Kitabı oku: «The Last Will And Testament Of Daphné Le Marche», sayfa 5

Chapter 8
Giles, Paris, 1956

Giles Le Marche had closed his pharmacy for lunch was and preparing to go home to a cooked meal, thanks to his housekeeper, Bertie.

Giles liked routine, procedure and process, and his owning his own pharmacy in Montreuil, right next to the main Paris bus depot, afforded him a good living with all number of people coming for their travel sickness remedies and medicines they were unable to find in their village.

He adjusted his hat on his dark head of hair—a genetic gift, thanks to his maternal grandfather, but he told his gentlemen customers the bounty on his head was due to the hair tonic he made, and used daily.

Men willingly bought the tonic, just like women bought all manner of balms and lotions for their ageing.

Everyone was looking for something, he thought, as he closed the door and locked it with his brass key and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit coat and set out on his walk home.

As he passed the bus station, he saw a small group of people gathered, all quibbling over the price of something.

Perhaps it was some delicious figs that a farmer had brought up from Autignac. He had a lovely blue cheese that would go well with the figs and a class of Tempranillo after dinner.

Moving to the back of the crowd, his height gave him a vantage point to see the spectacle below, but instead of a valise of figs, there was a young girl selling what looked to be cakes of soap, wrapped in raffia ribbons. Glass jars of varying sizes were filled with a lotion that the women in the crowd were trying on their hands and arms and murmuring to themselves.

‘Very soft.’

‘Lovely.’

‘How much did you say?’

As the women discussed the product and the price, Giles stepped forward and dipped a finger into the jar that one of the women was holding. He smeared it onto the back of his hand and sniffed it, then gently rubbed it in.

His skin absorbed the smooth emollient and left it feeling fresher and, dare he say it, almost younger.

He picked up a cake of soap and held it to his nose. Lavender, he noted, and picked up another and recognised pungent citrus scents.

‘How much?’ he asked the girl, who looked up at him with indigo blue eyes, and a shock of dark curled hair.

‘The soap? Two francs. The lotion is five francs,’ she said, as a woman handed her the money for one of each of the products.

He rubbed the back of his hand again and noticed that his skin was still dewy where he had sampled the cream. There was something different compared to the creams he made in his pharmacy, but he couldn’t quite place the core ingredients.

There was lard, which was common, but there was something else.

‘What is in it?’ he asked her, feeling his stomach rumble. If he had the ingredients, he could experiment in the pharmacy and create his own Le Marche creams.

The girl looked up at him, and he saw her tired smile. It was amused and defeated all at once, and he felt sorry for her for a moment. So many girls like this came into Paris to find work, but the city was becoming overrun with the country mice just like her.

He waited for an answer impatiently. She handed a woman her change and a jar of cream and then leaned over and put her hand on Giles’ shoulder and whispered in his ear.

He could feel her mouth next to his skin. Her hair smelt of sunshine but her whisper was redolent with ambition.

‘An enchantress never reveals her magic,’ she said and stepped back from him. He felt the hairs on his neck rise with a feeling he thought would never visit him again.

‘I will buy them all,’ he said, without thinking twice.

And later, when surrounded by the cakes of soaps and lotions, he wondered if it was the product he wanted or the girl from the country.

* * *

Daphné Amyx stood opposite him in the small pharmacy, her hands twisting around each other, as though she was resisting the overwhelming urge to touch the rows of perfectly lined up bottles with their pretty labels.

‘I can make more,’ she said, as she watched the man line up the jars and soap on the marble-topped bench in the dispensary.

‘When you’re next in town, bring me some,’ he said brusquely.

Daphné shook her head. ‘No, I mean I can stay here and make more for you. I could work for you. I’d be an excellent assistant.’

He looked up at her, as though seeing her for the first time. She was ten years younger than his own son and yet she had more self-possession and directness than anyone he had met of that age.

He was used to the teens coming into the store, the girls trying to shoplift the peroxide for their hair, the boys wanting the hair cream for their pompadour.

But this girl with the cloud of dark hair and a waist he could have spanned with his outstretched fingers was beguiling him.

‘I don’t need an assistant,’ he snapped.

‘I think you could.’ She gestured around the space. ‘Women like other women to recommend things, it’s part of the secret women’s business,’ she said with that smile that shifted his perspective of the world.

It had been twenty years since he had loved a woman. His existence was carved out of routine and duty, yet this girl turned his mind into a whirling dervish, spinning him back in time before responsibility and duty took over his life.

