Page 30 of Falling for Provence

Pascal had taken up the spot on the sofa beside her again, and Ellie was getting quite used to sharing what she was thinking aloud.

‘Six ripe lemons, freshly picked. Well, that won’t be difficult, will it?’

Ellie brushed her fingertips over the familiar texture of the cold-pressed watercolour paper. A4 size was rather too big towrite a recipe on, but she was reluctant to cut it into smaller pieces. Instead, she found herself planning a way to fill the entire space in a way that could turn it into something special, which could become a gift. Picking up an HB pencil, she softly outlined a title, thought about how much space would be needed to write the list of ingredients and the instructions and then began to sketch a lemon tree branch in the centre of the paper. She had the vase on the kitchen table to glance at as she drew the fruit and stalks, and the leaves with that little curl at the end. Her case was full of watercolour pencils and the brushes she used to activate them with water, and they were the perfect medium for this subject. By the time Ellie was happy with the shading of the yellows and greens she was using and she’d added the smudge of darker marks and lines of small imperfections, she’d almost forgotten about the text she wanted to add, but it was a welcome change to switch to a calligraphy pen and write with the kind of focus that produced letters to rival the neatness of a digital font.

She knew the recipe off by heart by the time the afternoon light was softening into evening, and she had been so immersed in what she was doing that it was still filling her mind as she wandered outside. The percentage of alcohol in vodka was not something Ellie had ever taken note of, but 95 per cent sounded rather a lot. She needed to go to thebricolageshop again because she needed a couple of bottles, firstly to put the lemon rinds and alcohol together to shake occasionally for a week, and then to filter the addition of the syrup before leaving the concoction for another three weeks until it was ready to drink.

It would be nearly a month before she could taste it.

A good chunk of the time she had available to finish renovating the house. Laura was thinking of coming back for a weekend about then, to check on progress and take photographs of anything that might be ready and suitable for the advertising campaign. Ellie needed to make another list. Not ingredientsthis time, or the steps of a recipe, and there would be no reason to illustrate a description of the work still needing to be done on the house and garden. It would be a waste of time to make a list like that into an artwork.

An artwork…?

Ellie found herself standing very, very still. With her eyes closed. Because that was what she had done with the recipe, wasn’t it? For the first time since Jack’s death she had lost herself in the process of creating something beautiful. It had snuck up on her, disguised as a practical task to record information she needed, and perhaps it had been her need for distraction from any thoughts of a child who nearly died or a man who could potentially steal her heart that had led her back to doing something she’d thought could never provide satisfaction. Or pleasure.

Maybe she hadn’t wanted to find that satisfaction, let alone any pleasure.

Because she didn’t deserve it?

Because she had failed as a mother and been unable to protect her precious baby even as he slept so close in his bassinet, right beside her pillow.

No wonder it had been overwhelming to find that Pascal had still been tied safely to that bench today. She’d almost witnessed another mother facing the loss of her child and… and she’d felt the touch of being held in someone’s arms.

Feeling protected.

Safe…

It was all too much, and whatever peace she’d found in coming home to this house was suddenly shattered. Ellie didn’t want to feel protected. She didn’t want the warmth of being cared for that much. Or of caringthat much. Because she didn’t want the fear that came with it. She could never face the grief oflosing it again, and the only way to stay completely safe was to avoid the risk.

She opened her eyes. She picked up that sheet of paper with its soft colours and beautiful words, crumpled it into a ball and dropped into one of the half-glazed pots beside the fireplace so that it was out of sight. She had to blink hard to clear the tears that were gathering, but Ellie knew that if she let them start falling now, they might never stop. She tried to focus on what was right before her eyes, to bring herself into the moment and escape both the past and any fear of the future, and she found herself staring at the floor. At the hexagonal tiles that Mike had calledtomettes. She was noting the range of shades of terracotta and the cracks and chips and wondering if they had always had such a matt surface or whether they had just been neglected for a very long time.

The afternoon heat still hung heavily in the air, but Ellie’s need for a task that could keep her entirely in the moment overrode any reluctance to engage in physical effort. Within a very short time, she had a bucket of hot, soapy water, a scrubbing brush and a pile of old towels. She was ready to scrub. One tile at a time, if necessary, and she would keep going until every single one of them was as clean as she could possibly make it.

Despite how often she had swept this floor, there was enough grime caked onto the tiles to make it necessary to replace the water in the bucket again and again. When the scrubbing brush proved inadequate for the task, Ellie switched to a pot scourer. Her knees hurt from kneeling on the unforgiving surface, her fingertips turned into prunes from being wet for so long and she had curls of her hair stuck to her face with perspiration. The dust from where she had been chipping away the plaster covering on the stone wall added an extra layer of dirt – and maybe it would have been more sensible to have waited until that renovationtask had been completed – but she wasn’t going to stop, because this was helping.

Thiswas the safest thing she had done all day.

She could allow herself to care about how clean a collection of ancient tiles was. To care about bringing an old house back to life so that it could be sold more easily and relieve her family of a burden they didn’t need or want. What Ellie couldn’t do was to allow herself to care too much about someone else’s child who’d nearly died. About a small dog that was going to go and live with someone else in the near future. And, maybe especially, about a man who’d reminded her of what it felt like to be held.

And cared for…

‘So… what did you think?’

‘About what?’ Laura sounded as though she had the phone on speaker. Ellie could hear the shuffle of papers and the scratch of a pen that suggested her sister was multitasking as she took this call.

‘About the photos I sent. The floor.’

‘Oh… right. Those old tiles.’

‘Tomettes. A really traditional flooring in France. Sometimes they’re square, but they’re almost always hexagonal in Provence. I scrubbed them yesterday, and today I went and found a special polish for them in thebricolage.’

‘The what?’

‘Bricolage. A hardware shop.’

‘Ah… No wonder that’s a word I never added to my vocabulary.’ Laura gave a huff of laughter. ‘I have zero interest in DIY.’

‘Can you see how shiny they are now?’ Ellie was holding her phone over the tiles. ‘It’s amazing what you can see when you look closely. The variation in shading is astonishing.’

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