She lets her sister follow her to say goodbye. Together, they gather a bunch of wildflowers, and she ties them with an old yellow ribbon that once adorned a straw hat. She holds her sister’s small hand as they walk up the hill and carries her when she gets too tired. She doesn’t want to be with her mother now; she thinks her mother’s sadness could overwhelm them and wash them all away.
Loss has changed her, too, but she cannot put her finger on exactly how. When she tries to imagine her finger finding the spot and pressing it, like when her mother asks her to place a finger to tie a ribbon, she fears she would not be able to bear the pain of it. So she focuses on the flowers she holds in her hand.
They take their bunch of flowers and place it on a grave by the wall. The plot is marked by a trailing blue plumbago that their mother planted, the petals tiny and delicate. She hopes the plumbago will grow and flower, getting stronger each year. Maybe it will send out tendrils and wrap its arms around the two stones next to it. Graves where no one ever leaves flowers.
She knows her father will forgive them for leaving. He understood when he grew sick after the operation that there was little chance of them keeping the house. The farm had gone a few years earlier when he could not afford to keep the flock. Now there is nothing left to sell.
Her mother had talked about the Lord providing and said she knew it would work out. But she thinks nobody, not even the priest, believed her. Her father knew they would need the help of family, and their family are an ocean away.
So now they are piling everything they own into a cart and are starting on the journey. All they will leave behind in Argentina is a grave on a hillside planted with plumbago.
Chapter 17
Emma
Bearded Iris
The evening has brought more rain. Emma looks out into the garden from the kitchen window and thinks back to her conversation with Betty and Les. With the memory comes warmth, and a glimmer of something else … anticipation? She had said she was writing a book, and maybe she will do just that. She has no idea what type of book, but it feels like it could be the start of something.
Her phone rings. It’s her mother. She feels a faint headache form at her temples, but the lingering warmth gives her the confidence to answer.
‘Hi, Mum, how are you?’
‘Ah, you’re there. Nice of you to call me back…’
Her mother lets that hang a while– an early marker that claims the space and air between them.
‘… I’ve been thinking about my birthday,’ her mother continues.
Emma does a quick mental calculation. She hasn’t missed a significant one. Her mother is sixty-seven. ‘That’s not until October.’ Her anxiety wrings the flat statement out until only questions are left.Have I missed something, got something wrong?
Her mother ignores her; Emma’s words are mere stepping stones to what she really wants to say. ‘Mathias needs to know the numbers in plenty of time. We will all be at his chateau on the Loire.’
‘Mathias?’
‘You know, Mathias and Lina, friends of Paul and Celia– I’ve mentioned them a dozen times. Mathias is insisting we have the week in the chateau with him.’
Emma has no idea who these people are. Her mother lives on her own in Paris but surrounds herself with an ever-changing circle of the ‘right’ people. Well, Emma corrects herself, the rightmen. Thinking back to Mathias, Emma wonders what his wife, Lina, thinks of this week in the chateau– ‘with him’. Not ‘them’, she notices.
Her mother rattles on, ‘Mathias employs over a hundred gardeners. He has a lime tree grove, a topiary maze and five thousand Oriental lilies.’
Emma does another quick calculation; fifty lilies per gardener. She doesn’t imagine Mathias is a man who gets his hands dirty.
‘Mum, I’m thinking of writing a book.’ She doesn’t know why she says this. Maybe to grab at something, to stop the slide into her mother’s world?
Her mother ignores this. Did she even say it at all?
‘We’re going for the week, but my plan is that you should come down for the weekend. Mathias is hosting a party for me on the Saturday night. You could fix it around one of your conferences…’
Great, I’ll ask the scientific world to plan an international symposium around your birthday, and, by the way, Mum, I’ve left work.
She is back to words that only resonate in her head. She has never told her mother about her new job, and as her mother never asks about her work, weeks pass, months pass and her mum is none the wiser about her life.
‘… We will be heading down the river on M’s boat on the Friday night– I haven’t included you in that. You can have a night in the chateau. It’s wonderful, original baroque. We can’t take the children on the boat– it’s not really suitable—’
What children?
‘—but I said you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on them.’