‘An assistant,’ he harrumphed. He was fifty years old and being manipulated by a woman. It seemed time didn’t change a thing. He liked to sleep with whores, that way there was no misunderstanding about the future.

‘Where are you from?’ he barked.

‘Calvaic,’ she answered.

‘And your parents?’

‘Only my mother is alive now, she works a small property with a few animals and vegetables. If I worked here, I would send her money to help.’

He paused, thinking of Yves, who never asked for anything or ever offered him anything. ‘Where would you live in Paris?’

‘I have friends in Le Marais I could stay with until I found something more suitable.’

He snorted. ‘Le Marais? Jews.’ He shook his head as he spoke the last word.

Daphné raised her head proudly. ‘Yes Jews, and my friends. My mother and I hid them for a time during the war, and I would do it again for anyone, even you.’

Giles looked up startled at the hardness that crept into her tone. ‘Of course,’ he said quickly. ‘I agree. I am just commenting on them taking my business. There are more and more pharmacies opening and a few of them are run by Jews.’ He felt ashamed as he spoke, realising his shame at not doing more during the war, in fact, avoiding it at all costs.

The war had interrupted his routine. He’d sent his son Yves to Switzerland to finish school and stay safe with his chemistry teacher’s family from university and, since then, Yves had stayed there, much to Giles’ disappointment. A trip back to France once a year for a weekend didn’t allow them to connect as a father and son. Instead, they were polite, like cousins once removed, knowing the skin of each other’s life but not the bones.

Yves mother, Louise, was the unspoken ghost in their lives, dying when Yves was fourteen years old.

The conversations about Louise and her death hadn’t evolved into a respectful mourning from both of them, and then the war started in earnest and Yves was sent away.

Daphné adjusted the belt on her teal dress, which was well made from shabby fabric. She would need clothes, he imagined, and he thought of the pharmacies on the Champs-Élysées where the women wore white shirts with little black bows tied around their necks.

‘I can pay you sixty-four francs a week,’ he said, waiting for her to argue. Instead, her eyes opened wide and she smiled with such radiance, he thought he might be thrown backward by the force of her happiness.

What had happened, he thought, as she clapped her hands? How had he been so bewitched by her? He had lost his mind, he thought, and was about to rescind his offer when she leaned forward and touched his face with her soft hand. Too soft for a rural girl, he noted, as she leaned into his ear again, whispering conspiratorially.

‘Goat’s milk,’ she said and pulled back, and he saw amusement in her eyes. She smiled again and he inhaled sharply, as everything within him that was dormant woke.

* * *

Daphné went back to Calvaic to get her possessions and see her mother again, on the strict instructions from Giles she was to return in three days’ time, ready to work.

She was all he could think about during those three days, with her absence draped around his mind and body.

Daily he told himself off for his desire, nightly he indulged in fantasies far beyond anything he and Louise had experienced during their marriage, or even anything he had done with the occasional whore he found in the back alleys of La Marais.

Then she walked through the door on the third morning. He could hardly concentrate all morning, waiting for her arrival, just before he set off home for Bertilde’s leek and Gruyère tart.

‘You’re here,’ he stated, as though she wasn’t going to come back to him.

The girl nodded, and he saw her eyes her were red, and she was pale.

‘Your farewell to your mother was difficult, I imagine,’ he said, somewhat more kindly.

She nodded, and he saw her eyes fill with tears again. ‘Have you eaten?’ he asked.

She shook her head and he picked up his jacket from the hook next to the dispensary and slipped it on, adding his hat and picking up his keys for lunch.

‘Home then,’ he said and he walked out of the shop with Daphné following him, locking the door after them.

Bertilde had left him the tart, still warm, covered by a linen tea towel on the dining room table. A small salad but enough for two sat next to it in a glass bowl, with a vinaigrette in a little jug. It was all exactly as it was every Thursday but to Giles it felt unusual and exotic.

Daphné stood in the middle of the room, looking around at his life and he wondered what she saw. The orderly room now looked sterile to his eyes. The darkness from the blinds being half closed felt ignorant and the closed windows suffocating.

He threw up the shades and opened a window, letting the warm air inside.

‘Shall we eat?’ he said, gesturing to the table.

Daphné sat down opposite him and watched him as he served her and then himself. He gave her more than him, and she looked up and smiled at him.

‘You should take the bigger piece,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to put on weight,’ he said, touching his flat stomach. He was in excellent shape, from his programme of walking every day and exercising self-discipline in all things.

