Chapter 2
THE CAR CAME TO an abrupt stop on the gravel, throwing a cloud of white dust into the air, and a tall man climbed out.
‘Maggie? Bonsoir , I am Georges; I am so sorry to be so late.’
Georges Alarie, the notaire who’d called her three days earlier, was thin as a green bean, and wearing a grey suit and highly polished shoes. He hurried towards her.
‘Don’t worry. I was late too. And I forgot the way, and my phone is out of battery so I couldn’t ring you and … blah blah.’
Georges smiled.
‘What?’
‘You and your aunt, you have the same …’ Georges rotated one hand in the air like a flamenco dancer.
‘Mannerisms?’
‘ Exactement . Mannerisms. She was always doing this “blah blah”. Alors , let’s go inside and we talk.’
‘I haven’t been inside, I only just arrived. I was looking at …’
He took in Maggie’s bewildered expression. ‘The garden? It does not look good, I know, but in the past few months your aunt, she was tired.’
‘Is anybody working here? It looks so …’ She trailed off, unwilling to say the words aloud. It looked desperately sad , and she felt a fresh wave of regret that she hadn’t visited for so many years. She gestured at the overgrown grass and weeds pushing through the gravel. ‘I don’t understand what’s happened.’
Georges smiled sympathetically. ‘Shall we go in? And then I explain.’
She followed him and noticed the geraniums, in terracotta pots the size of buckets at the top of the entrance steps, had turned yellow and died, making the front door look like the portal to a haunted house. After the double blow of the past three days – the failure of another IVF attempt and the discovery that her aunt had died – the sight of the decaying hotel was a gut punch.
‘Audrey says she ’as been coming every day, but, if you don’t mind me saying, I am not sure how much she does when she is ’ere.’
‘So Audrey’s running things?’
‘I am not sure I would call it that, exactement . There were a few bookings for this month but I told her to cancel them. I don’t think she ’as stopped crying for two weeks but she says she ’as been coming to check on the donkeys.’
Georges turned back to the door and gave it a vigorous shove with his shoulder: open, as it always had been. It was never locked in the old days because it never needed to be. Phil was usually here; Audrey was usually here; temporary members of staff were often here; locals came and went with wine and bread and meat deliveries; guests were constantly arriving and leaving, and with them, a stream of shrieks and shouts and the noise of tyres crunching up and down the gravel. There had to be a key somewhere because there was a keyhole, but Maggie had never seen one.
‘The donkeys are still alive?’ she checked.
‘ Oui , eating the garden. Can you ’old this?’ Georges held up the plastic bag he was carrying.
‘It is your aunt,’ he went on.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Her ashes, they are in that bag,’ he explained, as he felt for the light switch and pressed but nothing happened. The hallway remained dark and gloomy since the shutters were closed. And it smelt musty. Maggie’s nose curled: the faint tang of small, decaying rodent mingled with damp. She frowned down at the bag in her hand uncertainly.
He pulled his phone out for its torch. ‘Let us sit in the kitchen, I think that is best.’
She wheeled her suitcase through the swing doors that led from the hall to a short corridor and the kitchen beyond, at the back of the chateau, where the evening sunlight was pouring through the windows, turning the old oak table golden.
Georges started pulling pieces of paper from his folder while she looked around. That room, at least, looked the same: behind the oven hung a row of copper pots; to the right of that the old blue dresser, its shelves stacked with serving bowls, platters, jugs, ramekins, large tureens and piles of rattan baskets, which had been filled with croissants every morning.
To the right of the oven, the shelves still held dozens of pots and jars, all neatly labelled in Phil’s looping handwriting: jars of nutmeg and cloves, which Maggie liked to stick her nose into when small; jars of dried thyme and basil from the garden. Jars of seeds: coriander, mustard, black poppy, fennel, sesame and fenugreek. On the shelf below them, small bags of more exotic powders and spices carried back by Phil from foreign trips – a reddish-brown bag of ras-el-hanout from Marrakech; bright-yellow turmeric from Udaipur; a bright-red chilli powder from a street market in Mumbai, and a large jar of curled cinnamon sticks.
She glanced into the old pantry, a smaller room that contained two industrial dishwashers and three fridges. It looked almost the same too but there was something strange about it. It wasn’t just that Phil was missing or that there was a stillness to a room that had once been so busy. Maggie sniffed again and realized: it smelt strange in here, too.
