Chapter Eight
“The mattresses are here,” Colin called.
We were painting one of the rooms overlooking the garden. Colin had gone downstairs at the sound of the bell, and I heard a truck out in the courtyard. I put down my roller. “What did she do?” I muttered to myself. “Send someone to raid people’s bedrooms?”
Bing heard me and burst out laughing. “Are you talking about our ill-begotten foliage?”
I brushed back my hair. “I suppose you had no problem with that whole thing?”
He came down from the ladder and put down his roller. “Yes, of course I did. I even felt a twinge of guilt as I was driving around with Karl.”
I stared. “What do you mean, driving around with Karl?”
He made a face. “Karl and I drove around—well, Georges drove, Karl and I just looked—and we noted all the places that looked like they would be worth, ah, revisiting.”
“You were in on that?”
“Karl is certainly spry for his age, but, well … he needed help.”
I folded my arms across my chest. “And what, exactly, did you do?”
He looked thoughtful. “I just wrote down addresses. We went out after dinner, before it got dark, and drove around. It took us four trips to target everything he wanted.” Bing chuckled. “He had some very specific items on his wish list.”
I closed my eyes and shook my head. “Unbelievable. You have no faith in Claudine, her vision, my ability to carry out that vision, but you drive around making a literal hit list.” I threw up my hands. “You’re ridiculous.”
He reached and caught my wrists in his hands. “No, I’m not. Yes, I may have doubts about, well, everything, but this hotel is my son’s legacy, and no matter how absurd I may think this endeavor is, I will do anything and everything Claudine asks of me.” He moved closer, and his grip loosened as my hands fell to my sides. I could feel his smooth palms against my skin, and as his hands opened, they lingered, a cool caress.
I took a step away from him. “So how long did it take you to scout out eighteen mattresses?”
He threw his head back and laughed again. “The mattresses are from IKEA.” He nodded toward the hallway. “Hear that? They’re delivering them now.”
We went out to the landing, and two men were coming up the staircase, carrying between them what looked to be a rug, long and tightly rolled, wrapped in white plastic.
“That’s a mattress?” I asked, skeptical.
“Is there an elevator?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s big enough for two men and a mattress.”
He scowled at me. “Where do you want them?” he asked in French.
“Put one in each of the rooms up here,” I told him. “All the doors are open. And the last two are downstairs.”
The two men nodded, and I watched them disappear through a doorway.
“Seriously?” I asked Bing.
He shrugged. “You unroll them, and they expand to a regular mattress.”
I frowned. “Where’s the box spring?”
“There is no box spring.”
“What? That must be like sleeping on the floor,” I said.
He snorted. “Is your bed comfortable? Without a box spring? I would have thought you’d pay attention to something like that.”
“Something like what?”
“You climb into bed every night. How clueless do you have to be not to notice what you’re sleeping on?”
“There you go again,” I said hotly.
“What?” he growled.
“Making assumptions. And being a jerk,” I said. Maybe yelled.
“I’m not a jerk!” he yelled back.
“But you’re making assumptions. Remember that first day? When you said you jumped to conclusions, and it was a major flaw? And you were going to work on it?”
He glared. “So?”
“When are you going to start?”
Colin came up the stairs. “Uh,” he said nervously. “I can hear you. Actually, everyone can hear you.”
“Good,” I muttered and went back to work.
Claudine had scheduled the press event for a Monday morning. Local journalists, travel agents, and a few regional bloggers were invited, as well as someone from the Ministry of Tourism.
A photographer was arriving early on Saturday to take pictures for the brochure and website. I planned to download a few of the best images and plug them into our self-designed trifold, which we would distribute to all our invited guests at the press event. I figured I could paste and plug what I needed and print them off faster and much cheaper than sending the job out to a professional. Eliot helped me there—grudgingly. When he wasn’t hiding away from the rest of us in the tiny appartement he shared with Marie Claude, he worked for a graphic design firm. He put together a professional-looking brochure in the time it had taken me to finish three glasses of wine.
