A French Affair
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Susan Lewis
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Copyright
About the Book
Some secrets are too devastating to be told...
When Natalie Moore is killed in a freak accident in France her mother – the very poised and elegant Jessica – knows instinctively there is more to it. However, Natalie’s father – the glamorous, high-flying Charlie – is so paralysed by the horror of losing his daughter, that he refuses even to discuss his wife’s suspicions.
In the end, when their marriage is rocked by yet another terrible shock, Jessica decides to go back to France alone in search of some answers. When she gets to the idyllic vineyard in the heart of Burgundy she soon finds a great deal more than she was expecting in a love that is totally forbidden and a truth that will almost certainly devastate her life.
Set during one long hot summer in a sleepy world of wine, food and romance, A French Affair is a deeply sensual and passionate story of love, resistance, loyalty and betrayal.
About the Author
Susan Lewis is the bestselling author of nineteen novels. She is also the author of Just One More Day, a moving memoir of her childhood in Bristol, and lives in France. Her website address is www.susanlewis.com
Also by Susan Lewis
A Class Apart
Dance While You Can
Stolen Beginnings
Darkest Longings
Obsession
Vengeance
Summer Madness
Last Resort
Wildfire
Chasing Dreams
Taking Chances
Cruel Venus
Strange Allure
Silent Truths
Wicked Beauty
Intimate Strangers
The Hornbeam Tree
The Mill House
Just One More Day, A Memoir
A French Affair
Susan Lewis
To Jenny
Acknowledgements
My biggest thanks of all go to Raphael Vigneau, who so patiently and expertly guided me through the complex journey of wine-making – from the planting of the grapes, right through to the opening, pouring and tasting of an exceptional Grand Cru. If there are any mistakes in this book, please know they are all mine. I also warmly thank Julian Faulkner for his additional help with the wine-making process, and for the very enjoyable time we spent at his vineyard in the Var.
A very big and warm thank you to Cathy Hubert for the French translations, which give the book so much more colour and authenticity than it might otherwise have had. Again, if there are any mistakes, please be assured they are mine.
There are three people to thank for their invaluable help with the sections on sculpting – first and foremost Maria Gamundi, whose sculptures are amongst the most elegantly beautiful I’ve seen. Secondly, Martin Foot who very kindly showed me around his studio and explained many intricacies of his exceptional work. And thirdly, much love and thanks to my dear friend Fanny Blackburne, for giving me the experience of sitting as a sculptor’s model.
Lastly, I would like to thank my editors, Susan Sandon and Georgina Hawtrey-Woore for all their patience, forbearance, encouragement and support during the writing of this book – it was greatly needed, and hugely appreciated.
Prologue
‘THERE’S A SECRET hiding place in here,’ the little boy said, leading the way. ‘My uncle showed me where it is. He used to keep all his special things here when he was young, so did my granddad. Even Elodie doesn’t know about it.’
‘Do you think there are spiders?’ Natalie asked, keeping close behind.
‘Oh yes, lots. I can catch some if you like and you can give them names.’
Natalie’s eyes were searching the darkness. ‘There are beds in here,’ she said. ‘Does someone sleep in them?’
‘Only me and Elodie, when we want to.’
The little boy, Antoine, stumbled on the corner of a frayed rug, then stopped in front of a large mahogany chest that was mistily lit by a few rogue rays of daylight coming in through a small roof window. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked as Natalie joined him, his voice resonating importance.
‘You’re not going to do anything nasty, are you?’ she asked. ‘If you do, I shall scream and hit you.’
‘Don’t be silly. Watch,’ and kneeling in front of the bottom drawer he used its fancy iron handles to ease it forward. There was a bump as the drawer fell onto the floor.
Natalie looked down at it, then back to Antoine who seemed swollen with mystery. ‘So? It’s just a drawer,’ she scoffed. ‘We’ve got drawers all over our house.’
‘Yes, but I bet you don’t have one hidden away behind another,’ he said, and reaching into the empty space he pulled another drawer forward.
More interested now, Natalie dropped to her knees to inspect it. ‘It’s empty,’ she said, annoyed and disappointed.
‘Yes, because I took my secrets out before you came, in case you found them.’
Slightly bored again, Natalie looked around the dim attic space. ‘I’ve never been up here before,’ she said. ‘I think Harry and I should sleep here.’
‘You can’t in the summer, it’s too hot.’
It was summer now, and the drawer had no secrets, so they didn’t hang around for long.
The next time Natalie came was at Christmas, so it was too cold for her and her brother Harry to sleep in the attic then, and at Easter, when her grandmother brought her, she was too afraid to sleep there alone. However, she wasn’t afraid in the day, so it was where she sometimes went to write her secrets in her very own diary which she kept tucked away in the hidden drawer.
