Reflections of Sunflowers by Ruth Silvestre

Author:Ruth Silvestre [Ruth Silvestre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780749015091
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2013-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

‘You’d better come and have a look,’ he said.

He had now reached the end section of the wall directly under the chimney and, instead of beautiful stones, had suddenly begun to uncover a jumble of broken bricks, small stones and rubble. None of us had realised that when the new section had been built, the chimney had simply been cut into the wall, unlike the cheminée in the old part of the house, which is a separate construction.

‘I’ll have to just carry on, take it all off and… and see what can be done,’ said M. Duparq gloomily. By the end of the afternoon when he had knocked out all the rubble, our otherwise beautiful wall had a savage, soot-blackened wound running from top to bottom, which became even wider as it descended to the actual back of the fireplace. M. Duparq, sweating, stood back. He scratched his head, moving his cotton sunhat back and forth. He lit a small roll-up and just stood and gazed at the wall. Eventually he turned to us. ‘Ne vous inquiétez-pas,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’ ‘Je peux le refaire.’ We knew his skill with stones. He had built our wall by the pool but, as we looked at the jagged sooty edges, the broken lumps of crude red brick, we were not hopeful.

It seemed that M. Duparq had a few days holiday from his regular work for, after spending Sunday with his wife, he returned first thing on Monday morning, a pile of stones rumbling around in the back of his battered truck. ‘You can look when it is finished,’ he said firmly. Intermittently he trundled about with the wheelbarrow searching for the precise stone he wanted, finding others in the garden or from a ruined wall at the end of the track. We heard him throw down his scaffold board at the halfway mark but left him to it until at the end of the day he called us. It was a triumph. The join was invisible. Even M. Duparq allowed himself a grin of satisfaction at our surprised delight.

‘Pas mal,’ he said. ‘Not bad.’ He replaced the scaffold. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow and do the pointing.’

By the time he had finished, the wisteria, which we had all but forgotten in our anxiety about the wall, was badly bruised, bedraggled and covered in cement dust. We hosed it down, pruned off damaged branches and did our best to tie the remnants back up to the wires. As we now watched Matthew wrestling with its enormous growth it was clear that our wisteria was indestructible.

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