Chapter 1
One
The dawn light was only just filtering through the curtains, but Emma Taylor was already wide awake.
She had been lying sleepless for at least an hour, determinedly keeping her eyes closed, trying to ensure her mind remained empty, and failing.
Now, giving up all pretence that she was going to go back to sleep, she got up, shrugged on the retro velvet dressing-gown Mattie had lent her, padded over to the window and drew back the curtains.
The bedroom looked out over the garden at the back of the house, and in the gold and pink of early morning, its overgrown vegetation assumed a fleetingly magical quality.
The garden wasn’t large, but it had once packed a great deal of beauty into not much more than a hundred square metres.
There had been soft grass to sit on, a big wisteria against one wall—you could still see it, even now—rosebushes and hydrangeas, and carefully tended beds bright with flowers from spring to autumn, as well as a few edibles such as tomatoes and herbs.
The garden had been her grandfather Alain’s pride and joy, but since his death two and a half years ago, it had been slowly neglected to the point where now, overtaken by weeds and rank long grass, it would take quite a lot of work to get right again.
Her grandmother Mattie simply hadn’t had the heart to tackle it.
Emma opened the window, breathing in the fresh morning air.
The sounds of Paris waking up came floating above the high wall of the garden.
Sounds that she’d already become accustomed to, even though she’d arrived jet-lagged from the other side of the world only a week ago.
It was a cocktail of mechanical noises: the hum of early-morning traffic on the boulevards, the underground rumble of trains in a nearby Metro station, the swish of street-sweeping machines, the muffled thump of van doors as shop deliveries were made, and the distant sirens of police and ambulances.
But interwoven with that was a glittering thread of birdsong: blackbirds, warblers, robins, thrushes and wrens, taking part in the dawn chorus.
Emma could hear them but couldn’t see them, for they were hidden in the garden below and the surrounding trees.
As she stood there, an image came into her mind of her mother as a girl, standing at this very window, listening to the birds.
A lump formed in her throat, and she was about to turn away when her attention was caught by a flash of red in the garden below.
‘Monsieur Leroux took up residence here last autumn,’ Mattie had told her on her first day, ‘but he doesn’t keep regular hours, so you can never be sure when he might appear.
’ This was the first time Emma had seen him since she’d arrived.
‘Bonjour, Monsieur Leroux,’ Emma whispered as the red squirrel scampered lightly across the grass before vanishing into the undergrowth.
Monsieur Leroux—Mr Redhead. It was typical of her grandmother to have given the little creature a name.
There was something childlike about Mattie, something sweet yet clear-eyed.
Emma didn’t remember the first time she’d met her grandmother because she’d been three years old when her French grandparents had come to Australia.
It was their sole visit. And Emma had only been twice to her grandparents’ lovely old house tucked away in a quiet street of the 7th arrondissement of Paris.
The first time, she was seven years old and her stepfather, Paddy, had persuaded her mother, Corinne, to visit.
What Emma most remembered from those three dreamlike weeks were impressions: a cosy house with lots of stairs, her grandfather’s slow smile and slow speech, her grandmother’s sparkly manner and eccentric way of dressing, so different from her mother’s understated chic.
There were memories of riding ponies and sailing toy wooden yachts in the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg and listening in delight to her grandmother’s story of the dancing faun statue there.
She remembered eating divine cakes from the local patisserie—such as the best chocolate éclairs she’d ever eaten—and riding on the Metro, visiting the little zoo in the Jardin des Plantes and playing in the garden while her grandfather weeded around her.
Then they’d gone home to Australia, time had passed and passed.
Somehow, her childhood went by and they didn’t return to France.
Mattie had a heart condition that made flying difficult, so her grandparents didn’t come back to Australia either.
There were letters exchanged—Emma always wrote a special one at Christmas—and phone calls for birthdays, but that was it.
As a child, Emma didn’t wonder about her mother’s attitude, and if, as a teenager, she occasionally asked herself questions about her mother’s past in France, she didn’t voice them.
