The Lantern (3 page)

Chapter 4

T
he visitors are still here.

Bénédicte waits for them to go, holding herself tightly in her chair, pushing down the terrors that will follow if they do not. Breathing deeply, she makes herself see—behind her tightly closed eyes—the precious valley with its long southern screen of mountain.

Beyond, in the rising hills to the east, the first shivers of the Alps heft the land further into the sky. There the fields are corded purple, forever that long-ago summer when she scythed and bent with the other girls, the women, and the elderly to pick lavender flowers for the perfume factory.

Higher still the land is stubbled with sheep. They say that each troop of sheep keeps the scents of its particular grazing land deep in its fleeces, so that its provenance can be established by what the nose detects in the matted, unwashed wool: thyme and dry rocks, acorn-mashed mud, slopes where the herb savory grows in abundance, the pollen of gentian fields, hollows where leaves rot with windblown spikes of lavender.

Breathing slowly.

Breathing in scents of the fields and sun-warmed stone.

Hearing only the sound of a lightly running stream made by the wind in the trees.

Chapter 5

T
he approach to Les Genévriers is wide open.

The Luberon hills are like a great wide curtain, falling in folds created by steep gorges like a stage backdrop behind our land; all paths south through the property seem to end in ridged blue hills that deepen with the passing of the day. By early evening, the folds are sharply delineated by black pleats, the crevasses that trap the dark.

This property is not enclosed. We fling open all the flaking wooden shutters, and all is light and air. The blue is all-encompassing: the sky, the hills, the distant towns that cling to other hills along the valley, laid out before us.

Living there, waking up to it each morning, I felt as if life—my real life, that is, the life I had always been hoping to have—had truly begun. In every way imaginable, I was happy, exhilarated even. And, at the core of it, I had found Dom, and he had found me. We were embarked on a new life together.

Does this sound reckless? All I know is that I never thought this would happen to me, but when it did, I seized my chance.

After the momentous meeting in Yvoire, he came back to Geneva with me, and we went out to dinner, walked for hours around the black, wind-ruffled lake lit on all sides with advertisements for the most expensive watches in the world. Indeed, it was one of those names that had provided the work that brought me to Switzerland.

He pulled me in toward him. Against the light, he was a black outline with no visible features. We kissed, and I knew at the first, feather-light touch of his mouth that this was special.

“Eve . . .” he whispered.

It’s not my real name. It’s what he called me for the first time that long, lamp-lit afternoon in the café by the lake. He likes to claim I was seriously suggesting he take a bite of the Château d’Yvoire’s ornamental cabbage in the Garden of Taste. It’s a gentle tease that stuck.

“You’re not married?” I asked him again.

“I was,” he said. “I’m not married anymore.”

The same thing happened the next night, nothing more, and the day after that I returned to London, my translating job finished. Dom went to stay with friends in Paris before he turned up in London a week or so later. We went to the theater and to the Tate Modern. I tried to play it cool. So did he. But we both knew.

S
o we went away together, to Italy: a flight to Naples, then a hydrofoil across the bay to the island of Ischia. Four days, it was supposed to be. As a freelancer, I was able to juggle jobs. Arriving in Ischia’s harbor out of season in a lemon-yellow spring was like stepping into the set of a fifties movie. The jumbles of tall stucco houses perched over the water, the buzz of Vespa motor scooters, the shouting, and the sulfurous baths. In a hotel that was once a palazzo, we shared a bed with ridiculous gold silk sheets and stayed for a week. Until I met Dom, I never knew what it was like, physically, to find the perfect fit, to be aroused by a glance or a single passing contact. It was a revelation.

So was he, that first night. He had a wonderful body, broad-shouldered with well-defined muscles; a physique that made sense of the athletic stride. I had not yet known a man who looked so strong yet was so skilled in gentleness.

“Not an athlete so much as a swimmer,” he said, in response to my admiring question. “Long-distance swimming. When I was much younger, I swam competitively.”

“And you still do it, obviously.”

“Not seriously, anymore. I didn’t swim for a long time, but I went back to it a few years ago. Being alone with my thoughts, plowing up and down my line in the pool, working out, body and mind. It helped a lot during a tough time.”

“What kind of tough time?”

“Oh, you know. Life, sometimes.”

“Tell me,” I said gently, tracing his upper arm with a fingertip.

“I’d rather not talk,” he said, pulling me over him with a smooth, sinuous movement.

