Page 86 of The Resistance Book Club

Margot smiled at Theo. Or Emil. She would love him whatever he was called. ‘We’ll be together. Always,’ she said, and brought her lips to his in a tender kiss. She felt so safe in his arms.

As they broke from the kiss, she smiled up at him, her gaze running back and forth across the face that she loved so well and had thought she would never see again.

‘Arielle and I live in a cottage. It’s beautiful there, and we’ve even got a piano,’ Margot told him enthusiastically. She’d been decorating for Christmas, with paperchains made from newspaper, and holly she’d picked in the grounds. She admitted, ‘Although the piano’s broken. I kept picturing you lifting the lid and getting it working again. I kept imagining you’d find us and fill our little cottage with music.’

Theo’s eyes sparkled as he said, ‘I have a room here in the house, we’ll be neighbours.’ Then he touched his forehead gently to Margot’s. ‘But it’d be a crime to leave a piano unplayed, don’t you think?’ He furrowed his brow, comically pretending that the decision was a difficult one. ‘It sounds as though I really ought to pay a visit to the cottage. A lot of visits.’

‘Visit us whenever you like,’ Margot replied. She stroked her fingertips through his hair, drinking in every moment of their unexpected closeness. Her heart was at last healed. ‘We’re so blessed to be brought back together; I won’t let you go ever again.’

SIXTY-ONE

LUCY

2025

The summer sun was beating down on the cemetery, the graves of Lucy’s family in front of her. Mémé and Papi rested between her parents; Esther and Daniel, Margot and Emil.

But still, she thought about the kind, gentle man, with a core of bravery that ran through him like steel.

‘After seeing the lullaby that he wrote down for Mémé, I just wonder what happened to Theo,’ she said, her gaze wandering from Sébastien to Beatrice.

‘Haven’t you guessed?’ Beatrice asked. She smiled at Lucy, her gaze twinkling with mischief. ‘Every story needs a happily ever after.’

Lucy looked over at her father. It was unlikely, but she asked anyway, ‘Dad, did you ever hear Margot or Emil mention Theo? He was a musician, and a resistance fighter. He’d lost his eye when he was a child.’

‘He’d—’ Philip looked to Lucy, then broke into a smile. ‘Grandpa Emil!’ he exclaimed. ‘He used to tell us different stories about how he’d lost the sight in that eye. Sometimeshe’d been a pirate and had lost it in a sword fight; once he told us that a speck of stardust had got in there on the night he met Grandma. I never found out what had really happened, but every story was better than the last.’

Beatrice chuckled and asked, ‘And did you ever hear anyone play the piano so well?’

‘Never.’ Philip shook his head. ‘He could come up with the most beautiful melodies, just off the top of his head.’

‘So Mémé wasn’t the only one who changed their name.’ Lucy smiled. When she was only a baby, the man who had written the lullaby for Mémé had held her. ‘He was Theo all along!’

‘And they came home to Cordeval, together,’ said Beatrice tenderly.

Lucy felt as if she had come home too.

2026

Lucy said goodbye to her old life in London. She wound up her job atGlitzmagazine, passing the baton to a young woman who, with her love of fashion and the written word, reminded Lucy of herself.

Settling into life in Cordeval and getting the bookshop ready to reopen had been harder than she had thought it would be, with her phone constantly ringing as notaries, builders and decorators kept finding things they needed to discuss with her. Sébastien helped her through everything, with his laid-back humour, and, eventually, the bookshop reopened.

And if that hadn’t been enough, she’d taken on another project at the same time. She’d sat in a corner at Jojo’s in front of her laptop, working against the clock.

Once Lucy reopened the shop, the customers came in their droves. She proudly displayed photographs of her family – of Margot outside the shop in the 1930s, of Mémé reading to agroup of children in the 1960s. Emil – or Theo as she now knew he’d once been – on the beach, laughing brightly with a crowd of friends. And there was a photograph of Daniel and Esther, too, standing outside their cottage. Locals were so pleased to see the bookshop open again, and with Arielle’s granddaughter at the helm. Battlefield tourists included it their visits, coming to see the shop and the cellar, survivors from when France had been under occupation.

Lucy had devoted a shelf to a display of the banned books that she had found in the storeroom and the basement. They could stand openly in a row on the shelf now, as they would never have done during the occupation, so that customers could carefully leaf through their pages.

The revived book club was going from strength to strength. It brought in people who loved books, as well as people who wanted to absorb the history. And that night, it was a very special book club meeting. From behind the old brass till, Lucy thought back to her failed attempt at running a book club in London; how things had changed.

The bookshop was buzzing with people, and Galette was busily trotting from group to group, his tail wagging as he greeted everyone. From upstairs, she could hear the clink of plates and cutlery from Margot’s café.

The café did a roaring business on the first floor, with locals and visitors devouring Sébastien’s cakes and pastries as the photographs of Cordeval residents past looked down at them from the walls. Lucy had turned the top floor where Theo had once lived into a single flat that was now her home. There was no piano up there now, but Sébastien was a frequent visitor.

‘This is going to be one of those nights Cordeval remembers.’ Sébastian slipped his arm round Lucy’s waist and drew her close. ‘Another chapter in the story.’

Lucy kissed his cheek and breathed in the comforting scent of his cologne. She hadn’t expected to find loveagain so soon, but they were taking it slowly. One day, maybe she’d move in with him and live in the cottage that her great-grandparents had once called home. But for now, they were happy meeting on dates and bumping into each other between the café and the bookshop.