One rainy morning, as she sat under the roof window, writing down her most private thoughts about Antoine, she heard a car pull up outside, and a moment or two later her grandmother called out for her to come down and see who’d arrived. Quickly she wrote a few more words in her diary, then after sliding it carefully into the secret drawer she went downstairs. The kitchen door was open and because she didn’t mind the rain she skipped outside. She would go back to her diary later, she decided, and write about everything they did today.
But Natalie never went back to the diary again.
Chapter One
‘JESSICA? JESSICA MOORE?’
Jessica turned round, half-expecting to see someone she knew, but the flush on the age-crushed cheeks in front of her and the soulful look in the watery old eyes were enough to tell her that she’d never seen this woman before.
Jessica smiled at her vaguely. She didn’t want to be rude, particularly when the old lady looked quite a dear with her fluffy white curls and warming smile, but
nor did she want to engage with the air of tragedy that was emanating through the kindness in what Jessica felt to be almost suffocating waves.
As the woman began to speak Jessica continued to smile, and even nodded once or twice, but her mind had quickly switched to another place, another time, where she could no longer be reached.
They were standing halfway down the pet-food aisle in Sainsbury’s on the Cromwell Road. It was odd for Jessica to be there, since there were no animals at home, nor had there ever been. When she was a child she’d been so desperate for a dog that she used to walk around pulling a ball of string behind her, calling it Timmy. The memory flitted through her mind now as softly as a whisper. She was seeing a lonely little girl with no brothers or sisters, a father who was unknown and a strikingly beautiful mother who sometimes wanted her, but usually didn’t. Her grandparents, with whom she’d lived most of the time, would have allowed her a dog, but her mother, from the end of a phone, or during one of her sweeping, gift-showering visits, would never permit it.
‘She’ll be coming to live with me any time now,’ her mother used to gush, all corkscrew curls and cherry-red lipstick, ‘and I’m sorry, but I can’t have a dog too. They’re the worst kind of tie, and with all this quarantine business . . . What if we go to live abroad? No, no, a dog is just another complication, and that is something I really don’t need.’
They did go to live abroad, she and her mother, for two agonisingly lonely years, during which Jessica had missed her grandparents so much that in the end she’d stopped eating and even speaking. She’d known, in her eight-year-old way, that her mother didn’t really want her there, that she was a liability every bit as inconvenient as a dog, probably even more so, and the man her mother was living with didn’t seem interested in her either.
In the end, her mother and her French-Canadian lover had broken up, and Jessica had been packed off back to Dorset to her lovely gran and big, strong grampy. And that was where she’d stayed, discounting a couple more disastrous attempts on her mother’s part to be a full-time parent, until she and her best friend, Lilian, had left for university at the age of eighteen.
All best forgotten now, though. It was a long time ago, and really had no bearing on today at all.
Feeling a slight pressure on her arm, Jessica looked down to see the old lady’s arthritic fingers touching her kindly. Jessica’s eyes came up to the woman’s gentle gaze. She smiled again, then after whispering a polite thank you, she began wheeling her trolley on down the aisle. For the next few minutes she focused only on what she’d come for: Greek yoghurt, muesli, fresh pasta, artichokes . . . She’d made a list and most items were ticked off by now, so it only remained to pick up some bread before she could join a queue at the checkout.
It was a Thursday morning in early July. There weren’t many people around, but even so, as she moved quietly about her business she could feel the glances following her like ghosts, seeming to cling to her even after the curious, sympathetic and even embarrassed eyes had turned away. This was one of the very worst parts about being ‘known’: it allowed her no refuge in anonymity, nor any real privacy to call her own. At least not while she was out in public, and this was the first time she’d braved even a supermarket trip since the terrible event that had shattered her life. Had three months really gone by already? Sometimes it felt as though it was only three days, while at others it might have happened a lifetime ago.
Should she get a French stick, or a pain de compagne? She was thinking about Charlie now and wishing she’d let him come with her. He’d offered, but he hadn’t really had the time, and Nikki, their seventeen-year-old, had merely looked at her and shrugged, as if to say, don’t ask me, I don’t know what you’re making all the fuss about anyway, it’s only a supermarket, for God’s sake.
Jessica hadn’t told her she was afraid of breaking down in public. Nikki didn’t need to know that. For a few crazy minutes she’d considered keeping eight-year-old Harry home from school so he could come with her, but apart from being a selfish and even cowardly idea, it would have totally defeated the purpose of this visit, which was to start getting back to normal.
Strangely, now she was here the only thing she really felt was vaguely distanced from herself, almost as if she were another shopper watching Jessica Moore’s progress and wondering what it was like to be her. Do well-known people feel things as deeply as everyone else? Is it easier for them because they’ve got money, or fame, or beauty, or successful husbands, to fall back on?
‘It’s not her,’ she heard someone whispering nearby.
