Aurélie

Chapter Twenty Six

Aurélie showered, it was impossible not to shower twice a day in this city heat. She left her hair to dry naturally, enjoying the cool sensation as it draped down her neck. The air felt close, too close, like a storm was going to arrive.

She looked out of her window and saw the familiar haze over the Parisian rooftops that she recognised from London. The mix of smog and humidity swirling together to create a mauve intensity that precluded a summer storm. At least the crackle of lightning and the roar of thunder would release some of the oppressed air that seemed to be pushing down on the city. Lashings of rain would be welcome, but when she listened to the radio this morning she could make out the weather man saying the storm was not due to roll in until later tonight. It couldn't come soon enough.

Aurélie put on a light linen dress and immediately felt it stick to her skin. Recently it felt like she was taking perpetual showers, especially when Blake was around. Not only did he make her cheeks red and heart beat race, he also made her giddy. If it wasn't bad enough trying to stop herself tripping over her words and making a fool of herself, she spent the other half of her time with him surreptitiously trying to gauge if she needed another shower. The trials of early romance.

Aurélie ran her fingers through her hair, working out the knots that always seemed to appear regardless of how much conditioner or serum she applied. She moisturised her face and regarded herself in her dressing table mirror. Everyone said how much she looked like her father. She had her mother's colouring but definitely her father's eyes, nose and lips.

She wished she could see Rory more often. He lived in Edinburgh now, in a house not dissimilar to the one she had grown up in, in Bath, without him. It had just been her and Lucille in the house until she was ten and then her mother had met Kevin, but that relationship was doomed from the start as it became apparent that Kevin was very much into additional nocturnal activities, and Lucille very quickly kicked him to the curb with a Jimmy Choo heel.

Lucille had since married Malcolm and it had been third time lucky. They'd had a small registry office gathering and a dinner at a posh hotel in Clifton, Bristol, before honeymooning in Bali, with a very excited and lanky Aurélie in tow.

It's not as though Rory had been absent during her childhood, she saw him more often than some of her other school friends had seen their estranged fathers, but as she got older, went to university and then moved to London to pursue a career in finance, she found that she was always tight for time.

Weekends would get booked months in advance for birthday parties, music festivals and recently, hen does. She had inadvertently side-lined her father and had run out of time to go and visit him in Edinburgh as often as she would have liked. No one could say that Rory wasn't supportive though. He had been a tremendous help to her through her studies, often subbing her money in the last weeks before her student loan was due. He'd never missed a school play, parents evening, Girl Guide badge ceremony or birthday.

She didn't remember him leaving them, but she did have a vague recollection of Lena living with her and Lucille for a while, but then again she couldn't be sure if that was a real memory or a memory embedded from her mother telling her about it. For the first few years after he left it had been frosty between her parents, naturally. There was an undeniable resentment from Lucille, but the divorce had seemed very civil, with Rory agreeing to all of Lucille's terms.

Lucille never pushed for full custody of Aurélie, she was always firm that Rory was free to see Aurélie whenever he wanted and that she believed that children should never be used as weapons in a divorce. She had clearly witnessed too many distraught friends battling over visitation rights, and she didn't feel the need to punish Rory by declining him access to Aurélie. Something that Aurélie only regarded as admirable when she was much older and could understand how hard it must have been for Lucille to have Rory come to the house and share birthdays together. It seemed like they had both understood that their marriage had been a mistake, one made out of blissful ignorance and the only good thing to come out of it was Aurélie, their beautiful child.

Aurélie remembered that feeling of apprehension she had had when Lucille had announced her engagement to Malcolm casually over dinner one evening. Aurélie had been reluctant to get excited for her mother after her disastrous relationship with Kevin. Lucille kept her figure trim, she dressed well and always looked polished, but she was fiercely independent. Always had been as far as Aurélie could remember. The days that Lucille commuted between Bath and London for work, Aurélie had a childminder who she visited after school until Lucille was home at seven-thirty.

Lucille was always adamant that they would eat dinner together every night, unless cows on the line or some other ridiculous excuse was given by South West trains which meant that Lucille wasn't home until much later. If this every happened Aurélie had a pair of pyjamas at Mandy, the childminders house and she would sleep on the sofa in the conservatory until her mother picked her up, eating dinner with Mandy's children.

Aurélie secretly enjoyed it when this happened, not that she didn't love have evenings with her mother, but some days, when Lucille was late, she would let herself fantasize that she lived at Mandy's house and had three siblings. The urge to be part of a bigger family was something that she could never shift. She had met Malcolm a few times before her mother announced the engagement and Lucille's enthusiasm had grated on Aurélie.

She didn't see why her mother was putting herself through the trials of love again. Her fourteen year old eyes didn't see the vulnerable woman behind her mother's power suits, manicures and Yves Saint Laurent make-up. She didn't see the woman who crawled into bed, alone each night, long after she had put her little girl to bed.

But now she was older, and she could see how her mother had changed. Malcolm had released something in Lucille, some tension had dispersed and a wall had come down. Lucille had always been warm, loving and generous to Aurélie but she was quick to be suspicious of others and she could be downright short with some people – including Aurélie's teachers at parents evening.

Finally it seemed that Lucille had someone to really look after her, to take the reins at the end of a long day and pour her a glass of wine. Her mother finally had the man of her dreams. To the outside world Malcolm wasn't much to report on, and sometimes his fashion sense could be the wrong end of quirky, but he made Lucille happy and relaxed and Aurélie would be forever grateful and respectful of him. He adored the earth Lucille walked on and Aurélie just wished Lucille had met him sooner. He would never replace Rory in her life but he was the perfect fit for her deserving Mum.