Chapter 38
A COUPLE OF HOURS later, Maggie was packing in her aunt’s room. She had to. Couldn’t avoid it any longer. She’d been hoping to do it in peace, but Jamie was also there, discussing the party.
‘Do you think forty litres of rosé is enough?’ he asked, sitting on the floor underneath his laptop, as she pulled down an old suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and coughed at a cloud of dust.
‘ Forty litres?’
‘Plus twenty of red and five bottles of vodka.’
‘Jamie, we don’t want to kill the locals.’
‘We’re not going to kill anyone, and I thought you wanted a proper send-off.’
‘I do, but can we just not send off anyone else at the same time? Madame Desmoges is ninety.’
Jamie looked up. ‘What’s the latest on your husband? I’m guessing he’s not coming?’
‘No. He is not. Although I say that, I actually don’t know. I haven’t heard from him.’
‘Still not talking?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Still not talking. But a break is probably the only way forward.’
‘A break in communication or a break in you guys?’
‘Both? I don’t know the best way forward, but if he wants to carry on trying when I don’t, then that leaves us pretty stuck, right?’
It had been four days now. Four days since Mungo had left France. Four days of silence. But as the days ticked by, Maggie minded less and less. It was liberating to be able to think more clearly about what she wanted after being told what to do by so many people for so long. She’d have to speak to Mungo at some point but, right now, she had enough to be getting on with.
Jamie bent back over his laptop as she started sifting through the hangers in Phil’s wardrobe. Memories came back to her as if she was looking through a kaleidoscope: a flash of a red dress one evening as Phil served drinks on the terrace; a burst of pink from a kaftan she’d always worn to the beach, her long hair held back with a bandana. She folded both and dropped them into the suitcase at her feet, along with a faded blue denim shirt which Phil would sometimes knot over her dresses when the temperature dipped in the evening.
She moved to the dressing table and opened the middle drawer to retrieve her postcards, then started pulling the photos from the mirror frame. They went into the suitcase too, before her phone vibrated in her pocket.
‘Georges? Hi,’ Maggie said, lowering herself to the stool.
‘Maggie, bonjour . ?a va ?’
‘Yep, fine. Just starting to pack.’ She glanced around the room and felt momentarily overwhelmed by the amount she had to do. It wasn’t just the bottles, old lipsticks and stubby kohl pencils spread across the dressing table, but the books on the shelves above Phil’s bed, the clothes in her wardrobe, the paintings and photographs on the walls, the boxes which she could see under the bed, and the mass of precious objects spread across every flat surface.
Dotted across the shelves, in front of the books, were sea shells and old bits of stone that Phil had carried back from foreign trips; a marble Buddha – his hands pressed together – sat beatifically on the windowsill; a tiger’s tooth, given to her after a visit to a Himalayan monastery, lay beside him. Maggie used to clutch the tooth as a child, marvelling at the smooth coolness of it in her palm. At home in Fulham, they had paintings of fruit on the walls and porcelain dogs on the mantelpiece which she wasn’t allowed to touch. That this ivory-coloured fang had once been in the mouth of a tiger in India, and that she could actually hold it, was much more thrilling. But now, packing it all up, distilling her life into three piles (keep; get rid of; Audrey) seemed impossible.
‘ Bon ,’ went on Georges. ‘So I ’ave the compromis that I need you to sign.’
‘What’s that?’ She clamped the phone between her shoulder and ear and pulled out the stack of postcards from the drawer.
‘Just the contract. Once you ’ave signed, it means you are legally obliged to sell but there is a cooling period where ’e can withdraw if ’e likes. But I do not think this will be a problem. Ellen ’as sent me all the documents from London so we are in good shape, as you say. They ’ave told me so many times they want thees to be a quick sale.’
‘It’s better for everyone that way. Like ripping off a plaster.’
‘A plaster?’
‘Sorry, a Band-Aid.’
‘But ’ow is the sale like a Band-Aid?’
‘Never mind, forget the Band-Aid. I just mean if it’s quick it’ll be less painful. With any luck. I can come up this afternoon? I need to talk to Simone about clearing the rooms out, so after that?’
‘ Parfait . Can we say three, if that is agreeable?’
