The Lantern (24 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
O
ne evening, as I sat sewing, a thin strain of flute music drifted into my consciousness. Haunting, melancholic notes on the air, floating up from the lower terraces like the accompaniment to some forest god of the ancient world. The musician was André.
That night, it began; as the notes insinuated themselves into my senses, so did my thoughts of him. I began to be more and more aware of his handsome face, his strong arms. Innocent as I was, I felt scorched by the warmth of his flesh in the merest brush of our fingers as I handed him a glass of water, or a cup of hot chicory, or passed him a plate.
I realized after a while that I always knew where he was on the land, no matter whether that was in the woods above, bringing down stones for a wall in our brute of a tin wheelbarrow, or filling the cracks in the plaster that appeared like old enemies at the end of each dry season.
In the absence of Pierre, it was not long before Maman began to treat André as an adopted son. She gave him her lovely smiles and washed his shirts and trousers, and patched them, taking great care to match the fabric, even asking our neighbors if they had scraps that were more appropriate than ours.
He took a shower in the alley, which made me feel strange, just thinking of him without his clothes.
I
n the dull glow of the oil lamps on the dinner table outside, I watched surreptitiously as the shadows contoured his smooth skin, the way he drank his wine, held his fork, the movements of his mouth. The textures and tastes of the food on our plates, the flicker of a candle in a jar to catch the insects, the rustle of the vine above, the splash of water poured into a thick glass and transformed into amber as it caught the light: all seemed larger, fuller, more worthy of attention than before.
One evening, he caught me looking, and smiled.
The next, he caught my hand as Maman turned away with the dishes and I noticed his shirt was torn, from a thorn perhaps. I must have been unable to look into his eyes, too shy.
His hand was large and warm, and overwhelmed mine. I could hardly believe that what I felt, the pressure on my palm and fingers, was really happening.
“You have a tear in your shirt.”
The words were out before I knew it. They hung, stupidly, over us, over his warm touch.
But he laughed lightly, easily. “Would you mend it for me?”
So, not much later, after Maman had turned in for an early night, I collected a needle and thread. Back at the table, I drew the oil lamp closer, so I would be able to see my stitches, and André slipped his shirt off.
“No one can see us,” he said.
Tracing the line of my face with his fingers, he drew me toward him. We paused, exchanging warm breath. I knew what he wanted, and I was scared. But this time, I wanted it, too.
From the first touch of his lips on mine, the warmth and softness of him, I was changed. For the first time in my life, I loved the darkness. I embraced the black, as we kissed, and I lost myself in the smell and the taste and the feel of him.
O
utside the kitchen door was an odd clicking noise, irregular. At first, I dismissed it as one of the strange little rodents in the roof, but the sound was insistent. After a while, I got up and went out. At my feet was a sweet-faced black kitten chasing a walnut.
“Where do you come from?”
The kitten paused, looking into space, then flopped over onto its side and pushed the nut around with its back feet.
When it was still there an hour later, I put down a saucer of milk, but it didn’t drink any.
Beyond the courtyard, the pool site still swarmed. Despite the announcement, there seemed no letup in the frenzied activity down there, with cars arriving regularly. Some brought journalists, who barged their way into the main house to ask their questions. I let Dom tell them, in his most terrible French, that we couldn’t help them, that they should ask the police.
We just wanted this to be over. For the builders to fill all the holes in the walls and give the place a renewed solidity, to finish the pool. We wanted to plant our garden and light our candles and play our music and be left alone.
P
eople did disappear.
That was what was absorbing me, as we waited. Dom retreated more and more often into his own thoughts as well as his music. Perhaps the problem for both of us was that our dreamy preoccupations had left us badly prepared for the real world.
People did stop working, or rather, they stopped what they were doing before, for all sorts of reasons. Why, hadn’t I done exactly that myself? People left failed marriages every day. Had Rachel simply met someone else, and Dom’s pride was still too wounded to admit it? How I wished it might be that simple.
Rachel’s piece on the flash drive about Marine Gavet seemed unfinished. I came back to that notion again and again. Had it ever appeared in finished form in a newspaper, and if so, when?
I needed to know.
It occurred to me that the library in Apt might have Internet access. I was about to go looking for Severan, to let him know I was driving into town, when his heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs. He stood in the open doorway, filling the space, head nearly touching the lintel.
“Where is M. Ross?”
“Dom . . . he’s in the music room, I think.”
“I just looked there.”
“I’ll go and find him.”
“Stay here. Don’t you go anywhere.” It was a command.
He went off again, shouting for one of his officers.
I sat down, feeling sick to my stomach. I should have left sooner. Not for the first time, I cursed our isolation.
Dom was sullen as he preceded Severan into the kitchen, giving me only the quickest of glances.
