‘You will. One merely has to wait a few days.’
Jack handed her a cup of coffee. Celeste tore off a piece of bread, burying her nose in the delicious, yeasty smell of it. ‘Another myth. I was told that the English cannot bake good bread, but this is most acceptable.’
‘A high compliment indeed from a Frenchwoman.’ He handed her a slice of cheese and laughed when she sniffed that too, wrinkling her nose. ‘Try it, you might be surprised.’
She did, and was forced to admit that, like the bread, it was excellent. ‘Though it breaks my French heart to do so,’ she added, smiling over her coffee cup.
‘But you’re half-English, are you not?’
‘I suppose I am, though I don’t feel it. I think one has to be part of a country before one feels any sense of belonging. All this,’ Celeste said, spreading her arms wide at the sweeping view, ‘it feels so alien to me.’
‘Maybe that’s because you’re a Parisian.’
Celeste laughed. ‘When I first arrived in Paris, I felt such an outsider. It was as if everyone but me knew a secret and they were all whispering about it behind my back. Even after fifteen years, I’m still not considered a genuine Parisian. I don’t have that je ne sais quoi, that air about me. To the true Parisians, I will always be an incomer.’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Jack said. ‘Paris, it’s always seemed to me, is a city that only reveals itself at night, and even then, you have to know where to look. I always sense the best elements are just round the next corner, or along the next boulevard. In Paris, I always feel as if I’m on the outside looking in. It’s not like London at all.’
‘I have never visited London. I hope to go there before I return to France.’ Celeste broke off another piece of bread and accepted a second piece of cheese which Jack cut for her. ‘You have been away from England a long time,’ she said. ‘Does it still feel like home?’
He paused in the act of quartering a peach. ‘Charlie wants me to buy an estate and settle down. I never did share his love for country life, though he seems to have conveniently forgotten that.’
‘Perhaps it would be different if you had been the eldest son, if Trestain Manor belonged to you and not to your brother?’
Jack laughed. ‘Lord, no, I’d be bored senseless. It was always the army for me, so it’s as well I’m the second son and not the first.’ He handed her the peach. ‘What about you? Have you never thought of going back to live in your fishing village?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you miss it? I used to miss all this,’ Jack said. ‘Even though I wouldn’t want to live here, it’s my childhood home.’
Celeste stared at the quarter of peach in her hand. ‘The house in Cassis was where I lived. It was never a home.’ Her voice sounded odd, even to her own ears. She was, yet again, on the brink of tears for no reason. It was Jack’s fault. All she wanted him to do was help her unravel the mystery of her mother’s past, but for some reason, he persisted in linking that past with her own. He seemed to have the knack of inflaming her emotions as well as her body. She set the peach down. ‘Paris is my home,’ she said, as if repeating it would make it more true. Not that it needed to be more true. It was true.
She thought of the house where she had grown up. The distinctive creak of the front door. The very different creak of the fifth stair which had a broken tread. The way the floors always seemed to echo when she walked, signalling her presence too loudly. She tried to close her mind to the memories, but they would not stop flowing. It was Jack’s fault. This was all Jack’s fault.
On her last visit, after receiving the letter, she had packed up every one of her mother’s paintings. They lay in crates now, stacked in a corner of her Paris studio. She couldn’t bear to look at them but nor could she bear to dispose of them. The rest of the house she had left as it was.
She shook her head. She was aware of Jack, sipping his coffee, pretending not to study her, but the ghosts of the past had too strong a claim on her. Her mother on the cliff top painting, her hair covered by a horrible cap, her body draped in shapeless brown. Her mother’s face, starkly beautiful in the miniature inside her locket, strained and sad. Her mother’s paintings were all of the coast and the sea which took her. The sea which she had abandoned herself to, without giving Celeste a chance to save her. The beautiful, cruel sea, which her mother had chosen to embrace, rather than her own daughter.
The pain was unexpected. Nothing so clichéd as a stab to the heart; it was duller, weightier, like a heavy blow to the stomach. At least this time I have the opportunity to say goodbye, her mother had written, so certain that Celeste cared so little she would not wish to do the same. With good cause, for Celeste had made it very clear, after Henri died...
A tear rolled down her cheek. Her throat was clogged. She couldn’t speak. She was filled with the most unbearable sadness. What was wrong with her! She never cried. Had never cried. Now, hardly a day went by where she teetered on the verge of stupid, stupid tears.
In the distance, the chime of St Mary’s heralded noon. She dabbed frantically at her eyes with her napkin. She never carried a handkerchief.
‘Celeste?’
Jack! It was his fault for dredging all this up. His fault for making her so on edge. She jumped to her feet and snatched up her sketchbook. ‘I have the headache,’ she said. ‘I have no more paper. I need to rest. I need more charcoal.’
She was fleeing, just as Jack had, after that first kiss, and she did not care. All that mattered was that he did not stop her. She barely noticed in her anxiety to escape that he made absolutely no attempt to do so.
‘So this is where you’re hiding.’
Celeste forced herself to turn around slowly. Jack stood hesitantly in the doorway, dressed in his customary breeches and boots. She willed the flush of embarrassment she could feel creeping up her neck not to show on her face. ‘It is safe to come in,’ she said. ‘I am not going to descend into a fit of hysterics or stamp my feet or even run away again.’
He strode over to her, his relief obvious. ‘I’m sorry, Celeste,’ he said. ‘It was not my intention to cause you upset yesterday.’
‘Cassis was not a happy place for me when I was growing up,’ she said carefully. ‘I don’t like to talk of it or even think of those days. En effet, I never do. It is in the past where it belongs.’
And she would make sure it remained there. It sounded contrary, considering the accusations she had flung at Jack yesterday, but their cases were not the same, she had decided after another sleepless night. She had come to terms with her past, he had not. What she needed to concentrate on now was dealing with her mother’s past. Which was a separate issue.
Slanting a look at Jack, she was not surprised to catch him studying her, but she was relieved when he nodded his acceptance, albeit reluctantly. ‘Charlie,’ he said, turning his attention to the portrait she had been examining. ‘Aged about five, I think. What brings you to the portrait gallery?’
‘I was interested to see how the estate had been depicted previously, to avoid the risk of replicating any existing works.’
‘Ah, so you’re here purely in the name of artistic research and not at all out of curiosity?’
Celeste smiled. ‘Naturally.’ She turned to the next work, a family portrait, which showed a youthful Jack and Charlie sitting at their parents’ feet. ‘You looked much more alike as children than you do as adults. You both take after your mother rather