She pleaded. She could and would change. What had happened in the past was all just that—the past. She played on his guilt, the reaction of his family if he were to abandon her.
In the teeth of Dom’s resistance, she moved back in. He knew it was a mistake.
Dom withdrew into himself. He swam for hours every day to avoid going home.
In the year leading up to the sale of his company, he volunteered for the lion’s share of the traveling. He traveled a great deal, across Europe and to the Far East. The more she tried to stop him from going, the longer he stayed away. In London, his friends placed their spare rooms at his disposal.
He ignored her. By that stage, it was clear there was no baby. Even when she had admitted to Dom she was not pregnant, she still told other people that she was. When he refused to react, the lies became more and more hurtful, more outrageous. She told friends and family that he had alcohol and drug addictions, that he gambled recklessly, that he was turned on by seedy clubs and underage girls. Then he was questioned by the police after she claimed he had broken down and confessed to her that he was the man who attacked and raped a woman in a horrific case that had been widely reported in the newspapers. Luckily, he was able to establish beyond a doubt that he was out of the country at the time.
Then she claimed she was seriously unwell. He knew that; by then, he was certain that she was mentally unbalanced. If she would only accept professional help, all might not be lost. But Rachel laughed at the suggestion. She was sick, she said, physically, terminally sick.
He didn’t believe her, of course, certain it was yet another one of her attention-seeking stunts. Their arguments escalated. She played on his ingrained sense of loyalty, the power of the marriage vows, and his conscience. Effectively, he had left her anyway, even if he had not formally made the break.
She begged him to come back; he had to, she needed him desperately. He ignored her ridiculous pleas and extended his visit to Hong Kong and Japan. But, against all odds, all the stories and fabrications, this time she was telling the truth.
By the time he did return, it was almost too late.
Chapter 10
It wouldn’t be long now, I could feel it.
More and more of the others, the strangers, were coming. For nearly a week, I lived in trepidation, worrying about who would turn up next. By now, they were being announced by neon flashes. Light would flare on the ceiling and the walls when wind brushed the leaves back and forth outside. Even with the shutters half-closed, I found this an uncomfortable sensation, like a quick, silent explosion. Flashes followed: white rushes of rapid movement with streaks of green and yellow and red. I was reminded of the bird André gave me, or rather, more accurately, that the old lady gave to him; there’s quite a difference.
Then I’d see another of them arrive. And so many were children. Not just Pierre, but a whole raggle-taggle gang of them, none of them familiar. Staring at me, waiting for me to say something.
Then, on the sixth or seventh day, it was the turn of the kitchen wall to behave oddly. The kitchen is painted white, has always been white, but suddenly, when I opened my eyes after a mid-afternoon doze in the chair by the hearth, the walls were covered in a profusion of flowers, garish, scarlet poppies wide as dinner plates, with creeping stems like bindweed.
As I watched in amazement, the flowers seemed to open and close, and tendrils grew in sweeping curls. The wall was alive with color and movement. There was no sound but the beating of my heart. Within moments, red blooms were pulsing in time to my chest. I looked up in horror at the ceiling, and saw the inexplicable display had begun to take hold there, too, the tendrils would soon have the lamp in their grasp.
I ran. Fumbling at the door catch, my vision blurring with fear, I tilted down the stone steps into the courtyard and made for the open ground. But the disturbance had followed me.
The land was rotating. Round and round it went, all around me. Alternating blackness and light that made the world flicker like the first moving pictures.
I was off-balance, standing in the middle of a fairground ride. But these were live horses, and a full-size black steam engine pulling train carriages by, at speed, on the dusty path to the fields. I raised my eyes to the sky, and a great eagle hovering overhead transformed into a carnival clown.
It will soon be over, I remember thinking. I closed my eyes.
Chapter 11
In London, even then still unsure whether he was being played for a fool, Dom drove her to the private hospital for another scan and a second opinion.
A large part of him held back from her. Yet he was there with her in the consultant’s room when the news was broken. This was no lie. When Rachel first turned to Dom, she wanted him to tell her that everything would be all right. They were going to fight this, he told her, and she would pull through. So that’s what he did. That’s what anyone would have done.
Then she got angry with him. “It’s not you who’s got this, who’s going to have to do the winning. It’s me, that’s the bottom line.”
She was wrong, though. It was happening to both of them, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. She was coming to terms with her mortality, but so was he.
Outside the hospital, the world seemed cruelly normal. For once, Rachel was scared. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “For putting you through this. For everything I’ve done.”
And he did believe her.
Yet, as the months went by, they had to accept that the cancer was spreading, that she was not going to get better, no matter how hard she fought.
In their bedroom, she would turn her face to the wall. She was having hideous dreams, she said. Her voice was barely recognizable. Gone were the confrontations and provocations. The only comfort Dom could give was to agree to two requests.