‘I’m telling you, it is.’
‘Who? What are we talking about?’ a third voice asked.
‘Jessica Moore,’ came the reply.
‘Jessica who?’
‘Moore. You know, the one who does the arts programme on Wednesdays, after the news. She’s on the radio too, I think, but I’ve never heard her. It’s terrible what happened. Makes you want to go up and hug her, doesn’t it?’
‘Why, what happened?’
‘Don’t you ever read a paper? Honestly, I wonder if you even know what day of the week it is sometimes.’
Jessica dropped a French stick into her trolley and turned towards the checkout. That was another thing about being ‘known’, people seemed to discuss you as though you were unable to hear.
As she waited to pay she picked up a magazine, opened it and stared down at the words. She didn’t want to catch anyone’s eye, or hear any more whispers, she just wanted to be left alone. If she could, she’d tell them how she was trying to get her life back together, and coming here was one of the first small steps. So please don’t look at me any more, just try to pretend you’ve never seen me before.
She detested self-pity, but she knew that the envy she felt of those around her was rooted in it, for she longed to be free to go about her business in a normal, unnoticed way, untouched by curiosity, barely even registering in people’s consciousness, except as a tall, slim woman in white jeans and a plain T-shirt, who was paying for her groceries in cash, and taking a little too long to pack her bags.
As she wheeled her trolley across the upper level of the car park she could feel the summer sun on her skin and hear the nearby roar of traffic. Then someone whistled – a long, tunefully appreciative note, swooping up, and then down, before ending in a small staccato burst that made those around him laugh.
Though she didn’t look up, she guessed the whistle had come from the scaffolding nearby, where a small group of men with bare chests and hard hats were, apparently, not paying too much attention to their work. Of course, the whistle might not have been for her, but instinct, and the fact that no-one else was around, told her it was.
At thirty-nine she might have felt flattered by the attention, but she didn’t. In fact, it almost upset her to be reminded of how attractive she was. It seemed so superficial and irrelevant, and so very out of kilter with the way she felt inside. Who cared that her lithe figure and subtly exotic looks could still turn heads? Certainly not her. As far as she was concerned nothing could matter less.
As she approached her husband’s Jaguar she caught a glimpse of her reflection and felt a moment’s surprise. Then a small flutter of emotion broke into the numbness of her heart, like the tiny wings of a moth making ready to fly. She’d cut her hair so radically that she almost hadn’t recognised herself. She didn’t mind – she felt she’d like to be a stranger – but it seemed odd to see this different person looking back at her. She wondered if she’d been trying to make herself less attractive by chopping off the sleek blonde mane she’d always had. If so, she wasn’t sure it had worked, because the wispy strands that now curved and curled like feathers around her face and scalp seemed to make her dark, almond-shaped eyes appear even deeper and more lustrous, while lending a new softness to the precise symmetry of her delicately flared nostrils and sumptuously wide mouth.
Nikki had cut her hair short first. In fact, Nikki had gone a step further and totally
changed the colour, so now she was a brunette, instead of the scrumptious teenage blonde her father had so adored. It was a rare event to hear those two quarrel, but Charlie had been so upset by Nikki’s new look that he’d been unable to hold back.
‘It doesn’t suit you at all,’ he’d shouted, his pale, handsome face darkening with fury – though Jessica had known it was pain. He didn’t want anything to change, even though everything already had, irrevocably, and suddenly Nikki’s new hairstyle was too much for him to bear.
Was it really only a week since that explosion? It seemed so much longer, but time had lost all meaning since Natalie, their younger daughter, had been so cruelly taken from them.
Because of the way Charlie had reacted to Nikki’s new hair, Jessica had been sure to warn him about her own plans to cut hers. Instead of protesting, as she’d expected, he’d merely nodded, as though already half-expecting it.
‘Just please don’t change the colour,’ he’d said, lifting the hair from her shoulders and letting the cool softness of it run through his fingers. So she hadn’t, but even so, Charlie’s angels, as he’d teasingly called his three blondes, were no more.
As she loaded her shopping into the boot of the car the sound of rap music suddenly crescendoed beside her. She took a quick step to one side, as though to avoid a collision, then half-smiled when she realised it was the mobile phone in her pocket.
‘Hello, Charlie Moore’s number one fan,’ she said into it.
‘Jessica?’ Charlie said. ‘Is that you? Where are you?’
‘In the supermarket car park. Where are you?’
‘At the office, looking for my phone.’
Humour was lighting her eyes. ‘Well, seems you found it,’ she said. ‘You left it in the car when I dropped you off earlier. Sorry, I should have called to tell you.’
‘No problem. Has anyone rung?’
‘No. You’re your own first caller and it’s already past ten o’clock.’
‘No-one’s rung me at all?’ he said incredulously.