Chapter 2
Two
The day before Corinne had died, Emma had been on an out-of-town shoot for Thornton’s, the fine arts and antiques company she worked for as digital media manager.
She had been in the middle of photographing the glorious, and very rare, set of Clarice Cliff ceramics found in the attic of a local house, when a phone call had come from the hospital in Sydney.
Her mother was asking for her, the nurse said, she was quite agitated, she had something important to tell her daughter and it would be good if Emma came today.
Emma hurriedly finished the shoot, packed everything up and headed back to Sydney.
The trip should have taken her no more than three hours but, as fate would have it, an accident on the motorway delayed traffic for ages and by the time she reached the hospital five hours had passed.
She was met by an ashen-faced nurse who told her that Corinne had suffered a massive stroke and was unconscious.
Her mother died a day later. Even though Corinne’s cancer diagnosis had not allowed any room for hope, and Emma had been prepared for something like this for months, it had been a shockingly sudden end.
Amid the grief, there was a sense of relief that her mother’s suffering was over at last. But there was another thing, which gnawed at her still.
Her mother had wanted to tell her something important, and she should have been there to hear it.
It wasn’t her fault, Paddy kept telling her, and she knew in her rational mind that was true.
But in her heart, she felt a sense of guilt.
If only she had got there sooner! She was sure her mother had wanted to tell her about the past, maybe even the secret Corinne had kept for so long: the identity of Emma’s biological father.
Paddy had no idea what Corinne might have wanted to tell her, or who her biological father was, for Corinne had never told him either. ‘And I preferred it that way,’ he’d told her, with sad honesty.
The only clue Emma had was that photograph of her mother long ago in the tall grass. It had been on Corinne’s bedside table at the hospital that day, as if she had been intending to use it as a prop for the story she wanted to tell.
It was a photograph Emma had never seen before and which Paddy said he’d only seen once.
‘She told me it was taken in France, before she left to come here,’ he said.
‘Not in Paris, but on holiday somewhere in the country.’ That certainly accorded with the look of the background—the meadow with a church spire or pointy tower in the far distance.
There was also a scrawl in an unknown hand—not her mother’s—on the back, reading, simply, ‘un jour de printemps’, one spring day.
Paddy didn’t know who had written that either, or any other details.
‘You know what Corinne was like,’ he had said.
‘If she didn’t want to explain something, she simply didn’t. ’
Emma knew that all right. Even though Corinne had loved her daughter deeply, she had been a private, even secretive person. So the fact that she had finally been ready to open up was doubly affecting, and Emma couldn’t get it out of her mind.
Four weeks after the funeral, she had left Australia to stay with her grandmother in Paris.
It was Mattie who had urged her to come, knowing instinctively that her granddaughter needed time with her, in the place Corinne had grown up.
And Paddy had encouraged that, telling Emma she wasn’t to worry about him as he had his three lively sisters for support.
They and their families had been towers of strength in the last few months.
From the start, being in Paris with Mattie had felt right.
Unlike last time, when Emma had tried mediating a situation she didn’t understand, there had been no awkwardness.
Being with her grandmother felt both consoling and utterly natural.
And sharing her gentle, peaceful routine made Emma feel as if she was taking up again the lost threads of that first visit to Paris, starting to weave a relationship with Mattie that was all the more precious for having taken so long.
This morning, after a simple breakfast of coffee and fresh baguette with butter and jam, Emma had accompanied Mattie to the bustling local market and shops.
Mattie was clearly well known and greeted warmly at every shop and stall they visited.
On the first day they’d gone together, she’d proudly introduced her granddaughter to everyone, and a week on, Emma seemed to have become part of the scene, welcomed by name and asked about her day.
It reminded Emma so much of doing the Saturday morning shopping as a child with Paddy, who often stopped to chat with people he met in their small country town.
When Emma remarked on it, Mattie said, smiling, ‘Paris is at heart a series of villages, and it’s in our home village we feel most comfortable, just like people in the country do. It’s a natural human thing.’
