The Lantern (20 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
T
he next morning, I was shaky from lack of sleep, still chasing logical explanations for the events of the night before.
It was one of those searing, blue days when everything seems painfully sharp. I was sitting on the steps down from the kitchen with a mug of strong coffee, feeling unearthly, as though I was suspended in liquid, when I heard the car pull up. A few minutes later, Dom came into the courtyard. He looked awful, as if he had not slept, either.
Holding back all the questions and accusations, wanting and not wanting him to know how scared I had been, desperately relieved he was back, yet furious he had left me, I stared at him dumbly.
He stopped at the bottom of the steps. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Where the hell have you been?” I spat out the words.
Coming up toward me, he seemed older and more battered than I had ever seen him, with that air of vulnerability that confused me. His stained shirt hung slackly outside his jeans.
“Where? Just driving . . . then too many beers in the pub in Apt.”
“And?”
“And nothing. A room in the hotel in the back square. Drunk, but not quite drunk enough to risk being stopped by the police and losing my license.” He put his hands gently on my shoulders. I shrugged them off. Up close, every line on his face was vividly etched.
Even if he hadn’t wanted to risk driving—and over that short distance, on deserted roads, most Frenchmen would have—I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t called a taxi to get himself home.
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“It’s true. Stupid, but true.”
“What was so bad, Dom?” So bad that you had to stay away.
“You’ll think it’s idiotic—”
“Tell me.”
He looked away, up toward the roof. “It’s . . . what you were writing about. The blind girl, Marthe.”
“I know that, but—”
He shook his head wearily. “It’s what she was doing. Rachel. Exactly what she was writing. Now do you understand?”
T
hat same day, Fernand gave me a photograph of the Valensole lavender pickers in the 1930s. I’d asked him about the old times up there, and we’d had a lengthy conversation about times gone by. I was touched that he’d gone to the trouble, though, clearly, this was no longer a subject I would be able to write about.
The two men in the group picture took the dominant positions: one in the center of the front row, the other leaning on a pitchfork on the left flank. The women ranged in age from teenagers to grandmothers. Their checked dresses were utilitarian, most crossing over the chest and tied at the back. They wore aprons, too, and cotton scarves, which they knotted over their shoulders. In their arms, they cradled sheaves of lavender, like trophies. Faces dark, and eyes squinting against the sun. Hair was short, in the fashion of the time, and pulled back in clips. I was bemused to see how stylish these women were until I realized that, for many, this was their adventure, their time to leave home for new sights and experiences, even if they were only twenty kilometers away.
I looked deep into this photograph for a long time, knowing that I ought to abandon the work I’d done, but unwilling to do so.
I
wish I could say that I hadn’t known about Rachel and what she was working on, but I think, on some level, that I must have. At the time, I thought that morning was the tipping point in my relationship with Dom. If only it had been. If only we had both had the courage to speak then. As it was, I didn’t even tell him about the figure I thought I saw on the path. He would have called my fears excessive, and perhaps he would have been right. I’d had a panic attack; that was what it was.
A few days later, the newspapers again were full of stories about another girl who had gone missing near Castellet and about the discovery of her battered body. It took all my reserves of sense and sound judgment to strike through that flooding paranoia, the unwelcome pictures that flashed through my mind. Dom’s night away. The woman on the path. The last photo of the girl alive. The last known sighting of her in the area where Dom said he’d been walking. The deep scratches that had scored his face and arms.
Then I stopped myself. I was letting my jitteriness get the better of me. How could I have thought that, even for a moment?
T
he first I knew that Marthe had come back, that she had not left forever, it was a signal so subtle that I hardly realized that was what it was.
I had stirred early in my bed. I was warm and comfortable in my nest and I could smell lavender. The scent was quite distinct and pleasant. It was a while before I thought to wonder where it was coming from. Was it from the chest of drawers where I had placed a small cotton bag in with my nightwear? The drawer was closed, and the scent was too strong. I supposed the cleaning fluid I’d used on the tiled floor might have contained lavender, but, in that case, why hadn’t I smelled it before I went to bed? Some of my perfume bottles stood on the mantelpiece about two meters away, but I had never been able to smell their contents from this distance before, and, in any case, there was no pure lavender among them.
All I knew was that the scent was coming up the hillside and in through the open window. It was delicious, full of childhood memories and flowers. I luxuriated in it for a few heady moments before dismissing the thought as impossible. The scent was too strong, too immediate, to be coming in from outside. I could not understand it at all.
Later, when I went up to the room again and there was no perfume but that of cool, clean air, I decided that I must have had the remains of some scent on my wrists and neck, which had somehow been warmed and activated in the coziness of the bed. But I wasn’t convinced.
Somehow I knew, deep in the fibers of my being, what it signified.
Y
es, I yearned for Marthe to return but not like this.
I confess: I did not like it.
Even before she appeared in front of me, I knew she was there. Can a house retain scents of the past? Are they such potent spells? Or can the mind trick the body into believing it is actually smelling a concoction that exists entirely in the memory?
Or, if we are to talk about haunting: Is it the house or the resident that is haunted?
Whatever the answers that might be given by medical scientists or philosophers, I know what I smelled. Marthe’s presence. Day by day, piece by piece, all the components came together—the first, flirty trail of fruitiness, the vanilla and cocoa, the cherry and almond and hawthorn and wood smoke—until I could hardly breathe for her perfume.
T
hen it was spring again, almost a year since I had first seen Les Genévriers.
