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

‘Come inside?’ Ellie’s invitation was gentle. ‘Let me make you a cup of tea.’

Fi was still sitting on the dry grass. Marguerite and Coquelicot had unfurled their legs and scrambled to their feet to go and greet Ellie and gently inspect the bump of the baby tied to her chest, the dangling legs limp enough to suggest that she was sound asleep.

They ignored the small, scruffy white dog who had tucked himself between her feet.

Fi cast a sideways glance at the big house on the other side of the olive grove.

Ellie’s husband, Julien, would be in there.

‘I didn’t mean our place.’ Ellie had always been a little too good at reading her sisters’ minds.

She turned her head so that the little stone cottage beyond the lemon orchard was directly in her gaze.

‘I meant yours . Which it is, for as long as you’d like it to be.

There’s clean sheets on the bed and milk in the fridge because I thought Mam might change her mind about where she wants to sleep?—’

‘ Mam’s coming?’

‘Yes. She’s arriving tonight. It’s Lili’s first birthday the day after tomorrow. She wanted to come a day early so she can help get ready for the party.’

Oh, no … How had she completely forgotten that her mother would be in France in the coming days?

Fi had swerved her first instinct to run home to the safety of her childhood to try and spare Jeannie Gilchrist the pain of the trouble she’d got herself into, but it suddenly felt like she’d chosen the wrong direction in the maze.

She had a dead end right in front of her and she was simply too tired to turn around just yet to find a different way.

Ellie was turning back before Fi could try and hide her dismay.

‘But she doesn’t want to stay in La Maisonette,’ Ellie added quickly.

‘She even said she’d like to stay in that little hotel in Vence that we all like so much.

Laura wants her to stay with them so she can get full birthday party immersion.

I said I’d love to have her in our spare room so she can get full Bonnie immersion.

Whatever she chooses, I think we all know why she’d rather not be in this wee house, so it really is all yours.

Mam doesn’t even need to know you’re here, unless you want her to? ’

Maybe Ellie could sense that it was the last thing Fi wanted.

The smile she offered faltered and she looked away, bending her head to brush just the tips of her daughter’s hair with her lips.

The delicacy of the touch reminded Fi of the way the donkeys had welcomed her .

She felt her breath escaping in an inaudible sigh.

Maybe she hadn’t chosen the wrong direction, after all.

The tufty hair was all Fi could see of Bonnie in the wrap, apart from small dangling legs and feet encased in the soft fabric of a sleepsuit.

Baby hair…

She could feel the shape and hardness and weight of that lump in her chest again now. No surprises there, when a part of it was the shape of a tiny baby. This wasn’t the first time she’d recognised the irony that something so ethereal could still feel so solid. So heavy…

Her earlier tears had melted enough of the lump for it not to be interfering with her breathing now but the core of it was still there.

She knew how to push it into a space where it could be hidden, however.

Goodness knows, she’d had enough practice, including her brief visit at Christmastime with the challenge of meeting her sisters’ partners and her new niece.

But Lili had been well past the newborn stage by then.

Spending time with Bonnie was going to be so much harder.

Or maybe not. She was so drained right now that Fi felt a curious kind of numbness that felt soft and squashy, as if she was wrapped in the emotional equivalent of one of those inflatable sumo suits.

She could do this. She had no choice but to try, anyway. And perhaps she had actually reached the centre of the maze rather than a dead end. Maybe she’d reached the place she was meant to be.

It was a bit of a struggle to get to her feet, to be fair. Her muscles felt like they’d been left out in the rain long enough to have rusted to breaking point, but she managed to lever herself to her feet and then step towards Ellie.

And the baby.

Close enough to feel the warmth of them, and that was when Fi realised she was shivering. She’d been sitting still for too long and, while it was more than halfway through spring in the South of France, it was still chilly at this time of the day.

‘Let’s get you inside. I was planning to light the fire in there to air out the wee house today, and you look like you could do with more warming up than a cup of tea is going to provide.

’ Ellie led the way through the gate, into the lemon orchard, and the question she asked was tentative.

‘You’ve no’ been sitting outside all night, have you? ’

‘No. Just an hour or two, maybe.’ Fi’s voice felt rusty as well. She hadn’t really spoken to anyone for days now. Not that anyone would have ever described her as a chatterbox. ‘I tried to sleep in the car for a while when I got here.’

‘The car ?’ Ellie sounded astonished. ‘You drove here?’

‘Aye… Is that a problem? Should I not have the car parked on the road?’

‘No… It’s no problem but… oh, my gosh – how long did it take?’

Fi shrugged. ‘Four days. I had to do a few things once I got south of London so that I could take the car across the channel.’

To her surprise she found she wanted to talk.

If she talked enough about things that didn’t really matter, maybe she’d find a way to finally talk about the things that did matter.

Things that she’d never talked about to anyone.

It seemed more than likely that those unspoken words, pushed into any available storage space, had contributed to the solid stuffing of that lump and that whatever her tears had melted had created a weak spot.

They wanted to escape. But part of her was fighting back, not yet ready to surrender.

‘Luckily I had the insurance paperwork in the glovebox,’ she went on.

