Chapter 20
‘ YOU BEEN TO FRANCE before?’ Maggie asked, making polite conversation as she pulled right out of the drive. Gray was beside her in the passenger seat, in sunglasses and a baseball hat pulled low over his face.
‘Cannes a few times, Paris a few times. And we shot th— Oh, at last. D’you mind if I get this?’ He held up his phone.
‘No, ’course not.’
Gray lifted the phone to his ear. ‘Rich, hey, I’ve been trying to rea— What? What d’you mean?’
Maggie drove on, pulling the car in and out of the road’s bends as Gray grew increasingly incredulous.
‘What? Why has she spoken to them? I mean I know why, but can we stop it?’
She glanced at the fields and the pointed tops of the cypress trees between them. Just a normal day. Just a normal day in France with the most talked-about man on the internet beside her.
‘Can we minimize it? Jesus .’ Gray’s hand clenched into a fist in his lap. ‘This is all we need … No, yeah, I’m in a car. Doesn’t matter, I’m doing what you said. Yeah … no. OK. Let me know when you’ve spoken to Antonio. OK, yeah, sure.’
He hung up and stared through his window.
‘You … OK?’ ventured Maggie.
Gray drummed his fingers irritably on the car door. ‘My housekeeper’s talked to a newspaper.’
‘Oh.’
‘That was my agent. He’s trying to stop it but the piece is out tomorrow so …’
‘Do you know what it’s going to say?’
‘Drinking … arguing … this time that I lay down in front of my wife’s car.’
‘What?’ Maggie stared at him before quickly looking back to the road.
‘It was a stupid row and she tried to leave so I lay down in the driveway.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, trying to stifle a laugh, ‘it’s not funny, I know. But that is quite stupid.’
‘No, no, it’s OK. It’s …’ Gray echoed her laugh. ‘It was pretty dumb.’
‘Did she stop driving?’
‘No! She just sorta drove round me, scraping the car against the garage wall, and then I just lay there for, like, fifteen minutes, staring at the sky, wondering how the hell my life had come to this.’
‘Lying on the ground, having narrowly avoided a hit and run by your own wife?’
He laughed again. ‘Don’t sugar-coat it.’
‘Sorry.’ She glanced across to the passenger seat. ‘Too much?’
‘No, not too much. You’ve got that brutal British sense of humour. I like it, actually. But I guess, yeah, what the heck was I doing there lying on the ground like a fucking racoon?’
‘At least she missed you.’
‘True,’ Gray said, before sighing. ‘Sorry, I don’t wanna moan at you about my problems.’
‘No, that’s OK. It’s actually a nice distraction.’
He frowned. ‘From what?’
‘Oh,’ Maggie said, catching herself, remembering that Gray was a stranger. ‘Just life.’
They fell silent as the car approached Classons: another medieval town on the top of a hill, just like Narnesse, with narrow limestone houses and its own clock tower, only slightly bigger.
‘Tell you what you need,’ she offered, in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere. ‘A trip to France’s finest hardware shop.’
Gray frowned through the windscreen. ‘This is it?’
It looked very old-fashioned: a wood-panelled shop front, with a pile of wicker baskets either side of the door, and swirling letters in blue over it that spelled Quincaillerie.
‘Guess so,’ she replied, undoing her seatbelt.
Inside, the store felt like something from the Fifties: gloomy, with a creaking wooden floor, and high shelves that stretched right from the front to the back, weighed down with paint pots, tools, tool boxes, bird feeders, enamel cooking pots, clocks and a bewildering array of nails and screws.
‘You’ll have to translate for me …’ he started, squinting down one aisle. ‘I need a belt for the mower, oil for the shutters, and the paint.’
Maggie turned to the desk where a man in blue overalls stood behind the till.
‘ Bonjour ,’ she began, in her best accent, determined not to embarrass herself. Her French had once been conversational, enough to deal with French guests at the hotel, but now her brain felt stuck as it groped for the right words. ‘ J’ai besoin de … er … je ne sais pas le mot en Fran?ais mais … er … j’ai besoin de … er … ’ She paused and mimicked mowing the lawn, her hands clenched in front of her, making a growling noise.
The man in the overalls looked confused and frowned between Gray and Maggie, and then at her stomach. ‘ Un landau ?’
‘ Quoi ?’ asked Maggie.
‘ Un landau ,’ he went on, before demonstrating, holding his hands out as if pushing a pram. ‘ Pour un bébé? ’
‘ Non! Non , non , definitely nothing for a baby,’ she said, trying not to look at Gray in case she blushed.
The salesman leant over the counter and frowned harder at her face. ‘Maggie?’
‘Yesssss?’ she replied slowly.
He beamed, flashing his teeth underneath a moustache as thick as a dustpan brush. ‘Maggie! Eet ees me, Pierre!’
‘Pierre …’ Maggie murmured, trying to remember where she’d met this middle-aged stranger. Pierre? Oh my god. Pierre . Pierre Moulin. The same Pierre Moulin she’d kissed all those summers ago, who’d worked at the hotel. But … how? The teenage Pierre was a gorgeous, bronzed creature, so handsome that he could have done anything: become a model, joined a boy band, modelled Calvin Klein underpants. That couldn’t be this Pierre? This Pierre had a belly like a beachball, and more hair on his face than his head.
