The French Gardener(55)
“Ah,” said Phillip with a frown. “I’m not sure the nursery magic extends to vegetables. That’s a question for the vegetable fairy.”
“I so want him to be real,” she sighed.
“If you want him to be real, darling, he will be. He’ll be whatever you want him to be. You just have to use your imagination,” said Ava.
“But I want everyone else to see that he’s real.”
“We do,” Jean-Paul interjected, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees. “To me, he’s been real since I was introduced to him.” Poppy hid her smile behind the blanket, disguising her delight by pretending to be sleepy.
“You see,” said Ava, kissing her again.
“I think you should take him back to bed,” said Phillip. “He’ll only be grumpy in the morning if he doesn’t get his sleep.” Ava lifted Poppy off her lap and led her out of the drawing room. The child caught Jean-Paul’s eye and smiled shyly.
The rest of the week was taken up with planting all the flowers and shrubs. They followed Ava’s plan, placing each pot in its place on top of the soil, before planting it. Jean-Paul listened as she explained her reasons for positioning them as she did, patiently teaching him the names and preferred conditions of each. At the end of the day the children watered them with small watering cans of their own. By the end of the week they had finished planting. As if by magic gray clouds gathered above them and it began to rain. The children ran about with their mouths open, catching the drops on protruding tongues, while Ava and Jean-Paul laughed in astonishment at their good fortune. Hector drove the tractor back to Ian Fitzherbert’s farm, shaking his head at the family’s eccentricity.
Ava asked Toddy to bring her cousins for lunch on Sunday to meet Jean-Paul. Toddy was delighted, guaranteeing two, if not three, twentyish girls for him to choose from. “They’re jolly pretty,” she assured her. “Especially Lizzie. God, if I were only ten years younger I’d throw myself at Jean-Paul.” Ava’s parents, Donald and Verity, arrived on Friday night with Heinz, a small red sausage dog whose sharp yap and short scurrying legs terrified Bernie almost as much as Mr. Frisby.
Verity was similar to her daughter—a handsome woman with kind green eyes and strong bone structure who never felt the cold, but her strident nature had been mercifully diluted in Ava. With gray hair swept up into a beehive, her head looked out of proportion with her short body, but not even her daughter had the courage to tell her the look was outdated and unbecoming. Her husband had ceased to notice long ago; it was her personality that demanded attention and no one could ignore that. She spoke her mind, as old people do, and knew best, as grandmothers do. But she loved her grandchildren, always bringing presents and telling them stories which she’d invent as she went along, holding them in her thrall with colorful descriptions and eccentric characters which included their own toys magically brought to life.
“Did you know that Daisy Hopeton has left her husband and four children to run off with a South African who owns a vineyard in Constantia?” said Verity over dinner. Ava’s appalled reaction was very satisfactory. “I know,” continued Verity, shaking her beehive. “It’s ghastly. Poor Michael doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. Having to bring up those four children on his own. Why, Oliver’s only Archie’s age.”
“That’s terrible,” gasped Ava, who had been a childhood friend of Daisy’s. “How can a woman leave four children?”
“Quite,” Phillip agreed. “It’s disgraceful.”
“Disgraceful,” Donald repeated. He’d listened to nothing else all the way from Hampshire and was now bored of the subject. Verity was fired up with the story and had been on the telephone spreading it around to all her friends.
“From the horse’s mother’s mouth,” Verity confirmed when Phillip asked how she’d heard. “As you can imagine, she’s beside herself. One doesn’t expect one’s own child to let one down in such a public way. For a South African! She’s run off to the other side of the world. Why she didn’t take her children with her, I can’t imagine. What sort of woman leaves her children? It’s unthinkable!”
“She must have been dreadfully unhappy,” said Ava, trying to find something nice to say.
“Nonsense, darling! You bite the bullet and get on with it. One can’t expect to be happy all the time. That’s the trouble with your generation, you didn’t live through the war. You expect to be happy, as if it’s a right. It’s not a right. It’s a bonus. The cherry on the cake. Daisy’s a mother and she owes it to those children to bring them up. They’re going to have to live with the knowledge that they were abandoned. Imagine what a terrible scar. Those poor darlings. My heart bleeds for them. Bleeds for them,” she repeated with emphasis. “Darling, this soup is frightfully good. What is it?”