Dom would look in the mirror and hate what he saw. The sadness and guilt spreading like an invisible yet fatal disease. He was already serving a life sentence. While I feared I was haunted by the house, he was being haunted by Rachel. As was I, though in a different way. In thinking it was the spirits of those who had once lived here, I was too literal-minded; it was the spirits we had brought with us.
Chapter 14
The daylight is still playing tricks on me. What should be bright and clear is smeared with mother-of-pearl. It clots and breaks up my vision so that what I see is becoming more and more like van Gogh’s spirals and waves. He came south in search of color, and then went mad. I am still not convinced that I am not suffering the same fate.
Since the doctor gave me his grim diagnosis, I examine what I can see with minute attention, fear barely contained beneath the surface.
Being blind is not like closing your eyelids; that merely reduces the light entering the eye from the pupil. What is blackness and what is nothingness? Did Marthe see darkness continually or did she experience reaction to light? Did her memory of light make the empty void into a darkness she could relate to? The blackness into a remnant of vision?
There’s something else.
If all this was in my mind, there can only be one cause.
Who were those unknown children who came to see me, you may ask?
Chapter 15
Dom and I stayed on in Cassis. From time to time, we thought about progressing along the coast in the direction of Nice, but in the end, we felt comfortable in Mme. Jozan’s white hotel. Weeks went by and still we stayed away from Les Genévriers.
Through the heat and sleepless nights, we rode out the summer. Dom was like a victim of shell shock, as if, with his confession to me and the dismantling of his emotional defenses, he was only now allowing himself to react to the police investigation and the grisly discoveries at the house. It would take months for him to come to terms with what had happened.
I stood back and allowed him to be, listening when he wanted me to listen, reassuring when he seemed to be asking for reassurance, turning to him at night when he felt for my body, wondering if he would discover the secret I still kept. When would be the right time to tell him? It seemed too demanding of the future, to risk telling him before he had come to terms with the past. Perhaps telling him would give me fewer options than not telling. I was thinking of my own independence.
As the summer faded, we found an approximation of peace. The walking helped, sometimes with Dom, more often not. Between the tumbling slopes and steep, pine-bristled ravines, the sea was a constant companion. Its dazzle lifted the letters off the pages of my walking guide until I could see precisely how each black mark was stamped on the soft paper.
At night, I dreamed of the crumbling hamlet on the hill. I sensed it always was a place of secrets. It was, in my old understanding, like a sentence hung in midair: abrupt, unresolved. Surely there should have been another page, but that was all I had, the ghosts and intimations of a half-told story.
Perhaps the house in the dreams (that was and was not itself) had come to stand for our relationship. I was afraid it might.
One day, I bought a local newspaper at a kiosk and took it down to the harbor to read while I drank coffee. Three pages in, my heart lurched as I read the words “missing students” and the name “Marine Gavet,” “also known as Magie.” A grainy black-and-white photograph in the paper showed her laughing, caught on a security camera at a bank where she had recently opened an account. Her parents had arrived from Goult. Anyone who saw her should call the Cassis police.
Magie. What Francis Tully called his young model. I debated whether to call the police myself, with my feeble contribution, my hunch that she arrived in Cassis with Tully and posed for him. Perhaps she stayed on; perhaps she had caught a glimpse of another life and decided to grab it. Perhaps speculation was pointless.
I was still undecided when the call came from Severan that evening. The rocks burned below our balcony and the sea shuddered, and we were summoned to return.
Chapter 16
I killed her, you see.
The unknown children who came to haunt me: I did know them. Not in appearance, but in essence. I knew where they had come from.
When I returned from visiting Marthe in Paris in the months after André had left, I did not know where to turn. As realization of my situation crept up on me, I had to act quickly.
The only person I could think of was Mme. Musset, she who had taught Marthe and me so much. I said earlier that she was the one who helped me. The truth is, I went to Manosque and I begged for that help. She did not give it willingly.
I was carrying André’s baby.
What was I supposed to do? I had no hope of him, no longer even raged at him, felt only sadness and contempt. I could not have the baby, alone and unmarried. I would not allow my kind friend Henri to settle for a farce of a marriage.
So I went to Mme. Musset, who made up a tincture: parsley and angelica and pennyroyal that smelled of spearmint. I had to drink it diluted with warm water every hour, and also to take the juice of as many oranges as I could afford, to ingest high doses of vitamin C. She wasn’t happy to do it; she made some comment about me making a habit of leading men on, which made me wonder whether she was thinking of Auguste, the field supervisor, all those years before. But she did it, for Marthe. Because she thought Marthe had advised me to come to her, she gave me what I wanted.
First, I had to deal with Maman.
It was only fair she should take a holiday, I insisted. After all, I had been to Paris and left her to cope. I told her Marthe had sent the fare and paid for the hotel on the coast, which was partly true. Marthe had given me some money, and we had both decided that Maman needed a break.
The day I waved her off on the bus, I took the first sip of the tincture. My cramps began on the third day after that.
