Chapter 51
FIFTY-ONE
LUCY
Lucy was pale and shivering as they waited anxiously in the street with Sébastien and her father for the police to arrive. She didn’t dare raise her voice above a whisper and each breath she took felt like a risk, as if any sudden movement could set the bomb off.
The police arrived swiftly, cordoning off the winding, cobbled street. Their red, white and blue plastic tape fluttered in the breeze, looking out of place against the old buildings. They’d survived D-Day, with some patching up, but now they were on the frontline again.
Lucy felt a sudden rush of love for the bookshop. She didn’t want to walk away and leave it when it faced such peril, but the police ordered everyone to get back as they called for the bomb disposal team.
They headed up to Sébastien’s for safety, Lucy walking on shaking legs.
All she could see in front of her were the sharp metal fins of the bomb, poking up from the ground.
She had no idea which side had fired it, but that didn’t matter now.
It’d come within metres of hitting Margot’s beloved shop, and had waited for years, head first in the soil, biding its time.
It could’ve gone off at any moment – even while her father had been playing in the garden as a child. And it still could.
Jojo’s bar had been full and Sébastien had insisted all his guests were welcome at his home too.
The cottage and its sunny garden were full of people enjoying snacks that Sébastien was cooking up in his kitchen.
Diana was sitting with Beatrice on a bench in the sun by the front door, listening to her tales, but Lucy kept straining her ears, wanting to be the first to hear the explosion if it came.
If the bomb went off, the bookshop and her new future would be destroyed together.
And then there was the secret history that had been hidden there.
She couldn’t bear the thought of losing it all after she’d only just discovered it.
There were still other threads to follow up; she had questions that didn’t yet have answers.
She tried to distract herself at first by telling her father everything she had found out so far from the memory box.
She was glad she’d been writing it up, as it helped her to make sense of so many events reported in all those different notebooks and letters and in Margot’s diary.
She knew from his expression that he hadn’t heard these stories before.
Another of Margot’s loose sheets, which had been caught up in an envelope of photos of the harbour, told her about what Daniel had carved behind the piano.
Eagerly, she and her father wheeled the piano out, and there it was – the carving that Daniel had left behind.
Lucy swallowed a sob. ‘He was such a brave man. Imagine coming back up here to his cottage because he wanted to be here, even for just a few moments, with the daughter he’d never met before?
’ She saw again the parallels between her family and Isabelle’s; a father and daughter without a wife or a mother.
‘I’ve worked very hard and achieved an awful lot in my life, but I’d give it all up so long as I still had you.
’ Philip glanced out into the garden, where Diana and Beatrice were throwing a ball for Galette to chase.
Her stepmother looked so at home here and, as Philip watched his wife, he smiled softly.
Then he put his arm through Lucy’s and said, ‘We used to play armies in the ruins of Theo’s cottage just along the way. ’ He squeezed her arm. ‘Fancy a walk?’
They wandered through the sunlight, past Sébastien’s customers, along a path worn in the grass. They headed through the trees that had grown at the angle of the wind from the sea, to what had once been Theo’s cottage.
‘He lost so much,’ Lucy said, as the ruins came into view. She wondered what had happened to him; she supposed he must have died, as Margot had later met Emil. ‘His daughter, his wife, his home… but then he met Margot. I’m so glad they were happy, even though it wasn’t for long.’
Moss and grass were growing over the stones, and wildflowers were coming up between the cracks. She thought of the children who had played here and she was sure that would’ve made Theo smile.
‘I can’t imagine a loss like that,’ Philip said.
‘I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.
When Mum got the diagnosis… it all happened so fast after that, losing her.
I never told you, Lucy, because I suppose I’m not really that sort of man.
But you saved my life, just by being there.
Reading you your bedtime stories, all of that…
I couldn’t have kept going without you.’
Lucy smiled sadly. ‘She wasn’t ill for very long, at least. I felt so angry she was taken from us so quickly, but then, she didn’t really have time to suffer. That’s what’s important.’
She thought back to staying with her mum at the hospice, the sharp smell of antiseptic and the way the floors had squeaked under her pink T-bar sandals.
She remembered that her mother’s face was as pale as the pillow her head was resting on.
Lucy had only been five years old, and the hospice bed was so high up that she remembered how she’d had to clamber onto it with a storybook so she could cuddle her mum, or her dad had to lift her so she could see her.
‘Did I do all right?’ Philip asked suddenly.
It came as a surprise to Lucy, because her father was a man of unshakeable convictions, a man who made decisions.
This was the unflappable corporate lawyer, the highest achiever she knew.
This was a man who never doubted his abilities and had encouraged her to follow in those same footsteps.
‘I still wonder… should I have put you in school? I don’t know if it was fair to drag you around the world with me, but I didn’t want you to be stuck away in a boarding school, all on your own.
I wanted to do the best for you, but I didn’t really know where to start. ’
‘Oh, Dad!’ Lucy rested her head against his shoulder. He still wore the same cologne. ‘I loved travelling the world with you. I was such a lucky kid. And I’m so glad you didn’t put me in a boarding school, because then I would’ve felt as though I’d lost you too.’
‘When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘Mum and Granny gave so much to the children of the village. We had reading groups and drama and they turned the bookshop into somewhere all of the children were welcome. Some of my friends had hard lives, but when they came to the shop they could escape all of that. I knew how lucky I was because she was my mum, and I could see how much Mum and Grandma Margot meant to the whole village. Those people who call themselves Arielle’s Army…
they were the kids who had it hardest of all.
I decided then that I was going to work really, really hard, so my own family would always feel as loved and cared for.
’ He drew in a long breath. ‘What happened to your mum taught me that you can’t buy your way out of every problem.
’ Then he turned to settle his gaze on Lucy.
‘You don’t look like London Lucy any more, you know. ’
Lucy smiled at him. She knew he was right. It wasn’t just that she’d taken to wearing Breton tops and cropped trousers, or that she barely wore any make-up now. There was something else. She’d changed; she had a glow.
‘I hadn’t realised until they found the bomb how much that place means to me.
The thought of losing it is…’ Philip shook his head, leaving the sentiment unfinished.
‘Follow your dream, Lucy. I’ll go along to the house with Hannah and the girls and collect your things; we’ll get everything over to you without you having to deal with Andrew again.
’ He gave her a little wink. ‘And for what it’s worth, I always thought he was an oik.
I was just too well brought up to tell you. ’
Lucy chuckled as she put her arm round her father and hugged him.
She was so relieved that he’d come to understand why she wanted to take a different path.
And she was glad that she’d come to understand him too; now she knew where his relentless drive for success had come from, and why he’d been so ambitious for her.
As soon as she’d become the deputy editor of Glitz magazine, he’d told her she should now be aiming for Vogue.
He’d seen deprivation at second hand, so he’d wanted only the best for his daughter.
He hadn’t wanted her to struggle or suffer, and it reminded Lucy of how Daniel had been willing to risk crossing the mine-studded Channel to get his daughter to safety.
‘I see a different side to you when you’re in Cordeval too,’ Lucy told him.
‘You’re a quintessential English gent in London, but then after you’ve been here five minutes you go all French.
’ She grinned at him, but her smile faded.
The spectre of the unexploded bomb loomed large, casting a shadow across the sunny day.
‘If that bomb goes off…’ Lucy’s voice trailed away.
‘It better not.’ Philip put his arm round Lucy’s shoulder and gave her a squeeze. ‘But whatever happens, I’ll be here.’