Chapter Seventeen #2
Emma giggled. ‘He’s a terrible flirt. He used to flirt with Mum.’
‘Really? How do you know? Surely you were too young to notice.’
Emma lowered her chin at me. ‘Oh, Alix, of all people I expected better of you. Surely you know children notice everything? Doesn’t your little boy? It’s just the grown-ups who think they don’t.’
I laughed. ‘Yeah, you’re right. But listen, would you like it?’ With difficulty, I unclasped the necklace and wrenched it off in relief, quelling a little scream of agony as it tried to take a clump of hair in the process.
‘Oh, my gosh.’ Emma looked awed. ‘Are you serious? I mean, I think it’s fantastic, like, really cool, so avant-garde.’
‘It’s yours,’ I said, passing it to her and rubbing my sore neck.
‘Hey, thanks, Alix. That’s lovely of you.’
‘Just don’t wear it when Jules is around. It was very nice of him to give it to me, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful.’
Nicole had now stopped twirling and had slung the pashmina artistically round her shoulders. ‘Do you think I can wear him to the mosque?’ she pondered, smoothing and stroking the pink folds as if it were a cat.
‘Nic,’ Emma declared sternly. ‘You can wear whatever you like whenever you like.’
‘Ah, but would the serious ladies of the mosque approve?’ I countered lightly.
Nicole smiled. ‘No, they would not.’ She clapped her hands together in childlike glee. ‘But only because they will be so, so jealous.’
‘You look so gorgeous I’m not sure I’m not so, so jealous too,’ Emma said gloomily, and we all laughed.
Jess arrived around eight. It had struck me that it could not be easy for her to be a guest in what had been for so many years her own home where she had lived with the man she loved.
I wondered whether we were about to spend the evening all trying to pretend we were not aware of the incorporeal presence of the late Johnny Mandeville, the spectre at the feast.
Yet if Jess felt this, she certainly wasn’t going to show it.
Her composure was total. I wondered how much Luc’s behaviour towards her was playing a part.
From the outset, without any fuss or ceremony, he subtly deferred to Jess as if she were the hostess.
We were having curry, he told her. Where would she like to eat?
‘Whenever I cooked a curry for your father,’ she said, her eyes roving slowly around the salon, ‘we always ate in here, laid-back in front of the fire.’
‘Then that’s what we shall do.’
‘In our younger days there were some big fat floor cushions we used to recline on, with all the food spread out on a cloth on the floor like something out of Heat and Dust – one of my favourite films.’ She smiled a little.
‘Heaven knows what happened to the cushions, but it’s a good job they’ve gone.
If I reclined on a floor cushion these days you’d need a forklift truck to get me back on my feet. ’
Luc smiled and touched her arm.
‘Sounds perfect,’ said Emma. ‘In a bit I’ll help Alix put everything out on the dining table as a sort of buffet, and then we can just help ourselves and flop.’
‘Oh, you two are the best,’ Jess said fondly, her eyes shining.
Alphonse was also helping things along. In less than two days, Jess had evidently formed an unbreakable bond with the dog. Even Emma’s blandishments could not persuade him to leave Jess’s side.
‘Oh, he’s a love,’ Jess declared, stroking the dog’s ears. ‘My little shadow. Thank you so much for letting me keep him.’
‘The gratitude,’ Luc said, ‘is all mine.’
Leaving the three of them to their aperitifs, I retreated to the kitchen to finish off the rice and other bits and bobs.
I was to eat with them, Emma had earlier proclaimed.
She’d tried very hard to persuade Nicole to do the same, but the French girl was adamant, scrupulously polite but adamant: she had a lot of work she must do on her English course.
‘You shouldn’t press her, Emma,’ Luc had chided once Nicole had disappeared to her room. ‘Let the girl do what she feels comfortable with.’
‘But I wanted her company.’
‘Yes, well, you can’t always have what you want.’
Emma had grinned at this. ‘Do you want to reconsider that statement, Dad?’
‘Entirely.’ But he too had smiled. ‘I must have been mad even to think it.’
He seemed in a better mood, courteous if distant with me and warmly affectionate towards Jess.
Although Jess and his father had never married, she was of course what was effectively his stepmother, the woman who had brought him up.
And it was clear he loved and liked her.
But then Jess was someone who was difficult for anyone to dislike. She was certainly being lovely to me.
‘Hey, wow, Alix, you look terrific!’ she exclaimed when I came into the salon wearing the blouse Nicole had given me teamed with a pair of wide-legged jeans which actually I didn’t much like because they make my legs look like the trunks of one of those frighteningly tall trees you get in Canada.
‘It’s the Sienna Miller look,’ Emma had informed Jess.
‘Is it? That’s a bit beyond me, darling. However, whatever look it is, it certainly works on Alix.’
‘I think Caroline was trying something similar on Christmas Day, but it didn’t quite come off on her, did it, Dad?’
Luc looked blank. ‘If you say so, dearest.’
‘I half expected Caroline to be here,’ Jess remarked to Luc. ‘Is she coming later?’
‘No. She’s popped up to Paris for a dinner this evening.’
‘Wow,’ Emma whistled, voicing my own thoughts, ‘how the other half live.’
I sat down next to Jess on the sofa, along with a mental vision of Caroline boarding a private jet, sitting back to chilled champagne and caviar while a steward licked her doubtless Louboutin boots.
It brought me back down to earth with a bump.
Who was I trying to kid? No matter how much Emma tried kindly to include me in the Mandeville family circle, this wasn’t my milieu.
It was her father’s and that of his super-rich fiancée who had popped nearly six hundred miles up to Paris just for dinner.
