Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
LUCY
As Lucy drank her morning coffee, she looked down on the street from the window of Mémé’s flat with tears in her eyes. Sébastien and Galette were a blur as they came back from a run. They glowed in the golden summer sunlight, but Lucy didn’t feel touched by the sun at all.
Today would’ve been her wedding day.
Today, she would’ve woken up in a suite at the Dorchester with Hannah and Natalie, and a team of hairdressers and make-up artists would’ve got them all ready for the wedding.
Lucy would’ve worn her beautiful cream silk dress with a train, and the veil and tiara her mother had worn on her wedding day.
She would’ve walked under an arch of flowers and down the aisle on her dad’s arm, towards the man waiting at the altar rails with the vicar.
The man she’d loved: the man who’d shattered her heart.
She put her coffee bowl down on the dining table and picked up the piece of paper she’d left there the night before.
She’d found it in the box that Mémé and Beatrice had put together for her, the thin sheet of paper covered in dots.
She couldn’t make any sense out of it. At first, she’d thought it was a join-the-dots puzzle that she’d left behind here when she was a child, but it couldn’t have been that; it had no numbers and it was entirely hand-drawn.
She looked over a letter that had been written to Margot from a publisher in Paris, telling her the book she’d ordered the week before couldn’t be sent out because it’d since been banned.
It was hard to imagine the frustration and constant stress of trying to live day to day while the Nazis controlled everything, even the books people read.
Her glance wandered to the notebook and Margot’s diary, next to her laptop.
She couldn’t go on with the story. She’d read about the Germans rounding people up, first in Mémé’s handwriting as she recalled what Margot had told her, and then in Beatrice’s script, recording what she’d witnessed.
An ominous gap followed. Then she’d gone to Margot’s diary and seen an E for Esther.
If she was patient and concentrated, Lucy knew she could tease out some meaning from the initials and abbreviations in her tiny writing.
But the E haunted her. She kept thinking of the book downstairs, under the counter, wrapped in an old newspaper and addressed to Esther.
There had to be a reason why she’d never collected the book, and Lucy suspected she had been rounded up.
She felt too fragile today of all days to go on with her research.
It was getting stuffy in the lounge, so she pulled up one of the sash windows that overlooked the street.
Sébastien was outside Jojo’s, setting up for the day.
He pulled out the awning, so that it cast a welcome shadow across the pavement, and unstacked chairs and tables.
His dark hair was wet, as if he’d just got out of the shower.
Lucy waved hello, suddenly awkward in case he thought she’d been staring at him. He looked at her for a second, then waved in reply, before cupping his hands to his mouth and calling up to her, ‘Fresh pastries for breakfast, five minutes?’
She would’ve been drinking champagne in London right now, just a little glass as her hair was styled for her mother’s tiara. She’d— Lucy pushed the thought away. There was no point dwelling on what couldn’t be.
‘Morning, Sébastien. I’d love some!’ she called back. ‘I’ll be down in a second!’
She ran a comb through her hair, roughly pulled it back in a clip and brushed the lightest layer of foundation onto her face. Then she wandered down to Jojo’s in her trainers. Her high heels hadn’t gone far lately, and her large make-up bag wasn’t getting much use.
She headed into the bar and saw that Sébastien had laid a table with coffee and pastries. Lucy grinned as she noticed a pot of what looked like his home-made jam.
‘Perfect!’ she said. She thought of Margot, then, and how long she must’ve gone during the war without seeing a spread as delicious as this.
‘Well, I was out of order on the beach last week,’ Sébastien said, as Galette wandered over to Lucy, his tail wagging lazily. ‘Besides, I wanted to talk a bit of business with you and that’s always better over pastries.’
‘Business?’ Lucy asked him, as she sat down at the table.
It had to be about the bookshop. ‘Don’t worry about last week.
I was so rude to you. If you’d rather live here than in Paris, why not?
And I’ve eaten here every evening since I’ve been in Cordeval, and your food is just delicious.
It’s better than you’d find at a lot of swanky restaurants in London or Paris. ’
Sébastien murmured a thank-you that sounded a little bashful to Lucy. He pulled out a seat and joined her at the table. ‘When you put the shop on the market… would you give me a nod? I’d like to get an early offer on the table.’
