Nostalgia hit Margot hard as she entered the brasserie kitchen for the first time in years. In the old days, after a night on the town, the three friends would plunder the larder with gleeful abandon, but in the knowledge that Papa Bedeau would have stern words to say to them the next day.
Now that Hervé owned Le Chat, raiding the provisions felt more transgressive. But if Claire’s complaints about the new chef held any merit, he deserved to have his feathers ruffled a bit.
“There shouldn’t be so much surplus food here,” said Claire, frowning. She stood inside the enormous storeroom, surveying various covered meats and cheeses and a large gateau with only a quarter missing. The gateau, at least, would keep. “We always pack up the leftovers and take them to the nuns to feed the poor.”
“Ought we to do that now?” said Margot. “It’s late, but I’m game if you are.”
Claire shook her head. “No, it will have to wait until tomorrow.” She frowned. “I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.”
She continued to take inventory, and Margot heaved a sigh. “I don’t feel so much like gorging on leftovers now. Let’s just have some bread and cheese and wine, and we’ll pay for it, too. I don’t want you to get into trouble for pilfering.”
But Claire was still rummaging around in the larder and not paying attention, so Margot busied herself cutting a generous portion of cheese from a massive wheel of Brie, then hacked into a block of Gruyère. She added muscatels and some preserved figs dripping with vanilla-scented syrup and grabbed the rest of the water crackers Claire had made that day. Those would taste like cardboard by tomorrow, anyway.
All of it looked rather delicious, arranged artfully on a small platter, and she was pleased with herself. “Wine?” she asked Claire. “You’d better take care of that. I know almost nothing about wine, yet instinctively, I always choose the most expensive bottle.” She shrugged. “It’s a gift.”
“Hmm?” Claire’s unseeing gaze shifted to Margot. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“What’s up with you, Claire?” said Margot. “Brooding about Hervé?”
Claire flushed. “Of course not. Only I didn’t think he’d overturn all of our practices the minute he got here.”
Margot caught the waver in her voice. Then the truth dawned. Softly, Margot said, “It was your mother, wasn’t it? She made sure the leftovers reached the people who needed them.” Claire didn’t often speak of Madame Bedeau, but she must miss the big-hearted firebrand of a woman who had run Le Chat with such warmth and charm.
Claire nodded, but she gave a small shake of the shoulders as if to throw off a weight. “I’ll get the wine.”
They were sitting down at the big kitchen table when a key scraped the lock and the door to the apartment building creaked open. Margot jumped, her entire body racing with fear. Claire put a hand on her arm. “It’s all right. That’s probably Gina. I’ll go look.”
When she returned, Gina was with her, Dior gown and all, wrapped in Margot’s fur coat. Her expression was difficult to decipher, but it certainly wasn’t a happy one.
“You look like you could use a drink,” Margot said, grabbing another glass and pouring her one.
“Could I ever,” said Gina. She sat down and accepted her glass, then raised it. “Cheers, girls. And no, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Claire regarded her for a moment as if undecided whether to accept this statement. Then she said, “All right. But ma chérie . . .” She turned to Margot and her expression held deep concern. “I’m sorry, but I must say it. I cannot bear to watch you jump at every shadow without knowing why. It kills me to see you like this. Won’t you please tell us who or what you’re hiding from?”
Claire’s question caught Margot off guard. Her pulse, which had just begun to slow after discovering Gina to be the intruder, kicked up again. How did she explain it so they’d understand? Did she even want to make the attempt?
Margot took a long sip of wine, hoping that familiar soft, slow feeling of alcohol-induced calm would steal over her. But she couldn’t be calm about this. She wanted to tell them. She’d intended to do so before she left, if only to make their parting more final. If Claire and Gina understood her reasons for remaining apart, surely they would be less likely to insist on including her in their lives.
But where to begin? As she tried to frame the words, a sick, frantic feeling made her blood fizz and race. She couldn’t seem to open her mouth. She’d only ever told one person—her mother—and while loving and ultimately supportive, her mother had clearly thought her fears the product of neurosis.
“I know you got married,” said Gina with more gentleness than she usually showed. “I found the notice in the Sydney paper.”
A jolt of surprise made Margot stare at her friend. Her mouth twisted. Trust Gina to ferret out the truth. The marriage notice. Margot squeezed her eyes shut. Her wedding day. The best and worst day of her life.
“You looked so happy in that photograph,” Gina said softly. “What went wrong?”
Margot swallowed. “Well, I was happy. Deliriously happy, in fact.” She tried to smile but she couldn’t. “‘Delirious’ is a good word for it, actually. I—I don’t think I was quite in my right mind.” She tried to calm herself, to take a deep breath. What had her father always told her about breathing? But her voice trembled and the words came out all in a rush. “I always thought I was such a good judge of character. It was one of the things I really prided myself on, you know? But he . . . He was not a good man, even if everyone around him thought he was a god.”
