Chapter 2 #2
‘And did it work?’ Emma asked, delighted by this unexpected glimpse into her grandmother’s youth.
‘It certainly brought in a whole new clientele, mostly young people. But most of them didn’t have much spare cash, so they tended to hang around and talk philosophy or lament their turbulent love affairs.
Alain didn’t mind.’ A momentary sadness flitted over her face.
‘He was always happy to listen to people.’
Emma squeezed her grandmother’s hand. ‘Pappy was so kind.’ Pappy, the common French version of grandpa, was what she’d called him, but its female equivalent, Mamie, was too confusingly close in sound to the English ‘Mummy’, so instead, Mattie, short for her grandmother’s given name of Mathilde, had stuck.
‘It is what I remember most about him.’ She glanced out of the window.
‘That and seeing him work in the garden.’
Mattie followed her glance. ‘Alain always loved plants, but we didn’t have a garden in our first home, which was a cramped little flat.
But when Corinne was three years old, my uncle unexpectedly left me this house, with its hidden-away garden.
It was a dream come true for Alain.’ She looked at Emma.
‘You know, in France there’s a saying: Tout le monde a son jardin secret. ’
Everyone has their own secret garden, Emma thought. Aloud, she said, ‘Like in the book?’
Mattie looked puzzled, and Emma belatedly realised that her grandmother wouldn’t have read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was an English classic, not a French one. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you meant something from a book I really loved as a child. What does it mean?’
‘A private space,’ Mattie said. ‘A peaceful place that offers escape and relieves stress. It can be in your mind, where memories and dreams and ideas gather, or it can be something you actually do, like a long-running journal, or my sketchbooks. It can also be a secret, like forbidden love or a double life … Occasionally it can be an actual place that has a deep meaning for you.’ Her gaze turned back outside.
‘For Alain, the garden was his haven and his way of expressing himself. But that is why …’ She paused, and Emma saw the sudden shine of tears in her eyes.
‘I couldn’t keep it up, after he died, even if—if it broke my heart. ’
‘Oh Mattie.’ Emma hugged her grandmother tightly.
After lunch, Mattie always retired to her room for a sieste, leaving Emma to her own devices for an hour or two.
The first day, exhausted by the trip, she’d crashed out herself.
The next two days it was raining solidly so she’d explored the house.
She had a good sense of it now. On the ground floor were the kitchen and laundry—which opened onto the garden—the living room and dining room, and a small room which had once been a study but was now a makeshift library.
On the first floor were the bathroom and three good-sized bedrooms, the smallest of which was currently unused but neatly furnished.
Finally, up a steep flight of narrow stairs that Mattie never went up anymore, was the second or attic floor, with a room that had clearly once been a chambre de bonne or servant’s room but now only contained two trunks full of mothballed old clothes and an impressive collection of spider webs, as well as a separate storage room.
Full of paintings, books, faded but lovely carpets and well-worn furniture, the house was cosy in the way beloved old houses are.
The last couple of days, however, the weather had been bright and soft and Emma had left the house to go for a walk; the first day to the Boulevard St Germain and then the Jardin du Luxembourg—where, she was delighted to see, children still sailed toy yachts and the dancing faun still capered happily on his pedestal.
The second day she’d gone to the Latin Quarter and its charmingly ramshackle backstreets.
This afternoon she decided to head to the stalls of the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine, only a short distance away. And it was there, happily browsing among the stalls, that she happened upon the book.
It was a plain hardcover volume with a very plain title: Petit guide pratique du jardinage.
A practical little guide to gardening. It had been published in Paris in 1897 and was arranged in sections about trees, shrubs, flowers, vegetables and fruit.
There were rather nice black-and-white drawings too.
But it was something else that made her buy it: a bookplate, pasted on the flyleaf, which read In memory of our beloved sister Jeanne-Marie Merlin du Bosc, born 2 October 1895, died 20 August 1918, in her twenty-third year.
That simple yet startling dedication seemed freighted with such love and sorrow that it immediately spoke to Emma’s own loss.
Jeanne-Marie had clearly been a gardener, she thought.
Her family had wanted to honour her memory and celebrate her short life in a book she had loved.
And it was then, as Emma thought of the conversation with her grandmother, that the decision took root in her mind.
She would restore her grandfather’s garden. And this book would be her guide.