Was she, in some way, responsible for what was happening?
She’d stayed away from her family for so long to avoid causing unhappiness for herself and for them, but within days of them all being together there was a rift developing that was threatening to tear the Gilchrist women apart.
‘Hey, hinny…’ Fi left her tools near the trough and went to Marguerite first, offering her hand to be whiffled and then stepping close to stroke her neck and rub the base of her ears. Coquelicot waited patiently for her turn.
‘I might give you both a brush before I do your toenails,’ Fi told them. ‘Would you like that?’
Marguerite’s eyes were half-closed. If they both stayed this relaxed she might not even need to tie them up at the fence to trim their hooves. The rubber hairy pony brush she’d found in the back of her car was ideal for shaggy coats, and the donkeys clearly enjoyed the effort she put into the grooming. They helped occasionally by shaking out some loose hair and small clouds of dust. Fi stepped back after a more vigorous shake, rubbed her nose and then sneezed.
The sound had the effect of jolting her out of the pleasant distraction of her task and Fi found herself glancing over her shoulder. Towards the far side of the olive grove and the silent, solid shape of Julien and Ellie’s house. She knew her mother was in there, having moved from Laura’s house yesterday after a family meeting that had ended in tears. She knew plans were being made for Julien to take Jeannie to visit the village where the painting had been found because he was due to take his grandmother, who lived not far away, to a hospital appointment. Jeannie could go with them on the return trip and Julien could act as interpreter for her when they went to Saint-Martin-Vésubie on their way home. Ellie wasn’t going to go. She said there wasn’t room for her and Bonnie in the car, which was true but Fi suspected she was trying not to antagonise Laura any further by supporting their mother’s quest.
Echoes of things that had been said were fighting for room in her head but Fi tried harder to push them away. The donkeys had been perfectly happy for her to handle their legs and lift their feet while being groomed, so she fastened her leather farrier’s apron around her waist and tightened the straps around her legs to hold the padded chaps in place. She put her hoof knife and nippers in the pockets and picked up a rasp.
Marguerite obligingly lifted her foot when Fi ran her hand down her leg. For some time she was able to focus completely on cleaning out and then carefully trimming both the frog and sole of what felt like a toy hoof after the width and weight of the horses’ feet she was more used to. It wasn’t the first time she’d looked after a donkey’s feet, however, and she remembered what Gavin had taught her about making sure the interior shape was concave enough to keep any pressure on the wall of the hoof and not the sole. She used her nippers to clip off the excess horn and then the rasp to smooth any rough edges.
By the time she’d finished Marguerite’s feet and stretched her back before starting Coquelicot’s, the level of focus needed was slipping and snatches of what had become a confrontation yesterday were sneaking into the gaps.
Ellie had started the defence of Jeannie’s desire to investigate the connection she was so sure of.
‘Why are you so against this, Laura?Was he really so awful? I remember the way he’d tuck me under his arm and read me things from the newspaper.’
‘He was never a monster.’ Jeannie had been adamant.
Ellie wanted to agree with her. ‘I missed him so much.’
Fi had missed him too. So much. Was that why she’d been irresistibly drawn to a man easily old enough to be her father? A man she’d desperately wanted to notice her.
To love her.
‘He was never a violent man,’ Jeannie had added.
‘So why couldn’t he control his temper, then?’ Laura had been struggling to keep her voice calm. ‘He couldn’t control a lot of things, could he? I remember the day he wet his pants and I cried and cried. I knew nothing was going to be the same ever again. People pointed at him when he was too drunk to walk a straight line or speak a coherent sentence.’
‘There was something wrong.’ Jeannie’s statement was more like a plea. ‘But he wouldn’t listen to me and go to the doctor and then it was too late to help him because he’d disappeared…’
‘Aye… because he’d lost his job and then he tried to kill someone in the pub.’
‘That might have been an accident.’ It had been Fi’s only contribution to the tense discussion. The thought had come from the same place as that of feeling a bond with an unknown artist who lived in a stable. That people could behave in an unacceptable manner, like hitting someone over the head with a shovel, because of something they had no control over, so it wasn’t fair to blame them, was it?
‘So why did he run away?’ Laura had shaken her head sharply. ‘He was as ashamed as we were. You and Ellie were too young to know how bad it was, but it broke Mam’s heart and that’s why we never, ever talked about it. The only way to make it go away was to pretend it never happened.’
Fi had been too stunned to say anything more. It was so clear suddenly, but she’d never put two and two together. She’d been brought up to believe that the solution to dealing with something so traumatic was to pretend it had never happened? No wonder she hadn’t gone home to her family when she’d most needed them. And now Laura wanted to reinstate the unspoken pact?
How many times did history have to repeat itself before it was blindingly obvious that something wasn’t going to work?
Her mother had lived with unanswered questions about why her life had fallen apart. Why she’d lost the father of her children and the man she must have loved so much because, even now, she was defending him. Protecting him, even? Surely she deserved whatever peace she might find by searching for those answers?
She let the thought go with a sigh and turned to Coquelicot. ‘Let’s have a wee look at your tootsies, Poppy.’
Half an hour later, she straightened again and rubbed at the ache in the small of her back, but she took a moment to admire the neat shape of both the donkeys’ pedicures.
‘Bravo!’
Fi’s head snapped around at the sound of the male voice but, surprisingly, what she felt was curiosity rather than fear.
Because she’d recognised the voice?
‘Christophe!What on earth are you doing here?’
