Page 28 of The Magic of Provence (A Year in France #3)

‘Ready, Fi?’

‘I’m ready.’ Fi was feeding long blades of grass to Marguerite and Coquelicot, but it was probably wise to head for the shade of the lemon trees closer to the cottage. She could feel the heat of the sun softly scorching her fair skin. ‘Have you got some sunscreen on, Ellie?’

‘I’ll stay in the shade as soon as we’ve got everything we need out of the cellar.’ Ellie was draping a muslin wrap over the Moses basket that was tucked in beside the trunk of a lemon tree to get maximum shade. ‘Julien thinks my freckles are très mignon , but I’ve got more than enough already.’

Pascal was lying beside the basket, his nose on his paws, one ear up as he stayed alert for any protection that might be needed from a fly or a bee.

‘How long will Bonnie sleep?’ Fi asked.

‘Long enough, I hope. This is just a trial run for the first design, so we’ll use the smallest frame. It shouldn’t take too long.’

Mike the builder, who had helped with the renovation of La Maisonette, had apparently been delighted to help make the frames Ellie had requested for paving-stone moulds. She showed them to Fi when they went into the cellar.

‘Look… they’ve got screws in these two corners. When the concrete is set, I undo those and it’ll be easy to lift the frame off.’

‘What about the bottom?’

‘That’s what that sheet of plywood over there is for. Could you bring that out, please? And the bucket of sand beside it with a plastic sheet on top. I’ll get the pebbles and tools.’

They took everything outside into the fragrant shade of the lemon orchard. Ellie tipped the bucket of flat, round and oval stones out onto the ground beneath the tree next to where Bonnie was sleeping.

‘We need to sort the coloured ones into similar shapes and sizes. Different piles for the grey ones.’

It felt like a game. As though they’d stepped back in time to when they were little girls and playing together on a summer’s afternoon.

One sister was missing, but Laura wouldn’t have wanted to do something as frivolous as play with a pile of pebbles in those days.

She wasn’t doing something this enjoyable today, either.

‘I wonder how Laura’s getting on,’ Fi said aloud.

Ellie was starting a pile of the smallest grey stones. ‘She was nervous, wasn’t she?’

‘I’m glad she’s taking Noah and Lili with her. Mam said that Dad cried when he saw a photo of Lili because it looked so like how he could remember Laura when she was little.’

‘Is Mam up there today, too?’

‘Of course.’ Fi smiled. ‘She hasn’t missed a day since he came out of hospital, has she? And that’s what… two weeks ago now?’

‘Closer to three. It’s been a week since we went up to see his studio.’

They were both silent for a moment. That had been another emotional meeting with their father and they’d both been crying on the drive home, but a new connection was being formed for the children who’d been too young to really remember their father and an old one rediscovered for a father who’d forgotten he had children.

There was a long journey ahead for them all but the door was slowly being opened to allow Gordon Gilchrist to be part of his family again, if that was what he wanted in his life.

None of it could be rushed. They were going to have to take this one step at a time – a bit like how she and Ellie were tackling their first attempt at making a mosaic pebble paving stone today.

Ellie put a frame onto the plywood that she’d covered with the plastic sheet and tipped sand into it. She handed a plastering trowel to Fi.

‘Have a go at smoothing it out,’ she instructed. ‘It needs to be a thin layer because we don’t want the stones to poke out far enough for people to stub their toes.’

‘Sometimes I don’t know where the time’s going,’ she said, as she watched what Fi was doing.

‘Bonnie’s four months old all of a sudden and she thinks being able to roll over is the funniest game ever, which is adorable and I want to enjoy every moment of it but it feels like I’m going to turn around and she’ll be ready for school. ’

‘Time flies when you’re having fun.’ Fi smiled. ‘And slows down when you’re not. One of life’s meaner tricks. Take lots of photos.’

‘I am. And that reminds me…’ Ellie dusted sand off her hands and pulled her phone from the pocket of the pinafore-style apron she was wearing. ‘I need to find the photo of the pattern I thought we could use today.’

She glanced up from scrolling photos a moment later, however, her eyebrows raised. ‘You seem to be enjoying yourself at the moment. Did I see you going off with Christophe again yesterday afternoon?’

‘We just took Heidi for a walk.’

‘Hmm… and didn’t you “just go for dinner” in Menton again a few days ago?’

‘I did.’ Fi let her breath out in a sigh that was a groan of pleasure. ‘You wouldn’t believe how good a cook Nonna is. She made a mushroom lasagne that was the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted. I’m going to ask her to teach me how to make it.’

