Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
LUCY
Lucy felt stunned as she went to stand behind the counter again. It was unreal that Mémé wasn’t behind the till with her, and that Papi wasn’t upstairs cooking his special stew of mussels and cider for lunch.
And her life was back in London, her friends and everything she’d built. She polished the dust off the till with a cloth from under the desk, but she still felt like a fraud.
‘What am I doing?’ she sighed.
There was plenty to sort out, though, for now. For a start, there was all the clutter under the desk, along with the old book that had never been unwrapped. Lucy knelt down to take a closer look.
She took the wrapped book carefully and turned it over, wondering if she should remove the cover after all. There could be a photograph or a letter slipped between the pages.
Lucy was so tempted that she almost started to peel off the paper, but something stopped her. The book had been there unopened for so long and it felt like she was trespassing.
She put it on the counter instead, then went back to rummaging through the bits and bobs that Mémé had left behind.
She pulled out a stapler, a box of replacement staples, which proved to be empty, several notepads that had been started but never finished, biros without lids, lids without biros, a flier for a D-Day commemoration ceremony that had taken place only a few weeks ago, in June, a pencil stub with a worn-down rubber on the end.
Behind them all, right at the back of the shelf, she found a newspaper.
Lucy had to dislodge a mug that had lost its handle and a pencil printed with Babar the Elephant to free the newspaper. And as she brought it out into the light, she realised it was yellowed, and as old as the one that had been used to wrap Esther’s book.
It was so thin, just a sheet of paper folded in two, and in the top right-hand corner of the closely printed front page, she saw: CORDEVAL: feu des livres interdit!
A fire of banned books.
Anger coursed through Lucy as she read the short article, which was full of invective about banned books. First the Germans had to burn them in Clarenville, and then they’d had to move on to Cordeval, moving from one place to another to purge words and stories wherever banned books were found.
No wonder her great-grandmother had kept the newspaper, and no wonder Mémé hadn’t thrown such a compelling piece of history away.
The thought of burning books sickened her.
Needing some fresh air, she slipped on her Celine sunglasses again and went the other way this time, heading towards the beach.
She passed a greengrocer’s, which would’ve looked like a fancy food boutique in London, with its frilly cabbages, frothy carrot tops, and plaited garlic and onion strands hanging by the door.
At the corner of the street, she stopped at a shop that sold lavender- and vetiver-scented soap from Provence. She’d come back to buy some presents for Hannah and Natalie here before she left.
The street opened out onto a promenade, where a few hardy beach huts stared across the Channel to England, and a young man in a striped T-shirt was opening an ice-cream booth.
It wasn’t grand, like Clarenville’s promenade, but Lucy liked it.
She remembered coming down here with her grandparents when she was small.
She remembered how the sand had kicked up around her small feet as she’d hurtled across the broad beach.
There was a part of the sand where the tide never reached.
For as long as Lucy could remember, it’d been home to the rusting tank.
Each time she’d seen it another hole had appeared, as the salty air from the sea worked its way through the metal.
Even though time had wrought its damage, the rusted shell still showed the force of the blast that had stopped the tank, freezing it in time on the beach.
The metal panels had been torn apart, and whoever had been inside it couldn’t possibly have survived.
Lucy felt as if she could hear the echo of that blast rolling across the beach even now.
The rust had got the better of the paint, which had peeled away, so that any insignia had disappeared.
It must’ve been from the D-Day landings, Lucy had always thought, perhaps a tank that had been brought across the Channel to France, only to be destroyed moments after reaching the coast. Or it could’ve been part of the Nazi’s armoury, and had received a direct hit before it could take out any of the men wading through bullets and sea to dry land.
Whatever its story, it’d become a permanent feature of Cordeval.
Lucy took in a deep breath of the sea air, then tucked an escaped length of hair behind her ear and looked out across the beach. She saw a huge, dark, shaggy dog running through the foam as the waves rolled onto the sand, while a dark-haired man strolled along, watching the gleeful dog’s progress.
Then she lifted her sunglasses and realised that it was Galette, and the wind-tousled man was Sébastien. She waved hello, wondering if he’d see her.
