Chapter Twenty #2
‘I’ll make some of these dishes and bring them for you to try,’ she told the old lady. ‘Although I’m sure my versions won’t be as good as your mother’s.’
Madame Leclerc stood on the doorstep to wave goodbye as she drove up to the chateau. Juliette wondered how she herself would manage, leading such a solitary life, and decided she would last a week at the most.
Alison greeted her at the door and took her through to the salon, where the box was waiting on a table.
Juliette had been hoping for a leather-bound travelling case or at the very least a vintage wine crate, and was disappointed to see a prosaic cardboard box with the name of a removal company on the side.
‘Now have a good look through,’ Alison told her. ‘I’ll be pottering about in the kitchen, so take as long as you like and there’ll be a glass of wine waiting when you’re done.’
In fact, Juliette needed less than half an hour to find out that the box contained nothing of any interest. The correspondence only reached as far back as the 1960s, and was mainly concerned with such scintillating matters as drain repairs and right-of-way disputes.
Chateau Albertine seemed to have had various owners over the past sixty years, none of whom had stayed very long.
‘We bought the place from a couple who were getting divorced,’ Alison told her with a nervous laugh, as they sat on the terrace drinking rosé. ‘Not a good omen. Did Madame Leclerc tell you who lived here during the war?’
‘She didn’t want to talk about those times,’ Juliette replied. ‘Oh well, never mind – it was worth a try. I’m sure this house must have been significant to my grandmother and it’s so tantalising to wonder why, but maybe I’ll never find out and that’s fine.’
‘Of course, if she’d been alive today,’ Alison said, ‘we could just follow her on social media and see everything.’
‘Or at least what she wanted to show us.’ Images from Alison’s ‘chateau journey’ came to Juliette’s mind. ‘I guess you can never really know a person, can you?’ She drained her glass. ‘I’d better be going. Thanks so much, Alison. Listen, would you and Matt like to come to supper on Saturday?’
She’d invited Jean and Véronique, too, wanting to repay their hospitality and introduce them to Nico before the wedding.
She and Alison were never going to be best friends but Alison had gone to a lot of trouble on her behalf and, in the spirit of Thérèse and Arnaud, a dinner invitation was the least she could offer in return.
Alison accepted readily. As she walked Juliette back to her car, she waved to a man sitting on a ride-on lawnmower. ‘There’s our gardener. Actually, now I come to think of it, he’s lived here all his life. Why don’t you ask him about the chateau’s history?’
‘I don’t want to stop him working,’ Juliette said, not wanting to push her luck, but Alison thought from the look of it, Paincheau had finished for the day, and she was welcome to see what he had to say – though he could be surly, and even if he knew the answers to her questions, he probably wouldn’t tell her.
In fact, Monsieur Paincheau turned out to be charming.
He was in his sixties, probably: a wiry, plain-spoken countryman with a weather-beaten face.
He was interested in her photographs and studied the former layout of the gardens for some time.
‘Too much work,’ he said, shaking his head as he handed her back the phone.
‘All those hedges to clip? They’ll be better off with a wildflower meadow. ’
He wasn’t sure who owned the chateau during the war but he could ask someone who was bound to know, he told Juliette. He would try to make contact with this person and find out.
‘I’ve been talking to Madame Leclerc in the gate lodge,’ she said, ‘but she didn’t want to remember the past.’
‘Well, she wouldn’t,’ Monsieur Paincheau said, ‘not with her history.’
When Juliette asked him to elaborate, he was more than willing to explain.
Although he hadn’t been alive at the time, everyone in the village was aware of the Leclerc family.
Madame’s father, Georges Leclerc, had been killed shortly after the liberation of France – murdered, apparently – and rumours soon began to circulate that he hadn’t fathered their daughter.
‘Whether there was any truth in them was debatable, but Madame Leclerc shut herself away with the little girl,’ Paincheau went on.
‘People said there must be no smoke without fire and of course, being illegitimate in those days was a serious matter. But nobody talks about it now and our present Madame Leclerc is well liked in the village.’ He started up the lawnmower.
‘I’m only telling you her secret, by the way, so you won’t go upsetting her by mistake. ’
‘Thank you,’ Juliette replied. ‘I’ll keep it to myself.’
‘By the way,’ he called as he was about to drive off, ‘if you’re interested in those days, you should visit the Resistance museum in Saint Antoine.’
Juliette raised her hand in acknowledgement.
She wasn’t super-keen; the word ‘museum’ conjured up rainy Sunday afternoons and school trips, and she was in the mood for long lunches and walks in the sunshine.
Yet the next day, Véronique assured her this one was well worth the price of admission, and that if she weren’t so busy in the garden, she would accompany Juliette there herself.
So that afternoon, Juliette drove through the hills to Saint Antoine, and another piece of the jigsaw fell into place.