The Last Will And Testament Of Daphné Le Marche. Kate Forster
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who comforted Chantal when the telegram arrived informing them that Daphné’s father had died.
It was Max who suggested goats to Chantal, and Anna who taught Chantal how to milk them and make the soap. The oil they needed was hard to come by at the end of the war, so they improvised with lard but it worked, and with some sweet lavender from Chantal’s own garden, they had something she could sell on the side of road.
‘Anna, Anna,’ Max cried up the slim staircase, and Daphné looked around the store.
Dark and dreary, filled with a few cabinets of stock, and a curtain behind to separate the back room from the store, Daphné thought this was no place she would want to buy jewellery, yet she knew Max’s work and it was beautiful.
‘How is the business?’ she asked when Max turned from the stairwell.
‘You know, hard, I do what I can with what I have,’ he answered vaguely, but Daphné read his face and knew the answer.
Her thoughts were pushed aside when Anna came down the stairs in a rush and held Daphné for a long time, occasionally pulling away to touch her face.
‘And Maman?’ she asked of Chantal, who was Anna’s mother figure as her own mother had never been heard of after the invasion of Poland.
‘She is fine, worried about me and you and if the world is going to keep turning,’ laughed Daphné.
‘Of course, she is a mother,’ said Anna and her hands gestured to her children.
Daphné had met them once when they were younger, but now she saw a smaller version of Anna and Max, with the same proud face of their mother and the ingenious twinkle in their eye from their father.
‘Peter, Marina, this is Daphné,’ said Anna gently to the boy and girl who stepped forward politely to shake Daphné’s hand.
Upstairs, Anna had created a makeshift bed on the sagging sofa, but it was warm and clean and much more appealing than the shop.
The children had been sent outside to play, and Anna warmed up some vegetable and barley soup and placed it in front of Daphné with a large chunk of rye bread.
She ate it hungrily, savouring the flavours of the sour bread and the sweet broth.
‘How is the business?’ she asked as she dipped the bread into the soup.
Anna shrugged. ‘It’s hard,’ she said and Daphné thought she looked older than her thirty years.
As Daphné wiped the remnants of soup up with her last piece of bread, she thought about the store.
‘It needs to be lighter,’ she said. ‘To show of Max’s work.’
‘But there is no way,’ said Anna. ‘The only light is from the front windows, and the street is so closed in.’
‘Then you must paint it,’ said Daphné, thinking of the light that rose over the horizon on the farm.
‘Paint it? What colour?’ asked Anna, her face bewildered.
Daphné looked around at the utilitarian space. Anna didn’t have the time or money to think beyond the practical and everyday survival. ‘Why?’
Daphné picked up her bowl and plate and took them to the small tin tub that Anna used as a sink and put them in the water to soak.
‘Blush,’ she said, ‘The colour of make-up powder you see in the magazine.’
She took went to her bag and took out a magazine, flicking to a page and finding an advertisement, showing Anna.
It was a drawing of a woman holding a glass of pink champagne, her face beautifully contoured in shades of pink.
‘Pink lightens the skin, it takes away the age lines,’ read Daphné and she looked up at Anna and smiled. ‘And it’s pretty,’ she said.
‘What sort of pink?’ asked Anna suspiciously.
‘The sort of pink you see in a woman’s face when she’s happy, when she’s been outside in the sun, but she’s not sunburned or hot, she’s warm, inside and out,’ said Daphné thinking of Chantal. Her mind wandered as she kept speaking. ‘The rose in the sky at the end of the day, that looks like old paintings of heaven.’
Anna smiled and touched Daphné’s face. ‘You mean the afterglow,’ she said.
‘Is that what it’s called?’ asked Daphné, surprised there was a name for what she was describing.
‘It’s also the colour in a woman’s face when she falls in love,’ said Anna with a smile and Daphné bit her lip in anticipation. She was ready to fall in love, have an adventure, and to bathe in the afterglow of the world.
But first a job, she thought, as she washed her hands and combed her hair, and applied a little goat’s cream to her face.
‘I am off to find work,’ she said to Anna and, after picking up her bag, she headed out the door, waving to Max as she left the shop.
Paris wasn’t so hard to navigate. She and her mother had been there before, but this was her first time alone.
She paused and thought out the arrondissements in her head and got her bearings. She needed to cross the river to get to Montparnasse, where the cafés were. She could become a waitress, she thought, as she walked with purpose across the bridge and through Saint-Germain.
Jazz musicians busked on the streets, and tourists wandered with cameras about their necks. American accents mingled with the French and Daphné wondered why on earth she thought she could have stayed in the village. Paris was the only place for her, she could feel it in her soul, and she started her job-hunting in earnest.
Robert
Paris never looked more beautiful than in the autumn, Robert Le Marche decided as he drove under a golden canopy of magnificent beech trees.
Everyone always went on about spring in Paris, but autumn was sublime, with the leaves changing and people looking so chic in their coats and boots.
Robert parked his navy Bugatti on rue de Grenelle and jumped out as two attractive women walked towards him. Just as they passed, he pressed the key to lock the car, making them aware that the machine was his.
The women strolled by in deep conversation, ignoring Robert and his car, much to his chagrin. He had twisted his back getting out of the car gracefully and all for nothing, he thought, cursing the women but not the car that was as low to the ground as a snake on roller skates.
He pressed the security code next to the ornate iron gates and then pushed them open and walked inside, entering the private garden. He ignored the last flush of melon-coloured tea roses that stood proudly in their immaculate beds and an espaliered orange tree ran across the ancient brick wall, bearing the last of the fruit while orange and white poppies waved in the sun.
He could never understand his mother’s obsession with the colour orange. She was like Monet, always chasing the light, looking for that ‘dernières lueurs’.
He had stopped listening to her ramblings of the search when he was a boy, but Henri had always listened, even encouraging the pursuit, delivering hand-dyed tangerine silk woven with gold thread from Varanasi, amber beads from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, even a jar of antique buttons in her favourite shades of apricot and candlelight peach from the Camden Markets.
Henri was always such a sycophant, he thought, as he put the key in the lock of the front door and pushed it open.
The marble foyer and wrought iron staircase met him and he sighed, as he looked upstairs. Why his mother wouldn’t get an elevator installed in the place he could never understand. She had the money, but she refused, claiming it was sacrilegious to install such