Under diamond-bright sun, brown expanses prickly with last year’s dusty thyme and lavender were being overwritten by meadow flowers. Tight blue grape hyacinths sprang up in the lawns. Daffodils, primroses, and violets pushed aside drifts of crisp brown oak leaves, and white blossom burst out of the plum and cherry trees.
For weeks at a time, all was good. Better than good. It was as though the season of renewal and rebirth had reinvigorated Dom’s mood, and I responded with almost manic relief. We talked and laughed and drew closer again. I shut away any uneasy thoughts, blaming my own psychological shortcomings, my tendency to worry unnecessarily. Dom and I were spoons in a drawer, complementary personalities in perfect balance: we had rediscovered our sweet spot together. We spent days outside, feeling our winter bodies lighten. Dom hacked at the ivy strangling the deciduous trees, I cleared beds for planting, and we made a joint attempt to build a low wall from rubble we found in the wood.
Desire would spark mid-afternoon. We might draw out a deliciously languorous display of restraint until disappearing formally behind the closed shutters of the bedroom. Or I might surprise him in the shade of the garden.
We felt quite restricted (and had to become more inventive) when the masons arrived back to “butter” between the stones of the outside walls of the main house:
beurrer
is the term they use to describe the filling and smoothing of the gaps with lime mortar. I liked that.
The swimming pool contractor came to take soil samples and detailed measurements. A tangible sense of purpose reemerged. The sounds of physical work were oddly soothing. I no longer started at sudden noises. Dismissing any lingering suspicions as so many misunderstandings, cold thorns of the winter months, and too much melodramatic literature, I began to recover my sense of self.
T
he sound of shooting in the woods stopped, and M. Durand sowed lucerne for his sheep in the fields below our land, as he had done the previous year. It made me nostalgic for the sound of their bells, and for the perfect summer we had spent, even if it had been illusory.
It reminded me of the barrier of branches that had been dragged across the
chemin
. How it had concerned us until we saw it was only part of the process of providing a temporary enclosure for the sheep. (I would do well to remember that more often, I told myself. There was almost always a simple explanation.)
M. Durand was keen to tell me about the sheep, and the old ways: how the shepherds used to travel the traditional grazing routes by night, and talked and drank, ate and rested by day. “At night, they carried hurricane lamps. The hooves made a skittering noise on concrete roads, the whole herd running, dogs barking, bells going crazy. It was a hard, hard life. You can understand why hardly anyone does it now.”
“But some do?”
“These days the shepherds drive their vans and the sheep are transported in trucks. You can’t do it the old way anymore. Too much traffic. Shepherds use off-road motorbikes to get from pasture to pasture. They get supplies dropped by helicopter. But the best parts are still there: the sound of pure springwater falling. On the high plateaus, the grass is eaten so smooth it could be the lawn of a grand château.”
B
ut even so, despite the influx of new people and the day’s activities, the odd incidents continued: other signs of life that I could not read, sources of energy I could not trace, signals I was unable to decipher. All around, there was perpetual movement even when the men had packed up and left for the day: the rustling songs of the trees; the light flickering on the walls; the smells that rode up the stairwells on dust motes and collected in corners.
One evening, I went into the upstairs sitting room and found the radio playing softly, the radio that neither Dom nor I had switched on. Another time, the zoetrope seemed to be spinning of its own accord, though when I went over to look closer, it was quite still. In the hall, I found a picture on the floor in a mosaic of glass shards. A rattling sound, like stones thrown at the window, woke us up one night. There were more power outages.
One afternoon, as I was idly looking down over the lower terraces at the stone walls, my eyes fastened on a wooden beam in the wall attached to the first stone arch. Moments passed before it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a lintel, and that there had once been a door underneath it. It was there, very faintly, in outline. Another room, possibly, blocked up with stones.
I made a mental note to ask the architect if he might try opening it up and investigating the possibility of using it for some kind of studio.
I
t transpired, many years after the event, that Marthe blamed the family for her total blindness. I was honestly shocked by that.
It was true that, after she was pushed by Pierre and fell so hard from the window, and I had run with him from the scene of the crime, there had been a great row. But had that really worsened her affliction? According to her, now, after all the intervening years, it had. This was a different story than the accepted version. It was certainly not in the book that was written about her.
After she ceased to reply to my letters, I took that book down from its pride of place on the shelf and moved it to the table by my bed. I went through it word by word, looking for clues. I have it on my lap now.
I searched so hard one night that my eyes hurt. The lamplight went cloudy, as if the bulb was glowing from inside a shell, leaving the room nacreous as an early morning when mist still covers the sun.
Why had she never told us this before?
I
f I had not heard it, face-to-face, from someone she trusted and who knew her well, I would never have believed it. But there it was. Marthe had had a change of heart. We were all to blame: Pierre had been too rough, always out of control; Maman had been too uncaring, hadn’t taken her seriously enough; I had held my tongue, when I might have told the whole truth, out of fear of provoking Pierre into taking his usual reprisals out on me; Papa simply didn’t want to know when things went wrong, he had enough on his plate running the place.
Our father’s version of events was that the window from which she fell and banged her head was not a high one—if it had been the bedroom window three floors up, it would have been an impressive fall (assuming she hadn’t been killed by the courtyard cobbles), but this was only the ground-floor window, where she’d been sitting on the sill inside. Children were bred to help, not to create more problems. He was a countryman through and through, unsentimental to the bone. Characteristics she shared with him, as it turned out.
S
o now, I found myself shouting at her silent, accusatory spirit: “Is that what you want? But it wasn’t me! I had nothing to do with it! You know what Pierre was like!”
But did she? Did any of them, really? Sometimes it seemed I was the only one who could see it.