“Did he hit you?” Claire’s eyes filled with sympathetic tears.
Margot shook her head. “I used to think that in some ways, it would have been easier if he had. It was never clear-cut like that. But it was . . . hell, all the same.”
How to explain it? The way he had treated her like a queen when they’d first met, not just showering her with gifts, which wasn’t a new experience for her, but showering her with attention, with deep understanding, which had been far more seductive. Men so rarely listened. He’d told her his darkest secrets, his greatest fears, and she’d reciprocated—of course she had. She’d never met a man so open and honest. Even now, he was the only one in the world who truly understood her. It was the very thing that made him so dangerous.
Later—too late—she’d discovered that on his side, it was all lies. Sometimes she’d allude to a deeply emotional confidence he’d made, and he would look at her strangely, as if he had no idea what she was talking about. He’d been playacting, coaxing her to reveal herself, only to use her fears against her.
He hadn’t even waited for the honeymoon before it began.
At first, it was small things. A little joke in his wedding speech that at last Margot was completely in his power, which later did not feel like such a joke. Criticizing the way she walked—she’d looked so dear and precious, coming down the aisle with her funny little duck walk, hadn’t she? That comment, though couched in such affection, had taken the shine off the entire day. Her friends assured her she walked perfectly normally, but she couldn’t shake the worry that they were just being nice. After that, she couldn’t take a single step without feeling self-conscious. His voice in her head: Toe to heel, not heel to toe, my dear.
Then she began to find that unless she expressed herself with the succinct precision required of his medical students at the hospital, he pretended not to understand what she meant. He would question her as if employing the Socratic method until finally, he comprehended, or alternatively shook his head in frustration and gave up the attempt. By then, all of the color and sparkle had leached out of what had been, she’d thought, a very amusing story. Why was he the only one who couldn’t seem to follow what she said? She began to edit every sentence before it came out of her mouth. Sometimes, Margot caught herself silently rehearsing what she wanted to tell him beforehand. And it was exhausting, truly, to live like that, but it never occurred to her to rebel. He was so clever, and she needed him to respect her intelligence, too. But somewhere along the way, it simply became easier not to talk much at all. Before her marriage, Margot had delighted in her reputation as a raconteur, but her funny anecdotes went untold in that house.
Sometimes, absorbed in a fairly mundane task like cataloging his extensive record collection, he would ignore her all day, or for several days, even when she tried to speak with him about something important. Later he would tell her how much he loved her, that she was the only woman for him, and bring her bunches of her favorite pink peonies, or some gift that was so specific and thoughtful and tailored exactly to her taste that she remembered how well he knew her. It would seem as though he truly loved her, that his occasional lapses and small cruelties were merely the product of his highly stressful profession as a pediatric surgeon.
But more seductive than the compliments and the gifts was the sudden, razor-sharp focus on her and her alone. She would feel loved and wanted, drenched in happiness, until inevitably—with unpredictable timing—the coldness set in again, making her frantically search her memory for something she must have done wrong. Sometimes he seemed to go out of his way to disrupt her plans or behaved with a complete lack of consideration, woke her in the middle of the night to ask her something that easily could have waited until morning. If she complained about it, he did it more often. She learned not to object at all.
When Margot tried to put into words the way things had changed between them, her mother would say, “He’s a busy man, darling. You have to be accommodating. And you can be such a flighty thing at times.” Her elder sister, whose husband had run into money troubles, sourly told her to count her blessings.
Looking around at her friends, she started to notice that the wealthier a husband was, the more his wife was obliged (or willing) to put up with. Had she become one of those wives? Surely she had more pizzazz than that. It was what he’d loved about her, he’d said, the way she challenged him. Only they didn’t seem to have those kinds of conversations anymore.
By nine months into their marriage, Margot was terribly confused, but she hardly knew what she was confused about. Only after she’d left, when she thought hard about how it had all unfolded, did she see the pattern emerge. At first, he encouraged her to be extravagant. His money was hers, after all. He only required her to keep every receipt and explain to him what each purchase was and where it had come from and why she needed it. He never told her she couldn’t. He wasn’t at all mean. Somewhere along the line, however, he explained to her his philosophy about money and the unimportance of material things, and that he wanted to build their wealth so that he could retire early and spend more time with her. Ergo, her spending money equated with not wishing to spend time with him. Secretly she didn’t want to spend time with him anymore, but guilt made her all the more determined to prove otherwise.
Without being explicitly told to do so, she found herself scrimping on the household expenses and proudly presenting to him her latest savings. She stopped buying new dresses—he never liked the new ones anyway, and who else did she have to impress? He preferred her to be natural—she was so beautiful, after all—and he mocked her gently for her vanity whenever she primped in front of a mirror, stared at her blankly if she asked him how she looked.
