Chapter 6
6
‘Here…’ Ellie was carrying bowls to where Pascal had curled up in the corner of the living room, near the French doors. ‘Here’s some food and water. I’m sure you must be hungry and thirsty.’
Pascal didn’t move. He wasn’t looking at her either, but Ellie knew he’d been watching her every move since she’d brought him into the house. Perhaps he needed to feel a bit safer before he accepted the food and water?
‘Would you rather I left you alone to eat?’ She paused to consider her new housemate. ‘A blanket or something for you to sleep on would be more comfortable than those hard tiles. Or maybe an old towel, because that would be easier to wash and you kind of smell bad.’
It felt slightly ridiculous to be speaking aloud to an animal like this, but Pascal’s upright ear twitched as if he was listening.
‘You need a bath,’ she added. ‘But I can’t do that while you’ve got your leg all bandaged up. If I took the bandage off, I wouldn’t know how to put it back on properly.’
Julien would know how to do something like that…
Ellie gave herself a mental shake. Good grief… It was only about fifteen minutes since she’d seen her neighbour, but she was already inventing an excuse to see him again? Like a teenager with some sort of crush?
‘You’ll just have to smell bad for a while,’ she decided aloud. ‘But I’m not going to sleep anywhere near you. I reckon it’s time I sorted out a bedroom.’
Armed with a broom, dustpan and brush, and a piece of fabric large enough to protect her from breathing in any horrible dust, Ellie climbed the narrow stairs. She knew, from the brief glance when she had first explored this house, that the two bedrooms were almost identical in shape, with sloping, beamed ceilings, wooden floors and whitewashed walls. She knew that Mike the plumber had shooed out the bats and covered the broken pane on the window in the second room with a piece of wood, but she wasn’t ready to open the door that she’d slammed shut so decisively on that first night. Besides, the room with the larger bed had a window looking out onto the garden and the view beyond, so it would have been her first choice anyway.
The iron frames and vertical rails of the bed were painted an odd green-tinged black, and two horizontal brass rails at the top of both the head and foot ends were separated by circles and moulded columns that were thinner versions of the ornate knobs on the four corners of the bed. They were tarnished and dusty. The mattress was covered by what looked like very old lace. Probably handmade, Ellie thought, as she inspected the intricate flower patterns separated by cobwebs of tiny chain stitches, so it would need careful washing by hand. The feather-filled duvet looked clean enough but smelt musty, so Ellie carried it outside and threw it over one of the smaller lemon trees to bake in the afternoon sun for a while, even though she knew she wouldn’t be in need of its warmth at night.
She stripped the sheets off as well and took them down to the washing machine in the basement. Laura had bought a new set of sheets in the supermarket the other day, but whoever had purchased the linen for this cottage clearly had a taste for something more luxurious, and these felt like pure cotton with a high thread count. How lovely would they feel, freshly washed, bleached by sunshine and infused with the scent from the lemon trees as they dried?
Ellie took the feather pillows outside as well, but throwing open the shutters and windows to air the room was the best that she could do for the mattress. At least there was no evidence of it being inhabited by mice. It was also inner-sprung and didn’t look too ancient. Had this been her uncle’s room? A chest of drawers with an inset pattern of branches and leaves, a marble top and very ornate handles offered no clues because it was empty, the drawers lined with old wallpaper. A huge mirror with a brass surround crested by a fleur-de-lis motif startled Ellie as she looked up while closing the drawers.
Taking a second glance, she tried to figure out what felt so different. The wispy curls escaping from her braid were familiar enough, as was their fiery colour. Her hazel brown eyes still looked sombre. So did the set of her mouth. Were her freckles more obvious, perhaps due to the first kiss of the French sunshine? Or was it that she just hadn’t looked at herself properly for a long time because she didn’t want to see a reflection of how she felt.
Maybe that was the difference.
She felt different.
Not like someone who was dragging herself through the remnants of a life and struggling to find a way through broken dreams. Here, she was someone with a purpose. A house to coax back into life. Cleaning and renovations that needed to be done and a terrace and garden to tackle after that. But first things first. Ellie turned away from the mirror to find the broom she had propped in the corner and then started sweeping. Whatever pigeon population had been in here seemed to be long gone. The droppings were attached to the floorboards like concrete, and she had to use the back of the broom to break them free before they could be swept up. The effort required was enough to let her know that her elbow had definitely been bruised as well as grazed.
And that was enough to remind her, again, of Julien’s touch on her body as he’d examined her injured arm. Only, this time, it wasn’t just confined to the memory cells in her skin. Ellie could feel it somewhere much deeper, down low in her abdomen. It took her a moment or two to recognise the sensation that only ever came from physical attraction. Because it was so long since she’d experienced it?