They ate in silence and Giles watched, as she carefully used her knife and fork. There was something so endearing about her, and he wanted to protect her, teach her, love her.

He stood up and poured himself a glass of wine.

‘Wine?’ he asked Daphné who shook her head in refusal.

He saw a flush building on her neck, and he wondered if the air from the open window was too warm on her.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked her.

She paused, as though finding the right words.

‘Do you expect me to have sex with you?’ she asked, her bluntness outweighing any shame she might feel at the honesty of her question.

‘What? No,’ he cried and it was true. He had long ago given up having expectations from other people.

‘It’s just Mother said some men hire young girls so they can have something to toy with at work, and a wife to cook for them at home.’

Giles gestured around the room.

‘I have no wife, as you can see. I have a son, who I barely see who lives in Switzerland, and I have no desire for anything from you but the formula for your creams. I think we could make a very good business if we tried.’

Her eyes were downcast and then she looked up at him, her eyes meeting his, and he saw something that he imagined was disappointment in them for a moment, but then he remembered that Louise had said he had always been a fool, except now he was just an old fool.

Chapter 9
Dominic

Dominic Bertiull left Sainte-Chapelle with no more idea of what was next for the Le Marche dynasty than any of the mourners. His strategy to approach the ex-wife hadn’t played out as he had hoped. Usually they sang like birds, bitter and twisted with their place outside of the family, ready to spill their opinion on everything wrong with the past and placing curses on the future. But Matilde Le Marche hadn’t said a word. Dominic’s charms hadn’t worked; in fact, he thought, as he sat back in his office, they had quite the opposite effect.

Most women fawned over Dominic, particularly older women. He was deliberate in fashion, preferring expensive suits, silk ties and handmade shoes. He only wore shades of blues and greys, with black saved for casual wear and black tie events.

He knew he was pleasant looking, but good clothes and a slim and muscular frame ensured he went into the next category of class, and money lifted him up one more level again.

He was rich, beautiful, successful and single. Europe was his oyster and beautiful women his pearls. Born in London to his diplomat French father and a German mother, he was educated in England but went to university in America, much to his father’s disappointment. But Dominic wanted to become wealthy by the time he was thirty and money and America seemed to go hand in hand. He came back to Europe and set up an office in Paris, ready to embrace his Gallic blood, and to use his French charm to buy and sell companies for a profit.

He was rich by the time he was thirty, obscenely rich by the time he was thirty-five and, by forty, he was bored.

Matilde Le Marche came into his mind and he typed her name into his computer.

Photos of her came up from her modelling days, and he still saw the beauty in her face, although it was lined from sunbathing.

She was fifty-five years old, he noted. Ten years older than him and he wondered what she would be like in bed.

Dominic had slept with women older than Matilde, and younger than eighteen—he wasn’t an ageist. Sex was sex and he liked it because he was good at it.

He typed Celeste’s name into the computer and images of her filled the screen. She was attractive, he thought, but not like her mother had been. Celeste had sad eyes that caused her mouth to turn downwards, as though she was disapproving of everything around her.

Maybe she was like Daphné, he thought, amused at the idea. He had heard the stories of the woman’s iron fist in a velvet glove.

He flicked through the images and read some more about the company he had been watching for the last year.

There was nothing he didn’t know about the company.

Giles Le Marche, a chemist, had started the company in Paris in 1902. He married a French woman called Louise who had died just before the Second World War started.

Daphné married Yves in 1956 and was soon working in the company, turning it from a small family concern into a product that was found in every pharmacy across France.

In 1978, Yves died and Daphné took over the running of the company and soon the products were across most of Europe, but they never made it to the same level of success in America or the United Kingdom where French pharmaceuticals were seen as indulgent or too foreign.

There was a head office in London, and an office in Paris attached to a laboratory. They had excellent skin products and their lipsticks were moderately successful, but the rest of their line was struggling. Cosmetics was competitive and it wasn’t enough to have appropriate colours; they needed to have an edge, and Le Marche had lost its edge twenty years ago when Henri had died.

Dominic sat back in his chair and stared at a picture of Daphné and her two sons. They must have been sixteen and nineteen, he imagined. Robert looked like a younger version of his father, and Henri looked like a young Alain Delon.

Dominic peered at the image on the screen. Henri had a casual elegance that Robert didn’t, he noted, and he wondered what would have happened if Henri had survived and worked in the company.

