The Last Will And Testament Of Daphné Le Marche

‘God help me,’ laughed Elisabeth, as Billie picked up a flat carton and started to assemble it.

But, as Billie worked through the rest of the day, packing and sorting, labeling and lifting, she couldn’t help but wonder what on earth Grand-Mère had left her and would it be worth something. If it was, she would give the money to her mother; that was the least of what she deserved after what she had been through. Losing a husband so young, starting a new life with a young child.

Her mother was the bravest person Billie knew and there wasn’t a chance in hell she was going to let her mother get caught in the Le Marche web again since she spoke so badly of them. She always said her heart was broken after Henri died, and Billie knew they were somehow to blame. Why else had her mother cut all ties?

That night, when she lay in bed in her own little apartment, Billie looked at the framed picture of Elisabeth and her father from their wedding day in Paris.

Her mother was wearing a white shift dress with daisies in her hair, and her father a broad grin. They looked so happy, she thought, so why then did he decide to take his own life?

Chapter 3

Daphné, 1956

Daphné Amyx was eighteen and had two options available to her. Marriage or work. Marriage was possible in the village of Calvaic, but she didn’t want a pig farmer with his rough hands and crude tongue. She wanted a man like Jean Gabin, or the American actor, Jimmy Stewart who she saw in the movies at Saint Cere; and she knew that wasn’t someone she wasn’t going to find in the village.

Not that she had met the man yet, she just knew there wasn’t anything for her in the village any more and, as much as she regretted leaving her beloved mother Chantal, she knew it would be better for them both if she earned money in Paris while looking for a husband.

The day she had chosen for her reconnaissance to Paris was going to be beautiful and, as the light rose with the dawn, the garden had never looked as pretty in the growing kaleidoscope from the sunrise. Daphné felt the rising sun on her shoulders as she hung the washing on the makeshift clothesline in their back garden. Her mother’s sunflowers were facing east and sweet peas were climbing up the fence, as though greedily trying to get as much of the light as possible.

The morning and evening light was the best, she thought, as the kids danced next to their mothers in the field next to them, their little goat antics never failing to make Daphné giggle.

For a moment, Daphné felt almost nostalgic and then noted the beautifully mended holes in the nightgown she pegged to the line and let go of her sentimentality.

Rural life was hard enough, let alone for a mother and daughter who made a living from the land and making handmade soap from goat’s milk and selling it on the side of the road to the occasional tourist. Lately business had been good with the Americans who passed by. They liked the sweet little labels that Daphné had made and pasted onto the jars. She had even added some pretty linen over the lids and tied them with pink ribbon to really appeal to the customers. But then Daphné, ever the realist, pulled herself from her musing and focused on the day ahead. There was no time to be pondering the light when food needed to be put on the table.

She finished her task and walked back inside the small stone cottage, where her mother sat mending a linen sheet. The cottage was neat as a pin, and everything was polished and folded in perfect order, thanks to Chantal, Daphné’s mother.

The bus to Paris would be arriving soon, and Daphné checked her small case of soaps and lotions she and Chantal had made. If she couldn’t find a job, then she would sell the stock on the streets of Paris and return next week to try again.

She had a small overnight bag of a change of clothes and a coat belonging to her mother and would stay with the Karpinskis, who had fled Poland and had hidden in their village during the war, finding themselves unable to make their way to London.

The couple now had children and a small jewellery store in Le Marais, which they lived above and where Daphné would stay.

She picked up her case and smoothed her dark hair. ‘Mama, I’m going,’ she said to the back of her mother who stood at the kitchen sink.

Her mother turned and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Be safe,’ she said and Daphné could see the worry in her sad eyes. Losing her husband in the war meant she had little faith in the world to care for her beloved daughter. If Chantal had her way, Daphné would stay at home for ever.

‘I will be fine, Maman,’ said Daphné sincerely. She was smart, resourceful and brave and a two-day trip to Paris alone didn’t worry her like it did her mother.

‘You look very pretty,’ said her mother, admiring Daphné’s figure in the peacock blue dress which Chantal had made from fabric she had saved from before the war. Nipped at the waist, with a full skirt, the shape showed off her tiny waist and the colour complemented her sultry looks.

