Chapter 29
29
DAY FOUR
Now
‘Darling! Oh my goodness! What are you doing here?’
A tanned woman with short golden-blonde hair and half-moon reading glasses looked up at her son in adoration before wrapping her arms around him, almost in relief. Hugging him seemed to be medicinal, judging from the replenished look on her face. ‘Where’s Ida? Is everything all right? Come in, come in!’
She smiled and beckoned Jesse and Minnie through the front doors of the stone farmhouse with ivy creeping over its exterior. Even in the dark, Minnie could tell the stone was cream, the shutters were blue and the ambience was tranquil.
‘Ida’s fine, she’s at home, everything’s fine.’ Jesse’s mother threw him a loaded look – she didn’t buy his calm candour. He squeezed her shoulder as if to say really . ‘Mum, this is Minnie – Minnie this is Caryn, my mum.’
‘Wonderful to meet you, Minnie, do come in.’ Caryn smiled in warm confusion as she put her arms on Minnie’s and kissed her once on each cheek.
‘Lovely to meet you too. Wow, this is gorgeous!’ Minnie said as she walked in and looked around the entrance, where one wall was rugged and stone, another smooth, plastered and painted cream. A large table with a mixture of chairs around it dominated the space.
Jesse slung his backpack on the table and stretched like a cat.
‘Come on through. You’ll have dinner? I’ve a stew on the Aga.’ Caryn couldn’t contain her excitement as she led them to a kitchen with yellow cupboards, terracotta tiles and a hotchpotch of different style artworks, tea towels and utensils. Copper pans sat proudly next to plastic colanders. The room felt rustic, garbled, and smelled of red wine, red meat and comfort.
‘We were in Paris today for… for work, weren’t we?’ Jesse turned to Minnie, who was too busy looking around and smiling to concur. ‘And we decided to jump on a train here.’
‘Goodness, well aren’t I lucky? What a lovely surprise! Can I get you a drink? Beer? Wine? Lemonade?’
‘Actually I am parched,’ Minnie said, holding her neck. ‘A lemonade would be perfect! Thank you.’
Caryn opened an old looking fridge and took out a jug of lemonade Minnie assumed was homemade, it smelled so zingy.
‘I’ll have one too thanks, and a beer. I’ll get them…’ Jesse said, taking the jug out of his mother’s hands. Caryn didn’t know what to do with herself; she seemed happy and flustered.
‘The stew is probably still warm…’
Jesse looked at Minnie to see if she was hungry. They’d grabbed a baguette as they’d ran through Gare de Lyon but hadn’t eaten since then. ‘It’s beef,’ she added, giving Jesse a contrite look. Caryn had stopped eating beef when Lars turned seventy and decided to become vegetarian, but it had gradually made its way back on the menu since he died. The house smelled cosy for it.
‘That would be amazing,’ Minnie said, clutching her stomach. ‘It smells incredible.’
‘Yeah I’ll go for some too thanks, Mum.’
Jesse put ice cubes into three glasses and poured the lemonade over them from its jug with a stirrer, a satisfying chink and crunch sound that helped Minnie shelve her stress.
Jesse and Minnie had taken the last train from Paris to Avignon and were lucky to get the one taxi at Avignon station when they stepped off the train to balmy air and cicada song. Minnie couldn’t see much in the dark save for the odd stone house lit dramatically behind palms, cypress trees and bushes, as they travelled for almost an hour until they reached the village of Gordes. The taxi stopped at the end of a short stone path lit by stick lights to guide them on foot to a rustic cream and grey stone house with blue shutters, another chirrup of cicada song announcing their arrival to the unsuspecting lady of the house.
It was gone 10p.m. and both Minnie and Jesse felt as hungry as they were tired.
‘There’s plenty – I haven’t really got used to cooking for one,’ Caryn said cheerily, although her heart broke with every step she took towards the much-used Le Creuset dish on top of the Aga. ‘I’ll stick some bread in the oven just to warm it up. It’s this morning’s.’
Jesse handed Minnie her drink then followed his mother around the kitchen, getting plates and cutlery, his heart beating almost to the floor. Apart from the sound of toads and cicadas in the bushes outside, there was an eerie quiet without his dad’s effervescent presence lifting the home with his talk into the late evening. This house hadn’t felt right since his dad died. Nowhere felt right since his dad died.
It was only the third time Jesse had been home since. He’d spent two weeks here in December with Ida, drinking coffee, clearing rooms and sitting, utterly baffled and shocked while he and Caryn arranged a small funeral in France, while they planned a memorial service for wider friends and family, plus the UK literati, back in London, at a church on Hanover Square five days before Christmas.
Jesse brought Ida again for a week in the Easter holidays, to escape from the stalemate with Hannah, and stay somewhere they could just be , rather than hanging out at Andrew and Elena’s or traipsing around museums. It was Easter Sunday when Jesse finally told his mother about Hannah’s affair. He hadn’t wanted her to know, lest they work through it, but when his mother asked him what the hell was going on and why he still seemed to be sleeping at a friend’s house rather than at home, he couldn’t lie. Caryn sobbed, for her grief and for Jesse’s, while Jesse assured her that everything was going to be all right. It was just a blip.
While Caryn fussed over bread and wine glasses, and Jesse reassured her that really, everything was fine back in London, Minnie walked through to the eclectic living room and looked at the pictures on the walls, the mismatched rugs on the stone floor, and the endless shelves of books, looking like they could tumble out. Art books, dictionaries, biographies, books on writing. An old encyclopedia set that looked like it had been bought in the 1980s. Or the 1880s possibly.
On one smaller side wall, every shelf was bursting with books that had similar spines, with writing in similar fonts, shouting out their titles and authors in capital letters. James Patterson. Jonathan Kellerman. Patricia Cornwell. Lars Lightning. Then the penny dropped. That’s where she knew the name.
Minnie pulled out a Lars Lightning book at random, turned it over, and looked at the headshot on the inside back cover. The author had familiar muddy blue eyes and light hair, although this man’s hair was more white than dirty blond, still messy and thick in the same ruffled style.
Shit .
Minnie had read some of these books. They sat on the shelves of her parents’ home in Hampstead. She had enjoyed them too. Her dark side loved a crime thriller. She always marvelled that she could never predict whodunnit.
Jesse stepped into the living room, lowering his head at a familiar point on the low wooden door frame.
‘Plot twist!’ Minnie said, holding up a hardback of The Pondicherry Pursuit .
Jesse smiled wanly.
‘So this is why Remy is a departure! Your dad is Lars Lightning.’
‘Rumbled,’ Jesse confessed. Minnie’s game of no frills, no fancy, and knowing nothing about each other was fast unravelling.
‘I love his books! The Viking’s Curse was sooo good. It inspired me to go to Scotland a few winters ago. My sister Lillia and I – we tried to see the Northern Lights from there because they’d sounded so epic in the book and well…’
She trailed off as she ran her finger over a shelf entirely dedicated to Lars Lightning: hardbacks, paperbacks and foreign editions. ‘I didn’t realise.’
Jesse smiled. Equal parts proud and heartbroken.