The previous week had been spent in a whirlwind of activity. Everyone had finished all the items on their punch lists, including Vera, who had somehow finished the drapery for all the rooms, even those that weren’t quite ready for them. The public rooms were immaculate. We had eight individual rooms styled for photographs. All the exterior spaces, including the side rose garden, were complete. The front of the hotel was postcard-perfect, the exterior trim and front doors once again a peacock blue. The illicitly planted cast-iron urns were thriving. The back patio looked so lovely and inviting that no one would ever guess there was a former domestic in residence.
Claudine had made good on her promise of office equipment that didn’t cause me to hyperventilate every time I looked at it. She had the equipment delivered much earlier than I’d expected, but since her office was still technically open, I wondered what her staff was using to work on. The software had been installed. The website was ready to go live as soon as the images were uploaded.
Claudine had arranged for all her treasure—the artwork, rugs, and miscellany that had been in storage for decades—to be delivered. The truck was late, but I’d gotten used to deliveries being late. Karl wandered off to his garden, and I followed him. It was one of my favorite spaces, and not just because it was one of the few places that I didn’t have to fix. It was quiet until you really listened, and then you could hear the hum of bees and the soft chirping of birds. The abundance of growth was heartwarming, and it seemed as though if I sat there long enough, I would be able to see the tomato plants stretching toward the sun.
I settled on a bench. We had put cast-iron café chairs and tables around on the flagstone paths, but I preferred the benches. I watched as Karl fussed in the beds, pulling stray weeds and nipping back unwanted growth. He hummed as he worked. That was something else I’d grown used to, just as I’d grown used to many things in the ten weeks I’d been at Hotel Paradis.
I could make my own café crème now. The hulking machine back in the kitchen no longer caused me panic, and I made the espresso and steamed milk with the confidence of a Starbucks barista.
I took my mesh bag everywhere. If you bought anything from anywhere in Rennes, you had to figure out a way to carry it out of the store on your own. It only took me two solo trips to the bakery for me to put my mesh carry-all on a hook right by the door, right there in my face, so that I remembered to take it whenever I left the flat.
I called my parents every Sunday, on their landline. No, I couldn’t see my dad’s face, but now, when I talked to him, it was just to him, unless he passed the phone to Mom. No longer were our conversations interrupted by the disembodied voice of my mother from wherever in the house she wanted to be, instead of near enough to hear her daughter’s voice.
Mimi, Cara, and I had a weekly Facebook video date on Monday nights. Joe and I worked it out so that I could call them just as they came home from school, and he had his laptop set up for them. When I was their age, the idea of talking to someone face-to-face across an ocean would have seemed magical. They took it in stride from the very first conversation, slipping in front of the screen, snacks in hand, bursting with questions.
“Is your new hotel pretty?” Cara asked.
“Beautiful,” I lied. Not a lie, exactly. Soon, it would be.
“What are you doing now?” Mimi asked.
“Painting,” I answered promptly.
They both giggled. “Painting? Like a picture?” Mimi asked.
“No. Painting, like the walls.”
Cara frowned. “Did you do that at your other hotel?”
“No. But this hotel is different. And special.”
“Do you talk French all the time there?” Mimi asked.
I nodded. “Yes. And the more I speak it, the easier it gets.”
“Like riding a bike,” Cara offered.
“Exactly.”
“When can we learn French?” Cara asked.
I thought. “Probably in middle school. Definitely in high school. Do you want to learn French?”
They both nodded. “So when we come to visit,” Cara explained, “we can talk to all your friends.”
I didn’t know what the bigger pipe dream was—that they would be visiting me or that I had friends. Was I warming up to the people around me? Yes, I was. But did I consider any of them friends? Not really.
And the idea that Joe could afford to send them to France in the first place was absurd. My parents helped pay his rent.
“Well, that’s something to work for,” I said, keeping the conversation away from delicate subjects.
“We miss you.” Cara sighed. “Sunday, Nana was in a bad mood, and PopPop said his back hurt, and nobody would take us to the park.”
They had dinner every Sunday afternoon at my parents’ house, a tradition that began even before Sara had become ill. I had not joined them very often back then. It seemed I never had the time. Truth was, I never made the time. Of the few positive things that had resulted from the whole Fielding debacle, the greatest was my connecting with these two girls in a way that would have never otherwise been possible.
I felt my eyes suddenly burn. “I miss you guys, too. Like crazy. Which is why we’re going to talk like this every week, okay?”