Sébastien pushed his sunglasses up into his hair and waved one hand above his head.
Galette dashed across the sand towards her, ignoring Sébastien’s calls for him to stop.
Instead he launched himself at Lucy in a cloud of wet fur and sand.
Lucy flinched: she was used to the little dogs her friends in London had, and the chihuahuas in handbags that celebrities brought to their interviews.
Galette was like an enormous shaggy walrus in comparison, and Lucy didn’t want to get covered in all that wet sand in his fur.
Her heart melted at the innocent canine affection in Galette’s dark eyes, and she stroked his soft ears.
‘Sorry!’ Sébastien shouted as he jogged towards them. ‘He never listens to me.’ He patted Galette’s back. ‘Unless I’m asking him if he wants food.’
‘He’s a big country dog!’ Lucy said fondly. ‘In London, not many people have dogs that look like they can pull the fishing boats in.’
‘He’s from a long line of local lads who should know better.’ Sébastien laughed. ‘Just like me.’
Yes, Sébastien definitely looked as though he had a mischievous streak in him. She could see it dancing in his dark gaze.
‘You’ve always lived in Cordeval, haven’t you?’ Lucy asked him. ‘I came over as often as I could to see Mémé and Papi, and I remember seeing you about.’
He’d be coming and going, helping his parents unload the van with crates spilling over with leafy carrot tops and lettuce leaves, and manoeuvring heavy barrels of beer and cider through the door.
She’d be lying if she pretended she hadn’t noticed how the muscles of his tanned, bare arms had tensed as he’d carried the crates.
‘I remember seeing you as well. You and your mates always looked like you’d fallen out of Vogue.
I nearly asked you out once, but I wasn’t as brave then as I am now,’ Sébastien said with a smile.
He rubbed one hand against the back of his neck and shrugged.
‘I’ve been here most of my life. Spent a few years working in Paris, but…
I like it here. I’m not made for cities. ’
‘You nearly asked me out? I’m flattered!’ Lucy replied, trying to hide a nervous giggle in her voice. It must have been years ago, but back then she might just’ve said yes. She moved swiftly on. ‘Were you working as a chef when you were in Paris?’ she asked him.
‘Yeah, I was cheffing in Paris and Mum and Dad had the bar, but they were ready to pack it in and I was ready to come home. So I took over at Jojo’s, with Gran keeping an eye on it all. It’s different cooking for people here. They appreciate it in a way people don’t in the big hotels.’
Lucy could see the passion in his expression as he talked. He evidently loved his job, and, if the breakfast she’d had that morning was anything to go by, with his home-made croissant and jam, then she’d be in for a treat come dinnertime.
‘I think it’s great that you’ve come back from Paris and kept the bar in the family,’ she told him.
‘What a lovely thing to do. It’s so nice coming back to Cordeval,’ she went on.
She gestured towards the hulking mass of the rusting tank.
‘It’s got so much history. I mean, just look at the D-Day tank. ’
Sébastien glanced over at it. ‘It’s not a D-Day tank. It’s from way before that; the village had some pretty hard times.’
Lucy blinked at him in surprise. ‘It’s not from D-Day? I’d always assumed— wow.’
She thought of Mémé and Bea in the photo sitting outside Jojo’s. Everyone in that picture had lived through whatever horrors had brought that tank onto the beach. It had to be a Nazi tank, then. The members of Margot’s book club must’ve heard it explode.
‘I suppose, after the war, people didn’t like to talk about those times too much. There must be a lot of secrets that have never been told,’ Lucy said. ‘Mémé and Papi let me think that tank was from D-Day, so I never knew… They went through so much, all of them.’
‘And your bookshop hasn’t seen many updates since this tank was on the road,’ said Sébastien. ‘If you need a hand getting things how you want them, let me know. I did a lot of the renovations at the bar, so I’m halfway handy at that sort of thing.’
‘Well, it does need a bit of an update, doesn’t it?’ Lucy replied with a chuckle. ‘It’s very kind of you to offer, but I’m going to sell it. My dad knows someone in Paris who can sort all that out. It’s been nice coming back to Cordeval, but I do need to get back to London.’
