Page 6 of A French Adventure
Vivienne laughed. ‘And some. I’m currently on the rooftop terrace that looks directly out over the Med. You’d love it here.’
‘I’m determined to try to come for at least a weekend, hopefully longer, towards the end of your stay,’ Natalie said. ‘Don’t want to stop the writer writing! Have you done anything about our French connection yet?’
‘Give me a chance, I’ve barely been here twenty-four hours.’
‘Sorry, but it’s exciting. Got to go. Got cakes in the oven and the timer has just buzzed. Talk again soon. Love you.’ And the line died.
Thoughtfully, Vivienne placed her phone on the table alongside the laptop. She knew with certainty that Jeremy had not given his mother the bombshell news of his affair since she’d left. If he had, Elizabeth would have rung her by now, placing the blame squarely at her feet for not being a good enough wife.
Vivienne opened the parasol before settling down underneath it in front of her laptop and bringing up the file titled ‘My French Connection’. It wasn’t a large file, consisting only of the two items she’d scanned in before leaving home. A black and white photograph and a photograph of a sealed envelope with something inside and a French name and address scrawled across it. The temptation to open the envelope had been strong but she’d resisted, deciding as it wasn’t addressed to her she had no business opening it, unless she failed in her search for the addressee. She’d brought the actual items with her in the hope that they would help in her search. They were still in her suitcase for safekeeping. So little information – would it be enough to help uncover a secret from the past? Vivienne sighed. She was here to work. Searching for answers to secrets from the past would have to wait a little longer.
She closed the file and brought up her email programme. She’d write that quick thank you to Cécile now before it got forgotten. She’d been so kind to her on the plane.
As the email whooshed off into cyberspace, Vivienne resolutely opened the document that contained her latest book. She needed to stop procrastinating and get to work. This morning she’d read through the chapters she’d already written, make a list of the things she needed to research and the places she needed to visit, and then sketch out a plan of action.
5
Her parents were still sleeping when Olivia crept out of the apartment early the next morning. She’d not made it past the entrées last night before deciding she definitely needed a drink to get through the rest of the evening. Standing out on the balcony with nibbles and a glass of non-alcoholic bubbly, she’d chatted to her mother’s new friends until Harry had claimed her attention and both sets of parents had moved away as if by tactical agreement. Her first impression of Harry proved to be only too correct. It wasn’t just that he was far too serious and seemed to have had a sense of humour bypass, but he also turned out to be a firm believer in mansplaining. Sat next to him at dinner, the final nail in the coffin as far as she was concerned was his presumptuous rudeness about her job.
‘I’m assuming you’re not in finance? You don’t look the type,’ he’d said, raising an eyebrow at her.
She was tempted to mention her BSc from Keble College, Oxford in Economics and Management but decided she couldn’t be bothered. He’d clearly decided she was a blonde airhead so she played along with it.
‘Goodness, no. Far too boring for me. You may have seen a pink London taxi driving around Antibes and occasionally Monaco? Olivia’s Flowers and Champagne Taxi. That’s me.’
Harry had given a considered nod. ‘Good to have a hobby that gives you some additional income, but it’s not a proper job, is it?’
Olivia had seen her father, who was seated opposite her, glance across the table and she’d picked up her empty wine glass. ‘Please.’
Smiling, her father had picked up the bottle of Château Margaux and poured her a glass. ‘Santé.’
Olivia had swallowed her murderous thoughts along with a large gulp of her wine and from then on had struggled to talk to Harry without being downright rude.
Following her mother out to the kitchen to help carry in the main course, she’d tried to forestall the criticism about her behaviour she knew Felicity would launch into the moment they were alone by saying, ‘Maxine sends her love and apologies. Says it’s far too long since she saw you both. I think she’s planning a lunch with you soon.’
‘I’ll give her a ring in the week and we’ll arrange something,’ her mother had replied. ‘Could you please try a little harder to be polite to Harry? He is a guest here. I thought you and he might?—’
‘Please don’t finish that sentence,’ Olivia had interrupted. ‘You have to stop this matchmaking, because a) I’m not currently looking for a husband, I’m happy on my own. And b) your idea of a suitable husband for me is miles away from the kind of man I like.’
‘Well, you seem unable to find a suitable man yourself,’ her mother had snapped back. ‘Are you still seeing that deckhand?’
Olivia had smothered a sigh. Monaco had briefly been the home port for the yacht James was a senior deckhand on and early on in their relationship she’d driven over to meet him afew times of an evening. On one of those occasions, not wanting her mother to hear from friends that she’d been in town and not called in, she’d taken James home to meet her parents. Her father and he had got on at that initial meeting, mainly because of their common interest in F1, but her mother had grilled James about his prospects before deciding he wasn’t good enough for her daughter. It was a meeting that Olivia would rather forget and didn’t plan to repeat in the near future. She knew deep down that James was not a keeper, but he was good company and she needed her mother to realise she was a big girl now and would make her own decisions and mistakes.
‘Yes, I’m still seeing him. He’s fun and definitely not like Mr Up Himself out there.’
‘Here, you take these plates in and then come back for the meat,’ her mother had said, thrusting six warm dinner plates at her. ‘I blame Daphne for your current attitude. Ever since she left you that silly pink taxi and the villa, you’ve changed.’
Taking the plates, Olivia had opened her mouth to protest that it wasn’t a silly pink taxi but a flourishing floristry business, but closed it again. It had not been the time to argue with her mother.
Now as she drove up out of Monaco and approached the A8 in the early-morning light, Olivia thought about her mother’s words – had she changed that much since the unexpected inheritance from Aunt Daphne, her godmother? It had never occurred to her that her mother’s widowed and childless older sister would leave everything she possessed to her. If she’d given it even a moment’s thought, she would have assumed her mother would have been the beneficiary of her sister’s will. But it was an inheritance she, Olivia, would be eternally grateful for. It had given her the independence she’d started to crave: the freedom to choose how she lived her life, where she lived and, importantly, the freedom to be herself.
She’d known from an early age that she wanted to make her own income, not to be dependent on her parents, who’d given her the best possible start in life, for which she would be forever grateful. She knew she was lucky at twenty-seven to have been able to jump off the financial services rat race roundabout of living to work and to allow the French mantra absorbed in to her DNA as she grew up, of simply working to live a good life, run free.
Returning to live in France as an independent woman after university and five years in England was the first big change that Daphne’s inheritance had given her. The second change was learning to be her own boss. It had been a steep learning curve, but now she couldn’t imagine working for anyone else ever again. She loved that she had total responsibility for everything to do with the business. It was up to her, no one else, to make it a success.
Daphne had been a popular woman and, as her niece, Olivia had always been made to feel welcome when she’d helped out with flower arrangements and bouquets at weekends and during school holidays. When she’d inherited the business, she’d realised that that had been Daphne’s plan all along. Olivia had signed up for an intense course of floristry, she’d worked for free at the Cours Saleya flower market in Nice for some more real hands-on experience. She’d studied every video she could find online about the art of flower arranging: wedding flowers, buttonholes, large urn arrangements, wreath making, vase arrangements, posies, bouquets. Several of Daphne’s customers had stayed loyal, giving her a base to build on, and these days she supplied flowers for a variety of events, as well as selling in Antibes market and supplying several of the luxury super yachts.
Despite her mother saying it was the wrong thing for her to be doing, Olivia loved the life she lived now. It was, she knew, an intrinsically happy life because flowers were so universally lovedand people invariably smiled at her and the pink taxi when they saw her out and about.
