“How do they know about this in your office?” I asked.
“We’ve been following it all pretty closely,” Tommy said, surprising me. “After all, I was there when it happened and, in any case, just about everyone I work with has worked with Astrid at one time or another. They reckon it was only a matter of time before she got more than she bargained for. Liked the rough stuff more than was good for her.”
“But it was arson,” I pointed out. “Someone killed her by setting fire to her house while she was in it.”
“Well, she had a fair amount of bruises on her from what I heard,” he said.
“How will the fact that there’s been a murder in the area affect house prices?” asked my father suddenly and for an instant I was thrown by his question.
And my mother replied, “Not now, Ed,” which was even more bewildering. “Let’s have coffee next door by the fire,” she went on. “Lee, come and help me.”
I followed her into the kitchen. She had smiled and chattered away through supper but I had the weird feeling that she was preoccupied, that something was bothering her.
“Mum, what’s wrong?”
She had her back to me but I saw her tense. “Nothing, nothing at all,” she said in a way that told me something definitely was but before I could press her, Tommy joined us.
“Your father’s gone upstairs to make some calls. No coffee for him.”
“That’s what’s wrong if you really want to know,” I heard my mother mutter, speaking so softly she might have been talking to herself. And then she turned around and handed Tommy the tray of coffee cups and they retreated safely to their designated roles of charming hostess and obliging guest.
On Christmas morning my mother served us bowls of steaming hot chocolate and brioches for breakfast and then marched us into the freezing cold conservatory where, for some reason best known to herself, she had elected to place the Christmas tree.
When Tommy presented my parents each with a large square box wrapped in red paper covered in a rather lewd little Santa pattern, I held my breath.
But I need not have worried. Tommy’s present was a huge success, far more popular, in fact, than my cookbook for my mother and CDs for my father. Tommy had given them clogs. Bright red shining clogs so they could go clomping round the house making an unholy din on the stone floors.
“Lee told me the house had stone floors and that can get pretty cold,” he explained. “And the thing about clogs is that you can wear as many socks as you want and your feet still keep warm, they’re so high off the ground.”
He was right. Now that I thought about it all the villagers wore them. It was an intelligent and thoughtful present and I could see my parents were pleased.
“Civet de marcassin for Christmas lunch,” announced my mother cheerfully. I opened my mouth, poised to explain to Tommy that we would be having wild boar rather than the traditional turkey but he was already beaming with delight and saying “Great. Crazy. Can’t wait. And do let me help you in the kitchen again.”
“I’m going out for a couple of hours,” said my father.
On Christmas Day? I waited for my mother to explode but she didn’t.
“Don’t forget I’ve asked the de la Falaises, you know, from the château, to come for a drink. Around six,” she reminded him.
As it was, he only made it back by five, missing lunch altogether. Curiously, my mother made no mention of the fact that he hadn’t reappeared so I took my cue from her and didn’t remark on it.
My parents seemed to have progressed to first-name basis with the de la Falaises, which was a relief because I hadn’t a clue how you introduced a French count. Now it was Henri and Coco all over the place. Henri spoke excellent English but Coco, clearly not the first comtesse and probably younger than Henri’s children, didn’t speak a word. Uh-oh, this was going to be rather stiff. My mother’s French was incomprehensible. As far as I knew, Tommy hadn’t a prayer. Ironically, I realized I couldn’t speak for my father but I knew that my own French hadn’t progressed much beyond GCSE standard. Still, the sound of popping champagne corks could always be relied upon to loosen tongues.
It was only after I’d been chatting happily to Henri—in English—for about fifteen minutes that I became aware that someone else had arrived. Another Frenchman. He was behind me somewhere talking to Coco. I turned my head slightly but couldn’t see anyone.
My mother appeared at Henri’s side with a bowl of cashews.
“You never told us,” she said to me.
Never told them what?
Then Tommy appeared and grabbed a handful of nuts.
“Vous n’avez pas d’accent. Du tout! Incroyable!” Henri said to Tommy.
I was about to translate when I realized what he’d said.
“Merci. On m’a déjà dit. Aucune idée pourquoi? J’ai—comme on dit en Anglais—a good ear.”
Tommy spoke French. Not only did he speak French but he spoke it with an incredible French accent. He was fluent.
“But I thought you’d never been to France?” I spluttered.
“I haven’t.”
“So how . . . ?”
“Radio program a few months ago. Teaching French. I was the engineer but the broadcaster, a teacher, she taught me a few things and she said I was a natural. She gave me lessons. Trouble was I only ever talked to her. I never knew until just now if it would work with any other French people. Talking to Coco here was a bit of an experiment, but it worked okay, didn’t it, Coco?”
“Comment?” she looked very confused.
“J’ai dit qu’on a bien parlé ensemble—en Français.”
“Très bien.” She giggled and suddenly I thought it was high time Tommy stopped talking to her.
Still, later that night, thrown together in the cramped confines of the lit bateau, I had to admit that the fact that he could speak French did make him seem a little more sexy. That and the quantities of my father’s champagne we had consumed.
