Kate Forster - The Last Will And Testament Of Daphné Le Marche

He felt his eyes hurt with unshed tears for his boss and friend and he squeezed them tight to make them disappear.

Don’t frown, you’ll get lines , he heard her voice say and he smiled to himself as he opened a file. As long as the company was still under the Le Marche name, then it would have his loyalty.

Giles Le Marche had closed his pharmacy for lunch was and preparing to go home to a cooked meal, thanks to his housekeeper, Bertie.

Giles liked routine, procedure and process, and his owning his own pharmacy in Montreuil, right next to the main Paris bus depot, afforded him a good living with all number of people coming for their travel sickness remedies and medicines they were unable to find in their village.

He adjusted his hat on his dark head of hair—a genetic gift, thanks to his maternal grandfather, but he told his gentlemen customers the bounty on his head was due to the hair tonic he made, and used daily.

Men willingly bought the tonic, just like women bought all manner of balms and lotions for their ageing.

Everyone was looking for something, he thought, as he closed the door and locked it with his brass key and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit coat and set out on his walk home.

As he passed the bus station, he saw a small group of people gathered, all quibbling over the price of something.

Perhaps it was some delicious figs that a farmer had brought up from Autignac. He had a lovely blue cheese that would go well with the figs and a class of Tempranillo after dinner.

Moving to the back of the crowd, his height gave him a vantage point to see the spectacle below, but instead of a valise of figs, there was a young girl selling what looked to be cakes of soap, wrapped in raffia ribbons. Glass jars of varying sizes were filled with a lotion that the women in the crowd were trying on their hands and arms and murmuring to themselves.

‘Very soft.’

‘Lovely.’

‘How much did you say?’

As the women discussed the product and the price, Giles stepped forward and dipped a finger into the jar that one of the women was holding. He smeared it onto the back of his hand and sniffed it, then gently rubbed it in.

His skin absorbed the smooth emollient and left it feeling fresher and, dare he say it, almost younger.

He picked up a cake of soap and held it to his nose. Lavender, he noted, and picked up another and recognised pungent citrus scents.

‘How much?’ he asked the girl, who looked up at him with indigo blue eyes, and a shock of dark curled hair.

‘The soap? Two francs. The lotion is five francs,’ she said, as a woman handed her the money for one of each of the products.

He rubbed the back of his hand again and noticed that his skin was still dewy where he had sampled the cream. There was something different compared to the creams he made in his pharmacy, but he couldn’t quite place the core ingredients.

There was lard, which was common, but there was something else.

‘What is in it?’ he asked her, feeling his stomach rumble. If he had the ingredients, he could experiment in the pharmacy and create his own Le Marche creams.

The girl looked up at him, and he saw her tired smile. It was amused and defeated all at once, and he felt sorry for her for a moment. So many girls like this came into Paris to find work, but the city was becoming overrun with the country mice just like her.

He waited for an answer impatiently. She handed a woman her change and a jar of cream and then leaned over and put her hand on Giles’ shoulder and whispered in his ear.

He could feel her mouth next to his skin. Her hair smelt of sunshine but her whisper was redolent with ambition.

‘An enchantress never reveals her magic,’ she said and stepped back from him. He felt the hairs on his neck rise with a feeling he thought would never visit him again.

‘I will buy them all,’ he said, without thinking twice.

And later, when surrounded by the cakes of soaps and lotions, he wondered if it was the product he wanted or the girl from the country.

* * *

Daphné Amyx stood opposite him in the small pharmacy, her hands twisting around each other, as though she was resisting the overwhelming urge to touch the rows of perfectly lined up bottles with their pretty labels.

‘I can make more,’ she said, as she watched the man line up the jars and soap on the marble-topped bench in the dispensary.

‘When you’re next in town, bring me some,’ he said brusquely.

Daphné shook her head. ‘No, I mean I can stay here and make more for you. I could work for you. I’d be an excellent assistant.’

He looked up at her, as though seeing her for the first time. She was ten years younger than his own son and yet she had more self-possession and directness than anyone he had met of that age.

He was used to the teens coming into the store, the girls trying to shoplift the peroxide for their hair, the boys wanting the hair cream for their pompadour.

But this girl with the cloud of dark hair and a waist he could have spanned with his outstretched fingers was beguiling him.

‘I don’t need an assistant,’ he snapped.

‘I think you could.’ She gestured around the space. ‘Women like other women to recommend things, it’s part of the secret women’s business,’ she said with that smile that shifted his perspective of the world.

It had been twenty years since he had loved a woman. His existence was carved out of routine and duty, yet this girl turned his mind into a whirling dervish, spinning him back in time before responsibility and duty took over his life.

‘An assistant,’ he harrumphed. He was fifty years old and being manipulated by a woman. It seemed time didn’t change a thing. He liked to sleep with whores, that way there was no misunderstanding about the future.

‘Where are you from?’ he barked.

‘Calvaic,’ she answered.

‘And your parents?’

‘Only my mother is alive now, she works a small property with a few animals and vegetables. If I worked here, I would send her money to help.’

He paused, thinking of Yves, who never asked for anything or ever offered him anything. ‘Where would you live in Paris?’

‘I have friends in Le Marais I could stay with until I found something more suitable.’

He snorted. ‘Le Marais? Jews.’ He shook his head as he spoke the last word.

Daphné raised her head proudly. ‘Yes Jews, and my friends. My mother and I hid them for a time during the war, and I would do it again for anyone, even you.’

Giles looked up startled at the hardness that crept into her tone. ‘Of course,’ he said quickly. ‘I agree. I am just commenting on them taking my business. There are more and more pharmacies opening and a few of them are run by Jews.’ He felt ashamed as he spoke, realising his shame at not doing more during the war, in fact, avoiding it at all costs.

The war had interrupted his routine. He’d sent his son Yves to Switzerland to finish school and stay safe with his chemistry teacher’s family from university and, since then, Yves had stayed there, much to Giles’ disappointment. A trip back to France once a year for a weekend didn’t allow them to connect as a father and son. Instead, they were polite, like cousins once removed, knowing the skin of each other’s life but not the bones.

Yves mother, Louise, was the unspoken ghost in their lives, dying when Yves was fourteen years old.

The conversations about Louise and her death hadn’t evolved into a respectful mourning from both of them, and then the war started in earnest and Yves was sent away.

Daphné adjusted the belt on her teal dress, which was well made from shabby fabric. She would need clothes, he imagined, and he thought of the pharmacies on the Champs-Élysées where the women wore white shirts with little black bows tied around their necks.