Chapter 10
MAGGIE EMERGED FROM GEORGES ’ S office and remembered it was Friday: market day. In the square, competing stallholders were shouting at locals like town criers, offering glistening piles of vegetables, bottles of olive oil, large hunks of cheese and jars of lavender-infused honey. Shoppers in headscarves pulled their wheely trolleys over the cobbles while sparrows overhead watched all this activity from their nests in the church tower.
She glanced longingly at the boulangerie before heading towards the village fountain to sit on its wall. First job: call Mungo. Second job: buy a restorative croissant, and possibly a pain au raisin, depending on how the conversation went.
She pressed the green button and lifted her phone to her ear, eyes closed in anticipation.
‘Mungo?’ she asked, at a muffled noise from the other end.
‘Hiya, darling, it’s not a great moment. Can I call you back in a bit?’
‘You in the office?’
‘No, in the car, en route to see a house in Drayton Gardens but the traff—Oh, for goodness’ sake!’
‘What?’
‘Not you. This pillock in front of me. Sorry, darling. You all right? What’s up?’
Maggie stared at the coins underwater, glinting in the morning sun from the bottom of the fountain. ‘What it is … is, well, I’ve told Georges to put the hotel on the market.’
‘Terrific.’
‘But I want to stay he—’
‘And I think I might have found a photographer for the place.’
‘A photographer? What for?’
‘For the sale! We don’t want a local screwing it up, do we? I got in touch with a chap who shoots the houses down there for Country Life . And superyachts, come to that. Great man, Julian, and he says he’d be delighted to shoot it for us. He’ll cost a bit, but it’s always worth spending money on the photos. The better the pictures, the more interest it’ll get, and the more interest it gets, the higher the price.’
Maggie thought of the overgrown grass, the clumps of unkempt lavender, the wild flower beds, the windows and roof, tangled with ivy, and the shutters hanging off their hinges. ‘I’m not sure it’s ready to be photographed yet, Mun.’
‘You can find someone to spruce it up, can’t you? What’s that nutty manager called?’
‘Audrey, but she’ll almost certainly grumble about her back if I ask her to do any pruning.’
‘A handyman? A pliant local? Surely my beautiful wife can bat her eyelashes at someone who’ll lend a hand?’
‘I’ll try,’ she said, smiling down the phone. ‘What’s the photographer called again?’
‘Julian.’
‘OK. Talk to Julian about pictures, but give me a few days to try and find someone to help. And also, Mun, the thing is … I really want to stay here until it’s sold. Or at least, until it’s under offer.’
The line went silent for a few seconds. ‘But Maggie, darling, that could take months .’
She dipped her index finger into the water then drew a dark line along the wall. ‘Probably not months. Georges said we’ll have a better idea in a couple of weeks.’
‘It depends on the market. But why stay out there? Why not come home to your adoring husband?’
‘I feel like I have to stay here, like I owe it to Phil.’
‘Darling, we’ve been over this. You don’t owe her anything, and what about the appointment?’
‘What appointment?’
‘With Dr Goodall.’
Maggie thought back to her diary. July. Almost six weeks away. ‘I’ll be home by then, don’t worry. I just want to be here for a bit longer. Or at least, to pack it up. I think that’s what she would have wanted. What she did want, why she left it to me.’
‘This is mad, darling. She’s gone. What matters is what we want, now.’
‘I know, but I want to stay! This week, I’ve cooked for the first time in ages, properly cooked for the guests who are staying, and I felt, just, well, good again. Normal . And I haven’t felt that for so long. Not since the last misca—’
‘Yes, yes, OK. But do you think you can manage it?’
‘Mungo! Two minutes ago you were demanding I find a handyman.’
‘That’s different. That’s outsourcing. This is you doing all the work and I’m concerned that it might be a bit much. Is the stress a good idea if we’re going to carry on with the doc—’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Maggie said quickly, because if she heard the word ‘doctor’ again she thought she might throw her phone into the fountain. ‘It doesn’t feel like work out here.’