He scratched his head, careful to smooth down his dark hair again and clicked through the pages on the computer again. Yes, he knew everything about the company and the basics of the scandals that befell them, with tragic deaths and any number of rumours that followed them through the years, but what he didn’t know, and what he needed to know was what were Robert’s plans for Le Marche.

The Japanese company was desperate for an established cosmetics company with a European presence they could build on, and Le Marche was perfect if Dominic could get it for the right price.

He had two choices—he could pay what it was worth and have the deal done in a matter of months, or he could try to lower the value of the company, so his client paid less and he was paid more as a bonus.

Dominic thought for a moment and then decided he never liked to pay full price for anything and so he began his war on the House of Le Marche.

* * *

Edward Badger was still at his desk when Dominic Bertiull rang him from Paris.

‘I have a client who is interested in purchasing Le Marche,’ Dominic said, then paused for effect, ‘and the formula.’

Edward cleared his throat, ‘Madame Le Marche has only just been buried today, Mr Bertiull. I don’t think we’re in the position for any such offers at the moment.’

Dominic heard the tiredness in the man’s voice and he smiled. This was going to be easy, he decided. The lawyer and right-hand man of Daphné Le Marche was most likely sick of his position. No doubt he was already looking elsewhere for another job. No one in their right mind would work under Robert Le Marche, everyone knew how hopeless he was.

‘When do you think you will be ready?’ asked Dominic, with just the right amount of respect.

‘I will have to speak to the family,’ said Edward.

The family? thought Dominic. That’s interesting. Perhaps Robert isn’t the only concern. Perhaps the granddaughter got a slice of the company also?

That was easy enough to handle, he thought. He’d done his homework on Celeste and saw she was having an affair with a married man and had no real career. She would take the money in a heartbeat.

He clicked on the screen again and saw images from Paris Match of a small dark-haired child at the funeral of her father.

Henri’s child, he reminded himself, but then dismissed her. Daphné and the mother of the child hadn’t spoken since Henri had died and, according to his private investigator, she hadn’t been back in the country since the funeral.

There was no chance the woman would make a claim now, was there? He made a mental note to speak to his private investigator to find out her whereabouts, and if she was still in Australia.

‘When will the reading of the will be? Perhaps I can speak to Robert directly?’ he offered smoothly. ‘I know how busy you must be.’

‘The reading of the will is actually none of your business, but you’re more than welcome to speak to Robert, as that’s none of my business,’ countered Edward with the same slick tone.

Dominic ignored the barb and kept focused.

‘Robert mentioned the formula. He said his mother told him she had discovered something that would change a woman’s face, make her look younger, more beautiful. He said it was being trialled around the world.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Edward. ‘I have to go. Goodbye, Mr Bertiull.’

Dominic hung up the phone and sat in thought.

Something odd was going on. Edward Badger was very cagey about the formula, and then said that the decision to sell the company would be made as a family.

He needed to know more, but he didn’t want to scare the granddaughters away. His eyes turned to the computer screen, and settled on Matilde. Perhaps he might try seeing what she would reveal away from the Le Marche and Paris gossips. According to his sources, there was no love lost between her and Robert, so no doubt she would be happy to spill the secrets for some revenge and a price; there was no doubt that she would be left nothing by the old woman, and Robert wasn’t going to share anything he had with his ex-wife.

Robert really was a repugnant man, thought Dominic, as he left the office and got into his waiting car. When Robert had first approached him with the news that his mother was dying, and would he want to buy the company from him, Dominic wasn’t interested, but then he spoke of the formula. A contact at the private bank, Lombard Odier, told him there was a sealed envelope in a vault belonging to Daphné Le Marche with the words written on the front—

To be opened according to the instructions in the Last Will and Testament of Daphné Le Marche

It was a perfect mystery, and if he could get his hands on the formula, whatever it might be, and strip the company and sell it to the Japanese concern, everyone would be happy. Well, at least him and Robert.

His phone chimed with the reminder that he had a date tonight with a twenty-three-year-old Russian supermodel, who was walking for Chanel and Givenchy. She was utterly perfect to look at, but about as interesting as a clothes hanger.

He sighed, thinking about the evening ahead. He knew how it was going to play out. She would wear a slip dress, her nipples hard through the fabric, making everyone in the restaurant turn. She would order the crab soufflé and barely touch it, while drinking too much wine. They would return to his apartment, where she would allow him to have sex with her, while she did nothing more than lie there. Her belief in her beauty meant she didn’t have to contribute, as her looks were enough.

He thought about cancelling and then changed his mind. He had nowhere else to be, and any company, even Masha the model, was better than none at all.