The Lantern (17 page)

Chapter 11

T
he next day in the fields, during our break for water, I asked the others how they would describe the blues we could all see. It was a case of trying out the words to convey to Marthe the startling beauty all around.

“Blue like the stripe in the rainbow,” said Aurélie.

“No, more purple,” said Mariette.

“Not that dark.”

“A mauve, then. Don’t forget the green and grays underneath, and the chalky pink and brown stones in the soil between the lines.”

“A color that hesitates between blue and purple,” Auguste cut in. He did not usually join in our conversations. I found I liked his phrase very much.

We pulled our aprons straight and adjusted whatever arrangements we had made to keep our hair off our hot faces. A dragonfly swooped on its hunt for other insects, leading the way back to the rows we had been working.

As I was turning to go, Auguste pulled me aside. “Come and beat the flowers,” he said.

“Me?”

“You.”

“Certainly,” I said, pleased at the prospect.

“This way, then.”

As I went to follow, I hesitated. “Perhaps . . . it should be Aurélie . . . she was in pain last night.”

But Auguste did not even pause. “Don’t think that it isn’t tough work,” he said, striding out.

The water in the still was bubbling merrily. At the table, one of the much-older women, known to us simply, namelessly, as Madame, was thrashing the head of a sheath against a box to break off and collect the flowers. Then, with one deft sifting motion, she showered the ground with any remaining remnants of stalk and leaf, and an even more intense cloud of lavender scent exploded into the warm air.

“You tip what’s left here.” Auguste pointed to a line of boxes where the flower heads lay packed like grain. “Make sure you are thorough and careful. We want the best yield possible.”

Next to the alembic was a copper cylinder, fed by a pipe that looped up from the top of the still in a swan’s-neck shape and then down into this smaller mechanism for the next part of this mysterious process.

“This is the cooling chamber,” explained Auguste. “Once the steam has risen through the lavender flowers it is pushed up through the pipe that comes out of the top, and then down through the cylinder here.”

“How does it cool?”

“Cold water. The cylinder is full of cold water and the coils spiral round and round inside. At the end of the process—here”—he touched a neat, narrow spout—“the liquid contains the essence of the flower, its oil and scent.”

The other woman had stopped work, with an odd look at him and then at me.

“You never told me that,” she said.

“You don’t have a blind sister,” replied Auguste. It was a brusque explanation that left her none the wiser, judging from her face.

As soon as we were alone, he asked me if I would like to go out with him one evening.

W
e went the very next day. Flames licked the belly of the alembic still as we left the fields. Burning wood and resin released gusts of molten sugar and toffee.

It was the first time I had been into the town of Manosque at night. I was excited. As we approached on foot, we were dwarfed by the height of the stone buildings that rose steadily on the mound where the town had grown in ancient times. The center was mazelike, the plaster of the tall tenements elaborately veined with long creases, here and there chalked or scratched with stones with V for victory. Half-curious, half-unsure whether I should be there at all, I let Auguste lead me farther into its heart.

The traveling cinema was set up in a tree-lined square. Wooden chairs stood in rows in front of a number of tables placed on their sides and covered with a couple of white bedsheets nailed tightly across.

“That’s where the show will be projected, from a machine at the end of the aisle,” said Auguste.

He bought me some lemonade and steered me to a seat near the back. “You don’t want to be too close. It’s bad for your eyes.”

Soon, night was a black tent over the proceedings. The audience took their seats, and those who were unlucky sat on the rim of the stone fountain, or brought up the municipal benches, or begged chairs from the surrounding houses. Candle lanterns and oil lamps were lit, and the reek of paraffin mingled with the sweat of farmworkers, homemade potions of rosewater, the ubiquitous sweet violet warmed on the skin of women and girls, cigarettes on the men, and garlic from all. Excited chatter and shouting all around. Soldiers in French uniform, watching us uneasily. On my tongue, the sharpness of lemonade.

The movie began. It was
Angèle
, based on a Giono story but made jollier by Pagnol, who seemed to make all the movies I ever saw as a young person. The actor Fernandel was soon pulling his long, elastic face with its horsey teeth into expressions of disbelief and mock-horror, and the audience rocked with laughter.

