He stands, sketching, at the window of his quiet first-floor room. His limbs are an even shade of brown and he has the start of a beard growing. The deep furrows across his forehead have softened, and his hair is longer than it usually is. He’s been here six days already, and every day he wonders what took him so long. He wears flip flops and second-hand khaki shorts, and a pale blue T-shirt that once came from New York. The collar is frayed.
The window is open and the sounds are of cicadas, swallows and occasional footsteps on the path below. Across the grounds at the back of the mas, the air is corrugated by the blistering heat. The colour of the sky brings back memories that are no longer painful.
He looks at his watch. It’s time. He puts down his sketchbook and leaves the room.
The courtyard is deserted. The tables have been cleared of breakfast, and water from a small fountain dribbles noisily into a granite trough. He sits down in the shade of an olive tree and waits.
He hears car tyres on gravel, a door slam. A smallish man with grey hair – sixty maybe? – comes towards him smiling, hand outstretched.
Monsieur Judd, he says. I’m sorry I’m late . . .
Ellis stands up and shakes his hand. Monsieur Crillon? Thank you for meeting me.
No, no, please, he says. I’m so sorry about your friend. Of course, I remember Monsieur Triste. He arrived my first summer here. Come.
Ellis follows him into the cool of his office. Monsieur Crillon opens a drawer and says, The sheds are not homes now, but you know, eh?
Yes, of course. I realise, says Ellis.
Monsieur Crillon looks up from the desk. Here, he says. Keys. This is for the main gate. The others – you must try.
Ellis crosses the gardens towards the dark monoliths of cypresses. The key turns easily in the wooden gate, and he makes his way through the scrubby grass, as Michael once did, towards the five stone sheds and field of sunflowers that lie behind. And he thinks about Michael’s loneliness, and he thinks about his own. And he thinks his own might be manageable now.
The sign ‘Mistral’ is barely visible on the left-hand shed and he tries three keys before one turns. He pushes hard against the door. An oblique ray of sunlight cuts through the dust and gloom. A lizard scatters across the floor.
You got here then. I knew you’d come.
Nineteen. In his favourite striped Breton top, holding water and peaches. Look out there, Ell.
Ellis goes to the shutters. He pulls them open and the frame fills with sunflowers, a yellow world of beauty stretching as far as the eye can see. He lights a cigarette and leans against the ledge. Swallows soar with heat on their wings.
Did you know you were ill, he thinks. When did you know?
The song of cicadas unrelenting, always there.
I never would have left your side.
He walks out to the middle of the golden field and faces the sun, and he thinks, We did have time. We had so much more than many do.
And he feels all right. And he knows he’ll be all right. And that is enough.
In the front bedroom, propped up amongst the books, is a colour photograph of three people, a woman and two men. They are tightly framed, their arms around one another, and the world beyond is out of focus, and the world on either side excluded. They look happy, they really do. Not just because they are smiling but because there is something in their eyes, an ease, a joy, something they share. It was taken in spring or summer, you can tell by the clothes they are wearing (T-shirts, pale colours, that sort of thing), and, of course, because of the light.
The location of the photograph was not glamorous, not a holiday destination, or a once-in-a-lifetime visit. It was taken in the back garden of Ellis and Annie’s house. The photographer wasn’t a photographer at all but a wood merchant. He had just delivered the oak floorboards that Ellis had planned to lay in the back room, a job he never got to start. He came into the back garden and music was playing, the three of them sprawled on a blanket on the grass. The woman, Annie, had a camera and she asked him, Would you? And he took the camera from her, and he took his time because he wanted to get them right. He thought they looked so happy, and he thought they were family, and he wanted to show that in the photograph. They were all that mattered on that hot sunny evening in June 1991. And in the fleeting moment in which he met them, he realised that it wasn’t the woman, Annie, who held this small group together, but the man with scruffy dark hair. There was something in the way the other two looked at him, and that’s why he was in the middle, his arms tightly around them. As if he’d never let them go.
The shutter clicked. The wood merchant knew he had got the photograph and didn’t even take another to be sure, because he knew. Sometimes one frame is all it takes.
See you later, said the man to the other two. What are you going to see again? he asked.
Walt Whitman talk, said Annie. You can still come.
Nah, he said. Not my thing.
Love you, they said.
The wood merchant got back in his van pleased with himself. He never told anyone about the people he met or the photo he took, because why should he? It was a moment in time, that’s all, shared with strangers.