‘Sounds like she’s recovering well. She not about to drop dead any time soon, is she?’

‘She could,’ Fi countered. ‘She’s got a dodgy ticker now. Christophe and his mum are still really worried about her.’

‘And that’s what all this time with Christophe is all about, aye? Keeping Nonna happy by pretending you’re more than friends?’

‘That’s the plan.’ Fi had told her sisters about the fake dating idea.

What she hadn’t told them was that she wanted to try and help Christophe regain at least some trust in women.

She certainly hadn’t admitted that playing her part in the fantasy was irresistible because it wasn’t real and that made it feel safe.

Safe enough that she could even let another hope simmer quietly in the back of her mind – that Christophe might kiss her again one day and she wouldn’t freak out.

‘What if Nonna bounces back and lives for years?’

‘We’ve talked about that. If my visa doesn’t come through, I’ll have to leave France for a few months and we can work something out to let her down gently.

That I’ve got a job somewhere else or I got homesick.

In the meantime, I’m getting to go to lovely places so we can take the photos that are, apparently, the best part of Nonna’s day. ’

Ellie shook her head. ‘I hope you both know what you’re doing, that’s all.

Ah… this is the photo I want.’ She turned the screen towards Fi.

‘I thought we could start with just a single flower and plain grey around it. A coloured roundish flat stone in the middle and the petals will be oval shapes on their sides. I’ve got a rubber hammer to tap them in. Let’s find a nice one for the centre.’

They both turned back to play with the stones again.

‘Where did you go to collect all these?’ Fi asked.

‘The garden centre,’ Ellie said. ‘Sadly, you can’t just go and take buckets of decorative stones off the beaches. You have to buy them.’

‘How ’bout this one for the centre?’ Fi held it up. ‘It’s kind of round and it’s almost red, like the darkest tiles of La Maisonette’s floor.’

‘Nice.’ Ellie nestled the large flat stone into the centre of the frame. ‘Let’s find some pale ones for the petals.’

Ellie showed Fi how to settle them gently into place in the sand so that they made contact with the sheet of wood beneath. It took time to choose the right shape for each stone and position them to her satisfaction.

‘So…’ Ellie asked, as she sat back on her heels a short time later to examine progress. ‘Where was it that you went yesterday? Back to that riding school in the forest that you discovered last week?’

‘No…’ But Fi was distracted for a moment. What a discovery that had been. A house and a riding school, with one group of small children on ponies trotting around a ring and an adult on a horse getting ready to take a group of older children on a trek along one of the forest paths.

‘ That would be my ultimate dream ,’ she’d told Christophe. ‘ To have a riding school of my own. ’

‘ In a forest? ’

‘ Or near a river. Or in the mountains. Anywhere. But a forest would be perfect. ’

‘ Because you love trees? ’

‘ Oui. Because I love trees. ’

It had become a private joke, hadn’t it?

Because that had been how Christophe had persuaded her to go and help him with the donkeys in the forest. The day it had all begun.

Or had that really been at Lili’s birthday party – when she’d seen him smile for the first time?

When, so disturbingly, she’d been aware of wanting to be closer to a man, instead of running away?

‘Hullo!’ Ellie’s tone was amused. ‘Earth to Fi…?’

She had to shake off the memory of the way Christophe’s smile made his eyes crinkle at the corners.

‘It was a lovely park near the coast yesterday,’ she told Ellie. ‘It had cork trees. Have you ever seen one? They’re extraordinary.’

Fi had been fascinated – as much by the enthusiasm Christophe had for explaining so many different things as for the actual trees themselves.

She loved the way his eyes would light up.

She loved listening to his voice with that unique accent and the ability to sprinkle words from all sorts of other languages into what he was saying.

He could probably tell her about something as ordinary as, say, the sand or small stones she was working with today, and she would be more than happy to listen.

‘Never seen one.’ Ellie was starting to place different sizes of plain grey stones around the flower they’d created, filling all the empty space. ‘They’re a kind of oak tree, aren’t they?’

‘Yes. They can get the bark stripped off every ten years or so and it doesn’t kill the tree. You can get fifty thousand corks for wine bottles from the bark of a single tree.’

‘Is that right…?’

Ellie’s interest seemed to be merely polite but Fi was back in that park in her head. Watching Christophe’s face come alive because he was so interested in something. Feeling his hand reach for hers to put it on the extraordinary bark of the tree so that she could feel it.