Lucy hadn’t thought that Sébastien would’ve been interested, but of course, he must’ve grown up on Beatrice’s stories about the bookshop.
Her dad had told her that his friend would send an agent to Cordeval to take photos, measure up and advertise the sale.
But a local like Sébastien wouldn’t be able to compete if the shop was advertised in Paris. Still, she could put a good word in.
‘Oh, it’d be lovely if you bought the place,’ she said, pouring the coffee into their cups. ‘What are you planning to do with it? You could turn it into a café, selling those gorgeous home-made croissants of yours.’
Sébastien gave a smile and admitted, ‘I only thought about it a couple of days ago.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders.
‘It’s a survivor, that shop. I’d want it to stay what it is: a bookshop.
Which might be a challenge, considering I know nothing about bookshops, but I didn’t know how to cook once upon a time, so…
yeah. A bookshop.’ Then he tapped his index finger to his chin, thoughtful.
‘I used to go in a little bookshop in Paris that had a café out the back and I wonder about that. Not everybody wants to go to a bar, even one as great as mine, but relaxing with a brand-new book and a really special pastry? That feels pretty Cordeval to me.’
‘I’m sure Mémé would’ve approved,’ Lucy said. ‘Beatrice’s grandson running a café in her bookshop. Dad’s got a friend in Paris who’s going to deal with the sale, so I’ll tell them to get in touch with you, and the bookshop might be yours!’
But as she spoke, the words seemed so final.
A bit too final for today, and she put the coffee pot down heavily on the table.
What Sébastien had said to her on the beach came back to her: Mémé had wanted her to have the bookshop.
But Lucy had a career in London that she’d worked so hard for, and her friends who she’d miss horribly if she moved away.
Steering the subject onto less fraught ground, she asked, ‘Have you managed to fix the piano?’
‘Yes!’ Sébastien seemed as glad as Lucy that the subject had changed. He sprang out of his seat and headed towards the instrument. ‘It was blocked by a lullaby, if you can believe it. Pushed down into the workings.’ He settled on the piano stool and asked teasingly, ‘Music while you dine, madame?’
‘A lullaby?’ Lucy shook her head, wondering how on earth a lullaby had got inside a piano that lived in a bar.
Curious, she left the table with the steaming cup of coffee and went over to stand beside Sébastien at his piano.
There was a yellowed sheet of paper on the stand with handwritten notes leaping across the creased page.
Sébastien turned the paper over so that Lucy could see a shorter jumble of markings on the other side. ‘Wait – there’s two different tunes!’
He nodded, then spread his finger on the keys and began to play.
‘One’s beautiful. The second… well, it’s really just a random bunch of notes.
’ He shrugged, then looked up at Lucy and gave a bright smile as he flipped the sheet over to play the second piece.
This time, the music it produced was jolting and tuneless, just a noise.
Lucy leaned closer over Sébastien’s shoulder, trying to make sense of it. Maybe it was an experimental, avant-garde piece? But why hide it inside a piano? She went back to the table and sipped her coffee, musing.
As Sébastien returned to the lullaby and played the tender notes, she tore her croissant and daubed it with golden butter and his jewel-like jam.
She knew the tune, and was trying to place it as she ate, while the taste of the croissant took her back to her visits to Mémé and Papi when she was small.
When she was small…
Lucy paused, her coffee halfway to her mouth. Sébastien was still playing, but now she recognised the gentle melody, which came and went like waves whispering against the shore.
‘Sébastien…’ she said, tears pricking her eyes. She hoped they wouldn’t fall. ‘I know that tune. Mémé used to sing it to me when I was small.’
‘It’s called “Isabelle’s Lullaby”,’ Sébastien replied. His fingers were still moving on the keys as he nodded towards the sheet of music that rested on the piano. ‘Signed T.G. Lauterborn, 1941.’
Those names… she knew them from the notebook.
‘So that’s how my grandma knew that tune,’ she said as she realised. ‘Because it was written for Esther’s baby. Margot learned it from Esther and sang it to my grandma too. I wonder what happened to Isabelle?’