Liz took the book off the shelf, closed her eyes and, holding it tightly, muttered ‘You did this, you can do it again. Your passion for writing will return. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it.’ Repetition she knew was crucial to get the brain hardwired to believe you were speaking the truth and get those pesky creative neurons to behave.
Guy, believing everyone had finished lunch and disappeared, came out of the kitchen to go to tidy the dining room but stopped as he saw Liz. He looked at the book she was holding, heard the words ‘passion for writing’ followed by ‘you can do it’ being repeated and decided a fraction of a second too late to step back into the kitchen before she saw him.
Liz opened her eyes at that instance and stared straight at him and their eyes locked in a gaze for a brief second before they both blinked and broke the spell that seemed to have descended over the two of them.
‘Hello. Would you be Elisabeth James, the novelist, by any chance?’ he said, his good manners instinctively surfacing as he remembered Sandy saying that the author was one of the retreat guests.
‘Most people call me Liz,’ she said, smiling.
‘The book you are holding was a favourite one of my wife Jacqueline – she had all of them.’
‘That is lovely to hear, thank you,’ Liz said.
Guy looked at Liz quizzically. ‘I couldn’t help hearing you mutter about doing it again – are you suffering from what I believe is called writer’s block?’
Liz feeling decidedly awkward at being found muttering over one of her own books, as well as being somewhat disorientated by their unexpected eye contact, gave him a sheepish smile. ‘I’m definitely a novelist in search of a story. I’m trying my best to psych myself up to get on with a new book. You must be Guy Lyon?’ she said. ‘I’m hopeful your garden might just have given me a germ of an idea.’
He nodded and held out his hand. ‘Lovely to meet you, Liz.’
‘You too, Guy,’ Liz said quietly as she registered a tingle in her hand as Guy shook it gently before releasing it. ‘Do you ever have a problem with not wanting to cook? Feel as though you’ve lost both your touch and your passion for doing what you love?’ she asked. ‘That’s been my problem for months now with writing – a lack of ideas stopping me from getting actual words on the paper – or, rather, the computer screen.’
Guy nodded in acknowledgement of her words, a rueful look on his face. ‘Last evening was the first dinner I’ve cooked for guests in nine months.’
‘It was a lovely meal, thank you,’ Liz said. ‘You definitely haven’t lost your touch. I love cooking, so I’m making notes for when I get home and can experiment in my kitchen.’ She hesitated. ‘I hope your passion returns soon and you cook many more meals in your beautiful villa.’
Wordlessly, Guy stared at her for several seconds before visibly taking a deep breath.
‘My passion died the night my wife died. I’m sorry. Excuse me,’ and Guy turned to go back to the kitchen.
Liz’s quiet, sincere words, ‘I’m so sorry,’ registered as he walked away and he waved his hand in the air in a gesture of acknowledgement without turning round.
Liz watched him go, inwardly cursing herself for unintentionally making such an insensitive, blundering remark. It wasn’t like her at all. She hated upsetting people, would in fact go out of her way to avoid doing that. She’d used the word passion in relation to his love of cooking like she had a passion for writing, but he’d chosen to attach it to the loss of his wife. Guy Lyon must have loved his wife deeply to have lost his passion for cooking – the very thing that defined him.
Carefully, she replaced the book on the shelf and headed upstairs.
Back in her room, she opened her laptop and tried to push the encounter with Guy to one side. There was nothing she could do about it right now. She would apologise for upsetting him if the opportunity presented itself, otherwise she was going to have to forget about the look of pain that had crossed his face as she spoke. Forget, too, the tingle as Guy had shaken her hand. It must have been caused by tiny nerves in her fingers being squeezed. She flexed both her hands. She’d had a problem with repetitive strain in her wrists several times. Hopefully that tingle was not linked to another bout being on the way.
Liz opened a new document on her laptop. She was here to write. Out in the garden, she’d promised herself this weekend was going to be the end of her ‘block’ – if that was what it was. She typed the words ‘New Book Thoughts’ at the top of the page. Until she’d teased out a basic premise for the story from the one or two fleeting thoughts she’d had in the garden, there was no way she was going to tempt fate and label the document Chapter One.
For the next hour or two, she lost herself thinking about the various characters that had started to clamour for a place in the storyline. Closing her laptop at the end of her brainstorming session, Liz gave a gentle sigh of relief. She’d planned a storyline she was happy with and already she was loving her main male character – he was going to be such fun to write.
* * *
Guy swore to himself as he poured a glass of water and went out into the kitchen yard. What the hell had just happened back then? He’d definitely felt a spark of something in those few seconds they’d held each other’s gaze. Shaking her hand, too, had fleetingly caused not a spark but a spasm of the nerve endings in his hand to tingle and had triggered something in his head – almost a feeling of relief, of coming home. He had no intention of becoming friends with or even letting another woman into his life, but if he did, then Liz would be the sort of woman he would like in his life.
He shouldn’t have answered Liz James like that, stonily and without regard to how it sounded to her. He’d seen the dismay on her face as she heard his words, realised that she’d upset him. The fact that he’d known as soon as he’d heard Liz’s words that she was referring to his passion for cooking and had nothing to do with his dead wife made his behaviour inexcusable. For some illogical reason, though, hearing the wordpassionhad tipped his mind into the dark place that was never very far away these days. He hadn’t given any thought to the words he spoke before he said them, they’d just burst out of him. He definitely owed Liz James an apology.
Upsetting people with his reaction to their sympathy was one of the reasons he’d stayed away from everyone for the past few months. And now he’d upset a woman who had been offering her sympathy over a different loss – his passion for cooking. But were his two lost passions now irrevocably linked together? Both lost forever? Life would scarcely be worth living if that were the case.
13
That evening, Becky led them through a network of narrow roads into one of the main squares of Antibes, Place Nationale, with its cafes, restaurants and boutiques. There was a jazz trio tucked up on the bandstand playing ragtime and they stopped to listen for several moments before Becky insisted they carried on to the cocktail bar.
‘This place is so cool compared to the bar you went to last night,’ she said, leading them down a side street.
Once inside the bar, it was clear that Becky was well known as several men and woman came over to kiss her cheeks and say ‘Hi.’
Becky took lots of photographs of the group in the nineteen twenties-themed bar, promising to tag them so they could share them on their own social media.
