Chapter 34
34
DAY FIVE
Now
Jesse and Minnie whizzed around country bends, past ancient citadels, as the sun started to lower, lighting the lavender fields of the Luberon valley the deepest purple Minnie had ever seen. Minnie felt tipsy after a second pastis that Jesse had to abstain from so he could drive, and her senses felt alive, her vision richer, as she drank in the shades and scents of Provence in the golden hour.
‘Look at that!’ she said, at nothing in particular and everything that was spectacular, her hand out of the window, daring her fingers to kiss the bushes and hedgerows as they wound through the countryside.
After forty-five minutes, Jesse pulled up at a gravelly inlet at the side of the road on the edge of rolls and rolls of lavender fields. A humidity and thickness had filled the air. He turned off the engine and they sat in silence, ears sharp as they tuned into the sounds of sunset, chirruping, buzzing and breeze.
‘How did those cicadas not keep me awake last night?’ Minnie whispered.
‘They stop when the temperature goes below twenty-two degrees. Some August nights can be pretty noisy.’
‘I bet.’
‘What’s the birdsong?’ she asked.
Jesse held his hand up and concentrated.
‘Common whitethroat, and turtle doves… can you hear the coo?’
‘Yes.’
Then a rumble hit the distance. Or was it a combine harvester?
‘A storm?’ asked Minnie.
‘Hmmm, not likely, but it does feel muggy. Come on, just in case…’
As they walked towards field after field of lavender bushes, Minnie gasped in awe.
‘The colour! It’s so vibrant!’
Jesse’s hands were now in his pockets as he ambled thoughtfully.
‘That’s what I love most about these fields. The way the colour of the lavender changes throughout the day.’
‘How so?’
‘At dawn it’s pale and misty. Tinged grey. In the midday sun, surrounded by bees, it looks almost white tipped. In the evening, it glows this deep rich purple. I’ve tried to find the colours and replicate them, but there is no Pantone reference for any of them…’
Minnie laughed.
‘My dad describes it best though, in Riviera Runaway probably. I’ll have to dig it out.’
Another ominous sound rumbled in the distance.
‘What’s it like when it rains?’
Jesse looked back over his shoulder as Minnie followed the path he’d cut.
‘Beautiful.’
She gasped quietly. The sun was still shining despite the noise in the sky, glistening off the spire of a church in the distance. If a storm was coming it was rising inside of her.
They held each other’s gaze just a fraction too long again. Jesse broke it.
‘Come on,’ he said as they approached a stile. ‘We don’t have long.’
They climbed over and into an arched glade where the sun glittered through a tunnel of trees. The hum of the bees was getting louder – or maybe it was thunder getting nearer. The smell of lavender was certainly stronger, as the small wood opened out to the largest and most beautiful lavender field Minnie had ever seen. Neat rows of dark, rich purple led up to a pale grey stone abbey on a hill.
‘Oh my goodness,’ Minnie said. ‘It’s stunning.’
‘Here you go!’ Jesse declared. ‘Here’s your field.’
‘What?’
‘Tony said you should run carefree through a field. There isn’t a more beautiful one in the world.’
‘Oh my God.’
It was the most thoughtful thing anyone had ever done for her.
Minnie welled up before putting her fingers over her closed eyes, inhaling, and opening them again. The field really was that purple, tips of the lavender fronds glittering gold under the angle of the low dipping sun. ‘I have never been anywhere so stunning in all my life.’
‘It’s yours.’
Minnie swallowed hard and looked at the building in the distance.
‘Who lives there?’
‘It’s an abbey.’ Jesse looked at his watch. ‘But it’s closed now. The tourists will have gone. You can run like a banshee, if that’s your will.’
Minnie grabbed Jesse’s hand like it was the most natural thing in the world and threaded her fingers through each of his. She looked at him, her eyes glimmering as she led them, walking towards the abbey determinedly. As her pace quickened, she let go of his hand. Jesse followed her golden espadrilles, flashing as they trod their path. Minnie broke into a run, laughter bursting from her chest, her eyes closed and the brush and bristles of the lavender bushes kissing her shins as she passed.
Jesse had to start running too, to keep up, his heart brimming to see that Minnie loved this place as much as he did.