While Daphné wasn’t a beauty, she had an appeal that seemed to make men look twice at her. At seventeen, she knew it was sex appeal but was too shy and far too inexperienced to know its power.

She picked up her case, and kissed her mother on her weather-beaten cheek. Years of being in the garden and tending the animals had created lines on her skin yet it was soft from the goat’s milk soap and cream that she made and used.

‘I will see you on Thursday,’ she said and she smiled brightly as she went to the door. ‘Wish me luck.’

‘Good luck and give my love to the Karpinskis,’ said Chantal, and then Daphné was on her way.

* * *

The bus journey to Paris was long and slow, frequently interrupted by roaming sheep, goats, and even a family of ducks, who insisted on crossing the road in single file.

Everyone on the bus thought it charming, but Daphné just wanted to get to Paris. She knew there was something waiting for her there, but what it was, she wasn’t sure.

The only highlight was a women’s magazine that a woman had left on her seat after she had departed the bus. Such a luxury wasn’t in Daphné’s budget and the trip went quickly while she read every article and studied every picture.

When the bus arrived in Paris, it was after lunch and Daphné was tired, grimy and hungry, but she knew she didn’t have time to waste. Work was hard to come by in Paris and, as Anna Karpinski had said in her letter to Daphné, only the tenacious survived, but Daphné didn’t plan on just surviving, she wanted to thrive in the city.

Of course Anna and her husband Max were tenacious enough to have survived the war in hiding and make a life in Paris, but when Daphné arrived at their tiny shop, and she saw shabby state of their establishment and how rough the neighbourhood was, she wondered if life in Paris was as wonderful as the magazines she read at the village store claimed.

‘Daphné,’ cried Max, as she opened the door to the store, her eyes adjusting to the darkness.

‘Max,’ she said warmly and let him embrace her like her father would have.

Anna and Max had moved from house to house for three years during the war and often slept in barns or cellars. They never complained, and always worried for those who were protecting them.

It was Anna who comforted Chantal when the telegram arrived informing them that Daphné’s father had died.

It was Max who suggested goats to Chantal, and Anna who taught Chantal how to milk them and make the soap. The oil they needed was hard to come by at the end of the war, so they improvised with lard but it worked, and with some sweet lavender from Chantal’s own garden, they had something she could sell on the side of road.

‘Anna, Anna,’ Max cried up the slim staircase, and Daphné looked around the store.

Dark and dreary, filled with a few cabinets of stock, and a curtain behind to separate the back room from the store, Daphné thought this was no place she would want to buy jewellery, yet she knew Max’s work and it was beautiful.

‘How is the business?’ she asked when Max turned from the stairwell.

‘You know, hard, I do what I can with what I have,’ he answered vaguely, but Daphné read his face and knew the answer.

Her thoughts were pushed aside when Anna came down the stairs in a rush and held Daphné for a long time, occasionally pulling away to touch her face.

‘And Maman?’ she asked of Chantal, who was Anna’s mother figure as her own mother had never been heard of after the invasion of Poland.

‘She is fine, worried about me and you and if the world is going to keep turning,’ laughed Daphné.

‘Of course, she is a mother,’ said Anna and her hands gestured to her children.

Daphné had met them once when they were younger, but now she saw a smaller version of Anna and Max, with the same proud face of their mother and the ingenious twinkle in their eye from their father.

‘Peter, Marina, this is Daphné,’ said Anna gently to the boy and girl who stepped forward politely to shake Daphné’s hand.

Upstairs, Anna had created a makeshift bed on the sagging sofa, but it was warm and clean and much more appealing than the shop.

The children had been sent outside to play, and Anna warmed up some vegetable and barley soup and placed it in front of Daphné with a large chunk of rye bread.

She ate it hungrily, savouring the flavours of the sour bread and the sweet broth.

‘How is the business?’ she asked as she dipped the bread into the soup.

Anna shrugged. ‘It’s hard,’ she said and Daphné thought she looked older than her thirty years.

