Page 46 of The Bookshop Ladies

‘I’m so sorry. Are you okay? You’ve no idea how many times I wanted to tell you but not like this. I never wanted to do it like this. I know, it’s the worst possible timing and I should have told you years ago and…’

‘Yves Bachand is my father? That’s what you’re telling me…’ Robyn’s head was spinning, she couldn’t think. It was shock. She was vaguely aware; this was a state of shock. It would pass, but the reality was that everything she’d known about her family, about Joy, and more than that about herself had just been tossed out and it felt as if one half of her had been emptied in the process.

It didn’t feel as if she’d slept a wink all night, but she must have dropped off at some point because Robyn woke early the following morning. It was too early to go into work and convince herself she could actually do anything close to a normal day. Instead she grabbed her tracksuit bottoms and an old sweatshirt and stole out quietly to walk along the beach and maybe get her thoughts straight for the day ahead.

It was an auburn pink morning, one of those rare occasions where the sky gave the sea a run for its money as to which was most breathtaking. She remembered that saying about sailors and skies and mornings and warnings and she shook it off as her own ominous mood. Last night had been an avalanche of emotions. This morning she felt as if she was being catapulted across the whole range from shock to sadness. It was a strange thing, a deep well of sadness had opened up within her and she wasn’t sure what it was she was mourning. She hadn’t lost a father as such, just the idea of one she’d always believed she’d never know. Yves Bachand was her biological father. Perhaps if he’d had the chance he might have loved her? There was no right or wrong in where she found herself now, only the idea that maybe some opportunity had been missed.

As to Joy, she really had no idea what to make of her. Was she as genuine as Robyn had believed from the start? Or was there some more sinister reason for her turning up in Ballycove and helping out in the bookshop? She remembered the painting, standing on the floor of the flat. Yves Bachand had wanted her to have it. This nugget only came back to Robyn as she came to the estuary, where the river flooded towards the sea. It was time to turn back.

There was so much to take in. The truth that had tied up so much of her mother’s talent had poured out of her. Into the early hours of the morning, Fern talked about Yves Bachand as if he’d just stepped from the room only five minutes earlier. And he would be proud of her, isn’t that what her mother had said last night, he would be very proud of her. Somehow, all of it, although a shock, felt as if it was absolutely right to Robyn – she couldn’t explain it. It felt as if some missing piece of her life had just been slotted into place and she felt strangely more complete than she ever had before.

Shehadto call into Joy at the flat before she opened up the shop for the day. She just had to. She would let herself in through the bakery and knock on Joy’s door. Joy usually ate breakfast outside the bakery, coffee and croissants, so French. It was too early for that yet.

Leo nodded to her as she pushed through the side door leading to the flats upstairs. Robyn tiptoed, wanting to avoid disturbing Albie. She tapped lightly, twice on the door. ‘Joy, it’s me,’ she whispered as loudly as she dared. There wasn’t a sound to be heard and she wondered if perhaps Joy had packed up all her belongings overnight and raced back to Paris. ‘Joy, it’s me, open up, please, we need to talk.’ She listened for a while, actually straining to hear even a creak or the whisper of the curtains in the wind through the open windows.

‘Robyn.’ Joy pulled the door open so quickly that Robyn gasped in surprise. She stared at the woman standing opposite her, hardly recognisable as the elegant Joy Blackwood she had come to know so well in the shop.

‘Can I come in?’ she asked, but Joy was already standing back to admit her. ‘I just wanted to…’ she looked around the flat.

Robyn was right, or almost right. Joy had started to pack. Her clothes were neatly folded on the table, her suitcase was open on the floor, with some items already stacked up carefully. Her elegant cream leather handbag was standing open on the coffee table and her passport was peeking out of it. There was a half-finished bottle of wine standing on the kitchen table next to it and a glass which had been started and discarded the previous evening. ‘A late night for you too, I see…’ she said.

‘I’m so sorry, about the way you found out. I should have told you when I arrived, but…’ Joy stopped because perhaps they both knew thatshould haveswere a rabbit hole it might be impossible to escape.She shouldn’t have taken the job in the shop. She shouldn’t have pretended to be anything but who she was. She shouldn’t have come here at all perhaps?

But standing here before her, listening to what she should have done or shouldn’t have done, only softened Robyn’s heart. She remembered clearly that first day, seeing Joy at the shop door and then how she’d walked away. She remembered Joy had not asked for a job, but that she herself had talked her into it.

