Epilogue
She is tired and sick, in an undramatic sort of way: a gentle winding down.
Not the sort of ending she’d imagined during the war, when all around her people had been dying in the most gruesome ways.
She’s retreating inside herself, preferring to be alone with her memories rather than talk about the present: what she wants to eat, whether she’s comfortable, would she like the window open or shut. None of that really matters.
She thinks about her daughters; both of them, Esmé and Suzanne.
Was she right to have sought Esmé out again?
She certainly terrified Odile – that was for sure – but what did the woman think she was going to do?
Kidnap her daughter and whisk her back to America?
She’d had some vague idea of introducing Suzanne to her older sister, yet as soon as she saw the two women together, she realised there would be no point.
They were no more than polite strangers, and what a can of worms she’d open up by telling them the truth.
It wouldn’t be fair to Odile, and Suzanne wouldn’t understand why her mother had acted as she had; she can be surprisingly prim for a child of the Sixties.
So she’d just spun Esmé a story, given her Yves’ Cross of Lorraine and left her to work it out for herself, if she cared to.
The main reason for going back to Chateau Albertine was to find out whether her daughter was happy, and she certainly seemed to be.
Some people (including herself) would have found it a dull life, but Esmé was comfortable and she clearly loved her mother – the mother who’d brought her up, that was.
Odile had always had the knack of settling Esmé when she was a baby and she had it still.
What kind of life would the girl have had if Mathilde had dragged her about from place to place?
No, she made the right decision and refuses to feel guilty.
She remembers her girlhood in Paris, walking to school with her best friend and discovering a passion for reading and learning.
The deaths of her father and soon afterwards her mother, and the sense of desolation she felt before meeting Jacques.
Ah, Jacques! When she was a teenager and just coming into the first flush of her beauty, though she didn’t know it then, an older woman told her that if she was lucky, there would be three significant men in her life.
Such a specific number! She hadn’t taken those words seriously, yet as it turned out, this woman had been quite right.
Jacques had been her first love, so clever and kind.
She could picture him absorbed in a book, see his long fingers holding a pen or the light in his eyes as he told her a story.
Then there was Yves, whose face she could hardly remember.
Although she hadn’t known him properly, she’d loved him with a passion and he’d given her a daughter she’d adored too, while she had the chance.
Yet she couldn’t imagine them making a life together.
The countess had been right: he wasn’t the marrying kind.
And lastly, dear Jim, who had rescued her when she was at her lowest ebb and asked so little in return.
He’d given her the chance to start again, and they’d had another precious child together.
Suzanne was the light of her life, and now she had Andrew and dear little Juliette to watch growing up in the freedom they took for granted.
She and Jim had done the best they could but they’d both been damaged.
When she’d first met him in Paris, he’d come from liberating the concentration camps in Germany, and the things he’d seen there had scarred him for ever.
Their marriage had been as happy as it could have been, but they were prone to dark moods they couldn’t shake off; the black dog haunted them both, and there were times they felt very far apart.
She sighs, closing her eyes. Three extraordinary men, and she has indeed been lucky. Yet these days, it’s always Jacques she sees in her dreams, his arms outstretched and his face glowing.
‘I’ve been waiting such a long time for you to come,’ he says, and she replies with a smile, ‘Well, I’m here now.’
He takes her by the hand, and all the suffering they’ve endured, the pain and grief, melts away, and it’s just the two of them, young again and full of hope as they walk towards the sunrise.