So she stopped going to the beauty parlor as often, and opted for plainer styles, with a view to sinking into the background instead of becoming the life of the party as she had once always been. He didn’t seem to like extroverted women, and visibly winced whenever Margot’s more ebullient friends opened their mouths to speak. They irritated him so much that Margot began to see them only on her own, and then, slowly, not at all. The ones he did like seemed to turn against Margot, ever so slightly. She’d realize it was happening again when they began to parrot his criticisms of her, like ventriloquist dummies with his hand up their skirts.
Yet if anyone dared to criticize him or his treatment of her, she bristled and cut the acquaintance. She was too deluded, or perhaps too proud, to admit they were right. One day, Margot looked around her and realized she had no friends of her own. As a couple, they only ever saw the people who were acceptable to him.
So she wrote to Claire and Gina every week, clung to their friendship like a lifeline, even though their letters had stopped coming after she wrote of her marriage. His courtship of her had been a whirlwind, lasting less than a month. Although she’d begged him to wait until Gina and perhaps even Claire could fly out to join them for the wedding, he had refused, saying he couldn’t wait another minute more than necessary to have her to himself. Maybe Claire and Gina had been offended not to have been invited to the wedding? Or maybe they hadn’t taken note of her new address? He had arranged for all Margot’s mail to be redirected from Margot’s little apartment, in any case.
Then her husband bought a small farm in the highlands only a couple of hours’ drive from Sydney. It was idyllic, a perfect weekend retreat, with log fires and exquisite gardens and views forever. Somewhere she could read a dozen novels and go for long walks in solitude and bring up their children. She wanted children, didn’t she? Of course she did. She was aching for someone to love. Her failure to conceive had been a source of tension between them for some time.
Margot’s acquaintances oohed and ahhed over the highlands property and told her she was lucky. But when he suggested that they move to the farm permanently, she clung to one last vestige of self-preservation. She refused to go.
It was the first time she’d openly defied him, and though afraid, she’d been unprepared for his reaction. Before, he had undermined her confidence subtly, chipping away at its foundations. This time, he demolished her character, her family, her friends. From the vitriol that spewed from his lips, finally she understood what a well of hatred he harbored for her—for all women, in fact. He was a completely different man from the one she had adored, calling her names she had only heard from the dockworkers who visited her father’s surgery in Kings Cross.
Painfully she was forced to accept it: She’d loved a mirage. That man did not exist, and never had. For the first time, she saw him clearly. Now that she had, she couldn’t bear to live with him anymore.
Always attuned to her moods, he seemed to sense he’d gone too far. For the first time ever, he apologized. She was too frightened not to pretend to be swayed by the assault of his charm, but the entire time he was attempting to beguile her back into submission, the poisonous words he’d uttered to her wound themselves into her brain and writhed there like a parasite. Even now, half a world away and six months down the track, something would remind her and she would hear that venomous speech again, as clearly as if he were in the room with her. The lovemaking that followed his apology had felt like a rape.
She couldn’t remember much about the weeks that followed. She had trouble with her memory these days—whole tracts of time had been lost to fear and constant vigilance. The slam of a door, the jingle of keys—that meant he was home. Like a starter’s gun, those sounds would set her heart racing.
Seeming to forget she had ever refused to move to the country, he put their house in Sydney on the market and told her to oversee the packing. Suddenly the fog that had invaded her brain lifted. At the thought of being cut off from the city she loved, from her family, alone with him, she panicked. She was drowning, and she knew that if she did not act to save herself, if she didn’t leave, her very self would be obliterated.
So she waited until he left for the hospital. He had a full patient list that day. It was a sweltering November morning but she put on her fur coat and packed as much as she could carry without alerting the staff, who she was convinced watched her on his behalf. She had no money of her own—he made sure of that—so she sold her jewelry to pay for a ticket to Paris. Thank goodness, she’d renewed her passport.
She’d been of two minds about whether to tell her mother, but she couldn’t leave without a word and have her worry herself sick. “You can’t tell anyone I’ve gone out of the country. Not even Father,” she said to her mother before she left. “Promise me you won’t. Not under any circumstances.”
Her mother didn’t understand any of it, but she seemed to sense Margot’s urgency and fear, so she promised and pressed into Margot’s hands what money she had put by. “Oh, darling! I hope you know what you’re doing. It’s a big step, running away like this. How will you live?”
“I have friends in Paris. They’ll help me,” Margot lied. She had no intention of seeking out Claire, in case he found her through her friend. She had no idea how she would function without a husband to support her—he had undermined her self-confidence in every possible way—but if she thought too much about that, she’d never leave. But she’d done it. She’d gotten away. And she’d come to Paris, managed to wrangle herself a job at Dior.
“And the rest, you know,” she finished finally, her voice hoarse from all of that talking.
