The Restoration Artist Read Online Free PDF Page A

woman. I stopped and looked back. I couldn’t really recall what she looked like. Dark-haired. A bouquet of wildflowers. A bruise on one cheek. The faint scent of lily of the valley.
    I walked on, flinching every now and then when my bare feet trod on a sharp stone. Farther down the path I could see a row of poplars and the roof of a house where a thin wisp of smoke drifted up from a chimney. I’d only been walking a few minutes when I saw someone coming towards me, ashort man wearing a dark jacket and white shirt and a large floppy beret. He was in his late fifties, with a broad chest and a very thick moustache peppered with grey. In his hand he carried a stout walking stick, which he raised in greeting at the sight of me.
    “
Bonjour
. You must be Leo Millar.” He stopped abruptly, frowning. “But what has happened to you?”
    “Do you know me?” I asked, further confused.
    “I ate breakfast this morning at the hotel and Linda mentioned that a painter had come to stay. I assumed that would be you. I am the priest here on La Mouche. Père Caron. Or just plain André Caron, if you prefer.” He extended his hand and I shook it, flinching at the pressure. He looked down at the cuts and the dried blood on my fingers. “You’ve had an accident! Can I help you?”
    “There was fog. I couldn’t see. I … I fell. Off the cliff and onto a ledge.” I hid my hands in my pockets. “I managed to climb up.”
    “You were walking on the cliff in that fog? It’s very dangerous. Didn’t you see the warning sign?”
    I shook my head.
    “If you don’t mind me stating the obvious,” the priest said, “you don’t look at all well.”
    “I’m okay.”
    He pointed at my feet. “Where are your shoes?”
    “I guess I lost them, back there.”
    “Look, I think you’d better come with me to my house. It’s nearby. I can give you a pair of boots.”
    I looked back up the path, searching.
    “Is someone with you?” the priest asked.
    “No. There’s nobody. I just need to get back to the hotel. If you could point out the direction.”
    “This way then. Come.” He took me by the arm.
    In a few minutes we reached a house built on a rise overlooking the ocean, stone walls painted white, a slate roof. Mauve hollyhocks grew along the sunward walls and the blue wooden shutters were fastened open. A small enclosed orchard of apple trees stood behind the house.
    “Come in a minute,” the priest urged. “You can’t walk all the way to the hotel in bare feet. I’ll lend you a pair of boots.”
    We went round to the side and I followed him in through a low doorway. He tossed his beret onto a table in the hall under a crucifix and led the way into a snug kitchen, where he opened a cupboard and took down a bottle of liquor, pouring out two glasses.
    “Sit down. Drink this.”
    I swallowed and the silky liquid slid over my tongue and down my throat, spreading warmth through my chest. The apple flavour that filled my mouth transported me instantly back to those first lonely months in Paris, just after I’d arrived from Canada, when I’d had a room at the Hôtel Mistral on rue Cels, and my one acquaintance in the whole city had been a writer from Vancouver, David McCullough, three doors down the corridor from me. One evening after he’d sold a short story to
Esquire
magazine he took me to dinner at La Coupole, where, he said, he intended to make up for all the months of bean soup and mutton stew. We dined on oysters, and then
magret de canard
with a bottle of Saint-Julien that cost as much as the food combined, and after dessert we each smoked a cigar on the terrace with snifters of eighteen-year-old Calvados.
    Everything had seemed possible. Paris awaited us. David was going to be the next Hemingway and I was going to give Picasso a run for his money.
    Now I shook my head ruefully and took another sip.
    Perhaps mistaking my expression, the priest said, “It’s locally made. From some of my own apples.”
    He drank his own