Chapter 4
Juliet splashed cool water on her face and surveyed herself in the tarnished mirror. Not too bad. She had always considered herself lucky not to be an ugly crier; it was when her pale skin really came into its own, instantly sucking any redness away and leaving her as porcelain-complexioned as ever. She was patting her face with a towel when she heard knocking at the bedroom door and her sisters’ overly cheery voices. Was Frankie singing?
‘Juli-eeeettt! Darling Juli-eeettt!’
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are.’
They rattled the doorknob as they slowly pushed their way in; bless them, they knew to give her plenty of warning so she could compose herself or hide, whichever was most necessary. In the end, she did neither, instead coming out of the bathroom and sinking onto her bed. She felt wiped out. Frankie restlessly paced by the window as Martha sat down next to her.
‘Poor Juliet, are you all right? Oh no, silly question, of course you’re not all right. I’m sorry that all this is affecting you so much.’
‘Did you know about it?’
‘No, not before that meeting. Dad and Will have been whispering in corners a lot though, so, as I said, I did wonder if something might be up.’
‘Which, of course, it was,’ broke in Frankie. ‘They’ll have to finally put the village tenants’ rent up. Dad’s so soft-hearted he hasn’t increased it for years. Come on, let’s go down to the pub, we could all do with something to eat and the hair of the dog. Or are you dying to get back to London?’
Juliet had thought she was, but now that London was being snatched away from her, she wasn’t so sure. That sense of belonging that she had worked so hard to establish had been pulled from under her feet, and the thought of the capital wasn’t the welcome escape it had been an hour ago; it seemed more like shifting sands, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to step onto them.
‘I’ll stay one more night – I don’t feel up to it right now. I suppose a drink would do us good.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
Frankie grabbed one of her sisters’ hands in each of hers and pulled them to standing.
‘At least we can avoid Wet Will and Léo…although I must say that accent is sexy, even if it is clichéd.’
Martha poked her.
‘You can hardly accuse him of having a clichéd accent, he can’t help it, he is actually French. I think he’s nice.’
‘I suppose so, but what’s he doing here, running a cookery school with Aunt Sylvia in the middle of nowhere? I thought he was a big shot chef.’
Juliet grabbed a black blazer from the back of a chair.
‘Come on, we can Google him at the pub. Let’s get away from Feywood, at least for a while.’
The sisters trooped downstairs and scuttled out of the big front door. Juliet was glad not to see anybody else; she didn’t feel like being questioned again about what had happened, however gently or sympathetically. And then there was Léo, who had been shooting her daggers and obviously thought she was a precious princess living off Daddy’s money. At least a trip to the village pub would stop her having to think about all that for a while.
As the three girls walked down the drive, some figures appeared, walking towards them. Juliet waved.
‘Agnes! Thank you so much for coming on a Sunday. I’m afraid it’s hellish up there.’
The tiny, aged lady, who was carrying what must have been her own bodyweight in buckets, mops, brushes and colourful spray bottles, just laughed.
‘Don’t you worry about that, Juliet – keeps us busy, doesn’t it, girls?’
The ‘girls’, not one of them under seventy-five, nodded vigorously.
‘Means fewer trips to the gym, keeps us fit.’
They waved their laden arms as they carried on up to the house to blitz the appalling mess left from the party.
‘It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they did go to the gym,’ said Frankie, tottering across the cattle grid that spanned the end of the drive, the gate wide open, as usual. ‘They probably intimidate all the muscle men. I wouldn’t want to take any of them on in a fight.’
When Juliet had stepped off the last section of the cattle grid, she paused to look back up at the house. There was no doubt that it was a beautiful building, built of grey stone in a ‘L’ shape with gabled roofs and a magnificent arched porch above the huge front door. But the spring sunlight was bright and unforgiving, and she couldn’t deny that Feywood was looking tatty, especially when thrown into relief by the bubbling fecundity of nature all around: hawthorn bushes foaming with blossom, trees heavy under the weight of their burgeoning buds, the grass green and lush. The roof was indeed patchy and sagging, but it wasn’t just that: the stone-mullioned windows had moss growing lavishly on them and ivy was making a determined assault on all the gutters. The sweeping gravel drive was thin and muddy, and all the brickwork needed smartening up.
Frankie wandered on ahead, talking into her mobile phone, but Martha paused next to her and looked at the house.
‘The old lady’s showing her age, isn’t she?’
Juliet nodded and carried on walking along the lane, Martha maintaining an understanding silence by her side. Feywood really looked as if it was in trouble, and it saddened her. Apart from the difficulties with her mother, which had only escalated when Juliet had been a teenager, she had had a wonderfully happy upbringing in the beautiful old house and knew how lucky they all were to live there. With both her parents engrossed in their art, she and her sisters had roamed the estate freely when not at school, or working on their own art projects, and she knew every inch of it: the damp cellars where mice scuttled from your torch beam, the spot on the landing which creaked shrilly and alerted the household to your illicit nocturnal ramblings, the magical woods where, as children, they had seen fairies and elves, they were sure they had.
‘I just can’t believe that Mum left us in this mess – or maybe I can.’
Martha now linked her arm through Juliet’s.
