Epilogue — Iris
ONE YEAR LATER
The harvest starts on Thursday and the restaurant opens on Saturday, and I have color-coded both.
Cat finds this hilarious. Cat finds most things about me hilarious — which took me an embarrassingly long time to understand was a form of devotion.
Les Oliviers reopens under new management in four days. Mathilde retired at the end of June, handed us the keys, cried without apologizing for it, and then came back the following morning to inform Cat that she was doing the daube wrong.
She comes back most mornings.
Nobody has asked her to stop.
My mother rings on Sundays.
Sometimes.
It started in the spring — short, careful conversations about nothing in particular, both of us walking very slowly around the things we still can't say.
She asks about the fields. I ask about her knee.
We are unfailingly polite, in the manner of two people carrying something heavy between them who have agreed not to mention it.
It isn't forgiveness. I don't know that it ever will be.
But the phone rings. And there's a voice on the other end, still trying.
"The harvest's this week," I tell her. "You could come. If you wanted."
There's a pause. There's always a pause.
"I don't think I'm ready for that."
"That's all right. It'll be here next year."
Another pause. A longer one.
"I saw the piece about the restaurant," she says. "In the magazine. The photograph of the two of you."
I hold very still.
"It was a good photograph," my mother says.
That's all. That is the entire distance we cover, on a Sunday, in June.
When I hang up, Cat is in the doorway with a tea towel, not remotely pretending she wasn't listening.
"Well?"
"She said it was a good photograph."
Cat doesn't say that's wonderful. She doesn't say she's coming round. She has learned, over a year of Sundays, not to make it into more than it is.
"Right," she says.
And puts the kettle on.
On the night before the harvest we walk the fields, which we do every evening, because Cat says a farm you don't walk is just a spreadsheet.
At the top of the rise, she stops.
"So I've been thinking about something," she says, "and I'd like you to let me get to the end of it before you say anything, because I've been rehearsing in the walk-in for a fortnight."
"That explains the muttering."
"Iris."
"Sorry. Go on."
She takes a breath.
"Children," she says. "One. Possibly two. Not now — God, not now, the restaurant opens on Saturday — but at some point. In the actual future. If it's something you'd want."
I don't say anything.
"And I've thought about it very hard," Cat goes on, faster, "and I don't want to do it because of Marguerite, or legacy, or any of that. I want to do it because I want to teach somebody to cook in that kitchen. That's my entire reason. It isn't a very grand one."
"Cat."
"And if you don't want to, that's completely—"
"Cat." I take her face in both hands. "Yes."
She stops dead.
"Yes?"
"Not this year. Possibly not next year." I'm laughing, and my eyes are streaming, which is a condition I have grown extremely accustomed to since I met this woman. "But yes."
We stand there a while, watching the light go.
And then Cat reaches down, snaps off a stem of lavender, holds it up between two fingers — and my whole chest turns over.
"No," I say.
"Yes."
"Absolutely not."
"You've had a year." She points the stem at me. "I've been patient. I have been extraordinarily patient." A beat. "What did you write?"
That first night. This field. The two of us flinging our arms at the sky like children, and neither of us willing to say.
"You go first," I tell her.
"I asked you first."
"You're older."
"I am significantly older, Iris, and I will die on this rise."
I look at her — my wife, filthy from the fields, lavender in her hair, holding a stem up like a wand with no intention whatsoever of backing down.
"Fine," I say. "Together. On three."
"On three."
"One—"
"Two—"
And we both lift our arms and write it across the sky, big, the way she taught me. The way her grandmother taught her.
Four letters.
The same four letters.
STAY.
I lower my arm.
Cat is staring at me.
"You wrote stay," she says. Her voice has gone entirely.
"So did you."
"I wrote it about you."
"I know." My throat closes. "I wrote it about you, too. I'd known you five weeks and I stood in a field and asked the sky to make you keep me."
Cat presses both hands over her mouth.
"I'd known you five weeks," she says, from behind them, "and I stood on that terrace and asked it not to let you go."
We look at each other.
Below us, the farmhouse sits in the last of the light with the kitchen window burning, because I left it on. Because I always do now.
"It worked," Cat says.
"It worked."
She takes my hand. And then — because she is exactly who she is, and because she has never once in her life been able to leave a moment alone — she raises the stem again.
"What are you doing?"
"Writing it again."
"We're already married, Cat. It's done. You don't have to ask the sky for it anymore."
"I know." She's grinning at me, wet-faced and ridiculous, sixty years of ordinary Tuesdays stretching out behind her like a promise. "I'm not asking."
And she writes it across the dark — enormous, both arms, like a woman sowing a field she loves.
STAY.
Not a wish.
A fact.
We walk down through the lavender to the house with the light on. And we go inside.
And we stay.