Escape to the French Chateau

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Johnny tugged the ‘do not disturb’ notice from the door handle of Noel’s room and pounded on the door. He intended to disturb Noel as much as necessary to find out what he wanted to know.

The seconds passed and Johnny became increasingly irritated, pressing his face to the crack where the door and its frame met as he shouted to Noel.

‘Let me in, Noel. I know you’re in there.’

A myriad of fumbling noises from inside the suite had Johnny taking a step back, but it still took Noel an interminable amount of time to manage to unlock and swing wide the door.

Johnny pushed past him with a dramatic surge of energy, heading deep into the room as Noel closed the door and turned, leaning against it for support.

It was gratifying to see that Noel looked utterly shit. A slight blackened colour to the corner of an eye indicated Johnny’s attack the previous evening hadn’t been completely fruitless. It went some way to balance with the fresh abrasion on his own jaw, with its blossoming palate of rosy colours and the jolt of pain accompanying any attempt to touch it. And he was dressed, which was one up on Noel, still naked apart from yesterday’s boxers.

‘Let me get a shirt,’ Noel croaked through dry lips, pulling a T-shirt from a drawer and pushing himself into it.

‘When did it start?’ Johnny said, crossing his arms and fidgeting from one foot to the other.

‘Come again?’

‘When did you start sleeping with my wife, you moron?’

Johnny was amazed Noel wasn’t more prepared for this, for these questions. Surely it would have been something he would have wanted to know, if the shoe had been rammed onto the other foot. His brow creased, his impatience spilling over. ‘It’s a straightforward enough question, Noel. When. Did. It. Start?’

And still Noel hesitated, licking dry lips and running a hand through his bedraggled thatch of hair which would have given Boris Johnson’s a run for his money. For a second, Johnny feared his brother might be about to vomit, his skin paling as sweat beaded on his forehead. Or maybe it was the pressure of the question, of the truth Johnny feared the most about to be unveiled.

‘Why does it matter so much?’

Noel’s non-committal answer infuriated and frustrated in equal measure. Johnny needed to know, and he needed to know right now.

‘Let’s try a simpler question then, fuckwit. How long have you been sleeping with my wife? Months? A year? Years?’ Johnny’s voice cracked over the last word. ‘Please just tell me, Noel – is there a chance you could be Estelle’s father?’

Johnny searched Noel’s expression, scouring it for information. Had the gravity of his questions managed to percolate through, was that the reason Noel paled?

Despite everything, Johnny clung to the belief that this, if nothing else, would resonate with the brother alongside whom he’d been through so much. The brother who had supported him during his darker times and whom Johnny had supported his entire life, a brother who had pushed and driven both of them forward in the world, the same man who’d finally overstepped the bounds of what Johnny could tolerate. But even after everything, surely Noel would be on the same page as him with the sheer horror Johnny was currently experiencing. The feeling of an ice-cold fist located somewhere inside his guts, its grip hard and twisting and unwilling to loosen its hold, possibly ever again.

Because Johnny had to know. Had to know if his beautiful little girl wasn’t his at all.

Noel seemed to take an age to answer. Johnny wanted to get him round the neck, shake the information out of him. He had to know. He needed to know if the one remaining glimmer of light in his life was about to be snuffed out.

Then Noel began to shake his head, lines creasing his forehead.

Unclear as to what the action meant, Johnny took another step forward.

‘For the love of God, tell me, Noel.’

‘No. There’s no chance. Estelle is your daughter.’

Noel’s words bounced through Johnny’s head as he tried to grab hold of them and understand. He stayed put as Noel wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, pulling him until their foreheads touched.

‘I promise you, brother. Estelle is yours.’

Noel brought his other hand up to mirror the first, and they stood forehead to forehead, Noel’s grasp strong but familiar. Welcome, in a strange way. Comforting, even. They stood for a while, Johnny allowing more tears to fall. Eventually, he pulled away.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘The weirdest part of all of this is I never meant to hurt you,’ Noel said, the tremor in his voice transitory but not going unnoticed by Johnny.

‘How could it ever do anything but hurt me?’ Johnny asked.

‘No. I get that.’ Noel hung his head, then sucked in a breath. ‘She never told you we met years before you knew her, did she? When we were teenagers.’

‘What?’ This was news to Johnny.

