It was a huge relief when everything closed at midday. I had five shopping bags, containing my new wardrobe. They contained what amounted, apparently, to all the basics I would need until summer, including one pair of shoes, one pair of knee-high boots, several pairs of trousers, skirts and tops, a long expensive coat, and a lot of sexy underwear.
‘I don’t really think anyone’s going to be seeing it,’ I objected as Coco added expensive scraps of silk to my lingerie purchases whenever anything caught her eye.
She giggled. ‘I bet they will. And even if not, you’ll feel better. You will walk differently. It will make you wiggle.’
I shrugged. ‘If you say so.’
She nodded. ‘I say so. I’m single, aren’t I? I am the expert.’
‘You’re only single because you want to be,’ I told her dismissively. ‘You could marry again in a second if you wanted to.’
She looked at me, indignant. ‘Who could I marry?’
‘Coco! You could marry anybody. You’re perfect.’ I looked at her clean, silky hair. She washed and dried it every morning while Louis was still asleep. Then she put on her make-up. Then she got dressed in clothes she had ironed the night before. Then she woke Louis up for school and dressed him immaculately, too. All through the summer he had worn shorts with creases ironed down the front and short-sleeved linen shirts. ‘You’re beautiful. Your only problem is that most people aren’t good enough for you. That’s all.’
‘Emma,’ she said, with a sad smile. ‘You’re sweet. But it’s not true. I live in St Paul. I need to move somewhere if I’m going to meet anyone. You don’t get eligible bachelors around where we live. I’ve known every man since crèche. The ones who are single, by and large there’s a reason for it, and I know that reason. And I’m thirty-three, divorced, with a child. I am no great catch. Most of the interesting men have moved away.’
‘Yes.’ I thought about myself. If Coco couldn’t meet anyone, I had no chance. I didn’t want to, but perhaps one day I would. I saw, again, that moving back to Brighton was my only option. ‘So will you move away?’
‘Yes. Probably. One day soon. It will be hard to start again somewhere new. I’m looking for jobs. Perhaps we won’t go too far away. Perhaps I’ll go away, meet someone and bring him back here. This is very much my home. I don’t want to leave it all behind.’
‘I don’t either.’
She looked quizzical. ‘What? You don’t want to leave your home? Or this home?’
I wasn’t quite sure what I had meant. ‘This home.’
‘I thought you were going back to England.’
I nodded. ‘I am. When the house is finished. I’ll miss my life here, though. I’ll miss it terribly. I can’t think too hard about what sort of poky apartment I’ll be able to afford to rent. I’ll miss the garden and the chickens and you and Andy and Fiona and Martine and Patrick and Mathilde and everyone. I’ll miss the market. Alice will miss her friends and her school. Going back to England is the only thing we can do, but it’ll be sad.’
‘Maybe I’ll move to England,’ said Coco. ‘Louis and I could come with you. His turn to learn another language. And mine.’
Rosie interrupted us. ‘Look, darlings,’ she said. ‘This is all lovely, but I don’t understand most of it.’ She looked at me. ‘What’s she saying?’
I translated. Rosie nodded. ‘Fabulous idea, Coco. I can film you making the opposite journey from Emma. A twist in the genre. Nice.’ She looked at me. ‘That might give me consolation for dying alone and unloved.’
Coco frowned. ‘I think I understand,’ she said in English. ‘You film me? No.’
Rosie shrugged. ‘Think it over. Now, in honour of Emma’s decision to show the world that there is a gorgeous lady lurking under those grotesque jumpers, let’s go somewhere special and drink champagne.’
‘OK,’ I agreed, ‘but we can’t get drunk. I need you to get me to a hairdresser’s this afternoon, and kit me out with cosmetics. And then show me how to put them on. And Rosie,’ I added. ‘I need you to tell me what the hell is going on with your love life.’
‘Yeah, right,’ she said.
I found I enjoyed looking after my appearance. It gave me something to think about, so I quickly adopted it as my crutch, and thought about it almost constantly. It replaced Greg. It occupied the empty moments, the times when I was not with Alice, or surfing, or gardening. If ten empty minutes opened up before me, I would usually have sighed and fumed about Matt, or cried about my mother; now I would go upstairs and touch up my make-up. I would repin my hair, hand-wash my stockings and bras and lacy knickers. I felt different as a woman with a parent. I knew it was illogical.
