Belle - Lesley Pearse [186]
Etienne stood at the door of the tumbledown cottage he lived in and watched Pierre cycling back down the rutted lane towards the road to Marseille. It was a beautiful spring morning, warm sunshine had made wild flowers spring up all along the lane, and the sound of birdsong all around him made him feel a little less despairing. It had been good to see Pierre again, they’d shared so much innocent fun as small boys, and even though their paths had taken them in such different directions as grown men, there was still a connection between them.
Etienne had wished for his own death after burying Elena and his boys. He’d hidden himself away in this cottage and spent the entire winter drinking himself into oblivion, barely eating anything, not bathing, shaving or even changing his clothes. The only time he went out was to get further supplies of drink.
It was only as the weather improved in early March that he noticed his surroundings. He woke one morning on his straw-filled mattress, and the sun shining in the window highlighted the filth he was living in: empty food cans and wine bottles everywhere, the table covered with mouldy bread, unwashed plates, the floor unswept since he moved in and covered in ash from the fire. He noticed an evil smell – whether it was coming from him, or from food that had fallen to the floor and rotted, he didn’t know, but he knew it was time he did something about it.
He was so weak that he could only tackle the mess in small stages, resting in between. Just getting enough water from the pump outside, filling the old copper and lighting the fire beneath it left him breathless and aching. But he didn’t open a bottle, and that night, after sweeping out the rubbish and burning it, bathing himself and washing his clothes, was the first that he’d fallen asleep sober since the fire.
He was physically strong again now; long, hard days of clearing the ground around the cottage had built up muscle. Mending the roof, cutting wood for the fire and making new shutters for the windows had stopped him drinking and eased his grief.
There were still days when rage consumed him. He wished he knew for certain if the fire in the restaurant had been set deliberately to punish him for daring to tell Jacques he wouldn’t work for him any longer. If he could be sure he would have killed Jacques. But there was no proof – the source of the fire appeared to be the cooker.
The question Etienne had to ask himself now was whether it was wise to go to Paris and look for Belle. He’d made the break from Jacques, he could feel his old spirit gradually returning in just the way green leaves were unfurling in the hedgerows. But returning to Paris would undoubtedly bring him back in contact with the kind of scum he’d turned his back on.
Yet he could picture Belle’s sweet face as she nursed him when he was sick on the steamer, he could hear her gasps of delight as they explored New York, and he remembered only too well how tempted he’d been that night when she got into his bunk.
She had crept into his mind so often in the months after he left her in New Orleans. He’d hoped he would be sent back there so he could check on her, and he’d felt pangs of guilt when he looked at Elena, for surely such thoughts of another woman were as much adultery as the physical kind?
But just the knowledge that Belle had cited him as the one person she trusted meant he must go to her aid. What did he have to lose? Everything he held dear was gone.
He turned to go back into his cottage. If he left now he could be in Paris tonight.
Belle sobbed when the heel of her shoe clattered to the floor. She had spent hours hammering on the board over the window, trying desperately to make a hole in it. The heel broke on the first shoe, and then she’d begun again after a sleep, but now the second heel was broken too she couldn’t