Yesterday`s flower - Michelle Tarynne (fun to read TXT) 📗

The last time Albert had held her like this he’d been shagging Rose all afternoon. Guilt-affection, she realised now. She’d wanted to make love, but he’d held her instead. It’s not all about sex, he’d told her jokingly. Except it was. Just not with her.

Erika let Max go, running fully clothed into the shallows, where she slipped and fell waist deep in water. She found she couldn’t move, frozen in the cold water, sand welling inside her rolled-up jeans.

And she was crying. Oh my God, she thought, I’m crying in front of a complete stranger and I can’t stop.

After a moment’s hesitation, his forehead creased like badly ironed linen, Max smiled and then came to sit down next to her in the cold water. He slid his arm around her shoulders.
‘Maybe I am bonkers,’ Erika whispered, moving her hands to her face.
‘Tell me about it, then, beautiful Erika.’
And so she did.

♥

 

Max chaperoned Erika to a bed and breakfast on one of the streets overlooking the water, and checked them into a room with twin beds. He dug into her suitcase for a nightie, then disappeared into the bathroom while she dressed. He put a glass of water next to her bed, and placed her suitcase on the rack so she could reach her clothes comfortably. He then guided her to the bathroom, and she liked the way he swung her round to place her feet in the bath and rinse off the sand.

She also liked the way he sat next to her as she drifted to sleep, heart wrenched and tears spent.

Waking in the morning, she could hear the soft drawing in of his breath. Not like Albert, nothing like Albert, who snored the moment he rolled onto his back, and who talked in his sleep. Erika looked across at Max, wondering if he had even held her hand. Her head ached. Her stomach threatened to heave, but lying chastely in her bed, untouched, she felt a vague warmth creeping through her. She wondered why she wasn’t more embarrassed.
Maybe some good men do actually exist.

Erika had been more honest with Max than she had been with anybody in her entire life. Too honest probably. Considering her revelations, it occurred to her that she should repay his generosity by creeping out the room. Pay the hotel bill and disappear. Erika was, after all, a liability. She shifted, wanting more to cuddle up next to Max than to leave. But she wasn’t that selfish.

Soundlessly, she crept out of bed. She wanted to kiss Max’s cheek goodbye, but instead she left one of her sketches. A kite surfer reaching out to touch the crest of Table Mountain.
Reaching but not quite succeeding.

♥

Breakfast was a salmon omele e, a glass of orange juice and a large cup of black coffee. (She couldn’t quite manage the milk.) She picked at the meal listlessly, moving it around her plate. Si ing alone on the other side of Langebaan, which actually wasn’t all that big, Erika wondered if Max had woken up yet. Though her head throbbed painfully at the temples, despite the Nurofen, Erika felt unburdened. She decided that she’d drive to the West Coast National Park, on the banks of the lagoon, which she hadn’t quite reached the day before.

She checked the sky, glad there were no clouds, since she’d read that the flowers were be er on a clear day. Signalling for her bill, Erika scraped back her chair. It was already almost nine, and the gates to the park and the protected Postberg areas beyond the fence, had been open for a while. If she hurried, she might just be able to miss the hordes of tourists on buses, flocking in from Cape Town.

Compared to England, and even to her last few weeks in Scarborough, the landscape in which she found herself a few minutes later was dry and particularly rocky. Erika was more a uned to green fields and woolly sheep, clusters of yellow gorse against grey cobbles. Paddocks. Horses. The odd farmhouse or village with rows of red-brick houses. Yet there was something entirely decadent about this carpet of brilliant flowers spreading out before her: millions upon millions of blossoms gathered in tight formation in a kaleidoscope of pinks, whites and oranges. It almost took her breath away.

Wearing an odd-shaped straw hat she’d bought from a hawker on the side of the road

in Blouberg, her face plastered with a thick layer of sunblock, Erika set up her easel. She didn’t feel the same sense of excitement she had with the kite surfers, but she had a sneaky suspicion this may have something to do with some bo les of red wine … Still, she felt calm, unhurried and glad she’d remembered to purchase a few bo les of water – one for dehydration, but the rest for diluting paint and cleaning brushes.

The tourists did come, many of them peering to catch a glimpse of her work in progress. She tried to ignore them, but the voices of the tour guides carried above the cha er: This area is one of six accepted floral kingdoms on earth. Known locally as fynbos, and internationally as the Western Cape Floral Kingdom, this one has more plant species than the whole of Europe! Eighty species of flowering plants are endemic to this region … and that means they don’t grow anywhere else in the world!

Erika wanted to laugh. The guide’s voice rose into a state of near frenzy, reaching a climax with every juicy fact. She’d also wondered about this bizarre display of succulent semi-desert plants, and now at least she could put a name to them.

Painting on a grand scale, Erika’s canvas was quickly covered with colour. And beyond the canvas, to her left, clear purples verging on pinks grew more intense as the sun passaged higher into the sky. To her right, oranges and yellows with, on closer inspection, mud-brown centres. Close up they were fluffy, or frilly, star-shaped or prickly, dangly or dense – petals packed tight in rounded heads. In such small plants, the detail was really incredible.

