Chapter 19
19
It was only an hour or so’s drive to the small town of Roquebillière, but Ellie had never been this far up into the mountains, and the scenery – not to mention the road, which appeared to be carved into the side of an enormous cliff with a drop on the other side to the river at the bottom of the canyon – was spectacular. Several times she found herself holding her breath and, when Julien slowed to negotiate a narrow tunnel, she let out a gasp.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. ‘I know this road like… what’s that expression? Ah, oui – the back of my hand. You’re perfectly safe.’
Ellie nodded. ‘It’s an astonishing road. I’ve never seen nets like that attached to cliffs.’
‘Rockfall protection,’ Julien told her. ‘This is one of the more scenic roads in France. The river below us is the Vésubie, which is a tributary of the Var. Do you remember the terrible storm a few years ago where so much damage was done and many people killed?’
‘I do,’ Ellie said. ‘It caused problems in Scotland, too, but nothing as bad as in France. It was a real weather bomb.’
‘It was this river that caused the damage with the flooding here after such torrential rain. It wasn’t long after I was married, so I wasn’t here, but there were pictures on the news of houses being washed into the river as the banks collapsed. Sometimes with people still inside…’ Julien cleared his throat as if the memory was overwhelming.
‘It must have been terrifying,’ Ellie said. She could feel herself trying – and failing – to push away an image of Julien and his new bride on their honeymoon before it could spark a pang of envy. ‘And so awful to be a long way away and feel helpless.’
‘Sometimes it feels like it only happened yesterday.’ Julien seemed intently focused on the road ahead of them. ‘But it was before Theo was born. And there’s been so much done to repair the damage, but there are always reminders when I drive this road. There will always be the scars on the land in this area.’
‘And for the people,’ Ellie agreed quietly. ‘Life can leave so many scars.’ She wanted Julien to know that she understood – and shared – the loss he had to live with for the rest of his life. ‘Sometimes,’ she added softly, ‘it can be the scars you can’t see that are the hardest to heal.’
Julien’s gaze only left the road for a fraction of a moment. Just long enough to make contact with Ellie’s and for the connection between them to become that tiny bit stronger.
For her to know that Julien could see her own invisible scars. He could feel them.
And he cared.
If they never saw each other again after she left at the end of summer, Ellie knew that, as much as he could, Julien loved her, even if he didn’t recognise it – or chose to acknowledge it – himself.
It was enough.
Because it had to be.
Julien parked his car outside his grandmother’s house.
‘I’ll only be a moment,’ he said. ‘If I take you in, we’ll have to make it a visit and that won’t leave enough time to get to the wolf park.’
Ellie nodded but she could feel the chill of an undercurrent that told her they weren’t close enough for her to be meeting his family. That perhaps this was the reason she hadn’t seen him while Laura had been visiting.
She could feel herself being watched from the windows of the small house as Julien disappeared inside to fetch his son, and the chill intensified enough to give her a shiver.
But then he reappeared and Theo was running towards the car. He climbed inside and gave her a folded piece of paper before Julien fastened his seat belt.
‘Theo’s drawn a picture for you,’ he explained. ‘He said that’s what he does when he’s with you.’
Knowing that Theo not only remembered the night she’d looked after him but had wanted to repeat the connection that had come from drawing pictures together made any lingering chill evaporate instantly.
‘For me?’ she asked. ‘ Merci , Theo.’ Ellie unfolded the paper and admired the image, which seemed to have quite distinctive ears and teeth on a round ball with stick legs. ‘ C’est magnifique ,’ she told him. ‘Is it a wolf?’
‘ C’est un loup ?’ Julien translated when his son looked blank.
‘ Non …’ Theo’s face lit up in the biggest smile Ellie had ever seen from this rather solemn little boy. ‘ C’est Pascal …’
Julien pointed out the turning to the village of Saint-Martin-Vésubie as they passed it to get to the wolf park, high in the mountain forests towards the Italian border. Ellie turned her head as if she was trying to get a better glimpse of the village.
‘Stopping on the way home will be much better,’ he told her. ‘There’s a falconry show at two o’clock and it’s a favourite for Theo. He loves the owls most of all. I’m sorry; I know seeing the town is the real reason you wanted to come today, so I hope you don’t mind waiting a little longer.’
Ellie shook her head. ‘I love owls, too,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see them.’
There was something about her smile that made Julien think she was only being polite, and she seemed quieter than usual as she bent her head to scroll on her phone. Was it because of Theo in the back of the car? Had she overestimated her strength in coping with the reminder of having lost something so precious?
The reason for her scrolling became obvious, however, as he pulled into a car park beside the chalet that sold tickets to the park. She had been using her translation app to find out what owl was in French.
