Читать книгу The Last Will And Testament Of Daphné Le Marche - Kate Forster - Страница 9

The laboratory was empty when Billie March arrived at work. She turned on the lights and breathed in the cleanliness, and then put her bag away. After donning her white coat, she shoved her phone into her pocket and placed ear buds into her ears and turned on the music.

This was her favourite time of day—when her co-workers were exhausted at the end of the week and they struggled into work one by one, talking about their plans for the weekend.

Billie wouldn’t have a weekend if she could help it, but this weekend she had promised to help her mother and stepfather move into their new house.

Marvin Gaye sang about his Inner City Blues, which had seemed appropriate on the tram ride to the university, but now she needed something other than her father’s favourite singer and she settled on Florence and the Machine.

She moved through the scheduled work, testing new deodorants, and then onto a brand of soap powder that claimed to reduce all stains.

The sound of the door clicked and Nick Miller walked into the laboratory.

‘Morning, Billie,’ he said cheerfully. He was still wearing his bicycle helmet and had one leg of his jeans tucked into an unevenly pink-coloured sock, but neither of these facts took away from his happy face.

Billie smiled at him. ‘You look cheerful,’ she said. Nick was her work crush. He was what made it lovely to come in every day. With his good looks and his pleasant banter, she couldn’t wait to see him each day.

‘I got every green light on the ride to work today, do you know the odds of that happening?’

‘I have no idea but I’m sure you can work it out,’ she said, as she went back to her soap powder paste, which she was smearing on lipstick-stained cloth.

Nick had put away his knapsack and taken off his helmet and was walking back to Billie when she pointed down at his sock.

‘Untuck,’ she said.

‘Gee, thanks, Bill,’ he said gratefully.

When Nick had first starting working at the lab, his forgetfulness became an office joke and once, when Billie had taken a rare sick day, Nick had worn his helmet all morning, including in a meeting, and no one had told him because they thought it was so hilarious.

Nick had said it was funny also, but Billie saw the flash of shame on his face when he was teased and she took it upon herself to socialise him, or at least remind him to take off his helmet and untuck his jeans from his socks. Then they began to know each other more and Billie’s friendliness turned into friendship, and then a crush.

Not that she would do anything about it. Billie was as awkward around men as she was around make-up and fashion.

‘You’re in early,’ he said glancing up at the clock. ‘I wouldn’t have got here so fast if it weren’t for the green lights.’

‘I need to leave early to help my mum move house,’ said Billie, ‘so I thought I’d get a head start. God knows it’s going to be a bloody disaster with the amount of stuff Mum has hoarded over the years. The woman finds it impossible to throw out anything.’

‘I’m the same,’ said Nick with a sigh. ‘Thankfully, I live alone, so I don’t have to worry about anyone throwing anything out.’

At thirty-three, Nick was the epitome of a nerd bachelor, living in his little house in Northcote, where he would heat up something frozen for dinner and watch documentaries and reruns of QI for a little light relief—he liked to regale Billie with the highlights of Stephen Fry’s humour.

She knew some people in the lab thought him odd, even weird, but Billie saw through that and noticed his handsome face, and his patience in explaining things to others or when they teased him.

Billie often wondered if he even thought about women, but he hadn’t even tried to ask her out on a date, so she presumed it was safe to say he just wasn’t interested in women at all.

Not that Billie had pretentions about herself, but as a rare female in a science laboratory, who was pretty and had a slight resemblance to a popular character from Game of Thrones, she was nerd candy. Everyone, from the lab technicians to the top scientists, had asked her out, and even some of the married ones gave her the eye. It was exhausting, but slowly they realised she wasn’t there to play, she was there to work.

She glanced at Nick as he pulled on his white coat. He had a slim, well-built frame from bike riding, and his pants sat extremely well on his hips. She always looked at the way a man’s pants sat on his hips. They needed to hang, not cling and for a moment she wondered what was under his pants and then admonished herself for thinking in such a base manner.

‘Are you doing the soap powder tests?’ he asked, walking towards her.

‘Yes, working on lipstick stains,’ she said, wishing she had a solution for dissolving blushes.

‘What sort of lipstick?’ he asked.

‘Just lipstick,’ said Billie frowning. ‘I just went to the pharmacy down the road and bought one.’

Nick rolled his eyes. ‘Is it pearl, gloss, matte, long-wearing?’

Billie felt herself redden. ‘I don’t know, I don’t really wear make-up,’ she admitted.

‘You don’t need it,’ said Nick casually.

She reached up and touched her face, knowing she was blushing, but Nick was looking at the lipstick.