Cara, always the more cautious, narrowed her eyes. “Promise? What if you have something else to do?”
I shook my head. “It’s practically my bedtime all the way over here. I don’t do anything so close to bedtime.”
Cara stuck out her lower lip, thinking. “What if you get sick?”
I made a face. “I can do this in my bed.”
She persisted. “What if you’re still painting?”
I shook my head. “I can’t paint in the dark.”
She wasn’t giving up yet. “What if you have a date?”
“Then I guess you both will get to meet him.”
They burst into giggles, and we said goodbye a few minutes later.
Julia and I texted each other, often at night, just an odd line or two, but I could hear her laughter as I tried to explain what my life was like now: thrift store jeans and broken fingernails, hardening muscles and long soaks in tepid water, wine at every meal with crusty bread slathered with butter that tasted like fresh-mown grass, going to the market every Saturday morning with Bing and finding even more foods and flowers I had never imagined existed.
You sound happy, she texted me.
Maybe I am, I texted back. Or maybe I’m too tired to be sad.
What’s with Bing?
Nothing.
No. Really.
He’s attractive and too complicated.
And he was. Attractive. He was charming and funny and smart, and whenever we got physically close, I expected actual sparks to jump between our bodies. But he was still a high-minded, arrogant know-it-all who managed to irritate the hell out of me by the end of most of our conversations. And any invitation to further intimacy, emotional or physical, real or imagined, I quickly threw off. I didn’t know how long it would take before I trusted myself to make sound and reasonable decisions about my personal life again, but I was pretty sure that Bing was a risk, and I wasn’t willing to take any risks just yet.
I had also become something of a cat person. Napoléon Bonaparte now slept at the foot of my bed every night. I don’t know where he had slept before I arrived, but he settled into my little appart very nicely. I always had a small bowl of water for him. He ate in Claudine’s rooms and wandered the grounds quite happily, but he always managed to find me as I opened my door in the evening, slipping in and curling up for the night.
Today, as I sat waiting, I watched him skulk around the garden. He was hunting. Voles, Karl had said, and he froze, the tip of his tail twitching, as he tracked some unseen creature through the rows of pole beans.
“Lucia?”
It was Bing, interrupting the hunt. He walked across the gravel and sat beside me. Napoléon sat, glared at Bing, and began washing his front paw.
“Why is Napoléon giving me the side-eye?” Bing asked.
“He was hunting. Still no truck?”
Bing shook his head. “It could take until midnight. The French have an odd concept of time.”
“Are we sure all these things belong to Claudine? I mean, she’s not above a bit of petty larceny to further her cause.”
Bing smiled. “No, these are all her family heirlooms. She has a photograph of every item in a large notebook. She used to take it out and talk about the rugs like they were close, personal friends.” He stretched his arm out along the back of the bench. I was aware that the nape of my neck was inches from his arm, and all I had to do was slouch down a little bit …
“I think you’re doing well,” he said, quite unexpectedly. “Things are moving along much faster than I’d thought possible.”
“If I remember correctly, when I first got here, your expectations were rather dim. Nonexistent.”
He nodded. “Yes. That’s an accurate assessment. Aren’t you impressed that I can freely admit when I’m wrong?”
I made a noise. “Why should that impress me? Isn’t that something everyone should be able to do?”
“Yes, but if you knew me back in the day, you’d not only be impressed, you’d also be gobsmacked.”
I smiled. “That’s a great word. Gobsmacked.”
“Yes, it is. I love words.”
We sat together in silence. It was not one of those awkward, what-do-I-say-next kinds of silences. Rather, the silence between two people comfortable enough with each other to not have to fill in the empty. Tony Fielding had hated the emptiness and had filled it with talk, snapping fingers, or tapping toes. It had been exhausting at times.
“What?” asked Bing.
I realized I had made a kind of snort. “I was just thinking about what we’re willing to put up with for love.”
“Ah. Yes. Love.”
“Deep subject.”
“Very deep. I much prefer lust.”
I sat up. “Excuse me?”
He grinned. “Lust. It’s very direct. Straightforward. Just as powerful as love, but without all that thinking.”