‘J’aime les hiboux ,’ she said as Julien lifted Theo out of his car seat.
‘ Moi aussi ,’ he shouted. ‘ Dépêche-toi, papa. Allons-y! ’
‘He’s telling us to hurry up,’ Julien told her. He held out his hand to his son. ‘Come on, then.’
He purchased their tickets, and then they had a short walk through the forest to reach the bridge that formed the entrance to the park. He knew the old wood and stone buildings on the other side provided audiovisual presentations that depicted the history of wolves and their interactions with humans, but those were in French and he didn’t want Ellie to feel excluded. Besides, he could see people gathering to sit on the bank around the large, grassed area where the falconry show would take place very soon. He turned it that direction, but Ellie wasn’t watching and kept going straight ahead.
‘Ellie!’ Theo called. ‘ Viens avec nous. Par ici.’ He held his hand out to make the invitation obvious.
To Julien’s surprise, Ellie took hold of Theo’s hand, and they walked on either side of his son – like any parents of a small child.
Initially, he was shocked that Ellie, to outward appearances, was taking the place of his son’s mother, but then Theo looked up at him and the smile on his face was so happy it almost broke his heart. Could a child so young be aware that, for the moment, Ellie was filling the enormous gap in their lives?
But was it breaking Ellie’s heart as well?
Should he pick Theo up, perhaps, and give him a piggyback so that he wasn’t able to hold Ellie’s hand?
As if she’d caught his thought, or felt his gaze, she glanced up and there was reassurance in her eyes. There might have been a tiny tremble in her lips as they curved into a small smile that was definitely poignant, but she wasn’t distressed. She was, however, completely silent as they sat amongst the crowd a minute or two later. But that could simply have been because she was as mesmerised as Theo by the huge birds of prey soaring and swooping between handlers who were dressed in traditional costumes, with white shirts beneath leather jerkins and breeches tucked into high boots.
They moved on after the performance to find one of the viewing platforms where they could try and spot some members of the wolf packs and watch a feeding time, and Julien knew he had to check that Ellie was really okay with Theo wanting to hold her hand again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said softly, when Theo had let go of Ellie so that he could press his hands and his nose to the glass of a viewing area and couldn’t hear him speaking. ‘It was an… imposition, perhaps? For you to come here with Theo?’
‘It’s fine,’ Ellie said quietly. ‘Theo is adorable. I love that he’s not shy with me any longer.’
Julien hesitated. He wasn’t surprised that his son liked Ellie so much: he felt the same way himself. But could he say that? Or that he envied the way the little boy had taken hold of her hand, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. He would have liked to be holding her hand himself right now, to be honest, but he would never do that in front of Theo. As he’d reassured his mother and grandmother, when they’d been peering through the window at the woman sitting in his car, Ellie was his neighbour. A friend. Nothing more.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t take you in to introduce you to my mother and grandmother,’ he said quietly. ‘That was rude of me.’
Ellie shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
But Julien could sense that it did matter. That there was a barrier that he didn’t want to be there today.
Theo had spotted a wolf and was excitedly looking back at his father and pointing. Julien nodded and gave him a thumbs up, but he was thinking of something very different.
If he told Ellie the truth, she would really understand why they could never be anything more than friends. Knowing the truth might mean she could look back, when this affaire was over, on what they had had together without any regret for what they didn’t have. And it would be over soon. Very soon.
Theo was completely focused on the park attendants walking in the enclosure with buckets of food to leave for the wolves. Not that he would have understood what Julien was saying in English, anyway.
‘My mother and my grand-mère have never forgiven Sarah,’ he told Ellie quietly. ‘I knew they might not make you feel welcome.’
Ellie’s eyes widened. ‘They’ve never forgiven her?’ she echoed. ‘Why? Was the accident her fault?’
‘She wasn’t driving,’ Julien said, his voice without expression. ‘It was her lover’s car. She was leaving and, as far as I know, she had no intention of ever coming back to me. Or to Theo.’
He could see the total shock in Ellie’s eyes. He wanted to confess that he believed it had been a good thing Sarah had never come back, because she hadn’t loved him. She’d only married him because she was pregnant. He hadn’t loved her, either. Not the way you should love the person you were choosing to spend the rest of your life with.
Sarah hadn’t even loved her son enough to take him with her.
And maybe that was why Ellie was looking so shocked. Because she would do anything to have her own son with her again. She would never ever have left him behind.
But Julien hesitated before admitting that guilty secret and the opportunity was lost. As if he knew he was being talked about, Theo’s head turned swiftly, his eyes shining with happiness. A small finger was pointing into the wolf enclosure.