The plot involved the young daughter of a farmer, who runs away from home to follow a handsome young ne’er-do-well. I leaned between the heads of the people in front of me, and tried to concentrate. It wasn’t easy.

There was the pressure on my left leg from Auguste’s hand to contend with, at first. Then, as I leaned forward to get a better view, there was his arm snaking around my waist, and the nearness of his damp armpit. Then he was stroking my arm, and whispering into my ear. When he tried to kiss me, I pushed him away. That wasn’t what I had agreed to. I enjoyed talking to him, that was all.

One section of the screen started to pull away from its pins so that the actors now billowed and deflated as they played out the terrible warning of what happened to Angèle when she succumbed to the advances of an opportunistic young buck.

Afterward, we walked back to the farm a long arm’s-width apart and in silence.

I
n the lilac satin of early mist over the fields the next morning, he looked tired and hardly glanced in my direction. He gave some other girl a turn at the still after that, but I wasn’t too bothered, as I’d gotten what I needed by then.

Chapter 12

A
t one of the regular
brocante
markets one weekend, Dom stopped at a collection of old scientific instruments set out on a mat on the ground: microscopes, mechanical measuring devices, barometers, medical implements, and music boxes. Picking up an unfamiliar-looking item, he examined it closely. It was made of black metal, rather battered, the size and shape of a round cake pan in an upright spindle.

“What is it?”

“An instrument of optical illusion,” he said, setting it to spin, which it did with a wobble. “I’ve always wanted to find one of these. It’s a zoetrope.”

He pulled off the lid and showed me. It was just possible to see the faint script on it:
LES IMAGES VIVANTES
. Then he held it up. “See these narrow slits in the drum. You have to look through one of them at the images on the opposite wall inside.”

When it was spun, the images appeared to move, on the same principle as the simple moving cartoons produced by flipping pages of a notebook: a portly policeman chasing a child thief, and another of a ballerina.

“It’s mid-Victorian, I should think—1870s or 80s. It really was the beginning of moving pictures, the step before finding how to project the images. As stories go, they weren’t long—just a simple action, really.”

“And a bit repetitive.”

He smiled. “Now we just have to find the picture strips to put in it.”

Putting the lid back on, he took it over to the stallholder and began to haggle.

He returned triumphant, the zoetrope carefully cradled under one arm. He tucked the other around my waist and we went off, happily discussing where we might be lucky and find some more pictures to go inside. This was a good day. Anything might happen.

H
e placed the zoetrope on a table in the upstairs sitting room next to the shelves that held all our books. I looked up zoetrope in a dictionary (it was the same in English and French): from the Greek
zoe
(“to live”) and
tropo
(“to turn”). The wheel of life, in other words.

To the accompaniment of Satie’s piano pieces on the CD player—the
Gnossiennes
and the
Gymnopédies
, the
Pièces Froides
, softly overblown and melancholic—he began reading a book called
Eyes, Lies and Illusions
, then left it open, facedown next to the zoetrope. When he left the room, I picked it up; I wanted to know what was in his mind. The book was full of the art of deception and how it triumphed; tricks of the light and the inner eye.

We never did find any more picture strips to fit the zoetrope, though, for my part, I can’t say that I tried very hard.

T
hat afternoon, as I left him in the kitchen and went upstairs to the library room, a light switched itself on. One moment, I was on the twilit stairs, carrying a notebook in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, and the next, the room ahead of me was flooded with brightness.

I stopped and listened. No sound.

Moving to the threshold of the room, I saw that it was not an electric bulb but a burst of western sun hitting the bull’s-eye window that had filled the space with a searing, concentrated light. Just as though the light had switched itself on.

On the table, the dull, blackened metal of the zoetrope caught a gleam.

I tried opening a book I’d bought, on the history of the lavender industry, hoping to gain some insight into the background to Marthe Lincel’s work, but my thoughts were elsewhere. The rows of books seemed to mock my efforts, my vanity in even attempting. The notes about the perfume distillery hastily scribbled on paper after I got back from Manosque seemed slight and irrelevant. I wanted to write but could not find a way of proceeding that did not draw on the personal.

