The Lantern (22 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
I
t was less an interrogation than a dance of extravagant politeness.
“First I must ask you, is this a holiday house or do you live here all year round?”
He must have asked Dom the same question. I stuck to the facts without making assumptions about any future plans. “We have owned the house for approximately one year,” I said. “We first saw it in May last year and the final contract of sale was signed at the beginning of July. Since then we have lived here continuously except for one short break in Switzerland.”
Severan made notes, and we exchanged a few comments about the attractions of the area in terms that might almost have been social. How did we choose to buy here? Dom already knew the region, I said. Had we had many visitors? Not really. Which guests had come to stay? None. We had had no visitors staying with us, not French nor any other nationality? Not even in the summer when so many visitors come to the Luberon? No.
“That is strange, is it not?”
“Not really,” I said. But it was an effort to keep my voice steady. Did I really believe that?
“A couple like you, you buy a beautiful and expensive property and you don’t have family and friends to visit, to show it off, to relax with them in the sun?”
Why? Why exactly hadn’t we invited even a few friends? I wasn’t sure I could give an answer to that.
“You hesitate,” said Severan.
“There are several reasons,” I said, striving to remain calm, outwardly at least. “As you can see, there’s a great deal of work to be done on the house. It isn’t yet renovated the way we would like. The upper floors are barely habitable, with only one small bathroom for the whole house. It simply isn’t ready for visitors.” That was enough, surely. It was a good answer.
“Several reasons, you said.”
Already I felt cornered, not as sharp as I thought I was.
“None as clear-cut as that. We— We’ve wanted to spend as much time together, alone together, as possible. Our families have their own busy lives. We’ve both had busy lives up until now . . .”
Severan supplied a cold, polite smile. “Do you work?”
“Not at the moment.”
“A career break?”
“A change of direction.”
“And your husband?”
“The same.”
He asked me what we both did, before we had this wonderful opportunity to take time off, and I watched his pen as it carefully inscribed a version of what I told him. He needed to ascertain exactly how we had managed to finance this new life. Not many local people would be able to afford it, he said, to take on all the work. I made no comment.
Severan shifted in his seat. “Have you ever seen any person acting suspiciously on the public path that goes through the property?”
“Not that I can think of, no.”
“Any unusual activity? Anything you were not happy about?”
“No.”
“Anything odd at night? A vehicle maybe?”
“It’s very quiet. The only vehicles that come past are farm tractors, and those only rarely.”
“There’s no fence around the garden.”
“There will be. We have to install the new swimming pool first. The builders’ trucks need access. When the pool’s in, we can fence the garden.”
He tapped his pen on the notepad.
I wondered whether to remind him that the bones were found under the old pool, that they must have been there for decades. If he was asking whether anyone could have come into the garden, the answer would be yes, but they couldn’t have buried the bones under concrete.
“No sign of earth being disturbed—apart from the pool works, of course?”
“No. Nothing.”
“So . . . no disturbances, night or day, that could tell us anything about this . . . matter?”
“No . . . nothing I can recall.”
T
oo late an image flared in my mind: the battered old lantern with the stub of candle left burning. The puddle of light on the path. But by then I had been dismissed and was on my way out. I could have turned back and mentioned it. But I didn’t.
Neither did I say anything about the figure on the path, or the ethereal trails of scent. How could I, when part of me did not believe I had actually seen the woman, in any real sense? I had half-convinced myself I had been dreaming, had dreamed the whole episode of smelling the perfume and getting up in the night and seeing that still, silent form.
It was afterward that it grew in importance, along with a slithering worm of self-doubt. Severan had asked about Dom and called him my husband; I should have corrected him, but it didn’t seem relevant. Then there was the issue of our near solitude. I had not realized, until in the hours following that interview I allowed myself to face the truth, that I might have failed to answer too many simple questions, both Severan’s and my own.
I
was waiting for the visitor who would frighten me the most.
Surely it was only a matter of time. The pockets of fragrance, the lantern, the guests who arrived uninvited, the stream of ghosts crossing the divide after Pierre first broke through . . .
Who were they? After a while, when I had had long enough to think as rationally as I could, I became convinced that they were nothing more or less than the stirring of my conscience.
And so, in dread, I waited for her.
I listened to the sounds that could reassure me, temporarily, of normality. The leaves rustling down the alleyway, scraping the pebbled concrete with their imitations of light footsteps.
The
loirs
scampering between the terra-cotta tiles of the roofs, and balancing in the electricity wires like a high-wire circus act. We never succeeded in getting rid of them, you see, not since the time when André worked for us. These funny, rodentlike creatures—a kind of gray squirrel with larger eyes and ears—are becoming braver, promenading along the beams of the little terrace roof outside the kitchen.
