Chapter 11
étienne has his back to the door when I walk up to the bar at La Terrasse the next afternoon.
He’s at the coffee machine, frothing milk.
I decide to wait until the spluttering stops before saying hello.
He’s wearing a white T-shirt and his skin looks very tanned against the fabric.
He doesn’t have super-curly hair, but it does kind of curl down to cover the tops of his ears. It looks soft. It is soft, I recall.
I feel pretty edgy. I’d had alcohol zinging through my blood when we were talking—and, well, flirting—last night, but now I’m stone-cold sober. I have no idea what the dynamic will be when it’s just the two of us.
“Hello,” I say when étienne finally turns around.
He starts a little and then he smiles, saying “Salut” as he places the café crème he’s just made onto a tray along with a black coffee. “?a va?” he asks, pushing his hair back and revealing the tiny scar cutting through his right eyebrow.
I remember it from when we were younger, but never felt comfortable asking how he got it.
“Good. You?”
He nods, resting his forearms on the bar top. A waitress approaches and he straightens up and checks his watch, asking her something in French. She replies as she picks up the tray.
“Two more tables, both just finishing up?” I say as she walks outside with the coffees.
“So you understand French better than you speak it,” he teases. “I shouldn’t be too long. You want a coffee while you wait?”
“Sure, thanks.”
I perch on a stool while he gets to it. Gigi Perez is playing on the stereo.
Behind him on the wall are three framed photographs that I didn’t pay attention to the last time I was here, but now I can see Lise standing in one of them, beaming, with her arm thrown around the shoulders of a girl with braided brown hair.
The girl is in the other pictures too, wearing the same white jersey.
I realize that the words GREAT brITAIN are emblazoned across her top at the same time that I register she’s holding up a bronze medal.
“Who’s that?” I ask, getting étienne’s attention.
He follows the line of my sight to the picture, and for about two seconds, he goes as still as a statue.
“Eve,” he replies at last. “Lise’s sister.”
“What sport?”
“Paracanoe.” He places a black coffee in front of me. “Do you want milk?”
“She’s a Paralympian?”
“Milk?” he asks again, a silver jug in his hand.
“Yes, please.”
I watch him pour, wondering not only why he hasn’t responded, but why he looks so tense.
I remember our conversation last night about my shitty French and his vastly improved English and for some reason it occurs to me to ask, “Is she the one who helped with your English?”
A weariness seems to settle over him as he nods. “She was my girlfriend.”
And just like that, I have a dozen more questions.
He saves me from asking the ones that are vying the hardest to get out.
“She had ALS,” he says.
I’m floored. It’s the same type of motor neuron disease as his mother—and his use of the word had means…
He’s lost her.
“Oh shit,” I breathe. That must have been unfathomably hard. “I’m so sorry. When?”
“When did she pass away or when did she win that?” He nods at the medal.
“Both?” I reply weakly.
“She won that two years ago.” He swallows. “And she died just under a year later.”
He sounds proud, and yet so sad.
“Life is so unfair,” I murmur.
How much bad luck can one person have, to lose both his mother and his girlfriend to the same rare disease?
The waitress interrupts again to speak to étienne.
“The last customers have requested their bill,” he says to me when she leaves us to it. “They don’t want coffee so drink up and we’ll go.”
“How often do you help Lise out?” I ask as we wander over the pedestrian bridge by the restaurant, my head still spinning from his revelation of a few minutes ago.
“Not often,” he replies. “She’s short-staffed at the moment, but she’ll hire someone new before long.”
I still have so many questions, but I very much doubt he wants to put himself through reliving his trauma to satisfy my curiosity.
“How did the party cleanup go?” I ask.
“It hasn’t happened yet. I’ve got friends coming over at six.”
“That’s nice of them.”
“We’re brothers. We help each other out.”
The river level is so low that most of the smooth pale rock bed is exposed.
“You couldn’t kayak through this part of town,” I note.
“No,” étienne agrees, strolling over to the other side of the bridge and resting his forearms on the railings.
It’s such a pretty view of the town from this aspect: old terraced buildings of varying heights and widths are perched right at the edge of the riverbed.
They look as though they were hewn out of the rock with the way the rough stone at the bottom morphs into straight walls rendered with plaster.
