The Lantern

by Deborah Lawrenson

  As a group, we were mainly girls and young women. The older women apparently came from the nearby villages in the morning and went back each evening.

  It was all pretty friendly. Being one of the youngest, I wasn’t of much interest to the ones who were over twenty and wanted to talk about hairstyles and their romances with men, but I found easy company with a couple of others more my own age, Aurélie and Mariette. Aurélie was the tallest girl I had ever seen, taller even than Papa, and with long, thin shins like a giraffe I had seen in a book; her back often hurt her, perhaps because she had farther to bend. Mariette was the daughter of a cheesemaker at Banon. She would always share sharp white patties made of goat’s milk, wrapped in dry brown leaves, which she brought from her family’s farm. Her generosity didn’t make her popular, she was too awkward for that, but I liked her. I sensed we shared a similar lack of ease away from our own family land, though neither of us ever admitted it, being committed to claiming success in striking out on our own for the first time.

  Among the field workers were Spanish and Portuguese, men and women, regulars at harvesttime, and paid by the task. They were polite to us, extremely voluble among themselves, and kept slightly apart. What they were doing there during the war, I don’t know. Perhaps the authorities didn’t, either, but they were obviously known and trusted by the farmers, so perhaps they had simply stayed after other harvests and been assimilated into the land, just like us.

  They slept in a tent at the side of the fields and cooked for themselves on a camping stove. What they thought about sleeping so close to vipers slithering around the flowers, I never got the chance to ask.

  Chapter 8

  I thought they were icicles, at first. But as I drew closer, I saw they were fringes of glass shards hanging in the olive tree in the courtyard: the remains of the little jars I had wired to the branches in the summer to hold tea lights, their bellies blown away when rainwater they had collected had frozen and the ice expanded.

  As I unwound the wires and picked more sharp slivers off the ground, it seemed a long time since Dom and I had sat outside each balmy evening.

  When you first meet someone and they tell you stories about themselves, you generally have no reason to doubt these are true. You take them on faith.

  Here’s the rub: Dom never told me anything that wasn’t true. In any case, at this point, I thought I was the one who had reluctantly begun to keep uncomfortable truths to myself. I wanted so badly for the reality to match up to the dream. Right at the start, I had promised myself I would be bold. Before, I had been so shy and scared of a serious relationship—so scared of life, sometimes—but I trusted him with my hopes and expectations. Now I was experiencing the painful realization that real trust only comes with real knowledge of someone else. The truth was, beneath all the excitement and romantic backdrops, we were two people who really didn’t know each other very well at all.

  When Dom was not immersed in his music, he was reading science books, books rooted in complex physics, about string theory, time, and the universe. It didn’t occur to me to question his motives, to wonder if his interests were an avoidance strategy. Perhaps another woman might have, but I did not. I understood all too well about having a vibrant, satisfying inner life that complemented the outer one. It was a place of refuge, too. When I was reading and writing, I was in that exhilarating place where the life of the imagination is more real than the tiles and soil and rock under my feet.

  If we shared that, I reasoned, surely it was a mark of our compatibility. If he didn’t seem to want to see other people, well, to be frank, neither did I—not all the time, anyway. I was reveling in the freedom to think and research and experiment.

  So I put my faith in the hundreds of everyday details that showed we loved each other, not the great, showy speeches and excesses that had marked the beginning of our story, but the subtle gestures and kindnesses: the smiling eyes and plans, the soft, silent kisses as we passed, the pieces of music composed in my name, the rolling conversation and exchanged understanding over cups of tea, and wine, and the food we cooked together, his endless generosities, the way he touched me.

  There was balance in the relationship when we were both occupied with our own interests, so I followed up Sabine’s suggestion and visited the public library in Apt to research Marthe Lincel. The idea of blindness and scent was a compelling one.

  “I finally went blind when I was thirteen years old, and it was the loss of my sight that took me to places I might never have seen.”

  These are the first words of Marthe Lincel’s own memoir of her life as a perfume creator, published in Paris in the early 1960s.

  “In the village, they said our family was cursed, and that my blindness was this generation’s manifestation of it. I never thought that. We were caught in a cruel vise between past and future, ground by the wheels of progress, no different from any other family, perhaps with a little less luck than some.”

  She, or rather her ghostwriter, describes the journey she made at eleven years old: from the farmstead in the Luberon valley to the lavender road that winds eastward up through the hills to Manosque. It would lead her to Paris, where by the 1950s, at the age of thirty, she would have a shop in the Place Vendôme and fame in her chosen career.

  “Would that be considered a curse?” she asks.

  To the east of Manosque is the Valensole plateau, nursery of the lavender industry. Vallis and solis—the Latin for “valley” and “sun.” It was here Marthe Lincel learned the craft that would make her the highest-regarded perfumer of her generation. Her talent for blending scents was so prodigious that each one was a story, a sensuous journey that developed on the skin for up to ten hours.

  Photographs show a self-contained young woman with dark hair, fine-boned and attractive. From the photographs, perhaps carefully composed, her blindness is impossible to discern. There are no photographs of her after the age of forty.