I laughed out loud. “That’s an excellent way to put it. I’ll have to remember that.”
He turned his head. “The truck is here. Let’s look.”
Karl joined us as we walked. He was talking about Aubusson rugs, how they had been named for the town of Aubusson, on the banks of the Creuse River.
Bing shot me a look, and I giggled as Karl continued, out of the garden, onto the cobblestones, where the history of the Perrot family waited to be unloaded.
Claudine had her notebook on the check-in counter in the lobby, and three men were standing there, two holding a rolled-up rug wrapped in brown paper, and the third carrying a rectangular crate, antique-picture-size. A fourth man, in a stylish gray suit, was arguing with Claudine.
“We spent two days wrapping all these items to protect them from any damage. I will not spend any more time unwrapping them all just so you can check them,” he said.
She tapped the open page of her notebook. “What if there is something wrong? What if a frame is broken? Or a rug is stained?”
“Madam, your family has paid my company thousands over the past eighty years. You are one of our oldest and most valued customers. Do you think that if something had happened to even one corner of one rug, we would not have immediately told you?”
She looked at him, frowned, looked at me, then shrugged. “You have a point. All the rugs upstairs.” She gestured. “And the paintings can all be lined up against the wall here in the salon.”
He looked at the sweeping staircase. “Upstairs?”
“Yes. Most of the guest rooms are upstairs. There is an elevator. Small, but you can use it for the rugs. Take them up and line them all up in the hallway.”
He did not look happy, but he shrugged. “There are very many paintings,” the man said.
“I know,” said Claudine. “There’s more than enough room in there.” She turned to Bing, Colin, Karl, and me. “You can start to unwrap the rugs. Roll them out a foot or two and take a picture so I can match them against my list. We’ll do the art last.”
We went upstairs and followed the first rug from the elevator to the wide hallway. Colin carefully cut open the brown wrapping, revealing the rolled-up rug. We helped him unroll a foot or two.
“Oh,” I whispered.
Colin whistled through his teeth. “Wow.”
Karl squatted down next to Colin. “There are over one hundred of these rugs at Versailles,” he said. He pushed a little harder, and the rug unrolled a bit more.
I had seen pictures of these rugs, of course, but the depth of color and close texture took me by surprise, especially since the rug was so old. And it was large, at least ten feet long.
“I pictured smaller area rugs,” I said.
Karl stood. “Oh, no. These rugs were a sign of wealth. They were all made on a very grand scale. Each will cover most of the floor in every room.”
“If I had known that,” I muttered, “I wouldn’t have spent so much time and money fixing the floors.”
Bing laughed, pulled out his phone, and took a picture. “Where do you want this?” he asked.
We had finished the rooms overlooking the back patio. I opened the door to one of the rooms. The walls were painted, the furniture was clean and gleamed softly after Marie Claude and Eliot’s ministrations, and soft drapery covered both windows.
“In here,” I called. “I want to see how it looks.”
Bing and Colin carried it in. We moved the furniture to allow for the rug to be fully unrolled. It was a pale blue with cream, soft green, and blush pink. We put the furniture back in place.
“We need to dress the bed,” I muttered.
“First,” Bing pointed out, “we need a mattress.” The mattress was still rolled up and leaning in a corner of the room. He and Karl eased it onto the bed as I hurried out.
I headed for the housekeeping closet tucked into a windowless corner at the end of the hallway. Inside, by the light of a single, dangling light bulb, I pulled out a set of linen, three pillows, and one of the many quilts hanging from the wooden rack.
I hurried back to the room. We needed art. There was a picture rail in every room, dropped down about two feet from the ceiling. Trying to hang a picture on the wall was impractical, as it would have required a small spike and a sledgehammer to puncture the plaster. Pictures were hung on wire and attached to small hooks that slipped onto the rail.
I dumped my linens on the graceful bergère and headed downstairs.
Claudine had uncrated two paintings and was standing, arms crossed, and smiling. As I came up to her, she grinned broadly. “Look. Isn’t she lovely?”
I stared. It was a portrait of a young woman, her dark hair swept up, her face calm and lovely, smiling from an elaborate gilt frame. “Wow. Oh, Claudine…” I reached out a hand, then snatched it back. This was going to hang on a wall? Where anyone could touch it? It belonged in a museum.
