Chapter 75: Time For Goodbyes
The following two weeks folded into one another like the soft pages of one of Edith’s sketchbooks. Days were measured not by hours but by tasks completed and quiet moments stolen. Victoria fixed the stubborn latch on the garden gate. Yvonne, under Edith’s joyful direction, pruned the overgrown lavender along the path, her hands fragrant for hours afterwards. They walked with Hans for miles, their footprints a temporary record in the damp sand of empty beaches, erased twice daily by the indifferent tide. They cooked simple meals, the tiny kitchen a dance of avoiding cats and passing ingredients. Nights were for reading by the fire, for Edith’s stories of the village, for the comfortable silence of three people who no longer needed to perform for one another.
Yvonne absorbed it all—the rhythm of Edith’s whims, the way she cursed at a misplaced brush with the same vehemence she used to praise a perfect cloud formation. She saw, in Edith’s unapologetic existence, the clear, deep well from which Victoria’s own defiant streak sprang. It wasn’t just the bartending skills or the sharp tongue. It was the fundamental belief that a life could be built to one’s own design, however messy or wind-battered the result. This understanding settled in Yvonne’s chest, a warm, solid thing. She was incredibly, profoundly happy to have met this woman, to have traced the lines of Victoria’s spirit back to their source.
The morning of their departure dawned brittle and bright, a sharp frost glittering on the thatch. The car was packed, a Tetris game of suitcases, a bag of Edith’s preserves, and a drowsy Hans already nestled in the back. A hollow feeling had taken root in the cottage, the cozy clutter suddenly seeming like a stage set waiting to be struck.
Victoria moved with a brisk, practiced efficiency, checking tyres, wiping fog from the windscreen, her movements a little too sharp. She was steeling herself, Yvonne recognized. Building a shell of practicality against the soft, raw pull of leaving. She wanted to drive away before the goodbye could coagulate into something heavy, before the sight of her grandmother standing alone in the doorway could crack the composure she’d carefully maintained.
“Right,” Victoria said, slamming the boot shut. Her breath plumed in the cold air. “I think that’s everything.” She avoided looking directly at Edith, who was wrapped in a vast, moth-eaten shawl on the front step.
“You’ve forgotten the milk,” Edith said, her voice a dry rasp.
“We didn’t bring any milk, Gran.”
“My point exactly. A terrible oversight.” Edith hobbled forward, her gnarled hands gripping Yvonne’s shoulders. She smelled of oil paint and camphor. “You. You look after my girl. And that hopeless dog. And those plants of yours. Send me a picture when that monstera finally tries to eat the sofa.”
Yvonne laughed, the sound thick in her throat. “I will. And you… paint the sea until it gets bored of posing for you.”
“Cheeky.” Edith’s eyes, the same clear grey as Victoria’s, twinkled. She pulled Yvonne into a brief, fierce hug, then released her, turning to Victoria.
Victoria stood rigid, a sailor facing a gale. “Don’t say anything soppy.”
“Who, me?” Edith feigned offence. She reached up, her cold hands cupping Victoria’s face. She didn’t speak for a long moment, just held her, her thumbs stroking the sharp lines of Victoria’s cheeks. Victoria’s eyes squeezed shut, her jaw clenched. “Ah, go on with you,” Edith murmured finally, her voice softer than the sea wind. “You’ve a ferry to catch. And a city to get back to. It’s been a treat having my house full of life again.” She dropped her hands, shooing them toward the car.
Victoria nodded, swallowing hard. She opened the driver’s door.
“Wait!” Edith barked, the moment broken. “Silly old bat. Nearly forgot. One more thing.” She turned and shuffled back into the cottage, leaving the door ajar.
Victoria let out a long, controlled breath, her forehead resting against the roof of the car. “I told you. Sappy. I can’t do sappy before ten a.m.”
“Too late,” Yvonne whispered, touching her back.
Edith returned, manoeuvring another canvas, this one taller and narrower, wrapped in the same kind of old bedsheet. She was breathing a little heavily from the effort. “This one,” she said, propping it carefully against the stone wall of the cottage, “is for the café.”
She pulled the sheet away.