Mungo grunted. ‘And what am I going to do?’
‘You can come and visit?’
‘Wasn’t much of a success the last time I came out.’
‘This would be different. A weekend, come on, Mun, you can take a weekend off. I think we both need it, time together, a break in the sunshine.’
Another grunt.
‘Listen, I’ll only be out here a few weeks. A few weeks so that I feel like I’ve handled this properly, and then I come home, and we see Dr Goodall, and I’ll have the strength for another round. I just need to recharge first.’
What she wanted to add was that her body felt spent. For the past few years, since giving up the restaurant, it was as if its only purpose had been to get pregnant and stay pregnant. Various parts of it had been inspected and injected and subjected to internal scans, and external scans, and prodded and poked by a succession of nurses and doctors. She’d watched them frowning between her legs as if they were looking at a broken piece of pottery, and now, all she wanted was a few weeks of not worrying that she was broken. For the past few mornings, her first thought on waking up had been about the Bancrofts’ breakfast, not her uterus, and she’d almost wanted to cry at the relief she felt while preparing croissants and coffee for them, instead of a bewildering array of vitamins and juice for herself.
But she didn’t say any of that, because she knew Mungo would get defensive. ‘It’s really not forever,’ she told him instead.
‘Well, all right,’ he replied, grudgingly. ‘I just miss you, that’s all.’
‘I miss you back,’ she said, smiling down the phone again in relief, before Mungo announced he was pulling into Drayton Gardens and had to go. He was still miffed when they hung up, she knew, because after seven years of marriage she could interpret every inflection in his voice. But he’d be fine by the evening because, like many English men who’d been to boarding school and subjected to physical rituals like morning runs and rugby to dispel any feelings that were considered ‘difficult’, Mungo was good at pulling himself out of a funk. He’d go for a walk over lunch, or cycle on the Peloton at home later.
She stared at her phone screen for a few moments before looking back up at the boulangerie . Definitely a pain au raisin as well as a croissant.
But first, before that, one more person to message. Jamie. Her best pal, recently heartbroken, which meant he might want a break from London. Not that Jamie being heartbroken was unusual. He had a new lover every moon cycle. What was the latest one called? Ben? Bim? Maggie couldn’t remember. But still, although she’d run the hotel almost by herself before, she wouldn’t mind some help, and Jamie could cook. Sort of.
They’d become friends fifteen years earlier, when they were both junior chefs in the kitchen of an extremely unhygienic Thai restaurant in Soho. After working there for several months, they’d both left at the same time: Maggie to work as a commis at a hot new restaurant in Hoxton and Jamie to launch a food blog at a time when blogs were fashionable, because he’d realized he preferred writing about food to cooking it. The blog had since morphed into one of London’s most successful restaurant PR agencies and, if Jamie didn’t win the business of a new restaurant, he wrote a snarky review about it, which usually went viral.
He was brutal, beautiful (shaved head, sky-blue eyes, always impeccably dressed), and, as his Twitter bio proudly proclaimed, ‘the gayest man in London’. Crucially, he was also one of Maggie’s few friends without children, so she could hang with him without being reminded of what she didn’t have. Conversations with Jamie weren’t interrupted by a baby’s squawk for milk, or a toddler announcing that he needed the loo. Ironically, Maggie thought often, these days she had more in common with a gay man than she had with her two closest female friends, Rachel and Laura, who seemed to speak in their own exclusive code about ‘woof woofs’ and ‘num nums’.
She tapped at her phone:
Fancy a French holiday?
I say a holiday but you might have to be my sous-chef …
And make the odd bed …
And do the odd bit of washing-up …
And maybe paint a couple of walls …
But apart from that, it’ll be a holiday. And it’s BEAUTIFUL out here atm …
Also there’s a cute gardener …
Click. Send. Maggie stood and fished a coin from her purse before dropping it into the water, making a wish, and walking towards the boulangerie .