A Postcard from Paris by Alex Brown

Author:Alex Brown [Brown, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2021-02-03T17:00:00+00:00

15

A few days later and Annie was in Cour Felice looking at the boarded-up shop from the outside and imagining Trixie standing here in the exact same spot and doing the same thing, admiring her beautiful boutique. Annie closed her eyes momentarily and tried to imagine how glamorous and chic the boutique would have been in the Twenties when it was likely that Trixie had first opened her perfume emporium.

She had discovered from reading more of Trixie’s diaries written during World War One that Trixie had developed a number of potions and fragrances while she was volunteering as a Voluntary Aid Detachment in France, and had then continued building up her knowledge and collection of concoctions in the years that followed, so it would seem a natural progression and a marvellous idea for her to open a perfume shop when she came back to France in the 1920s. But what Annie couldn’t work out was why Madame Bardin had said that Trixie gave a phial of perfume to a German soldier in World War Two … If it was true, then why would she do that? Especially as she was British. Yes, she had considered Maggie’s point about there being French and British Nazi supporters too, but it just didn’t seem feasible, not when her brother and her lover, plus Stan, the older brother of her childhood friend, Queenie, had been killed by Germans in the Great War. All of them had been in the PALS regiment from the same village. Tindledale. Annie had read about that too in one of the earlier diaries, when Trixie had written that a German soldier would be vilified back home in Tindledale. And then something struck her. The picture-postcard village with the water mill. The place Annie had travelled through on her scenic route before taking the Eurostar to Paris. Yes. What a coincidence.

She remembered it now, Tindledale, and so pulled out her phone from the pocket of her dress and did a quick search to be sure. There it was. The train route went through the Kent countryside, and so now she knew that Trixie, aka Beatrice Crawford, came from Tindledale in England. It looked so quaint, with a traditional little village pub – she saw on the Google search that it was called the Duck & Puddle and there was a haberdashery shop too. Hettie’s House of Haberdashery. Maybe someone in the village might remember the Crawford family, Beatrice, or her brother Edward. Annie made a note in her phone to mention all these details when she next called Joanie to update her. And she would tell her about Tindledale too and ask her if she could remember any kind of connection to the village.

Bringing her thoughts back to the here and now in the cobbled courtyard of the Parisian Cour Felice, Annie looked again at the boarded-up boutique in front of her, focusing her mind, as if telepathically trying to connect with the woman who had lived here for near on eighty years.

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