A French Affair - extract

‘There’s a secret hiding place in here,’ the little boy said, leading the way.  ‘My uncle showed me where it is.  He used to keep all his special things here when he was little, so did my granddad.  Even Elodie doesn’t know about it.’
‘Do you think there are spiders?’ Natalie asked, keeping close behind.
‘Oh yes, lots.  I can catch some if you like and you can give them names.’
Natalie’s eyes were searching the darkness.  ‘There are beds in here,’ she said.  ‘Does someone sleep in them?’
‘Only me and Elodie, when we want to.’
Antoine stumbled on the corner of a frayed rug, then stopped in front of a large, mahogany chest that was mistily lit by a few rogue rays of daylight coming in through a small roof window.  ‘Are you ready?’ he asked as Natalie joined him, his voice resonating importance. 
‘You’re not going to do anything nasty are you?’ she asked.  ‘If you do, I shall scream and hit you.’
‘Don’t be silly.  Watch,’ and kneeling in front of the bottom drawer he used its fancy iron handles to ease it forward.  There was a bump as the drawer fell onto the floor. 
Natalie looked down at it, then back to Antoine who seemed swollen with mystery.  ‘So?  It’s just a drawer,’ she scoffed.  ‘We’ve got drawers all over our house.’
‘Yes, but I bet you don’t have one hidden away behind another,’ he said, and reaching into the empty space he pulled another drawer forward. 
More interested now Natalie dropped to her knees to inspect it.  ‘It’s empty,’ she said, annoyed and disappointed.
‘Yes, because I took my secrets out before you came, in case you found them.’
Slightly bored again Natalie looked around the dim attic space.  ‘I’ve never been up here before,’ she said.  ‘I think Harry and I should sleep here.’
‘You can’t in the summer, it’s too hot.’
It was summer now, and the drawer had no secrets, so they didn’t hang around for long.
The next time Natalie came was at Christmas, so it was too cold for her and her brother Harry to sleep in the attic then, and at Easter, when her grandmother brought her, she was too afraid to sleep there alone.  However, she wasn’t afraid in the day, so it was where she sometimes went to write her secrets in her very own diary which she kept tucked away in the hidden drawer. 
One rainy morning, as she sat under the roof window, writing down her most private thoughts about Antoine, she heard a car pull up outside, and a moment or two later her grandmother called out for her to come down and see who’d arrived.  Quickly she wrote a few more words in her diary, then after sliding it carefully into the secret drawer she went downstairs.  The kitchen door was open and because she didn’t mind the rain she skipped outside.  She would go back to her diary later, she decided, and write about everything they did today. 

But Natalie never went back to the diary again.

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