“Loving you has been my greatest joy and my most dreadful sorrow. You will always be here in my heart. Every day I walk around our garden I will think of you and with every year that passes my love will grow stronger and deeper.”
“I will wait for you, ma pêche.” She so longed for him to mean it. Gratefully she grabbed the lifeline he now threw her.
“You promise? Because as soon as my children are older and Phillip doesn’t need me I will cut myself free. I’ll be ready for you to take me to France. We can grow old together and love without guilt, knowing that I stayed when I had to. That I did my duty.”
“I wish you could leave with me now, but you’re not that sort of woman and I love you for it. We have got away without hurting anyone. Only ourselves.”
She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Everything will be so empty once you’re gone. So pointless. There will be no more magic, just soil and plants like every other garden in the world.”
He looked at her with fire in his eyes. “The magic is deep in the earth, Ava. It will always be there because we sowed it. Don’t ever forget that.”
They made love one last time as the rain rattled against the windows. “One day I’ll come back to this cottage and reclaim you,” he said, kissing her temple. “I’ll find you here, waiting for me, and nothing will have changed. The teacups will be on the table, the kettle hot and a fresh coffee cake, your very best, to welcome me home. This is our special place. Leave it as it is. As a shrine to us, so that one day, when I come back, it will be like yesterday. I will walk in as if I have only been away for an hour and we will pick up where we left off. We will look older, a little frayed at the edges, a little wiser, but our love won’t have changed. I will take you to France and we will sow our magic in the gardens of Les Lucioles and live out the rest of our days together.”
“What a beautiful dream,” she sighed, burying her face in his neck.
“If we dream hard enough it might come true. Like your silly pink in between the green and the blue. If we look hard enough we may see it.”
“We’ll create a rainbow to last,” she whispered, no longer able to restrain her tears.
She stood in the doorway and watched him walk away. It was as he wanted, a small bag in his hand, as if he were only going for an hour. She watched until he was out of sight, walking down the river towards the village where he would take a taxi to the station. He hadn’t wanted to say good-bye to the children or Phillip; he didn’t think he could bear it. Instead, he had kissed the woman he loved and taken her love with him.
No one else seemed in the least surprised that Jean-Paul had gone, though Phillip was a little put out that he hadn’t bothered to say good-bye. It was the end of the summer and he had always said he would stay a year. Hector and Ava continued in the gardens as they always had. But Hector missed him, too. Ava wondered whether he knew about their affair; he looked at her with such sympathy in his eyes, as if he understood her pain. The children went back to school and Phillip finished his book. Toddy took Ava riding on the hills and noticed that the bounce had gone from her step and that she had lost her glow. She suspected it had something to do with Jean-Paul, but for once she kept her thoughts to herself. When Ava had told her that Jean-Paul had left, she had tried so hard to mask her pain, but Toddy had seen it behind her eyes and in the way she had averted her gaze. She knew if she pressed her on the subject she would cause her friend terrible suffering. Ava would tell her when she was ready. In the meantime, she stayed close, as an old and trusted friend, giving comfort with her familiar presence.
Ava wandered around the gardens like a specter. Alone at night she sat on the bench beneath the mountain ash, recalling their relationship in painstaking detail, from the day they met to the day they parted, until finally she withdrew to the cottage where she began her scrapbook, sticking in petals from the flowers they had planted together and leaves from trees and shrubs that held a special significance for them. She wrote poems, descriptions of the gardens, lists of the things she loved the most from the morning light on the lawn to snowdrops peeping through frost. She wrote because it was cathartic and because her memories relieved the pain.
Jean-Paul returned to France, his heart bleeding from a wound that would never heal. His life stretched out before him like an eternal sea upon which he would drift, abandoned and alone, like the Flying Dutchman. He had no desire to discuss his feelings, but his father picked him up at the airport and drove him home, and he found himself confiding his hurt. To Jean-Paul’s surprise, Henri didn’t berate him as his mother had done, but smiled indulgently. “Look,” he began when they were on the open road. “Let’s talk man to man.” Jean-Paul was in no mood for one of his father’s lectures. “I make it no secret that I have lived half my life in Paris with Yvette. There is nothing wrong with a man taking a mistress. There’s a great deal wrong with a man wanting to marry his mistress. Especially if the woman in question is Ava Lightly.”