Evie
There was something a bit furtive in the way Marie-Thérèse looked up from the dish she was prodding with a skewer. A very large meaty object secured in a net was bubbling in a pan on top of the stove, in a broth seasoned with vegetables, parsley, peppercorns and salt. There was far too much of it for just me. But then I’d worked out, by now, that her cooking fed not only me, her and her husband, but also assorted other out-of-work family members: all those cousins and nephews who couldn’t find jobs in the Billancourt car factories. I saw the casseroles in the pantry, lids tied on with string, waiting to be delivered, and sometimes I saw Gaston taking them out to the car or, of a morning, bringing back empties. Well, that was fine by me. I’d learned that the cuts of meat she chose for these cookathons were economical ones. I didn’t particularly want to eat a whole calf’s head myself anyway. And I knew these were hard times for many.
‘Mm,’ I said politely. ‘That smells good.’ I wanted to put her at her ease. But there was uncertainty in her answering nod.
‘It won’t be ready until dinner time,’ she said, averting her eyes. ‘You need to boil it for at least five hours to be sure it’s cooked.’
‘Oh, I’m not hungry now,’ I said quickly. Heavens, I’d only just had breakfast.
I wanted to ask her a quite different question. Something Plevitskaya had said yesterday about Grandmother had been coming back into my head all morning: ‘… her death so unexpected … when dear Constance was so full of life just a week ago.’
It had made me wonder: had Grandmother’s stroke been brought on by a sudden shock?
For a while that morning, that thought, gloomy though it was, had at least been a distraction from the emptiness that not thinking about Jean kept leaving me with. But then an awful new thought had struck me – had the shock perhaps been the prospect of my arrival?
‘I’ve been wondering,’ I went on casually, ‘what you think made Madame la Comtesse take ill so very suddenly … when, as everyone says, she was so full of life just before?’
Looking relieved, and suddenly interested, too, Marie-Thérèse put down the meat skewer. ‘It was very sudden,’ she said. ‘I’ve wondered that myself. As if something had happened to bring it on. But, you know, mademoiselle, there was nothing …’
Leaning against the cooker, she added reflectively, ‘She was in the study that evening, where the young men had been working with that machine. Ah, cette musique! Playing the same tune over and over again, far too loud – enough to make anyone ill, you’d think; my head was certainly aching from it. But she was fine; she didn’t seem to mind it in the least. Then, that last evening, after they’d gone, she took her apéritif in there – well, it’s the best place to watch the sunset from. She was right as rain when I took it in – even asked me to make up a bed for you and get Gaston to meet your train, nice as anything. But then, just a few minutes afterwards, she came staggering out, calling for me. I could hear at once that her voice wasn’t right. I rushed out from your room, where I was making up your bed. But she’d already collapsed, right there in the doorway, before I’d got halfway down the corridor.’
She nodded, not without gloomy satisfaction. ‘So you see,’ she finished, ‘there can’t have been a reason. It just happened, from one moment to the next; the will of the Lord.’
I nodded back, feeling fractionally reassured that Marie-Thérèse had at least said Grandmother had sounded calm when she’d told her I was arriving in Paris.
‘But of course it was those men coming back the next morning that finished her off,’ Marie-Thérèse added crossly. ‘The Russian thieves.’
Well, I thought dispiritedly, not wanting to argue, it did look as though, this time at least, she must be right. Those men had just taken their chance and pinched the machine.
It was painful for me to remember that morning’s commotion – the shouting and barging, and Marie-Thérèse’s hiss of ‘Sacrés Russes!’ as the door slammed behind them. I’d never forget it, because that was also the moment when, behind the bedroom door, Grandmother had woken up, and had her second, fatal attack. I was never going to be able to banish the horror in her face, the hand flapping, her agonized ‘MMMM!’ and the pandemonium that had followed, or the way I’d failed to listen; the way I’d run away.
But right now the person I felt sorriest for was Plevitskaya — because the only real loser from that morning’s theft was her and her recording, which had vanished with the machine. She must have thought, when we’d last spoken, that I could get the recording back and have it finished. She must think I had the machine. But I didn’t. It had gone with the engineer thieves. She’d never have her disc.
I sighed. On second thoughts, the person I felt sorriest for now was myself.
Leaving Marie-Thérèse to her pots, I wandered back to my bedroom, taking stock.
There was no Grandmother in Paris, no cosy friendship with the General, no cosy friendship with Plevitskaya either (she’d really only been so nice to me to get her recording finished, I could see now), and no Jean – nothing but dead ends.
What I should have said to Marie-Thérèse when I went into the kitchen just now was that I was giving her and Gaston notice. (Details were running through my head at a great pace. I’d give them wages until Christmas; she could have Grandmother’s fur coat; would it be absurd to give Gaston the car?) Only cowardice had stopped me, or inertia – the same inertia that had stopped me even thinking of wiring the family news of Grandmother’s death (which I now saw, in a sudden, separate agony of self-reproach, had been terribly wrong, because however estranged Mother had been from her, she’d surely have wanted to be told that her own mother had died. Anyone would). Now was the time to face up to these things, because, whatever anyone said when I got home, and however much I might be dreading my return, I had to accept that there was nothing left to do here but get ready to leave.