“Tomcat?” My pet name for him that I hadn’t used in months.
“Mmm?” He was almost asleep.
“I can’t tell you how impressed I am by your French. It’s made my Christmas.”
“Thanks.”
“So what were you and Countess Coco yattering on about while my back was turned then?”
“She was asking me all about your house.”
“My house? In London.”
“Well, your parents’ house.”
“Don’t remind me. What on earth for?”
“They’re thinking of buying it. Her and the Count. Tax exiles.”
“Tommy, are you crazy? Are you sure you understood correctly? Your French . . .”
“I understood perfectly. I was as surprised as you are. I made her repeat it several times.”
“Oh, Lord, I’d better tell Mum and Dad.”
“I think you’ll find,” said Tommy, burrowing his head in my hair, “that they already know.”
CHAPTER 9
TOMMY WAS RIGHT.I cornered my mother in the kitchen the following morning while he was still in bed nursing his champagne hangover.
“How on earth did you find that out?” she asked, stunned.
“La Comtesse told Tommy last night. Is it true? Why do they want to buy our house?”
“They want to move to London like all those French exiles your father was going on about.”
“What on earth would make them think it was for sale?”
“Simple,” she said, turning to face me, “we told them.”
Now it was my turn to be stunned.
“Oh, it’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen for a while. They haven’t even seen it yet. They’ll probably be over in the next month or so. That’s why I want you to keep me up to speed about the renovations. I want the place to be in mint condition when they see it. And I want that lodger in the summerhouse out.”
So they were going to sell the house. I knew it had been too good to be true, living rent free in the middle o
f one of the most fashionable parts of central London. What would I do now? Hope Selma Walker made me a ton of money so I could grow up and finally buy a home of my own?
My mother seemed to be reading my thoughts. “I have to confess that’s one of the reasons we asked Tommy to come with you. We wanted to get to know him a bit better, because you’ll probably move in with him now, won’t you? I mean, it’s been, what? Eight years?”
“Mum, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m not going to live with Tommy. I’m not even sure you can really call us a couple.”
Now why had I gone and said that? I waited for her to ask me why but she just looked at me sadly and said, “Oh, not you as well?”
“What do you mean?”
“I had an ulterior motive for getting you down here for Christmas. I needed to tell you something. Your father’s got a mistress. He’s had her for a while. One of those wretched Parisienne divorcées who seem to take it into their heads to run away down here and bury themselves in the countryside. Lord knows where he met her but he wants to marry her. He wants me to give him a divorce and he needs to sell the London house to pay me off. The de la Falaises came along at just the right moment.”
“Oh Mum.” I felt a wave of sympathy for her. Well into her sixties and being forced to start a new life on her own. I moved toward her to put my arms around her.
She almost let me do it. I had my hand on the back of her head and was starting to stroke her hair, expecting to feel a tremor of emotion in her body, when she jerked her head back.
“I’m fine,” she said, moving away from me.
Same old story. Every time I tried to show her any affection, she brushed me off. When I was a little girl, the excuse had always been that I would mess up her appearance. Now she didn’t even bother with an excuse. It wasn’t as if she sent out signals, Keep your distance; I’m not one of those touchy feely people. She worked hard on her warm and hospitable image. God knows, Tommy had fallen for it. But it was a front. She had a problem with any kind of intimacy. I had a sudden, fleeting insight into my parents’ sex life. Had she flinched every time my father had reached for her? No wonder he had looked elsewhere.
Feeling guilty that I should even see my mother in such a light, I shut down that train of thought as quickly as it had crept up on me.
“You can’t be fine,” I insisted. “It’s an awful thing to happen to you. No one would blame you for feeling terrible. It’s understandable.”
“I do not feel terrible. I am totally in control.”
That was the problem. If only she’d snap now and then and freak out like the rest of us.
“So why can’t you sell this house and keep the one in London?” Answering a practical question might help her to open up.
“Because we’d get about four times as much for the house in London, that’s why,” said my mother and I saw her point. “Of course, if we don’t make a quick sale to the de la Falaises, then I’ll probably have to come back and live in the house with you till we do sell it. I’ll have nowhere else to go.”
“But you live here, Mum. You live in France. Why can’t you stay in this house now you’ve done it up?”
“Because your father wants to live here with Josiane and I want to get as far away as possible. I tell you, Lee, it’ll be a relief to get away. This place is the pits. I’m quite looking forward to starting a new life, if you really want to know.”
“That’s right, Mum. That’s a good positive attitude. What’s she like, this Josiane?”