The first was that he would support her in her wish to refuse more chemotherapy and live as normally as possible while she still could. She wanted to go to Provence and to work. Dom protested that he could only spare a couple of long weekends and a few days here and there away from his business; it was just at this time that the negotiations for the sale of the company were getting complicated. Why choose to go there, why not stay in London?
She was determined.
“One last good story,” she said. “Maybe more than one, who knows?”
It energized her, she told Dom, to have goals. She wanted to get away, to go somewhere she could immerse herself in other stories and forget her own. He began to think that maybe she really had miraculously turned a corner, that she could get better if he supported her. Deep in his subconscious, he knew it could never be that simple, but there she was, in front of him: she glowed, she was the woman he had first met. And she wanted to be somewhere she knew he would want to be, too.
Rachel’s will prevailed: she rented the Mauger house for six weeks. Dom visited her there as often as he could, and was heartened by what he saw. She looked healthy enough, though she battled terrible exhaustion. He had no reason to doubt the veracity of the stories she told him of her experiences here. Perhaps there was no need to invent them, they were rich enough. She was researching Marthe Lincel, and began making her own inquiries about the girl who went missing from Goult.
The rental agent dropped around a couple of times to check that all was well. Rachel had made a friend for life, it seemed, by agreeing to investigate Marthe Lincel’s story. That was the way Rachel operated: she won people over by giving more than they could ever have expected. The agent seemed pleasant enough but she hardly registered with Dom, so intent was he on keeping an eye on Rachel. It was a short but peaceful interlude, during which he scrutinized her behavior and agonized over making the right decision when the time came to fulfill his second promise.
Rachel was the one who found the clinic, made the appointment, booked the travel tickets and the hotel in Geneva. They went to see it, took in the impersonal, cream-painted walls and beige carpets, and she deftly interviewed the soft-spoken, middle-aged Swi
ss couple in charge.
They did not see anyone else there, which was a relief. She was asking questions, as she always did. The man seemed suspicious at one point, as if he could tell she was a journalist and suspected her motives. She was very quiet after they left.
“If I have to, I will,” was all she said. “I want to die on my terms.”
Dom, still profoundly disturbed by her decision, said nothing.
They found a small apartment to rent nearby. During the following weeks, they sought a third and then a fourth opinion. The doctors’ brutal confirmations were the same.
They were running out of time.
As the pain increased, Rachel scripted her final lie: her family was to be told that she died at the flat they were renting near the hospital where she was being treated, that the end was sudden, that no one had suspected she would go so soon. It was what she wanted. What difference could one more lie make? For once, it was a lie intended to spare others from hurt.
Even when they returned to the clinic for the last time, they saw no one except for the quiet, middle-aged couple and a nurse who provided the morphine that would make her as comfortable as she could be. The room was functional, completely sealed off from the outside world. Dom dreaded what would happen there, not daring to think ahead. But Rachel smiled, and squeezed his hand.
Was she as numb as he was? Doubts churned ceaselessly. Of everything that she had put him through, this was the worst. Was he truly trying to do the best for her, what she wanted? Or was he acting for himself? Could they have tried any harder for a cure? No. Would he do what she asked, when she called time?
They were shown how to operate the morphine line, then left alone.
I will not write down exactly what Dom did. It was enough. He did what she had demanded of him. It was brutal and ugly, as she raved and cursed and needled him. It was not a good death. Nothing could have been further from the peace she craved. Then, when the unbearable worst of it was almost over, came the words that made the difference.
“I’ve changed my mind,” she said.
Such an innocuous phrase. A brief string of ordinary words. Words she had used before.
He heard the familiar mockery in her voice. Saw, behind her half-closed eyes, the lizard watching, waiting for him to react in those seconds of poisoned calm. Had all this been a setup? Would she go that far, could she be that twisted? Even now, with the last of her strength, was she tormenting him, or could she not stop herself from leaving him with one more terrible uncertainty?
Dom did not stop. He heard her speak and his body reacted instinctively, viscerally, to her voice and he could not stop. He kept right on with what they’d started, with what she’d claimed she wanted. What the practical and compassionate Swiss couple had heard her say she wanted. What her signature on the consent forms indicated. And part of him wanted to do it, was fired by so much anger that he had never wanted to do anything more. Sensing a trap, furious with himself for walking into it, needing it all to be over—he crossed the line only he knew was there.
Suicide? Or murder?
Afterward, when the staff at the clinic had moved in, discreetly and swiftly, Dom was left agonized and isolated. In the weeks following Rachel’s death, he was physically ill, shaking and nauseous, as if his own body had turned on him in punishment when no one else would. When his guilt almost broke him after silent months on his own, he confided in his sister, a doctor, and found himself a pariah in his own family, more alone than he had ever thought possible. And when he had looked to his churchgoing parents for support, he found none. Only a tacit understanding that he was no longer the son they had brought up to know right from wrong. If forgiveness was possible, it would be a long time coming.
Chapter 12
For two days after that, I stayed in bed.