  Her family, the Lincels, lived at Les Genévriers for as long as anyone could remember. The years were marked by vintages of walnut wine and olive oil, each one a variation of the terroir, the land that produced it, a reflection of its soil and gradient, height and angle to the sun, that year’s temperature fluctuations and winter rainfall. In vaulted stone caverns under the main house and courtyard, where barrels creaked and cobwebs laced the ranks of bottles, their labels were the only written history.

  When Marthe created her signature scent, Lavande de Nuit, like the winemakers and the olive farmers she bottled the past. Then she walked away.

  She left Paris at the height of her success and disappeared without a trace.

  Chapter 9

  Work in the lavender fields was hard but not unbearable. I was well used to bending and cutting and picking, and the man in the waistcoat was a fair master. He did not tolerate idleness but made sure we had iced water to slake the terrible thirsts that seized our throats after a few hours in the dry, perfumed dust under a fierce sun. His name was Auguste, I learned, and he was the son of the farmer who had brought most of the new lavandin to this plateau. He had negotiated a lucrative contract with the scent distillery.

  So, all in all, despite the physical aches, I was not at all unhappy. The change of scene, the new vistas, new mountains and lines of the horizon were all an adventure, one that helped to blot out the terrible stories we heard of executions and Nazi atrocities from Paris and the rest of the Occupied Zone in the north.

  Sometimes, when work was done, I took myself off for slow ambles in the lanes around the fields. My eye was drawn to a corner where a neighboring field of sunflowers had tossed up golden heads in sumptuous contrast to the palette of blues. The bands of yellow ochre sang with stinging clarity between ropes of indigo on the tilting fields.

  In other areas, where lavender rose upon lavender in a hundred shades of mauve, twilight brought a deep, unreal violet to the plateau. One evening in late July, I watched, transfixed, as the undulations merged into a mysterious landscape where no bo
undaries were definable between flower and sky, between falling shadow and the darkening blue. For an hour or more, perspective ceased to exist.

  I stared into the secret openings and whorls of flowers, then up into the vast new views, making sketches to help myself focus on the detail, always trying to find the right words to describe them. I was beginning to understand now what my sister had been saying, with the envelopes containing petals.

  Then, just as I hurried away in what was left of the light, a black shadow lengthened under a solitary olive tree in the middle of the field and detached itself. It set a course in my direction. Unsure what to do, and feeling that to stand still might be taken for an admission of guilt in the course of some misdemeanor, I put my head down and continued on the path.

  It was not until the man’s footsteps crunched hard by my own that I looked around, although I did not stop. It was Auguste.

  “You’re a quiet one,” he said, coming straight to the point.

  This came as a shock, for I had been making a great effort to be sociable, and indeed had spoken to more strangers in the past weeks than I had in the whole year previous.

  “Where have you been this time, all by yourself?”

  “Just . . . walking,” I said.

  He nodded. He had a grave manner.

  “This . . . this place with so many purple fields . . . I’ve never seen anything like it.” I was stumbling on, with my mouth as well as my feet. “It’s so beautiful.”

  He asked me where I came from, and told me he had heard of it. He might have been being polite.

  “I had you down as a clever one, who thought she could wangle a beater’s job at the still by seeming to express an interest,” he said.

  It’s true that with a table set up for the job, separating the flowers from the stalks meant less backbreaking bending, but then again, it was only fair that the older, frailer women had that privilege.

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  Another grave nod.

  “There was a reason but it wasn’t that.”

  And I told him about Marthe as we walked, side by side, through the cicadas’ deafening evensong, back to the farm. All around, a scented veil blurred the rows of lavender and the coming night.

  Chapter 10

  I did call Sabine.

  She asked me what I’d been doing, and seemed so delighted I’d taken up her suggestion, so warm and friendly, that I immediately accepted her invitation for a day out. I told Dom, and he made no comment.

  A few days later, she drove by to pick me up and we set off east on the road to Digne and Sisteron. When she’d told me our destination, it seemed it simply couldn’t have worked out better: Manosque, the town where Marthe Lincel had learned her craft.

  A route sign indicated that we were heading into the Alps of Haute-Provence. The road swooped in and out of plane tree avenues. By early summer, they would form green tunnels under a high canopy of leaves, a reminder of the old rural France.

  “They are gradually being uprooted due to the dangers they are said to present,” said Sabine. At the wheel, she was assured and purposeful. “Too many accidents caused by wide modern trucks; drivers plowing head-on into the thick trunks; drunks at the wheel veering off course and crashing into a wall of wood, hard as iron. They say the flickering light between them triggers headaches and even epileptic fits.” She exhaled an expression of exasperated disbelief.

  I agreed that the dappled arches over bright country roads were a symbol of an older, slower time.

  “Two-hundred-year-old trees they are destroying! If you hit a tree, it is the tree’s fault?” she demanded, smoothly passing the car ahead of us.

  She was interesting, charming, and helpful. Part of me thought that I could come to relish her friendship, if indeed that was what was on offer; and part of me was wary. Given how eager she was to discuss Rachel, she was using me for information every bit as much as I was using her. As things stood, the balance between us was just about even.