“She’s another Coco de la Falaise. Younger than springtime and hard as nails.” I heard the bitterness in her voice but said nothing. “But it’s not that bad,” she went on. “As I said, I really am quite looking forward to a new life. It wasn’t a one-sided thing, you know, this breakdown between me and your father. As soon as I got him down here and he had nothing to do, I realized what a mistake I’d made. I had no one else to talk to and you may not see it, Lee, but your father is pretty boring. I don’t know how I put up with him for so many years. He has no conversation. He gets you to do all the talking and you think he’s unbelievably charming and because of that he fools you into thinking he’s also fascinating. I remember when I first met him. He was the most handsome creature I’d ever seen. That’s the danger with good-looking men. You never think to look any farther till it’s too late. Ed was a great listener because he had to be. He had nothing to say for himself. Sorry, darling.” She turned to me and for one glorious second I thought she was actually going to embrace me.
But she didn’t move.
“I shouldn’t go on about him like this. He’s your father after all. But I should warn you, I intend to get as much money out of him as possible. In fact, if they sold Josiane’s house down the road for a good price then perhaps he could buy me out of the Notting Hill house. We own it together.”
I didn’t tell Tommy until we were in bed that night. I imagined my mother in the next room, telling my father that I knew. And then I realized that even though my parents were on the point of getting a divorce, they still shared the same bed. Or were they forced to because Tommy and I were in the guest bedroom? Had they been sleeping apart for months? Would my father move his stuff back into this room as soon as my mother had put us on the train? I found it extraordinary that my father and I were in the same boat, both of us putting on a show of normalcy, he with my mother and me with Tommy. At least my mother knew about Josiane.
“Who’d have thought your dad would go off with someone?” Tommy remarked. “It’s the quiet ones you want to watch.”
“It explains a lot,” I said. “I could tell when we arrived that something was troubling her. Yet he was strangely elated and I couldn’t figure out why.”
“He’s a good-looking man,” Tommy observed. “He takes care of himself.”
“Oh, he always has. That’s what he does best,” I said, aware that I was sounding a little bitter. “He’s pretty vain in many ways, pretty selfish too.”
“Lee, I have to say something.” For once Tommy appeared to be wide awake. “You don’t sound as if you like your father very much.” He looked at me anxiously as if he was worried he might have said something he shouldn’t.
To my surprise I answered immediately, “You may be right although I look at Dad and think what’s not to like? I don’t dislike him. I’m happy to see him. I’ve never had much of a conversation with him. I confess I don’t think about him much when I’m away from him.”
“You sound like you’re talking about a near stranger.”
“Well, that’s probably because I am. You might say the same about Mum. My parents have never seemed like parents to me. They’re like an older couple I know. I visit them from time to time and they’ve been kind enough to loan me their house to live in.”
“That’s shocking,” Tommy muttered, clearly appalled.
“Is it? I’ve never really talked about it before. When I was a child we were like three adults living together. Except I couldn’t be left on my own. But half the time they acted as if I didn’t exist.”
“I never realized you were so unhappy as a kid.” Tommy bundled me into a rather clumsy embrace. “There’s so much I don’t know about you.”
“I don’t think I was unhappy, really. I just learned to be completely self-sufficient. I learned not to depend on my parents for anything. I was perfectly happy in my room with my books. And I had plenty of friends. To be honest, I always felt that my mother made very little distinction between me and my friends. She behaved exactly the same to all of us. Very entertaining, loads of delicious food, but in terms of genuine feeling and emotion, we could have been refugees from another planet for all she cared.”
“So how’s she going to take it now her husband’s dumped her?”
“You mean will she finally see that what she needs is a shoulder to cry on? I think she’s probably known that for quite a while but whether she’ll actually admit it is another matter. Oh God, why does this have to happen at this stage of
their life?”
It was starting to hit me as I had known it would. I had been trained by my parents not to show emotion in their presence so I had maintained a calm front during the talk with my mother and throughout the rest of the day. But now I was beginning to crumble. My parents were splitting up. Up to now I had been able to fool myself that we were some kind of family unit. I had a vision of my parents being picked up by a huge anonymous hand and thrown into the air in two different directions. I saw my mother landing in my arms and my father in the arms of a glamorous stranger who turned on her heels and carried him away. I was having childlike fantasies about my parents’ future instead of facing up to the reality. Josiane was probably a perfectly nice woman who would treat me exactly as my mother had for thirty-something years.
“You see, Tommy,” I said, “you see . . .”
“See what? You’re getting yourself all worked up.”
“You see why I don’t want to get married? My parents have been married for nearly forty years. What’s the point of marriage if it can just be dissipated by an affair after all that time?”
“You think it’d be any better if they’d been married for eighteen months and then split up?” asked Tommy reasonably. “They were probably very happy for at least twenty of those years and that may well be more than your father will have with Josiane. Besides, that’s not why you don’t want to get married.”
“It’s not?” I sniffled and pulled a bit of squashed Kleenex out from under the bolster. “What’s stopping me then?”
“You’re just plain scared. You look upon marriage as a kind of trap, I know you do. You worry away thinking your whole life will change if you share it with someone else and you won’t be able to do any of the things that are important to you.”
“And that’s bullshit?”
“Total bullshit. I know who you are. I know you’re a neurotic, territorial polar bear who needs her space and I’d give it to you.”
“I like the space you give me now. Why do you have to live with me?”
How to Seduce a Ghost Page 13
