The Seafront Tea Rooms Read Free Page B

keen for his daughter to speak French, to keep the connection – so he’s looking for someone to live with them and teach her.’
    ‘You’d make a wonderful au pair,’ Hélène said, wrapping a squirming Mathilde in one of the warm towels. ‘Would you like that, darling?’
    ‘Maybe,’ Séraphine said, slowly.
    Anna was already reaching into her handbag for a pen and paper. She checked her phone and wrote something down. ‘Here’s Adam’s email. Think about it?’
    Séraphine took the piece of paper and smiled politely. ‘Thank you.’
    Evening fell, and while Hélène put the twins to bed, Séraphine and her father carried the dishes inside to the kitchen.
    ‘Are you sure you won’t join us for a drink in the library?’ he asked.
    ‘No, it’s fine. I’m a little tired.’ She said goodbye to the guests and went upstairs.
    In her bedroom, she walked over to the window to close the wooden shutters, pausing for a moment to look out. The well-tended garden and the vineyards beyond were warmly tinted by the grey-pink sky at dusk. Out to the east was the village square, a cobbled area with shops around it, where a market was held once a fortnight. A few metres away was the school she’d gone to, and the church the whole family, including her grandparents, attended every Sunday. The landscape, streets and buildings were as familiar to her as her own fingerprint.
    And yet every stone, branch and street corner looked different to her now. Meeting someone who understood her made her realise how much of her real self she’d kept hidden. She drew the shutters, and lowered the catch to secure them.
    From the room next door came the sound of giggling. She stepped into the corridor and put her head around the twins’ bedroom door. In her sternest voice, she demanded, ‘Mathilde? Benjamin? Why are you two still awake?’
    In tandem, without a word, they ducked under the covers, rolling on to their sides. Séraphine quietly closed the door and glanced along the corridor towards her brother’s room. Even though he’d moved out, the room still had his football posters on the walls, a rack of his old shoes by the wardrobe. With only two years separating them, Guillaume and Séraphine had been close. She used to sit on the chair in his room and he’d strum his guitar, playing her the new songs he had written, while incense burned in the corner.
    Back in her own room, Séraphine turned on a lamp and lay back on her bed. When Guillaume left, a crack formed in their home. In truth, the hairline fracture had appeared earlier and only deepened when he walked out; he had been slipping away from them for over a year – spending most of his time with his band in Bordeaux, rarely bothering to come home at night. As his band grew more successful and started touring in Europe, he’d seemed less happy, somehow. On the rare occasions when he was home he’d appeared disconnected, listless.
    Her parents chose not to see the change in him, the deadness Séraphine noticed behind his eyes. He’d finally left before Christmas, saying goodbye but not leaving an address. ‘A commune,’ he’d said to Séraphine in an offhand way. ‘You can be yourself there, not like in this place, this prison. If you want to find me, come to Bordeaux. Ask and they’ll show you.’ He’d walked out with a sports bag in his hand, nothing else.
    Séraphine looked up at the shadows on her ceiling. She had always wondered if, when the right person came along, she would know if it was love. If you could be sure, instinctively, that was what you were feeling. She’d had boyfriends before, of course, but she’d never lain awake at night thinking about them. Now she knew: love was an absence of questions, of doubt. It was a certainty that you had found what it was you’d been looking for and there was no reason to go on searching.
    She knew how her parents would react, and that was why they must never find out. If she followed her heart, she’d be