Severan waited until we were both standing in front of him. “We have now found the remains of a second body. It was a few meters away from the first. I can tell you it is the body of another woman.”
I
t was an old-fashioned lantern, with a frame of wrought iron that held four glass panes, and a lovely curlicue on the top, and another that held the catch to open it to light the candle. The kind of lantern that had been used for a hundred years, perhaps by a night watchman dangling it by its loop on a hook at the end of a pole.
André was still lodging in the old Poidevin cottage, and said he found it in a cellar there. Wherever it came from, the lantern became our signal: I want you. I’m waiting for you. You are not alone in the dark.
Of course, a secret code was hardly necessary. Maman must have known what was going on; most likely, she was actively encouraging us. But it was the romantic gesture that we found so appealing. He would take it from a stony shelf behind the lilac in the courtyard, and place it, lighted, on the path. Then, playing the game, I would slip in through the dark alleyway when the coast was clear.
B
attling the winds and rains of winter, and the chronic decay all around us, André soon became our mainstay. Without him, we would have gone under far earlier. Every other weekend, he went back to his village to check on his parents and to see his brothers and sister and their children. It was a great big family, by all accounts. After he’d gone at first light on Saturday, cycling off on Pierre’s old bicycle, I felt empty, as if part of me was missing.
As summer came, he began to miss a few of those fortnightly visits. On the Saturday evening, we might take the horse and cart into the next village and treat ourselves to dinner at an inexpensive restaurant. Sundays would be for walking in the woods and on the plateau, taking wine and food, eating in the great wide silence, then finding a shady hiding place in which to sleep, stuck together.
When he asked me to be his wife, it was a moment of pure happiness. I accepted him in the sure knowledge we would have a wonderful life together. I didn’t receive a ring; he gave me a much more original symbol of our love and commitment. He began to build his gift to me, in stone, painstakingly bringing the rocks down from the woodland where some listing walls had collapsed.
I said earlier that André seemed to me like a figure from the traditional tales of Provence. Perhaps he was more like a character from Jean Giono’s books, those almost mythic men who give his stories such a universal appeal. The messages were simple: have faith that the gods of nature will prevail, faith in hard labor on the land, and celebrate the determination of the peasant and the artisan to redeem the harshness and transform it into beauty and a symbol of that endurance.
It was André who built the two Romanesque arches in the gardens. He called them, in all seriousness, his monuments to our love. Complete follies, and the most wonderful presents I had ever been given.
We still lit the lantern, though the message had changed subtly. It had come to mean, I love you.
As he worked, and the arches slowly took shape, I dreamed of a simple but gloriously happy wedding in the village’s small church, saw the flowering rosemary strewn on flagstones as I walked up the aisle to him. The beignets and pancakes made with white flour for our special day. The long table set under the vine-and-fig canopy in the courtyard for the feast. The friends and neighbors from the village arriving with ribbons streaming from their carts.
M
y fiancé’s other present was less of a success. One evening, he arrived with a great unwieldy object, over which he had thrown some sacking.
“What on earth is it?” I asked, noting that it seemed to have some kind of independent movement as he held it out. The muscles in his arm were straining.
“Open it.”
I pulled back the sacking. Two black, beady eyes met mine through the bars of a cage. Instinctively, I pulled back. “A parrot?”
“A parakeet.”
It had been given to him by an elderly lady in the next village after he passed through on his way back from town and saw her fall from a loose stone she had been using as a doorstep. It was so typical of him that he mended it for her and took no payment other than a basket of apricots. She insisted he also take the bird in a cage.
The birdcage, a large, ornate cylinder affair made of thick wires, was placed in the corner of the sitting room. From a riot of bright green and yellow and red feathers spouted a vicious, hooked beak. When it launched into a stream of loud expressions of indignation, you could see a devilish blue-gray tongue, which neither Maman nor I could bear to look at.
In short, the bird was a brute, and it soon became obvious why the old woman could stand no more of its squawking. We put it outside by the wood store in the courtyard, and both sides declared an uneasy truce.
But the whole episode did make us laugh.
“If Pierre were here, he’d sell it at the market,” said Maman ruefully. “We might get a few sous for it.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, and André said he would give it a try himself. He came back with it in the afternoon.
T
he second body was that of a younger woman.
This time, the remains were exhumed not from the pool area itself but from the raised bed that formed part of the ornamental stone crescent at its head. Weedy clumps of fast-growing herbs had been pulled away by the police team, and they had found her there.
We couldn’t believe it. How was it the police search team had found exactly what it seemed they had been denied with the first discovery? What made them keep searching? Had they been looking for further evidence linked to the first when they found the second body, or had they always believed they would find another? I begged Severan to tell us what was happening. His mood was grim exaltation, with a dash of vindication perhaps.