There was silence in the brasserie kitchen. Suddenly Margot couldn’t bear to hear Gina and Claire’s reaction. If they dismissed her pain, there was nowhere left to turn.
She took a deep breath and rose to her feet. “So you understand,” she said, staring at her hands, “why I can’t live here with you. Why I have to stay in hiding. He knows I’m in Paris. I told him all about you and Le Chat and the wonderful times we had here. If he comes after me, it’s the first place he’ll try.” She had deliberately not looked at either friend while she told them. It was Gina’s opinion she feared the most. Surely she would despise the cowardly way Margot had accepted such awful treatment.
There was a long pause. Then, “Oh, honey,” Gina said. With a scrape of her chair, she launched herself at Margot and wrapped her arms around her tightly, all expensive scent and soft fur. Claire joined in, wiry and strong, and they stayed like that until Margot managed to whisper, “I never got your letters. I realized what happened as soon as you told me you never received mine. He must have taken them before they got to me and intercepted the ones I sent to you. I was so stupid! I used to leave them for the housekeeper to mail, but she always did his bidding.”
“You were not stupid,” said Claire. “You are one of the cleverest people I know. And when someone tells you they love you and marries you, how could you possibly suspect they would do such horrid things? It’s like something out of a movie.”
“He sounds like a master manipulator,” Gina agreed. She stepped back and put her hands on her hips, her face the picture of an avenging goddess. “I hope he does come looking for you. I’d like to give him a piece of my mind.”
“I’d gut him where he stands,” said Claire with relish. “And you know I have excellent skills with knives.”
Margot gave a broken laugh and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand. “It’s so hard to explain what it’s like. It all happens so gradually, and before you know it, you’re trapped.” In a small, strained voice, she added, “Even my father . . .”
That had been the hardest of all to take. Her husband had established such a rapport with her father that he could do no wrong in Doc MacFarlane’s eyes. A generous donation to each of the welfare organizations her father championed in Kings Cross, and he’d cemented himself in the Doc’s good books. Margot was too proud to complain to her father of the treatment she’d received from him, having encouraged and delighted in their close relationship. To turn around and debunk the myth she’d built would have made her look unstable at best, and at worst, a malicious liar. She’d left Australia without even bidding her beloved father goodbye.
“He isolated you from everyone who cared about you,” said Claire. “He wanted to make you alone and afraid. I’m sure your papa would have been on your side.”
“That’s just it,” said Margot huskily. “Every month, I’ve telephoned home to let Mother know I was safe. Last time I spoke with her, she admitted she’d finally told Father where I was. I begged him not to pass it on to my husband, but he . . . He said it was his duty. He said it was my husband’s right to know. So you see why I’ve been so jumpy. I keep expecting him at any moment.”
“Well, I’m glad you told us,” Claire said, at last. “But it makes it all the more imperative that you come live with us, right this minute. We’ll stand by you, no matter what.”
“Of course we will,” said Gina. “We can keep a secret. Besides, he might have decided not to come after you. A man like that . . . Wouldn’t he be too proud?”
“Yes!” said Claire. “And even if he does find you, what can he do? He can’t drag you all the way back to Australia.”
“Not in this day and age,” Gina agreed. She tapped her chin. “Let’s look into the legalities. Maybe Maître Bosshard can help you with a divorce. Then you can make a plan and set your mind at rest—on that front, at least.”
Margot gripped a hand of each of her friends. “Thank you!” She couldn’t quite explain how deep her fear of her husband was, nor that Gina’s practical solution, while well-meant and eminently logical, did not reassure her. It wasn’t over her body but over her mind that he held such power. Somehow—she didn’t know how—he would get into her head and persuade her or subtly coerce her to return to Sydney with him. And then she would be lost.
Claire squeezed her hand. “The way I see it, if you keep living in hiding, then he’s won, hasn’t he? And I do not want him to win.”
“No matter what, you can’t stay in the Pigalle,” said Gina. “I won’t allow it. And you know,” she added, “the more I think of it, the more I doubt he’ll follow you to Paris. He’s probably preying on some other poor victim by now.”
That idea made Margot see a glimmer of hope for the first time. If he had found someone else, he wouldn’t come looking for her. Of course he would have found someone else! Why hadn’t she thought of that before?
“We’ll help you move tomorrow,” said Claire.
“But you have to work,” Margot objected.
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Claire a trifle grimly. “I’m taking some time off from the brasserie.”
Margot looked from one friend to the other. They were striking down all of her fears. And although she knew those fears would rise up again, like the undead in a horror movie, it was such a relief to let her friends make the decision for her, to borrow some of their courage. She was so very tired of struggling alone.
Suddenly seized with her old brand of recklessness, Margot drained her glass and held it out for more. “To us! The best friends in all the world!” she cried, holding up her glass in a toast.
“To us!” chorused Claire and Gina. They clinked glasses, then fell to planning Margot’s move.