I was role playing. Alice liked my new hobby, and we would sit at the kitchen table together while she advised me on shades of lipstick and asked me to make her up, too. I painted her fingernails pink and let her wear a tiny bit of make-up for an hour or so if it wasn’t a school day. She started asking to have her ears pierced.
‘Of course you can’t,’ I told her with a laugh. ‘You’re three years old.’
‘There’s a girl at school with earrings in her ears.’
‘Well, you can’t have them.’
She scowled, folded her arms, and withdrew. I wondered what I was doing wrong to be encountering this conversation so early on. I hadn’t been expecting to have it until she was at least seven.
I was pleased to note, almost immediately, that men were looking at me in a way they had never looked at me before. The transformation had, however, cost a frightening amount of money, and money was something that was very close to running out. I was living off my credit card, and I knew I had no chance of paying it off. Even when he had been with us, Matt had contributed little towards our daily expenses, nothing towards the house or the renovation. I hadn’t minded: he had explained that he spent most of his salary on commuting and the rent on his London flat, so I had always bought the food and paid the bills.
Now, however, the costs were escalating and I knew I could not ignore the situation any longer. The builders were billing us regularly, and Alice and I were in urgent need of some funds. We had just about enough cash left to pay for the rest of the building work. I did not want to contact Matt, who was making small and irregular payments into my French bank account. I wanted him to contact me again and take care of his responsibilities properly. He did not.
Because I knew I needed some work, I made enquiries about teaching English. To my surprise, I was instantly offered an interview by the local Chamber of Commerce, who ran a comprehensive range of language classes. I laughed at the idea of myself as the language assistant. Coco and Fiona laughed at the idea of me meeting businessmen who needed to speak English for work. The Chamber of Commerce was, they agreed, the very best place in Villeneuve for me to meet a new husband; a real one, this time.
‘You’ll meet someone,’ Rosie told me, when I got the call offering me two afternoons’ work a week. ‘I know you will.’
The day before I taught my first class, Rosie put down her camera and asked if she could come and stay with me.
I blinked. ‘Of course you can. This house is way too big for Alice and me. You could have stayed here all along. But only if you tell me about the sticky ex.’
Rosie sat at the dining table and shook her head. She looked exhausted.
‘There is no sticky ex,’ she admitted. ‘I just needed to say something to make Greg believe it was over.’ She ran her fingers through her thick hair. ‘It’s not an ex. It’s a tumour.’
Rosie had found a lump in her breast, back in November.
I hardly dared breathe. ‘And?’
She put her shades down on the table. ‘And I ignored it. I had my Elll but I didn’t dare go to the doctor on my own. My French is crap. And I was scared.’
‘I’d have gone with you.’
‘You had enough going on. I mean, we had a professional relationship. Imagine how unprofessional it would have been if I’d put the camera down and asked you to help me.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Anyway, I went in the end. Fiona told me that her GP spoke some English, so I snuck off to see him, on my own. And he sent me straight to a specialist at the hospital for a biopsy. So I had it, and the outcome is that it’s malignant. I found out two days ago.’
‘When did you have the biopsy?’
‘Last week. When you didn’t see me for a couple of days. I needed Greg to go before I did it because he’d have noticed. I’m going back to England for chemo and surgery. I’ve got private health insurance because my parents are Tories, and they keep insuring me, too. So I’m going straight in to Bupa.’
I wanted to shake her. ‘Why the hell didn’t you say anything? Rosie! You could have told me. And what the fuck were you thinking of, not saying anything to Greg? Are you insane?’
She shook her head and put her shades back on. ‘Greg’s perfect,’ she said. ‘I knew he was too good to be true. He’s a free spirit. I met him in between Cambodia and Cuba, for God’s sake. He likes me because I’m independent. He doesn’t want to be tied down to some whining woman with no eyebrows.’
I sighed. ‘Rosie. I’m going to tell him. He loves you. Believe me, loads of women have fancied Greg over the years and he’s never been one-tenth as into them as he is with you. You two are brilliant together. He’ll support you through anything. You have to let him. And eyebrows grow back. You can pencil them in. You know he won’t notice.’
‘Look, it’s too much pressure on Greg. I don’t want to put him in that position. He can hardly say, “No, I won’t be there for you because you’ve got cancer.” Can he? If I tell him, he’ll have to drop everything and hold my hand. And I don’t want to make him do that.’