‘This is a Maybelline gloss. This has a lot of lanolin in it, so it will be more greasy than some.’

He smeared the pale pink lipstick over the back of his hand.

‘It’s a bit sickly, needs more depth,’ he said.

Billie watched him with interest. ‘How do you know so much about lipstick?’

‘I worked in a make-up lab before here, but they went bust,’ he said. ‘I actually enjoy the different compounds and ancient recipes. Some ingredients stay the same, regardless of the century.’

‘Like what?’ she asked, noting how excited he looked as he spoke.

‘Beeswax. In Victorian times, they used beeswax with spermaceti . . .’

‘What’s that?’ asked Billie, screwing up her nose.

‘It’s an organ from inside the sperm whale’s head,’ he said. ‘They would mix it with sweet almond oil and rose water and this became known as Crème Céleste or cold cream, as we know it now.’

Billie laughed. ‘I have a cousin called Celeste in France. I’m sure she’d love to know she was named after something that came from inside a sperm whale’s head.’

Nick shook his head and smiled. ‘Are you going to tell her?’

‘Oh God, no. I haven’t spoken to her in twenty-odd years,’ Billie said, as she held the lipstick up to her face. ‘I can’t even remember her.

‘Is it my colour?’ she asked, surprised at her coquettish tone.

She wasn’t usually a flirt, but something about Nick being so knowledgeable, and his compliment with no expectation attached, had her head in a little whirl. However, she took comfort in knowing she would never do anything about this work crush. Her life was simple, and love would only make it complicated. The surety of science made up for any brief love affair she might have, when she knew it was most likely destined to break her heart.

‘No, you’d look better with reds, but with a navy base,’ he said, peering at her. ‘It’s the dark hair and blue eyes combination, just like Snow White.’ He beamed at her. Then he moved and started smearing soap powder over the stains, as the door opened and the rest of the staff arrived for their day’s work.

And Billie spent the rest of the day wondering who exactly Nick Miller was and did he have a girlfriend and then Googling pictures of Snow White.

* * *

‘Mum?’

Billie stepped over the bubble wrap and packing tape that lay across the doorway of her childhood home in Carlton. It was a long terrace house, with a hallway the length of two cricket pitches, currently lined with boxes, art leaning against the wall, and ephemera from Elisabeth and Gordon’s attempt at moving fifteen years of their life.

The problem was that Elisabeth and Gordon found themselves easily distracted. Elisabeth would drop whatever she was doing to write down a poem that swam through her mind, and Gordon would find an old book that he claimed to have been looking for ‘since for ever’ and would then settle down in that exact spot to read some old volume on the history of an ancient civilisation of a far-flung country. Billie knew the only way she would get her mother and stepfather moved was if she marshalled them and assigned them tasks, overseeing the project with extreme bossiness, something she knew her mother hated.

No reply came to her call and Billie sighed, as she put her bag down on an empty armchair.

Assessing the living room, she saw plastic boxes of photographs from the shed had managed to make their way inside, but the lid had been lifted and now snapshots of Billie’s childhood lay sprawled across the wooden floors. Photos of her and her father, and her mother, photos with her and her mother’s parents, family friends, parties, but no one else. She knew nothing of her father’s past, or his family, and loyalty to her mother meant she didn’t pry into the past.

‘Billie.’ She heard her mother say her name and she pulled herself away from the photos.

Dropping the photographs back onto the table, she looked up to see her mother standing in the room, phone in hand.

‘How’s it all going?’ she asked, already knowing the answer.

‘Henri’s mother has died,’ came Elisabeth’s reply; her face went its usual shade of ivory whenever she mentioned Billie’s father’s side of the family.

‘Oh, shit. I guess she was pretty old,’ said Billie casually.

‘Don’t swear when you learn of someone’s death,’ admonished Elisabeth.

‘Why not? I didn’t know the woman,’ said Billie with a careless shrug. ‘It’s not like she made any effort to see us after Papa died.’

Billie never asked about her any more. When she was younger, she had asked a few questions, but Elisabeth’s answers were short and angry, using words such as ‘toxic’ and ‘corrupt’, and Billie, who grieved her father deeply, needed someone to blame, so her father’s family from France seemed a likely reason. She trusted her mother’s opinion and so she joined her in hating them and getting on with their lives as a form of revenge.

‘I know, but she was still your father’s mother. That accounts for some respect,’ said Elisabeth. ‘That was her lawyer on the phone. A lovely man, very kind and discreet. He didn’t ask me about Henri at all; I assume he knows what happened.’

‘OK,’ she said slowly, trying to read her mother’s face. Elisabeth seemed stressed and worried, as though things were all out of place, which they were, thought Billie, but this was more than just moving house.