As Daphné wiped the remnants of soup up with her last piece of bread, she thought about the store.

‘It needs to be lighter,’ she said. ‘To show of Max’s work.’

‘But there is no way,’ said Anna. ‘The only light is from the front windows, and the street is so closed in.’

‘Then you must paint it,’ said Daphné, thinking of the light that rose over the horizon on the farm.

‘Paint it? What colour?’ asked Anna, her face bewildered.

Daphné looked around at the utilitarian space. Anna didn’t have the time or money to think beyond the practical and everyday survival. ‘Why?’

Daphné picked up her bowl and plate and took them to the small tin tub that Anna used as a sink and put them in the water to soak.

‘Blush,’ she said, ‘The colour of make-up powder you see in the magazine.’

She took went to her bag and took out a magazine, flicking to a page and finding an advertisement, showing Anna.

It was a drawing of a woman holding a glass of pink champagne, her face beautifully contoured in shades of pink.

‘Pink lightens the skin, it takes away the age lines,’ read Daphné and she looked up at Anna and smiled. ‘And it’s pretty,’ she said.

‘What sort of pink?’ asked Anna suspiciously.

‘The sort of pink you see in a woman’s face when she’s happy, when she’s been outside in the sun, but she’s not sunburned or hot, she’s warm, inside and out,’ said Daphné thinking of Chantal. Her mind wandered as she kept speaking. ‘The rose in the sky at the end of the day, that looks like old paintings of heaven.’

Anna smiled and touched Daphné’s face. ‘You mean the afterglow,’ she said.

‘Is that what it’s called?’ asked Daphné, surprised there was a name for what she was describing.

‘It’s also the colour in a woman’s face when she falls in love,’ said Anna with a smile and Daphné bit her lip in anticipation. She was ready to fall in love, have an adventure, and to bathe in the afterglow of the world.

But first a job, she thought, as she washed her hands and combed her hair, and applied a little goat’s cream to her face.

‘I am off to find work,’ she said to Anna and, after picking up her bag, she headed out the door, waving to Max as she left the shop.

Paris wasn’t so hard to navigate. She and her mother had been there before, but this was her first time alone.

She paused and thought out the arrondissements in her head and got her bearings. She needed to cross the river to get to Montparnasse, where the cafés were. She could become a waitress, she thought, as she walked with purpose across the bridge and through Saint-Germain.

Jazz musicians busked on the streets, and tourists wandered with cameras about their necks. American accents mingled with the French and Daphné wondered why on earth she thought she could have stayed in the village. Paris was the only place for her, she could feel it in her soul, and she started her job-hunting in earnest.

Chapter 4

Robert

Paris never looked more beautiful than in the autumn, Robert Le Marche decided as he drove under a golden canopy of magnificent beech trees.

Everyone always went on about spring in Paris, but autumn was sublime, with the leaves changing and people looking so chic in their coats and boots.

Robert parked his navy Bugatti on rue de Grenelle and jumped out as two attractive women walked towards him. Just as they passed, he pressed the key to lock the car, making them aware that the machine was his.

The women strolled by in deep conversation, ignoring Robert and his car, much to his chagrin. He had twisted his back getting out of the car gracefully and all for nothing, he thought, cursing the women but not the car that was as low to the ground as a snake on roller skates.

He pressed the security code next to the ornate iron gates and then pushed them open and walked inside, entering the private garden. He ignored the last flush of melon-coloured tea roses that stood proudly in their immaculate beds and an espaliered orange tree ran across the ancient brick wall, bearing the last of the fruit while orange and white poppies waved in the sun.

He could never understand his mother’s obsession with the colour orange. She was like Monet, always chasing the light, looking for that ‘dernières lueurs’.

He had stopped listening to her ramblings of the search when he was a boy, but Henri had always listened, even encouraging the pursuit, delivering hand-dyed tangerine silk woven with gold thread from Varanasi, amber beads from the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, even a jar of antique buttons in her favourite shades of apricot and candlelight peach from the Camden Markets.

Henri was always such a sycophant, he thought, as he put the key in the lock of the front door and pushed it open.

