Battling the winds and rains of winter, and the chronic decay all around us, André soon became our mainstay. Without him, we would have gone under far earlier. Every other weekend, he went back to his village to check on his parents and to see his brothers and sister and their children. It was a great big family, by all accounts. After he’d gone at first light on Saturday, cycling off on Pierre’s old bicycle, I felt empty, as if part of me was missing.
As summer came, he began to miss a few of those fortnightly visits. On the Saturday evening, we might take the horse and cart into the next village and treat ourselves to dinner at an inexpensive restaurant. Sundays would be for walking in the woods and on the plateau, taking wine and food, eating in the great wide silence, then finding a shady hiding place in which to sleep, stuck together.
When he asked me to be his wife, it was a moment of pure happiness. I accepted him in the sure knowledge we would have a wonderful life together. I didn’t receive a ring; he gave me a much more original symbol of our love and commitment. He began to build his gift to me, in stone, painstakingly bringing the rocks down from the woodland where some listing walls had collapsed.
I said earlier that André seemed to me like a figure from the traditional tales of Provence. Perhaps he was more like a character from Jean Giono’s books, those almost mythic men who give his stories such a universal appeal. The messages were simple: have faith that the gods of nature will prevail, faith in hard labor on the land, and celebrate the determination of the peasant and the artisan to redeem the harshness and transform it into beauty and a symbol of that endurance.
It was André who built the two Romanesque arches in the gardens. He called them, in all seriousness, his monuments to our love. Complete follies, and the most wonderful presents I had ever been given.
We still lit the lantern, though the message had changed subtly. It had come to mean, I love you.
As he worked, and the arches slowly took shape, I dreamed of a simple but gloriously happy wedding in the village’s small church, saw the flowering rosemary strewn on flagstones as I walked up the aisle to him. The beignets and pancakes made with white flour for our special day. The long table set under the vine-and-fig canopy in the courtyard for the feast. The friends and neighbors from the village arriving with ribbons streaming from their carts.
My fiancé’s other present was less of a success. One evening, he arrived with a great unwieldy object, over which he had thrown some sacking.
“What on earth is it?” I asked, noting that it seemed to have some kind of independent movement as he held it out. The muscles in his arm were straining.
“Open it.”
I pulled back the sacking. Two black, beady eyes met mine through the bars of a cage. Instinctively, I pulled back. “A parrot?”
“A parakeet.”
It had been given to him by an elderly lady in the next village after he passed through on his way back from town and saw her fall from a loose stone she had been using as a doorstep. It was so typical of him that he mended it for her and took no payment other than a basket of apricots. She insisted he also take the bird in a cage.
The birdcage, a large, ornate cylinder affair made of thick wires, was placed in the corner of the sitting room. From a riot of bright green and yellow and red feathers spouted a vicious, hooked beak. When it launched into a stream of loud expressions of indignation, you could see a devilish blue-gray tongue, which neither Maman nor I could bear to look at.
In short, the bird was a brute, and it soon became obvious why the old woman could stand no more of its squawking. We put it outside by the wood store in the courtyard, and both sides declared an uneasy truce.
But the whole episode did make us laugh.
“If Pierre were here, he’d sell it at the market,” said Maman ruefully. “We might get a few sous for it.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, and André said he would give it a try himself. He came back with it in the afternoon.
Chapter 13
The second body was that of a younger woman.
This time, the remains were exhumed not from the pool area itself but from the raised bed that formed part of the ornamental stone crescent at its head. Weedy clumps of fast-growing herbs had been pulled away by the police team, and they had found her there.
We couldn’t believe it. How was it the police search team had found exactly what it seemed they had been denied with the first discovery? What made them keep searching? Had they been looking for further evidence linked to the first when they found the second body, or had they always believed they would find another? I begged Severan to tell us what was happening. His mood was grim exaltation, with a dash of vindication perhaps.
Then he arrested Dom.
“We now have the remains of two bodies on this property,” he said curtly when we both protested loudly. “What do you expect us to do?”
They took Dom to police headquarters in Cavaillon for questioning. Severan would tell me nothing more.
Where lies the line between books and life, fact and fiction? Of seeing and being seen? It was only now, when events were unfolding, that I recognized, from books rather than experience, that I truly appreciated the boundaries between reality and art. Before, I would read to understand, to think: yes, that person has a dilemma, those were the options available, and—for better or worse—that was the solution she or he chose. I have always argued for the fundamental honesty of fiction. But now I could see more sharply where the honesty lies. Possibly not in the stripping bare of the soul or on the crest of high drama, but in the small details and observations.
Dom hunched over the silent piano, his elbows on the keys. The wave of frozen discord. The great dark space of his absences. His face visibly closing.
The next morning, following a sleepless night, strong winds were brawling over the garden. Flowers and shrubs billowed and feinted, flattening themselves under the blows.
