness. Perched on a rush-seated chair directly alongside Charlie’s scales, trousered legs crossed, exercise book in her lap, fingers pressed tight around her pencil, she repeated the figures to herself as she wrote them down. There must be no mistakes, or there would be arguments later. Each was paid in francs at the end of their stay, according to the total of their loads.
As the sun was setting, the lorry from the perfume factory would arrive, grinding to a halt at the roadside on the hill’s rimmed apex. It was there to collect the many baskets of petals, to hurry them back to the factory where the oils were extracted overnight and the process of perfume-making got under way. While Charlie bargained and debated the weight of the day’s total collection with mean-mannered Arnaud, the factory’s agent, the pickers returned to the barn, to wash and change from their soiled work clothes and ready themselves for dinner. It was served outside beneath the stars on a long wooden table Charlie had constructed out of disused railway sleepers.
These were the hours of repose, of conviviality, and the Italians knew well how to get the best out of their leisure before they fell onto their straw bedding to sleep deeply, some drunkenly, snoring until dawn. Marguerite silently envied them their easy-going ways. She watched as their children skipped freely to and fro, tumbling down the hillsides, chasing dogs, running amok. Some evenings, if he had dealt swiftly with Arnaud, she’d enjoy watching her husband play with the kids, tossing them into the air, kicking balls with them, laughing, relaxed, their dog panting and gambolling at his feet. She knew how Charlie longed for children of his own, their own. And she wanted to be ready to give them to him, but she wasn’t. Not quite yet.
The Lost Girl Page 25
