No, Dom never told me anything that wasn’t true. But it may have been the kind of truths that lawyers deal in. There are degrees of honesty. How much detail is the right amount? There is omission, and holding back and misleading statements. But there are confidences to honor, too. There are white lies that spare someone the hurt of too harsh a truth. And there is simple restraint: always thinking before you speak, and a precision in one’s choice of vocabulary that can conceal a multitude of ambiguities.
This was what I was thinking, my mind clogged with suppositions and imaginary dead ends, as the scent grew still stronger. I was angry with Dom for disappearing without a word, hurt and nervous, too, at being on my own in this situation. I was aware that my breathing was fast and shallow, that I needed air.
I went back out onto the bedroom terrace. A three-quarter moon hung over the hamlet, dropping puddles of gray light over its domestic landmarks. Enough light to see that I was no longer alone.
Relief flooded through me, pushing aside anger. “Dom!” I called down at his shadow.
He did not reply. My anger reignited and I shouted again.
Still no response; no movement, either. Then—did a cloud move and the moonlight gleam brighter?—I saw that the figure was not Dom.
It was a woman standing below on the path. She was completely still in the dark, looking out to the hills, her back to me. I couldn’t think what she was doing there, or who she was. Or why she was out in the middle of the night and chose to stop just there.
My first thought was to call down and demand an explanation, but though I opened my mouth, just as in dreams, nothing came out. As though my subconscious took over to pull me back from the brink, I stopped.
Whoever she was, she was an unlikely intruder. Hardly more than a silhouette, she simply stood there, small and fragile and utterly calm. Perhaps the barest ripple disturbed the fabric of her skirt, and brushed her hair back from her face, the face I still could not see.
Uncertain, I held back.
The world stilled. The temperature plummeted. Night noises faded, leaving absolute silence.
I lunged back into the room to find the flashlight. How stupid was I, to do nothing? I switched on the beam as I fumbled with the other hand for my phone. Then I edged back to my vantage place. I shone the light straight down at her.
She was gone. There was nothing there.
My body knew it before my mind. In the minutes that followed, as I pressed my back into the stones of the wall, heart pounding, a thought came into my head. It arrived with all the slippery discomfort of a recovered memory: on some primal level, I knew who she was. I had felt her presence, and now, fleetingly, I had seen her. She was one of the women of the house, one of the spirits.
I closed my eyes, feeling my skin tighten all over. There she was again, already stamped on my memory. It was the very ordinariness of the vision that was so chilling. As if nothing in the world could be relied on not to shift shape, as if this was the visceral knowledge we learn to suppress: that childhood terrors are all too real.
It was only then, as I sat trembling on the bed, fighting waves of panic and fury at Dom, that the scent gradually ebbed away.
Chapter 19
It was a terrible spring that followed the winter Marthe went to Paris to make her fortune.
As late as March, the frosts lay like foam on the cherry, plum, and pear blossom, killing most of the fruit before it had even formed. There were very few branches that managed any yield that year. It rained so hard that the springwater overflowed the spring over several weeks and washed away the sloping field of lucerne below. The damp penetrated the sheepfold and the animals sickened. Too many lambs died. Our hopes of a good return at the market dwindled and died.
Our summer passed in a desperate race to compensate. We planted and gathered as many vegetables as the soil could throw up, and rushed to preserve as much as possible for another hard winter. No rot-blown plum or pepper was too soft or small or pocked to have the bad parts excised before being added to the pile for bottling. Our thumbs bled as the juices ran and the small fruits slipped under the knife. We sowed and nurtured pumpkin and squash. The hunting season began. The guns brought back thrush and blackbirds; now and then, a partridge.
The first low clouds of autumn came in like wisps of smoke across the mountains. The walnuts we had left to eat were dropping, quickly blackening, eaten inside out by earwigs. We harvested what we could, then the ladder came out and we snapped the crop from the trees, hustling to get them into the barn before more rain came. We worked as fast as we could, to the music of the changing winds, our hands stained yellow by releasing the nutshells from their pods.
After heavy rain, the wild tangle of green grapes and wisteria outside the windows dripped like a shower. The scent of fig mingled with wood smoke and warm, wet earth, and, for years after, was synonymous with despair.
In the midst of all this, Pierre left.
There were arguments in raised voices, and slammed doors, but Pierre was determined. He dressed his abandonment as an opportunity to take the best of all worlds, that he would return with money and still be able to work here when he could, but no one was fooled.
Then Old Marcel died, leaving two distraught dogs that howled all day and night for ten days.
Papa became dejected. Whatever suggestions Maman put forward were swept aside as worthless. We had never seen him like this, nor heard our parents arguing with such ferocity when they thought that we had gone to sleep.
Then, one evening, Arielle’s father, Gaston Poidevin, came and told our parents that his family, too, would be leaving Les Genévriers. He had been researching the opportunities in the new industries for some time, he said, and it was with great regret that he had decided to reestablish his family at Cavaillon, down in the plain on the road to Marseille. “Treachery” was the word Papa used, rejecting his old friend and tenant’s reasoned arguments.
