“Have you been to Cassis? Look at the paintings done there by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell. Read Woolf. See the place where they lived, then look again. Without roots like that, a book, a painting, an installation . . . it’s all fraudulent.”
He had just returned from a painting trip of his own there, he said. “With a lovely young model. I call her Magie—and she is magic. The best I’ve had for years. Fearless, you know? I’d like to do more with her. But you should go to Cassis. You’d like it. In fact, come with me!”
When it is time for me to go, we exit through the garden where he wants to show me a metal gazebo he has made for trailing roses. He exhorts me again to go to Cassis and presents me with a granite pineapple and a severed hand.
Chapter 16
A cold wind whipped my hair across my face as I stood by the wall in the garden.
A granite pineapple and a severed hand.
I had assumed Dom had bought them at the reclamation yard. Rachel’s words played and replayed in my head. Could they possibly be different ones, bought by Dom, not by coincidence (that would be impossible) but after remembering the ones given to Rachel?
I dismissed that idea in seconds. Surely it would require a great deal of luck to find such specific and odd ephemera.
And yet—what did it matter if she had left them with her ex-husband? Perhaps she had given them to him, knowing how much he would like them. There was nothing sinister in that.
“Why don’t you come and sit here?” asked Dom when I went inside. “You keep scurrying away like a little mouse, always disappearing off to new corners where I can’t find you.”
He had lit a fire, only semi-effectively, in the sitting room off the kitchen and had pulled a couple of chairs and a low table closer to the hearth. Normally, this room was so bare and chilly we tended to keep to the natural warmth of the kitchen.
I shook off my coat and said I’d bring us some coffee.
“It’s made. What have you been up to?” he asked.
“Oh, just . . . nothing much. Looking around the garden.”
“Well, come and warm up here.”
So we sat together, sipping coffee in near silence. The fire popped and emitted small belches of smoke. After a while I fetched my book. Dom went off to bring in more logs.
Despite the spitting flames, the room was still cold. Flakes of plaster floated down from between the narrow lath beams of the ceiling. More fell on the pages I was reading. After a while, it seemed like snow coming through the roof. I shifted my chair and suddenly wondered why Dom was taking so long.
A long, creaking sound made me jump. A sound like a door forced from the position it had been stuck in for years. Was it Dom somewhere else in the house? I craned my head and listened. Nothing, only the fire. Then another, louder creak. I thought of sailing ships in tempests, and shivered. Another larger lump of plaster came down.
I was almost on my feet when the room erupted. A roaring sound, followed by a huge crash as I was suddenly pulled with some force into the kitchen doorway. The noise of falling masonry and wood shattering on the stone floor was earsplitting. Then a scream, which had come from me. At the moment it happened, I had no idea what had jerked me out of danger.
Then my face was against Dom’s chest, and he was swearing and shaking as hard as I was. Only feet away, the ceiling had collapsed onto the chair where I had been sitting. A cloud of gray dust hung over the heap of rubble. Above was an ominous black space. We were both choking.
“Oh my God,” Dom said, over and over again. “Did you not realize?”
“I heard some creaking noises, but I didn’t think—”
“If I hadn’t got back when I did—”
“Don’t . . .”
We clung to each other, hearts pounding. I concentrated on breathing, willing the panic to recede. If anything, Dom was trembling more violently than I was.
Upstairs, in an unused room, I stashed the printout of the Francis Tully interview in a box containing files and papers of my own. Even as I did it, I felt guilty. Though that did not stop me thinking obsessively about what I’d read.
Rachel had written herself prominently into the interview. She was there on the page as a character alongside the subject in a way that—ordinarily, at least—only seasoned journalists were. Did that say anything about her, or was that simply the required form of this particular piece?
It was pretty clear that the interview with Tully had been a tricky one, and yet it seemed that they had ended by warming to each other. She came across as patient and resourceful, confident in the manner in which she bearded the lion in his den. He had enjoyed her company enough to give her the stone hand and the pineapple.
Francis Tully must still be living at his house in the Alpilles. Who knew, perhaps—just perhaps—I would go up to his village and hope to find him in the café. I could tell him I remembered reading a newspaper feature, and ask about the woman journalist who had written it. What if they really had got on well after the sticky start, and they had kept in touch?
Then I stopped myself. This was pure fantasy, clutching at straws. Don’t tie everything into knots and conspiracies, he had said to her, and I, too, would do well to heed the warning. There didn’t have to be a common thread; for all that I was doing my best to spin one out of nothing.
As it transpired, I never had the chance to test my nerve, because when I did go back down to the Internet café in Apt, waiting until the friendly man at the counter had no other customers before being admitted to make a rapid search for references to Francis Tully, I found myself reading obituaries. The old man had fallen down dead in his beloved garden some six months earlier.
It was around then, at the time the ceiling collapsed and I found out more about Rachel, that Dom started retreating more into himself during the days, leaving me to my own devices.