‘I’m going to tell him.’ I held up a hand to stop her protests. ‘Don’t. Nothing you could say would stop me. I’ll tell him that you don’t know I’m talking to him. And I’ll leave it up to him what he does. He’s my brother and he has a right to know.’
Rosie sighed and nodded. Then, suddenly, she burst into tears. ‘I’m going to make the best programme ever about you,’ she said.
Rosie moved into the room I had once allocated for my second child. We cheered each other along. Alice adored having her about, particularly since Rosie let her use the camera, under strict supervision, from time to time.
The builders were used to dealing with me, and by and large I left them to get on with it. Suddenly, they were making the final touches. The interior walls were painted white. The new bathrooms were put in. Everything was, suddenly, nearly finished.
Monsieur Dumas, the head builder, dropped by to check up on the progress of it all. He walked around humming to himself and nodding in approval at his men’s work.
‘And how is Monsieur Smith?’ he asked, sipping his coffee and smoothing his hand against the kitchen wall tiles, which were small and white. ‘You really did order the best of everything,’ he added, sizing up the tiles, and he looked at me for an answer to his question.
‘Monsieur Smith?’ I echoed. He nodded, eyebrows raised. ‘You haven’t heard?’
He shook his head. ‘Heard what?’
‘Oh, he left.’
‘Left?’
‘He doesn’t live here any more. He lives in London now. He has a child there.’ I looked straight at him, as bravely as I could. I tried to imagine whether he was single. He was tall and bald and thickset. I could not force myself to be attracted to him. I knew that I was a long way away from wanting to date. I doubted I would ever do it.
‘He is mad,’ said Monsieur Dumas kindly, and he lit a cigarette and told me a long story about his wife’s brother’s ex-wife, her multiple lovers and her credit card debts. Rosie joined us, accepted one of his cigarettes, and leaned back on the walls, half understanding. We were delighted to hear about someone else’s misfortunes for once.
Jo sat in Lara’s kitchen. She kicked off her work shoes and leaned back in her chair. She could hear the distant cheerful noise of CBeebies, and she knew that Olly and Trixie were sprawled on the sofa staring at the screen. Olly probably had his hands down his pants. He generally did when he was concentrating.
‘. . . and then she said, well, we were actually planning on making the wedding adults only,’ Lara was saying. ‘Which is fine, of course it’s fine, it’s their decision. But she could have told me sooner! So now we have to find someone to take Trixie for the day, and then I’ve got to rethink the accommodation thing . . .’
‘I’ll have Trixie,’ Jo said.
‘Oh! No, I wasn’t hinting,’ said Lara. ‘Really I wasn’t. I was just offloading.’
‘I know. I didn’t think you were hinting. But I’d be happy to have her. She can stay overnight. She’s no trouble and Olly will love it. What date is it?’
‘May the fourteenth. Saturday.’
Jo took out her diary. ‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘Olly’s meant to be with Hugh but I’ll swap things around so he’s home. And it’s not as if I have anything to do on a Saturday night, is it? It’ll be fine.’
‘Jo. Thanks. But you’re so down these days. Is there anything I can do?’
Jo shook her head. ‘I wish there was. I wish there was something I could do. If only I could jack it all in and go away somewhere. But I can’t leave the gallery. I’d never dare sell it. And Olly’s starting pre-school this year. So I’m utterly tied down. And there are no fucking decent men anywhere.’
The doorbell rang. Lara laughed.
‘Bang on cue. Sorry to do this to you, Jo. I’m sure you’ll hate me. He’s moved in next door and I invited him over for a glass of wine.’
Jo was aghast. ‘How could you? Lara!’
‘Look,’ said Lara, moving to answer the door. ‘He has no idea about this. You just happen to be over for supper with Olly. I’m just being neighbourly. It’s nothing. He’s divorced, by the way. Couple of kids. Older than ours. Worth checking over.’
Mike was the same height as Jo, with dark hair and eyes. He smiled at the two women as he handed Lara a bunch of gerberas. Jo thought he looked open. She thought he looked interesting. The gerberas were exquisite. It was the best first impression she had had for a very long time.
Rosie filmed me as I filled my biggest wheelbarrow with the bags of Matt’s clothes, and wheeled them to the communal bins. I was not feigning my smile when I threw them in. There were so many of them that I couldn’t close the lid afterwards. The only memento of Matt, now, in the whole house, garden and outbuildings, was the photo in Alice’s room. I longed to throw it away. He kept catching me off guard.