It was all Johnny could do to remain in the same room as Noel.
Out in the bright sunshine, an instant prickle of heat had Johnny reaching for the car keys. He needed some space. A bit of time away from the others. As he thanked Jean-Michel Beaufoy for the opportunity to work with him, Johnny decided he’d take one of the hire cars, drive around for a bit, then head back to the hotel when he was good and ready.
‘You three are OK to go back together, aren’t you?’ he said, not waiting for a reply as he unlocked the car and climbed in. ‘Catch you later,’ he called as he started the engine and threw the car into reverse.
Johnny wanted to leave Noel in a cloud of dust, to drive away without so much as a backwards glance. Wanted to feel able to step out from Noel’s shadow. A perceived shadow, he supposed it wasn’t anything more than that, but real or not it was something Johnny was finding increasingly difficult to deal with.
He willed himself not to glance into the rear-view mirror as he headed down the track, but he couldn’t stop himself, caught sight of Noel laughing with Ed and Ricky as though nothing had happened.
Johnny supposed nothing had happened, not really. Noel was better at the business side of Taylor Made Wine; he always had been. There wasn’t any point resenting that fact. So why did he find himself feeling increasingly resentful?
A few minutes down the road and Johnny recognised the stretch of gardens and woodland off to his right. Came up on the driveway to the dilapidated chateau with itsà vendresign out front. Found himself turning the wheel and inching towards the building down a drive which was more potholes than surface.
Maybe a wander around the place would help to clear his head.
Fran used her lunch break to explore the outbuildings Harry had mentioned. Set to the very back of the property, the buildings were clearly the most original part left of the chateau. While the main building had been utterly renovated and modernised, every brick repointed to perfection, every piece of plasterwork replaced and freshly painted, this cluster of buildings seemed to belong to another era, an era when cobwebs and imperfection were a part of the chateau’s life.
While she might have an issue with rodents, she’d never been squeamish where spiders or their webs were concerned, which was just as well as she found herself brushing them out of her hair as she pulled open a shed door and ventured inside. A glance at the rapidly gathering dust on her uniform reminded her it might have been a good idea to have changed, but she didn’t have time on her side and hadn’t wanted to delay her search.
Fran expected to find the buildings out here to be full of trash. Full of the things which might not have initially been thrown out when the chateau was renovated, but which had, over time, become redundant. Maybe abandoned gardening equipment, odds and ends from the renovation process. As expected, there were offcuts of wood, half-empty pots of paint, ladders.
But no cat.
There was no obvious sign of Red living here, either. She moved further inside, skirting her way around piles of dusty wooden crates, enormous, galvanised drinking troughs, stacks of terracotta floor tiles. Further back, she could see strange shapes shrouded in dust sheets, and as there was still no sign of Red, Fran pressed further in and folded back an edge of one of the huge, dust-laden calico sheets.
‘Oh my God.’
Unsure as to what she had been expecting to find beneath the sheets, in her opinion what was there was almost as dramatic as the discovery of a dead body, or a pile of gold bullion. It was furniture.
Antique armchairs with fraying upholstery, sets of dining chairs minus their seats, unloved hardwood cabinets with beautiful – if damaged – veneers and beading. Fran ignored the cloud of dust as she threw the cover completely out of the way and looked more closely. Beneath a pile of pale-green wickergarden chairs she could also make out an enormous chesterfield sofa, its leather still in half-decent condition.
When she had a workshop of her own, these were exactly the kind of projects she’d give her right arm to work on. Figuratively speaking, obviously, because without her arm, reupholstering anything would prove extremely challenging. But strangely enough the prospect of having a workshop of her own one day was, in essence, why she was here at Chateau les Champs d’Or in the first place.
After she’d broken free of Victor and had scurried home to heal with the unwavering support of her mum, she’d believed that she would remain in Lyme indefinitely. Her job in the tea shop kept her busy, and the small pieces of vintage furniture she’d found in flea markets and abandoned at the very back of antique warehouses took up most of her spare time as she patiently brought them back to life and then sold them. It was a hobby, but it was also something Fran cared passionately about – seeing mildewed wood brought back to its gleaming best, upholstery repaired or sympathetically replaced to restore the item to a useful piece of furniture gave her a real buzz. Plus, it all helped to pay her share of the bills.
But her mother’s rented flat was too small for Fran to renovate anything larger than a nursing chair or a small armchair, and money remained tight. There was no way she could see a way to afford a flat of her own, let alone rent a space to make her love for renovating antique furniture into anything other than a hobby. And while she recovered from Victor’s wounds, that was fine.
So, it felt like divine intervention when an unexpected phone call led her to some utterly different possibilities. Maybe one day Fran would be able to consider renting a studio of her own, like the ones she’d seen in a cannery warehouse renovation a few miles up the coast from Lyme Regis.
As she stared at the unloved pieces of furniture in the shed, it seemed as though she’d come full circle, as though the universe was telling her she was moving in the right direction.
Maybe she could even offer to buy some of these pieces, have them shipped over the Channel to await her return.
With ideas buzzing, Fran spread the calico sheet over the furniture, then took a final glance around the space. Whatever Harry had said about this being where the cat lived, she couldn’t see any sign that Red had been here, and with a final time check, she gave up on searching further, heading instead for what she hoped was the quickest way back into the chateau.
As Johnny pulled the hire car back into a hotel parking space, he was calmer. He’d lost track of the amount of time he’d spent at the for-sale chateau, taking a leisurely wander through the well-established, if not well-maintained gardens, and having a good peer through the dusty, cracked panes of glass into as many of the downstairs rooms as he could.
There was no denying the place needed a total overhaul, that whoever took it on would either need a large wedge of disposable income for the renovations or be prepared to roll up their sleeves and do it themselves. Having said that, from what little he could see, there hadn’t seemed to be any sign of falling ceilings, terrible structural issues, or vandalism.
What Johnny had also seen – in his mind’s eye at least – was Estelle skipping through the rooms, jumping up and down the broad steps leading up to the main doors, running free through the tall grasses of the gardens. The image, although nothing more than a fantasy, had him smiling, and Johnny smiled again at the thought as he threw open the car door and climbed out.
With the car locked, Johnny noticed the other grey Mercedes parked further along and drew a breath. His mood dipped and his smile faded. Back to reality. Scrunching his way across thegravel, another figure approached from the rear of the property. Johnny glanced across and had nodded his acknowledgement before he realised he recognised her.
‘Hi, excuse me?’ he said, catching her full attention and unable to stop himself wondering why she was covered in what appeared to be cobwebs and dust. ‘Could I have a word?’
Brushing at her sleeve, she nodded. ‘Absolutely. How can I help?’
With her staring at him, the simple apology he’d hoped to voice dried in his throat. Somehow, it seemed pathetic and pointless. There was no reason she should she give a flying monkey about him, or his apology.