No. More likely because she hadn’t expected it. And didn’t want it. She had chosen to stay in France because she needed to rediscover herself. By herself. For heaven’s sake, a big part of why she was at such a low point in her life was down to the last man she had allowed to share it. She wasn’t about to make another mistake like that.
She also wasn’t about to let Liam sneak back into her thoughts. As Laura had reminded her, she was well rid of him. It was probably quite timely, mind you, to remind herself that it was physical attraction that had started that whole train wreck of a relationship.
As a distraction from thoughts she didn’t want to gain traction, Ellie attacked the floor with even more enthusiasm, holding her breath to avoid inhaling the dust, and she soon had too much mess to fit into the dustpan. On her first trip downstairs to empty it, she found that Pascal had moved from the corner of the living room. He was now lying close to the bottom of the staircase.
‘Did you have some food?’ she asked him. ‘And water?’
She checked the bowls as she went outside to empty the pan under a lemon tree, but they seemed undisturbed, and that worried her a little. She didn’t just have a property to spruce up, she had unexpectedly gathered some other beings to care for. Even if they were only abandoned donkeys and a stray dog, she had responsibilities to think about other than purely personal ones.
Surprisingly, it didn’t feel like an unwanted burden.
Because this was a temporary situation? Because they were animals, rather than people? Or was it because they, along with this property, meant that she had to think about things other than herself?
When she came downstairs to empty the last of the mess she had scraped from the floorboards, Pascal got up and followed her, limping badly. Ellie slowed her steps, paused by the bowls and waited for the little dog to catch up.
‘Water… See?’ She stooped, wetting her fingers and then holding them out. ‘You must be thirsty by now, aren’t you?’
Pascal sniffed her fingers, and then, a heartbeat later, a pink tongue appeared and licked them. Thoroughly. While Ellie wiped her fingers on her jeans, he took another step towards the bowl, lowered his head and began to lap up the water. As she returned from the lemon orchard to find the little dog delicately extracting a single piece of kibble from the bowl and then crunching it between his teeth, she found herself smiling, a little bemused by how such a small thing could feel like a significant achievement.
That she had figured out how to work the washing machine was also very satisfying and, while the sheets were drying in the sunshine, Ellie took hot water, a scrubbing brush and a couple of old towels upstairs to finish cleaning the floor of the bedroom. By the time she was done, the linen was dry, and she climbed the stairs yet again to remake the bed. This time, Pascal followed her. He didn’t come into the bedroom but positioned himself by the door to see what was going on.
The new fitted sheet from the supermarket, with its elasticated corners, would have been easier to put over the mattress, but she knew how delicious this crisp cotton would feel against her skin tonight, especially with that faint hint of lemon that she caught as she shook out and smoothed the sheet. Folding and tucking in the ‘hospital’ corners she, along with her sisters, had been taught at a young age gave her a pang of homesickness, so she took a photo of a neat corner and texted it to her mother.
I remembered, see? Just as good as a fitted sheet.
Proud of you
But hope you’re doing more interesting things than housework all the time.
Ellie considered her reply, her gaze roaming until it caught on the small face peering around the edge of the door, a black nose resting on a bandaged paw. Should she tell her mother that she had run over a dog that she was now fostering? Or that she had had a disturbing moment of finding her less-than-friendly neighbour attractive?
It’s all good
I’ll have a glass of wine and enjoy the sunset when I’ve finished making the bed. It’s gorgeous here.
That seemed to finish the conversation, and Ellie decided later, as she fluffed up the pillows and stuffed them into their clean cases, that maybe she shouldn’t have added that last sentence. This inheritance, and the reminders of a former life, had been obviously unwelcome for her mother. Upsetting, in fact. Although the catastrophic disintegration of her marriage and the struggle to raise her young daughters alone had been decades ago, so surely it should have lost its power to derail such a hard-won contentment, if not happiness?
Homesickness was laced with something that felt like a warning. A bad relationship or an inability to escape the past could really taint the rest of your life, couldn’t it? Ellie was finally realising how close she had been to letting that happen to herself. Her family had been right to be worried about her.
They’d been right about something else, too.
What had been intended as simply a two-day break in another country had unexpectedly become life-changing. And maybe Laura telling her to start standing on her own two feet had provided the motivation to dig deep and find some determination and self-discipline. Perhaps that push had been exactly what she’d needed, because it was beginning to feel as if it was at least possible to start embracing life properly again.
And, even if it was only a possibility, it felt remarkably good.