The Middle Room

by Stephen Reardon

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When Florence Denning's mother contracts TB during the First World War, Florence's French grandmother moves into the Denning family home in North London to nurse her. Commandeering 'the middle room' she turns it into an unwelcome outpost of France and sets about becoming a thorn in the flesh of everyone in the family – except Florence.

As Florence reaches her early teenage years in the 1920s, her grandmother begins to treat her as a confidante and an equal, so long as they are closeted in the middle room away from the rest of the family. Here the years fall away. Florence is entrusted with more and more of her grandmother's past – and her culinary skills. Her grandmother becomes once again Josephine Lucie, the protégée in the salon of a noted Parisian art connoisseur and his once great chef.

But her protector's works of art were not always as he represented them to his gullible clientèle, and as the Prussians inconveniently lay siege to Paris in 1871, nor was his salon's cuisine. While the chef has increasingly to engage in his own forgery in the kitchen, his employer uses Josephine Lucie to avoid his reputation being destroyed by a painting of equally dubious provenance.

At the outbreak of the Second World War newly-married Florence is caught up in another city siege, the London Blitz. Her husband has been assigned to the London headquarters of General de Gaulle and finds that Josephine Lucie's past is bound up with the intrigues of a Free French officer.

 

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ISBN 978-1-4092-5564-2