‘Look, I’m not sure I understand anything of what happened last night, but the more I think about it all, I can see it was probably a hard thing to say that first day.’ She stopped for a moment, thinking back again to the first time they met. ‘And, I did slightly railroad you into taking the job in the bookshop.’

Robyn reached out and touched Joy’s arm. It wasn’t what she had planned to say, but those words had been rehearsed for a woman in a pristine suit and high heels, with her hair perfectly arranged and never a smudge of mascara astray or a speck of lipstick on her teeth. This woman, Joy Blackwood, with eyes red from crying, was a very different person. Suddenly it hit Robyn – Joy had just lost her husband. She was grieving and trying to come to terms not just with his death, but maybe with his life as well.

‘You have to believe me, I never knew about you,’ Joy said later, as they sat at the table with cups of untouched tea cooling between them. ‘I mean, I suspected something had happened with Fern, I’m not sure why… but after I came back from the States, it was as if there was something broken between us. For a while, I put it down to our grief – we had lost our baby. We were both distraught, but maybe in my heart, I always felt it was something more. And then, Fern just disappeared from his client list overnight. It seemed one moment, all he could talk about was this unique talent and then it was as if she had never existed. As time passed, it faded and, one day, I realised I didn’t feel it any more, this gap, this fissure in our relationship.’

‘Last night, when we left here, my mother said they weren’t in love with each other..’ That was true, Fern had given only one reason why she hadn’t told the truth about Robyn’s father and that was the idea that it would hurt the woman he had been married to. Her mother hadn’t loved him, not enough to do that to an innocent bystander.

‘I always believed he loved me, but then when he told me about you, the night he died… it turned everything over again.’ Joy sounded raw, as if the pain of grief and betrayal had haunted her for a very long time.

‘It was only one night. One night when he was grieving and… there was never a relationship as such, it wasn’t that he set out to betray you.’

‘Ah, perhaps he hadn’t meant to betray me, but he did and the fact that he hid so much for years just makes it all even worse.’ Joy looked towards the window. Suddenly her expression changed, it was neither sad nor hurt, but rather, Robyn thought she would describe it as stoic. ‘You know, what they say about Frenchmen and affairs?’ she scrunched up her shoulders, ‘it’s not true. No one marries with the expectation that their husband will be unfaithful. No one likes it when it happens.’

‘I’m so sorry and if it means anything, I think my mother always regretted it. I mean…’ Robyn tried hard to think of a way to say it so she managed to capture how Fern had put it. ‘She was glad to have me, but she was sorry, not so much because of what had happened, but because of you… she always felt guilty about that.’

‘Such a waste of time,’ Joy shook her head. ‘Guilt, it doesn’t do me any good now and it won’t have done your mother any favours.’

‘Maybe not, but there it is.’ She stopped, looked at Joy, the night had wreaked havoc with every part of her appearance. ‘You know, she never told him she was pregnant, he only found out by accident…’

‘But he would have known, I mean, you’re so like him.’

‘No. We ran into him one day, apparently. It was a total fluke. She never wanted to create any trouble between you.’

‘She is so much better than I gave her credit for all those years ago,’ Joy said. But Robyn wasn’t so sure. It was one thing coming here and defending Fern to Joy, but quite another to understand how her mother could have lied to her for her whole life about who she really was. A run along the beach wasn’t going to sort that one out so easily.

‘She is.’ Robyn stopped. She wasn’t sure what else there was to say and found herself looking around the apartment. Everything was so tidy; another hour and perhaps she’d have arrived only to find the scent of Joy’s perfume on the air. ‘I think, if it wasn’t too weird, you’d like each other.’

‘I actually really did like her, but I know that the feeling is no longer mutual. As they say,in another life, well, who knows? We might have been friends.’ She shrugged. ‘But we’re too many actors on the same stage here, the legacy from the past is too huge. Maybe if Yves had known or if he’d told me sooner then…’

‘No. I mean, yes, she was surprised.’ Robyn stopped. ‘I don’t think she hates you, okay, she was shocked to realise that you were Yves’s wife, but she’s… got a lot on her mind at the moment.’ And that was probably the biggest understatement she could manage. ‘Her life, well, things are not easy for her at the moment.’

‘She told me about Luc, she deserves better.’

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