A Hidden Life (24 page)

‘Nonsense, not giving up yet. She's old. Perhaps it takes her a long time to get here from wherever she is.'

‘
Oui?'
Lou was startled to see the door opening. A woman peered out at them. She wasn't young, but she was nowhere near eighty. Not Mme Franchard, then.

‘Er …' Lou's French, such as it was, had run away to a very distant corner of her brain. Where were the words when you needed them?
‘Nous cherchons pour
 …' No, wrong. Wrong. Chercher
means to look for so you don't need ‘for' as well.
The voice of Miss O'Callaghan, her French teacher at school, came back to her briefly and Lou pulled herself together. ‘
Nous cherchons Mme Franchard. Je suis
 … (no!)
je pense que je suis la grande-nièce
(was that right? Too bad if not)
de Mme Franchard. Nous sommes de la même famille.'

Lou smiled, quite pleased with her effort, and the woman still holding the door smiled back.

‘Ah, c'est vrai? C'est tout à fait étonnant. Elle m'a toujours dit
 …' Lou listened to a long speech of which she understood very little, but managed to work out that Mme Franchard had told this woman that she had no family – that was the astonishing thing. So who was this woman? Lou took a deep breath and wished her father could help her, but no, he was standing by, looking pleasant and respectable and that was it. She'd have to do it.

‘Est-ce que c'est possible de parler avec Mme Franchard? Est-ce qu'elle est ici? Dans cette maison?'

Not exactly Voltaire but she'd made it clear that she wanted to talk to Mme Franchard and asked whether she was here. Lou didn't want to get into dying. She knew the word for ‘death'
(la mort)
and the infinitive
(mourir:
to die) but didn't fancy tackling stuff like tenses. Was it the Japanese who only had a present tense? Amazingly sensible.

Out of the stream that emerged in reply to her question, Lou grasped two things. The first was that this person was a concierge, a kind of caretaker. Her name was Solange Richoux and yes, Mme Franchard did indeed live here. Solange held the door wide open with an air of triumph and led them across a kind of inner courtyard to another door which had a small brass card-holder next to it and on the card, in faded brown ink, Lou read the name:
Madame Manon
Franchard.
Solange had taken a bunch of keys out of her overall pocket and was about to open the door when she turned suddenly and said, in broken English for some reason – maybe what she had to tell them was so important she couldn't leave anything to chance – ‘She is antique, Mme Franchard. She has more than eighty years. I go in first. I tell. She does not hear so good.'

‘Oh, yes,' said Lou. ‘That's a very good idea.
Bonne idée!'

‘Don't look so worried, Lou,' Matt said.

‘But she's here, she's alive. We're going to see her. Oh, God, I'm so nervous. What if she's—'

‘You come now.' Solange was back, and beckoning them with her finger, looking for all the world like someone out of a fairy tale. And the apartment they stepped into could also have come straight out of a spooky story. Lou and Matt followed Solange down a dark and narrow corridor and into a room that opened off to the right. At first, Lou couldn't see properly, but behind her Solange was switching on a light, which didn't help much, but which was something. The whole room was full of books. As well as shelves-full on the walls, there were piles of them on the floor, and a kind of path between these tottering mountains of mostly hardbacked volumes led from the door to an armchair in which a small, thin, wizened old lady sat surrounded by newspapers. She was dressed in black and was skeletally thin. Her skin was almost translucent and seemed stretched over the bones of her face. A strong, beaky nose and a gaze which was still quite sharp and must once have been piercing gave her the look of a bird. She wore two pairs of glasses on gold chains round her neck, and – was that a cat? Yes, there was definitely a cat curled up on the table next to the armchair. Ginger by the look of it, and quite oblivious to all the goings on. Only an ear pricking at the sound of their footsteps and a snore every so often convinced Lou that the creature wasn't an ornament. She wouldn't have been a bit surprised to have found a stuffed pet in a room like this.

‘I'll do this, Lou,' said her father and she was grateful. ‘I'm good at old ladies, though I've not seen anything like this in my life. Surely so many books must be a fire-hazard?'

‘Go on, Dad, she's waiting,' Lou whispered, as Solange said,
‘Approchez, approchez.
Mme Franchard wish to see you. Speak.'

