Well, not perfect exactly. The disastrous ending to their balloon flight had made Angus angry – again – which was quite understandable but, as another cool mouthful of champagne slid down her throat, Tilly had no trouble soaking in a moment of what was remarkably close to perfection.
She tilted her head back, closing her eyes as she enjoyed the sunshine on her face, and she let her breath out in a contented hum.
‘I’m almost glad our balloon crashed,’ she said. ‘If we hadn’t landed in pig shit, we wouldn’t be here right now, would we?’
She opened her eyes to find Angus looking at her, one side of his mouth curled up in an adorably lop-sided smile that gave him a dimple in his cheek.
‘What’s French for pig?’ he asked.
‘Cochon.’
He nodded. ‘Cochon caca,’ he said.
Technically, it wascaca de cochonif you wanted to say pig shit, but Tilly wasn’t about to correct him. She was laughing instead.
‘Where on earth did you learn that word?’ she asked.
‘At school. We had a very young French teacher and she knew how to get the attention of a bunch of twelve-year-old boys at a prim and proper private school. We adored Mademoiselle Dubois.’
Tilly’s level of happiness had gone up several notches. She lifted the little bottle and drank the last drops of her favourite wine.
‘I’m never going to forget this,’ she said.
‘What – the champagne?’
‘No. Well, yes, there is the champagne but that’s only a part of it. There’s also feeling the sun on my skin and the water on my toes. Hearing the cicadas sing and the sound of the stream. And there’s you…’
‘Me?’ Angus was frowning.
‘Yes, you. You made me laugh – about something that I never thought we’d find funny and that just made everything so much better. It’s made a memory that I’ll always have.’
Tilly was tipsy enough to be talking far more than she normally would. The words were tumbling out like the water flowing over the stones around her. ‘And memories like that can last a lifetime. You can take them out if you want to shine a light in a dark time – if you feel lonely or sad,peut-être. You can find the memory and it might let you feel that good all over again, even if it’s just for a heartbeat.’
Tilly could hear a tiny wobble in her voice, as if tears were gathering. ‘And just that one heartbeat might be enough to remind you that it’s still possible to feel like that…ça va aller.’ She shook her head as she found her English words harder to find. ‘That everything’s going to be okay.’
She caught her breath and stopped speaking to give Angus a chance to say something but he didn’t say a word. He was staring at her and she had no way of interpreting the expression on his face.
Astonishment?
Concern – that he might be stuck in the company of a woman who talked far too much about things that were far too emotional for someone who thought being romantic was no more than some kind of performance?
Disgust – that someone could drink enough alcohol this early in the day to forget normal boundaries? She was being employed by him as a guide. She wasn’t supposed to lose her mind due to a childish amusement at a reference tocaca de cochon.
Suddenly embarrassed, Tilly slid off her end of the flat boulder. She would go and find her shoes and see if they’d been washed clean in the stream. But she was in fast-running water up to her ankles as she tried to stand up and the stones beneath her feet were slippery. She tried to turn to get back to the safety of the boulder but she could feel herself losing her balance.
She could also feel her arm being caught and held in a firm grip. Angus had stood up from the other end of the boulder and he had his hands on her shoulders now, keeping her steady. The sun was behind him as she looked up so she still couldn’t read his face even though it was much closer to her own now.
So close she could feel the warmth of his breath.
Or was that heat coming from his hands and spreading over her skin with the speed of wildfire? And how was it that heat like this could be giving her goosebumps, as if she were suddenly chilled?
‘What about this?’ His voice was low. Curious, almost. ‘Will this be part of that memory?’
Oh, oui! Absolument…
Tilly didn’t say that aloud, of course, but maybe he saw it in her face. Or perhaps he could feel that her skin was on fire, in spite of standing ankle deep in cold water with goosebumps on every inch of her body.
‘How do you do that?’ he asked quietly. ‘How do you always find the silver lining of a cloud?’