‘But I still needed stickers for the car and the headlights, and I had to buy things like a warning triangle and a high-viz vest in case I broke down or had an accident.’ She managed a sound that was almost laughter.

‘I’m surprised I didn’t need to use them.

It was way harder than I thought it would be to use a right-hand-drive car on the right side of the road. ’

The grass was longer in the orchard. It had been too dark when Fi had gone in the opposite direction towards the olive grove to notice the splashes of colour amongst the grass – dots of bright red from poppies and the sunny yellow centres of wild white daisies.

Flowers had even seeded themselves in the cracks and joins of the stones walls that had been used to terrace the slope of the property.

Mostly poppies, and that made Fi want to smile.

On her long drive from Calais to the South of France poppies had become increasingly noticeable.

They grew in the inhospitable shingle right beside the motorways and railway lines but they came into their own the further she got into the South of France.

Around Luberon, as she neared Marseille, they were illuminating distant landscapes in vibrant swathes of red.

The lemons hanging from the trees around them were all shades of bright green to yellow. Ellie stretched out her hand to pick a ripe lemon and held it to her nose with an appreciative sniff as she kept walking.

‘You’re so much braver than I was when I first arrived here,’ she told Fi.

‘Riding a bike was all I could manage. Feel free to use Margot while you’re here if you want a left-hand drive.

She’s in the garage. You conquered the quirks of driving a 2 CV when you were here for Christmas and it’ll do her good to have some cobwebs blown away. ’

They reached the terrace at the back of the cottage, with its flagstone paving, the lovely old Moroccan candleholders and the little wrought-iron table and chairs. Ellie took a key from under the nearest candleholder and unlocked the door.

‘Have you still got the spare key I gave you?’

Fi nodded. ‘That was when I knew I had to come here,’ she said quietly. ‘When I grabbed my passport and phone and found the key under some old knickers.’

Ohh … maybe she hadn’t used up her lifetime supply of tears.

The look on Ellie’s face as her sister realised that she had left in a hurry because she was escaping something awful wasn’t enough to make them fall.

That happened when Ellie gave her a one-armed but surprisingly fierce hug as she protected Bonnie from getting squashed.

‘It’s okay,’ she whispered in Fi’s ear. ‘Whatever it is, it’s going to be okay. You’re safe now, hen.’

* * *

Fi had only been in this small house once before, when she’d come to give the donkeys some fresh carrots as a Christmas treat and had gone inside to have a peep at where Ellie had been living after deciding to stay in France and renovate this unexpected inheritance for the three Gilchrist sisters.

The impression that had stayed with her was that it had notes of familiarity that reminded her of the wee cottage that had been her childhood home in Oban, Scotland.

At the time, she’d wondered if it was because of Ellie’s touch in bringing the house back to life, but maybe it was something inherent in the warm, earthy colours that made it feel so homely.

The exposed stone of the walls had a golden hue and the terracotta tiles on the floor had darker notes of amber.

The huge old leather sofa was a dark caramel colour that made Fi instantly think of the palomino pony she’d learned to ride on at Dorothy McArthur’s riding school in Oban.

He’d been called Whisky and he’d been the love of her life for years – her unfailing rock in the turbulence the Gilchrist girls and their mother, Jeannie, had to navigate after being abandoned by their father.

‘Sit down,’ Ellie suggested as she crouched and reached around baby Bonnie to put a match to a fire that was already set. ‘It’s an amazingly comfy sofa. I slept on it the first night I was here because I was too scared to sleep upstairs. There were bats in one of the bedrooms.’

Being told what to do was a relief. Fi sank onto one end of the sofa and allowed her mind to deal with nothing more than the colours of this room as Ellie went into the kitchen to make some tea.

She stroked the buttery-soft leather beside her and could feel the map of lines and wrinkles that came to any skin of advanced age.

She could see the chips and cracks of the tiles on the floor in front of her, too, and wondered if they were as old as the cottage itself.

Had people been walking on them hundreds of years ago?

Nearer the fireplace, the tiles were reflecting the flicker of flames.

The fire was only beginning to exude warmth but Fi noticed she wasn’t shivering any longer.

She felt even warmer as she lifted her gaze to the big painting that hung over the fireplace.

A smudgy sort of painting that might look clearer if she went a little further away from it, but its colours were perfect for this room and maybe it was better that there was a dreamy kind of blurriness to the image because it was an invitation to give her exhausted emotions a brief reprieve.

She could almost feel herself stepping into this painting as she spun back in time to some long-forgotten childhood summer.

She was barefoot in that crunchy, golden, sun-dried grass and she was picking wildflowers like daisies and poppies – tiny symbols of love that had stalks, so she could clutch them and present them so proudly to her beloved mammy.

Even when she closed her eyes, Fi could still see herself in that meadow.

She could feel the sunshine and the bliss of not having to worry about anything, even if was only for a blink of time.

She heard the murmur of Ellie’s voice from the kitchen but it was too much effort to respond.

She was sinking more deeply into this couch with the sigh of every breath leaving her body.

She felt a soft blanket cover her body like a butterfly’s kiss but she didn’t even try and open her eyes.

She was safe.

She could rest, at least for a little while.