The marble foyer and wrought iron staircase met him and he sighed, as he looked upstairs. Why his mother wouldn’t get an elevator installed in the place he could never understand. She had the money, but she refused, claiming it was sacrilegious to install such modernity in such an old home.

Robert hadn’t argued with his mother because he would never win. He learned that years ago, but now, as he stood in the foyer of the four-storey family home, he felt nothing. He thought he would feel some sort of relief, even some satisfaction that she was gone, but there was only silence in his heart and in the house.

He walked up the stairs slowly, stopping at each level to catch his breath, and silently cursing his addiction to cigarettes.

Finally, he reached the top level and loosened his tie from his neck. He was once a handsome man, but a lifetime of sunbathing, smoking, drinking and eating rich food had ruined his fine features and had turned him into a doughy version of his former self.

He crossed the room, with its heavy, ornate furniture, and opened the drawer of the Louis XV desk. He pulled out a kidskin file and opened the gold lock with a small key that hung on his key ring.

He rifled through the papers inside and then, not seeing what he wanted, pulled them all out and spread them across the desk.

Birth certificates, the marriage certificate, deeds to the houses and other items that Daphné had deemed important were inside. Everything except the one thing he wanted.

He pulled out his phone, dialled a number and waited.

‘Edward Badger please, Robert Le Marche,’ he said, as he checked the papers again.

‘Edward speaking,’ came the crisp English accent.

‘Where is the will and the formula?’

‘Let me first offer my condolences on the loss of your mother,’ said Edward smoothly. ‘She was a remarkable woman.’

Robert had never liked him. He tried too hard to be Henri’s replacement.

‘Remarkable is one word,’ said Robert drily. ‘I’m at rue de Grenelle, the documents aren’t here.’

‘The formula is in the bank vault, and the will is in the office, as per your mother’s instructions before she passed.’

Robert felt his blood pressure rise. ‘She wrote her will three years ago,’ he said.

‘No, there was a codicil the night before she died,’ said Edward.

‘A what?’

‘A codicil is an amendment to a will,’ said Edward.

Patronising prick, thought Robert.

‘I know what a fucking codicil is,’ he snapped, walking around the top floor, staring unseeingly at the view across Paris. ‘When can I see it?’

‘We have some details to attend to, and then we will read the will. Madame Le Marche expressed very firmly that it should be after her funeral.’

Robert clutched the back of a gilt-edged chair.

‘I need to get things moving,’ he said, trying to control his voice.

‘Yes, I can understand that,’ said Edward and then he paused on the end of the phone. ‘We have to wait for Sibylla’s response,’ he said.

‘Sibylla? Henri’s child?’ asked Robert. He now circled the chair and sat on its overstuffed silk cushion.

‘Yes, she’s in the will,’ said Edward.

‘What did Daphné leave her?’ Robert ran through the list of chattels and houses. The château now used as a wedding venue, the house he was sitting in, the apartment in London where she died? Perhaps it was some art? Robert could accept some art going to the girl, she deserved that much, and a flush of guilt ran through his body, causing a cold sweat.

‘Why do we need to wait for her? If it’s an item, we can ship it over, can’t we?’ Robert’s voice betrayed him as his desperation rose.

‘That’s not going to work,’ said Edward. ‘Now if you will excuse me, I have more details to attend to, as I’m sure you do also, for the funeral will most likely be enormous.’

Robert sat in the chair, staring at the wall.

Sibylla Le Marche. He barely thought of Henri’s child nowadays. How old was she when he died? Nine or ten? He searched his memory for the girl who had played with Celeste while he and Matilde pointed blame at each other for Camille’s death.

She was more like her mother Elisabeth, he remembered, dark haired and quiet, in contrast to Celeste’s boisterous beauty.

Just thinking about the past gave him a headache and he decided he needed two things. A strong coffee and blowjob from one of the escorts he used for such purposes.

He dialled a number and waited. ‘Anika, it’s Robert, can I see you?’

‘Darling,’ she purred in her German accent, ‘I’m in Cannes.’ She laughed and he could hear the sound of laughter in the background.