Then he arrested Dom.
“We now have the remains of two bodies on this property,” he said curtly when we both protested loudly. “What do you expect us to do?”
They took Dom to police headquarters in Cavaillon for questioning. Severan would tell me nothing more.
W
here lies the line between books and life, fact and fiction? Of seeing and being seen? It was only now, when events were unfolding, that I recognized, from books rather than experience, that I truly appreciated the boundaries between reality and art. Before, I would read to understand, to think: yes, that person has a dilemma, those were the options available, and—for better or worse—that was the solution she or he chose. I have always argued for the fundamental honesty of fiction. But now I could see more sharply where the honesty lies. Possibly not in the stripping bare of the soul or on the crest of high drama, but in the small details and observations.
Dom hunched over the silent piano, his elbows on the keys. The wave of frozen discord. The great dark space of his absences. His face visibly closing.
T
he next morning, following a sleepless night, strong winds were brawling over the garden. Flowers and shrubs billowed and feinted, flattening themselves under the blows.
In the kitchen, sunlight filtered through the movement in the leaves of the courtyard trees, rendering the white plaster walls inside diaphanous and transitory, like fluttering muslin. A bright, Christmassy scent of freshly peeled oranges was all around. I couldn’t think where it came from, as we had only apples in the fruit bowl.
Feeling disoriented, and still in my nightdress, I let myself into the music room, looking not for Dom but some other resolution. Apart from the books of piano pieces—his favorite Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Chopin—and loose pages of scribbles on staves, there was nothing. I supposed that if I had known more about music then I might have been able to read something into his choices and his own markings, but it was not a language I instinctively understood.
It seemed to me then that I knew as little about Dom as I did on the first day we met, and that any knowledge I had gained in the interim had made him more mysterious to me, rather than less.
C
raving a sense of normality, I showered and dressed, then walked up to the village to buy milk and bread.
I trudged up the woodland path and emerged on the road up to the village. The first person I saw, her car parked at the side of the road just by its junction on the last bend, talking rapidly into her mobile, was Sabine.
She waved, rolled down her window, and then stepped out.
There was no escape. She was eager for every last detail. It goes without saying that she already knew what the police had found, and had a firm grasp of all the latest wildfire theories. She knew better than we did what was likely to happen next.
It occurred to me then: was it Sabine who had tipped off the police about Dom? What did she suspect, Sabine who seemed to know more about all of us than was comfortable, and who enjoyed the power it gave her?
O
utside the café in the village, where we sat for a morning coffee, the sky was a few shades too bright, the clatter from inside a touch too loud.
Sabine considered what I’d just told her. “Why didn’t you say something before?” she asked.
Nervously, I twisted the bracelets on my wrist. As I went through some of the incidents that had spooked me—the light flickering on the walls, the sound of stones against the window, the eerie evanescence of scent, the power outages—I felt more stupid. None of these could possibly be anything but random and unrelated. It was a relief to be able to tell someone, though I had to be careful. Not too much information; just enough to prompt her to tell me more than I told her.
Mercifully, she did not seem to know about Dom’s arrest. And, above all, I had to deflect her from that.
My gaze rested on the fountain in the square where we sat: black-green with lichen and moss, the water spewing from the mouth of a gargoyle so flattened and worn by age it looked like the head of a tortoise, water as cool and dark as the Styx.
“I thought it was nothing, just . . . crazy incidents, that I was . . . overreacting.”
“But you are clearly upset.”
“Yes.”
“Quite a lot of odd things, all happening in a chain together.”
It was a question of relationships, perhaps, between the infinite numbers of unconscious perceptions we make based on our own experience. It is a sum of impressions, in other words. Tricks of the light, yes. But of the inward eye, too.
“I was more scared of making too much of it,” I admitted.
“Some of them could easily be accidents, coincidences—the picture smashing, for instance. That happens. The glue on the backing tape dries up and gives out after so many years.”
“I know.”
“And power outages happen. They happen a lot here sometimes.”
“Of course.”
“But then the stones at the window . . . those are deliberate actions,” said Sabine. “So then you must ask who would be doing these actions deliberately.”
“Kids . . . bored kids, having a laugh.”
“It’s possible. What does Dom say?”
Careful now. “He doesn’t.”
“But you’ve told him.”
“I don’t mention it anymore.”
“There is another explanation, if you want to call it that,” said Sabine quietly.
It was unsettling how serious she looked. I dropped my eyes and let them wander beyond our table to where the uneven, cobbled road led away up the hill.
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No!” I thought she was joking, and laughed, but her composure suggested otherwise.
“No—not at all,” I repeated. “Why, what makes you say that?”
“I shouldn’t have. Forget it.”