‘Works for me.’
‘ Bon , see you then.’
‘Babe, you seen this?’ Jamie asked, as soon as she’d hung up. He was holding up the photo of Phil and her from the bedside table, of them singing into wooden spoons in the kitchen.
‘Yeah,’ she replied, smiling sadly. ‘It was taken years ago.’
‘No, I mean the back.’
‘What?’
Jamie turned the photo over to reveal lines of handwriting, then held it out for her.
DARLING MAGS,
LOOK AT US! WHAT A TIME WE HAD. NOW LOOK, IF YOU’RE READING THIS, IT MEANS YOU’RE IN FRANCE, AND FOR THAT I’M VERY GRATEFUL. I’M SORRY FOR SO MUCH, MY DARLING, BUT MOSTLY THAT I DIDN’T TELL YOU OFTEN ENOUGH HOW VERY PROUD YOU MADE ME. I WISH I’D TOLD YOU EVERY DAY HOW IN AWE I WAS OF THAT SMALL, DETERMINED, INQUISITIVE GIRL WHO BECAME THE MOST TALENTED, BOLD AND BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, BUT I DIDN’T, SO I’M TELLING YOU NOW. I ALWAYS WANTED THE WORLD FOR YOU, WHICH IS WHY I’M GIVING YOU MINE. TAKE LE FIGUIER. IT’S YOURS TO DO WHATEVER YOU LIKE WITH. WHATEVER DECISION YOU MAKE, I’LL BE BEHIND IT, WATCHING UP ON MY CLOUD, PROBABLY WITH A GLASS IN HAND.
GO WELL, MY DARLING, AND FORGIVE ME.
PHIL
PS. DON’T TAKE ANY NONSENSE FROM AUDREY.
‘Oh my god,’ she murmured, her eyes repeatedly scanning the lines. It wasn’t dated but Phil must have written it towards the end. How could she have missed it? Maggie thought back to the evening she’d arrived, weeks earlier, when she’d seen the photo propped up between the pill bottles. She’d been so tired and felt so guilty at the sight of it among the medications that she’d quickly slipped it back into place. She hadn’t thought to turn it over.
‘You all right?’ checked Jamie.
‘Yeah, fine, it’s just …’ She looked up from the photograph and put a hand to her chest to steady herself, feeling nine years old again at the longing for her aunt to be there physically, in that bedroom. ‘Fine,’ she repeated, placing the photo carefully on the stack of postcards before smiling at him. ‘Just relieved you found it, thank you.’
‘No probs, babe. And can I have these?’
It was a pill bottle, one of the many, from Phil’s bedside table: anti-sickness pills, morphine pills, lorazepam, codeine, bottles of pills that Maggie had never heard of and couldn’t pronounce, indigestion tablets and a box of extra-strength laxatives. It made her depressed just to look at them all, imagining how medicated her aunt’s last weeks must have been.
‘What are they?’
‘Zopiclone, sleeping pills. Good ones. My drug dealer charges a fortune for them.’
‘Sure,’ she murmured, still mulling over the note on the back of the photograph, repeating fragments of it to herself. Phil had trusted her with Le Figuier, to do ‘whatever’ she liked with it, which meant she could sell it. But why did it still feel like a betrayal?
‘Nice,’ Jamie went on, pocketing the bottle, ‘and, OK, what d’you reckon about Champagne?’
She forced herself to look away from the photo and tore off a bin liner from the roll to start dealing with the yellowing bottles of scent, old eyeliner pencils and pots of cream that covered the dressing table, silently apologizing to Phil for the brutality that this job was going to require. Like she’d said, it’s yours to do whatever you like with .
‘Jamie, this is a party for a handful of middle-aged to elderly locals, not Glastonbury.’
‘Nobody drinks Champagne at Glastonbury, babe.’
‘Whatever. But thirty sounds a lo—’ She stopped at a knock on the door.
‘Maggie?’ Gray asked from outside.
‘Hi, yeah, just … packing up. I’m not naked, come in.’
He pushed open the door. ‘That’s a great pity. Oh, hey, man. Sorry to interrupt you guys, but I wanted to alert you to something.’
She frowned. ‘What is it?’
‘Probably better if you hear for yourself.’
