Chapter 3
AS GEORGES ’ S CAR RECEDED down the drive, Maggie saw a note on the dresser.
DINNER IN FRIDGE. AUDREY.
She marvelled that Audrey still had her job. Phil had originally employed her as the manager of the hotel because she spoke English and knew everyone within a fifty-mile radius. And to be fair, at the start, Audrey brokered deals with the butcher, with the fromagerie and the boulangerie and with the vineyard for Le Figuier’s supplies. Phil was grateful; she’d lived in Paris for two years before buying the place, but she was a newcomer to Provence and understood that she needed a local to help with introductions.
Except having made these introductions and secured her position as manager, Audrey had done very little else. She’d abandoned the bookings and the finances to Phil, while sitting outside the kitchen door smoking and complaining about a never-ending list of ailments – a sore back, a sore hip, a sore neck, a sore leg. There was always something wrong with at least one of Audrey’s body parts. But because Phil had been kind and felt sorry for Audrey, and because she’d worried that sacking her would cause problems in the village, she’d kept her on.
Maggie blinked at a bowl of chicken stew in the fridge and closed the door. She felt too depressed to be hungry now.
She retraced her steps to the gloomy entrance hall and dropped her head back to look up at the top floor. A curving staircase led up the far wall of the chateau to the first floor, before turning into a landing, which ran around that level and into another staircase leading to the second floor. Four bedrooms on the first floor; four on the second. At around 6 p.m., if you stood in this spot, you would have heard doors closing and opening, guests laughing, calling down for their lover to come in from the pool for a bath, yelling for someone to bring them a drink and Phil yelling back that she’d send someone up. The place had vibrated with life.
Not any more. As Maggie stood there, she could only hear the dusk whistle of a bird outside.
She took the stairs two at a time and tried the first door – the lavender room. Phil had named each bedroom after something that could be found growing in the hotel garden, and persuaded an artist friend to paint each plant across each door, almost as if it was growing up the wood.
Maggie glanced around the room – at the bed, the wardrobe and the leather chair in the corner, its seat worn shiny. Every piece of furniture in every room had been sourced by Phil from flea markets and house clearance sales, precisely because she’d wanted each room to look different. She didn’t want her hotel to feel like a chain with identical beds, and desks, and desk chairs. Instead, she’d bought mismatched iron bed-frames, or old four-poster beds, chests of drawers from different periods, some painted, some sanded, and great big wardrobes made from walnut, or pine, or mahogany. She’d found huge, gilt mirrors to hang in every bathroom, and rattan chairs on which to throw swimming towels or dressing gowns, which sat beside old-fashioned cast-iron baths.
The only thing Phil bought new (the only thing she could afford to buy that first year) was mattresses, because she baulked at the idea of allowing guests to sleep on anything lumpy, or on a mattress from a house clearance, which had witnessed the death of its previous owner. So guests slept comfortably on new, sumptuous bedding but old frames, and the result, they often remarked, felt like staying in a French stately home, albeit with better food.
Maggie blew across the chest of drawers, watching the dust motes dance in the evening sunshine. If a guest arrived now, they might prefer a Travelodge.
She walked around the landing, opening each bedroom door to the same stillness, and bathrooms that seemed arid and forgotten, with stiff towels on the rails and unwrapped soaps beside the basins. When had the last guest checked out? Phil had been ill for two months but the hotel felt as if it had been neglected for much longer.
Perhaps she’d find an answer on her aunt’s side of the chateau. That was how the hotel had always operated: the guests stayed in the main house while Phil (and Maggie, whenever she’d come to stay) had slept in a small, separate annexe that led off the kitchen.
Maggie half expected to see her aunt there when she pushed open her bedroom door; sitting at her dressing table, applying the thick black kohl that she wore from morning until night, lining her eyes like an Egyptian queen.
Instead, she found the room untouched, as if Phil would return any minute. The bed wasn’t stripped and her wardrobe was ajar, her red silk robe still hanging from a corner of its door. The sweet, musky smell of palo santo hung in the air. Maggie walked towards the bed feeling ten years old again at the familiar creaks of the floorboards under her feet.
On the bedside table were bottles of pills and, behind them, a photo that made her heart clench. It was an old photograph of them, taken one summer in the kitchen when Maggie was a teenager. She and Phil were standing in front of the oven, both singing into wooden spoons, taken the first summer she’d come to Le Figuier by herself. It was the summer that Phil had taught her to cook; the summer she’d first kissed someone; the first time she’d ever got drunk. Properly drunk. She’d swallowed rosé like water because she hadn’t known she was supposed to sip it and, after dinner service had finished, they’d sung karaoke in the kitchen until she’d rushed to the bathroom to throw up while Phil had rubbed her back.
She shut her eyes as she cringed at the memory. There’d been a Polish student working at the hotel that summer. She couldn’t remember her name but she’d taken the photo. Maggie rubbed her thumb across their faces; she looked so young, bright cheeks giving away that she’d drunk too much, whereas Phil was as casually glamorous as always: eyes shining at the camera, blonde hair scraped back because she’d been cooking, apron still knotted around her waist.
How long had Phil kept this photo by her bed? Was it recently, during her illness, to remind her of happier times? Maggie blinked, still unable to believe that Phil, the most lively woman she’d ever known, had gone.
She slid the photo back behind the bottles, then turned to the wardrobe, bursting with a familiar kaleidoscope of dresses – bright greens, electric blues, fuchsia pinks and sunshine yellows. Phil had always worn long dresses or skirts which swirled around her ankles, refusing to cook in chef’s whites.
She left the robe hanging on the door because it felt intrusive, somehow, to tidy it away, then moved to the dressing table. That looked the same, too: pots of face cream, eyeliners and mascara sticking out of a mug, a glass bowl of cotton wool balls, a half-burned incense stick lying on a ceramic burner, and various gold chains and beaded necklaces hanging on one side of the mirror. She recognized some of the photos stuck into her mirror, taken at various stages of Phil’s life, mostly with different men. One with Alain the chef in Paris, Maggie knew, because she’d seen other photos of him; one with the Californian pool designer, Taylor Jackson, taken as he stood on the edge of the vast dirt hole to the side of the hotel, which would later be tiled and filled with water. Another of Alic, a Dutch diplomat who’d promised he’d leave his wife for Phil and then didn’t.
Looking around the room, it dawned on Maggie that she’d have to pack it all up; pack up the dresses and the books; throw away the pots and bottles of pills; put the photographs somewhere. But where? Transport them home simply to sit in a box in their Battersea attic?
To avoid answering her own question, she opened the dressing table drawer to find old lipsticks, old coins, restaurant matchboxes and a stack of postcards held together with a rubber band, which she pulled off, allowing the postcards to spill over her lap and slide to the floor. There were dozens – some with cartoon animals on the front, some of London buses and taxis, some that she’d bought after going to a museum or gallery; of a sphinx from the British Museum and a marble sculpture from the V&A.
It was almost like coming across her teenage diary. ‘Miss you!!!’ read Maggie’s rounded, juvenile handwriting, back in the days when she was dotting each ‘i’ with a small heart. On the back of one postcard, she grumbled about her exams. On another, she asked about the donkeys and said she’d recently been to an Italian restaurant in Covent Garden where they served one long pizza on a board that ran the length of the whole table. Maggie smiled. It had been one of her schoolfriend’s birthday party. Rachel? Laura? She couldn’t remember.
Quickly, as she felt nostalgia blur her eyes again, she dropped the postcards back into the drawer. And only then, finally, did she let herself cry.