Without a word, he gathered her into his arms and held her tightly to him, warming her with the heat of his body, smoothing her hair back from her eyes so that he could kiss away the hot tears that she began to weep. He rocked her, as a mother gently rocks a baby, and let her cry, silently at first, but then with wrenching, guttural sobs that seemed torn from the deepest reaches of her shattered heart.
She fell silent finally, her tears spent at last. He held her still and they lay together, cradled in the dunes’ embrace with the roar of the wind and the sea all around them. But she felt warm now, safe in her husband’s strong arms, the blood in her veins beginning to thaw and flow again like the quiet, almost imperceptible trickle of the first streams after a long and bitter winter.
Her dry, cracked lips moved and he leant in close to hear her whispered words. And he smiled, hearing the wonderment in her voice as she echoed the words she’d said that night, so many years ago, in a dark and alien forest:
‘You came to find me. I was lost and you came to find me.’
2015, Edinburgh
As I read the last words I’ve written, my grandmother nods and her eyes close, a smile illuminating the soft skin of her face, as worn and fragile as the powder-blue cardigan that’s draped over her shoulders. (I’ve offered to buy her a new one to replace it, but she laughed and said, ‘You’d be wasting your money, my dear Kendra. This comfortable old friend will see me out.’)
Over the winter, week by week, I’ve untangled Ella’s story from her cache of memories, the tapes and photographs and letters, and written it down the way she wanted it to be told. When I began, I’d thought it would be a simple exercise of typing out her words exactly as she’d spoken them into her tape recorder. But as I listened and pored over the neatly ordered photo albums and shuffled through the letters from Christophe and Caroline, her story had drawn me in so that I could see it through her eyes; it seemed to be writing itself, carrying me along so that I, too, fell in love with the places and the people who had filled her life with everyday miracles.
I’ve grown far closer to her in these last months and, instead of the chore it used to be, visiting Ella has become one of the highlights of my week. It’s been a welcome escape from the realities of my own life, the draining demands of my job and the anxieties about my son and my husband. But it’s more than that too. I see her differently now that I know her story. Her past has come to life and made me see what really matters in this world. I’m proud that I’m her granddaughter and I hope that I can claim some of her courage and her sense of beauty in my own genetic make-up.
As the words I’ve just finished reading hang in the air around us, I stroke my grandmother’s age-spotted hand, the skin soft as crumpled tissue paper. I see each brown mark, each callus, each stiff, gnarled knuckle differently now. The scatterings of dark stains, which the French call ‘the flowers of death’, are reminders of summers spent on a sun-soaked island – more sea than land – where, for the first time, a young woman found freedom and love; the calluses tell of a sail-boat skimming across the lace-capped waves with sheets close-hauled, the ocean’s wind catching each breath and tossing it into the eternity of a perfect blue sky; and the swollen joints are mementos of acts of breath-taking love and courage, these hands that clasped and held and carried, a whole history of work and motherhood: an extraordinary life.
But they are hands that had to learn to let go too, just as I will have to let go soon of this frail hand that I hold in mine.
There’s a tap at the door. A nurse pops her head round and I turn to meet her bright, professional smile with a polite one of my own.
‘All okay here?’ she asks, her voice softer than usual, out of respect for death’s hushed presence in the room. The open door allows in a waft of nursing-home air, which smells of the plug-in air-fresheners that spit a venomous, chemical scent at each passing pair of legs to mask the underlying perfume of urine and disinfectant. It mingles with the scent of the white lilies in a vase on the chest of drawers in the corner of the room. I brought another bunch with me when I last came to visit. They’re past their best now, the pure white petals turning to parchment as they decay.
I nod, smile again at the nurse and turn back to my grandmother. Ella’s breathing is faint, a shallow, staccato sip on the inhalation; an impossibly long pause; a faint sigh on the exhalation.
I wish I’d known Ella’s story before, so that I could have been a better granddaughter to her than I have been. But at least I came to understand it before it was too late. At least her story can now be told. I hope my mother will understand too, now, before it’s too late for her to make her peace.
My heart was in my mouth when I’d finished writing; the day I brought the finished manuscript to Ella’s room. What would she make of it? Had I done her story justice?
She had been awake, but she asked me to read it aloud to her, saying, ‘I’m too far gone these days. My eyesight is so poor, and my memory wanders so if I try to read anything myself. But they do say that hearing is the last of the senses to go. So, read it to me, my dear. Let me listen to my own story one last time.’
There’s been an unspoken sense of urgency these past few days. Every time I came to visit her to read her some more of the manuscript, she’d drifted a little further away. She would fall asleep sometimes as I was reading to her and then I’d mark the place carefully and tiptoe away, hoping that she was dreaming of the Île de Ré, or the beach at Arisaig, and the two men who have loved her as she has loved them.
And this final day, with the last words read, I sit in silence, watching her smile as she lies there with her eyes closed. And my heart swells with happiness that I’ve done her story justice and with sadness that, now that it’s told, there’s a sense of another ending that sits heavily in the hot, artificially scented room.
I wonder whether I should leave her to sleep, but suddenly her eyes open wide, the misted sea-green of them clearing so that, for a few moments they are the colour of the deepest ocean once again. Viridian.
‘Thank you, Kendra,’ she says. ‘I knew you would tell my story well. That you would understand. That you would write the truth of it all.’
‘I’ll give it to Mum,’ I reply. ‘I know she’ll see things differently too when she reads the whole of the truth.’
Ella nods and then reaches her age-spotted hand towards the bedside cabinet, pointing to the fine, deep-blue ceramic bowl shot through with a vein of purest gold like a lightning bolt.
‘It’s the kintsukuroi bowl, isn’t it Granny?’
‘Caroline gave it to me when Angus and I left the island.’ Her voice is a faint whisper now and I have to lean in close to hear what she’s saying. ‘She asked us to call in at the gallery on our way past, just as we were setting off for home. We walked in and when Angus saw the painting, Neptune’s Locket, he looked at it for a good long spell. Then he nodded, and said, “He loved you the way I love you – body and soul.” It felt as if he was laying to rest the spectre of Christophe that had haunted him throughout our marriage. A bit of closure, I suppose. And then Caroline said that she had something to tell us. Which was that Christophe had left the painting to me.’ She frowns, struggling to remember.
‘At that news, Angus’s expression flickered – just the tiniest bit, but I noticed it. And in that moment I understood that his acceptance had taken courage and generosity of spirit, but that having the painting there the whole time would have been too much, even for him. So I said to Caroline that I didn’t think there was room for it above the mantelpiece in Morningside. Can you imagine how out of place it would have been in that setting? I told Caroline that the painting belonged where it was, in the gallery, so that people could still come and see it. And that was the right thing to say because I saw the look of relief on Angus’s face. But then he said, “And we will come back every summer to visit it, and you can show me this island which has been the other love of your life.” So, that’s what we did.’
‘Where is the painting now, Granny?’
‘Why, Kendra, it’s there!’ Sudden joy flickers across Ella’s face. ‘Caroline is still alive; she lives on the Île de Ré. She has help, of course. Do you remember Sandrine and Benoît, who used to manage the house for the Martets? Whose daughter cared for Christophe through his illness? Well, they are long gone, but their granddaughter runs the gallery in Saint Martin for Caroline. And Caroline herself still goes there most days to supervise things, despite her age. She’s quite famous in the art world and still has the keen eye for beauty she always had . . .’