Alarmed, she followed Gray down the back stairs and through the kitchen, then up the main staircase into his room.
He motioned with his hand before putting a finger to his lips, and she stepped towards to the window, noticing a pair of trainers at the end of his bed and a book splayed on the duvet. She wasn’t sure what she might have expected to see in Gray’s room – his Gladiator breastplate leaning on the wall? A pirate hat slung on the bed post? His Oscar beside his laptop on his desk? The normality of trainers and a paperback felt oddly endearing.
The window overlooked the pool, and the grassy bank that rolled out underneath it, offering a view to the cypress trees and the hills in the distance beyond. But directly underneath it was the terrace that spanned the length of the dining room: the terrace on which David Donovan was sitting, talking on the phone.
She turned her ear to the window to hear better.
‘Yeah, mate, that’s what I’m telling you. That’s the angle. He’s here, has been for a few weeks, as far as I can gather.’
Maggie craned her neck to try and see the terrace more clearly. He was sitting on a sunbed, laptop open in front of him, typing as he spoke.
‘Nah, no idea. But there’s this party happening on Saturday. Heard some English geezer talking about booze. So if Gray’s still here, I’ll stick around, get some photos and file to you by, what, nine? They look very cosy, he and this English bird, I’m telling you. We can give his agent the chance to deny it, of course, but somethin’s goin’ on.’
Maggie felt an intense heat radiate across her face. Did he mean Gray and her? But that was absurd; David had only arrived the previous day. How could he think anything was going on? Admittedly, the previous evening, Jamie gone down to the bar to see Louis, leaving her and Gray on the bench outside the kitchen, chatting. And also admittedly, she had wondered again if Gray could sense any sort of charge between them, in the dusk, as the swifts swooped overhead. Because they’d started talking about the move, and the party, and what would happen to the donkeys, and then moved on to their marriages, how she and Mungo had got together, and how he’d met Holly on set.
They’d talked more openly and honestly than she had with anyone, even Jamie, for as long as she could remember. And there were moments during their conversation when it had felt momentous, two people unburdening themselves and drawing closer in a way that seemed magnetic; but every time she’d imagined this, Maggie had chided herself for having such silly, teenage thoughts about a man that the rest of the world also daydreamed about. There was just something about him that she increasingly recognized, not physically but emotionally; Gray was questioning his life, and his marriage, and the choices he’d made along the way just as she was. But David couldn’t have heard any of that unless he was spying on them from somewhere in the grounds.
‘Bastard,’ she hissed, under her breath.
Gray turned from the window. ‘For implying that we’re getting it on?’
‘Yes! I mean, no! No, I don’t mean …’ Maggie’s face glowed red. ‘I mean, bastard for creeping around.’
‘Whoaaaaa! You angry?’ He paused and looked amused. ‘You usually have this …’
She raised her eyebrows.
‘This cool British aloofness about you.’
She looked back through the window. ‘Yeah well, not today. Not with this dick creeping around.’
‘These guys are so full of shit, kinda like cockroaches the way they get inside places. This one guy, a photographer in LA, claimed he was a realtor to try and get inside our home. And another one said he was from the security team, and someone else said he was a dog walker, and rang the intercom …’
Maggie frowned down at David’s head while Gray continued talking about the various ways in which journalists had tried to get into his house. And then she had an idea.
‘Hey, how’s your revenge plan coming along?’ she said quietly.
He tilted his head from side to side. ‘I haven’t come up with anything good yet, but if he’s already talking about his story, time isn’t on our side.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said, turning back to the window. ‘I know how we’re going to deal with him.’
‘How?’
‘It’s what you just said that made me think of it.’
Gray frowned. ‘Cockroaches?’
‘No!’ She laughed and then clapped a hand over her mouth, worried she’d been too loud. But beneath them, David Donovan was too consumed with his phone call to notice. ‘Come on, let’s go back to the other side.’
‘You gonna let me in on this evil plan?’
‘Yes, just not here.’ Maggie put her finger to her lips. ‘I’ll show you, but we need to go back to my aunt’s bedroom.’
‘Promises promises,’ Gray joked, which made her wonder all over again if he was flirting or she was simply imagining it.