When Emma wakes, Betty is sat in the chair beside her. She is wearing a shirt covered in red ladybirds, and Emma immediately knows that all is right with the world. Betty has her nose in a book, but she turns as Emma stirs.
‘Betty, did I dream it or did my mother come to see me?’
‘Yes, she did, love. It took me a while to find her number and to start with, I don’t think she realised how serious it all was– she just kept saying you shouldn’t have come to Paris in August.’ Betty sniffs. ‘As if that has anything to do with the price of fish.’
Emma half smiles. ‘Is she coming back?’
Emma’s phone got smashed when she collapsed and like Tamas’s after the crash, her screen is now cracked and her phone unusable.
‘Well, love, it seems there was something she needed to get back for, and so once she knew you were all right,’ Betty sniffs again, ‘well, she went off to visit these friends, but she’s coming back at the weekend.’
‘Good of her,’ Emma observes.
Betty gives her a long look and returns to her book.
As Emma lies, half drifting in and out of sleep, she thinks of Violet. She wonders if she will ever dream of her again, but something tells her she never will. Each time she thinks of the dream, her memory of it becomes more faded. Perhaps one night all that will be left are the words: ‘Then youdoknow me?’ Although even now, Emma wishes she had asked the question the other way round: ‘How do I know you?’
Most of her thoughts are of Will. Something has shifted, she can tell that. There is less pain. Occasionally, she tries to recapture the former agony as a way to reach him, but it is somehow elusive. All she finds is an aching emptiness rather than the searing pain of old, and she knows she has to say goodbye.
She first realised it with Philippe by his swimming pool– breathing in the scent of sandalwood. She wonders if, from now on, she will always associate the smell of sandalwood with the smell of chlorine.
The weekend arrives and with it comes a visit from Philippe and from the hotel manager, who wants to see how she is doing. There is no sign of her mother, just a delivery of a vast bouquet of Madonna lilies with a note wishing her daughter a speedy recovery and assuring her she will be back in the week to see her.
Emma asks Betty to give the lilies to one of the nurses and returns to emailing Guy on her tablet. She is still waiting on a new phone, but Betty has brought her bag into the hospital with clothes and other things she might need.
By Monday, there is talk of her being allowed to ‘go home’ to the hotel– and by Tuesday, Betty has arranged for them to have adjoining rooms on the ground floor, despite Emma insisting she is perfectly capable of walking up the stairs.
Les helps her organise this ‘homecoming’, before returning to Oxford and the garden centre. They are to follow three days later.
Les bids Emma a warm farewell, adding, ‘And as for the future … well … you may not know what you want, but you know how to get it.’
This makes an odd sort of sense to Emma, although it is certainly not one of Les’s usual sayings. She smiles, asking, ‘Where’s that from, Les?’
He rubs his beard, ‘The Sex Pistols.’
Breakfast has finished and Emma has secured herself a table by the window in the hotel’s dining room. The hotel is much the same– busy with summer visitors– but for Emma it has the feeling of a seaside hotel at the end of the season. The red and white geraniums in the window box beside her are looking parched and leggy.
She is wearing a simple dressing rather than a bandage, and with a scarf around her head, she is able to hide where her head has been shaved and make it look like she has swept her hair up to one side. She still feels fragile and a bit sore, but there is no doubt that the blood transfusion and iron pills have made a big difference. She has not had a headache for days and she is no longer swamped by the lethargic light-headedness she had grown so used to. Despite the fragility, she feels like a new woman.
She has even managed a trip to her mother’s apartment to collect the suitcase of family photos and documents her mother kept there. That was not a pleasant trip. The stark elegance of the echoing apartment was a reminder of her childhood– not that there was anything in the décor or ornaments that Emma could remember. It seemed as though, since her father’s death, her mother had whitewashed her family out of her life.
Still, she did find the documents and photo albums and although she hasn’t felt ready to delve into these yet, they are safely stored under her hotel bed.
For now, Emma’s laptop is open on a table by the window, and she has just had an email from Alistair. Since their Zoom call he has emailed her more information about Violet’s later life: how she had married briefly but it hadn’t worked out; how she had never had children; how, when she retired after a life at sea, she moved to Suffolk to be near her sister, happily tending her garden until she died.
She is partway through typing a reply to Alistair when Betty joins her, carrying a pot of coffee.
‘Everything good with you?’ Emma asks, already knowing the answer. Les and Betty have decided to come back to Paris in the autumn to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary.
‘More than good, love,’ Betty says, sitting down. ‘Do you remember I said Les had some ideas for the garden centre? Well, he told me on the phone last night that the deal he’s been working on is ready to go through. And, if I agree, we’ll be selling a small parcel of our land.’
‘Really?’ Emma tries to sound positive, but she knows it comes out as worried.
Betty smiles, reassuringly. ‘He says you gave him the idea when you talked about what you could do with a small plot– you remember, to give people some inspiration? Well, it gave him the notion that maybe we didn’t need quite so much land and could manage with a bit less. It will give us money to do the renovations and it will mean we won’t be worrying.Plus we can visit New Zealand each year– we thought January would be a good time to go.’
‘Who are you selling the land to?’
‘Well, that’s the great part, love. The council is keen to provide more allotments in the area, and so they’re offering a very good price. In the long run it saves them money if they can add to an existing site rather than start new allotments from scratch.’