‘This is unreal!’ Minnie shouted, as she ran, becoming more out of breath with each step, as the field started to incline towards the abbey. A roll of thunder rumbled nearer now, making Minnie scream, a scream that turned into a laugh; bees darted away. The foreboding in the sky hit Minnie with a fear and a sense of dread, and suddenly she felt as if a dark cloud was looming low, above her shoulders. She was so utterly happy it made her feel so dreadfully vulnerable. Her panting and laughter turned to panic, shallow breaths and tears, as she stopped abruptly, turning around to face Jesse. Her face suddenly serious. He stopped, alarmed.
‘What?’
Minnie rushed back to him and placed a palm on each of Jesse’s cheeks.
‘Don’t go back to her,’ she said. As if she had seen what was coming.
‘What?’ Jesse said, dumbfounded.
‘Don’t go back to her. I want my time with you,’ Minnie whispered, breathlessly, as she looked up at him and kissed him decidedly. She drew back, startled by how startled Jesse looked. Then he lifted her, her legs wrapping around his waist as he cradled her, as she clung on, kissing feverishly as they both willed the sun not to set.
Minnie sat on top of Jesse as the heavens opened, as if out of nowhere, and the rain clouds released their burden on the lavender fields. Her white dress was soaked and stuck to her at the bodice as she hitched it up, until they locked together, rocking and moving to the sounds of their breaths and the rolls of thunder. The bees and birdsong had stopped, and they felt entirely alone, as if they were the only two people in the village, the province, the world, until she fell onto his chest, his T-shirt wet through, the storm passing.
They lay side by side on their backs for a few blissful minutes, dents in the neat rows of lavender around them.
When Minnie propped herself up and emerged, the world looked completely different. The temperature had dropped; the cicadas had stopped singing; goosebumps fizzled on her arms.
She sighed.
‘Well Tony was sort of right. Make new friends, try new things…’ She said it with a sharp irony. ‘I feel great.’
They both suspected Tony would not approve.
Jesse propped himself up on one elbow, digging into soil where the ground had become wet, and circled Minnie’s face with his other forefinger as if she were a treasure he had just found.
‘Thank you,’ he said, more formally than he meant to.
‘You’re welcome,’ Minnie laughed. ‘Thank you.’
The air lifted, a freshness rolled over on the scents of lavender and rain, and the storm clouds that had come from out of nowhere started to break. A sunbeam, nature’s only straight line, powered through a crack in the clouds that seemed to be fast shifting shape.
‘Well my new dress is a little ruined,’ Minnie said, unsticking the top of it from her chest, trying to avoid the hem touching the earth.
‘My mum’s always got towels in the boot for her flowers, I’m sure we can salvage it.’
‘I don’t care.’
She lay back down, resting her hand on Jesse’s T-shirt, shocked by how the day had turned. Jesse looked up at the sky, aware of the scratches on his forearms and the scrapes on his calves, which were starting to sting. Through a widening gap in the clouds they could see blue again, and a plane’s fuselage sparkled in the last glimmer of sunlight, leaving a performative vapour trail in its wake. If the plane had a banner on the back of it, it would have said, ‘You broke the rules BIG TIME!’
Jesse took his phone out of his pocket.
‘Nouvelair, Paris Orly to Oujda… which I think is… Morocco. Yep, it’s Morocco.’
Minnie pulled away and sat up.
‘Look, what is your deal with planes? Is it her?’
‘No!’
‘Are you as scared as me?’
‘Of planes? No.’ He looked across to Minnie. ‘Of falling for you? Terrified.’
Minnie smiled, then leaned over to give him a reassuring kiss.
‘So what’s the deal?’
Jesse sat up and rested his arms on his knees. He watched a shiny petrol blue beetle crawl over his forearm, scurrying for shelter, and let it be.
‘Last November I went to Nigeria, on a research trip.’
Minnie listened.
‘I’d been asked to design for the next Africa Cup of Nations which is always the coolest job. I get to go and really look at designs. Street art. Typography that’s typical of the region. Create a font. It’s fascinating stuff.’
Minnie’s eyes widened. She’d never been to Africa. She couldn’t believe Jesse just hopped on a plane for research.
‘How long did you go for?’
‘Maybe five days – I never like going away for long.’
Ida.
‘I lost something really important on that trip.’
‘What was it?’
Jesse lifted the beetle from his arm hair and nestled it into a lavender bush.
‘Whenever I went away, or whatever I was doing really, I always carried this silly trinket with me. My dad’s keyring.’
