Page 44 of The Village Cafe in the Loire

‘Thanks. But I don’t really need it. I’m fine, honestly,’ Becky said.

‘Well, then I will be there to help you if you need.’

‘Thanks.’ They’d both said in unison. Then laughed. ‘Jinx!’ Becky said, harking back to a playground game they’d used to play.

‘Yeah, that doesn’t work in your thirties,’ Amber had said.

‘Damn!’

The taxi driver revved the engine, just enough to remind them that he was on the clock and that Amber did need to start her journey to the airport.

‘Have a good flight.’ Becky stepped forward and gave Amber a hug. Her friend gripped her tightly, almost as if trying to communicate how strongly she felt through the strength of her hold. ‘You really do complete me,’ she whispered, and felt a reciprocal squeeze.

When she stepped back, Amber gave her a small smile and slipped into the taxi, turning her face forwards as it pulled away and took her towards the airport.

Then it was just Becky and Pascal in the early evening sun.

Becky sat down on the edge of the pavement and hugged her knees, watching orange rays turn the tops of the buildings a golden colour, flooding one half of the pavement with light, but sending the road into darkness.

If she was honest, she was struggling to hold it all together. Over the last twenty or so years, she’d barely given Maud a thought. But since she’d been here, certain her aunt was dead, she’d started to remember her. Mourn her in a way that she hadn’t before. Now, suddenly, Maud was alive. And although it had always been the case, to her it felt surreal, as if something magical had happened, as if she’d been given a second chance.

Pascal moved forward and sat next to her, saying nothing. A physical reminder that he was there, even if he didn’t know what to say.

And what could they say? She wasn’t quite sure where the misunderstanding had come from. Receiving the solicitor’s letter about the gift her aunt had bestowed on her, the language it had used. The fact that she’d been reading it as a foreigner and had been too stubborn to hire a translator had meant that she’d jumped to all the wrong conclusions. And Maud had seemed so old, even when she was a child, that she’d assumed the woman was at least in her nineties even back then.

Instead she was eighty-two, had moved to a retirement house – a kind of care home for those who needed minimal help –because she could no longer run the café, and had begun to struggle on the stairs. ‘She had no one to care for her,’ Pascal said. ‘And I think she didn’t want to be a burden. Besides, she is happy at this place – it is not for those who are waiting to die, not immediately. But in fact, it is full of people who are being cared for so that they can live.’

Becky’s grandfather had been in a care home towards the end of his life. She had visited sporadically, hating the smell of the place, the fact that her grandfather had seemed to age rapidly oncein situ, becoming more and more dependent and, eventually, confused.

Perhaps this was different.

‘I did wonder why people kept saying they were visiting her,’ she admitted. ‘I thought it was nice that they paid their respects, but it did seem a little… excessive.’ She gave a small smile.

‘J’imagine,’ he said. ‘We must have seemed very strange to you.’

‘I just can’t… She must think I’m awful ignoring her for so long after she gave me the café. And then coming over but not visiting. Why didn’t you tell me?’

Pascal shrugged. ‘I believed you would come eventually. I thought perhaps you were nervous because you hadn’t seen her. Of course I could not know what you really thought.’

‘No.’ Becky shook her head. ‘What an idiot.’

‘We are all idiots in our own way.’

‘Thanks. That’s… very reassuring.’

Pascal laughed. ‘I love your British humour and – how do you say? – sarcasm. How you find a reason to laugh even when the situation is bizarre or even sad.’

‘I think we just do it because it stops us from crying.’ Becky smiled, blinked rapidly and managed somehow to stop her tear ducts filling again.

Pascal nodded. ‘But you have no problem with letting out your emotions?’

Becky laughed properly then. ‘If I told anyone back home you’d said that, they’d be stunned!’ she said. ‘Honestly, I haven’t cried in years until I came here.’

‘It is that bad here?’

‘No… it’s…’ she began, then looked at his face. ‘Oh, you’re joking.’

He grinned. ‘See, I am learning the British humour.’

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