She doesn't mention it that night. Or in the morning. Or at all.
I keep waiting for the bill.
It never comes.
Mathilde corners me at the pass on Thursday, in the ten-minute lull between service and prep, and says, without any preamble at all:
"When I retire, you should buy this place."
I nearly drop a sauté pan.
"What?"
"Les Oliviers. When I retire." She's wiping down a board while she says this, entirely unbothered. "I am sixty-nine. I have a bad hip and a sister in Nice who is deeply irritating and lives beside the sea. I am not doing this forever."
"Mathilde—"
"You'd want to change the menu, which is fine, because my menu is thirty years old and I'm bored of it." She holds up a finger. "Not the daube. You may have everything except the daube."
"You want tosellme the bistro."
"I want to sell it to somebody who loves this village and understands what this room means to people. And unfortunately that appears to be an Englishwoman." She shrugs, magnificently. "The universe is cruel."
I stand in the middle of her kitchen holding a pan.
"I'd have to talk to Iris," I say.
"Obviously you'd have to talk to Iris." Mathilde snorts. "She'll have a spreadsheet before you've finished the sentence."
She is not wrong.
I walk home through the stubble and let myself think about it properly for the first time.
The bistro and the distillery. A restaurant and a lavender business, side by side, one feeding the other. Iris has half of it built already — she's been quietly making supplier calls for a month and thinks I haven't noticed, which is adorable, because she leaves the tabs open.
We could actually do this.
We could build a thing that outlives us.
And the thought doesn't send me running.
That's what stops me dead in a field, in the cold, at half past six in the evening. The idea of a whole life — years of it, decades of it, boring parts and all — does not make me want to get into the car.
It makes me want to gethome.
Which is, I suppose, how I come to ruin a perfectly good dinner.
I had a plan. I'd like that noted. I had anexcellentplan — a proper one, with a date and a location and a ring I have not yet bought and a speech I have not yet written — scheduled for some vague future moment when I would be a calmer and more impressive person.
The plan survives until pudding.
Iris is telling me about a supplier in Aix who has been rude to her on the telephone twice, and she's doing the man's voice, and she's doing itbadly, and she has a fleck of tarte tatin on her chin, and the lamp over the table is doing something completely unforgivable to her hair.
And I hear myself say:
"Marry me."
Iris stops mid-word.
