‘I know, Aunt Sylvia, sorry. I just don’t want to be pigeonholed one way or another.’
Léo tactfully removed himself to the sink area and started making coffee, which he considered a good idea most of the time, even just before bed, but particularly when some busyness was needed. Since he had been living at Feywood, he had watched his English hosts go through the same routine with tea, over and over again, but he never found quite the same satisfaction in squishing a teabag against a mug as he did from brewing fresh, aromatic coffee. He had even tried making tea with loose leaves, in a pot, but found it more fiddly than the result warranted, and he didn’t like stray tealeaves in his teeth. As he ground and poured and swished, he kept a surreptitious eye on Juliet and her aunt. Juliet must have regretted her harsh tone of voice because after a few more exchanges, which Léo could not hear over the bean grinder, he saw her reach out to Sylvia and then melt into the older woman’s kind embrace. She looked so tense but yet so vulnerable; a complicated woman, he reflected again as he gave the pot a single stir, then pushed down the plunger.
‘Is that coffee nearly ready, Léo?’ asked Sylvia, giving him the cue he needed to turn around and join the women again. ‘It smells wonderful.’
‘Good! These are the beans I roasted myself – hopefully rather more rich and sweet than last time I tried.’
‘You roast your own coffee beans?’ asked Juliet. ‘How do you do that? I didn’t know you could do it yourself.’
‘Oh yes, it’s very easy. There are lots of ways to do it, but I just use the oven. It’s taken me a few tries, but I think this is a good batch. I’ll show you how to do it, if you like?’
There was a small silence. Juliet looked taken aback as if he had asked her out to dinner, not just offered to show her a simple kitchen procedure, but he reminded himself of how touchy – or maybe, he revised, a better word would be sensitive – Juliet could be.
‘Er, yes, all right, thank you. It would make an excellent subject for photography.’
‘Bon, then we shall include it in the schedule. Come, let’s all sit down and decide where to start.’
NINE
Juliet quickly began work on the drawings for the cookery school website. Although there was no deadline, she felt enthused by the new project and wanted to earn the photography sessions that she felt in her gut were a doorway to a career expansion. For a week, she sat unobtrusively as Sylvia and Léo worked, sketching them as they chopped and stirred, assembled intricate pastries and burnt sauces that had to be started again from scratch. She also caught them laughing together, grimacing in frustration, picking herbs in the kitchen garden and sampling wines to match them to their dishes. It was only a few days before their first students came for the weekend, and the feeling in the kitchen was intense and purposeful, so she stayed in the background as much as possible. When she reviewed her work at the end of the week, she was thrilled with what she had achieved. Her acerbic political cartoons were more about lampooning people she had never met, exaggerating their flaws and idiosyncrasies and making sly, satirical digs. These cartoons, while humorous, were much gentler and more in tune with their subjects. She had drawn out the relationship between them, and amplified it, so that Léo looked particularly flamboyant and Sylvia steady and calming. Her favourite showed him weepingdramatically over a failed sauce, she serenely adding a touch more salt, whilst patting him on the shoulder.
On the weekend the students came, Juliet removed herself from the cookery school completely, knowing that both Léo and Sylvia were nervous, and assuming they wouldn’t want her getting under their feet. She considered going back to London – she had the offer of a spare bed and an upcoming party – but although she toyed with the idea, she found herself more drawn towards the flowers budding in the rose garden and the shafts of sunlight playing across the mossy tree trunks in the wood. She had been in touch with some country lifestyle magazines who wanted further examples of her work, and this seemed the perfect opportunity to prepare something, when everybody else was occupied with the cookery school students and nobody would start quizzing her about what she was doing, and why, and how it defined her as a person.
‘I don’t know why you keep disappearing,’ said Frankie, folding towels into messy lumps, which Martha patiently took and refolded, one after the other. ‘We could do with some help in the house. I know they’re only staying a couple of nights, and thank God they’re making their own meals, but they manage to generate a lot of work. Helping with the guests was meant to be part of the deal.’
‘I’m not really the welcoming B&B owner type. Look at the disaster when I tried to make the beds, Martha had to redo them all.’
Martha pulled a face.
‘Yes, and you still haven’t found time to let me show you how to do it properly. It’s not difficult, Juliet.’
Juliet felt a pang of conscience. She may hate these domestic duties, but she knew that getting on with them – and getting better at them – was an important part of helping out.
‘Sorry, M, we can do it later, yeah? And I’ll be all right at cleaning up after they’ve gone. We should play to our strengths.’
But Frankie wasn’t letting up.
‘You’re going to have to learn how to do everything, we all are. We’re lucky to be living here, but look at the place. Every time you move a piece of furniture, there’s black mould behind it, and the attic is going to be a swimming pool in the winter if we can’t fix some of the leaks. You know how to use a washing machine, don’t you? At least go and put these towels in – programme five.’
With a sigh, Juliet scooped up the pile of towels and took them through to the small utility room that was off the kitchen. She stuffed them in, added detergent and fabric softener and set programme five running, although she was briefly tempted to choose something different and inappropriate, so that the towels all came out stiff as cardboard, or the size of handkerchiefs, and her sisters gave up on asking her to help. But, checking the time so she knew when to come back and put the towels in the drier, she knew that she would put in more of an effort, however much she hated it. She wanted to help save Feywood, but housework, she reflected as she walked back to her little studio, was not her forte; she had better hurry up and make a success of herself one way or another so that she could double her contribution to the household finances and skip the domestic labour part.
She slipped quietly into the old stable block, nodding a greeting to the students, who were gathered round Léo and hanging on his every word regardingcrème fraîche, whatever that was, and went up the stairs, feeling the usual sense of peace and relief when she shut the door behind her. After boiling the kettle, she spent twenty minutes in her new favourite pursuit – drinking a cup of tea while staring out of the window thinking of nothing in particular – before getting to work on honing someof the soft watercolours she was sending to the magazine that afternoon.
By Sunday afternoon, when the students were preparing to leave, Juliet couldn’t fail to notice how tired Léo and Sylvia were looking, how tight their smiles had become. The normally pristine cookery school was now in need of a good scrub and tidy, which even Juliet felt she could tackle. Juliet smoothed down her black silk shirt and reasoned with herself that she would probably only break something, or not get it clean enough, making more work for the others in the long run, so she restricted herself to stacking the dishwasher. Then she ran down to the village and bought a couple of bottles of Prosecco and some nibbles, and was waiting with them apprehensively when Léo and Sylvia trudged back from waving their new protégées off up at the house.
‘Juliet, what’s all this?’ Sylvia’s tired face lit up.
‘Look, I’ve seen how hard you’ve both worked this weekend. Your students looked like they were having the time of their lives, and I just wanted to say well done. Sit down and have a drink; I’ll start work on some of the cleaning.’ She shrugged, feeling awkward now at having made the gesture.
‘That was very thoughtful of you,merci. I could murder a glass of Prosecco.’
Juliet busied herself ripping the foil off the first bottle and pouring the wine. Not wanting to add making a toast to her embarrassment, she waved her glass vaguely at the other two, muttered a well done and took a big gulp, then turned away and busied herself spraying down the work surfaces. As the Prosecco wound its way down her body, she started to relax. Maybe this hadn’t been a terrible idea; they seemed pleased and surprised, both of which she had hoped for.
‘I also wondered if we could put in a time for our first photography session, now that the students have gone?’
To Juliet’s surprise, Léo roared with laughter and held up his glass in an exaggerated toast.
‘Ah, an ulterior motive. Of course.’