And so her grandparents remained as vague, kindly presences in her memories of that first time in Paris.
There seemed to be no particular urgency for Emma to see them again, or perhaps it was just that her mother’s detached attitude towards them had affected her more than she had realised.
In any case, it wasn’t until two and a half years ago that Emma had finally come back to Paris.
And that was for her grandfather Alain’s funeral.
She’d come with her mother and they’d stayed ten days.
It had been hard, and not only because of the sad occasion.
Paddy couldn’t come because of work and Corinne hadn’t wanted Emma to come, but for once Emma put her foot down.
Emma wasn’t sure if her mother had agreed because her daughter’s unusual firmness had taken her by surprise, or because she was more vulnerable than she cared to admit.
It was a big thing to lose your father, no matter how strained the relationship had been, and Corinne did seem to be genuinely affected.
Emma had thought that might trigger a proper reconnection between her mother and grandmother, but unfortunately, once they were in France, the old barriers seemed to go up.
Although Corinne tried to provide comfort to her mother, it was clear that it was an effort, and Mattie must have seen that, though she never reproached her.
Sometimes it felt as though her mother’s life had only really started when she’d set foot in Australia thirty-two years ago as a pregnant twenty-year-old; or perhaps when she’d met Paddy, several months later.
Corinne talked readily enough about her life in Australia, before and after Emma was born.
But although she had spoken a bit about her childhood, the years of her adolescence and the period just before she left France were a closed book, which she passed over in silence.
She’d never spoken about Emma’s father, other than to say that it hadn’t worked out with him.
Emma had always thought of Paddy as her real father. He’d been there from her earliest babyhood, steady, kind, funny, and full of love. For her, and for her mother. And that was all that mattered. But now …
She turned from the window, her gaze falling on the photograph propped up on the mantelpiece.
It was a black-and-white shot of her mother as a very young woman, late teens maybe, lying in long grass, laughing, chin propped up on her elbows, a crooked chain of daisies on her head.
It was a beautiful picture but it made Emma’s eyes prickle with tears.
‘Emma?’ Her grandmother’s voice, surprisingly deep for such a small woman, came suddenly through the door. ‘You’re awake, ma chérie? I thought I would make some hot chocolate to warm us, it’s such a chilly morning.’
Emma blinked away the tears. ‘That sounds perfect, Mattie,’ she said.
It was, in fact, not particularly chilly for a May morning, but she’d learned that her grandmother was frileuse, a succinct but untranslatable French term for someone who easily felt the cold.
Emma would have preferred coffee, but she could have that later, and she’d got used to the morning ritual of watching Mattie in the kitchen downstairs, fiddling about with the little saucepan she kept specifically for hot chocolate, and chatting about this and that, letting Emma enter the flow of talk when she felt ready.
During such moments, Emma knew how much she’d missed.
But also how right she had been to come at last.
Across the river, Charlotte Marigny jogged through quiet leafy streets, earbuds pouring in a stream of her special Paris running playlist. It was an eclectic mix of classic Parisian songs—Piaf and Brel and a smidgen of old-school French rock, like Johnny Hallyday and Michel Polnareff and, just for a bit of fun, ‘?a plane pour moi’, Plastic Bertrand’s bizarre earworm of a punk song.
She remembered hopping up and down to that as a little kid, delighted at being invited into the world of her teenage brother, Nicolas.
The one-hit wonder still had cult status in France, but Nicolas had long outgrown it and the quiff of dyed blond hair that he’d affected at the time, in homage to the singer.
Now he had an important job somewhere in the corridors of the European Parliament in Brussels that he could be a little pompous about explaining, so she didn’t ask.
She was staying at their aunt Juliette’s place in the 16th while Juliette was off on some jaunt in Prague with an old friend who Charlotte suspected had once been a lover.
Her aunt obviously knew something was up because she had told her to stay for as long as she needed, but she hadn’t probed at why her niece felt she needed to get away so precipitously.