Page 2 of Falling for Provence

‘Of course.’ Laura opened her handbag. ‘It would be hard to lose something this big.’

The huge iron key didn’t want to turn.

‘I wonder how long it’s been since Uncle Jeremy came here.’

Ellie made a huff of sound. ‘I didn’t even know wehadan Uncle Jeremy until last week.’

‘Aye… well…’ Laura shrugged. ‘It was Dad’s side of the family. We never saw any of them again after he vanished.’ Her tone hardened. ‘We neverwantedto.’

The flash of almost forgotten childhood bewilderment, laced with fear, grief and that shameful edge of relief that could never be admitted, got released in the wrench Ellie gave the key. The lock turned with a definitive clunk that seemed to give weight to Laura’s statement. Nobody wanted a reminder of Gordon Gilchrist. Nobody wanted anything to do with this holiday house they had unexpectedly inherited from his brother simply because there were no other living relatives to be found.

Dust motes danced in the streak of sunshine the open door was providing, but the room was still dark with the windows shuttered. There were massive rough-hewn beams on the ceiling, and the interior of the walls had been smoothed with whitewashed plaster, some of which had crumbled enough to reveal the stones that formed the outside of the house. Matching stones created an open fireplace with a blackened interior, but there was no hearth in front of it, perhaps because the entire floor was covered in hexagonal terracotta tiles. To one side of the fireplace was a family of three differently sized pottery jars that had small handles and, oddly, were only glazed on the top half. The biggest pot was knee high, and the dark, golden glow of itslimited glazing was part of the spectrum of ochre that included the terracotta of the floor.

‘It has a certain charm, I suppose,’ Laura conceded. ‘We’ll have to sell it fully furnished, though. Imagine trying to movethat…’ She waved a hand at a cupboard that looked like an enormous wardrobe, with carved doors and brass inlays. ‘Although… it’s obviously an antique.’ Her breath came out in a snort. ‘The furniture might turn out to be worth more than the house.’

Ellie stepped towards the cupboard, resisted tracing the intricate pattern of flowers, leaves and bunches of grapes with a fingertip, and pulled the door open. Heavy shelves were stacked with bowls and plates in the same warm, earthy tones that were clearly intrinsic to this house. The uppermost dishes and the shelf space between the stacks had a film of dust peppered with mouse dirt.

Laura’s high heels tapped on the tiles as she moved to the kitchen. She twisted one of the old taps, which coughed and spluttered and then released a stream of rusty water. With a grimace, she turned it off.

‘Looks like a French version of an Aga, here,’ she said, turning away from the sink. ‘A wood burning version. I wonder if there’s actually any electricity.’

‘Doubt it.’

Laura reached for a wall switch and a bulb sprang to life above her head. ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’

‘Maybe someone didn’t get the memo and forgot to disconnect it.’

‘Let’s hope there isn’t a huge power bill waiting for us somewhere, then.’

‘Nobody’s been here, so why worry about it?’

‘Somebody’s got to. We can’t all float through life and hope that problems just magically melt away.’

Laura’s earlier apology for snapping wasn’t repeated, but Ellie ignored the barb despite the unfair suggestion that any approach to dealing with a personal struggle as soul-destroying as hers had been could ever be dismissed as something as carefree, or pleasant, as ‘floating’. But saying anything would mean she had to talk about it, and that was the last thing Ellie wanted to do.

She tried the light switch beside the crockery cupboard but nothing happened. Walking past a table to one of two pairs of tall doors, she opened them and then pushed at the shutters behind the doors. One creaked ominously and then sagged to catch on the ground as the top hinge gave up any attempt to continue supporting it.

‘Oh…’

‘What is it?’ Laura abandoned the kitchen but didn’t forget to switch the light off. She shaded her eyes against the much brighter sunlight, stood silent for a long minute and then let her breath out with an approving hum.

‘Well, that’s something positive. Nice view.’

‘Mmm…’ But Ellie was no longer looking at the craggy outline of mountains or the green wash of acres of forest or even the bright streak of blue just a little deeper than the sky that was the glimpse of the Mediterranean in the distance. Her gaze was on what was directly in front of them – a stone-flagged terrace and ornate metal candle holders, like tall miniature houses, that sat on the stones amongst even higher weeds and hung drunkenly from the branches of an overhanging tree. This space looked abandoned and totally forgotten. A secret garden that had been alone so long there was nothing left but a sense of… what… loneliness?

Despair, even?

Ellie tried to shake off the claws of an unpleasant sensation she was only too familiar with. She knew that the best thing todo was to move, so she walked across the terrace. ‘That’s why I could smell lemons,’ she said. ‘It looks like there’s an orchard.’

The steep slope of the garden had been terraced with stone walls, and flat spaces were filled with the dark green foliage of the trees. Bright yellow lemons glowed amongst the leaves and lay on sparse grass beneath. The heel of Laura’s shoe speared one of them as she went further into the garden.

‘Oh,yuck.’ She used a stick to scrape the overripe fruit from her shoe. ‘I’m not going any further. That must be the boundary, anyway.’

She was pointing at a sagging wire fence at the end of this terrace. The slope beyond was gentler and there were olive trees instead of lemons. Shorter grass gave the impression that the land was less neglected, so they assumed it was part of the neighbouring property. A flicker of movement under the shade of one of the olive trees made Ellie blink.

‘Oh,’ she said again. ‘Look! Donkeys.’

The shapes blended into the shade of the tree, but two huge shaggy heads were pointed in their direction, four long ears pricked forwards with mild curiosity. One of the ears twitched again.

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