The Restoration Artist Read Online Free PDF

measure down in a quick swallow and fetched a porcelain basin, which he filled with water and set on the table. “Soak your hands in this. I’ll get the disinfectant.” He returned with a brown glass bottle and a towel, which I used to wipe the dirt and dried blood from my hands.
    “This will sting a bit,” the priest said, uncorking the disinfectant, “but it will do you good. You’d better wash your feet as well.” Watching me dab at my hands with the disinfectant, he said, “Let me see if I can find you some shoes. Our size might be roughly the same.”
    A minute later, he reappeared with a pair of worn boots and some socks. “These will do, I think. They’re a bit old but still in good condition.”
    While I tried on the boots, the priest poured two more glasses of Calvados. Then he reached into his pocket for a package of Caporal tobacco and sprinkled the flakes into a sheaf of paper, which he rolled into a cigarette. He lit it with a match from a box on the table.
    “So, you were out walking and had a fall?”
    “Yes. Stupid of me. In all that fog I didn’t really pay attention to where I was going. Luckily I landed on a kind of ledge and managed to climb up.”
    “I know the place. You’re extremely lucky that you didn’t tumble straight into the sea.” He tapped the ash from his cigaretteinto a large scallop shell that served as an ashtray. “So you’re a painter? I can’t recall any artists visiting our island before. They tend to prefer the more dramatic vistas in Brittany.”
    “I’m always on the lookout for new landscapes, and when I saw La Mouche on the map I thought it might be worth a visit.” I was amazed that I could lie so easily, and to a priest.
    Père Caron regarded the tip of his cigarette and blew on it while giving me a long, searching look. “Are you … in any sort of trouble?”
    “No,” I answered quickly. “I’m just a tourist.”
    The priest held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I didn’t mean to offend you. But you must admit that your appearance is, how should I say, a little unusual.”
    “I told you, I fell.”
    “You’re not French, are you.”
    “I’m Canadian. But I’ve lived in Paris for the last ten years. I came to study art and I stayed. It’s my home now.”
    “Canada. It’s a long way to come. Do you still have family there?”
    “There isn’t anyone. Not any more.”
    But there never had been. I’d grown up in the Guild Home for Boys in Vancouver. A home for those without homes. The closest to family I’d ever had was a dormitory of other boys: the lost, the forgotten, the unwanted and the abandoned. At the Guild, we didn’t ask questions about parents. We’d all learned that there were no answers.
    I stood up and put my hands in my pockets, then took them out and rubbed the ache in my left arm. I wanted to leave, but I also wanted to know more about the island. “Are there many people living here?”
    “Alas no,” he said. “Most were sent away during the war years when the Germans occupied the island. Not many returned. And now, with the decline in the fishing industry, few of us are left. Some fishermen and their families in LeBec, the village on the other side of the island. The hotel and the shop on this side. Ester Chauvin’s farm. One or two others. That’s about it.”
    I wanted to frame my next question carefully. “What about the children?”
    “Since the war there has been no school here. Twenty years now. At first those families with children used to board them in Saint-Alban because we didn’t have enough pupils to warrant a school. But that wasn’t really suitable in the long run. People ended up moving to the mainland. A few tourists come in the summer.” He shook his head sadly. “Perhaps soon only the birds and the goats will live here.”
    “I thought I saw a child in the fog earlier.”
    “What did the child look like? I know everybody on the island.”
    “It was a boy. About ten years old, with