The scent of the kitchen used to change throughout the day. In the morning, once the delivery from the boulangerie had arrived, it was of fresh baguette and brioche rolls studded with pearls of sugar, and of thick black coffee. Shortly before tea was laid out, there’d be the whiff of cinnamon and honey as a cake cooled on a wire rack. Later in the day, once dinner preparations were underway, it smelt of garlic and olive oil, or of chicken broth simmering on the hob, or rosemary picked from outside, roasting inside a rolled shoulder of lamb in the oven.
But now the kitchen smelt sterile and slightly sour, as if someone had scrubbed every corner to remove the past.
‘Coffee?’ she asked Georges, spotting a jar of instant beside the kettle.
‘ Oui , if you are having one,’ he replied, as he arranged his paperwork in different piles on the table.
Maggie instinctively reached into the cupboard above the sink for two mugs.
‘OK, what first?’ she said, sitting down beside Georges.
‘ Alors , you had not spoken to your aunt for some time, correct?’
‘No, I … we, er, had a falling-out. Years ago. It was complicated.’
‘Families are always compliquées . Bon , I will talk as if you know nothing about your aunt’s estate.’
‘I don’t know anything. But Georges, before we get into that, do you mind me asking, what was it? She wasn’t old, and I know she … but how could she … I mean … I don’t understand …’ Maggie leant forward and covered her face with her hands, momentarily overwhelmed at the idea of her aunt dying here alone.
She’d skim-read a few articles that had appeared online about Phil in the past few days, and her mother had emailed her a link to the Telegraph ’s obituary, which had startled Maggie because it featured a huge close-up of Phil – blonde hair tied back in a bandana, eyes lined with kohl – and also because she hadn’t known her mother could send website links. But nothing had mentioned how she’d died, and although Georges had mentioned a brief illness on the phone, she’d been too stunned by the news to ask anything else.
‘Sorry,’ she said, after a few moments, removing her hands. ‘What happened, is what I mean.’
Georges gave her a sympathetic smile. He already liked this English woman, even though she looked like she needed to sleep for several years, and her skin was as pale as milk. ‘It was her liver. She ’ad liver cancer. But she didn’t want anyone to know, and she didn’t want to go to hospital, so that was when she came to tell me what she wanted.’
‘When?’
He tapped his fingers on the table, counting. ‘That was two months ago.’
‘So it was …’ Maggie’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘It was quick?’
‘I can tell you, she was not in pain by the end. The doctor, he came here every day in the last week with more drugs. So it was quick, oui .’
Maggie felt another stab of guilt at the idea of Phil upstairs, suffering by herself. ‘But her funeral … I would have come. I wish I’d known because I …’ For the first time in three days, she felt her throat go thick and her eyes blur. She tried to remember the last time Phil had sent a postcard to London. She’d written them two or three times a year, even though Maggie never replied. How could she? How could she put down everything she wanted to say in a postcard? One day, she’d assumed she’d see her again and they’d talk. Properly talk, like they used to. But until that day came, she’d decided it was better to say nothing. And now she never would.
‘She wanted it to be quick so the funeral was arranged for two days after she died. No fuss. She ’ad her own way of dealing with these things, your aunt.’
Maggie nodded slowly. That was true. That had always been true. ‘Was it in the village?’
‘ Oui , and then the incineration in Classons.’
‘Cremation,’ Maggie corrected, wincing at the idea of her aunt making that journey alone.
‘ Alors , the estate,’ Georges said, returning to business mode. ‘As you know, the ’otel was extremely popular for many years.’
Faintly, she murmured that she did. On Tuesday night, after Mungo had returned home and consoled her, he’d started talking about the chateau’s value. To be fair, as an estate agent, it was his job to work out how much houses were worth. Not that Mungo liked being called an estate agent. ‘Estate agents are the tossers who drive branded Minis,’ he often told people, before flourishing his business card from his suit pocket as if performing a magic trick. The card declared that Mungo was a ‘property search specialist’, which meant that he sourced multi-million pound houses for the ultra-rich who wanted to live in Mayfair or Knightsbridge.
But Maggie couldn’t bear discussing the hotel as if it was simply another deal, so she’d rolled over and said she didn’t want to think about it. Except Mungo was probably right; her aunt must have made a small fortune. In almost twenty-five years, the hotel had always run a waiting list of people desperate to come and stay here, apart from the winter months when it closed to give the staff a break. And even though now it looked tired and forgotten, for years it had been fashionable. Very fashionable.