I prepared a pile of clean towels, boiled water and bottled it, and waited. I was on my own, the most scared I had ever been. For hours, I thought nothing would happen, that the pain was all I had provoked. Then I started to bleed.
I must have been further along than I thought. After the spasms of pain and the blood, came the tiny form of a baby. Not an unidentifiable entity but a shocking, stillborn baby, formed more fully than I ever thought possible. A girl.
Desolation, pure and complete.
The next day, I lit the lantern, our lantern, for the last time, using the biggest candle I could find to keep the light alive for as long as possible. It flared into a fat crocus. Then I placed it on the ground in the old storeroom next to the arch her father had built. The crocus glow warmed the black space as I dug.
When the grave was deep enough, I anointed the baby with Marthe’s perfume, made the shape of the cross, then buried her in her own vault. It was the best I could do. When the light went out, she would sleep held safe inside the ribs of its crude wooden beams.
A prayer, and then I bricked it up, stone by stone. Next to the arch that stood for love, it was all my own work. The masonry I learned from silently watching my lover when he thought I was busy elsewhere.
So, the baby was laid to rest among her ancestral stones, though she would never open her eyes in the morning to the great curtain of blue mountain that hangs beyond the bottom of the path, or feel the soft breeze coming off the sea of hills, or taste the wild plums and the cherries dried on the tree, or smell the lavender and thyme and rosemary. But neither would she be hungry in winter, and feel the sting of ice through the holes in her boots, work hard and love with good intent only to lose it all, or know how it is to be desperate and alone.
I once thought it was better she did not know sorrow. I realize now that I can never atone for what I did. I carry her still, knowing that the greatest betrayal was mine, of her. I will never forgive myself.
And I will never leave her.
Chapter 17
In Apt, the seasonal crowds were thinning at last, te
mpers calming in the supermarkets where the locals had been making their frustration and displeasure known since the second week of July, at the lack of parking spaces and the lines at the checkouts. The tourist surge had been weathered, the money taken.
We shopped quickly, and then headed up to Les Genévriers.
In our absence, paradise had overreached itself. The courtyard was dense with chaotic inflorescence. The fruit was splitting on the fig tree; giant hornets gave full song to their thirst. The earth was warm where summer sun had burned away the grass.
Beyond the courtyard, the statues stood reproachful—lonely spirits stuck in this all too earthly world. Work on the swimming pool looked like any other building site where work had stopped. It was a mess of abandoned digging and plastic wire guides and stones. Hardy grass and wildflowers had sprung up on the piles and banks of exposed soil.
The grapes were almost ripe, the prettiest mauve and purple baubles under the vine’s dry, rustling leaves. Greengages, too, pulpy and darkened on the grass beneath the tree, crusting with a lichen of mold, were being devoured by insects, birds, and small animals. Too high on the tree to pick, too many to eat; the joy of plenty turned to decadence.
The key stuck as we tried to open the shutters to the back door, as if the lock had rusted since we left, and we had to walk around to another door to the main house and find our way in from the alleyway between the two main buildings.
Inside, the house was dark and silent and cool. As we passed through each room, we threw open the shutters to the light and felt the stones breathe and familiar shafts of brightness sweep the floors and walls. Pockets of scent stirred the senses: here, old soot and cloves combined in imitation of church incense; there, lavender and citrus.
The wooden monk in the hall had lost his sheen. Our secondhand furniture simply looked used up and shabby. In the music room, spiders scuttled across a floor speckled with dead insects. On the mantelpiece, an untidy slew of leaflets for all the summer concerts we had missed.
By four o’clock in the afternoon, the light receded. In the west, it was gray-yellow over the valley, and by five, a thunderstorm had started. Forks of lightning pitched through the blackened skies. It was warm, too, the warmth building to suffocation point. In the fountain trough, the water was an ominous, toxic green, fronds of algae waving mistily from its floor, clouding like the sky. In the air, an odd, almost ginlike tang.
Dom and I stood together on the covered terrace and watched as white explosions flashed on a hillside below us.
“Look down there,” he said.
Lightning had struck an electric cable, and fire was sparking its way along the wire, from pole to pole.
Then the rain came down, beating emphatically on every surface, cascading off the roof tiles like a sheet fountain.
That evening, when the sky was clear and red, we set a table on the covered terrace, as we had done so many times that first summer, and lit candles. With tangible relief that we had a neutral subject, we discussed the state of the house and what needed attention. Evening breezes took the flames in hand and ripped them down the tall dinner candles in twenty minutes, leaving stalactites of wax in mysterious shapes to drip onto the table and the plate of cheese. But by ten o’clock, another wind had pounced. It picked up the tablecloth and yanked it roughly aside, like a failed trick. A glass tipped over, then the empty wine bottle, and we went inside.
The next morning, Severan and his assistant arrived promptly at nine. Sitting astride a kitchen chair, Lieutenant Severan accepted a cup of coffee, as did the woman officer he introduced as Adjutant Grégoire. She was about my age, with hazel eyes that locked onto whatever had her attention. After she finished with us, the oven and the work surfaces came under scrutiny.
