“Anyway, Olivier, my uncle, was very angry when my mother, his sister, got a job at the factory,” he says. I’m intrigued as to how he’s going to join the dots. “He didn’t speak to her for years. They only made up when she was very ill.”
“What was his problem?” I ask, perturbed. “Why did he hate the factory so much?”
He sighs heavily. “Because Gérard was his uncle.”
The local man who lost the bet against Jackson’s great-grandfather was related to Étienne?
“So Gérard wasyourgreat-uncle?” I ask as it clicks into place.
He nods. “By marriage. He and his wife never had children, so the landwouldhave passed to my grandmother and, eventually, to Olivier.”
“And does Olivier have children?” I ask, reeling.
“No.” He shakes his head.
“So the land would have passed toyou.”
“I don’t lose sleep over it. But my uncle thinks that he would have built a factory himself. My mother was very”—he shrugs—“about it. She was glad of the jobs the Osiers created. But my uncle has a grudge and he’ll probably have it forever.” He sighs. “He doesn’t live around here anymore, but if he found out that Ihad given you my blessing to use my mother’s design on the bottles, I’m not sure he’d ever forgive me.”
“Is this also why you refused to discuss selling the garage?”
He says nothing for a moment, but when he speaks, his voice is laced with venom: “I willneversell to that woman.Ever.”
Shit. Itiscomplicated.
The waitress returns with our drinks. A hot wind sweeps through the outdoor space, tugging a few more locks of hair loose and making the leaves rustle overhead. I give up on the butterfly clip and tuck my blond hair behind my ears instead. A fleck of bark from the mottled plane-tree trunk floats down and lands on the table. Étienne plucks it off and discards it. It’s the same shade of green gray as the T-shirt he’s wearing.
“You said Albert remembers my mother.” He sounds calm, but there’s tension in the set of his shoulders.
I nod. “He said that she was a lovely girl, that she had a lot of energy and was always laughing. He told me to tell you that he was sorry for your loss.”
No reaction. If Étienne had been the one playing poker against Jackson’s great-grandfather, Pierre never would have won.
“What’syourrole in all of this?” he asks, picking up his glass. “What do you actually do?”
“I’m the project manager. By the end of August, I need to have produced marketing assets that Jackson can use to convince retailers that their customers will be willing to pay the price of wine for a bottle of water.”
Étienne almost chokes on his cider. “The price of wine?” he asks, coughing.
“People pay five pounds for a packet of crisps when they could get them for a fifth of the price. If you can tell a story and show how special and artisanal something is, customers are happy tosplash out. But that’s why the bottle needs to look beautiful,” I say. “In an ideal world, people will want to show it off even when it’s empty, as a vase or a candlestick holder or even filled with fairy lights.” I can’t wait to see images splashed across social media. “We want to make sure our bottle will be seen so people remember it and know what to ask for.”
He’s staring at me, his attention focused. And then he mutters, “Selling water for the price of wine. No wonder he let thebuvettego to ruin.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Go and look.” He jerks his chin over his left shoulder.
All right, I will.I put my glass down on the table and push my chair out. I can feel Étienne’s eyes on me as I make my way quickly through the parkland toward the factory.
The cave—or grotto, as I remember Mellie referring to it—is on the other side of the road by the factory, set back into the rocky hillside. As I approach the entrance, my enthusiasm to venture inside dims. It looks very dark. Didn’t there use to be lights in here? I turn on my phone torch.
The air quickly transforms from dry heat to cool damp and I get the sense that I’m walking on a rain-soaked pavement as I walk through a short tunnel and into a cavern. The sound of running water echoes off the rough stone walls, and right at the back, several meters into the hillside, is a plastered panel with a spout protruding from it. I shine my torch over it. The plaster has cracked and crumbled away, some of it clogging up the stone basin that the water is supposed to spill into. Instead the water spurts out in random directions—the tap must be blocked or broken. I reach my hand out to catch one of its streams and gasp—it’s warm. I thought I’d remembered that from my childhood.
“Okay, so thebuvettealso needs a revamp,” I say to Étienne on my return. “I’ll add it to my list.”
He huffs out a laugh. “Do you ever stand still?”
“I love what I’m doing now. I hated my last job.”
