Chapter 1
MAGGIE LEMON DIDN ’ T CRY when she heard about her aunt’s sudden death. A Frenchman called Georges Alarie, a lawyer – or a notaire – as they were called over there, had rung to tell her the bare facts: Phil was dead, a small funeral had already taken place, and she’d left her entire estate to her niece.
Maggie had been so overwhelmed by this news that she’d mumbled a few words, something about discussing when she could fly to France with her husband, before hanging up. Then she’d slumped on the cold bathroom floor, numb at the news about her aunt, numb at the sight of the negative pregnancy test on the tiles beside her – almost winded, as if someone had poked a needle through her ribs and deflated her lungs.
She hadn’t cried that evening when her husband came home and folded her into his arms, saying that they’d try again, and also that he was sorry about her aunt.
She hadn’t cried that night, as Mungo slept and she stared into the blackness of their bedroom thinking: why did pregnancy happen to everyone else and not her? Was she broken? And why hadn’t she called her aunt before now? Why had she wasted so much time?
She nearly cried two days later while ransacking the house for her passport, before discovering it in her knicker drawer. (What was it doing in there? Maggie blamed the IVF hormones.)
But then she was so busy travelling to France that she didn’t have a moment to cry. She might have cried when, somewhere over the Channel, the baby sitting on its mother’s lap beside Maggie vomited breast milk over her jeans. But still somehow, no tears. She couldn’t detect anger or sadness or frustration. She couldn’t detect anything; she just felt empty. Or perhaps barren was more appropriate. Yes, Maggie’s whole body felt barren .
‘ Bonjour, madame ,’ said the man behind the car hire desk at Nice airport, with a wide smile. He had gelled hair, extremely overpowering aftershave and a badge pinned to his lapel that declared his name was Marcel.
‘ Bonjour ,’ Maggie murmured, hoping that Marcel wasn’t going to try and sell her extra insurance. She pushed her phone across the desk. ‘The booking should be under Lemon; this is my reservation number.’
‘ Fantastique . And for just thirty euros a day extra, would you be interested in taking out the excess insuran—’
‘No, thank you. Just the car.’
Unfortunately, because of Marcel’s aftershave, Maggie backed away from the desk so quickly that she didn’t hear his directions, and it took half an hour to find the car in the car park, and another fifteen minutes of lurching between rows while she tried to locate the exit and second gear.
‘FUCK OFF, YOU FRENCH LUNATIC,’ she shouted, as she crawled onto the motorway and a passing car blared its horn at her. Swearing was very rare for Maggie because she had an unusually calm nature for a chef. She rarely swore, and had never shouted in any kitchen, or even snapped at Mungo when he corrected people who mispronounced their surname (‘it’s Le -mon , actually’).
Next, her phone rang.
‘Hello? Hello? Mungo? CAN YOU HEAR ME?’ she shouted over the noise of lorries thundering past. ‘Mungo? I can’t speak for very long because I haven’t got much batt—’
‘Hi, darling, just checking in. Have you arrived safely?’
‘It’s not a great moment. Mungo? Can you hear me? I’LL RING YOU LATER.’
But he couldn’t reply because Maggie’s phone chose that moment to run out of battery entirely, which meant she lost the directions on Google Maps.
Mungo was in the middle of a property deal and had been unable to fly out with her. And although Maggie had repeatedly assured him that it was fine, that she could manage, right then she wished he was there because she felt so alone, making a pilgrimage to a place she’d tried not to think about for so long, because thinking about it stung. She should remember the way, but finding the small road that twisted from the motorway up into the green hills and pine forests that blanket that part of Provence was a challenge when vast trucks and vans were roaring past her towards Marseille.
It was another hour before she found the right junction and started recognizing the countryside. There was the fourteenth-century abbey on the hill; there were the perfectly formed vineyards and the bend where tourists often stopped to take pictures of the sun-drenched valley. Maggie drove on through medieval towns of stone churches and shuttered houses with names that came back to her like old song lyrics: Fayence, Draguignan, Classons. After Classons, she turned off the air-conditioning and opened the car windows for the unmistakably Mediterranean smell of pine and scorched earth, filling her lungs with it. And then finally, finally , she came to the stretch of road that curved up into the hills like a ski slope, bend after bend: the road that led to the village of Narnesse, and Le Figuier.
She crunched down a gear as she approached the turning. First-timers often shot past the gates to the hotel because they were set back from the road. The only clue that you were in the right place was a small metallic sign decorated with the illustration of a fig tree – the discreet entrance a deliberate ploy by her aunt to put off journalists and photographers.
She hadn’t been here for eight years but the sight still made her smile: the dusty limestone track, the ornate metal gates, the sign. It looked exactly as it had a decade ago. Or at least, the entrance did.
The rest of it, she realized, as she crawled slowly down the drive, looked quite different.
In the hotel’s heyday, guests would drive through the gates to find a wildflower meadow either side of the drive, with long grasses, poppies and white peonies dancing in the breeze. The meadow gave way to a long avenue of plane trees, and beyond that, a lawn surrounded by banks of lavender, so that guests could smell it wherever they walked in the grounds. It was the sort of garden that was supposed to look natural and wild but which had, in reality, required the services of a full-time gardener. But there hadn’t been any gardener here for a while. The meadow was thick with weeds and brambles, the lawn tufty and bleached in places, and the lavender had turned grey.
She pulled up in front of the main entrance and looked around with dismay.
The chateau had always been impressive. The first time Maggie saw it, aged nine, she thought it looked like a house from a fairy tale: pale-yellow stone with four storeys of windows framed by pale-blue shutters, which seemed to glow and turn almost violet at sunset. A flight of stone steps leading to the front door curved upwards from the gravel drive, and purple wisteria dangled from the wrought-iron balcony that hung over the main entrance.
But now the house looked almost as abandoned as the garden. Trails of dark-orange rust ran south from the shutters’ hinges and patches of green-grey moss grew across the stone fa?ade. Maggie tipped her head back to see tentacles of ivy spreading across the roof and around the gutters.
It felt eerily quiet, too. Whenever she’d visited, and later when she’d worked in the hotel kitchen after leaving school, she’d loved its chaos – the noise and the bustle which had started at six in the morning and often run until long past midnight. There’d been voices, music, a constant hissing, steaming, sizzling hubbub of activity in the kitchen, the sound of doors swinging, and footsteps running up and down the staircase that twisted upstairs to the bedrooms from the entrance hall. Life had burst from every window.
Now, apart from the click-clicking of the crickets in the grass, it was silent.
She walked across the drive, gravel crunching underfoot, and looked at the pool, to the left of the house. It had been designed by an American called Taylor Jackson, a moustachioed Californian who’d specialized in creating pools that looked like part of the landscape, which had become fashionable among the rich, international crowd whose boxy glass homes were photographed for Architectural Digest . Her aunt had met Taylor at a party on a yacht in Nice the summer she bought the chateau and, having fallen in love with her (most straight men had fallen in love with Phil, as had a handful of gay ones), he’d designed and overseen the creation of the Le Figuier pool.
Formed from white stone transported from the French coastline, it had been filled with salt water and the result resembled a lake, more green than turquoise, with a ledge that ran along one whole side so guests could sit in the cool water with a drink or book. It caught the morning light when the sun rose from behind the hill and kept it most of the day until it slid beyond the horizon. But now the cover was sagging under the weight of dead leaves.
What had happened to this place? Where was the staff? Where was anybody ?
She spun around at the sound of a car speeding up the drive.