‘He wants you to go to London for the reading of the will,’ she said, surprise showing on her face.

‘London? Me? You also?’ asked Billie, aware she was speaking in staccato but unable to piece together the thoughts jumbling in her mind.

‘Just you, not me. He said it’s vital,’ Elisabeth stated, clearly saddled with the importance of the message.

‘I don’t want anything of hers,’ said Billie, bending over and picking up the photographs and stuffing them back into the plastic box they had escaped from.

‘He said it was vital,’ her mother repeated, her eyes widening at the last word.

‘I doubt it. Probably some old relic she wants to be passed to me,’ said Billie. ‘I’m not interested in anything they want to give me or you.’

Elisabeth paused as though about to speak and then deciding against it.

‘Go on, say what you were thinking,’ said Billie, crossing her arms.

The house felt cold, and the dust was making her eyes itchy.

‘Billie, the thing is, you father . . .’ Her voice trailed away.

‘What about him?’

‘He was from a good family in France, they have money.’

‘I don’t need money,’ said Billie.

‘No, I know, it’s just that, well, when your father died, I changed our names to March, to try to take away the legacy of his family.’

‘So what is his name?’ Now Billie felt that everything was out of place. She was Billie March. All her documents said so, and it was her mother’s name. She had just assumed they were Marches.

‘Le Marche,’ said Elisabeth, looking ashamed.

‘OK, Le Marche. And what else do I need to know that you might have omitted from my past?’ Billie felt her arms cross and she tried to uncross them, but she felt like everything was coming at her at once.

‘The Le Marches own a successful skincare company across Europe.’

Billie stared at her mother, trying to understand.

‘They are very, very wealthy, and I think your father would like you to have what Daphné has left to you.’

‘You told me my entire life that they were next to evil in terms of family, and now you’re telling me to go there and take whatever trinket or cash they have left me? Do you realise what a hypocrite you sound like?’

‘I thought it would be good to find out what it is. It might have something to do with Henri,’ Elisabeth said in a flat voice.

Billie knew her mother wasn’t a manipulative woman, but she was also not without demands. While Elisabeth would never ask Billie to do anything she wasn’t comfortable with, there was always something around her husband’s death that made her lose all sense of herself.

But she was as selfless as she was generous, which now made Billie now feel terrible.

Since her father’s death, Billie had watched Elisabeth try to get on to the best of her ability without her beloved Henri and, to the outsider, she had succeeded. As a well-respected professor of French poetry, and a poet with a few volumes of her work published, a new husband and a daughter who had a degree in chemistry, she had done well as far as the benchmark of success indicated.

What others didn’t see was the toll that came from coping with a death she didn’t see coming, and one that she wondered every day if she might have prevented. The anniversaries of Henri’s death where Elisabeth wouldn’t get out of bed. The man missing in the photos at Billie’s birthdays and at Christmas that caused Elisabeth to shed a tear in the kitchen, where Billie had found her many times, weeping over the sink.

But now Billie was furious. ‘Why didn’t you tell me who Dad’s family are?’

Elisabeth swallowed a few times. ‘I didn’t want you to leave me for them,’ she said. ‘The lure of money can be very enticing.’

‘Did you think I would do that? God, Mum, you don’t know me at all.’

‘I’m sorry, I just hate them,’ said Elisabeth passionately, and then she burst into tears.

‘Mum, I don’t want anything from them, even if it is Papa’s. He’s gone, we’ve all got lives now that are successful away from the Le Marches.’

Elisabeth looked down at the phone in her hand and slowly nodded. ‘Of course, you’re right, I will let the man know that they can send you anything via mail, or ship it, whatever it is.’

Billie saw the disappointment in her mother’s face and she knew the real reason she wanted her daughter to attend the will reading was to see if there was a final clue to Henri’s death. Something, anything, to tell her why it ended the way it did.

‘It will be an old painting or something, Mum, honestly, they’re not going to give me anything valuable. No doubt the family would have got their hands on anything worth money by now.’

Elisabeth raised her dark eyebrows and rolled her eyes a little.

Billie felt better seeing her mother’s scorn replacing her bewilderment.

‘You’re right,’ she said, looking relieved.

‘Of course I’m right, I’m a realist,’ said Billie. ‘You can try so many different ways to get a different result but often end up with the same outcome. That family is exactly the same. No matter what you do, they will always be self-interested, selfish and toxic, the best thing you ever did was move us to Australia. I feel sorry for them all stuck in the past. Now let’s get you moved, I’m feeling very organised.’

‘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?