A French Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page A

Baking had been Juliette’s first curiosity and introduction to cooking. The experience of making kouign-amann , of cooking the breads and cakes for the Saints Days, birthdays and Christmas. At fifteen Juliette took orders for her Bûche de Noël , Yule log, and large gingerbreads made with honey and delivered them to neighbours’ houses on Christmas Day, wrapped in cellophane with big, red bows. But now Juliette has Delphine . Delphine is hers. She is Delphine . Juliette glances at her bag, left by the top of the stairs. Inside her phone is filled with messages. She still owes the bank a lot of money, Delphine isn’t really all hers yet, and a good Gault et Millau review is critical to the restaurant’s ongoing success. Juliette looks back at the paper in her hand. There is only one page for job vacancies and businesses for sale in Douarnenez. Juliette scans the listings again – Bakery, Mechanic Shop, Children’s Clothing Store. Waitress, apprentice plumber, the cook/housekeeper position she’d noticed earlier. She screws the paper up in her hand, balling it, making the words inside disappear, before dropping it to the floor. Stupid tiny town. She hates it. There are no jobs, no growth, everything and everyone is in a state of disrepair and deterioration. It makes her feel unsteady. It makes her feel as though it might be contagious, that she needs to get out, fast, or she’ll succumb to it, too. She’ll slow down, she’ll start decaying, her life tipping rapidly towards death.
    Juliette moves quickly to the sink and reaches for the roll of grey rubbish bags her mother keeps on the shelf beneath. She takes one to the dining table and sweeps papers into it. Then steps back. On the table is a bare patch, free from dust, where the papers were piled. She grabs a stack of letters and bills by the phone and thrusts them into the bag too. A line of photographs, mainly of Juliette as a teenager – sullen and unsmiling – go in. Magazines, old newspapers, plastic lids, a blurry photograph of their cocker spaniels both long-dead, loose coins, a pair of broken scissors, trousers with a tear in the pocket and a needle waiting in the fabric. Juliette fetches another rubbish sack. And on and on and in it all goes till the space looks five times bigger and clear and Juliette can breathe better. The clock on the wall ticks audibly, it is now close to midnight. Juliette is panting a little. Finally she sees the paper she screwed into a ball on the floor and she pushes that in and ties the top of the sack. It takes all her strength to drag the bags down the stairs, nearly hooking her handbag up with one of them, and out the front door. She can feel the soft weight of the magazines and the glass-and-wood clatters of the photo frames as she bumps them along to the edge of the kerb. When she straightens, the cool, night air fills her lungs. Above her hundreds of stars glitter in the black palm of the sky. Juliette stares. The night sky never looks that way in Paris.
    *
    When Juliette wakes it takes her a moment to remember where she is. She stares at the blue, floral pillowcase and then the thick brown carpet and, on it, her handbag, the top spread open, her phone facing up to her. She picks it up and scrolls through the messages. Fourteen of them, mostly from Louis, none from the person who had been in her dreams. The one that makes her feel warm and misplaced and guilty, as though she shouldn’t have those kinds of thoughts in her childhood bedroom, except this is exactly where those kinds of thoughts had first begun. Juliette sits up and puts her feet against the carpet, taking a moment to absorb her surroundings. Her parents have kept the posters she put up with gold thumbtacks when she was a teen. The British bands she had loved – Duran Duran, Joy Division, The Smiths – and a large close-up of Kate Bush, looking misty and faraway and beautiful. There is a white chest of