Page 53 of Summer at the Château
‘You always did wear ridiculously high heels.’ As Pixie altered her pace marginally, Brigitte tried to catch her breath enough to keep up.
‘Justine, she say this was a beautiful place. She adores living here.’
Pixie didn’t answer. Reaching the bench by the willow tree, she sat down and looked at Brigitte. ‘Right, I’m waiting. Start talking.’
Brigitte sat down and took several deep breaths. ‘First, Justine didn’t mention that you were living ’ere for the summer. If I’d known, I promise you I wouldn’t ’ave turned up like this causing a scene.’
‘There would have been a scene whenever you came.’
‘That’s probably true.’
‘So why now? Why not years ago? When Justine was born.’
‘Because we were friends? Because I knew how ’urt you would be. Because… Oh, lots of reasons, including the fact that I was too ashamed to tell you at the time.’
‘Ashamed that you’d had an affair with my husband or ashamed you were pregnant?’
‘I didn’t ’ave an affair with Frank.’
‘But you obviously slept with him.’
Brigitte nodded. ‘Remember your last IVF attempt? Of course you do. You talked to me about how if it failed, you and Frank ‘ad both agreed to accept that you weren’t meant to have a baby and you’d both put it behind you and get on with your lives as a couple. I ’ave the memory of you crying for days when it did fail and it was several months before you resigned yourself to the knowledge you would never have a child.’
‘It was so hard,’ Pixie whispered. ‘I’d longed to be a mother, to have a family, to say I was devastated when I had to accept it would never happen is to understate my feelings. At the time I felt like giving up, that I didn’t have anything to live for.’
‘You had Frank. A man who was also suffering, but his main concern was for you. He came to see me a few times, asking me to try and ’elp you and did I think there was anything more he could do. One evening, he broke down, said you’d screamed at him when he’d suggested maybe some time away together would ’elp you both to heal. That night, he said he didn’t know what to do, nothing seemed to be right.’
‘I screamed at him a lot, I was a regular fishwife at the time,’ Pixie said. ‘I remember him suggesting we got away from it all, had a long holiday. I couldn’t believe how he felt a holiday would cure anything.’
Brigitte hesitated. ‘The evening when he broke down he was already in a terrible state when he arrived on my doorstep asking if he could stay. He was my friend too, so of course I said he could. I made up the bed in the spare room. In the end we both slept there. That was the night Justine was conceived. It was also the one and only night I slept with Frank. I never set out to sleep with him.’
‘Not an affair then – a one-night stand.’
‘Frank rang me the next day to apologise. Said he wasn’t in the ’abit of sleeping with his wife’s friends and certainly not her best friend. He also said he planned on telling you, he felt so guilty.’ Brigitte smiled ruefully. ‘Took me some time to talk him out of that, but eventually he agreed not to tell you. On a “need-to-know basis”, I didn’t think it was fair to burden you with the knowledge. I’d ’ad a couple of glasses of wine before he arrived that evening and Frank also drowned ’is sorrows with a couple of glasses. We didn’t love each other, it had just been sex between two consenting adults, and we both knew the chances of it happening again were nil. It ’appened once and once only.’
‘Did you think of telling him when you discovered you were pregnant?’
‘No, not at first. To find myself pregnant in my late thirties was unexpected but thrilling. Like you I’d spent most of my adult life longing for a baby but had never met anyone to settle down with. Remember, I’m a few years older than you – I admit to three, no more – and the ticking of my biological clock was getting fainter. The thought that I was actually ’aving a baby blew my mind. There was no way on this earth that I would terminate the pregnancy, which left me with few choices.’ Brigitte took a deep breath. ‘I could tell Frank and you and see if you wanted to adopt the baby when it was born. Two big problems with that. I didn’t know how you would react to the news. You might ’ave kicked Frank out for being unfaithful and I would have broken up a good marriage and still been left ’olding the baby. Secondly, deep down, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to part with a baby I’d given birth to. So I decided the easiest thing by far would be for me to keep the baby, disappear out of your life without saying anything and become a single mum. Selfish in one way, but I still think it was the right thing for me to do.’
‘I never really understood why you disappeared the way you did. One moment you and I were meeting up for lunch every week and the next you’d vanished without a word. Even Frank was surprised when HR told everyone in the office you’d returned to France because of a family emergency.’
‘Well, technically it was a family emergency – mine. I decided it was better to go quickly rather than prolong things. Also, I couldn’t face seeing you because a, you would be upset that I was pregnant so easily while you kept failing, and b, you would quiz me as to who the father was and I wouldn’t be able to tell you.’
‘So you ran away with your sordid guilty secret.’
Brigitte pulled a face. ‘You could say that, and I guess from your point of view it was sordid, but it never felt like that to me. I really felt unexpectedly blessed to being ’aving a baby. Oh look,’ Brigitte pointed to the far edge of the lake. ‘There’s a heron, isn’t he beautiful?’
The two of them watched the large bird for a minute before he slowly took off and flew gracefully away, then Pixie turned to look at Brigitte.
‘Justine tells me Frank came to see you in St Malo after she’d contacted him.’
‘Did she also tell you how furious he was with me for not telling him I was pregnant? I warned Justine before she contacted him that it wasn’t all about her, that other people’s emotions were involved and there was more at stake than first appeared.’
‘I still don’t understand why Frank didn’t tell me about the château viager scheme finishing or confide in me about letting Justine and Ferdie live in the cottage. I thought we were so secure in our marriage and told each other everything.’
Brigitte looked at her. ‘Even all these years later he was terrified of losing you when you heard about Justine. Keeping quiet about Justine once he’d learnt of her existence was so hard for him. He wanted to tell you but was scared of the consequences. He knew that initially you’d be hurt, and furious with him, not to mention with me, and he desperately hoped that when you did meet Justine you would be forgiving enough to accept her as part of your family. He made both me and Justine promise not to tell you the truth until he was ready and felt the time was right.
‘Which would have been when?’ Pixie’s voice was curt. ‘Justine says she made contact with him four years ago and came to live here in the last fourteen months. Surely in all that time he could have found a way to tell me?’