He began taking long, solitary walks whatever the weather. He would set off in the car, while I stayed behind, reading and cooking and thinking. When he returned, he was full of stories and small observations, though, and wanted to share them. I rationalized that this was all for the good, that it never seemed we were living together too closely, that it was a way of ensuring boredom would not set in.
If ever I did start to worry, I persuaded myself that this was normal in such a relationship, given that we spent so many hours in close proximity. There were plenty of times when he was attentive and concerned that I was happy; it was my oversensitivity and lack of confidence that made me misread the situation. I was so in love with him that the thought of our life together slipping through my fingers was unbearable.
And we always came together at night. He would put winter’s wild offerings from the garden in a vase by my side of the bed: sprigs of evergreen rosemary and pine, translucent dried circles of honesty. He always asked me if I needed anything, and bought me an electric heater for the bare, cell-like room on the ground floor where I liked to sit reading.
One book in particular I kept returning to at that time: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It has none of the intellectual cachet of Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or Crime and Punishment, but for me, its modesty is the point. The story has an emotional pull and a truth all its own. Dom’s wife was called Rachel, another of Daphne’s heroines; was it that coincidence that drew me to Rebecca rather than any other novel about a woman haunted?
PART III
Chapter 1
Winters at Les Genévriers were often harsh, for all the luminous skies.
When the snows came, they were heavy. In the severest winters, the path up to the village and the school was impassable for weeks on end and the violet ink in the wells set into the wooden desks would freeze solid.
Then, more than ever, the farm was a community apart, with a sense of isolation even from a village only ten minutes’ walk up the hill.
The start of the hard months was marked for us by a change in our footwear. At the end of September, we swapped the rope-soled shoes we wore in summer for wi
nter socks and leather boots. The wind began to bring cold air from the mountains, and carried chilly spots of rain.
There are only three days in the year when one or the other of the Provençal winds does not rake across this land. But the old ways are going—are long gone, in many cases—and soon the millers and shepherds, and farmers and fishermen whose lives depended on reading the winds will have died out, too.
At Les Genévriers, the winds sent word from the north and northwest that September was turning to October, and it was time to taste the vin de noix. It was a rite of early autumn, like the preserving of fruit and vegetables in bottles and earthenware jars in summer.
The green walnuts were gathered in June, and distilled with red wine, eau-de-vie, sugar, and oranges. In many ways, this was our most vital crop, as it was our famed walnut liqueur that brought the neighboring families to the farm to buy, some with their own bottles to fill from the barrels for a few sous less.
Papa would go down to the cellar beneath the barn. In this room was the still; then, along a short passageway, was the vaulted, gravel-lined wine cave under the courtyard. From the first barrel, he would draw a glass of sweet tawny wine.
Marthe could smell essences in the vin de noix that no one else could.
Marthe, swirling the glass of walnut wine and sniffing. The first time she said, to universal fascination, “I can make out warm caramel, that’s the top note. But then, the liqueur stays on the tongue and gives the honey of the tobacco plant, and overripe plums, and heliotrope and cocoa.”
Then, as no one broke the silence, she added, “If I really concentrate, there’s a hint of the scent of split figs cooked with honey, you know, at the moment they turn jammy under the heat. Only then, at the end, the mellow bitterness of the nut.”
Bitterness? Top note? What were top notes? I could see I wasn’t the only one wondering.
“Hmmn,” said Papa, deciding to play the game. “But what does it taste of? Does it taste good?”
“It tastes all right, perhaps a little too sweet and sticky.”
She couldn’t have seen the expression of hurt and disappointment on his face, but she went on in the nick of time, “But the aroma! It’s so very special, so absolutely right, the scent of these special nuts grown in this place. Just as it should be, quite wonderful.”
“Aah, that’s true,” he said, swilling it around under his nose before taking another great slurp. “A magnificent wine.”
“May I be honest, Papa? To be truly magnificent, it should have some bite, some sharp contrast. Perhaps an herbal note that would anchor it, make it a little less fluffy.”
“Fluffy?”
“Flabby, fat with too much sweetness.”
That made him bellow. “Fluffy? Flabby? Bite? What kind of insolence are they teaching you at this school of yours? Be gone with you and your fancy ideas!” But it was a false bellow that could not conceal his joy at an unexpected source of pride in addition to the wine. He waved us away and settled down with the bottle and a rich satisfaction.
By that stage, Marthe was at a special school in Manosque: a school for the blind. I’d finally become aware that she couldn’t see very well when I had started at the village school, which at that point she still attended. Every morning at half-past seven we walked up through the woods and she would take my arm, although I was younger than her.
Sometimes a cloud sat on the top of the mountain range like icing on a cake and I would point it out, but, though I realize this only in retrospect, she was always happier noticing the smells and the changes in the springiness of the mud and stone path and the flap of birds’ wings above.
This can only have been our routine for a term or two (though, in my mind, it went on for years and years), because Marthe was sent to the special school for the blind when she was ten or eleven.