“You realize you are making, at a stroke, our lives here twice as hard?”
I do not remember the response. There was nothing Poidevin could have said. If Papa hadn’t been able to persuade his own son to stay, how could he succeed with anyone else?
Maman was as close to Marie Poidevin as I was to Arielle, and we cried for the loss of our friends, though without letting Papa see us. Tearfully, Arielle and I vowed everlasting friendship, no matter where we came to rest in the future.
For a few weeks after that, Papa tried hard to pull his spirits up. We had our backs to the wall, he admitted, but we would never be defeated, it was not in our bones to give in. We had our land, and, with hard toil, we would make it pay. We gave a cheer at that, and hugged one another. The arguments with Maman ceased, at least within our earshot.
As the months crept into winter, though, it became clear there was an artificial aspect to our spirited pride. Our father, exhausted and ashamed, took to the walnut liqueur.
Christmas was a muted affair. For the first time, neither Marthe nor Pierre returned. For the last time, we ate the traditional Thirteen Desserts with the Poidevin family, and Arielle and I placed the clay santons, the little saints, around the holy crèche in the hall. I added a new one, a lavender girl, to our battered collection of figures: the shepherd, the miller, the carpenter, the tambourine player, the dancer, the baker, the woman with a bundle of sticks.
A few evenings later, none too steady, Papa had been cleaning his hunting rifle. He could have put his cloths away, but instead he decided to go rummaging in one of the many shelves of the basement under the house.
He returned with the Prussian revolver that Pierre had once stolen. None of us knew he had kept it. But, somewhere, he had. Maman said that he decided to use the remaining oil on the cloth to give it a polish.
We told everyone it was a freak accident. Maybe it was. But maybe it wasn’t. We all had different reasons for suspecting it was what he had wanted to do when he went and fetched that dangerous old gun from its hideaway—a gun that hadn’t seen the light
of day for years—a few days after that cold, strained Christmas when both Pierre and Marthe stayed away.
I was outside when I heard the shot. There was a glorious sunset in a red-and-violet mackerel sky, and I was watching intently as, for a few minutes, the distinct clouds were rimmed with scarlet light. A moment later, the light shimmered in shock and went black as the report rang out, so close by. All thought fractured in the second or so needed for surprise to turn to panic. Suddenly, all luminosity was extinguished, leaving a heavy, blue-black glower reaching up over the valley to the house.
Chapter 20
The next morning, I was shaky from lack of sleep, still chasing logical explanations for the events of the night before.
It was one of those searing, blue days when everything seems painfully sharp. I was sitting on the steps down from the kitchen with a mug of strong coffee, feeling unearthly, as though I was suspended in liquid, when I heard the car pull up. A few minutes later, Dom came into the courtyard. He looked awful, as if he had not slept, either.
Holding back all the questions and accusations, wanting and not wanting him to know how scared I had been, desperately relieved he was back, yet furious he had left me, I stared at him dumbly.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Where the hell have you been?” I spat out the words.
Coming up toward me, he seemed older and more battered than I had ever seen him, with that air of vulnerability that confused me. His stained shirt hung slackly outside his jeans.
“Where? Just driving . . . then too many beers in the pub in Apt.”
“And?”
“And nothing. A room in the hotel in the back square. Drunk, but not quite drunk enough to risk being stopped by the police and losing my license.” He put his hands gently on my shoulders. I shrugged them off. Up close, every line on his face was vividly etched.
Even if he hadn’t wanted to risk driving—and over that short distance, on deserted roads, most Frenchmen would have—I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t called a taxi to get himself home.
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“It’s true. Stupid, but true.”
“What was so bad, Dom?” So bad that you had to stay away.
“You’ll think it’s idiotic—”
“Tell me.”
He looked away, up toward the roof. “It’s . . . what you were writing about. The blind girl, Marthe.”
“I know that, but—”
He shook his head wearily. “It’s what she was doing. Rachel. Exactly what she was writing. Now do you understand?”
That same day, Fernand gave me a photograph of the Valensole lavender pickers in the 1930s. I’d asked him about the old times up there, and we’d had a lengthy conversation about times gone by. I was touched that he’d gone to the trouble, though, clearly, this was no longer a subject I would be able to write about.
The two men in the group picture took the dominant positions: one in the center of the front row, the other leaning on a pitchfork on the left flank. The women ranged in age from teenagers to grandmothers. Their checked dresses were utilitarian, most crossing over the chest and tied at the back. They wore aprons, too, and cotton scarves, which they knotted over their shoulders. In their arms, they cradled sheaves of lavender, like trophies. Faces dark, and eyes squinting against the sun. Hair was short, in the fashion of the time, and pulled back in clips. I was bemused to see how stylish these women were until I realized that, for many, this was their adventure, their time to leave home for new sights and experiences, even if they were only twenty kilometers away.
I looked deep into this photograph for a long time, knowing that I ought to abandon the work I’d done, but unwilling to do so.