  From a distance, this time of year, the lavender fields were dull brown corduroy. But in the background, the Montagne de Lure floated above forests, and behind that, the peaks to the north stood vast and wide, still capped with snow.

  The sunny day was cold as steel. Pink and orange tiled roofs were outcrops of illusory warmth under the blue vault of the sky. Half-forgotten hamlets in rolling hills, the last shudders from the formation of the Alps. I had been reading Giono, immersing myself in his otherworldly stories of harsh existence on these uplands, the vastness of the lonely country and the subtlety of the barely perceptible difference between success and failure.

  A little way out of town, the Musset perfume factory was a modern plant, short on romance, too. A few token oleanders and tubs of lavender softened the entrance and the parking lot. “A very long time since the days of Mme. Lincel of Les Genévriers,” said Sabine.

  “But look,” I said. A map in relief pointed the way to a library of scents in the grounds, and a closer look revealed that tags on the plants were in Braille.

  “You know, a lot of people assumed she came back to the village when she left Paris,” said Sabine, as if she hadn’t heard. “But if she did, she didn’t stay long. She cut herself off, just like that. No one knows where she went.”

  We took the tour, but I felt curiously disengaged.

  Sabine was right. If we had been hoping to find the spirit of Marthe Lincel, it had long since evaporated, along with the scents she had conjured and captured in glass.

  We drove back to the outskirts of Manosque, past billboards advertising the local supermarket, roadside fruit stalls, garages, and building-supplies stores. Sabine parked with skill in a space I would have sworn was too small, and we walked through a medieval arch and tower into the center of the teardrop-shaped town. The narrow streets of its heart were restricted to pedestrians, and there was a bustle about it just before the shops closed at twelve thirty.

  Sabine suggested lunch, but neither of us felt much like eating. Instead we wandered past weathered stone doorways and out into a sunlit square lined by the familiar flat buildings of the south, ochre-plastered and shuttered, which rose above the tree line. Here and there were tall palms, and umbrellas were appearing over café tables. Many of the shops and restaurants were Moroccan. Pungent tagine spices overpowered more delicate scents. A horsemeat butcher had closed down; flyers on its grimy window announced a meeting of the Jeunes Communistes. African women offered to braid our hair, and in dark doorsteps, their men sat wearing mismatched clothes of clashing patterns, watching mutely as we passed.

  In another square, secondhand books were piled on tables, the dealers watching from inside their shops. On a stone bench outside a chapel, in a sheltered corner, we sat and let the sun’s rays warm our faces for the first time that day. I closed my eyes and felt the red pulse of the heat.

  Sabine caught me off guard. “So tell me what really happened to Rachel,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Rachel. I really would like to know.”

  Even to my own ears, my voice sounded unnaturally high and grating. “But I have no idea!”

  Sabine didn’t respond but fixed me with an unsettling, penetrating stare. It reminded me of our first lunch.

  “I wish I did know,” I said. I could feel a deep flush spreading up my neck.

  “They were happy together,” said Sabine. The fierce way it came out was nothing less than an accusation.

  “She was long gone when I met Dom. Nothing to do with me, I can assure you.”

  Another long appraisal, which I sat through with discomfort. “You see, when I last saw her, she and Dom were talking of coming to live here, of slowing down a bit. She was going to do some work with me. And she had just had it confirmed that she was pregnant. She—they—couldn’t have been happier about that.”

  I had to look away then.

  Sabine spared me having to respond by going on: “So what happened after that?”

  I thought of Dom on t
he ski slopes, his head in his hands. The way he withdrew from me at Les Genévriers. The sad, sad melodies that floated up from his music room. All the months I had known that something wasn’t right. I’d thought that it was my fault, but I was wrong.

  “Are they divorced now?” asked Sabine.

  It was a very direct question. A good one, too.

  “Yes,” I said dully.

  At least I had always assumed they were divorced. When I’d asked him right at the start, he told me he wasn’t married, but that he had been. He didn’t say he was separated, there were no tussles with the ex-wife, no communication that I knew of, so I took that to mean that they were already divorced. Now—well, suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

  “You said . . . did she have the baby?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  The fact that I obviously didn’t know either whether they had had a baby together hung unspoken in the air between us.

  Surely, surely Dom would have told me if they’d had a child.

  “There’s no child,” I said, to myself as much as her. Then, more certainly, “Dom doesn’t have a child. If he did, he would see it, be a father even if he and Rachel were no longer together.”

  Sabine’s expression was impassive.

  “And sometimes . . . the happiness or otherwise of other people’s relationships is difficult to ascertain, even when they seem happy enough on the surface.”

  “Perhaps,” said Sabine.

  A pause, before she asked, a little slyly, “Are you happy with him?”

  “Of course I am,” I said.

  What I should have said was, “Why do you ask?”

  After that, we didn’t linger in Manosque. We walked briskly through slightly down-at-the-heels streets back to where the car was parked. I didn’t even look out, as I’d intended, for the plaque on the wall marking the house where the town’s most famous son, Jean Giono, was born. By then, all I wanted was to be alone with my thoughts.