“Odette Perrot,” Claudine said. “Painted in 1843.”
The second painting was a landscape, a river flowing through a wheat field, horses in the background pulling a cart. It was so beautiful that my breath caught in my throat.
Claudine sidled up beside me and poked me in the ribs. “You didn’t believe me, did you?”
I shook my head slowly. “It’s not that I didn’t believe you. It’s just…” I put my arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick hug. “I just never imagined anything like this.”
There were tears in her eyes. “I’ve never seen them,” she whispered. “Not in real life. Just the pictures.”
“Well, wait until you see your rugs. Can I take these upstairs?”
“Of course. I’ll come with you.”
I shook my head as I took Odette in both hands. “No. Not yet.” I gestured at the young workman who came in carrying another crate. “Could you grab that for me? Please?”
He nodded and picked up the landscape, and upstairs we went.
Bing had the mattress on the bed. The headboard and footboard were carved mahogany. The mattress was unrolled, a pile of plastic wrapping heaped on the floor, but only looked four inches high. I carefully leaned Odette against the footboard and stared.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.
Karl looked confused. “What do you mean?”
“It’s flat.”
“Of course,” Karl said. “You have to give it time to expand.”
“How much time?” I asked.
“Two, three days,” he answered.
I shook my head. “We don’t have three days. The photographer is coming the day after tomorrow. Bring in three or four more.” I looked at Bing and Colin. “Please?”
I turned to Karl. “Do we have any flowers yet?”
He shook his head. “No. Not yet. But…” He frowned. “I have something.” He hurried out.
Colin and Bing returned, and after unwrapping three more mattresses, we had something that looked like a regular mattress on the bed.
“Colin, can you hang these?” I asked, motioning toward the paintings. “Do you know where the hooks are?”
Colin nodded and left, dragging the mountain of plastic behind him, while Bing helped me make the bed. The quilt was made of cream-colored cotton, the intricate stitching outlining patterns of birds and roses.
Colin came back in, the small brass hooks in hand, and Odette was hung next to the door. The landscape filled the wall next to the armoire.
Karl came trotting back in, breathless, carrying a slender glass vase under one arm and graceful fronds that I recognized as coming from the tall grasses growing in the urns. He set the vase on the small table next to the bed and arranged the grasses.
He smiled at me. “Yes?”
I nodded. “Oh yes.” I pulled open the drapes and pushed the tall windows open, revealing a bit of the balcony. Then I ran over to the doorway and surveyed the entire room.
“It needs more,” I muttered.
Bing stood beside me. “Yes.”
“Karl,” I called. “Any ferns left?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
I ran my eyes around the room. “Good. Can you bring one in here? Over by the bathroom door, just to fill up that bit of space.” I turned to Bing. “Let’s look at a few more of Claudine’s treasures.”
Downstairs, they had brought in two large wooden crates that were pushed up against the mahogany counter. Both had been opened, and the once nailed-on lids were askew.
I pointed. “What’s in there?”
Bing went over, knelt, and dug his hands into the packing material. He pulled out a large, round object wrapped in brown paper. He peeled the paper off and revealed a large porcelain bowl, creamy white, sprayed with pink roses and faded gold.
“Perfect,” I breathed. “What else?”
He rooted around some more, then turned with a grin. “Candelabra?”
“Bring it up.” I grabbed the bowl, blew off the dust, and hurried back upstairs. “Colin,” I called from the landing. “Any chance of candles?”
“Certainly,” he called back and came out of the room and headed down the back staircase.
It took us longer than I’d thought it would, but finally, we looked at each other, grinning with satisfaction.
“Karl,” I said. “You get her.”
We could hear her grousing all the way up the stairs.
“What is so important?” Claudine asked. “I have rather a few things to do.”
And then, right in the doorway, she stopped, and we could hear her gasp.
The room was beautiful. It was a step back into a more gracious time. The open windows let in a breeze that ruffled the pale curtains. The bedclothes were turned down, the pillows plump against the cream of the linen bedsheets. The furniture shone, and the candles flickered on the delicate writing table next to the bed.
