Chapter 37
THIRTY-SEVEN
LUCY
The cellar flickered with candlelight. A new copy of Grand Hotel waited on each chair.
A table was set up with some nibbles that Sébastien had prepared – slices of fresh bread with Camembert and honey, which Lucy knew was from his garden, pork with Normandy apple sauce, and little plum tarts with cream.
Margot and her friends could only have dreamed of having such a plentiful spread during the war.
Lucy had spent the afternoon with Sébastien, trying to help him cook, although she was sure she had only got under his feet.
He’d teased her when she’d forgotten about the apple sauce and it’d burned on the bottom of the saucepan; she’d teased him for the ear-splitting music.
It’d been fun, and she was so pleased that she’d made such a good friend in Cordeval.
While they were cooking, Beatrice had texted Sébastien to let him know she’d just got home. When he told her about the book club meeting that evening, she’d replied in seconds to ask if she could come.
Lucy borrowed Sébastien’s phone to reply: We can’t have the book club without one of the original members. You’ll be our guest of honour! Lucy xxx
And now Lucy was alone in the cellar, waiting by the door for the women to come through the tunnels. She was on edge, listening for them, as she wondered what they’d think of the club, and was nagged by memories of that awful evening when she’d sat on her own with her copy of Wolf Hall.
But right on time, she heard the buzz of excited voices echoing along the tunnels. How different it was today for the women who were able to laugh and chat as they made their way to the book club, while their ancestors had been forced to creep and whisper.
Then came the knock that Lucy had been waiting for. She opened the door and a shaft of candlelight fell across the tunnel and the smiling faces of her new friends. She was especially pleased to see Beatrice, who, despite her age, had insisted on going through the tunnel as well.
‘You’ve made it!’ she said, standing aside. ‘Come on in.’
‘Bea first,’ said Anouk. ‘She’ll want a moment.’
‘We closed it up after war,’ Beatrice told them. ‘It didn’t seem right to pack everything away and forget, so we locked the door and left it as a memory. Not a shrine, but a reminder of all that we’d done.’
She swallowed hard, then stepped over the threshold into the cellar.
With a gasp, she clasped her hands together, turning to take in the place that she hadn’t seen for decades.
Her gaze settled on the message written on the wall and she smiled, before she looked over to the chairs and then the radio.
‘I can’t believe it was me,’ she whispered eventually.
‘All those years ago.’ Then she walked across to the radio and murmured, ‘The Professor sat here and we crowded around, listening for “Clair de Lune” to send us a message.’ The she picked up the yellowing notepad from the table, where a jumble of letters and numbers had been written in a hasty pencil long ago.
‘And here’s the last message we took in code, to tell us we were liberated.
After this, the messages were in French.
Everyone spoke freely after this; the Germans were trying to escape and we went out into the street and pelted the bastards with manure and rotten vegetables and everything we could lay our hands on.
’ She chuckled. ‘The lad I ended up married to gave me a broken beer bottle and we went around cutting all the Nazis’ tyres, so they couldn’t get too far before the Allies rolled into the village.
’ She tapped her fingernail to the paper and brought the page closer to the candle to illuminate it.
‘You wouldn’t know, but that’s a coded signature.
This came from the coders up in Yorkshire, where we had friends. ’
‘Oh, I didn’t know there was a link between Cordeval and Yorkshire,’ Lucy said.
‘We did a fashion shoot in Yorkshire a few months ago up there – some lovely old abbey that had something to do with radio or code during the war.’ She wished she’d paid more attention now, but the history had passed her by, as she’d been too busy trying to keep a starlet happy who complained for a hobby.
‘We started the book club just as a quiet little resistance,’ said Beatrice.
‘We only wanted to read the books the Nazis banned, but it didn’t stay that way.
Nobody looked at us, you see; we were just women.
Mothers and shopkeepers and little girls.
’ She gave a devilish wink. ‘What harm can women do, after all?’
Coralie looked at Anouk and said archly, ‘Ask Anouk that the next time she’s off to Paris for one of her protests!’
Anouk nodded. ‘Cordeval women don’t take shit,’ she said with pride. ‘Lucy won’t either; she’s Cordeval, even though she thinks she’s London!’
Lucy laughed along with the others, but it touched her deeply that Anouk thought she was Cordeval too. She wouldn’t have agreed with that when she’d first arrived, but the village had pulled her in and shown her that, down in the depths of her heart, she belonged here.
Only, it didn’t suit Lucy’s plans and dreams for her future.
If she accepted the promotion, she’d be like the women she admired at airports who wore elegant suits, their phones clamped to their ear as they wheeled a designer suitcase behind them.
They’d be headed off to Paris, New York or Milan, a different city every week.
She’d have a huge desk with a view across the Thames and the London skyline, and a jump in her wages so that she’d soon be able to afford her own enviable townhouse.
Her inbox would be full of invitations to every fancy event going, and she’d live on canapés and champagne.
Most importantly, her father would burst with pride, because it would give her all the success and status that he’d dreamed of for her.
It would make all those long working days he’d slogged through, and all that lonely globetrotting, worthwhile.
And it would be a reward for Lucy too, for all her hard work.
But the longer Lucy stayed in Cordeval, the further away that life seemed.
She’d loved preparing the cellar for the book club and helping Sébastien in the kitchen, and she was so pleased to see the book club members loading up their plates and tucking in with undisguised delight. It was the sort of food that London fashionistas would run a mile from.
The extraordinary stories that Beatrice and Mémé had put down for Lucy had fascinated her and drawn her in.
The more she read about Margot and her friends, the more proud she was that part of her family was from here.
And she’d always loved to visit when she was a child.
The bookshop, the village, the people… it’d been a warm hug for a little girl who had followed her father around the world.
They took their seats, but no one opened their books yet. Instead, everyone was enthralled by Beatrice’s stories as she told them about the original book club.
As Lucy listened, something changed inside her.
She wanted to stay in Cordeval, and run the bookshop that Mémé had left for her.
And the first thing she’d do was finish putting together the story from the memory box. Somewhere inside it was the key to the secret that Mémé had wanted Lucy to find out. She just had to keep digging into the past…