‘Pierre?’ she asked, trying not to sound shocked. Presumably she looked different too. The previous month, she’d spotted a grey hair above her right ear and wondered whether she should start looking at home dye kits in Boots.
‘You guys know each other?’ asked Gray.
‘Yes!’ said Pierre.
‘No!’ said Maggie. ‘Not really. We haven’t seen one another for years.’
‘You look exactement the same,’ Pierre replied.
She laughed nervously. Was he flirting? ‘I’m sure that isn’t true, Pierre, but thank you. You look, um, terrific.’
‘I am too much sorry about your aunt. I ’ear the news.’
‘Thank you. It’s, er, quite strange being back here when everything’s, um, so changed.’
‘ Oui , not exactly the same as when we were here that summer.’
He was flirting. Maggie’s eyes darted to Pierre’s hand and she saw with relief that he was wearing a wedding ring. ‘No, not exactly the same. But OK, so we need a part for the mower. You know, like the lawn mower?’
‘A drive belt,’ Gray added.
Pierre’s smile faded as he turned from Maggie to Gray, still wearing his cap and glasses. ‘You are ’usband?’
Maggie felt her cheeks start to flush again. ‘No! No, he’s my, er, friend. Staying at the hotel.’
Pierre’s smile returned. ‘You are keeping the ’otel?’
‘I don’t think so. Sadly.’
He laid a forearm on the counter, leaning closer to Maggie, as if he was about to whisper something. ‘That is too much sad. It would be nice to ’ave you ’ere again, like the old days.’
‘And then we need some oil for the shutters, and paint,’ she said firmly.
Pierre waggled his eyebrows at her suggestively before standing up. ‘ Bon , OK, the paint and the oil, eet ees down that one. And the belt I will ’ave to order. What is the machine? You know the make?’ He looked expectantly at Gray.
Pierre . Maggie pressed her fingers to her temples as she walked in the direction he’d pointed. It was as if time was playing a trick on her, as if the past eighteen years had taken place in a matter of seconds. Surely it was only yesterday that she was working in the kitchen, waiting for Pierre to come in ask for a glass of water so she could smile at him? In which case, why was there a middle-aged man standing behind the till? Suddenly, as she scanned a row of paint cans, she missed her aunt so much that she felt winded. She wanted to tell her. She wanted to laugh with her.
‘I think he said if he orders it today, it’ll be in tomorrow,’ Gray explained, when she returned to the counter with two cans of oil.
‘OK, great.’
‘I will bring it to the ’otel,’ Pierre added.
‘Oh, no, you don’t have to. That’s OK, I ca—’
‘I am sure. You do not worry, Maggie. It would be my honour to bring eet to you and see the ’otel again. Old memories, non ?’ Pierre flashed his teeth before another glare at Gray.
‘OK, thank you.’ She dropped the cans on the till, returned to the aisle for the blue paint before they carried the various tins back to the car.
‘Ex boyfriend?’ Gray asked, grinning as he closed the boot for her.
‘No!’ Maggie replied primly.
‘C’mon. You could have cut that sexual tension with a hand saw. That guy was into you.’
‘He wasn’t into me. And I’m married.’
‘So? Are you telling me you can’t flirt if you’re married?’
‘No!’ she replied defensively, but she felt her cheeks flush again as she climbed back into the car.
‘Sorry, sorry, my mistake, I forgot,’ Gray said.
Maggie turned to frown at him, trying to think what they’d missed off the shopping list.
‘You’re British, which means no flirting.’
‘What? No, it doesn’t.’
‘It does. You guys are funny, good with the jokes, but less good at flirting. You’re all “Oh, I think it might rain today” instead of “Hey, how’s it going?”’
She laughed and turned the engine on. He was half right, at least when it came to her. She’d never been very confident at flirting. Had she missed the flirting lesson at school? Other women seemed to be able to do it as naturally as breathing, but until she met Mungo she’d always felt like an awkward teenager with men. Not that she’d even flirted with Mungo, really. He’d just arrived in her life one day, and almost the next they were together. And they certainly didn’t flirt now. There wasn’t much space for flirting when your husband was injecting you with hormones every night.
‘So c’mon, Maggie,’ Gray continued, ‘tell me, what’s the story with Hercule Poirot back there?’
She looked across at him and smiled. ‘Long story.’
‘Great, I love a long story.’
‘OK, fine,’ she retorted, ‘I’ll tell you but it was a long time ago.’ The vision of middle-aged Pierre popped into her head again. ‘A very long time, so no judgement, please.’
‘No judgement. I’m the guy who lay down in his driveway, remember?’
She spent the rest of the journey telling Gray about that summer at Le Figuier when she was sixteen, which had several benefits: he forgot that an intrusive piece about his private life was about to break in the New York Times , and she forgot to be weighed down by gloom about selling the hotel. They laughed the whole way back.