Chapter 23
MAGGIE LIFTED HER HAND to her forehead and squinted up at the chateau. It looked better. Much better. In just a few days, Gray had repainted the shutters and scrubbed away the trails of red rust that bled down the stone from their hinges. Using the same ladder, he’d hacked off the tendrils of ivy that had spread across the roof and hung over the guttering like a rockstar’s fringe. He’d cut back the grass, trimmed the lavender bushes and replaced the dead geraniums in the terracotta pots either side of the front door. Under the glare of the morning sun, with Paul and Ringo grazing on one side of the chateau and the sunbeds perfectly lined up beside the pool on the other, Le Figuier looked almost as it had twenty years ago, all thanks to an Oscar-winning handyman.
She checked her phone. 11.17 a.m. Mungo would be arriving with the Boho House entourage that afternoon: Ellen Payne, the business development manager, a surveyor whose name Maggie had already forgotten, and, most importantly of all, Bob Lacey, the Boho House owner.
They were flying to Nice on Bob’s jet and Mungo had already sent increasingly panicked WhatsApps about their arrival: could they have cold hand towels ready, a bottle of the best rosé chilling in an ice bucket, a tray of canapés prepared in case Bob was hungry, and what was she (Maggie) planning on wearing because he (Mungo) was coming in his pale-blue linen suit. I thought I’d greet you naked , she’d texted back, which had prompted Mungo to ring and check that she was joking.
At the sound of an engine, she turned to see a silver car crawling slowly up the gravel. The new guests, she guessed, a couple from Manchester who’d explained that they were coming for a weekend ‘babymoon’. Maggie hated that word. It didn’t even make sense. A honeymoon was what you went on after the event, not before.
She flinched internally whenever she heard anyone say it. To Maggie’s ears, a woman, even a friend, declaring that she was going away for a babymoon sounded smug and self-congratulatory. ‘You’re already getting a baby!’ she’d wanted to tell her friend Sara, when she’d announced that she and her husband were off to a fancy hotel on the Amalfi Coast the previous summer. ‘Do you know how lucky that is? Why do you get a holiday on top of a baby?’
She hadn’t said any such thing, obviously. She’d smiled and swallowed her jealousy and said they must try the lemon cake if they were going to Amalfi. But it still made her jaw clench. And what, she thought, as she watched the car slow to a halt, was the point in coming to France for a babymoon when you couldn’t eat cheese, salami, or any form of shellfish?
‘Hello, hello, welcome!’ she said with a wide smile, as the passenger door flung open.
A blonde woman with a stomach the size of a beer barrel tried to get out. First one leg, then the second leg, then she attempted to rock herself to her feet, cheeks pink with the effort.
‘Arabella!’ cried the man, running around from the other side. ‘Arabella, let me help.’
He offered his hand and Arabella heaved herself from the car like a buffalo emerging from the water hole.
‘You must be exhausted,’ Maggie said, walking towards them. ‘I’m Maggie, welcome to Le Figuier. Please, come in, this way, and we’ll get you a drink.’
‘We are a bit exhausted,’ agreed the man. ‘I’m Jack Wrackham, and this is my wife, Arabella.’
‘We’re on our babymoon,’ Arabella added, stroking her enormous stomach.
‘Well, thank god for that, I thought you’d just had a big breakfast.’
Arabella frowned.
‘Never mind, bad joke,’ Maggie said quickly, as she led them up the stairs to the front door. ‘Congratulations! When are you due?’
‘Next month, the eighteenth. So he’s a Gemini like me.’
‘Terrific,’ Maggie said brightly, privately thinking that made sense. If you were the sort of the woman who talked about babymoons you were presumably also the kind of woman who believed that foetuses had star signs. ‘Let’s get you checked in. Oh, Audrey, hello, this is Jack and Arabella, they’re checking in for the weekend.’
‘ Bonjour ,’ Audrey grunted from the reception desk.
‘Could you take their details and show them to their room? And can I get you a tea or coffee?’
Arabella looked as if Maggie had just suggested a nice cup of arsenic. ‘A coffee? No , thank you. Could I have a water? You do have bottled water?’
‘Yes, think so.’ Maggie tried to remember if there was any in the store cupboard.
‘Coffee for me, thanks,’ added Jack.
‘Coming right up,’ she said, before making her way to the kitchen where Jamie was working at the table.
‘Who’s that?’
She flicked the kettle on. ‘New couple. On their babymoon .’
Jamie looked up and gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘Gross. You all right? Want me to handle them?’
She shook her head as she felt a surge of gratitude towards him. ‘Nah, it’s OK. But thank you.’
‘No probs, babe. But right, listen, in happier news, I’m thinking about this party and Louis says he knows someone who can roast a pig for us.’
‘Why? I can do the cooking.’