Not for everyone, Emma thought, remembering her mother’s strictly practical style of shopping back home.
Corinne didn’t go with Emma and Paddy on those Saturday morning expeditions, telling her husband she couldn’t stand all the chit-chat.
She said she knew that, as a well-liked GP in their close-knit community, Paddy had to pretend to show interest, but she worked in system management at the local council and there was no need for her to be forced into an interest she didn’t feel.
Paddy smiled and said that he wasn’t pretending, but Corinne had simply raised an ironic eyebrow.
So how had she coped as a child being trotted around this neighbourhood by her chatty mother?
Not well, presumably. But, on the other hand, she’d been happily married to someone with the same sociable temperament as the mother she’d left so far behind.
People could be so complicated.
Another of her mother’s paradoxes was that though she no longer considered France her home, she had ensured that her daughter could not only speak but read and write French.
And thank goodness she had, as French was a necessity with Mattie, for Emma’s grandmother only spoke that language.
And they talked so much in those early days!
Mattie loved hearing about Emma’s childhood, and she delighted in sharing stories of Corinne’s childhood, as they pored over photos in the old family photo album and her own drawings from long ago.
Mattie had once been a commercial illustrator, and still kept a visual art diary for when the mood took her.
Her sketchbooks were full of studies of Corinne as a child, playing, or reading, or sleeping: small moments of her mother’s life that touched Emma deeply.
So far, though, Mattie had only briefly mentioned Corinne’s departure from France thirty-two years ago.
There had been no big fight leading up to it, she’d reassured Emma.
Her parents knew Corinne was itching to get away and see the world.
They’d known she was going to Australia on a working holiday visa and would be away for up to two years.
But they had no idea she was pregnant. In fact, neither had she, for her periods were often late, and quite irregular.
It wasn’t until a month after her arrival in Australia that she’d known for sure, after visiting a doctor.
But she hadn’t told her parents about it until Emma was three months old.
Why, Emma wasn’t sure. Perhaps she was afraid they would try to dissuade her from having the baby.
Or perhaps she had thought they would try to make her come home.
Or maybe she had simply wanted to keep it to herself, till she was ready to tell.
Time passed, Paddy successfully sponsored Corinne to stay and the move to Australia became permanent.
It wasn’t that she cut her parents off because she did keep in touch by fairly regular letters and an occasional phone call, but Corinne made it clear her life was in Australia. And so the pattern was set.
Today, over a simple but delicious market-sourced lunch of pan-fried fish with herbs, the conversation, which had started by Mattie asking about Emma’s work with Thornton’s, soon came to an intriguing turn.
Emma had just told her grandmother how she’d got the job by chance because they’d come across her Instagram posts about vintage and charity shop finds, when Mattie smiled and said, ‘You know, Alain once had a shop selling those kinds of things.’
As far as Emma had known, her grandfather had worked in a newspaper printing office most of his life. ‘I had no idea! When?’
‘A couple of years before we got married. It was where we met, in the late 1960s. I was twenty-five, working for various magazines, and that day I’d gone to the river to sketch and happened across his shop, not far from here.
’ Her eyes shone. ‘It was a fascinating place, every square millimetre of its tiny space crammed with unusual old things he’d picked up all over France, but I was the only customer.
We got talking and I soon realised that, though he was the most interesting man I’d ever met, he didn’t have the slightest idea about publicity. So I offered to take it in hand.’
Mattie smiled mischievously, and Emma imagined her grandmother as she’d seen her in one of the photos: a lively young woman in a minidress and boots, dark kohl-rimmed eyes under a thick fringe, turning up to the quirky shop of the quietly handsome, kind man who would become the love of her life.
Mattie’s hair might be a shining silver-white now, instead of a lustrous jet black, but her eyes were just as sparkling as she happily reminisced.
‘I designed a series of pop-art flyers and took them around the places where people my age gathered.’ She shrugged. ‘Our version of social media, I suppose.’