‘However,’ went on Georges, ‘for some time now, well, ah, there have been debts.’
Maggie frowned over her mug. Debts?
‘When she came to me and I asked for her records to try and make sense of everything, she told me she didn’t keep records.’
‘No, paperwork was never really her thing,’ she replied, recalling Phil’s chaotic booking system: anyone wanting to stay at the hotel had to ring and enquire about dates, whereupon Phil would check ‘the book’, a thick, annual diary that lived on the reception desk, to see if those dates were free. No computers, no emails, no paper trail. It had mostly worked fine, give or take the odd guest who arrived unexpectedly and had to be put in one of the attic bedrooms.
‘I ’ave spent the past few months doing the sums,’ Georges went on gravely, ‘and I am sorry to say they are not good.’
He pushed a piece of paper across the table with one slim finger and Maggie blinked at a number at the bottom of the page with a minus sign in front of it.
‘That’s all debt? That? ’
Georges nodded.
‘She was nearly a million pounds …’
‘ Non non , euros.’
‘Nearly a million euros in debt?’
He nodded again.
‘A million? A million ?’
Another nod.
Maggie felt her stomach churn at the figure. ‘But … but … but how did she manage that?’
Georges shrugged. ‘She was brilliant, your aunt, in so many ways but in this way’ – he tapped the page with the same slim finger – ‘she was not so brilliant. And she kept taking loans, to pay for staff and for renovations. This place, it is expensive to run. And it just got more and more.’
‘Can I just check, Georges, and sorry if I’m being stupid: she’s left everything to me?’
‘ Oui .’
‘So she’s left me a million euros of debt?’ Maggie wanted to cry then, not just because of the hotel’s decay and her aunt’s solitary death, but the pathetic hopelessness of the situation. A million euros of debt, and for what? The number flashed in her head like a cheap bar light, and the pressure of it tightened her chest. Mungo’s salary was good but she hadn’t earned anything while going through IVF, and recently he’d started worrying about their mortgage rate, plus the doctors’ fees had mounted up. Now this.
‘She ’as left the debt, oui . But if you sell the ’otel, we take the debt off that, and there will be some taxes but there are ways to minimize those. So you sell the ’otel, pay back the bank and take whatever there is left from that. As well as …’ he coughed quietly into his curled fingers, ‘my fees.’
She stared at the piece of paper. Sell Le Figuier? It sounded wrong. She’d barely had time to think about what she’d do with the place since learning that Phil had left it to her, but the idea of handing it over to someone else felt like a betrayal. ‘How soon do you think it could be sold?’
Georges moved his head from side to side. ‘It is quite ’ard to say because it is so unique, and given the ’istory it would need a very special buyer. But I would think, given that it ’asn’t been on the market for twenty-five years, there will be some people very keen to see it.’
‘And when does the bank need the money?’
‘Soon, because the debt is getting more and more.’
Maggie glanced at the clock. Not yet 7 p.m., but she felt exhausted.
‘You are ’ere for ’ow long?’
‘Until Saturday. I wasn’t sure how long I’d need to …’ she gestured feebly at the table, ‘sort this out.’
‘ Bon , OK, why don’t I leave all this ’ere for you to look over and we can meet again when you ’ave ’ad a chance to think?’ Georges slipped a business card from his suit pocket. ‘This is the address. You can call me on that number or an email.’
‘Sure.’
He pushed his chair back to stand when a look of concern crossed his face. ‘You will be OK ’ere?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she replied, staring at the paperwork covering the table before glancing up. ‘And thank you for looking after her.’
A pink spot appeared on Georges’s cheeks. ‘Not at all. Your aunt was a very special woman.’
‘She was,’ Maggie agreed, before feeling another stab of guilt. So special and yet she hadn’t spoken to her for eight years.
Once he’d let himself out, she stood and turned to the plastic bag on the counter and lifted out the urn.
It was surprisingly light, not much heavier than a bag of sugar, but it was also hideous: metallic blue with a single rose painted on it. Her aunt would have hated it because she had such impeccable taste – in clothes, in food, in interiors.
Impeccable taste in everything, apart from maybe in men, Maggie thought, as she set the urn on the table.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she told it quietly.