‘You and Natalie – are you going to make a go of it?’
Johnny wasn’t expecting Noel to laugh, certainly not the rueful, thin sound which filled the air for a second, gone just as quickly.
‘She doesn’t want me. She never has, not really. I thought—’ Noel paused, mid-sentence, then shook his head. ‘I thought she did. I really thought so. But I think I was wrong.’
‘So, all of this was for nothing, then?’ Johnny said.
Noel shrugged, but this time it was a heavy movement, it wasn’t dismissive, or designed to irritate. ‘Looks that way.’
‘Fucking hell, Noel.’
‘Yeah. Fucking hell.’
Red seemed more than happy to listen to Fran’s story, and once she got going it felt good to get the truth out into the open air, even if the cat was the only one around to hear it.
‘It started when the newspapers ran the story about my mum,’ Fran said. ‘Well, when I say it started then, I suppose strictly speaking it started a long way before that. Like nearly twenty-seven years ago, but that’s not the point.’
Red purred, encouraging her to continue.
‘I used to ask her about my father, especially when I was a kid and most of the other kids at school had dads. But she always reverted to the same line, told me he didn’t want to know and that we were better off without him. Over the years I guess I just accepted what she said.’ Fran tickled Red’s chin. ‘My mum was one tough cookie, and what she said, went. And we were fine, without him. Anyway, I digress. It’s giving me more time to make a fuss of you, so I don’t suppose you mind.’
Red kneaded at her leg, stood and arched his back, then turned and curled the other way, presumably to ensure both sides got equal amounts of stroking.
‘But after Mum died, and all the gory details of the accident appeared in the newspapers, I received a phone call from somebody at Wilding Holdings, and everything snowballed from there. I thought it was a scam to begin with, only picked up the call because I’d been answering so many from the hospital,Mum’s friends, and then the undertakers. I remember thinking,Oh no, now what?The woman called three times before I began to believe that Bill Wilding had known my mum years before and that he really did have something he wanted to discuss with me.’
Red headbutted her fingers, and Fran resumed her stroking, unaware that she’d fallen still at the memory of that first meeting with Bill Wilding.
‘It was surreal. I just remember thinking he wanted to pass on his condolences, or something. But wondering why he was travelling all the way from London to do so. And how on earth had he known my mother?’
Fran laughed, glancing away across the tinder-dry grassy bank, tracking the baked shades of green until they became blues, and she was staring up and out, into the sky.
‘Hindsight is a beautiful thing, Red. Has anybody ever told you that? He explained he’d known my mum when she was working at one of his first hotels in London. Nearly twenty-six years before. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when he told me they’d been in a relationship, even though he was married at the time. Or that he hadn’t done anything to keep in contact with my mum when she’d suddenly left.
‘He told me he hadn’t imagined for a moment that she’d been pregnant, hadn’t had the first idea until I was mentioned in the newspaper. He seemed insistent that I should understand. Asked me why I thought it was that she’d never contacted him, never told him. Never asked for money.
‘It took me a while to compute that he was trying to tell me that he thought I was his daughter. That I might be Bill Wilding’s daughter. Can you imagine? Crazy, right?’
Red tensed, attention taken by something imaginary closer to the chateau.
‘Is it a mouse?’ Fran grimaced. ‘I hope it isn’t a mouse.’
The flick of an ear and a twitch of Red’s legendary tail suggested whatever it had been, it was either unimportant, or it was gone, and Red turned his face up towards Fran again.
‘I know, I’m too comfy to move, either.’
Fran sighed. So much had changed in her life over the last few months, but in essence she was still the same girl she’d always been. It would have been easy to have been swept away by everything Bill Wilding could offer, even if his arrival in Fran’s life had been twenty-six years too late.
But questions remained. Like, why didn’t her mother ever contact him to let him know he had a daughter? Fran’s mum had been proud, determined, single-minded – stubborn, for want of a better description – but why had she chosen a life of struggle rather than seeking help, even if it was only financial, from the father of her child? There was no way Fran could ever find out, but her mother hadn’t been someone who took decisions lightly, so there must have been a reason. Perhaps she didn’t think she would be believed. Maybe she worried she would find herself on the wrong end of a legal wrangle.
But what Fran had found out so far about her father didn’t seem to tally with someone who would have treated Fran’s mum unfairly, even if it had been an under-the-radar kind of deal, so Bill’s wife would have been none the wiser.
When Bill had asked how he could help Fran, how he wished very much to be a part of her life, to make up for all the years he’d missed, they’d eventually settled on a plan. Fran took on her role as undercover hotel sampler, in part to find out about her father’s business, but also because Fran didn’t want money from him, preferred the idea of earning a salary – even if it was a very generous salary for doing what amounted to sitting aroundin the sun. Bill had laughed, suggesting it was all the summer holidays Fran should have had, strung together.
It still seemed unreal, as though someone was going to pop up at any moment and tell her that the DNA tests were wrong, and that they’d come to take back the company credit card. And would she kindly never contact Bill Wilding again. At the start, Fran hadn’t thought much further than the idea of earning enough money to be able to fund her own little studio, the chance to be able to start her own furniture restoring business.
But when Johnny had been talking about trying to get a bank loan for renovation works, should he decide to take on Chateau des Rêves, Fran couldn’t ignore the fact that she could ask Bill for it. Wondered if her new-found father might allow Johnny an interest-free loan so he wouldn’t be crippled by the interest he’d have to repay. Wondered, for the first time, how being the daughter of someone like him might affect the way other people viewed her. Wondered how it might change her.
Or perhaps that had always been a concern. Maybe that was why she’d had the wild idea of becoming a member of Chateau les Champs d’Or’s staff, rather than a guest. Maybe that was why she hadn’t told Penny the whole truth. Was she hiding from who she really was? Who was she, really?