‘Yeah. It doesn’t excuse what we’ve done to you, the fact that we had history. But we went out for a while, way back then. It didn’t work out, obviously, but when I saw her again, when you said how you’d fallen in love with her – it all came rushing back. I did my best to keep my distance. And it was obvious she’d moved on, forgotten all about me. At least, that’s what she said. It stung like hell, I can tell you.’

‘What are you saying, Noel? Are you trying to blame Natalie?’

‘It was as though we had unfinished business. Every time we were in the same room, I knew exactly where she was, all the time. Like she was some kind of magnet, and I was a pile of iron filings doing their best to stay away.’

Johnny shook his head. ‘I still don’t get what you’re trying to say. I went out with other women, before Natalie. Seeing them again doesn’t send my libido into overdrive. It doesn’t have me diving for crappy physics GCSE analogies.’

‘Yeah, well we’re not all as together as you, are we?’

‘I’ve never felt less together, Noel. I’m destroyed. That’s all I know. And right now, it’s looking like it’s all your fault.’

‘I’m not trying to shift the blame. I know it sits squarely at my door. You think I’m so strong, and confident, but I’m not. Bottom line is I’ve always been jealous of you, of the easy rapport you have with life. While I’m all bluster and noise. I know I have serious shortcomings, Johnny, there’s no need to try to make me feel better about it.’

‘Wasn’t going to.’

‘And the fact that you and Natalie had such a great relationship after she and I crashed and burned all those years before? It did nothing but add to my insecurities. So, when she began to flirt with me, I don’t know. I guess I lost my head. It’s not an excuse. I should have put her straight, should have told you what was happening. Should-a, could-a, would-a. Easier to say than to do, but I should have found a way. I was completely wrong, but all I’m trying to say is that it takes two to tango.’

It was a crap apology, if that was even what Noel had intended to deliver, coupling it as he had with the body blow that his wife had been complicit in what had happened between them. That she’d never told Johnny she already knew Noel. They’d both hidden their former relationship from him, then had rekindled it.

The revelations explained a few things, the shifts in his brother’s behaviour began to make more sense, but it was all far too little, way too late.

‘Your videocall that made you late for the Beaufoy wine tasting – was that her?’

Noel didn’t confirm or deny, which as good as answered his question. Johnny was surer than ever before – this was the moment in which he realised he was never going back to the life he had before, not in any form. It occurred to him that Natalie’s sudden plea for him to reconsider – it was all linked, and he was the one being taken for a fool. But he’d been taken advantage of for the last time.

‘You understand this is it. For us, I mean?’ Johnny said.

‘It doesn’t have to be,’ Noel said. ‘I fucked up, but you should take some time. Think things through. The business needs both of us.’

Johnny ignored the words, focusing on a final question, a far less important one than finding out about Estelle, but he needed to ask.

‘You and Natalie – are you going to make a go of it?’

Johnny wasn’t expecting Noel to laugh, certainly not the rueful, thin sound which filled the air for a second, gone just as quickly.

‘She doesn’t want me. She never has, not really. I thought—’ Noel paused, mid-sentence, then shook his head. ‘I thought she did. I really thought so. But I think I was wrong.’

‘So, all of this was for nothing, then?’ Johnny said.

Noel shrugged, but this time it was a heavy movement, it wasn’t dismissive, or designed to irritate. ‘Looks that way.’

‘Fucking hell, Noel.’

‘Yeah. Fucking hell.’

Red seemed more than happy to listen to Fran’s story, and once she got going it felt good to get the truth out into the open air, even if the cat was the only one around to hear it.

‘It started when the newspapers ran the story about my mum,’ Fran said. ‘Well, when I say it started then, I suppose strictly speaking it started a long way before that. Like nearly twenty-seven years ago, but that’s not the point.’

Red purred, encouraging her to continue.

‘I used to ask her about my father, especially when I was a kid and most of the other kids at school had dads. But she always reverted to the same line, told me he didn’t want to know and that we were better off without him. Over the years I guess I just accepted what she said.’ Fran tickled Red’s chin. ‘My mum was one tough cookie, and what she said, went. And we were fine, without him. Anyway, I digress. It’s giving me more time to make a fuss of you, so I don’t suppose you mind.’

Red kneaded at her leg, stood and arched his back, then turned and curled the other way, presumably to ensure both sides got equal amounts of stroking.

