Page 51 of A French Inheritance
‘We’ve been lucky,’ Bruno said. ‘The truly hard frost reached as far down as the Languedoc department.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘We wait and we watch for secondary budding on these two rows and hope for a good summer and they catch up with the rest.’
‘What about the frosted shoots and leaves?’
‘They’ll turn brown in the sun and drop off eventually,’ Bruno answered.
‘We’d better go and check the avocados,’ Adam said. ‘You want to come up to the farm for breakfast in about half an hour?’
‘Thanks. I’ll see you then.’ And Bruno turned his attention back to the vines.
Adam and Lucy walked quickly across to the avocado plants and both heaved sighs of relief as they moved between the rows and saw they too had thankfully survived the frost.
‘I’ll add a short video of these onto the vine one, showing how well the avocados have survived,’ Lucy said.
* * *
Briony woke early on Easter Monday and lay in bed half listening to the dawn chorus, cocooned with her own thoughts under the duvet. Yesterday morning with Elliot before and after he’d hugged the tree was uppermost in her mind. Had she done the right thing in not hugging him? She pushed her doubts away and consoled herself with the thought that Elliot actually asking her for a hug was a sign that their friendship was becoming stronger.
As the birds’ chorus became quieter Briony got up and made for the bathroom. After breakfast, she was going to do some research on her laptop and then start to formulate a proper plan for setting up the brocante.
Jeannie was already downstairs with the coffee set up and bread sliced ready for the toaster.
Sitting out on the terrace after breakfast, Briony opened her laptop. ‘I’m going to see if I can find out who this EM is; she was clearly important to Great-granny. Not got a lot of information to go on but…’ she shrugged. ‘It’s worth a try.’
Briony typed the name Elsa plus several of the names Marie-Louise had mentioned in her journal. But Google kept showing ‘no results’. After half a dozen failed attempts, Briony gave a frustrated sigh.
‘No luck?’ Jeannie said.
Briony shook her head. Her hands hovered over the keyboard trying to remember how Yann had described the woman. As they came back to her she typed them in.
Elsa + 20th century celebrity + American + arranged parties + French Riviera + the nineteen thirties.
Anticipating the ‘no results’ answer again, she pressed enter for one last try.
But a second later she had a result. There was a name and photos of a woman called Elsa Maxwell, with several links to information about her on the screen. Briony sat back and looked at the pictures. Was this her great-granny Marie-Louise’s friend Elsa?
When she clicked on one of the links and read that Elsa Maxwell had lived with a friend in a small Provençal farmhouse in the village of Auribeau-sur-Siagne in the countryside behind Cannes, Briony felt her excitement rising. That village was just a kilometre or two away. This had to be the woman with the initials EM that Marie-Louise had been friends with. Even if this unprepossessing woman looked nothing like the image of her Briony had visualised in her mind.
Most sites she clicked on the links to, described Elsa Maxwell as an ‘American gossip columnist, author, radio personality and a professional hostess famed for lavish parties for royalty and high-society figures of the time’. ‘Hostess with the mostess’ was a frequent description. Together with the much-used old-fashioned phrase ‘closet lesbian’.
So was that the reason Albert had been so adamant that Elsa wasn’t a respectable woman and Marie-Louise was not to be seen with her? Attitudes amongst the people he knew and lived amongst were so different in those days. Elsa might mix with, and be accepted by, the wealthy, royalty and well-known figures of the twentieth century, but Albert, from all accounts, was a parochial product of the nineteenth century and would have found it hard to accept the new morales of a world changed by the Great War.
Briony saved the original page with all its links as Jeannie put a cup of coffee in front of her. ‘Mum, I think I’ve found our mysterious EM,’ and she pushed the laptop across to Jeannie.
After Jeannie had looked at several of the links, she agreed with Briony. ‘Poor Marie-Louise.’
Briony nodded. ‘At least we know now why Great-granddad Albert was so anti her friendship with Elsa, but we still do not know why Great-granny stopped painting. And that’s one mystery I don’t think we’ll ever solve.’
Briony closed the page down and opened a new file.
‘Right. Time to start planning my new business. Which basically involves setting the unit up with some stock, creating a stock list, doing an advert, painting the parrot cage, planting up the handcart, deciding on a name and finding a signwriter. All in just a few weeks.’
‘Yann is taking me out for dinner this evening. He’s booked a table at the Auberge in Cannes. Honestly I seem to have done nothing but eat since I got back, but I’m all yours for the day,’ Jeannie said.
‘I was hoping you would say that. Fancy working up at the unit with me today? I know it’s a holiday, but I also know time from now until the day I open will fly past. We can put up the trestle tables from the garage and see where they fit best. Need to find some cloths to cover them. And then maybe start going through the boxes I took up from the garage and decide what to sell, what to keep and what to throw.’
