Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Women
Publisher: Just Do It Publications
ISBN-10: 1499621280
Type: Fiction
Pages: 330
Copyright: May 14, 2014
ISBN-13: 9781499621280
Price: $3.14 (eBook)
The Angels of the Jardin Massey is women's contemporary upmarket fiction(novel)with a fantasy time slip element.
Sometimes the best relationships have unlikely beginnings.
When ex-pat American, Anna Stevenson, is diagnosed with breast cancer her life appears to hit rock bottom. Bereaved, broke and exiled in south-west France, the only solution is a lodger. But she didn’t bargain on scatty British exchange student Lizzie Matthews, and Lizzie didn’t bargain on the grouch queen landlady from hell.
Fortunately, a stone’s throw from Anna’s apartment there’s a sanctuary, the magical Jardin Massey, a place where legend has it, angels restore what is lost. Here the present is overlaid with the past. Easy to mistake disorientated 16th century monk, Guillaume, for a 21st century traveller sleeping rough.
As Anna seeks support online to come to terms with her disease, a cancer website blog delivers a crushing revelation, brutally thrusting her estranged daughter back into her life. Blighted lives intertwine, each with their own demons to fight, each in need of the restorative power of a mysterious garden that guards its secrets.
Guillaume dubs Lizzie’s iPhone ‘the box for summoning angels’ with a medieval take that is truer than he knows. THE ANGELS OF THE JARDIN MASSEY celebrates the modern miracle of technology and the timeless miracle of relationships that make angels of us all.
Excerpt
Anna Stevenson sneaked a glance at her naked breasts. The nipples were hard and prominent. She turned her head on the pillow to study the youthful stranger by her side. Female flesh was daily routine to him, young and firm, flaccid and middle-aged, his profession made no distinction.
A trim goatee beard disguised the babyish curve of his chin. Her fingers itched to trace that line of soft bristles, transform herself from body to person in one intimate gesture.
“Relax,” he murmured. “Think of a beautiful beach in St Tropez. Relax.”
The crowded beach at St Tropez; seven years on the memory was still vivid: a stifling, sticky afternoon, redolent with sun oil and the sugary aroma of doughnuts from a beachside kiosk. Too prudish to go topless herself, she’d seen Crispin ogling the pert boobs, the smooth tanned buttocks in their flimsy thongs. That night in their airless hotel room, he’d bent her over beside the bed and wrenched off her shorts, venting an afternoon’s pent-up lust, hands cupping her breasts, fingering her nipples.
This stranger’s hands were broad and strong like Crispin’s, the nails cut square, their tips shiny white. He glided the ultrasound device across her right breast again. On the monitor beside her head, a pinprick of light wavered, halted, over an insignificant, crab-like thing. Laconic, he stared at the screen, like a baseball fan viewing an indifferent game.
“I think we will ‘ave to arrange a biopsy.”
His English was excellent but the ‘h’ sound defeated him.
“Isn’t that what they do to dead people?”
“No, I think you are confused. That is an autopsy.”
She tried to return his smile, but her lips wouldn’t respond. Her breasts sagged sideways now, like shrivelled balloons from some long forgotten party.
He handed her a skimpy, white cotton gown. “When they do a biopsy,” he said, “they take some little bit of tissue, from ‘ere, from your breast, where I ‘ave seen there is something, a growth, a lump…..”
“A tumour,” she prompted. Her right breast gleamed from the jelly he’d smeared on for the ultrasound. She mopped it with a wad of paper towel, chastely fastening the tapes across the front of the gown.
Too late, she regretted her modesty on the beach at St Tropez. ‘If you’ve got it, flaunt it,’ Crispin had whispered. She should have taken up the challenge while she still had healthy boobs to flaunt.
The young doctor wouldn’t meet her eye. Crossing to the desk by the door, he typed in the biopsy request. “Maybe a tumour, yes, but maybe something not serious, something benign.”
The printer spewed out a single sheet which he signed with an illegible squiggle.
“Take this tomorrow morning to the Clinique St Jean. I ‘ave made an urgent appointment. But you can be calm. We can ‘ope there will be good news.”
With a brief, sheepish grin he whisked off to his next patient.
Anna sat on the edge of the couch and stared at her toenails. This morning she’d painted them bright pink in honour of her new sandals. Now her glamorous toes looked incongruous, like mourners in cocktail dresses at a funeral. She shuffled them into the towelling mules they’d issued with the gown.
‘Something benign.’ She’d met his type before; exploring your breasts one minute, fobbing you off with crap the next.
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