Page 24 of The Resistance Book Club

‘Yeah, I was cheffing in Paris and Mum and Dad had the bar, but they were ready to pack it in and I was ready to come home. So I took over at Jojo’s, with Gran keeping an eye on it all. It’s different cooking for people here. They appreciate it in a way people don’t in the big hotels.’

Lucy could see the passion in his expression as he talked. He evidently loved his job, and, if the breakfast she’d had that morning was anything to go by, with his home-made croissant and jam, then she’d be in for a treat come dinnertime.

‘I think it’s great that you’ve come back from Paris and kept the bar in the family,’ she told him. ‘What a lovely thing to do. It’s so nice coming back to Cordeval,’ she went on. She gestured towards the hulking mass of the rusting tank. ‘It’s got so much history. I mean, just look at the D-Day tank.’

Sébastien glanced over at it. ‘It’s not a D-Day tank. It’s from way before that; the village had some pretty hard times.’

Lucy blinked at him in surprise. ‘It’snotfrom D-Day? I’d always assumed— wow.’

She thought of Mémé and Bea in the photo sitting outside Jojo’s. Everyone in that picture had lived through whatever horrors had brought that tank onto the beach. It had to be aNazi tank, then. The members of Margot’s book club must’ve heard it explode.

‘I suppose, after the war, people didn’t like to talk about those times too much. There must be a lot of secrets that have never been told,’ Lucy said. ‘Mémé and Papi let me think that tank was from D-Day, so I never knew…They went through so much, all of them.’

‘And your bookshop hasn’t seen many updates since this tank was on the road,’ said Sébastien. ‘If you need a hand getting things how you want them, let me know. I did a lot of the renovations at the bar, so I’m halfway handy at that sort of thing.’

‘Well, it does need a bit of an update, doesn’t it?’ Lucy replied with a chuckle. ‘It’s very kind of you to offer, but I’m going to sell it. My dad knows someone in Paris who can sort all that out. It’s been nice coming back to Cordeval, but I do need to get back to London.’

Sébastien frowned. ‘Sell it?’ he asked. ‘That’s a shame; it’s a bit of a village institution. It’s been in your family for generations.’

Lucy shook her head. ‘But if things had worked out for you in Paris, you would’ve sold Jojo’s. Or if you’d been offered your own Michelin-starred restaurant in Berlin or Barcelona, you wouldn’t have wanted to worry about a bar in a fishing village, right?’

Sébastien laughed, but Lucy didn’t detect any humour in it. ‘That’s how you see Cordeval? A place where people wash up when they fail at life?’ he asked. ‘By your standards, things worked out very well for me in Paris, but I didn’t want to slave for the applause of spoilt millionaires at Le Cinq. I wanted to be here, so I came home. To a bar in a fishing village.’

Lucy felt a furious blush heating her face. Her father had taken her to Le Cinq for her twenty-first birthday. It was a world away from Jojo’s bar and she struggled to understand thepull of Cordeval. There were the family connections, of course, and it was picturesque. But then, she thought of the lights in the trees that lit up the Champs-Élysées at night, all the way to the Arc de Triomphe, and all the boutiques and the glamour. He’d given all of that up for a fishing village that got a blast of cold air off the English Channel.

‘But that was what you wanted to do,’ she reminded him, defensively. ‘I’ve never had any ambition to run a bookshop. I liked coming here when I was little, and helping Mémé in the shop, butmyambition is to be the editor ofCosmoorVogue. You grew up here, Sébastien. I didn’t. I don’t belong in Cordeval. It’s not my kind of place. It’s just so quiet, and I can barely get a phone signal. It’s in the middle of nowhere for another thing, and it’s trapped in the past.’

He ruffled one hand through his hair, then flipped his sunglasses back down onto his nose. ‘She wanted you to have it,’ he said again. ‘And you’re selling it to the highest bidder just because you can’t get a phone signal?’ He shrugged. ‘Yeah, you’re right. It’s not your kind of place.’

‘But Mémé didn’t ask me if?—’

Before Lucy could finish her sentence, her phone suddenly sprang to life in her pocket. She’d forgotten all about it, because the signal was so poor, but it was ringing – there had to be a patch of better signal down on the beach.

She took it from her pocket and saw Andrew’s name on the screen, with a photo of her planting a kiss on his cheek. The sight of it turned her stomach, but she did need to talk to him, no matter how much she didn’t want to hear his voice.

‘I really need to take this,’ she said to Sébastien.

‘I’ll see you later,’ Sébastien said. He scrubbed Galette’s head and together the pair of them turned and strolled away across the sand.

How simple his life seemed compared to hers.

She swiped to take the call. ‘Andrew?’ she said. She staredout to sea and the waves became blurred by the tears that had suddenly risen in her eyes.

‘Where are you?’ Andrew sounded far away on the stuttering line, and she remembered them sitting in their tranquil living room just a few evenings earlier, dreaming of their honeymoon in the Maldives and sipping white wine. ‘I’m so sorry, Lulu, I just…I’m a bloody idiot!’

‘I can’t believe you’d do that – and in our own bed!’ Lucy replied. She wondered if he could hear the waves on the shore behind her. ‘I’m so— furious doesn’t even touch it. You must realise that I can’t marry you, Andrew. The wedding’s off.’

‘No, no!’ Andrew said urgently. ‘Think of how it’ll look. What will people think?—’

Lucy had nothing to say to that – nothing that was polite, at least.

She hung up.

Her hand shook as she put her phone back in her pocket. She looked out to sea, at the frothy waves racing each other to the shore. Yes, it was true that her life was in London, but an enormous part of it had been shattered into pieces. She would have to go back and sweep up the shards of that old life, and throw herself into the new. She’d longed to become editor in chief of the magazine, and now the rare chance was right there in front of her. All she had to do was grab it.

But before she did, she had to do what her grandmother had asked.

There are secrets tied to the book club, and it’s time you found out.