A thin, clear voice, quite at odds with the Dickensian setting, came from the corner.

‘Please forgive my indisposition. I am too old to rise to greet you, but please speak now.'

‘Thank you, Madame. You're very kind' Matt said.

‘I go to make the
thé,'
Solange announced, picking her way back through the books to the door. ‘I return soon.' She disappeared and they were left alone with Mme Franchard.

Lou listened as her father explained what had brought them to Paris. He told Mme Franchard who he was, how he was perhaps related to Madame's sister and how very interested he was in finding out everything he could about his great-aunt, because his own father was dead. Lou thought it was no wonder that the old ladies of Haywards Heath and beyond wanted her father to draw up their wills. He was so comforting. He had such a pleasant manner and such a lovely voice. And she could sense his emotions as he spoke. He was clearly quite moved by the occasion. He was quite handsome, too, she realized. You never think of your parents as handsome or pretty – they're just your father and mother, but Dad was rather gorgeous in a middle-aged sort of way. Lou felt quite proud of him. Now he was talking about her. Lou blushed when he described her as her grandfather's favourite but she stepped forward when she was beckoned to come closer.

Mme Franchard peered up at her. Then she swapped the glasses she was wearing for another pair that were lying on the table and once she'd put them on, she stared at Lou for what seemed like ages.

‘En effet
 …' Mme Franchard breathed and took a hankie from a pocket in the depths of the knitted garment that was draped over her shoulders. ‘You are Louise? The same name, the same face.
C'est incroyable … liens
 … you bring that photograph over there … the big one.' She pointed to a dim corner of the room and Lou saw two or three silver frames peeping out from behind a pile of old letters, and pages torn from newspapers and magazines. This flimsy paper wall almost hid them from view but she went over and picked up the largest of them, which was about the size of a postcard. It showed two young women sitting in a garden under a tree which could have been the twin of the one she liked looking at in the library in London
— an apple tree in full bloom. One of the girls was thin and dark and even in the bad light and even after the passage of what was practically a whole lifetime, Lou could recognize Mme Franchard.

‘This is you,' she said, putting the photograph into the old lady's hands.

‘
Oui,
and this is my Louise. You see how she is. So resembling you.
Incroyable.
I feel … I feel
bouleversée.
How do you say? Turned up and down?'

‘Upside down,' Matt said and leaned over to see the photograph. ‘My goodness, Lou, it's quite striking. This Louise
does
look like you. Really. It's not just …'

‘Let me see.' Lou took the frame from Mme Franchard and gazed more closely at the photo. This Louise is prettier than I am, she thought. Better dressed. Her hair's not a mess tied up in a ponytail. She wore it in a way that reminded Lou of the Duchess of Windsor: parted in the middle and with a kind of roll all round the head. You did that by pinning the hair on to a sausage-shaped thing, which Lou knew because she'd been in a school production of
An Inspector Calls.
But it's true, she thought. She does look like me. How odd, how worrying and fascinating and strange, that such things could happen: that a random collection of cells and enzymes and whatever else made up a person could arrange itself
twice
into a person, who was in some ways the same and in others completely different, separated by years and years. Lou shivered.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I do look like her. I can see that.'

‘And you are named like her.'

Lou nodded. She knew of that connection, and had always been proud of it.

Solange came in at that moment and performed the walk through the books, which must have been even more hazardous when you were carrying a tea tray, but she was clearly used to doing it. She also poured the tea and handed it round before leaving the room again.

‘You must be alone,' she announced from the door. ‘You have much to speak.'

‘Tell us, Madame,' Matt said. ‘Tell us about your sister, Louise.'

‘It's so lovely,' said Ellie, ‘to have the chance for a proper chat. Such ages since we last met. I've been meaning to get in touch since the funeral. Such a palaver, getting settled into the new flat and so forth.'

‘Yes, it must have been,' said Phyl. ‘Have another scone, Ellie.' She had no intention of taking up that particular baton. She didn't want to hear Ellie's moving-in stories.

‘I won't, thanks, though they are delicious. I'm sure you must have baked them yourself. You're such a wonderful homemaker.'

