"I'm aware."
"Nerves or joy?"
I think about it seriously.
"I don't know," I say. "I've never had both at the same time before."
Nadia's face does something. She turns away and busies herself with my dress and does not comment.
The painting is above the fireplace. I go and look at it in my dressing gown, with jam on my thumb.
Marguerite at thirty, lit up like a window, looking at something outside the frame.
My mother is not going to be in that field today. She told me plainly, and I have not spent one hour pretending otherwise.
But she paid a storage bill every month for twenty-nine years on a crate she couldn't bring herself to open. And standing here, I find I can hold two things at once now — that she is a woman who did something unforgivable to me, and a woman who could never quite let go of her own mother's face.
I don't cry. I'm not spending today crying about her.
I go and put my dress on.
There is no aisle. There's a gap between two blocks of chairs and a path somebody has trodden flat through the stalks, and it isn't straight, because nothing here is.
The whole village stands up when I come out of the house.
A hundred and ten people. Some of whom I have never met. All of whom, apparently, have opinions about my life.
And at the end of the path, under an arch Jacques built in two days out of olive wood while swearing continuously, is Cat.
Purple silk. Hair down. Already completely wrecked, and we haven't started.
The distance is about sixty metres. I cover it in roughly four steps and also about a year.
Michel goes ahead of me.
He is forty-one years old, six foot two, and wearing a suit that cost more than the still. He is carrying a small wicker basket.
And he is scattering lavender.
Into a lavender field.
He is doing itbeautifully— slow, solemn, two-handed, the way you'd sow a field you loved. He is taking it with total seriousness. And behind him, a hundred and ten French villagers are watching an enormous Englishman throw lavender at a field of lavender with tears standing in his eyes.
Monique is openly weeping. I don't believe she has understood the joke.
I'm not certain there's a joke anymore.
By the time I reach Cat I am laughing and crying at once and I have entirely forgotten to be nervous — which I suspect is exactly what he intended.
"Hi," Cat whispers.
"Hi."
"You—" Her voice goes. She stops. Tries again. "No.I've got nothing. I had something."
"You had index cards."
"I haveretiredthe index cards."
