Chapter 27
LUNCH WAS AN OMELETTE because the salads and quiche that Maggie had made and left for everyone else before the market were finished.
‘An omelette?’ Mungo grumbled. ‘I’ve come all this way for an omelette?’
‘With very good goat’s cheese, and I’m making turbot for dinner, so you’re not going to starve.’ She moved to the counter and beat several eggs.
‘You look different,’ he observed from the kitchen table.
‘Different?’
‘You look better.’
Maggie glanced over her shoulder and laughed. ‘Thanks, Mun. Are you saying I usually loo—’
‘Darling, you know that’s not what I meant. You always look ravishing. But I was so worried after the last go at things. You seemed so washed out whereas now you look more, well, more like you. Less tired.’
‘I think being out here has helped. I feel less tired.’
‘Good. But you have missed me, haven’t you?’
Maggie smiled over her shoulder again. ‘Mmmhmm,’ she replied lightly.
‘Who was that man shopping with you earlier?’
‘Oh, that’s Gray. I’ve been meaning to mention him. Gray Hudson?’ She sprinkled a handful of chives into the eggs and spun to monitor her husband’s face.
‘Gray Hudson. Do I know that na— Hang on a tick, the actor?’
‘Mmmhmm.’
‘The actor, Gray Hudson? The actor ?’
‘Yes, sshhhh. He’s upstairs.’
‘Maggie!’
She turned around again. ‘What?’
‘What on earth is Gray Hudson doing here ?’
‘He was filming nearby and there was some drama. A scuffle on set. It’s been all over the internet. So he wanted to find somewhere private, to hide out for a bit. And lots of famous people used to hang out here.’ She knew Mungo wouldn’t have read or heard about the scandal. He was extremely snotty about celebrity news and took a perverse pride in not knowing who almost anybody on television was, unless it was Sophie Raworth on the news because he fancied her, although he always denied it.
‘How long’s he been here?’
‘Er, a couple of weeks.’
‘Two weeks!’
‘Yes. Shhhh! I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to make a big deal about it. And he’s been very helpful, tidying up the garden and painting the shutters.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Mungo, shhhh . This is precisely why I didn’t say anything.’
‘Sorry, darling, it’s just quite a lot to take in. You’re saying Gray Hudson, the Gray Hudson who was in that film about cowboys …’
‘ Saloon that’s the one he got the Oscar for.’
‘Fine, the Gray Hudson who got an Oscar for his performance galloping about as a cowboy has been gardening here for the past week?’
‘Yes, and painting.’
‘Well … well … well …’
Maggie flipped the omelette. ‘Well what?’
‘Well, what’s wrong with a handyman?’
‘He offered. And the only other handyman in the area seemed to be someone I kissed when I was sixteen.’
‘A handyman! Maggie!’
She halved the omelette with her spatula and slid it onto two plates. ‘Mungo, don’t be a snob. I had a brief crush on Pierre when I was a teenager, and then I bumped into him in the hardware store in Classons, but Gray had already offered to help, so I thought why not? You said find someone to tart it up and I did. Here.’ She laid a plate in front of her husband.
‘Goodness me, what a jolly time you’ve been having.’
‘I have, actually. And we’re all having dinner tonight so will you be nice?’
‘Nice? Why wouldn’t I be nice? And who’s “all”?’
‘You, me, Gray and Jamie.’ She’d asked Gray whether he’d prefer to eat in the dining room that night as they walked back from the market, and part of her hoped that he’d say yes because she worried that Mungo would say something disparaging about actors if they ate together. And she didn’t want to be embarrassed by her husband in front of Gray in case it lessened his view of her by association. But Gray had said no, he’d enjoy the company, and she’d walked on with a sense of foreboding.
‘Quite the gathering.’
‘Mun …’ Maggie gave him a look.
‘Darling, I’ll be nice. I don’t imagine we’ll be discussing astrophysics with a Hollywood actor but I’ll be nice. Can you pass the salt?’
Maggie reached for the ramekin.
‘Anyway, here’s hoping our superstitious hotelier coughs up the moolah and everything can go back to normal,’ Mungo went on, grinding the crystals between his fingers. ‘I told them the asking price on the way out, but mentioned we were open to negotiating. Ironically, it’s often dicey work with the very richest clients because they’re worth grillions and yet if you go in too hard they work out you’re taking advantage of them and get awfully upset. Maggie, darling, are you listening?’
‘Mmm, no, I mean yes, sorry.’ She was listening, sort of, but she was also mulling over the idea of selling to Bob Lacey. Phil had left the place to her, which meant it was Maggie’s to do what she wanted with it. Would her aunt have handed it over to a hotelier who talked of spas and televisions in the bathrooms? Almost certainly not. But then Phil had also racked up all that debt.
They were interrupted by Audrey, shuffling into the kitchen with a basket of laundry.
