Ritual (24 page)

Overhead, the dappled shade of the apple trees cast patterns of shadow on her half-closed eyelids, though in the still heaviness of the Sunday afternoon the leaves were barely moving and even the crickets' grating cry seemed muted.

In the dark interior of the shuttered house she could hear the sounds of Grandmère stamping about her kitchen, swearing at the cat and the stove, clattering pots and plates, as she assembled her speciality,
Civet
de
Lapin
au
thym
, for the family meal this evening. Everyone would be there, Elise Daubigny's wiry black hair was showing signs of grey and her small bony frame had started shrinking but her will was as strong as ever and not one of her large sons would have had the courage to defy a maternal edict. Altogether there would be twenty-three people of three generations gathered in Juliette's honour around the long table on the terrace, spread already with a starched tablecloth so white that looking at it in the strong sunlight was almost painful.

The dark little mews house in London which had insidiously become Juliette's prison seemed strangely insubstantial in her mind, like a nightmare from which she had drifted back into this comfortable, drowsy state.

I've left him for ever, she said to herself, shaping the words with her lips as if to reassure herself that this, at least, was no dream. It's all over. I've escaped.

She had planned it with infinite care, so that he could have no suspicion. She had packed an item at a time, always with an excuse ready to explain if need be why she should be going into the cupboard where the suitcases were kept.

Then, when he had gone to his weekly meeting at the headquarters of the computer company which employed him to work from home, she had broken a window, hoisted her luggage through it and fled. She had left no note; he would be able to see what she had done on the surveillance cameras when he came home. She had been icily calm until she reached the airport; then she had started shaking so much that she couldn't hold the medicinal glass of brandy she had prescribed for herself.

‘Tu
ne
lui
as
pas
dit
?
'
Elise Daubigny had said, her thick black brows shooting up almost to her hairline, when her granddaughter explained briefly the reason for her sudden visit. 'You haven't told him?'

She was astonished, but so pleased that for once in her outspoken life she didn't say too much. She nursed a consuming hatred for the English who in the name of freedom had destroyed her native city of Limoges and killed her parents, and it pained her to think that Juliette, her favourite among the grandchildren (largely because she didn't see her often enough to notice the flaws she regularly pinpointed in the others) was making the same mistake as her mother in marrying one of the swine. And Juliette was very like her mother, with the same creamy olive skin, oval face and delicate features; if her eyes had been brown instead of dark blue, she would have been Marguerite all over again.

Elise's mouth still twisted with bitterness when she thought of Marguerite, the precious only daughter in a family of boys, who had defied her widowed mother by going to work in England, been fool enough to marry a perfidious Englishman with blue eyes like Juliette's, and had come home sick and heart-broken — as Elise had bluntly warned her that she would — only to die.

That was fifteen years ago, and Marguerite's memorials were a plaque in the family vault and this child who, apart from her eyes, had little that was English about her appearance. She was pretty like her mother, and foolish like her mother too, courting inevitable disaster with an English husband when there were honest Frenchmen like her third cousin Valery — Elise liked to keep marriages within the extended family — who had only taken plump, stolid Anne-Marie when it was clear he couldn't have Juliette.

It was three years since she had last seen Juliette, and it was all too clear what that marriage had done to her. The sparkle had gone; she was nervous, too thin, and sorely in need of good food and good wine and the soothing village tranquillity in which Ambys had basked for the past six hundred years.

`If you had not left him, he would have killed you. They are all murderers, these English. Like your father,' she said mercilessly. 'Here in France you will recover.'

So Elise, who was up every morning by half-past six, and who disapproved of sunbathing, or indeed almost any form of leisure apart from sitting down outside the front door in the cool of the evening and commenting acidly on the antics of one's neighbours, had left
la
petite
to sleep late this morning, and spread the rug under the tree herself so that Juliette could rest after a proper nourishing lunch of Elise's good soup, bread from M. Moreau's bakery and the cheese that Mme. Bouchet made herself with milk from her little herd of goats.

Banished from the kitchen, Juliette lay in the orchard with her eyes half-closed and thought about the past and the future.

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