The Lantern
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
The Lantern
A Novel
Deborah Lawrenson
“I often stopped before that wild garden. It was in the most silent fold of the hills . . . All around the wild hair of the undergrowth was waving and there was the strong odor of the hostile earth, which had a life of its own, and was independent, like a beast with cruel teeth.”
—J
EAN
G
IONO
“Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.”
—O
LIVER
G
OLDSMITH
Contents
S
ome scents sparkle and then quickly disappear, like the effervescence of citrus zest or a bright note of mint. Some are strange siren songs of rarer origin that call from violets hidden in woodland, or irises after spring rain. Some scents release a rush of half-forgotten memories. And then there are the scents that seem to express truths about people and places that you have never forgotten: the scents that make time stand still.
That is what Lavande de Nuit, Marthe’s perfume, is to me. Beyond the aroma’s first charge of heliotrope, as the almond and hawthorn notes rise, it carries sights and sounds, tastes and feelings that unfurl one from the other: the lavender fields, sugar-dusted biscuits, wildflowers in meadows, the wind’s plainsong in the trees, the cloisters of silver-flickering olives, the garden still warm at midnight, and the sweet, musky smell of secrets.
That perfume is the essence of my life. When I smell it, I am ten years old again, lying in the grass at Les Genévriers, on one of those days of early summer when the first fat southerly winds warm the ground and the air begins to soften with promise. I am twenty, as I toss my long hair and walk on air toward my lover. I am thirty, forty, fifty. Sixty, and frightened . . .
How can I be frightened by a scent?
T
he rocks glow red above the sea, embers of the day’s heat below our balcony at the Hôtel Marie.
Down here, on the southern rim of the country, out of the mistral’s slipstream, the evening drops as viscous liquid: slow and heavy and silent. When we first arrived, the stifling sultriness made sleep impossible; night closed in like the lid of a tomb.
Now, in the few hours I do sleep, I dream of all we have left behind: the hamlet on the hill and the whispering trees. Then, with a start, I’m awake again, remembering.
Until it happens to you, you don’t know how it will feel to stay with a man who has done a terrible thing. Not to know whether the worst has happened or is yet to come; wanting so badly to trust him now.
W
e cannot leave France, so, for want of anywhere better to go, we are still here. When we first settled in, it was the height of summer. In shimmering light, sleek white yachts etched diamond-patterned wakes on the inky blue playground and oiled bodies roasted on honey-gold sand. Jazz festivals wailed and syncopated along the coastline. For us, days passed numberless and unnamed.
As the seasonal sybarites have drifted away to the next event, to a more fashionable spot for September, or back to the daily work that made these sunny weeks possible, we have stayed on. At this once-proud Belle Époque villa built on a rocky outcrop around the headland from the bay of Cassis, we have found a short-term compromise.
Mme.
Jozan has stopped asking whether we intend to stay a week longer in her faded pension. The fact is, we are. No doubt she will tell us, in her pragmatic way, when our presence is no longer acceptable.
We eat dinner at a café on the beach. How much longer it will be open is anyone’s guess. For the past few nights, we’ve been the only customers.
We hardly speak as we drink some wine and pick at olives. Dialogue is largely superfluous beyond courteous replies to the waiter.
Dom does try. “Did you walk today?”
“I always walk.”
“Where did you go?”
“Up into the hills.”
I walk in the mornings, though sometimes I don’t return until mid-afternoon.
W
e go to bed early, and then on to places in our dreams: places that are not as they really are. This morning, in the shallows of semiconsciousness, I was in a domed greenhouse, a ghost of itself: glass clouded with age; other panes shattered, glinting and ready to fall; ironwork twisted and corrupt with rust. No such edifice exists at Les Genévriers, but that was where I was.
In my dream, glass creaked audibly above my head as I stood mending bent iron shelves, frustration mounting as I failed repeatedly to straighten the corroded metal. Through broken glass, the pleated hills were there, always in the background, just as in life.
By day, I try not to think of the house and the garden and the hillside we have left behind, which ensures, of course, that my brain must deal with the thoughts in underhanded ways. Trying is not necessarily succeeding, either. Some days I can think of nothing else but what we have lost. It might as well be in a different country, not a few hours’ drive to the north of where we are now.
L
es Genévriers. The name of the property is misleading, for there is only one low-spreading juniper, hardly noble enough to warrant such recognition. There is probably a story behind that, too. There are so many stories about the place.
Up in the village, a wooded ten-minute climb up the hill, the inhabitants all have tales about Les Genévriers: in the post office, the bar, the café, the community hall. The susurration in the trees on its land was their childhood music, a magical rustling that seemed to cool the hottest afternoon. The cellar had once been renowned for its
vin de noix
, a sweet walnut liqueur. Then it was shut up for years, slumbering like a fairy castle on the hillside, and prey to forbidden explorations while legal arguments raged over ownership in a notaries’ office in Avignon. Local buyers shied away, while foreign bidders came, saw, and went.
It is more than a house; it is a three-story farmhouse with a small attached barn in an enclosed courtyard, a line of workers’ cottages, a small stone guesthouse standing alone across the path, and various small outbuildings: it is officially designated as
un hameau
, a hamlet.
“It has a very special atmosphere,” the agent said that morning in May when we saw it for the first time.
Rosemary hedges were pin-bright with pungent flowers. Beyond, a promenade of cypresses, prelude to a field of lavender. And, rising at the end of every view, the dominant theme: the creased blue hills of the Grand Luberon.
“There are springs on the land.”
That made sense. Three great plane trees grew close to the gate of the main house, testament to unseen water; they would not have grown so tall, so strong, without it.
Dom caught my hand.
We were both imagining the same scenes, in which our dream life together would evolve on the gravel paths leading under shady oak, pine, and fig trees, between topiary and low stone walls marking the shady spots with views down the wide valley, or up to the hilltop village crowned with its medieval castle. Tables and chairs where we would read or sip a cold drink, or offer each other fragments of our former lives while sinking into a state of complete contentment.
“What do you think?” asked the agent.
Dom eyed me complicitly.
“I’m not sure,” he lied.