‘Thank you, and when you’ve finished those rooms, could you make up the lilac bedroom for Mungo and me?’ Maggie asked her. She didn’t really want to move bedrooms. She’d never slept on the other side of the chateau, but she and Mungo could hardly sleep together in the little single bed in the annexe.
‘ Oui , and the lady outside, the fat one …’
‘The pregnant one?’
‘ Oui , she is asking for some mint tea.’
Maggie looked at her half-eaten omelette. ‘I’ll make some if you can take it out, then carry on with the rooms.’
Audrey shuffled out again and she stood to turn the kettle on.
As if in protest, Mungo laid down his knife and fork. ‘Darling, we are going to have some time to ourselves this weekend, aren’t we? You’re not going to work all the time?’
‘Mun, we have guests. And Jamie.’
‘Who’s supposed to be helping.’
‘He is helping. Sort of.’
‘But what about me?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘What am I going to do when you’re cooking and making guests tea?’
‘It’s May in Provence! Lie on a sunbed, go for a swim, play tennis. I can’t just ignore the guests.’
‘Your poor old husband, always coming last.’
‘That’s not true.’ Maggie couldn’t bear his poor me act. She blamed his mother for spoiling him – an adored only child, the perfect son, whose mother still had keys to his house, their house, so she could come in and put food in the fridge.
Helen, Mungo’s mother, apparently viewed Maggie’s job as a challenge. Barely a week went by when she didn’t ‘pop in’ with a cottage pie or a shepherd’s pie, or a chicken pie or a fish pie. ‘He loves my pies,’ she’d say accusingly, every time, as if Maggie wasn’t capable of making a pie. Sometimes Maggie fantasized about Helen being in an accident. Not a fatal accident, just a fall that rendered her incapable of coming to their house for a while. A broken leg or ankle would do it. Worst-case scenario, a hip.
‘No, no, don’t you worry about me,’ Mungo continued, in a martyred tone. ‘I’ll amuse myself. Maybe I will play tennis. Have a knockabout with Jamie.’
She shouted through to the hallway. ‘Audrey! Tea’s ready!’
‘But first I might just email Ellen,’ Mungo said, pushing his plate back. ‘There’s a bar area in the dining room, isn’t there? Does it get Wi-Fi?’
‘Yes, go for it,’ Maggie said, with a wave of relief. She used to find his eccentricities funny. Mungo dressed and talked like an Englishman from the Twenties, and was wildly enthusiastic about some things (food, French wine, golf), while being wildly unenthusiastic and amusingly scornful about others (beards, sports cars, people who wore white socks and, inexplicably, Wales and anyone from Wales). But more recently, and especially while she’d been wading through each day in the aftermath of each miscarriage and failed IVF attempt, she’d found his theatrical manner slightly wearing. Mungo liked an audience, and sometimes she simply didn’t have the energy.
Maybe it was just that the physical distance in the past few weeks had created an emotional distance, she told herself as she cleared the lunch plates. Maybe she was being too protective of this place, and not grateful enough to Mungo for his efforts to help sell it. Maybe they just needed to have the evening together and relax back into one another’s company?
That afternoon, she cooked while he worked, and the Wrackhams and Jamie lay on sunbeds at one end of the pool, with Gray hunched under a baseball hat, tapping at his phone at the other end. And as Maggie rolled the pastry and stoned the olives, she felt her shoulders drop. On a daily basis, chefs risked burns, blisters, callouses, cuts, back pain, sore feet. On a really bad day, you might get the whole lot. But in the past couple of weeks, cooking again properly for the first time in three years, she felt the opposite. She felt stronger.
She forced herself to think back to Mungo’s question: had she missed him? She found it almost impossible to decipher whether she’d missed him from the certainty that she hadn’t missed London, waking up every morning and feeling a vague lack, as if she was a puzzle with several pieces missing. In the past few months, on bad days at home, it had occurred to her that nobody would notice if she stayed in bed until the evening, entirely still, staring at the ceiling as the hours ticked by and others went about their daily business.
She’d put her sense of helpless inertia down to the lack of a baby, but now she wasn’t sure because, since arriving in France, it had gone. She still didn’t have a baby, but she didn’t feel the same lacking out here. Quite the opposite, in fact; she wanted to get out of bed and hurry into the day.
Maggie tipped the olives into a bowl and started scraping potatoes. Perhaps, if they sold this place, she could use some of the money and open somewhere in London. Somewhere small. But somewhere. A project. Her own space. The idea felt like a balloon inflating behind her ribcage: her own restaurant again so she wasn’t simply sitting at home all day, creating elaborate three-course menus for dinner to pass the time.
Her hands paused in front of her. How would she launch a restaurant if they were going to begin another round of IVF? How would she manage even a small place if she was pregnant? When she was pregnant . It had been the constant mantra of the past three years. But the idea of starting another round of IVF, a fourth go, filled her with a panic that seemed to make her chest smaller again, and her breath tight.
She moved to the sink and ran herself a glass of water, then continued with the potatoes. She’d broach the conversation with Mungo tomorrow because she wanted dinner to pass without trouble.