In the past few days, Jamie had forged ahead with plans for the farewell party, and Maggie had come round to the idea because inviting the entire village for drinks and dancing in the garden felt fitting, like history repeating itself. Phil had always thrown a party for her birthday, or used it as an excuse for another party at Le Figuier, more like. She usually made a huge cake, which she served to all the guests, before turning up the speakers in the dining room and encouraging them to dance around the pool. Maggie had been there a handful of times, as a teenager and a twenty-something, and remembered them as nights that went on forever, the noise carrying on until the golden fingers of the sun came up beyond the hills.
‘I thought you might want the night off?’ Jamie checked.
‘No, I want to do it.’
‘OK, music. I’ve asked Claude to bring his band.’
‘Christ.’
‘And fairy lights is the other thing. I was thinking we could string some up around the pergola, and between the trees?’
‘Jamie …’
‘It’ll look sensational, trust me. How many parties have I organized in my life?’
The answer was hundreds. In over a decade working in restaurant PR, Jamie had organized and overseen the launch parties of hundreds of London restaurants and since Maggie had gone to many of them, she knew he was good at it. Some years earlier, at the launch of an Italian in Mayfair, he’d organized handsome waiters in very small togas to walk around the glitzy crowd feeding them grapes (soaked in vodka) by hand. At the launch of a Japanese in Soho, guests had been greeted at the door by samurai swordsmen holding trays of steaming sake. At the launch of a new gastropub called The Horse and Coaches, he had Kate Moss arrive (almost naked) on a real horse.
‘Fine, yes to fairy lights.’
‘Great. This fairy will order some now.’
‘I’m going into the village in a minute, you all right here?’
‘Beer station …’ he mumbled under his breath.
‘Jamie?’
He looked up from his screen. ‘Yes, right as rain. You go, I’ll hold the fort.’
Maggie was about to pick up her bag when Gray appeared through the back door. The sight of him standing there had become more normal over the past few days. Not totally normal. But more normal than it had been at first. And he looked better too. Several days outside had tanned Gray’s forehead and cheeks, injected some colour back into his face, made him look more like a tanned French farmhand than a gaunt, depressed actor.
‘You good?’
‘Gonna put another coat on that ceiling.’
After sprucing up the outside of the hotel, the previous day Gray had moved inside to patch up the paint in the bedrooms – covering up scuffs on bedroom walls, hiding damp stains in the bathrooms and, in the magnolia room, painting over a large orange patch on the ceiling from the leaking bath above. Maggie had checked and checked and checked again that he was happy to do this, told him that he didn’t have to, but Gray batted her away.
‘You’re helping me out,’ he’d told her in his low American accent, so she’d left him to it every time. She had to hand it to him; for a pampered Hollywood actor more used to having teams of people run around after him, he was a hard worker. But then diligence, she guessed, was what had helped him win an Oscar.
‘OK, thanks. I’m heading out to the market but I won’t be long.’
‘A market? Like a little cute, French market where they sell soaps and those garlic necklaces that old men wear?’
She laughed. ‘I don’t think anyone’s made those for fifty years but, yeah, kind of. Although it’s mostly imported stuff from China now. Tupperware, rice cookers and enormous pairs of knickers. Underpants ,’ she added in an American accent, at Gray’s frown.
‘Can I come?’
‘You?’
‘Yeah.’
‘ You want to come to Narnesse market?’
‘Now you’ve told me about the … what did you call them?’
‘Knickers?’
‘Knickers,’ Gray repeated slowly, stressing both syllables as if it was a foreign word. ‘Yeah, now that you’ve told me about them, how could I miss out? And to be honest, I wouldn’t mind a break from here, get out for a bit.’
‘OK, but … you’re just going to … walk around the market?’ Maggie didn’t know how to say it, but the idea of Gray strolling about, between stalls selling olive oil and lavender bags, was comical. The dumpy French housewives in headscarves who pulled wheely bags behind them might not recognize him, but someone would, even in his baseball hat.
He looked thoughtful. ‘Do you have any sort of disguise?’
‘I’ll have a look upstairs. Meet me down here in ten?’
‘Sure. I’ll do the ceiling when we get back. When’s the billionaire arriving?’
How is this now my life, thought Maggie; standing in the kitchen at Le Figuier, talking to Gray Hudson about a bedroom ceiling and a British business tycoon?
‘Four.’
‘Sure.’ Gray ducked back outside and Maggie turned to look at Jamie.
‘I’m saying nothing,’ he mumbled, as she slid to the table and opened the Notes app on her phone. ‘It’s just a shopping trip, just you and Gray Hudson going shopping together like a married coup—’
‘Jamie …’ Maggie warned, for the seventeenth time that morning.
‘OK,’ he said, looking up hopefully from his screen. ‘Do you think we need a DJ, too, for after Claude’s band finishes?’
‘No,’ she replied firmly, at the vague sensation that this party was getting out of control, ‘this is a wake to sprinkle my aunt’s ashes, not The Great Gatsby .’
Jamie sighed and held down the delete key on his keyboard.