In the kitchen, sunlight filtered through the movement in the leaves of the courtyard trees, rendering the white plaster walls inside diaphanous and transitory, like fluttering muslin. A bright, Christmassy scent of freshly peeled oranges was all around. I couldn’t think where it came from, as we had only apples in the fruit bowl.
Feeling disoriented, and still in my nightdress, I let myself into the music room, looking not for Dom but some other resolution. Apart from the books of piano pieces—his favorite Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin—and loose pages of scribbles on staves, there was nothing. I supposed that if I had known more about music then I might have been able to read something into his choices and his own markings, but it was not a language I instinctively understood.
It seemed to me then that I knew as little about Dom as I did on the first day we met, and that any knowledge I had gained in the interim had made him more mysterious to me, rather than less.
Craving a sense of normality, I showered and dressed, then walked up to the village to buy milk and bread.
I trudged up the woodland path and emerged on the road up to the village. The first person I saw, her car parked at the side of the road just by its junction on the last bend, talking rapidly into her mobile, was Sabine.
She waved, rolled down her window, and then stepped out.
There was no escape. She was eager for every last detail. It goes without saying that she already knew what the police had found, and had a firm grasp of all the latest wildfire theories. She knew better than we did what was likely to happen next.
It occurred to me then: was it Sabine who had tipped off the police about Dom? What did she suspect, Sabine who seemed to know more about all of us than was comfortable, and who enjoyed the power it gave her?
Outside the café in the village, where we sat for a morning coffee, the sky was a few shades too bright, the clatter from inside a touch too loud.
Sabine considered what I’d just told her. “Why didn’t you say something before?” she asked.
Nervously, I twisted the bracelets on my wrist. As I went through some
of the incidents that had spooked me—the light flickering on the walls, the sound of stones against the window, the eerie evanescence of scent, the power outages—I felt more stupid. None of these could possibly be anything but random and unrelated. It was a relief to be able to tell someone, though I had to be careful. Not too much information; just enough to prompt her to tell me more than I told her.
Mercifully, she did not seem to know about Dom’s arrest. And, above all, I had to deflect her from that.
My gaze rested on the fountain in the square where we sat: black-green with lichen and moss, the water spewing from the mouth of a gargoyle so flattened and worn by age it looked like the head of a tortoise, water as cool and dark as the Styx.
“I thought it was nothing, just . . . crazy incidents, that I was . . . overreacting.”
“But you are clearly upset.”
“Yes.”
“Quite a lot of odd things, all happening in a chain together.”
It was a question of relationships, perhaps, between the infinite numbers of unconscious perceptions we make based on our own experience. It is a sum of impressions, in other words. Tricks of the light, yes. But of the inward eye, too.
“I was more scared of making too much of it,” I admitted.
“Some of them could easily be accidents, coincidences—the picture smashing, for instance. That happens. The glue on the backing tape dries up and gives out after so many years.”
“I know.”
“And power outages happen. They happen a lot here sometimes.”
“Of course.”
“But then the stones at the window . . . those are deliberate actions,” said Sabine. “So then you must ask who would be doing these actions deliberately.”
“Kids . . . bored kids, having a laugh.”
“It’s possible. What does Dom say?”
Careful now. “He doesn’t.”
“But you’ve told him.”
“I don’t mention it anymore.”
“There is another explanation, if you want to call it that,” said Sabine quietly.
It was unsettling how serious she looked. I dropped my eyes and let them wander beyond our table to where the uneven, cobbled road led away up the hill.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No!” I thought she was joking, and laughed, but her composure suggested otherwise.
“No—not at all,” I repeated. “Why, what makes you say that?”
“I shouldn’t have. Forget it.”
Chapter 14
There was a boy in the village I had always been friendly with. He was in my class at school. Henri claimed he was in love with me, but I never had those feelings for him. His jaw was too heavy, and his bottom lip seemed to swing pendulously. It grew worse as he aged, which was a shame. He worked on his family’s farm on the other side of the hill; they kept a large herd of goats and made cheeses, good, strong cheeses, and the smell of that always seemed to linger around him and leave savory trails in his wake. He was a musician, too, and played in the band at the fetes in the small villages in this eastern end of the valley. Unloosing his accordion to squeeze out torrents of notes, Henri was the star of the show with his fine renditions of popular songs as well as the complex, swooping rhythms of the traditional dances.
When I danced with André in our village, Henri never took his eyes off us. I was uncomfortable and flattered all at once. But then, at the end of the set, when the band was taking a break, swigging rough rosé, he leaped down and caught me by the arm.
“Sorry, so sorry,” he said to me. “But I have to do this.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he had swung for André. Blood dripped from André’s nose and formed rosettes on his white shirt.
“What are you doing? What’s going on?”
By now, other people were gathering to enjoy the spectacle.
“Ask him. Get him to tell you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
There was a tone in his voice that didn’t ring true. “André?” I asked. “What is he talking about?”
