Page 24 of The Magic of Provence (A Year in France #3)

They collected Heidi, parked near the old port and walked through a green space dotted with tall palm trees. The sun was shining against a clear blue sky, the smell of salt flavoured the air and it was easy to imagine that people coming towards them were seeing a couple out walking their dog.

It didn’t feel like they were a couple but it didn’t feel as if they were simply friends, either.

It felt different.

New.

Like nothing Fi had ever experienced before. She thought about it for a minute or two and then decided that she liked it. It felt safe. Real. A solid enough base to let that feeling of being able to help Christophe stay there and put down some roots.

They were heading for what looked like a miniature castle with tiny turrets on each corner of the roof.

‘Cute,’ Fi said. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s a museum now, for the artwork of Jean Cocteau, but it was originally a military fort built for the defence of Menton from the Barbary pirates in the seventeenth century.’

‘Really?’ Fi blinked. ‘Pirates attacked cities then and not just other boats?’

‘They were the Barbarians,’ Christophe said.

‘They captured and enslaved about a million people. Both the sea and the coastlands of this part of the Mediterranean were dangerous places in those days. It’s a complex history.

I’ll tell you more about it one day.’ He quirked an eyebrow in her direction.

‘I think there are happier things to see and talk about today.’

‘Okay.’

One day …

Fi liked that as much as she liked how it felt to be in Christophe’s company.

It made it feel as if this was the start of something big enough that she didn’t even need to think about its ending yet.

The kind of feeling you got from loving the first page of a book or the initial notes of a song – it wasn’t quite a promise but it held the same seduction as hope.

They crossed a road just past the fort and went onto a walkway with gardens on either side, Heidi walking between them.

This was the closest Fi had been to the old apartment blocks that were painted such pretty shades of ochre – a dark terracotta building with tall, pale blue shutters on its windows, a dark gold with sage green shutters and then a pale orange.

Some had balconies with wrought-iron balustrades, some had a scramble of vines climbing their walls and others had bright flowers in window boxes.

Oban was also a coastal town with wonderful old buildings just across the road from the sea, but it didn’t have these colours.

This softness. Even the ocean was more likely to be a moody grey than this extraordinary deep blue with a twist of turquoise.

This place was enchanting. It felt summery and light-hearted and…

happy. Fi was falling in love with Menton and her breath came out in a contented sigh before she broke the silence.

‘You were born here, yes?’

‘Yes.’ Christophe sounded surprised. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Ellie told me. She said you were born here but you moved to Vence and that was how you met Julien and became such good friends.’

Christophe nodded. ‘I lived here until I was about eight years old and then my father got sick and died quite suddenly. My mother was offered a job as a housekeeper in Vence and it came with a small apartment and she was allowed to bring me, so that’s where we went.

I met Julien on the first day of school.

I think he knew how scared I was, and he was standing beside me when we went to lunch and he said that I could sit with him.

He was my first friend and he’s the brother I never had. ’

‘When did your mother come back here?’

‘When I went to university in England for a year before I started my training as a vet. Nonna wanted her to go down south to where she’d been born but, in the end, she moved to Menton to be with Mamma.

Maybe she knew that it made Mamma happier to be living again in a place that had memories of my father for her. ’

‘So she’s never met anyone else?’

‘I think she’s chosen not to ever look for anyone else. I think that sometimes love is so big it cannot be replaced and it’s better to live with happy memories than to live with something… less? Is that the best word?’

‘It’s a good word. Something less means that you’ve taken something away. Good when it’s something bad but not if it’s something that makes you happy.’

They were walking past a marina now that was crowded with all shapes and sizes of boats, from yachts with their tall masts, sleek modern catamarans built for speed, and the charm of vintage wooden boats.

Fi could see the curve of a white sandy beach further ahead against the backdrop of craggy hills.

‘I think it was the same for my mother,’ Fi said. ‘But she would never have admitted that. It would have been too shameful.’