‘But after Mum died, and all the gory details of the accident appeared in the newspapers, I received a phone call from somebody at Wilding Holdings, and everything snowballed from there. I thought it was a scam to begin with, only picked up the call because I’d been answering so many from the hospital, Mum’s friends, and then the undertakers. I remember thinking, Oh no, now what? The woman called three times before I began to believe that Bill Wilding had known my mum years before and that he really did have something he wanted to discuss with me.’

Red headbutted her fingers, and Fran resumed her stroking, unaware that she’d fallen still at the memory of that first meeting with Bill Wilding.

‘It was surreal. I just remember thinking he wanted to pass on his condolences, or something. But wondering why he was travelling all the way from London to do so. And how on earth had he known my mother?’

Fran laughed, glancing away across the tinder-dry grassy bank, tracking the baked shades of green until they became blues, and she was staring up and out, into the sky.

‘Hindsight is a beautiful thing, Red. Has anybody ever told you that? He explained he’d known my mum when she was working at one of his first hotels in London. Nearly twenty-six years before. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when he told me they’d been in a relationship, even though he was married at the time. Or that he hadn’t done anything to keep in contact with my mum when she’d suddenly left.

‘He told me he hadn’t imagined for a moment that she’d been pregnant, hadn’t had the first idea until I was mentioned in the newspaper. He seemed insistent that I should understand. Asked me why I thought it was that she’d never contacted him, never told him. Never asked for money.

‘It took me a while to compute that he was trying to tell me that he thought I was his daughter. That I might be Bill Wilding’s daughter. Can you imagine? Crazy, right?’

Red tensed, attention taken by something imaginary closer to the chateau.

‘Is it a mouse?’ Fran grimaced. ‘I hope it isn’t a mouse.’

The flick of an ear and a twitch of Red’s legendary tail suggested whatever it had been, it was either unimportant, or it was gone, and Red turned his face up towards Fran again.

‘I know, I’m too comfy to move, either.’

Fran sighed. So much had changed in her life over the last few months, but in essence she was still the same girl she’d always been. It would have been easy to have been swept away by everything Bill Wilding could offer, even if his arrival in Fran’s life had been twenty-six years too late.

But questions remained. Like, why didn’t her mother ever contact him to let him know he had a daughter? Fran’s mum had been proud, determined, single-minded – stubborn, for want of a better description – but why had she chosen a life of struggle rather than seeking help, even if it was only financial, from the father of her child? There was no way Fran could ever find out, but her mother hadn’t been someone who took decisions lightly, so there must have been a reason. Perhaps she didn’t think she would be believed. Maybe she worried she would find herself on the wrong end of a legal wrangle.

But what Fran had found out so far about her father didn’t seem to tally with someone who would have treated Fran’s mum unfairly, even if it had been an under-the-radar kind of deal, so Bill’s wife would have been none the wiser.

When Bill had asked how he could help Fran, how he wished very much to be a part of her life, to make up for all the years he’d missed, they’d eventually settled on a plan. Fran took on her role as undercover hotel sampler, in part to find out about her father’s business, but also because Fran didn’t want money from him, preferred the idea of earning a salary – even if it was a very generous salary for doing what amounted to sitting around in the sun. Bill had laughed, suggesting it was all the summer holidays Fran should have had, strung together.

It still seemed unreal, as though someone was going to pop up at any moment and tell her that the DNA tests were wrong, and that they’d come to take back the company credit card. And would she kindly never contact Bill Wilding again. At the start, Fran hadn’t thought much further than the idea of earning enough money to be able to fund her own little studio, the chance to be able to start her own furniture restoring business.

But when Johnny had been talking about trying to get a bank loan for renovation works, should he decide to take on Chateau des Rêves, Fran couldn’t ignore the fact that she could ask Bill for it. Wondered if her new-found father might allow Johnny an interest-free loan so he wouldn’t be crippled by the interest he’d have to repay. Wondered, for the first time, how being the daughter of someone like him might affect the way other people viewed her. Wondered how it might change her.

Or perhaps that had always been a concern. Maybe that was why she’d had the wild idea of becoming a member of Chateau les Champs d’Or’s staff, rather than a guest. Maybe that was why she hadn’t told Penny the whole truth. Was she hiding from who she really was? Who was she, really?