Roman said to me:
“I hate Sundays.”
“You could always come and see me.”
I said that to my feet because, this morning, I found looking him in the eye impossible again. Hélène’s death had taken me back to square one where his eyes were concerned.
“Will you be staying in the area?”
“Where else do you expect me to go?”
“Well, regarding that, I have a present for you.”
He said it to the beer he was drinking. Because something about me must have been impossible to look at too.
We were on the cold, impersonal concourse of the TGV railway station, the one that’s a forty-minute drive from Milly. A few bistro-style tables had been put there, in a corner, beside a makeshift bar on which three travelers leaned, sipping their coffees. We were sitting close to an automatic exit door that kept opening and closing without anyone ever walking through it. Every so often, our conversation was interrupted by the almighty roar of a train speeding towards Lyon, Marseille, or Paris.
That morning, Roman had phoned me at The Hydrangeas to tell me that he wanted to see me, but not there. For now, he just couldn’t bear to be back there, at The Hydrangeas, again. He handed me an envelope. A large envelope.
“You can open it once I’ve gone.”
He said that to my eyes, because this time, we did look at each other. At the same time.
“OK. I have something for you, too.”
I leant down to my bag, which was on the floor. Jo always says you mustn’t put your bag on the floor, it brings bad luck, and you’ll never have any money if you do so. I thought of Jo’s love for Patrick as I handed the blue notebook to Roman.
“It’s your grandparents’ story. I’ve finished writing it.”
“Thank you.”
He stroked the cover of the blue notebook as though it were a woman’s skin. And, without looking at me, as he inhaled the paper of some random pages, he murmured:
“The day I asked you to write down Hélène’s story, you had an eyelash on your cheek . . . I asked you to make a wish.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“And . . . did you make your wish?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
I indicated the blue notebook to him. “My wish was to write it to the very end, not give up halfway.”
There was a great silence, a general strike, no TGV for several minutes. He drank some beer. Stroked the blue cover with his girl’s fingers. And then said:
“It’s a fine title, The Lady of the Beach.”
“Where are Hélène’s ashes?” I asked.
“My mother scattered them into the Mediterranean.”
“Hélène called it her blue suitcase.”
He finished off his beer.
“And Edna?”
“Edna lives in London, at her youngest daughter’s. She’ll be ninety-four next month. She had two children after . . . Rose.”
“Do you see her?”
“Occasionally.”
A woman’s voice joined our table, the one announcing his imminent departure. He stood up, took hold of my hands, kissed them, and headed for the platform.
His departure floored me.
I did what they do in films, I ordered a whiskey. A drink I loathe, but I so wanted to be in someone else’s film. I downed my whiskey in one. It burnt me inside. My head began to swim a little. I thought of Hélène and Lucien. And I saw the two of them there, behind the bar. They’d changed bistro. I even saw Louve, asleep on the sawdust.
I thought of the Mediterranean. I thought of the seagull. I thought of afterwards, of Gramps and Annette.
The envelope Roman had given me was still on the table. It was just a brown envelope, but surely contained more than just a postcard. I opened it. Inside, there were some documents. The most serious-looking kind. Those that, all your life, you put away in a drawer so as not to lose them. They were the deeds to a property.
I went over them several times because my full name kept cropping up, but was still none the wiser. It was all written in Italian.
I almost ordered another whiskey, but then I spotted the other envelope, smaller and paler, tucked in the middle. With “Justine” written in fountain pen on it, as beautifully as it had been on the flyleaf of From the Land of the Moon.
Inside the envelope, I found a note. Still in Roman’s handwriting: “Justine, the Sardinian house is yours. My family and I bequeath it to you.”
I gazed all around me. I pinched my own arm. I stood up.
I was about to leave the station concourse when the barman caught hold of my arm. The one I’d just pinched.
“Mademoiselle, you’ve forgotten that.”
He pointed at a huge parcel placed against the lowered shutter of a newsstand.
“It’s not mine.”
“It is. The man you were with told me it was for you. And even that it weighs a ton.”
On the parcel, that same “Justine” again, written in blue ink.
I asked the barman for some scissors. He didn’t have any. But he took a little knife out of his pocket. He cut the strings carefully, repeating three times, If you ask me, it’s something valuable. It’s true that it did look like a carefully wrapped painting, straight out of a museum. A painting I wouldn’t be able to carry on my own, it was so large and heavy. It would never fit into Gramps’s car.
While the barman was unwrapping the mysterious object, I kept looking inside my bag to check the two envelopes were really there. That they hadn’t flown away. That the whole thing wasn’t a dream. Even though it was one. I, Justine Neige, orphan, twenty-one, nearly twenty-two, was the owner of a house because I’d listened to a woman telling me her story.
The four travelers now leaning on the bar came over to us. When the barman had finally removed the many bits of cardboard and wrapping paper protecting the object, I discovered that it wasn’t a painting, but a huge black-and-white photograph under glass.
Initially, I recoiled. Someone had followed me without my knowledge.
On the photograph, Hélène’s seagull was in the foreground. I was sure it was hers, I’d have known it anywhere. It was flying behind me, against the light, in the lane where I feed the fat cat.
The photograph was breathtakingly beautiful.
The four travelers murmured how marvelous it was. The barman couldn’t tear his eyes away from it. He swiveled it around. On the back, it was signed by Roman, and there was a title and a date: “Justine and the bird, January 19, 2014.”
Three days after Hélène’s death, the seagull had come to bid me farewell. And Roman had captured that moment forever.