Heidi took advantage of Christophe’s steps slowing to sniff at the base of a palm tree. The look Fi was receiving from Christophe was almost bewildered.

‘The ability to love is the greatest gift people have,’ he said. ‘It’s what makes life worth living. It should never be something to be ashamed of.’

Fi stood still. ‘But what if the person you love is not worthy of being loved?’

Christophe was frowning as he caught her gaze but then his whole face seemed to soften. ‘Everyone is worthy of being loved,’ he said quietly.

His eyes were saying even more.

That she was worthy of being loved?

She dragged her gaze away before it could form anything more than a wisp of sensation, because this was unsettling. Her heart had skipped a beat and it was hard to catch her next breath. She tried to shake it off by starting to walk again.

‘What about bad people?’ she countered. ‘Like murderers?’

‘Nobody is born bad,’ Christophe said. ‘It could be that they end up doing bad things because they grew up without the love they needed. They simply had… less.’

That silenced her. The compassion of this man made him fit right in with the softness of the colours and joyful vibe of this small city. So did the man playing classic French music on a piano accordion near the market as they entered the commercial centre of the old town a short time later.

Christophe led her down narrow, busy streets with shops that looked more Italian than French, with crammed window displays of pasta and salami and…

lemons! The glow of yellow shone from every direction, in the shops and market stalls.

There were tall, golden bottles of limoncello, lemon-shaped soap and scented candles, tea-towels and aprons printed with lemons, baskets and boxes overflowing with the actual fruit in front of greengrocers, and it had to be lemon-flavoured gelato filling the giant fibre-glass cone outside the door of the ice cream shop.

Both Fi and Heidi were staying close to Christophe as he led the way.

They wove through the crowds and then he took them under archways that led uphill, through shady tunnels and up so many stairs.

They went through cobbled squares with leafy trees and ancient fountains and, as they walked, Christophe told her what it had been like to live here and about the famous Fête du Citron that had been held every February for coming up to a hundred years.

‘Queen Victoria herself came once,’ Christophe said proudly.

‘But that was a long time before the parade became all about the lemons and oranges. It was my favourite thing when I was little – maybe because I remember being on my father’s shoulders so I could see everything above the crowds of people.

The last one I went to was the year he died.

Tintin was the hero of the show that year.

My papa used to read the Tintin books with me and we thought it was very funny that our little dog, Biscotti, looked just like Snowy. ’

Ohh … Fi could almost see him as a child.

How adorable would he have been with those fine features and big brown eyes and curly hair and that smile …

? How devastated and lost must he have been trying to understand that his papa would never read him stories again or take him to the lemon festival?

She wanted to reach back through time and give that little Christophe a hug.

Maybe he could feel the direction of her thoughts as he stopped to let Heidi have a long drink from a pool beneath the trickling water that was coming from the mouth of a bull’s head carved out of stone.

‘I haven’t been to another Fête du Citron since then,’ he added quietly.

‘Not even when Julien asked me because he was taking Theo this year by himself – Ellie thought it was too cold to take Bonnie when she was only a couple of weeks old. But when Mamma talked about it this morning, I meant what I said. We will go next year, if you are still here.’

‘And I meant what I said.’ She knew he would hear the empathy beneath her words.

And at least some understanding of what it was like to have a father ripped from your life at such a young age, even if her father had chosen to leave her and her grief had been tainted with shame. ‘I’d love to go. If I’m still here.’

‘Do you think you’ll want to go back to Scotland?’

Fi shook her head. ‘I drove all the way here,’ she told him.

‘By myself. It took days and days and some of it was scary, especially driving into the train and staying in your car to watch the land disappear as you go deeper and deeper under the sea.’ She pulled in a new breath.

‘But it only takes about thirty minutes and then you’re coming out the other side, and from the moment I realised I was in France it felt like everything was new.

Different. And deep down I thought that maybe this could be a new life for me.

That I could be different.’ She closed her eyes for a moment.

‘I never want to go back to Scotland. Not to live.’