Sébastien frowned. ‘Sell it?’ he asked. ‘That’s a shame; it’s a bit of a village institution. It’s been in your family for generations.’
Lucy shook her head. ‘But if things had worked out for you in Paris, you would’ve sold Jojo’s. Or if you’d been offered your own Michelin-starred restaurant in Berlin or Barcelona, you wouldn’t have wanted to worry about a bar in a fishing village, right?’
Sébastien laughed, but Lucy didn’t detect any humour in it.
‘That’s how you see Cordeval? A place where people wash up when they fail at life?
’ he asked. ‘By your standards, things worked out very well for me in Paris, but I didn’t want to slave for the applause of spoilt millionaires at Le Cinq.
I wanted to be here, so I came home. To a bar in a fishing village. ’
Lucy felt a furious blush heating her face.
Her father had taken her to Le Cinq for her twenty-first birthday.
It was a world away from Jojo’s bar and she struggled to understand the pull of Cordeval.
There were the family connections, of course, and it was picturesque.
But then, she thought of the lights in the trees that lit up the Champs-élysées at night, all the way to the Arc de Triomphe, and all the boutiques and the glamour.
He’d given all of that up for a fishing village that got a blast of cold air off the English Channel.
‘But that was what you wanted to do,’ she reminded him, defensively.
‘I’ve never had any ambition to run a bookshop.
I liked coming here when I was little, and helping Mémé in the shop, but my ambition is to be the editor of Cosmo or Vogue.
You grew up here, Sébastien. I didn’t. I don’t belong in Cordeval.
It’s not my kind of place. It’s just so quiet, and I can barely get a phone signal.
It’s in the middle of nowhere for another thing, and it’s trapped in the past.’
He ruffled one hand through his hair, then flipped his sunglasses back down onto his nose. ‘She wanted you to have it,’ he said again. ‘And you’re selling it to the highest bidder just because you can’t get a phone signal?’ He shrugged. ‘Yeah, you’re right. It’s not your kind of place.’
‘But Mémé didn’t ask me if—’
Before Lucy could finish her sentence, her phone suddenly sprang to life in her pocket. She’d forgotten all about it, because the signal was so poor, but it was ringing – there had to be a patch of better signal down on the beach.
She took it from her pocket and saw Andrew’s name on the screen, with a photo of her planting a kiss on his cheek. The sight of it turned her stomach, but she did need to talk to him, no matter how much she didn’t want to hear his voice.
‘I really need to take this,’ she said to Sébastien.
‘I’ll see you later,’ Sébastien said. He scrubbed Galette’s head and together the pair of them turned and strolled away across the sand.
How simple his life seemed compared to hers.
She swiped to take the call. ‘Andrew?’ she said. She stared out to sea and the waves became blurred by the tears that had suddenly risen in her eyes.
‘Where are you?’ Andrew sounded far away on the stuttering line, and she remembered them sitting in their tranquil living room just a few evenings earlier, dreaming of their honeymoon in the Maldives and sipping white wine. ‘I’m so sorry, Lulu, I just… I’m a bloody idiot!’
‘I can’t believe you’d do that – and in our own bed!’ Lucy replied. She wondered if he could hear the waves on the shore behind her. ‘I’m so— furious doesn’t even touch it. You must realise that I can’t marry you, Andrew. The wedding’s off.’
‘No, no!’ Andrew said urgently. ‘Think of how it’ll look. What will people think—’
Lucy had nothing to say to that – nothing that was polite, at least.
She hung up.
Her hand shook as she put her phone back in her pocket.
She looked out to sea, at the frothy waves racing each other to the shore.
Yes, it was true that her life was in London, but an enormous part of it had been shattered into pieces.
She would have to go back and sweep up the shards of that old life, and throw herself into the new.
She’d longed to become editor in chief of the magazine, and now the rare chance was right there in front of her. All she had to do was grab it.
But before she did, she had to do what her grandmother had asked.
There are secrets tied to the book club, and it’s time you found out.