‘Juliet, she did have cancer?—’
‘It’s the fact she hid it all from us, though. And now I look like I’m fiddling while Rome burns, gallivanting around London while the rest of you put buckets under the leaks and pray for a miracle. If I’d known, of course I would have done something. It’s just classic Mum, you always end up feeling so outmanoeuvred, so…impotent.’
Frankie had finished her phone call and turned around, grinning.
‘Who’s impotent? One of your city lads? Maybe you need a nice strapping country boy to show you a haystack or two.’
Juliet was not in the mood for Frankie’s teasing.
‘Ha ha. Come on, at least we’re here now. Let’s go and get a bloody big drink.’
She pushed open the door of the pub and entered its cool, dim interior. It was the pub they had frequented since being teenagers and the beams were soaked with plenty of Carlisle sisters’ history and high jinks. They were always given a warm welcome, and today was no different as the proprietor, Renee, spotted them.
‘Hello, girls, how fabulous to see all three of you in one go. And I think it’s birthday greetings to you, Juliet?’
She nodded reluctantly.
‘I’ll never forget your eighteenth, I never did get the stain out of the wall – had to move that monk’s bench in front of it in the end. Well, what can I get you? Surely not any more snakebite and black?’
‘God no, never again. I think we’ll just share a bottle of that New Zealand Sauvignon, please.’
‘And some chips?’ asked Frankie hopefully.
‘You’re in luck, the kitchen’s open. Go and sit down, and I’ll bring it over. Inside or out?’
‘Oh, inside, please.’ Juliet didn’t want to see anybody she didn’t have to, and people were always wandering past the perfectly situated pub.
The sisters made for their favourite table, tucked away in an alcove by the stairs. Renee brought over the bottle and glasses, and Juliet started sloshing out the wine.
‘You see, that’s the sort of thing I dread, people knowing everything about me, and never letting me forget. I’ll be forced to relive that eighteenth birthday party at least once a week if I move back.’
‘She was only being friendly, just teasing, she didn’t mean any harm by it.’
‘Martha, I know that, but I wish you could understand how I feel. It’s so – cloying.’
‘That’s it, though, I don’t understand. I find the familiarity comforting, not suffocating. I like feeling known.’
‘But I don’t feel known. It’s like they know one version of me, one that was always overshadowed by Mum anyway, and coming back here…It would be like I was sentenced to being that person again as if all the work I’ve done since I’ve moved away will have been for nothing, just ignored, and I’ll be the difficult middle sister who didn’t inherit the family talent but tries her best, bless her.’
A silence followed this outburst, and Juliet took a long and welcome drink of wine. When she looked up, she saw her sisters’ shocked expressions. It was Frankie who spoke first.
‘Juliet, I had no idea that was how you felt. Apart from anything else, you’re incredibly talented – just look at how you’ve broken into that ridiculously male-dominated world of satirical cartoons. You’re a trailblazer.’
Juliet shrugged.
‘I’ve done well, I know, I just can’t get over the way Mum considered it a poor second to everybody else’s fine art, or your installations. But it’s not just that. I couldn’t get anything right – my hair, my clothes, my friends, the music I liked. It was constant nit-picking and criticism.’ She looked unbearably sad for a moment. ‘I don’t know why she hated me so much.’
‘She didn’t hate you!’ burst out Martha, grabbing Juliet’s hand. ‘She just…I think she felt you were the most like her out of the three of us, and maybe that was hard for her…If anything, she loved you the most and wanted the best for you. She just went about it badly…’
She trailed off, and Frankie spoke.
‘And with Mum gone, surely you’re established enough now to come back on your own terms?’
Juliet fell silent again. This was the problem. She knew what her image was now; heaven knows it had taken her enough time and effort to establish. She came across as tough and sharp, up for an argument, strong-willed and independent, witty, feisty and wild. But, inside, she knew how fragile that image was. How, once she shut her front door at night, she shed it with relief and had started more and more to indulge in pastimes nobody would expect. She bought, then sketched and photographed flowers, one of her greatest pleasures, and had even sold some of her pictures to a country lifestyle magazine – under a pseudonym of course. It was the sort of twee publication that her London friends mocked and would have been horrified to learn of her attachment to. She had started dreaming up some ideas that she thought would make a good children’s book, using her signature cartoon style, but in a far softer way than her sly, satirical newspaper drawings. She avoided the news, other than what she needed to know for work, and preferred watching gentle reality shows about sewing or baking to the gritty Scandinavian crime dramas she read synopses of so she could join in the conversations at parties. To be fair, she did still enjoy the occasional party and she liked meeting new people. She knew she was at a crossroads and had to decide, or uncover, or just realise who she was, and feared that coming home would force her back into a box that she was unhappy with, whether that was her eighteen-year-old self, desperate to push away from her mother, or the persona she had been projecting more and more convincingly over the past decade. Juliet noticed her two sisters looking at her with concern, and she raised her glass.
‘Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t still let it hold me back, it’s silly. But can’t we drop it?’
Martha didn’t seem ready for that.
‘I have to say, it might be good for you to leave London, at least for a while. You must see Toby all the time, and it can’t be nice.’