Presently, however, we ate, and it was surprisingly relaxed, like the type of evening I’d have at home when friends come round to eat.
There was some desultory conversation about President Trump – ‘He’s the rudest man ever,’ said Jess – and President Macron – ‘Why is everyone so bitchy about his wife?’
She was lightly amusing about Alphonse. ‘He absolutely refuses to sleep anywhere but with me,’ she complained in mock despair. ‘So, keep it quiet, but I now have a young man sharing my bed.’
Everyone laughed.
‘However, he certainly gets me out of the house. I’ve done more walking in the last couple of days than I have in years, which is not only very good for my aging bones but at this rate I shall soon be as slim as Brigitte Macron.
Yesterday we walked all the way up to the Chateau to put some flowers on your father’s grave, Luc. Have you been up there this trip?’
He shook his head. ‘Not yet. Emma and I thought we’d go tomorrow morning, early, because of her catching her flight after lunch.’
‘Your dad would have been so proud of you writing another book, you know. When does it come out?’
‘Easter, but don’t get excited because it won’t be anything like a bestseller. Unless you’re Simon Schama, academic texts never are.’
‘Yours should be,’ Emma declared stoutly. ‘They read like a good novel. In fact, yours is the only history book I’ve ever enjoyed.’
Luc cast his daughter a gently ironic smile. ‘Have you read any others?’
Emma blushed. ‘Perhaps not, but only because they’re so boring.’ She turned to me. ‘Have you read it, Alix – Dad’s first book?’
I replied I hadn’t but would like to, at which Luc frowned.
‘Don’t bore Alix with that, Emma.’
‘No, I’d like to read it,’ I repeated.
Emma promptly jumped to her feet. ‘Great. There’s a copy up in the gallery.
I’ll find it for you and put it on your bed, Alix.
It’s brilliant. It starts off with the story of a perfectly ordinary young woman during the French Revolution who suddenly does something so uncharacteristically reckless it ends in her death. ’
‘Charlotte Corday, presumably?’
‘Charlotte Corday,’ echoed Luc, looking at me in surprise. ‘How did you guess?’
I explained I had seen a play based on her life a few years ago. ‘She fascinated me after that, although I found her very sad.’
‘Sad? She was a murderer.’
‘But she murdered a creep,’ put in Jess. ‘Marat was disgusting. She did everyone a favour.’
Luc looked thoughtful but said nothing.
‘Dad dedicated the book to Mum,’ Emma continued chattily on her way out of the room.
Then she stopped in her tracks and turned back to us.
‘Do you know, it’s only just occurred to me, but that’s pretty weird, isn’t it?
Two young women not too far apart in age if centuries apart in history and both dying tragically because neither of them knew that what they were doing was so dangerous. ’
There followed a slightly uncomfortable pause after she had gone. Until Luc too suddenly sprang to his feet.
‘She knew what she was doing all right,’ he said quietly. ‘Therein lies the tragedy. She knew only too well.’
As he left the room, Jess and I looked at each other. I knew we did not have to ask which woman he was talking about.
When I got upstairs at the end of the evening, I found Emma had left the book for me as she had promised.
A glossy hardback, it looked slightly incongruous lying on my Red Room bed where you’d more expect to see one of those old tooled-leather tomes with the pages deckle-edged in faded gilt.
Picking it up, I looked at the cover: Knitting While the Heads Rolled.
Under this was a subtitle: Feminism and the French Revolution.
Then below that what seemed to be Luc’s full name: Jean-Luc Mandeville.
I turned it over. On the back was a black-and-white headshot of Luc looking younger but very serious, yet somehow with a seriousness that suggested he had thought the photograph required him to look serious rather than how he actually felt at the time.
I flicked it open to the inside back flyleaf. The author information was quite short and succinct.
Dr Jean-Luc Mandeville was born in France to a French father and English mother.
He gained a First Class degree in Modern European History from Brasenose College, Oxford followed by a doctorate in Feminism and the French Revolution from the Sorbonne.
Dr Mandeville lectures in Modern European History at the University of Warwick.
He is married to Esther Fielding, the celebrated rock climber, with whom he has a daughter.
Knitting While the Heads Rolled is Dr Mandeville’s first book.
I turned back to the imprint. It had been published the year before his wife died. And there on the dedication page sat, as Emma had said, her name. Quite simple, no frills; just two words: For Esther.
I sat down on the bed feeling puzzled. I knew when it came to the dead Esther, I could not deny that when Jess had told me about how she had died, I had experienced an immediate sense of shock that a woman with a child could do something so irresponsible.
However, this had made me annoyed with myself because I also knew only too well that nobody would ever contemplate thinking or saying the same thing about a man.
A man would be praised, lauded, made legendary by his bravery in taking the ultimate risk, despite that risk resulting in any child he had being left fatherless.
It now seemed that Luc thought or felt the same. When he had said Esther had known what she was doing, there had been a note not just of bitterness in his voice but also condemnation. It was as though he blamed her for the risk she had taken, as though he didn’t respect her.
I recalled the stuff Jules had told me, the stuff about Luc’s marriage to Esther being a failure, a sham perpetuated only for the sake of their child.
Why, then, had Luc dedicated his book to his wife, only a year before she died?
I’ve never written a book so know little of such things, but I do know you are not obliged to dedicate your work to someone.
It’s arguably an old-fashioned convention.
But if you do go in for it, you surely choose somebody you love or admire or at the very least respect?
Luc Mandeville did not seem to have respected Esther Fielding. Did that mean he did not love her?
I cleaned my face, got undressed and jumped into bed. I opened the book and started reading. Perhaps it would provide the answer.