Chapter 19
NINETEEN
LUCY
Under Beatrice’s gaze, Lucy lifted the lid off the box.
An extraordinary collection of yellowed paper, documents, envelopes, black-and-white photos, and scribbled notes lay before her, a historical treasure trove. But it was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.
She didn’t know which piece went where or how to even start.
She took out a photograph of Margot and Emil, her great-grandparents.
It’d been taken in a wintry back garden somewhere, with leafless trees behind them.
They had their arms round each other’s waists, and Emil’s hand rested on the handle of a pram.
A round-faced baby in a knitted bonnet was sitting up in the pram, merrily pointing at whoever had been behind the camera.
‘Well, I know who they are,’ Lucy said to Beatrice as she laid it down on the coffee table. ‘Margot and Emil, Mémé’s mum and dad. And that’s Mémé in her pram!’
Beatrice rested her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. ‘I’m going to leave you alone with your family,’ she said gently. ‘They’ll tell you their story.’
Lucy touched Beatrice’s hand in response. ‘Thank you, Beatrice.’
Somehow, as Beatrice headed off, Lucy didn’t feel alone in the flat; it was as if Mémé was here with her.
She gazed at the photograph, trying to tease out every detail.
Margot’s winter coat had no buttons and was tied closed with a belt; rationing, Lucy thought.
Emil had a knitted scarf round his neck.
Lucy wondered if she could work out what the background was.
Lots of trees, not too tall… it was likely to be an orchard, but that didn’t narrow things down in Normandy.
She stopped herself and thought back to her journalism training and how to put a story together.
Before she could home in on the details, she needed to understand the bigger picture, but the box seemed to be nothing but details, all clamouring for her attention.
Once she accepted the job at Glitz, she would be writing precious few articles, but that was what came with the role.
She would enjoy piecing Mémé’s story together.
She carefully removed each item, trying to organise them into piles.
But she soon got confused by her own system.
A photo of her great-grandparents was one thing, but what about the photographs of people she didn’t know?
Snapshots taken at the harbour. A wedding photo from the 1930s of a young couple with hopeful smiles.
They weren’t her great-grandparents, but there was no name on the back, so she had no idea who they were.
She found another photo of the same couple, blinking in the sunlight of a garden.
The edge of a cottage was just within the frame, and it must’ve been on the clifftops, as Lucy could see a view of the village below with the small lighthouse on the harbour.
A young tree, its boughs studded with apples, stood to the one side.
When Lucy turned this photo over, she saw two names neatly written on the back: Esther et Daniel.
The strong sunlight came and went through the window as puffs of white cloud raced across the sky.
Lucy turned the photograph back over and looked again at Esther.
It was her book that had been left under the counter, and Lucy felt a connection with the young woman staring back at her through the decades.
Lucy found older photos in the box, of people wearing clothes from the 1920s and even earlier – were these Margot and Emil’s family?
She sipped her coffee as she looked at a postcard from Clarenville-sur-Mer, showing the palatial hotel and the wide, golden beach, but there was no message written on the back.
She found a slim diary with a dark red cardboard cover.
1941 was printed on the front, and Lucy flicked through the thin pages.
It said Margot Dufour inside the front cover, but Lucy struggled with Margot’s handwriting.
The diary was so tiny that the words were cramped, and she used her own abbreviations and initials, which made no sense at all. Lucy would have to come back to that.
There were letters in the envelopes, but some contained more than one, as if the original envelope had disappeared.
Was there any link between one letter and the next?
The paper was so thin, almost like tracing paper, and Lucy had trouble reading the old-fashioned handwriting.
One of them looked as if it was from someone called Serge, but she was unable to make out who it was to, or most of the contents in the letter. Who was Serge?
And what about the business card for Sylvie – couturier de luxe?
Lucy had no idea who Sylvie was, nor which pile to put her business card on.
She carefully unfolded a sheet of paper that was crumbling around the edges and saw handwritten sheet music.
The staves had been hand-drawn in ink and the notes had been pencilled in.
She cursed herself for not being musical – she couldn’t work out what the tune was.
A sheet of thin paper covered in random, pencilled dots accompanied it, and Lucy couldn’t understand why.
Near the bottom of the box, she found a printed book with a cream-coloured cover.
She almost dropped it when she read the title: Liste Otto: Ouvrages retirés de la vente – works withdrawn from sale.
She flicked through it, shocked at some of the titles, which she recognised at once; even Oliver Twist had been banned.
Lucy made herself a coffee at Mémé’s stove, then set up her laptop on the dining table. If she started to type up the letters, it might help her to make sense of things. Create a timeline, maybe, and then she could slot everything together.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard and she stared at the blinking cursor, before her gaze shifted to the box on the coffee table and the piles of papers and photographs around it. She wasn’t a historian, unless it involved Dior, Schiaparelli or Chanel; surely this was beyond her.
Besides, she didn’t have forever to stay in Cordeval and rummage through old letters and photographs.
She had to give Polly her answer and return to London.
Although she could’ve taken the box back with her, it didn’t seem right; everything inside it was part of Cordeval’s story and it shouldn’t leave.
She took a long sip of her coffee, then went back over to the box. Carefully, she shifted envelopes and folded sheets of paper, and more photographs, until she reached a notebook right at the bottom.
Unlike everything else in the box, this looked new. So new, in fact, that Lucy recognised the brightly coloured cover, busy with patterns of polka dots and wavy lines, because the very same notebooks were still on sale in the shop.
Curious, she opened the cover.