She took a step in. Odette smiled, and Claudine smiled back. “I think you’ve done it, Lucy,” she said softly.
“We’ve done it,” I said.
She walked farther into the room, her steps muffled by the thick rug, taking in the soft pillow across the back of the flowered slipper chair by the window. She touched the grass in its vase and trailed her fingers across the fronds of the fern. “Yes. This is what I had always imagined.” There were tears in her eyes as she smiled. Then she shook herself. “But where will we put the television you insist we need?”
“It’s not like we’re getting sixty-four-inch HDTVs in here,” I said. “We can probably hide a small screen in the armoire.”
She nodded. “Perhaps. We need more lighting.”
“I know.”
“And we certainly can’t have open flames in the candelabras.”
I kept my voice even. “We’ll get the flameless candles. Anything else?”
She shook her head. “No. The fern here is a nice touch.”
Karl beamed. “Yes. And I know where we can get many more, if you’d like.”
I closed my eyes briefly, and when I opened them, everyone was looking at me.
I felt Bing’s warm breath in my ear. “Well done,” he whispered.
And as I smiled, Claudine clapped her hands. “Yes. Well done.”
The rooms were set. Pictures had been hung, rugs rolled out, and Karl had been assigned the job of going to the Saturday market first thing in the morning to buy fresh flowers. Claudine couldn’t afford to put large bouquets in each of the rooms, and I had a brief vision of her sending us out into predawn Rennes to steal flowers from people’s gardens. Instead, Karl insisted he could rearrange the flowers in every room, giving a different look in every photograph. I allowed myself to relax. When Gaspard, the photographer, arrived the next morning, we would be ready.
Except …
Now that the weather was warm, we had taken to sitting out in the garden after dinner, usually with a bottle or two of wine. One of the most endearing traits of the French, I decided, was their belief that you didn’t need an event to drink good wine. In fact, drinking was the event.
Claudine made her pitch as though she were offering each of them a chance of a lifetime. “We need people in the pictures,” Claudine began. “You know. Guests.”
“You don’t have guests,” Colin pointed out.
“Ah yes,” Claudine agreed. “But I have all of you. You can pretend to be guests. You know, checking in, sitting in the garden, opening a suitcase … you all can be on the website!”
No one jumped up in excitement. No one raised their glass to toast such a splendid idea.
Vera spoke first. “You may not take my picture,” she said. “I don’t photograph well.”
Bing was laughing very quietly, his shoulders shaking as he shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” Marie Claude mumbled. Eliot had not joined us. Again. “I have nothing to wear.”
Claudine and I had offered Marie Claude a job as a desk clerk once the hotel opened. Her living on-site was certainly one reason, but she was a smart, capable young woman who was working in a bank, and I reasoned that she had the customer service experience needed for the job.
Claudine looked at Marie Claude. “You’ll wear what you will wear once we open. A white shirt and a black skirt or pants. Do you mean to tell me you don’t own a white shirt? I was going to have you photographed behind the front desk with Lucy. Checking in Vera and Bing.”
Bing raised an eyebrow. “What?”
Vera cleared her throat and said again, a bit louder, “You may not take my picture.”
Claudine rolled her eyes. “You are beautiful, Vera. Don’t be silly. I’m sure you will look amazing. As will Bing. You will make a striking couple. And it will send the right message, no?”
“What message is that?” Bing asked. “That old people are welcome here?”
Claudine scowled. “Don’t be difficult. That everyone is welcome here.”
“I don’t feel comfortable,” Vera said stiffly, “being the token person of color.”
Claudine made a face. “That has nothing to do with anything, Vera. You should know that by now. The color of your skin is a very nice, politically correct plus, but even if you were a bland, blond Swede, I’d ask you. I need a couple to check in to my hotel. Lucy and Marie Claude will be doing the checking in. I can’t have them pretending to be guests. They are legitimate employees. Bing needs to be with someone, so it’s either you or Colin. And the two of you make such an attractive couple”
Vera’s face softened. “Very well.”
Karl leaned back and said, “Then perhaps we can ask Stavros’s oldest daughter? You know, the one with four children? To show that we welcome families as well?”
She narrowed her eyes as Vera and Bing both burst out laughing.