Anything but the story of the husband who makes a mystery of his first wife. Nor the composer who will not play the music his first wife loved. The wife who disappeared. The Bluebeard legend: the man who tells his new wife she may have the keys to his castle, she may open every door except one; the door she does indeed open to find the floor awash with blood and the bodies of his former wives hung from meat-hooks around the walls.

Unsettled, I turned to the pictures in a book of old Provençal photographs. My head began to hurt as I tried to concentrate on the grainy images, to see through them to re-create the surroundings of a girl who once grew up here, among the biting insects and hungry wasps, darting brown lizards, the grass drying to straw while still growing on the hillside. The complex visual patterns of field and hill overlaid with mosaics of uneven tiles, stones, brickwork, all expressed in black and white, light and shade.

It was no good. The pictures I wanted to see were of Rachel. Rachel and Dom.

One afternoon, when he was out, I had a thorough look through the house, in out-of-the-way drawers and cabinets, in all the places where boxes were stored, searching for an album, or an envelope, even—anything that contained a link to Dom’s past, but there was nothing.

From my weakness, the doubts that kept returning to my state of not knowing, Rachel was like a ghost materializing. And with her strange presence came that scent, romantic and cruelly mocking, that drifted lightly from room to room, though the courtyard flowers had all died back. There seemed no possible source other than my own overwrought imagination.

O
ne night, the lights flickered, then died. An outage. It was the first of many that winter, as it turned out, for which we became prepared.

The first time, there was no flashlight ready by the side of the bed, or on the table in the library where I had been sitting. Slowly, I edged down the staircase, feeling with my feet for the bends in the steps, and with my hands for the unstable balustrade. I called again, but Dom did not answer.

Down in the kitchen, a feeble light came through the glass of the back door, and I groped my way toward it. All was silent. Then came a noise like hail on the unshuttered window. Hail, or the ringing splatter of stones being thrown.

I stopped and listened, feeling my heart beating faster.

Nothing more.

“Dom?”

No answer. Gingerly, I opened the door. A half-moon was enough to make the outside brighter than the inside, enough to find my way to the garage where I knew there was a flashlight.

On the path to the garage, I stopped. There was someone in the garden.

I called out, but there was no answer, so I changed direction for a few paces and went toward it. I seemed to be in the person’s line of sight, but they had stopped moving. Then I stopped, shaking my head at myself. It was the statue of the Greek boy on the lawn. In the half-light, he seemed less solid; his lichen-stained skirt flicked up around his thighs as if caught by a playful gust of air; his petrified gesture of anguish was all too real.

Get a grip.

I made for the garage ahead. My feet were soundless on the grass.

But, again, there was a movement at the periphery of my vision. A light, this time. A glimmer of light that was moving slowly up the path, swinging slightly as if held by a night watchman. It came from the direction of the wild orchard, a patch of yellow brightness, like the glow from a hurricane lamp.

As I waited, shivering, it seemed to wait, too, suspended in the black air. Too low for a star, too near to be light from the hamlet on the facing hills across the valley.

Then the light dimmed.

By the time I had opened the car door, found the flashlight, and locked up again, the land was almost totally dark. A cloud covering the moon, perhaps. I waited expectantly for footsteps to come up the path, but none came.

I switched on the flashlight and was astonished to see that, by my watch, it was past midnight. I headed back to the house, still calling for Dom. I found him on the sofa in the music room, fast asleep.

I
n the next morning’s milky daylight, a tarnished, old-fashioned lantern sat in the middle of the track. It was the one with the curlicue top we had found with a mountain of rubbish in the corner of the courtyard when we had cleared all the overgrown bushes. We’d kept it and used it in the summer.

Someone must have taken it. It had been deliberately placed on the path, it must have been. Had Dom done it? Could the light I thought I had seen be connected with this battered old thing?

I picked it up and brought it back. The candle had burned down completely. There wouldn’t have been much left anyway, there never was when we blew it out at the end of a long summer’s night.

When I asked him, Dom knew nothing about it. He seemed to think I might have dreamed the whole thing.