Page 55 of The Magic of Provence

Fi called out as she began to walk away, Pascal at her heels. ‘Doesn’t being employed mean I get paid?’

Ellie laughed. ‘Aye… we’d better sort that out, hadn’t we? I don’t want you to get headhunted by someone else. Like Didier, who’s probably desperate to find a farrier. Or Christophe deciding he could open a donkey riding school as a side hustle.’

Oh… imagine that. Working – maybeliving– with Christophe and a whole herd of donkeys. That might make a new irresistible daydream all on its own. Fi started scooping up all the leftover pebbles and letting them trickle through her fingers back into the bucket but it wasn’t that she was playing with stones again like a kid that was making her smile.

Ellie hadn’t been wrong. Fiwasenjoying herself. Life had, in fact, never felt quite this good. Ever.

18

The days were growing longer and warmer as summer officially grew closer.

The amount of time each day that Jeannie Gilchrist was spending with Gordon was also growing longer. At first she’d stayed in the old barn with him, talking to him or simply sitting in the sunshine outside in silence. Patchy memories, or at least parts of them, were slowly returning.

‘Do you remember working on the fishing boats? How cold it could be? Your hands would feel like blocks of ice when you got home.’

‘I remember a fire in a house and how much my hands would hurt as they warmed up. Is that why I feel the way I do when I walk past thepoissonnerie? Seeing – and smelling – all those fish makes my head spin so much I can’t think. I try to not go near them.’

She cooked him meals. The kind of meals she’d made for him when they were first married.

‘Remember stovies? And your favourite leftover meat to go in them?’

Jeannie had made the corned beef herself, at Ellie’s house, cooking the meat in a brine of vinegar and pepper, brown sugar, bay leaves and mustard. She’d served the favourite family meal of corned beef with hot mustard sauce, cabbage and roasted potatoes and carrots to Ellie and Julien, Laura and Noah, making sure she had enough leftovers to chop up and use to make the classic Scottish dish of stovies. She’d made oatcakes, as well, to go with it.

Oh… the look on Gordon’s face when he tasted it! He remembered. Of course he did. Taste would have to be able to evoke memories in the same way a scent could. What else could she make him? Her famous cottage pie? The special Sunday dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with cauliflower cheese and the garlic potatoes that you could make so crispy by parboiling and then rolling them in semolina before putting them in the roasting pan?

Perhaps she wanted to cook everything for him. Because feeding someone was the first and easiest way to nurture them.

She took the sketches she’d found in the attic in her Oban cottage and he traced that ruined building with his finger and then closed his eyes and was silent for so long she thought he’d fallen asleep. She jumped when he started speaking.

‘It was a grey day but that only made the moors more beautiful. I wanted to fix that little stone cottage and live in it in the hills forever. With you…’

She watched him work on a large painting as he began to feel better. And then sketching on tiny cards with a touch of colour from water paints, a simple bunch of daisies on one, poppies on another and lavender on a third. There was a carefully written message inside each card, for each one of his daughters. Jeannie had been carrying them in her handbag ever since, waiting for the right moment to give her girls something she knew would be heart wrenching.

Sometimes, now, she and Gordon went out somewhere, into nearby villages and up into the mountains to walk in the forests. She took him to the hospital, too, for his outpatient appointments that were monitoring his general health and his reaction to the anti-seizure drugs he was now taking. There were appointments with therapists who had been provided to help him through the traumatic process of trying to sort the tangle of what he knew to be reality and what he had assumed to be nightmares. He was learning to catch wisps of confusion and, with Jeannie’s help, to find out if they, too, were parts of his missing life.

He had a passport now. A birth date. He knew the names of his parents and that he’d spent his earliest years in the town he’d instinctively gone back to. He’d recognised the brother he’d forgotten he had from the old photograph Ellie had found hidden in the book.

‘I’m starting to feel like a real person,’ he told Jeannie. ‘When I’ve always only felt like a ghost. This would never have happened without you, darlin’.’

Ohh…

It had taken a long time for Gordon to start smiling much at all butthissmile – this was the one that had woken something that had been very deeply buried to try and protect it from pain. Perhaps it was the endearment it came with. Or the look in the dark brown eyes of the quintessential Scottish Highland warrior who had been her first true love.

Her only true love.

That was the place that this smile had touched.

Her soul.

She could see the man she’d married so clearly again now.

Her Gordie.

She’d wanted, so much, to kiss him. More than that. She’d wanted to see if his body would recognise hers and remember the familiar rituals they’d created in their lovemaking. That would happen, she realised in that moment.

But not yet.

She could see him coming closer but he still wasn’t within that kind of touching distance – because he wasn’t ready? Rejection could only damage what was happening between them, so Jeannie wasn’t going to be the one to make the first move or to try and encourage Gordon to make it. This was a journey that couldn’t be rushed, and it was well past time that Jeannie went back home to Oban and back to her work as a practice nurse in the local medical centre.

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