I wish I could say that I hadn’t known about Rachel and what she was working on, but I think, on some level, that I must have. At the time, I thought that morning was the tipping point in my relationship with Dom. If only it had been. If only we had both had the courage to speak then. As it was, I didn’t even tell him about the figure I thought I saw on the path. He would have called my fears excessive, and perhaps he would have been right. I’d had a panic attack; that was what it was.
A few days later, the newspapers again were full of stories about another girl who had gone missing near Castellet and about the discovery of her battered body. It took all my reserves of sense and sound judgment to strike through that flooding paranoia, the unwelcome pictures that flashed through my mind. Dom’s night away. The woman on the path. The last photo of the girl alive. The last known sighting of her in the area where Dom said he’d been walking. The deep scratches that had scored his face and arms.
Then I stopped myself. I was letting my jitteriness get the better of me. How could I have thought that, even for a moment?
Chapter 21
The first I knew that Marthe had come back, that she had not left forever, it was a signal so subtle that I hardly realized that was what it was.
I had stirred early in my bed. I was warm and comfortable in my nest and I could smell lavender. The scent was quite distinct and pleasant. It was a while before I thought to wonder where it was coming from. Was it from the chest of drawers where I had placed a small cotton bag in with my nightwear? The drawer was closed, and the scent was too strong. I supposed the cleaning fluid I’d used on the tiled floor might have contained lavender, but, in that case, why hadn’t I smelled it before I went to bed? Some of my perfume bottles stood on the mantelpiece about two meters away, but I had never been able to smell their contents from this distance before, and, in any case, there was no pure lavender among them.
All I knew was that the scent was coming up the hillside and in through the open window. It was delicious, full of childhood memories and flowers. I luxuriated in it for a few heady moments before dismissing the thought as impossible. The scent was too strong, too immediate, to be coming in from outside. I could not understand it at all.
Later, when I went up to the room again and there was no perfume but that of cool, clean air, I decided that I must have had the remains of some scent on my wrists and neck, which had somehow been warmed and activated in the coziness of the bed. But I wasn’t convinced.
Somehow I knew, deep in the fibers of my being, what it signified.
Yes, I yearned for Marthe to return but not like this.
I confess: I did not like it.
Even before she appeared in front of me, I knew she was there. Can a house retain scents of the past? Are they such potent spells? Or can the mind trick the body into believing it is actually smelling a concoction that exists entirely in the memory?
Or, if we are to talk about haunting: Is it the house or the resident that is haunted?
Whatever the answers that might be given by medical scientists or philosophers, I know what I smelled. Marthe’s presence. Day by day, piece by piece, all the components came together—the first, flirty trail of fruitiness, the vanilla and cocoa, the cherry and almond and hawthorn and wood smoke—until I could hardly breathe for her perfume.
Chapter 22
Then it was spring again, almost a year since I had first seen Les Genévriers.
Under diamond-bright sun, brown expanses prickly with last year’s dusty thyme and lavender were being overwritten by meadow flowers. Tight blue grape hyacinths sprang up in the lawns. Daffodils, primroses, and violets pushed aside drifts of crisp brown oak leaves, and white blossom burst out of the plum and cherry trees.
For weeks at a time, all was good. Better than good. It was as though the season of renewal and rebirth had reinvigorated Dom’s mood, and I responded with almost manic relief. We talked and laughed and drew closer again. I shut away any uneasy thoughts, blaming my own psychological shortcomings, my tendency to worry unnecessarily. Dom and I were spoons in a drawer, complementary personalities in perfect balance: we had rediscovered our sweet spot together. We spent days outside, feeling our winter bodies lighten. Dom
hacked at the ivy strangling the deciduous trees, I cleared beds for planting, and we made a joint attempt to build a low wall from rubble we found in the wood.
Desire would spark mid-afternoon. We might draw out a deliciously languorous display of restraint until disappearing formally behind the closed shutters of the bedroom. Or I might surprise him in the shade of the garden.
We felt quite restricted (and had to become more inventive) when the masons arrived back to “butter” between the stones of the outside walls of the main house: beurrer is the term they use to describe the filling and smoothing of the gaps with lime mortar. I liked that.
The swimming pool contractor came to take soil samples and detailed measurements. A tangible sense of purpose reemerged. The sounds of physical work were oddly soothing. I no longer started at sudden noises. Dismissing any lingering suspicions as so many misunderstandings, cold thorns of the winter months, and too much melodramatic literature, I began to recover my sense of self.
The sound of shooting in the woods stopped, and M. Durand sowed lucerne for his sheep in the fields below our land, as he had done the previous year. It made me nostalgic for the sound of their bells, and for the perfect summer we had spent, even if it had been illusory.
It reminded me of the barrier of branches that had been dragged across the chemin. How it had concerned us until we saw it was only part of the process of providing a temporary enclosure for the sheep. (I would do well to remember that more often, I told myself. There was almost always a simple explanation.)
M. Durand was keen to tell me about the sheep, and the old ways: how the shepherds used to travel the traditional grazing routes by night, and talked and drank, ate and rested by day. “At night, they carried hurricane lamps. The hooves made a skittering noise on concrete roads, the whole herd running, dogs barking, bells going crazy. It was a hard, hard life. You can understand why hardly anyone does it now.”
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