Phyl smiled. ‘I'll just put the kettle on again. I could do with another cup – how about you?'

‘Lovely, thank you.'

Phyl plugged in the kettle, her back to Ellie, and tried to work out how she felt about her husband's ex-wife sitting at her kitchen table. She'd invited her – couldn't not have invited her once she'd phoned and said she was ‘in the area' – and now here she was. Did they have anything to say to one another? Nessa. They could talk about the impending divorce, Phyl supposed. Poppy had been a distraction for a while, with Ellie exclaiming and making the kind of noises you were supposed to make when you met a small child, but Phyl could tell from Ellie's body language that she was less than comfortable with such an unpredictable and possibly destructive creature as a baby. She shrank away even while she was hugging the child, and that amused Phyl. She'd seen the same sort of physical recoil at the surgery in people who weren't entirely happy about being near animals. Poppy
was now on the other side of the room, happily engaged in some elaborate game with two dolls, a spoon and a couple of empty yoghurt pots and her mutterings and gurglings interspersed with the odd word here and there were a comfort to Phyl.

‘You've missed Matt, I'm afraid,' she said. ‘He's in Paris today.'

‘Paris! Goodness,' said Ellie. ‘What on earth is he doing there?'

‘He and Lou went for the day to see someone – well, it's a long story really. But we found a letter last weekend. From a Frenchwoman who claimed to be John Barrington's aunt.'

‘Really? How thrilling! Are we about to have revelations? I've always thought there was a mystery about John. He was far too quiet, don't you think?'

‘It's not something I've given much thought to, if I'm honest. He was Matt's dad and didn't say much to me, not really, but I never worried about it, or thought he was hiding anything. I just assumed he was a silent sort of man.'

‘Hmm. Well, I always,' Ellie leaned forward confidingly, ‘had the impression that there were lots and lots of things he could have told us if he'd wanted to.'

‘Maybe he put them into his books. Lou says
Blind Moon
is very good.'

Ellie wrinkled her nose. ‘I did read it once, ages ago when Matt and I first met. You know how it is – you try to immerse yourself in everything to do with the beloved, don't you? If you're in love with a chess player, say, you learn all about the game and maybe start playing it yourself, even though it's not your thing at all. That's what I've found. Well, I thought that reading his father's books would somehow get me closer to Matt.' She laughed. ‘How wrong I was!'

Phyl said nothing. She didn't like the way Ellie called Matt her ‘beloved'. Of course, she'd say she was clearly referring to a time that was past, but still, it made her feel … feel what? Disconcerted, you could call it. Not pleased. Ellie talked on and on. It wasn't easy to stop her once she got into her stride.

‘I can't remember all that much about
Blind Moon
between you and me. Not my kind of thing either. This boy, in a country I couldn't get a handle on somehow. North Borneo? Well, I knew that was the Far East and I also know they suffered dreadfully there during the
war and in those Japanese camps, like the one in
Empire of the Sun,
but honestly, the adventures and thoughts of an eight-year-old boy … I think there's something a bit weird asking adults to read a book which is written from the point of view of a child.'

‘It's supposed to be very powerful,' Phyl murmured. ‘Very moving. Sad.'

‘Well, yes, exactly. It was, but really, why would you want to read a book that made you feel miserable? Mad, I call it.'

‘It ends hopefully, I'm told. The child – the boy gets to go to England with his mother's friend. She adopts him.'

‘Whatever John did,' Ellie leaned forward confidingly, ‘it wasn't a huge success, was it? Constance always said that the books didn't make a penny piece.'

‘Money's not the only measure of success,' she said.

‘No, but it's one of them.'

‘Well,' Phyl said, ‘John clearly felt he had to write them. I expect it gave him an interest. Something to take him out of himself.' She searched for a way to change the subject. She didn't know much about literature – certainly not enough to be able to discuss it with Ellie. She was also not about to give her the satisfaction of agreeing, but she, too, had found
Blind Moon
not exactly to her taste, and hadn't finished it. That was one reason why she'd been so upset when Constance had left Lou the copyrights as her part of the inheritance. It seemed to Phyl like something that wasn't really worth having, though she never said so. Ellie had changed tack. She was back to Paris.