‘Why are you in Cannes?’

‘I’m with a sheik I met at the festival, who offered me an obscene amount of cash to stay for a while. We’ve been all over the Mediterranean, and we’re just coming back into Cannes now.’

Her voice hushed to a whisper. ‘I can pay my apartment off with this trip,’ she said.

Robert wasn’t sure if he should congratulate her or call Interpol in case she went missing.

‘Please be careful,’ he pleaded with Anika. She was by far his favourite of the young women he used for pleasure.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Jesus, you’re like my father.’ She was laughing as he ended the call.

The thought of Anika’s mouth around the sheik’s cock made him shudder, but he also felt a searing jealousy, while the thought of the wealth the sheik must have made him livid.

Yes, Robert had money, but he wasn’t obscenely liquid like the Middle Eastern sheiks or the Russian oligarchs.

His thoughts went back to his mother’s will and he felt a small seed of doubt sprout in his mind. Maybe things weren’t going to go to the way he expected after his mother’s death, and he wondered why he thought they would since they had never gone to plan while the old bitch was alive.

Leaving the kidskin wallet on the table, he made his way downstairs and through the garden out to the street, where he saw his Bugatti was now sporting a parking fine.

Today was proving to be the worst, he decided, when his phone rang and he saw his daughter’s name on the screen. Now it was proving to be even more hellish.

‘Celeste,’ he barked. ‘I can’t talk now.’

‘Why not?’ He could hear the pout in her voice. ‘I just want to find out about Grand-Mère’s funeral. When is it?’

Robert pulled the ticket off the windscreen and unlocked the car.

‘I don’t know, I haven’t organised it yet.’

‘Papa, she died two days ago, what do you mean you haven’t organised it?’

‘I haven’t had time, I have a company to run, not everyone lives your life,’ he said as he slid into the seat of the car, cursing his back. He needed one of those driver’s pillows he had seen in a catalogue for people with disabilities when he was last visiting his mother.

He made a mental note to get his secretary to order one, as he started the car, the sound of the engine nearly blocking out Celeste’s question.

‘What did you say?’ He wasn’t sure he heard correctly.

‘Do you want me to organise it?’ she asked again, her voice sounding small. ‘I thought it might be nice for me to do it.’

Robert paused, the phone still up to his ear, the engine thumping impatiently.

‘That would be lovely, Celeste, really, if you think you can handle such a sad affair. I need to be looking at the company and all that it entails, so your help would be so wonderful.’

His charm soothed him, and he felt the anxious grip in his chest loosen.

‘Do whatever you need and just send the invoices to Le Marche,’ he said. ‘Now I must go, darling, about to head to a meeting, message me with any details.’

And he hung up before she could speak.

What a gift, he thought happily, as he pulled out into traffic without looking, knowing he wouldn’t be hit by another driver. Who wanted to deal with the insurance on a Bugatti? He laughed as he turned up the radio to a song he didn’t know the words to until it annoyed him enough to change it to the jazz station he loved. Soon John Coltrane was playing Lush Life, and Robert thought that his life was indeed very lush, and once he had Le Marche sold, then he would be the one sailing through the Greek Islands or the Mediterranean and girls like Anika would never leave him for a sheik again.

Everything was looking up, he thought. He was even feeling generous to Henri’s child. Let her have whatever it was Daphné had willed to her, what did he care now. Most likely it was one of her hideous paintings or some jewellery. He was about to get what he deserved and, even though he was fifty-eight years old, he still felt thirty. With this in mind, he dialled another girl he liked.

‘Chloe, my place, twenty minutes?’ he demanded more than asked and she responded as he thought she might and agreed to see him but for double the price.

But what did he care? He was truly rich now and, as his mother always said, the wealthier you become the more life costs you.

His ex-wife’s face came to mind and he felt himself scowl and then stopped. Matilde wasn’t worth getting more lines over, he thought, as he glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. His blond hair had turned silver, which, he’d decided when he turned fifty, was elegant. He could have dyed his hair, like his grandfather had for years, according to Anna. What a pathetic old man, he thought, thinking of Giles Le Marche.