Erika looked up at the queues of tourists that were building up outside the park. She could hear laughter and hooting, and once or twice she turned to watch students hanging out their cars or si ing on their roofs and bonnets. They seemed half-pissed or high on happiness. Her stomach growled, her omele e no longer filling the space left by her liquid dinner. As her canvas was already almost dry, she decided she would retire gracefully to the restaurant recommended by the B&B.

Parked at Geelbek a li le later, Erika considered her supplies. Powder pastel seemed entirely too insipid to echo the colours she had seen from the road. She dug in her wooden paintbox, extracting a small pack of oil pastels to take inside with her.

The restaurant was set in a Cape Dutch building on the lagoon. She’d been told she may see flamingos but hadn’t noticed any as she’d walked through the garden …Were flamingos always pink, or did they come in other shades? She chose a table under an umbrella, then began to doodle while sipping a rock shandy. In her old life she would have felt self-conscious si ing alone. She didn’t feel that now, but she recognised that it still wasn’t quite as nice as sharing a meal with someone. She wondered what Max had done when he’d seen that she wasn’t there. Perhaps he’d been relieved ...

Thinking back, she realised that he hadn’t revealed much about himself. While Erika had spilt her life story in the shallows, he had been remarkably reticent. She didn’t know his surname, where he lived or what he did for a living. How was it they’d managed to talk for so long?

♥

Erika accepted a basket of freshly made seed bread. It smelt delicious, and the pat of bu er she spread onto it melted it immediately. With her mouth absorbing the delicious loaf and her eyes on her sketchpad, Erika was distracted enough not to notice his approach.
‘I took a chance on finding you here,’ Max said.

Erika swallowed quickly, her cheeks immediately red.
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘You must think me terrible.’

‘Well, you did pay for the room at least,’ he said with a note of mirth. ‘And you didn’t vomit.’ He pulled out a chair, and se led himself down. ‘These are great,’ he said, drawing her sketches towards him. ‘Especially this one. You’ve got this vygie perfectly.’
‘Is that what it’s called?’

‘Golden Vygie or Lampranthus aureus, 60mm in diameter. Grows on granite outcrops.’ ‘You’re a botanist?’ Erika asked.

‘I’m in the wine business actually, but I love plants. Thank you for the drawing. You gave me the best one, but I guess you know that.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Erika said. ‘I made such an ass of myself last night, I thought I’d give you a break and vanish without us having to –’

‘Hash it over in the morning? It’s forgo en, Erika. I hope you feel be er, though,’ Max said.
‘You know,’ Erika replied, ‘I feel more myself than I have in months.’

Max smiled, his hazel eyes crinkling at the edges, as he reached out to pat her hand. Erika’s lunch arrived, and while Max munched on the seed bread waiting for his own
order, he told her a li le more about himself.

‘So, I live in Franschhoek, just near Stellenbosch,’ he said. ‘I have for most of my life, except for a brief internship in the Loire Valley in France. My father insisted on it. I didn’t like it at first. I was terribly homesick. I missed Le Domaine.’
‘Le Domaine?’ Erika asked.

‘Our farm. It’s been in the family since the my ancestors arrived in May 1689, on a ship called the Sion. Although that may not seem so long ago by British standards, by South African it positively entrenches our family name into the country’s history.’
‘So, what’s your surname?’ Erika asked, glad for the excuse to ask.

‘De Villiers. Of course, with the strong influence and force from the Dutch East India Company, the pronunciation has changed from the French. Nowadays we say the “s”. It took less than three generations for the Dutch to eradicate spoken French from Olifantshoek, as it was then known. But enough of the history lesson.’ Max studied Erika’s expression, then smiled. ’You’re far more polite than my brother. My conversation almost puts him to sleep.’
‘Does he live at Le Domaine as well?’

‘Oh, yes, dear old Jared and I are stuck with each other for life. We both love the farm far too much to leave ...’
‘But you get along?’ Erika asked.

‘Oh don’t get me wrong, I love my brother, but we’re different. Sometimes I wonder how we can even be related.’

After lunch, Max walked Erika around the restaurant’s garden and then past a bird hide that hulked over the water. He seemed quite content to identify each flower they saw, and then lie on his back in the sunshine as he waited for her to draw it.

‘Carpobrotus acinaciformis,’ Max said, ‘Isn’t the magenta beautiful? You must’ve seen these from the tarred road coming in.’ Max had casually tucked his jumper on the ground under his head.

‘I think so …’ But Erika was thinking about Albert. Albert, who would never have let his clothes get dirty, and when had he ever been patient enough to wait for her to draw something? Usually he’d insist on her taking a photo and painting the image from that, so his precious time

wouldn’t be wasted. But he would buy her flowers. Beautiful bunches. Often just for the hell of it. ‘That was quick,’ Max said, observing Erika moving to the next clump of fynbos. ‘The

mountain sour fig or Carbobrotus edulis. Those yellow flowers turn pink as the plant ages. Our housekeeper, Prudie, sometimes makes sour-fig preserve with the fruit ... Boy, can that woman cook.’

After an hour and a half, Erika’s fingers were beginning to cramp. Max, almost comatose in the afternoon heat, hadn’t moved