Roof tiles crashed off in high winds. More creaking presaged the fall of more disintegrating ceilings. I was alert for the pattering of crumbling plaster, followed by the crash of falling masonry. When I dared to go up to check, ambushes awaited, startling reflections in windows blacked out by shutters, glimpses of shadows, odd people at odd angles.
Doors slammed in the wind, forever slipping their catches but impossible to lock, because keys no longer turned and steel would not dock in holes that have shifted out of alignment with the weight of the house.
I, too, could feel myself shifting.
A
soil specialist was called in. The bones were photographed in situ, and then gradually uncovered. The earth was being brushed, grain by grain, from the remains until they were exposed and raw. Not only the bones but the soil itself would be analyzed.
It was a clear spring day, new leaves translucent. On such a day, when the land was washed clean of winter, it seemed a desecration: the macabre evidence in the pit and the surrender of normality to dispassionate, vaguely hostile professionals. We were numb.
Outside the fluttering police tapes around the hamlet, rumors were spreading fast. Naturally, connections were being made to the missing girl students. Word was that these were the remains of the first to go missing, a nineteen-year-old from Goult, who had failed to arrive home after a party more than two years previously. All unconfirmed, of course. But everyone knew it must be so. Speculative headlines screamed from the front page of
La Provence
. The fate of those girls was so well established in the public consciousness that while a spokesman for the gendarmerie tried to play down the certainty with bland statements, no one seemed willing to believe the police could not advance the obvious theory with all this new evidence.
“Where exactly were they found?” “How old were these bones, then?” “What happens now?” the locals asked us.
We all wanted to know.
A
fter a while, we stayed inside and tried to ignore the coming and going as the forensic scientists dug and scraped and came to their meticulous conclusions. An archaeologist was introduced to us, but Lieutenant Severan remained implacable. His big presence seemed to be a permanent feature of those next few days, during which he stared deep into the garden and across to the mountains and answered no questions. “We have recovered some items from the scene, which are being examined,” was all he would allow us.
On the morning of the third day, I sat on the steps, waiting for him to appear in the courtyard.
When he approached, I asked, “Is it all right for me to put some things through the washing machine?” I indicated the full laundry basket at my side. It was a challenge of sorts. Were we suspects or not?
He waited for a few seconds, perhaps for me to say something else, then reached in, groping among the sheets and pillowcases and Tshirts that made up the load. It was an uncomfortably invasive and confrontational action.
“Go ahead.” Brusque, but smiling, as he removed his hand from the basket. As if he was waiting, that “go ahead” meant something more.
I responded cautiously. “Are you able to tell me yet what you’ve found?”
“In addition to the remains . . . tissue fragments and scraps of fabric.”
“Clothing?”
“Seems so.”
“But it can’t be what they’re saying, can it? The student . . . in the papers . . .”
“Everything must be examined before we draw any conclusions.”
His manner was still watchful, evaluating, superficially polite but stiff.
I was about to point out the obvious, that the bones had been found under the pool floor. They must have been there for years.
“Why didn’t you tell me someone else was staying here?” asked Severan.
“There isn’t anyone.”
“Then who was the woman who was here this morning?”
“What woman?”
“She was leaning over the forensic tape having a good look at the site where the bones were found. This morning about eight o’clock.”
“I’ve no idea. She must have wandered down from the village.”
Severan waved his hand dismissively. “It’s all sealed off. I have men at both ends of the track to keep the public away. She can’t have got in, or out for that matter. So she must be staying here.”
I shook my head. I didn’t like the notion of strangers arriving to gawk, but had to accept that they would. “Didn’t you ask her?”
“I saw her as I was parking in front of the
bergerie
. When I got out of the car and went over she was gone.”
A sudden brief vision fell like a shadow across my mind’s eye. “What did she look like?”
“Not very tall, slim, dark-haired, gray-blue dress . . .” Severan patted his pockets, perhaps for his cigarettes, never taking his gaze from mine.
Involuntarily, I shivered as I said, “I think I may have seen her before. I don’t know who she is.”
Severan was watching me carefully but said nothing.
“I wish you had asked her name,” I said.
He might have been about to press me on that, when the electronic jingle of my cell sounded. Left to myself, I would have ignored the arrival of the text. With Severan studying me intently, that was not possible. Moving away, I opened the message.
It was from Sabine.
Call me urgently
.