‘ Regardez, regardez…’ he called. ‘ Les loups viennent manger maintenant. ’
Julien smiled back at Theo. Maybe part of that smile was relief that he could shut the past away again – in that locked space where it belonged.
‘The wolves are hungry,’ he said to Ellie. ‘Here they come…’
It wasn’t until they had driven to Saint-Martin-Vésubie, parked the car and started walking down the main street – with its distinctive channel creating a downhill stream that was running fast enough to create tiny waves and delight Theo – that the implications of what Julien had told her began to surface from the shock it had given Ellie.
She had been so sure it was because he’d lost the love of his life that there could never be a future for her with Julien.
But if it was because he wasn’t ready to trust again, that felt like… like a light at the end of a tunnel.
A glimmer of hope…
Theo found a small branch, like a miniature tree with a bunch of shiny green leaves at the top, broken off a laurel or bay tree that was growing in a huge urn outside a shop. He dipped the leafy end into the gargouille and watched the water rippling around it as he walked beside it, holding the sharp, snapped-off end with care. And then he dropped the whole branch into the stream and trotted after it as the current swept it downhill.
Keeping up with Theo meant there was no time to look around and try to spot the café that would have been where her father and uncle had been playing in the gargouille so many years ago, but when they reached the church where her grandparents had been married, there was plenty of time to let the moment sink in. Oddly, Ellie found herself thinking about a completely different church.
The beautiful église Saint-Grégoire in Tourrettes-sur-Loup that was forever embedded in her memory due to having become lost in the fantasy of something too good to be true – that she had been marrying Julien there.
She had yearned for that future hard enough for it to hurt, assuming that it could never happen in real life. But was it possible that it could? That glimmer of hope became a little brighter. Bright enough to make her eyes water, but Ellie was smiling as she blinked and took out one of the two photos she’d put in her pocket that morning.
She could feel Julien looking over her shoulder as she glanced up from the black and white image to the soft, Mediterranean colours of the church in front of her and the faded painting in the circle. At the same moment, the bell in the ancient tower to one side began to strike the hour. Five slow notes that filled the air and echoed between the stone walls of surrounding buildings.
Ellie tilted her head to smile up at Julien. ‘This is magic,’ she said. ‘It’s like I’ve stepped into this photograph or gone back in time, or someone has just waved a wand and made a picture come to life.’ She pulled in a deep breath. ‘Thank you so much for bringing me here. I think I know why I love France so much – it feels like at least part of me belongs here.’
‘Of course it does.’ Julien sounded matter-of-fact. ‘You have French blood in your veins. Part of you does belong here. Maybe…’ He was holding her gaze. ‘…you should stay?’
Ellie’s breath caught somewhere deep in her chest. Did Julien want her to stay?
Hope was as much of a drug as falling in love, wasn’t it? Ellie knew she might be in danger of instant addiction.
‘Why don’t you keep La Maisonette?’ Julien added. ‘You already own a third of it.’
Oh… Could it be this easy to remain a part of his life? For long enough to win his trust? To earn at least acceptance if not approval from the women in his family?
‘It’s a good house,’ he added. ‘I thought of buying it myself if it ever came on the market, so that my grandmother could live closer, but when I talked to her about it, she made it very clear that she would never leave the village she’s lived in all her life.’ He was watching Theo, who was being drawn back to the miniature river on the main street. ‘You and your sisters could use it for a holiday house, perhaps, if you didn’t want to live here?’
Did he think there could be any reason why she wouldn’t want to live here? Like, how awkward it might be to have an ex-lover as a neighbour?
The thought didn’t get a chance to embed itself in her head, fortunately. Julien was looking up at the sky.
‘We should go,’ he said. ‘Those clouds might be a long way away, but the weather forecast did have a warning for a possible thunderstorm today and they can be quite violent at this time of year, with lightning and thunder and hailstones.’
They walked back up the hill towards the car. Theo clung to his father’s back with his arms and legs as he was piggybacked, still holding the branch he’d found. It wasn’t easy to keep up with Julien’s long strides, but Ellie could understand why he was in a hurry. Was Theo afraid of thunderstorms, like Pascal? She wanted to get home herself and make sure her little dog had been okay on his own all afternoon.
But even that underlying sense of urgency couldn’t prevent her stopping, so fast she almost lost her balance, outside a window she hadn’t noticed on the way down to the church.
‘Oh, look!’ she exclaimed.
Julien was several steps ahead of her, but he turned and, when he saw Ellie’s face, he came back.
‘ Oh là là… It’s the painting you liked.’
It was.