A long time ago, the walls were painted apricot, but now the color is so faded that only a hint remains, a faint echo of the vibrant terracotta roof tiles.
“Why is the water so shallow here?” I ask, going to stand beside him.
“The main body of the river flows underground from back there,” étienne replies, pointing over his shoulder. “And it comes out along there, joining up with the Ardèche.” He nods downstream.
“So you can’t kayak from your house—sorry, what did you call it? The Willows?”
“Les Saules.”
“You can’t kayak from your place to the Ardèche River?”
“No, I have to drive, although often I hitch a ride with Raphael.” That’s his friend who has a kayak-hire business. “He’s always going back and forth with tourists.”
“I still haven’t done a kayak tour.” They look like fun—you drive to the hire place, paddle downstream, and then someone comes to collect you in a bus and brings you and the kayak back to the hire place so you don’t have to fight against the current.
“Like I say, the worst tourist to have ever come to the Ardèche.”
Unlike last night, now I can see the twinkle in his eye, but his comment still prompts a pang of guilt.
“Mellie is a nervous driver.” I’m keen to explain. “She never wanted to go far when I came here as a child. Imagine how boring my holidays would have been if I hadn’t been able to hang out with Jackson at his pool.”
“I’m sure you would have found other ways to entertain yourself.”
I glance at him sharply. Was there a hard edge to those words? But he smiles and turns around, leaning against the bridge and folding his arms across his chest.
“Can you drive now?” he asks me pointedly.
I hadn’t started learning when we met, even though my seventeenth birthday had been and gone that April.
I was a bit freaked out by the idea of getting behind a wheel.
And in France, you couldn’t learn to drive until you were eighteen, which was a few months away for him.
Every time I visited, he’d take me back to town in his kayak and would then have to paddle himself upstream. No wonder he was strong.
“I can now. It took me ages to get around to taking my test.” I catch a stray lock of hair that’s blowing in the hot wind and secure it with a hair clip. His dark hair is shifting in the breeze too. “To be honest, I’m so busy at home that I’m usually just glad to get here and put my feet up.”
I freeze as he reaches out and brushes his thumb against my right cheekbone, his gaze focused. “Dirt,” he says, and then I notice that his white T-shirt has suffered the same fate.
“This bridge is filthy.” I laugh as I attempt to dust him off.
His stomach goes concave in reaction to my touch, and then he catches my wrists and my chest contracts. We both look down to see that I’m making an even bigger mess of his T-shirt.
“Oh shit, sorry!”
He chuckles and gently pushes my hands away as he turns and leans over the railing, pointing at the base of the bridge. “So, the first Sainte églantine is right here.”
I gasp at the sight of the small round painting. I’ve walked over this bridge countless times and it was there all along.
“How did your mother manage it?” It would have been impossible to paint it from this angle. “Can we climb down?” I ask, looking for a way.
“Yes, from over there.”
He leads me across the bridge to the park where the market takes place and turns left in the direction of the public swimming pool.
We duck under the railing to get off the footpath and wade through the long grass by the river.
I scramble down the bank after him as he drops onto the rocky riverbed, turning around to offer his help.
His hands are rougher than they used to be—I guess years of fixing cars have taken their toll—but his grip is as firm and steady as it ever was and I feel strangely disappointed when he lets me go.
“It’s so beautiful,” I murmur as we stare up at the small round painting of the auburn-haired woman in a yellow dress, encircled by blue birds and pink flowers.
It’s remarkably well preserved—his mother, Estelle, obviously used a different material on the metal, and though the paint has flecked off in places, it’s mostly intact.
“Do you know how old she was when she painted this?”
“They were all done before she turned twenty-five, which is when she had me.”
“And do you know what inspired her?”
“Her great-great-grandfather painted postcards in the early 1900s. My mother had a collection of them; she kept them in an old biscuit tin. They were all in the same art nouveau style. She was inspired by one of his designs: a lady sitting in a giant oyster shell, clutching a pearl. She didn’t really like the shape of the shell so she came up with this instead. ”
“Have you still got the postcards?” I ask with interest.
“I imagine they’re at Les Saules.”
“Could we look for them sometime?”
He nods. “I’m going next weekend if you want to come.”
“I’d love to. I can’t stop thinking about it. Are there still bees in the walls?”
He shakes his head sadly. “Not anymore.”
“Where did they go?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I guess they moved on.”