Karl’s eyes were dancing. “I know how happy you will be to see small children running around, making all that noise and bumping into things.”
“Stop it,” she snapped. “Of course families are welcome, but we do not have the appropriate space. You know that. We can only accommodate two persons in each room.”
Colin leaned over and said in my ear in a mock whisper, “Her love of children is practically urban myth.”
“I do like children,” Claudine said loudly. “I love them. Ask Philippe. He will tell you that he had a wonderful childhood. Didn’t he, Bing?”
Bing swirled the wine in his glass. “I’m sure he did. What child wouldn’t, growing up here? He had the run of the local haunted house. But I seem to remember that when he brought his friends over to play, well, sometimes that didn’t go over so well.”
“That,” Claudine declared, “is because his friends were hooligans, running around here like a pack of wolves.”
Bing threw his head back and laughed. “They were boys, Claudine. How did you expect them to act?”
Karl had a broad smile on his face. “This is an ongoing conversation,” he said to me. “Claudine’s patience with boisterous children has long been the subject of much debate.”
I smiled back at him and relaxed in my chair, watching their faces. Even Marie Claude, who I know hadn’t lived here nearly as long as Bing or Karl, was in on the joke. But then, she had known Philippe, and he may have told her the stories of his childhood, spent in an empty and echoing hotel, his mother scolding as he and his friends slid down the long banister of the grand staircase.
There was a familiar ease among them all, a feeling of belonging, and I ached to be a part of that. I had never felt embraced and accepted by my own family, and years of moving from one place to another had never given me the deep roots of long friendships.
At The Fielding, I knew every employee and had felt closer to some than others. There were a few who would call me for a drink after work or just to sit and chat in the lobby after an event. But after Tony left, not one of those people reached out in comfort or support. Instead, they looked at me as a coconspirator, and nothing I could say or do changed anyone’s mind. Even those I’d imagined as friends turned their backs. I couldn’t blame them, I suppose. Tony and I had moved in tandem in the years we were together. His betrayal was seen as mine as well. It did no good to try to explain to anyone that Tony had been one of my greatest mistakes.
I considered myself lucky to have Julia, someone I had known in college, and we had somehow remained connected through all my many moves.
As much as I wanted to relax enough to let these people in, I had held back, still so distrustful of my own instincts that I sometimes worried that I would never again put any kind of faith in another person.
Claudine looked at me and explained. “They are all being overly critical. True, Philippe and I had a few issues as he was growing up, but that is true of all parents and their children. And to be honest”—she smiled wistfully—“I had wanted a daughter so badly. Oh, to have had a little girl to dress and teach to cook and play with.”
Bing nodded. “Although, I must admit, she tried. Poor Philippe, he was the only boy in kindergarten who had a pink winter coat.”
“That was not pink,” Claudine shot back and then looked chagrined. “Okay, maybe it was.” She pointed at Marie Claude. “When you finally get down to having your children, I want nothing but little girls. Understood?”
Marie Claude smiled. “I’m not quite ready for that, Claudine, but I will certainly keep your request in mind when the time comes.” She looked at me. “She always gets what she wants.”
I nodded. “Yes, I’ve noticed that. So, I guess we’ll all pose for the camera tomorrow morning?”
Vera sniffed. “What about Colin and Karl? Will they be another couple?”
Colin sat up, grinning at Karl. “What do you say?”
Karl looked thoughtful and finally said, “Sorry, Colin. You’re much too old for me.”
We all burst out laughing.
Claudine waved a hand. “Colin, you will be a guest in the salon, having breakfast. Stavros will be here, of course, and has already agreed to be photographed. Karl, you can lounge out in the garden, sipping a glass of wine.”
Karl grinned wickedly. “Certainly. And tell us, Claudine, how will you be photographed?”
She narrowed her eyes, opened her mouth to say something, decided against it, then grinned broadly. “I will sit out with you in the garden. We can hold hands, if you’d like. Or perhaps share a kiss for the camera?”
Karl blushed as he burst into laughter, and we all joined in. I felt a surge of something.
Maybe a wave of confidence that the first hurdle was almost over.
Maybe a growing sense that the hotel would open on time and be as successful as I wanted it to be.
Maybe a feeling that yes, I did belong here after all.