AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No, but I think he must be in Brittany, and Arnaud thought so too. It’s where he always heads when he goes off-grid.”
“True. So what are you going to do? Will you go to Brittany? Laure might know where he’ll be staying.”
“Pierre has made it clear that he doesn’t want to see me. He’ll have seen my messages telling him I’m here and I also left him a couple of voicemails. So no, I’m not going to Brittany.” He hesitated. “I’ve been thinking—what if he’s annoyed with us for allowing Laure to stay with us for so long? What if he thinks we’re taking sides? If the story of him having a daughter is a pack of lies, and their problems are because of something Laure did, he might think we’re condoning her behavior.”
“I never thought of that. But if Laure has made it up, how can we find out? It’s not as if we know any of their other friends. We met some of them once, at his fortieth birthday party, but I don’t know where any of them live. Funnily enough, I asked Laure if she wanted you to go to Claire’s, to see if Pierre was there. But she said it would only make things worse.”
“Interesting. The only thing we can do is ask Laure again about his supposed daughter. If it is a lie, she’ll trip herself up in the end. Liars always do.”
28
Iris pushed her feet into her trainers and went quietly out of the front door. It was only six thirty in the morning, but she’d had a restless night. She was going to London later with Esme, and she needed a clear head.
She climbed over the stile and took one of the routes up the hill. It was much steeper than any of their usual running routes but the view from the top was spectacular. When she was almost at the summit, she found a convenient stone and sat facing the early morning sun. From her viewpoint, she could see their end of the village with the quarry behind it, the fields in front and the wood that lay to its right. She traced the ribbon of road past the duck pond, past Esme and Hugh’s house, and all the way to The Watershed. It looked so utterly peaceful. A wave of depression took hold; the beautiful scene in front of her only accentuated the ugliness she felt inside.
Laure had been with them for six weeks now, and sometime during those six weeks, Iris had lost her way. Before, she had known who she was: Iris Pelley, wife to Gabriel, mother to Beth, home enhancer. But things had changed. She was still Gabriel’s wife, but not in the sameway as before. The physical side of their relationship had gone, and his rejection of her was having repercussions she found alarming. She had never fantasized about anyone before, but now her dreams were haunted by Joseph. If she was honest, she even found herself daydreaming about him. It made her ashamed, because she loved Gabriel and that should have been enough. But it wasn’t, not anymore.
Maybe if she and Joseph hadn’t started their morning ritual of waving to each other, he wouldn’t be on her mind so much. On the surface, it was innocent enough. It had begun last week, on Tuesday morning, when she’d happened to glance out of the bedroom window and had seen him standing in the garden, gazing up at the house. She had watched for a moment, wondering what he was thinking about. Was he contemplating its elegance as the sun climbed over the gray slate roof? Was he contemplating what it would be like to live in it, own it? It was only when she’d moved nearer the window and had given him a little wave that she had broken the spell the house had put him under. He’d raised his hand in acknowledgment, then walked to the shed to prepare for the day ahead.
She had thought it a one-off, so she’d been surprised to see him standing in exactly the same place when he arrived for work on Thursday. Again she had waved, again he had waved back. When Saturday came around, he’d been there again and she had watched surreptitiously from behind the curtain for a while, wondering how long he would stand there, how long he would wait for her to wave. Quite a while, it seemed, because it was at least a minute before she’d made herself visible. Even though he was quite a way from the house, she’d been able to see that he was smiling, as if he knew she’d kept him waiting. And two days ago, on Tuesday, they had gone through the whole ritual again. She wasn’t sure what it meant, or if it meant anything at all. It was only a wave—but it gave her a frisson of excitement. It was only a wave, but it felt illicit, intimate.
And then there was Beth. Although Iris had come to accept that they would never have a close mother-daughter relationship, the physicaldistance between them—because Beth was in Greece—had amplified that emotional distance. It was only now, in the cool breeze stirring the air around her, that Iris finally acknowledged her disappointment when Beth had told them she’d be spending her gap year in Greece, and wouldn’t be back until the following August. The three weeks that Beth would spend with them at the beginning of September, before starting at university, would be taken up with seeing her friends before they all went their separate ways again, leaving very little time for her and Gabriel. She might have a couple of shopping trips with Beth, but that was about it.
And Laure. It was two weeks since Laure had come back from Paris and to Iris’s dismay, she seemed to have no intention of ever going back. On the contrary, she’d settled even further into their lives by deciding to help in the walled garden, as if she had sensed their eagerness for her to leave and was trying to make herself indispensable.
“Has Laure said anything to you about leaving?” Gabriel had asked the other night.
“No. I’ve tried to find out, I asked her if she’d made any plans and she replied that for the moment, she wanted to take each day at a time.”
“For how long? A week, a month, a year? Why can’t she take each day at a time at the apartment in Paris? It’s not as if she has nowhere to go.”
Iris had laid a placating hand on his arm. “Let’s give her another couple of weeks. If she hasn’t shown any sign of moving on, then we can ask her to leave.”
“Has she really given up on Pierre?”
“I think so. She’s convinced he’s playing happy families with Claire and her daughter. Apparently, the day he sent the message to his workplace saying he was taking the whole of July off was the start of the school summer holidays.”
Remembering that conversation, Iris sighed. Although it was a relief not to have Laure constantly at her side—it was Gabriel who hadto put up with her now—it made her dwindling workload all the more evident. Thank God she had Esme’s commission, because there’d been no news from Samantha Everett about the town house. Beth had told her to give Samantha a nudge, but the truth was, while there was no news, there was hope, and Iris needed a bit of hope in her life.
Sudden tears pricked her eyelids. She blinked them back; this was not the time to break. She closed her eyes, and let the silence wrap itself around her.
When Iris arrived back at the house, Gabriel was in the kitchen making coffee.
“You were up early,” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“I couldn’t sleep so I went for a walk.”
“Why don’t you go back to bed for a while?”
She took bread from the cupboard and put a couple of slices in the toaster. “I can’t, I’m going to London with Esme.”
“Looks like Laure is going to be here on her own, then.”
“Why, where are you going?”
He reached behind her for the kettle. “I thought I’d take a break from gardening and go out on my bike for the day, find a pub for lunch, then cycle back. I feel like getting out, spending some time on my own. It can get a bit crowded around here.”
“I know what you mean. Make sure you take plenty of water with you; it’s going to be hot.”