The air left Yvonne’s lungs in a soft gasp.
It was a portrait of the two of them. Not a formal pose, but a captured moment. The brushwork was exuberant, messy, thick with impasto. Colors collided and bled at the edges. It was, unmistakably, very Edith.
But it was also, miraculously, perfectly them.
They were depicted sitting on the low stone wall at the cliff’s edge, the sea a turbulent swirl of Prussian blue and chalky white behind them. Victoria was in profile, her gaze turned toward the horizon, her expression one of quiet, watchful containment. Edith had used thin, precise strokes of charcoal-grey and slate to define the sharp line of her nose, the subtle shave of her undercut, the frames of her glasses. She looked like a weathervane calibrated to some distant storm.
Yvonne was painted facing forward, slightly turned toward Victoria. Her form was rendered in warmer, earthier tones—burnt sienna, ochre, muted green. Her dreadlocks were a cascade of messy, coppery swirls. Her glasses, with their thick red frames, were two bold strokes of vermilion. Edith had captured the gentle curve of her smile, the focused curiosity in her eyes as she looked not at the sea, but at the side of Victoria’s face.
The magic was in the connection. Between Victoria’s grey and Yvonne’s umber, Edith had layered a chaotic, delicate web of thin, vibrant lines—threads of gold leaf, specks of emerald, veins of a deep, rose madder. They swirled in the narrow space between their shoulders, tangled in the air where their hands almost touched on the wall between them. It was as if the painter had visualized the quiet, electric hum of their bond, the invisible network of understanding and care that linked their separate silences.
It was not a flattering portrait. It was a true one. It showed Victoria’s distance and Yvonne’s groundedness, their contrasts not as opposition but as complement, held in a dynamic, beautiful tension by those wild, connective threads of color.
“I painted from memory,” Edith said simply, her eyes on the canvas. “And from what I saw over the washing-up. Two weeks is plenty of time to learn a shape.” She looked at them, her gaze sharp. “It’s for the café. A place should have its heart on the wall.”
Yvonne couldn’t speak. She stared at the painting, at the truth of it. She saw herself through Edith’s eyes—not as an appendix to Victoria, but as a central, warm force. She saw the way Victoria leaned, ever so slightly, into the space Yvonne occupied.
Victoria was silent for a long time. She walked slowly to the painting, her boots crunching on the frost. She reached out, stopping just before her fingers touched the dried, textured paint. She traced the air over the golden threads that linked her painted self to Yvonne’s.
“Gran,” she said, her voice rough. “It’s… it’s everything.”
“Good.” Edith sniffed, wiping at her nose with the back of her hand. “Now get it in the car before it freezes. And before I decide I want to keep it for my own gloomy wall.”
They wrapped the painting with trembling hands, cushioning it with the last of the blankets between the suitresses in the back seat. The goodbyes, after that, were swift and dry-eyed, the emotion already channelled into the canvas. A final, hard hug. A last scratch for Hans between the ears.
They got in the car. Victoria started the engine, the sound shockingly loud in the quiet morning. She didn’t look back as they navigated the potholed track. But Yvonne did. She watched in the side mirror as the figure on the doorstep, small and swaddled in her shawl, grew smaller, blurred, and was finally swallowed by the bend in the lane and a stand of skeletal trees.
For miles, they drove in silence, the only sound the hum of the heater and Hans’s quiet snores from the back. The painting sat behind them, a silent passenger.
Finally, on the motorway, heading south, Victoria spoke, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. “She sees right through everything,” she said, her voice almost wondering. “Right down to the bones.”
Yvonne reached across the gearshift, her hand finding Victoria’s where it rested on her thigh. She laced their fingers together, feeling the cool metal of Victoria’s wedding band. “No,” she said softly, thinking of the golden threads, the web of color. “She sees what holds the bones together.”
Victoria’s grip tightened. She didn’t look over, but a slow, deep breath eased from her, a release of something held for two weeks, for a lifetime. She brought their joined hands to her lips, pressing a kiss to Yvonne’s knuckles. The car sped on, carrying them away from the salted cliffs, toward home, toward the café, toward a blank space on a sun-warmed wall that was now waiting for its heart.