“Are you baking?” she asked.
I shook my head.
The adjutant breathed in deeply. “Smells like almond biscuits . . . lovely.”
“It’s . . . this kitchen, I think.”
Severan sniffed but made no comment. Tapping a sheaf of papers on the table for our attention, he got down to business. “We have collated the results of our forensic tests. The first remains to be found were those of a women in her late forties to early fifties. The second set of bones belonged to a young girl between sixteen and twenty. According to our soil specialists, they had both been interred at the same time. The bodies and the blood are too old to be linked to the cases of the missing girls. Both have been in the ground for several decades.”
“Do you know who they are—were?” asked Dom.
I am sure I saw a glance pass between them, a compassionate kind of look that may have held an element of unspoken apology. At least, I like to think so.
“We have a theory, but as yet no actual proof.”
We waited as he took a sip of black coffee.
“We have reason to think that the remains of the older female are those of a woman whose family lived here for generations. Her name was Marthe Lincel.”
“Marthe Lincel!” I couldn’t help it—I gasped.
“You know who she was?”
“Yes . . .”
“No relatives survive, so it is impossible to make any kind of DNA comparison, but what we know of her age and size, last known whereabouts, approximate dates of her last activity, and the length of time her body has been in the ground, all support the theory.”
I was racking my brain trying to remember what I had read about her. It all seemed a long time ago, in another life. “There was a ghostwritten memoir of sorts, that covered her life up to the age of forty or so. Wasn’t it assumed that she retired after that . . . ?”
“That’s the story the Musset boutique puts out,” said Adjutant Grégoire. “Perhaps it suits their dreamy wholesome image of Provence. Perhaps that’s what they were told and they never thought to question it.”
“She must have been a loss for them, though,” I said.
“That’s true . . .”
“Is it possible to tell how they died?” asked Dom.
“The same method in each case,” said Severan. “By a blow to the back of the head with a heavy object. Both skulls were subjected to a brutal assault.”
There was a pause, in which we all seemed to contemplate the possible realities of that.
“How—” I just couldn’t leave it. “How did you come to the conclusion it was Marthe Lincel?”
Severan rubbed his hand over the stubble on his face. “We talked to many people in the village. Her name came up several times. She lived here, after all. The other is as yet unknown.”
“Is that it, then?” Dom wanted to know.
“We will continue making inquiries, but I have to say this will not be a priority.”
“A woman called Sabine Boutin and her mother seem to know more than anyone about the Lincel family,” interjected Adjutant Grégoire.
I had the impression it was she who had been tasked with most of the Lincel line of inquiry, and was proud of a job done well.
“The Boutins were old family friends of the Lincels,” she went on. “They have been trying to discover what happened to Marthe Lincel for many years, and have been extremely helpful. If you want any more information, perhaps you could get in touch with them in the first instance.”
“Perhaps I will,” I said, looking at Dom.
“And naturally if anything else comes to light—in the house or grounds—you will get in touch,” said Severan, standing to go.
“What about the bloodstains?” asked Dom suddenly. “You said you found bloodstains here that could be read like a map.”
“Old, too.”
“Where, though?”
Severan winced, and pointed to a patch of tiled floor not a meter from his boots.
It was the stain I had been scrubbing to no avail since we arrived.
Chapter 18
While I was still at the hospital, a distinguished gentleman came to examine my eyes and talk to me. He was Professor Georges Feduzzi of the University of Avignon.
It was he who suggested I make these recordings.
He told me, in his warm, clever voice, that it would be a great service to his scientific researches, to the understanding of blindness, and of Charles Bonnet syndrome in particular. When I agreed, he took my hand and squeezed it softly.
It may seem strange, but I actually felt proud.
As you have heard, the stories tumble out of me. Perhaps I could have written it myself, once, with great effort of will. But, for once, I admitted I needed help. I can no longer see the words on the page.
As I have made these recordings, I have become less afraid. As I accustom myself to the idea of blindness, of what will happen to me, of the loss of my reading, I find I miss the prospect of Marthe appearing. With every day, I feel her within me, like the house is around me. You cannot be here, among these stone walls and rocks and paths and gnarled, wind-twisted trees, without being aware of the passage of time and the spirits of the past. I’d felt so alone with only the cloudiness and the scents, first of lavender, then of heliotrope and milky almond woodiness; the scents of Christmas and baking; on warm, stormy nights, the sharp hints of gin from the junipers that grow wild on the scrubby slopes below.
Understanding is all. The visitors come more and more rarely. That is consistent with the syndrome, too. There is a period of intense activity within the brain, and then it subsides. The doctors predicted that, and they have been proved right. The family and all the forgotten strangers only appear regularly in my dreams now. If one of them does come home during the day, I try not to worry. Instead, I make mental notes of what I think I see, and I speak them into these tapes.
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