I did not want to. Not after she had set me up by suggesting I research Marthe Lincel. I was sure now that she had done so deliberately. She had used me to rile Dom, and I found that deeply unpleasant. Perhaps I had misjudged the depth of Sabine’s friendship with Rachel, and this was all some sisterly demonstration of loyalty. I hadn’t seen her since our day out in Manosque, and although I’d thought I might run into her in the village—at the post office, in the café, perhaps—where I could tell her what I thought of her, our paths hadn’t crossed.
I snapped the phone shut.
Severan was staring high into the catalpa tree, at nascent leaves lemon-lime against the sky. “It really is a splendid spot,” he said, almost companionably.
“Yes, it is.”
“My aunt and uncle had a place—”
There was another electronic interruption. Again, our separate pretenses.
Sabine was insistent.
Meet me now in the Café Aptois
, the text commanded.
“Ah, technology,” said Severan pleasantly. “Whoever sent it can tell when someone has read their first message. You can’t ignore it now. Who is it from?”
T
he body lies silent in its earthen vault. No marble and stone in the public cemetery for this one, no carved tribute, nor dates that testified to a full life well lived.
For me, she was there in the wind that sent cool rivers running through the trees and carried the warmed scents of summer. And then, she was there in the angry mistral that cleansed and neutered all scent, in the winds that snatched tiles from the roof like malevolent hands, tore up delicate petals, and wrenched the top branches from the oaks and planes. Some people claim to be able to see the mistral, literally see it as an evil force, tormenting humans and destroying their work and spirits.
On the worst days, I hear it howl and recognize it as retribution.
I did so very wrong. What use now would be confession?
There will be no forgiveness. The ghosts tell me that.
L
ittle by little, I took on most of the day-to-day responsibility for the farm as the last of the tenant families reluctantly handed in their keys and moved down the valley to work for the expanding candied-fruit factory with its new machinery and higher wages.
With every departure, there was less help, and less money.
No money to pay for repairs. There never was, but what this place did once have was manpower. One or other of the men would devise some means of solving the problem, or a team would form, my father directing operations. Arielle’s father, Gaston, and Albert Marchesi were always there to pitch in, Gaston tall and mournful, Albert with his quick, efficient trot. At the very worst, help would have been summoned from the village, and the work paid for in kind, or in walnut wine and mutton.
I was twenty-seven. Maman was frailer than she should have been for a woman not all that far into her fifties, but she was ground down by grief as well as the grim physical work of subsistence. Naturally, we tried to get replacements, but no one was interested. We asked around, even going so far as to leave notices in the shops in Apt, but had no luck.
The tide was flowing the other way. Young people were moving to the towns, to work in the new factories and earn steady wages. The villages were emptying. Even those who were happy with the old ways in the country were setting out farther afield to look for work. The life of the hillsides had always been harsh, but it was becoming ever bleaker.
Without family—without sons—it was hard. Pierre had no intention of returning, that was clear. The last time we had seen him was at Papa’s funeral, and that was our first reunion in more than a year. He told us he was earning good money making agricultural machinery, though he was vague, I thought, about where exactly the factory was.
“L
ooking at onions” is a Provençal phrase, which means keeping an eye on the neighbors to see that standards are upheld. We worked so hard to ensure that our onions were better than ever, but we couldn’t do everything on our own.
When André appeared on the path to Les Genévriers, he was the answer to our prayers. He was a jobbing mason, he told us. “And carpentry, too. Any jobs you need doing I can turn my hand to, even roof tiling. I don’t mind getting up on a roof; I have a good head for heights.”
The hardest part was disguising our desperation so that he would not charge us double.
“We might let you have a look at the barn roof, as you’re here now,” said Maman with a dignity that was only slightly stiff.
He was quite young, about my age, I guessed, as we took him around to the other side of the courtyard. The hole in the barn roof was the size of a manhole. Tiles had slipped and been loosened further by the squirrel-like pests we never quite managed to control.
“Loir,”
he said.
“That’s right,” said Maman. “They may look sweet but with their incessant games hiding nuts, and building nests up in all the roofs between the rafters and the tiles . . .”
“It’s an infestation,” said the young man. “They’ll dismantle the place if you give them half a chance. There are a few tricks I know with them, but first we need to make the roof watertight again. If you show me where I can fetch a ladder, I’ll get up there and have a proper look.”
His clothes were the dustiest we had ever seen, so there was no point in wondering if he would change into any kind of work overall. He shucked off his jacket and set to.
As he climbed up, I saw that his shoe leather was holed and patched with bark. Sometimes he took his shoes off, he told us later, tied the laces together, and slung them over his shoulder in order to save the leather on the soles.
“I could do that in a day,” he said, after what appeared to be a serious inspection. He named a price that seemed reasonable, so we agreed on the spot, and that was the first job he did for us, beginning at first light the very next day.