In Martha’s world, things should always be nice.
‘No, it is not “nice”, but I can handle it.’
‘But he was so awful to you?—’
‘Yes, I know, and I don’t want to drag it all out again. So can you drop it?’
Martha looked down at her lap and flushed. Juliet knew she had been overly harsh to her kind and sensitive sister, but they had already talked about Toby once today and that was quite enough. He had been abusive in his levels of coercive control, and although in managing to escape him she knew that she had shown great strength, she still felt the whole episode as an open wound, where any mention of it was like squeezing fresh lemon juice on to sore flesh. She knew, too, that what had happened, the way he had treated her, was not her fault, but that didn’t stop her feeling intensely shameful about it. She didn’t want pity, or kindness; in a way she would rather have been castigated for her stupidity, that might have been more of a relief. But even Frankie didn’t do that, even she treated Juliet sympathetically whenever the subject arose, and it was sometimes more than she could bear. Her mother, naturally, had loved Toby and couldn’t understand why, as she put it, Juliet ‘didn’t just stand up to him as an equal’. If only she had known how hard she had tried, but he had a way of twisting your words so that you were always in the wrong, insisting you had said something you hadn’t. She knew the name, now, for what he had done, gaslighting, and she was shocked at how skilfully he had confused and manipulated her.
Juliet suddenly realised that her heart was racing, and that she was staring at the table, while her sisters looked at her in concern. She gave them a shaky smile and upended her empty glass.
Frankie picked up the wine and refilled their glasses, pretending to wring out the bottle once it was empty. This small, rather weak joke broke the ice that was rapidly forming at the table, and Martha and Juliet smiled. Juliet grabbed Martha’s hand and squeezed it, and the smiles widened.
‘Now, if we are going to talk about men,’ said Frankie, ‘then I think we need to bring Léo back to the table. I must say, I like his commanding Gallic air, I’d be inclined to honour and obey, if it wasn’t for the way he was looking at you, Juliet. Scorchio!’
She picked up a stray coaster and fanned herself theatrically. Juliet raised an eyebrow.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
But Martha grinned and snatched up the baton.
‘Yes, I agree with Frankie. He was definitely smouldering in your direction. I think you’ve lit un petit feu under that one.’
‘Oh, shut up, both of you. He was glaring at me, not smouldering. He obviously thinks I’m a spoilt princess, and since he found me in the garden this morning, talking to myself with my hair sticking out at all angles and breath like an ageing Labrador, he also, no doubt, finds me hugely amusante.’
‘Well, if you move back, you’ll be seeing a lot more of him. Maybe he’ll grow on you?’
‘Frankie, really, stop it. He is not going to grow on me – no man is. Men only ever want you to do what they want, to a greater or lesser degree, to change you and mould you.’
‘Not all men are like Toby.’
‘No, Martha, I know, but I think it’s a rare man who doesn’t think he could make just a slightly better job of you than you have of yourself. I’m sick of it. Wherever I go, here or somewhere in London, it’s not going to be with a man in mind.’
She pushed away the image of the brown eyes and ready smile. Handsome he may be, and even sexy, but that was irrelevant. Attractive men were, in her experience, like cream cakes: tempting and fun in the moment, but something you only lived to regret, whether on your hips or in your heart.
‘Yeah, yeah, I give you three months. Anyway, let’s Google him, I want to know why he’s here and not ripping up Paris like he should be.’
Frankie pulled her phone out of her pocket and started tapping away.
‘Are you sure we should? It seems intrusive.’
‘Martha, if we find anything, it’s public knowledge, so it’s not as if we’re rifling through his pockets or reading his diary.’ She paused as she scrolled down. ‘Ooh, and if we did, we’d find it made very interesting reading.’
She flashed the phone towards her sisters, who barely had time to make out a blurry picture of Léo kissing a dark-haired woman, before she spun it round again.
‘It’s all in bloody French, of course; hang on, I’ll read it out, and we can have a crack at it: Le chef de renom, Léo Brodeur, pris dans un accrochage avec la star de télé-réalité mariée Veronique Mercier.’
‘Let me see that.’ Juliet snatched the phone from Frankie. ‘Well, the first bit must just be “famous chef”, renowned maybe, I don’t have a clue about the next bit, and then it says something about a reality TV star mariée – must be “married”.’
Martha took the phone from her and inspected the picture.
‘Maybe he is married to her, but this photo looks like it was taken in secret. Maybe she’s married, but to someone else?’
‘Yes! I bet that’s it. He’s been involved in some scandal and had to flee to England to escape it. I’m going to see if I can find anything else.’
Frankie took her phone back and tapped away for a few minutes, eventually throwing it down in disgust.
‘Everything’s in French and way beyond what any of us remembers from school. I suppose he isn’t famous enough here for it to have made the British press.’
‘Well, I’m not disappointed,’ said Juliet, picking up her coat. ‘“Love rat” seems to me to fit the bill perfectly; I don’t need to know any more. I feel better after this, so I’m heading back to Feywood. Are either of you coming?’
They both declined, so Juliet set off alone, glad of the peace so she could process all the new information of the past few hours and start making some decisions about her future.