Strangely, I don’t recall being shocked by the discovery of her condition, despite the fact that I had not known of it before. She had not complained. She was a calm, gentle girl, who was happy to sit and study nature in close-up, and we had all accepted this without asking why this should be. If anyone was shocked, it was Pierre, and that was neither for long nor with any sense of remorse. Though, naturally, we did not learn of his involvement until quite some time later.
Even now, I am not sure exactly how or when our parents found out the extent of her loss of sight, how long they had been aware there was a problem. The first I knew of it was when they told us calmly, one evening at supper, that Marthe would be going away.
I was surprised, obviously, but young enough to accept the news without question, as I did so many other new experiences. Later on, I did ask her once or twice whether the onset had been sudden and frightening, but she fudged the answer. Perhaps she thought I was curious for all the wrong reasons and my asking was just prurient. So I was left none the wiser. All I had were my impressions, which may or may not have provided an accurate picture of what really happened. And when the time comes that you really want to find out the truth, there is no one left to ask.
Chapter 2
One morning, the air changed. A light dusting of frost iced the garden. The topiary stood stark-white and petrified. Winter was upon us. Under mercury clouds, the bare bones of nature were being picked clean by bitter winds.
Outside, the atmosphere thickened. Snow was threatening. Static electricity crackled when our fingers touched. We walked through the transformed woods, down to the ruined chapel.
Light changes the scenery. The same place, a different season: the difference is brightness. When the late-afternoon light was low but bright, the tussocks of grass on the fields were backlit into a strange moon surface as we walked. But later, returning to the house with the sun at our backs, we moved into our own shadow, like going forward into the past, back into the fabric of our self-imposed solitude.
The next morning, flurrying and fluttering at the windows, the snow was mesmerizing. Flakes were fat clumps now, the ground so cold that the white was building up into a fleece, sticking to the leaves of the ivy. Wind whipping it in all directions, pulling the gaze from one zigzag fall to another, distorting the perspective.
Outside, the stone pineapple was losing definition, and the hand had accepted a palmful of whiteness. I had said nothing to Dom about their provenance. The stone cornucopia acquired a powdering of sugar: plump, dredged grapes; peaches topped with alien cream. White cushions formed on the wooden benches and chairs, set for conversations that would not take place until the spring.
Snow took hold of the skeletal structures of the garden, coating the seed heads and stalks. Soon the alliums and globe artichoke were extravagantly plumed in winter’s coat. Life slowed into a strange calm as disarray and decay were covered over, more thickly smothered hour by hour.
I set up one of the summer garden chairs in the stark room I’d appropriated as a study. It looked out on the courtyard with the blanketed olive tree and the fig, but I put my back to the window to catch the light, writing now as well as reading, with a traveling rug over my knees and the electric fire ticking away.
There was a faint smell of lavender from the dried-out bunch that I’d stuffed in a glass carafe during the summer. At one point, I thought I heard some music from Dom’s piano, but it was only a brief, experimental run of notes and ended almost as soon as it had begun.
Finally, my ideas were beginning to crystallize. Everywhere I turned, there were the raw materials of narrative: stories passed on by everyone we met; snippets of information that seemed to resonate. And my own observations: the old keys that didn’t fit any lock; the empty wells; the hunters who trespassed in our wood; the discovery of more rooms in the house, secrets that were there all along, only needing to be unlocked; the blind girl who created perfumes.
It was going to be an experiment, but I decided to try writing my own book about the sensuous dimensions of the countryside surrounding us, drawing on the old Provençal tales and setting the story of Marthe Lincel at its heart.
But however much I immersed myself in the past and our enclave, it was hard not to be aware of what was happening in the here and now. Dom spent more and more time in his music room, away from me.
Neither did he seem to have much contact with his family or friends. Nor did I, for that matter. We had received a total of six personal letters, all for me, since we’d been at Les Genévriers. It wasn’t healthy being so isolated.
“Do you want to invite your parents down here for Christmas?” I suggested. “Surely they’d love to see the place.”
“I can’t think of anything worse. Not at Christmas.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Too many masses, confessions. Too much guilt. I’ve never been as good a Catholic as I was brought up to be.”
“Ah.”
“What about you?”
“Well, my mother might like to be asked, though she’d make her excuses,” I said. “She likes going to my brother’s—being with the grandchildren.”
“Just the two of us, then.”
Did he say it too quickly?
“Just the two of us,” I agreed.
Chapter 3
Marthe did well at Manosque, learning Braille in addition to all the normal lessons. Then, one day, her class was taken on a field trip that changed the course of her life.
The school was tentatively (and perceptively) forming an association with a small local perfume factory. From the second she walked into the blending room, Marthe told me, she knew she was in the place where she was meant to be. Several of the girls showed an aptitude for the work, but it was Marthe who was the most enthusiastic, the one who asked if she could come back soon.
She knew straightaway that she had found her métier. That evening, she sent us a letter, dictated to one of the teachers, which said: “Smell these together. I think it’s beautiful. All best wishes to you all from Marthe.” The envelope contained a white rose petal and a twist of dried orange peel.
The Lantern Page 11
