Chapter Thirty-Three
‘Everyone in Chateau Albertine had something to hide,’ Madame Fayol said, although they couldn’t have been particularly successful as she seemed to know most of their secrets. Juliette stared at the old-fashioned cassette recorder as the narrow tape whirred from one spool to the other.
‘Now where was I? Oh yes, so then as for her household: one of the housemaids was a Polish Jew who went off to Spain when the Nazis occupied the chateau, and the gardener, Georges Leclerc—’ and here Juliette’s ears pricked up ‘—turned out to be a collaborator. At first he was feeding information to the Vichy police, and then the Boche. He gave away a British pilot who was hidden in the chateau, and then he told them about the count’s wine collection, buried in the kitchen garden.
Hoping for a share of the spoils, I suppose.
’ She sniffed. ‘He was a miserable bastard, that Georges. Disappeared when the chateau was liberated and his body was found in the mountains a month later. Nobody cared to find out who shot him.’
‘How do you know so much about the goings-on at Chateau Albertine, Mamie?’ Francoise asked on the tape.
Her grandmother chuckled. ‘Well, I kept my ear to the ground, and besides, I had my own informant: a friend who worked there for a while during the war and served with the Maquis later, alongside your father. They called her Lionne and she was also known as Fleur, but I’m sure that wasn’t her real name.
Thierry told me she’d once saved his life, though I can’t remember how – you’ll have to ask him about that.
When I first met her, she was fresh out of prison and in a bad way, but there was something besides her looks that set her apart: some inner steel that made you not want to cross her.
She’d come from Paris and her husband was dead – or at least so she thought.
And by the time she’d found out differently, she’d fallen in love with a fellow from the Resistance.
What was his name? Yves something. Yes, Yves Toussaint, that was it.
Turned out he was famous, though we had no idea at the time.
He was a friend of the de Courcy family so he was often hanging about the chateau. ’
She clicked her tongue. ‘Everything was such a muddle during the war; we just had to manage from day to day the best we could. And of course, when Madame de Courcy was killed, everything turned upside down.’
It had been a tragic accident: an Allied plane dropping its bomb before crash-landing in a field several miles away. The countess had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, taking the little girl for a walk. The child died beside her, and the dog, and the pony they’d come to feed with an apple.
‘What little girl?’ Francoise prompted.
‘Why, Odile’s daughter,’ her grandmother replied. ‘Her name has slipped my mind.’
‘But I thought you said Odile and her daughter were still living in the gate lodge today?’ Francoise said. There was a brief pause in the conversation and the sound of shuffling papers. ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Then maybe it was another child,’ Madame Fayol said.
‘From the village, perhaps. It was so long ago that I’ve probably muddled everything up.
’ But her tone was evasive, and a short while later, she asked Francoise whether she were planning to make this recording public.
‘I don’t want to upset anyone,’ she said.
‘Nobody nowadays can imagine what we went through and how we felt at the time; why we acted the way we did. Some secrets should stay in the past.’
Juliette leaned forward, laying her hand on Francoise’s arm. ‘Would you mind rewinding the cassette so I can hear the last five minutes again?’
Hair was standing up on her arms because suddenly, all the pieces of the puzzle had slotted into place and she was looking at a complete picture; one she could hardly believe, but which she knew in her heart to be true.
‘At last!’ Nico greeted Juliette as she hurried through the door. ‘I was beginning to think I’d be hosting this supper on my own.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she replied, too distracted to kiss him. ‘I had no idea it was so late, and then the traffic was awful.’
‘Well, you’re here now,’ he said. ‘Where’s the ice?’
‘The ice?’ She groaned. ‘Oh God, I forgot. Sorry, I’ll go now.’ But the guests would be arriving in an hour and although she’d made the a?oli that morning, thank goodness, she still had to poach the salt cod and finish prepping the vegetables, as well as change her clothes and put on some make-up.
Nico took the car keys from her hand. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go.’ He shook his head affectionately. ‘I hope this conversation with Madame So-and-So was worth it.’
‘Oh, Nico, it really was.’ Juliette touched his hand for a moment. ‘I’ll tell you later, but I know everything now – or at least the bare bones of the story – and I can still hardly believe it.’
