Page 21 of Summer at the Château
‘Thanks. I feel in need of this,’ Pixie said before taking a gulp.
‘How did she react?’ Gwen asked.
‘She was in a terrible state before I got there. I told her about Frank, but I couldn’t tell her I needed her to leave,’ Pixie said, sinking down onto a chair before taking another large gulp of her drink, hoping it would calm her down. ‘Didn’t feel I could hit her with that news straight away, the state she was in.’
‘There will be time enough for that,’ Gwen said.
‘She’s got a child. A boy. He’s three – nearly four.’ Pixie paused. ‘She also said she’d known Frank for about four years.’
‘Oh.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Doesn’t necessarily follow,’ Gwen said, her voice trailing away.
‘No, but it would explain his behaviour over the château and letting her live in the cottage.’
‘Did you learn anything else?’
Pixie shook her head. ‘No. She had to dash off to collect her son – oh, his name is Ferdie – before we got any deeper into the whys and wherefores of the conversation.’
The two of them sat in silence, each deep in their own thoughts for several moments.
‘So, while she knows about Frank, we know nothing more about her, apart from the fact she has a child,’ Pixie said, before draining her glass and placing it on the table. ‘But whatever the truth turns out to be it doesn’t change the fact that I’m selling the château in the autumn and she has to leave.’ She stood up.
Gwen looked at her. ‘Aren’t you going to eat anything?’
‘I’m not really hungry. I’ll clear the table and then we need to start settling in. Tomorrow we’ll need to do a supermarket shop for the weekend. It’s Labour Day on Saturday, May the first, so the shops will be closed, with only the boulangerie open for a short time in the morning.’
‘Does Fern know we’re back?’
Pixie nodded. ‘Yes, We’re off out on Saturday evening for supper at the auberge. But now unpacking calls.’
Once in her bedroom, Pixie opened the first of her cases and started to place things in drawers and on shelves. Opening the carved doors of the large Breton armoire, she winced as she saw Frank’s new clothes still hanging there. She’d forgotten to pack them up ready to be donated somewhere. They’d just have to stay there for now and she pushed them to the far end of the rail.
The first suitcase emptied, she zipped it up, pushed it under the bed out of the way and reached for the second one. The urn with Frank’s ashes had been an impulsive last-minute addition to this case and was one of the first two things she saw as she undid the buckles and straps on the old-fashioned case. She’d had some absurd notion that she couldn’t leave him behind, that they had to spend the summer at the château together. She picked up the silver framed photo of Frank that was the first thing she saw every morning when she woke up and placed it on the bedside table. Returning to the case, she held the urn carefully while looking around for inspiration as to where to put it, him, while she decided where to scatter them. She certainly didn’t want them in full view, forcing her to look at them every day. A photo was one thing, a happy reminder, ashes were another thing altogether.
‘If you weren’t already dead, Frank Sampson, I could cheerfully murder you right this minute. Why didn’t you tell me what was going on – surely after all our years together I deserved that? Right, you’re going in the armoire for now. Out of sight, out of mind, until I decide what to do with you.’
And she marched back over to the armoire. Kneeling down, she placed the urn in the far corner on the floor underneath Frank’s clothes, before standing up and slamming the door shut.
16
The next two days were busy ones for Pixie and Gwen. A visit to the small hypermarket in Carhaix took care of several hours on their first full day. They stocked up not only on food and wine, Pixie also bought candles, cushions and a couple of throws which, together with the things she’d brought from England, she hoped would turn the château into a home from home for the summer.
Pixie smiled as she saw a large display of the flowers known as ‘the friendship flower’ in France, muguets, in the gardening and plant section of the hypermarket.
‘I’d forgotten about the tradition of giving these lily of the valley flowers on May Day,’ she said, placing half a dozen pots on top of the shopping in the loaded trolley. ‘We can take a couple to Fern and Scott tomorrow and toast King Charles IX for starting the annual gesture way back when.’
Back at the château, Gwen took charge of putting the food away in the kitchen, while Pixie carried the rest of the shopping in, placing most of it in the sitting room where the television was. It was a lovely room, although the dark oak panelling and the polished wooden parquet floor, combined with the dark leather furniture, did give it a somewhat sombre feeling. By the time Pixie had placed her cream throws over the settees, candles on the mantlepiece and a cream rug on the floor in front of the wood burner, the ambience of the room had become more welcoming.
As a final touch, she put three pots of muguets together in a large ornamental china bowl she found in a cupboard and placed it on the low carved wooden table in front of one of the settees. The perfume they gave off was wonderful and she bent and sniffed it appreciatively.
From time to time, as she passed one of the tall windows, she glanced across at the cottage. Justine’s car was parked to one side, but there was no sign of her or her son. Part of Pixie wanted to go over and have the conversation she’d not managed the day before faced with Justine’s obvious distress over Frank. Justine needed to be told that the château was going up for sale at the end of summer, giving her no alternative but to start looking for somewhere else in the next few weeks. If she gave her enough time to find somewhere else, Pixie couldn’t be accused of evicting the two of them in a fit of spite, which, for some reason, made her feel better.
There was also that other conversation she wanted to have with Justine, starting with the question that she’d failed to answer yesterday – ‘How well did you know my husband?’ Which would lead on to the next, inevitable one, ‘Is he Ferdie’s father?’ If the answer to that second all-important question was what she’d started to suspect, Pixie hadthatquestion to ask herself – what was she going to do about it? Acknowledge or deny? Accept or reject?
The thought of having that conversation, though, filled her with dread. Her life had changed so much in the last few months and something deep inside told her once she lifted the lid on this particular Pandora’s box, life would be in free fall once again. And right this moment Pixie wasn’t sure whether she could cope with whatever Justine had to tell her. Perhaps it would be better to take Jean-Yves up on his offer to write a formal letter asking her to vacate the cottage as soon as possible. In the meantime, she intended to avoid the cottage and its occupants as much as possible.
