Chapter Twenty-eight

La clé

On my last day in Saint Clair, I received one final treasure.

It had started to rain as I packed my suitcase, and Josephine texted.

It’s not very nice with the rain. I spoke with Ivor, he says it would be better if you come to the Villa to spend the rest of your time in Saint Clair.

I hadn’t expected her to leave me the key.

It was different being left alone in the Villa. When the gate locked shut, I walked the circumference of the garden from lemon tree to mimosa tree, and sat on the stone porch that looked down to the sea. I felt so content.

I wandered from room to room in the 1920s-built mansion. The floorboards, the tiles, most of the fittings and fixtures were exactly as they would have been when dad, Kershaw, and Aldington had stayed there, writing and dreaming and singing and sighing and entertaining guests from England and Australia who shared one thing in common: a love of poetry, a sense of the sweetness of life and how much it needed to be preserved, or reimagined. A protection of their precious peace, because they knew what war could shatter.

My peace here … an absence of strain and strife, it has always been peace.

I walked upstairs to the master room, and looked out the shutter windows to the ocean, almost hearing music on the gramophone, dad playing the large piano downstairs, I could even taste the sweet, dry bubble of champagne Richard might have opened from the verandah. I could feel love and peace emanating from the floorboards, coming from all who had lived and laughed here, and all the poetry they’d created from those times and in the path their lives took afterwards. The choices they had made to come here, what they’d suffered and what they’d saved.

I smelled the mist rising up from the garden, and that same Mediterranean air dad had inhaled in 1948, and I remembered his words.

Here, I see the war was worth it.

Downstairs, I returned to my notebooks, carrying dad’s heavy French memoir into the living room, where I could curl up under the lamp on the couch.

I leafed through the pages of dad’s memoir, thinking of the extraordinary journey he’d taken to come here, to start a life in France. The pages typed on an ancient, heavy typewriter, the stiffness of his aching back making the typing exercise a battle between awareness of pain and the desire to see something through. The desire to create something that lasted.

The memoir had been the heaviest thing in my suitcase to France, probably weighing as much as his ancient typewriter, and I’d almost left it in Australia, until Ayala implored me to use it as a guide through the French life of dad.

I’d used that memoir as a map, retracing dad’s footsteps in Paris and Saint Clair. While the France that I saw wasn’t still peppered with scars from the occupation of World War II as it was when he arrived, everywhere I’d journeyed held ruins from ancient battles, and doorways to medieval churches.

I lay down dad’s memoir in the Villa Aucassin as a thank-you to Ivor for keeping it as it was, for letting me in.

Besides, I knew the story and I would always have it, now — the feeling of a life that held joy as well as sorrow, sunshine as well as sickness, a beauty and love that lasted so much longer than his physical pain. Dad’s words had shown me the way. I’m sure he would have liked that memoir to return to Saint Clair, to the Villa where, outside, the nightingales still sing during the day, his words back in his beloved France full of people who felt like kin.

I wrote a long note and slipped it into the front page, placing the heavy manuscript on the table in the room that looked out to the sea.

After an hour alone in the precious Villa, Raphaël arrived, the man who’d bridged the divide between me and Saint Clair. He parked outside and I opened the gate.

‘So — you have your key … ?’ he said, and I’d been lost in thought for so long I thought he was being poetic.

‘No, I mean, we need to lock the door.’ I just stood there, blankly.

We laughed in a way that bridged all our language mishaps. But he seemed concerned about something — and there was a change in his face. He looked at his watch.

‘Louisa — have you eaten?’

Oh, France. The necessity of food.

‘Raphaël, I have to ask. You and Josephine have been so generous, so kind. Why?’

He looked at me thoughtfully, opening the door to his car.

‘Because we see, the story is very sensible.’

‘Sensitive?’

‘Oui. Pardon …’

He stood, choosing the right words to finish.

‘And — it is your father.’