There were two possibilities. Either I was in the presence of evil, and the farm was possessed; or I was losing my mind and these hallucinations were the proof. But how could the house I had known all my life be haunted like this when it had never been before?
Hour upon hour, these thoughts chased each other through my head, while in my room I watched a procession of angels with halos, halos without angels, silver mists, and golden blurs, dimming, shafts of clarity, and brilliant flashes of light.
The doctor came on the third day. I have never been so relieved to see anyone in my life.
They must have drugged me at the hospital.
When I saw the doctor, he told me I had been asleep for two days and nights.
“Have I gone mad?” I asked, all fight gone.
“No, not at all.”
“Am I possessed?”
“No . . .”
“What has been happening to me, then?”
It was bad news, he said softly. He reached out and took my hand that was lying on the cover. I’d had enough of that, I replied feebly.
“I am sorry to have to tell you that you are losing your sight, Mme. Lincel.”
I closed my eyes and pushed my head back on the pillows. I felt more pressure on my hand as he squeezed it to show he cared.
“But all the visitors!”
“There is an explanation.”
“But they were there, completely real . . . people I knew!”
“The brain has an extraordinary capacity to evoke sensations and visions . . . a heightened reality . . .”
“But I am not crazy . . .”
“No, not crazy at all.”
“But how?”
“We don’t know everything, of course, but there is a medical condition—an optical syndrome—that might explain what you have experienced. We will need to conduct some tests, with your consent, before we can say with certainty this is the explanation.”
Wearily, I agreed.
Chapter 13
There will always be those who believe that what Dom did deserves the harshest punishment. Deaths in euthanasia clinics have led to murder charges; often there is a trial, followed by acquittal and useless expressions of regret that the matter was ever brought to court.
It is against the law, as well as the natural order, even if committed out of compassion. But Dom knew that he had crossed the boundary at the very end.
“I’m not the person you thought I was,” he said.
That was only true up to a point, as he well knew. Until then, he had revealed what he chose to reveal about himself, nothing more. Reading between the lines, I found not necessarily a different man but a far more complicated one.
“Perhaps I saw the person you always were, until then,” I said carefully.
He closed his eyes, and it was written all over his face, his shoulders, his chest, that a weight had lifted. In my hands, his were trembling.
“And, the police know . . .” I went on. I saw it now. “Severan knows. When they arrested you, they must have known.”
“They checked with the clinic, made me sweat. Made me tell them over and over again until it sounded false, like a story I had made up and was failing to tell exactly as before. All night they kept on, question after question.”
“You told them the whole truth?”
He made a noise in the back of his throat. “Very nearly.”
“Does that mean yes or no?”
I waited, hardly able to breathe.
“No.”
I started to shake harder. I think it was relief. “They let you go.”
“The whole situation . . . it’s a very gray area, but so long as no one wants to make a show trial of it like they do in the U.K. . . .” He hesitated. “In the end, where is the line if the prosecutors want to draw it? It will be all right. I think the police are more interested in their own case and the pressure to get that solved.”
But there was also the incident with the police back in London, thanks to Rachel’s spitefulness, when he had been questioned about the rape. That was on record, too.
“So . . .” I was still having difficulty coming to terms with what he had told me. “All this .
. . whole dreadful story, all the worry, but you didn’t think to tell me?”
“No.”
“You don’t think that maybe—?”
“It’s a terrible thing, to have killed someone. I thought, if you knew . . .”
“What, I would leave you?”
He didn’t answer.
But I was thinking of the weight on his conscience, the effort of living alone with that knowledge. In this instance, knowing that part of him wanted her gone, wanted her to die—that he killed her knowing she had changed her mind. And I wondered, from what he had told me about her, whether Rachel said what she did to leave him with one terrible, lasting wound.
When I met Dom that day, a hundred years ago, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he had been back to clear out the flat and hand over the keys before the lease expired. The skiing trip with friends was true enough, but he had always intended to do this, had steeled himself to do what he hadn’t been able to face before.
Almost a year had passed.
He was in Yvoire because she had wanted to go there. It was a final farewell to the girl he had once loved very much, before all the lies and unhappiness.
“Then I met you and it was the first time I had allowed myself to think about moving on. There had been nothing—no one—until then to make me remember that the future could still be good.”
“Perhaps it was too soon.”
“I tried to let you go.”
I thought of the afternoon in Hyde Park, when he seemed to be telling me it was over, that he was moving to France. The occasional meetings in London followed by distressing silences that preceded the real beginning of our relationship, which I had airbrushed out of my version of our whirlwind romance. And now I understood the subtext, his dignity and quiet grief. How it began to eat away at his spirit, and then mine. His fear when the remains were found beneath the old swimming pool, the police investigations. His certainty of what would follow when they discovered his wife had died under suspicious circumstances. The way events spiraled to implicate him, just as he had dreaded.
The Lantern Page 26