“I have no idea.”
“Roussillon. Ask him how much fun he had at the Roussillon fete last week. Go on, ask him.”
“Oh, for goodness sake, come on Béné, let’s go.”
“No, André, wait.” I couldn’t conceive that my old friend would be behaving like this for no good reason. “Last weekend you went back to see your family, didn’t you? You weren’t even in Roussillon.”
“No, of course not.” He rubbed his palm across his bloodied face.
“Yes you were. You were with a pretty woman and two small children who called you Papa.”
“What?”
“I was playing with the band. Their accordion player was sick and I was the substitute. I recognized you and watched you all night from the stage. You barely left your family’s side. You kissed your wife a few strides away from where I was having a drink and promised your work would be finished and you would be back for your fifth wedding anniversary next month.”
I turned to my fiancé, incredulous. “Is this right?”
It was obvious from his sudden sheepishness that it was, but I persisted. “I ask you again. Is this true?”
“I never wanted to hurt you.”
“So it is true!” I felt my bones melt, as if I might fall down on the spot. Other people had stopped speaking nearby, the better to take in the drama. “Then why? Why ask me to marry you? Why lead me on when you already had a wife and children back home?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Because . . . because . . . I care for you so much, Bénédicte. I could not help it, and . . . no, don’t turn away, listen to me! There’s a long story. I was pushed to marry her. Our families always wanted it, not me. Why do you think I spent so long away? Because I wanted to escape. Because I found you, and I thought there might be a way for us, if we could only find it!”
It was a pretty speech. I even found I believed some of it, probably because I wanted to so badly.
André reached out to touch me.
I drew back sharply, all too aware that we had an audience. “What are you doing? Go! Please go now! Don’t make it any worse!”
By then, some of the other men had started jeering, telling him to get out of the village. Henri put a protective arm around my shoulders.
André had no choice. He turned and walked away.
I was hollow. I felt as if my insides had disappeared and I was just a shell. The ax had fallen so swiftly, entirely without warning.
André left that night. I have no idea where he went; he just walked off into the blackness.
For weeks, I was inconsolable, unable to sleep or eat. I dragged myself through a dank imitation of life, in which every action seemed to require too much effort. I barely spoke, even to Maman. I retraced the paths we’d walked, and cried until it felt like there was not a drop of moisture left in me.
Then, late one night, long after I would have gone to bed if there had been any point in doing so, I saw it—the light on the path, in our secret place. I shuddered, sure I was imagining it. But as I approached, I heard my name being called in a whisper.
I jumped. “Who’s there?”
It sounded like him. It couldn’t be him.
Again, my name. Then he stepped out from the shadows by the bergerie.
André had returned.
I would have leaped into his arms. More than anything, I wanted to, yet I held myself in check.
“What do you want?” I asked in a small, flat voice.
“A chance to explain.”
“Please don’t lie to me again.”
“I won’t lie. And I never lied when I told you I loved you and I wanted to marry you, that you were the most lovely girl I had ever held in my arms.”
“And you never wanted to hurt me,” I said mockingly.
He protested, of course. But there was nothing he could say that could alter the situation. He was married. It was im
possible.
For the second time, I sent him away.
The next morning, I found the birdcage was open, and the parakeet gone. I remember feeling glad about that, considering it an act of mercy. As André well knew, I never liked the bird, and I didn’t want it there to remind me how badly I’d been deceived.
So, that was how I once had a fiancé. Or, rather, to be more accurate, how I once had a lover, since there were fundamental reasons why André was never my fiancé, not really. In the space of a few cruel minutes, out under the lights of the village square, with everyone watching, he stopped being my André, and became someone else’s husband and father of two small children.
It was such an abrupt end to my dreams; and such a long time before I came to terms with it. So many different facets of the story held me back. He must have loved me—he couldn’t have faked that, the way he held me with such tenderness. It must have been an impossible situation. A genuine love story that had begun when we had least expected it. He was not a terrible person. Then again, perhaps he was just an adventurer with a glib line in explanations.
I found it hard to trust people after that.
Funny enough, we kept the cage after the fiend flew away. I suppose we must have thought we could sell it if a dealer from one of the traveling secondhand markets ever called. It was an interesting-looking object, and strong, too. Someone might have been able to make use of it. But that was another opportunity that passed us by. As far as I know, it’s still there, by the wood store, rusting and empty.
Everyone and everything is gone, except me. Maybe if I could find the courage to step out beyond my bars . . . But, you see, I never had a reason to go.
And now they are all coming back. Perhaps it wasn’t a light on the path, after all. Perhaps it was the spirit of that parakeet trying to materialize. Now that would worry me.
Chapter 15
Taking a deep breath, I asked Sabine, “I suppose you still haven’t managed to track Rachel down, since we last spoke? I felt a bit uncomfortable with the idea of translating her notes, as if I was taking something of hers without her permission.”
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