It was the big painting that she had fallen so instantly in love with when she’d seen it at the first summer market she’d been to in Vence. The one with the chapel-esque stone building. The one with the mountains as an indistinct background to the brightness of red and white flowers in the grass and stones in the foreground, made even more stunning by the impasto technique of layering the paint – probably with a knife or just fingers – to give it both a three-dimensional effect and the suggestion of movement, as if a breeze were blowing across the meadow.
There was a link here that felt important: that this artist, whose work touched her heart so much, might come from the same village that the unknown side of her family might have lived in.
‘Is this where he works, do you think?’
Julien looked at the sign hanging over the door. ‘It’s a gallery rather than a workshop, so it may just be in here for sale. Have you changed your mind about buying it?’
Ellie shook her head. Reluctantly. Because if this painting wasn’t way out of any price range she could afford, it should be.
‘Why don’t I ask?’ Julien suggested, as if he’d read her thoughts. ‘Or there might be a smaller version in the gallery?’
So they went inside, but the other paintings on display were clearly by very different artists. Julien spoke, at some length, to the woman behind the counter.
‘I don’t think the artist wants to sell the painting,’ he told Ellie. ‘He’s asking over a thousand euros.’
‘Someone will buy it,’ Ellie said. ‘And he deserves to be paid that much.’ She led the way to the door, knowing that she’d held them up long enough.
‘Apparently no one knows his real name,’ Julien said as he stopped outside the gallery to pick Theo up again. ‘He lived on the streets for a long time but now he lives in an old stable on a farm. Nobody sees him during the winter, and that’s when he does his paintings. And then he comes out in summer and takes them to the market to earn money for more paints and food. People call him l’ermite. ’
‘The hermit?’
‘ Oui . The ’ermit.’
Sometimes Julien’s accent was just too gorgeous. So cute it made him as adorable as his son. Ellie heard herself sigh, which was a sound of pure happiness.
‘That’s a good story,’ she said quickly, in case Julien guessed the real reason she sounded so happy. ‘Maybe he was living on the streets because he felt lost, and now he’s found where he needs to be and he’s doing what he loves.’ Ellie took one last glance behind her at the painting. Had that been, unknowingly, why she’d felt such a connection to this artwork? Because she had been lost herself but lucky enough to have come to what might be the only part of the world that could have made it possible to find herself again?
The storm was much closer as they followed the mountain road towards the canyon that had been carved out by the Vésubie river. Gigantic fluffy clouds were filling the sky, intermittently blocking out the sun, giving them a shockingly bright halo around an inky blackness in their centres that made them look like bottomless holes.
The first flash of lightning came as they went through one of the tunnels in the gorge. When Theo cried out in fright, Ellie put her hand though the gap between the front seats of the car so that he could hold onto it when the crash of thunder followed only seconds later, but he was clutching the tree branch which he had insisted he had to take home with him, so she just rubbed his arm instead.
The storm was right on top of them. Fat raindrops hit the windscreen a minute later with such ferocity that Julien had to put the wipers on a frantic speed. When the rain changed to hail after another blinding flash of light and a crack of thunder that she could feel in her bones, Ellie was as frightened as Theo.
‘We need to find somewhere to pull over.’ Julien’s voice was calm but grim. ‘I don’t like this.’
With the river down a steep bank on their left and a sheer rock wall on their right, there was nowhere to pull over, but Julien was driving very carefully as he went into the next bend. It didn’t matter how careful he was being, however, when he found himself facing a large vehicle that was passing a small peloton of cyclists huddled together as they battled the elements.
They were only moments away from a head-on collision with the truck. In the space of a heartbeat, Ellie could feel the impossible choice Julien was having to make. Should he swerve towards the cliff and collide with the cyclists? Take the chance that the truck was also going so slowly a collision might be the safest option? Or should he pull the wheel the other way and hope that the low concrete wall would be enough to prevent them going over the bank?
Ellie also felt the moment that the concrete wall gave way as the screech of the car’s hubcaps on the hard surface competed with another rumble of thunder. The car tipped so far she was sure they were about to roll, but then it hit the bank and somehow stayed upright but gathered speed on the steep slope.
The scream of pure terror from Theo as they hurtled towards the river was a sound she was never ever going to forget. But worse was to come. The crunch of hitting the huge boulders in the river was so jarring, Ellie was convinced this was the last thing she would ever be aware of.
Except it wasn’t.
That shrill scream of a small child had been cut off as if a switch had been flicked.
Despite the roar of rushing water around them, another crack of thunder, and the horrific gunshot sounds of airbags deploying, the silence from the back seat of Julien’s car was deafening.