He pictured the serene deity, her haunting beauty.
‘I had it all trip, with me in my pocket. Got home and – boom – disappeared.’
Minnie’s brow creased.
‘It was just a silly thing, but I called the hotels, tracked down the taxi driver, called every cafe and diner I had stopped in during that trip, trying to locate her.’
‘Who?’
‘It was a little Indian goddess statue. Her name was Saraswati. Just some tourist tat I suppose. There wasn’t even a key on the keyring.’
‘Sounds special if it was your dad’s.’
‘It was. My dad was on a research trip to India with my mum, ages ago, and he bought it for me. He was really taken with it. He gave it to me when he got home, said she was a good luck charm for my new business. She would be in my pocket in those early make-or-break meetings. I clutched her when Ida was born. I asked her to give me the wisdom to be a dad myself. Took her everywhere with me, always in my pocket. A month after I lost her, my dad died.’
‘Well that’s not your fault, you know.’
Jesse looked like he wasn’t so sure.
Minnie wondered how the hell she could find a keyring like that short of going to India herself, but she already knew it wouldn’t be the same.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I was such a mess when my dad died… then everything with Hannah. It took me a while to remember… having to empty my pockets at airport security in Lagos, I had to put her in the tray when I went through the X-ray machine. So I’d been on a wild goose chase for nothing.’
It still didn’t explain the flight tracking. Was he looking for a flight to Lagos?
‘Did you leave her at the airport?’
Jesse remembered the tension of Andrew and Elena’s wedding back in February. The distance between him and Hannah in their finery. Their shoulders not touching. Her bag falling on the floor, the clank of its metal strap clinging to his chair.
‘Months later I remembered, I did have her going through security on my way home. I did! So I’m pretty sure I dropped her on the plane, and she must have clung to the metal under the seat – sometimes she would cling to a radiator or the fridge. She must have been magnetic.’
Minnie pushed a strand of Jesse’s hair back up off his forehead.
‘I dropped some stuff at one point during the flight. Felt around, picked everything up. Or so I thought. But I didn’t realise until I got home she was gone. And I only realised a few months later that that’s where she must be. Or where I think she is. It’s the only explanation. I wasn’t pickpocketed. No one would have stolen it if I was.’
‘So what’s with that?’ Minnie looked up to the sky.
‘I follow her. I looked up the flight records and found out the registration of the plane that day from Lagos to London.’
‘Like the flight number?’
‘The tail number – that actual aircraft – now I like to know where in the sky she is.’
‘You think your dad’s keyring is still there? A cleaner didn’t pick it up? Or someone else dropped their things, scrambled around for them, and found her?’
Jesse narrowed his eyes and looked up. Did he sound mad and grief-stricken? Probably.
‘I think she’s still up there.’ He put a hand to the sky. ‘Going about her adventures under seat 23C.’
Minnie laced her fingers through Jesse’s, on his hand reaching out. They kissed again.
The clouds had almost entirely dispersed now. As fast and as thick as the air and the storm had come, it had cleared, although the light was fading.
‘What are we going to do, Jesse?’
He looked at her, half broken, half galvanised.
‘Come on,’ he said, jumping to his feet and pulling Minnie up. ‘Let’s dry off. We can get dinner in the village. We’re close to home.’
Home.
Minnie felt the pull of that home, the pull of the clock ticking on a day she didn’t want to end.
At dinner, their clothes and eyelashes all dry, Jesse and Minnie hardly let go of each other. Talking intently, listening close. Stealing kisses between bites of veal and ratatouille; lamb and rosemary. Jesse switched his phone off after the fourth angry text from Hannah. They shared the best chocolate fondant Minnie had ever eaten.
Along with Aperol and red wine with ice.
The air felt fresh and warm again by the time they pulled up outside the house, although the cicadas were still silenced.
Caryn was asleep but she’d left another note on the dining table, to say there was a frangipane tart on the oven and she was going to bed.
‘Shhhh…’ Minnie said, putting her fingers to Jesse’s lips. She took his hand and led him through the farmhouse, to the flower room and out to the pool, where she stripped off, swam one tantalising, teasing, silent length naked, and waited for Jesse to get in and follow. They made love as quietly as they could against the deep end, before going up to Minnie’s room together and drifting off in each other’s arms. The last thought Minnie had as she fell asleep, was of Jesse’s wife, and a question of whether it was really over.