He paused in the doorway. ‘OK, but set that aside for the moment. There’ll be about forty people arriving soon and we need to give them a good time. I’ve loaded the fridge with champagne and rosé so at least their first drink will be chilled.’
He was right: she had to focus. Reluctantly dismissing everything she’d heard at Francoise’s house, Juliette switched into practical mode.
She dragged kitchen chairs outside for those who didn’t want to sit on the ground, put out paper plates, arranged glasses and serving dishes, stuck tea lights in jam jars and dotted them around the garden for later.
Then finally she ran upstairs to choose a dress and put on some lipstick, and had poured herself a glass of wine by the time Nico returned with the ice, followed up the path by Jean, Véronique, Sophie and Ben.
Well, this evening wasn’t meant to be perfect in every tiny detail; it was about two families getting to know each other in a happy, relaxed atmosphere.
Sophie might have been an only child but she had several cousins to whom she was obviously close, and they had come from all over France to be with her.
The garden was soon buzzing with conversation, and once everyone had arrived, Juliette had to clap her hands a few times for quiet.
Nobody would be in the mood for a long speech but she’d decided to mark the occasion with a toast, and looking at the faces turned expectantly towards her, she wanted to say something meaningful – especially in the light of what she’d learned that day.
She glanced quickly over her audience. There was Andrew, scratching his beard with the intent, distracted expression that meant his thoughts were miles away.
If she’d talked to him at a party, she’d probably have decided he was rather odd, but he was her brother and she’d come to accept his quirks – even appreciate them.
And surely that’s what being part of a family was all about: learning to get along with people you might not necessarily have sought out, whose views and interests might be completely different from yours but to whom you owed some loyalty (unless they were completely awful).
Family brought a sense of connection with people you might otherwise never have met in a hundred years, and wasn’t that what everyone was looking for?
The sense that you would always matter to someone, as they mattered to you.
You made friends with people you were drawn to but your family and its extended members were the luck of the draw.
She thought about Nico and his brother Marc, their grandmother Zizi, and spiky Delphine; the most challenging relationships might turn out to be especially rewarding in the end.
Yet she couldn’t begin to express these muddled thoughts without offending half the people waiting for her to speak.
Instead she simply said, ‘Welcome, everyone. I’ve been thinking a lot about families recently, and I’d like to share with you a saying from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, which has always stuck in my mind.
“You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them. ”’
Wonderful Desmond Tutu: she’d always loved him because he seemed so jolly and unsanctimonious.
Pausing to collect herself, she swallowed hard, then raised her glass and continued, ‘So let’s drink a toast to our darling Ben and Sophie as they set off to create a family of their own.
’ Adding hastily, ‘But not necessarily with children. A couple can be a family too.’
‘It was all going so well until then,’ Ben told her afterwards, but he was smiling, and Sophie hugged her especially tightly.
‘And now I have to think of my sister as God’s gift?’ Andrew said. ‘That’s never going to happen.’
She grabbed his sleeve. ‘Listen, bro, I have to talk to you urgently. Come and find me before you leave?’
Hours later, when most of the other guests had gone, she and Andrew sat down in a quiet corner of the garden. ‘I’ve got a story to tell which you’ll probably find hard to accept,’ she began, and pulled out her phone to show him the photograph of their grandmother, pregnant in 1942.
Andrew was quiet for some time after she’d finished talking, looking at the picture on Juliette’s phone. Eventually he handed it back to her. ‘So you think Mémé had a baby, which she gave to another woman to bring up when she went to America? But why would she abandon her daughter?’
‘Because she was active in the Resistance,’ Juliette replied.
‘What sort of life could she offer a child? And I found out that the girl’s father, Yves Toussaint, had been killed in some skirmish with the Germans in 1944.
Since Odile’s own daughter had died alongside the countess, I suppose it was a consolation for her to bring up another little girl. ’
Andrew shook his head. ‘I don’t know; you’re constructing a theory based on some random woman’s recollections from years ago. It all seems a bit sketchy to me. And you’ve met the woman you think is our aunt? Half-aunt, I guess.’