I did try asking again, much later, but he made it clear I should drop the subject. And so, I let it go. Who hasn’t had a tough time of some description? If I’m honest, at that stage in the affair, when I didn’t know how serious we were, any hint of trouble was only important in that it played to my bookish fantasies that somehow I would be the one to rescue him, the romantic heroine who would restore what he had lost.

Reluctantly, we went back to the mainland, but didn’t move from Naples until two days later. In Menton, just across the border with France, we checked into a hotel with full business facilities, and I managed to finish one piece of work I had promised, and sent word to other regular clients that I would be on extended leave until further notice.

We trailed blissfully and aimlessly along the French Riviera for a while, feeling decadent, of another age. Was this how it had been for all those rich artistic people: the Scott Fitzgeralds, the Bloomsbury group, the Picassos and Somerset Maughams? It was idyllic. We were idyllic. The whole scenario was exciting, and fun, and all-consuming, and stage-managed, of course, but it was also a manifestation of a profound understanding between us, which had taken both of us unawares.

I had never consciously looked for an older man, but know now that I shouldn’t have left it to chance. Dom was fifteen years older than me, and everything I hadn’t realized I’d wanted all along: confident and sophisticated but undercut with a vulnerable creative streak I understood all too well. We went back to London together and we stayed together.

“I
’m thinking of moving,” he said one Sunday afternoon as we ambled around Hyde Park and the Serpentine gallery in that semi-exiled way of self-obsessed lovers who had spent the whole morning in bed, and lunchtime, too.

“Are you?”

“I’ve had my eye on somewhere special. Somewhere I’ve always wanted to live, dig myself in, put down roots.”

There it was again, that natural empathy we had. The idea of roots struck a chord with me. Deep down, throughout all the years I spent shuttling between divorced and still-warring parents and their separate continents, I yearned for somewhere I really knew as home.

“I’ve looked at other places,” he went on. “But this is the one that stays in my mind that everything else has to match up to. But nothing does compare. Like it’s cast a spell—I even dream about it!”

“So—it’s what, a house—apartment?”

“It’s an old farming hamlet. In Provence.”

“You want to move to France?” I asked weakly. A sudden shaft of pain in my chest expressed the dread I didn’t dare articulate. It was an effort to keep my voice even.

“It’s the most beautiful spot. And I know the area well. My family used to rent a villa in the Luberon for summer holidays. We went back year after year while my sister and I were growing up. I think my parents would have liked to buy somewhere there themselves, but couldn’t afford to, or thought it was impractical.”

I knew by then that his father was a senior civil servant and his mother had stayed at home in the traditional way. His elder sister was a doctor, a general practitioner in Richmond. Dom talked vaguely about introducing me to his family, but it hadn’t yet happened.

“Anyway, now there’s no reason I can’t buy a house there . . . as I say, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful place, and well, this is something I’ve always wanted to do. I really want to do this.” He was speaking too quickly. Then he stopped walking, right in front of a Rebecca Warren sculpture titled
Perturbation, My Sister
, and faced me, searching for some answer he needed from my eyes.

My heart pounded uncomfortably. I stared into the distance, sure he was about to tell me it was over between us, that this was the parting of the ways.

“Come with me—come and see what you think. If you think you could live there.” His delivery was offhand.

Less than two weeks later, we were standing in the courtyard of Les Genévriers for the first time.

T
hat was how it began. A whirlwind and a new start: one that had immediate appeal. Perhaps it wasn’t as odd for me as it might have been for someone who had always lived within the same boundaries, in the same place, in the same country. Sure, I realized it was a risk, but I felt excited and optimistic rather than uncertain. It seemed like the outward expression of our joyous discovery of each other, our unexpected and intimate happiness.

I didn’t ignore the practicalities. I decided not to sell my tiny flat in London but to rent it out furnished, which would cover the mortgage. I stored most of my assorted possessions at my mother’s house. In the end, all I brought with me were enough books to fill two bookcases, a laptop, and a suitcase of clothes.

“I’ll still work, contribute my share,” I said. “I like to work.”

“You can do what you want. Why not find that special book to translate?”

“You mean that?”

“You know I do.”

There’s always translation work around, and I did have every intention of finding out exactly what was available, but somehow I never got started. Dom. The landscape. The life of books and music. It was all enough. How lucky were we?

There are plenty of cynics who would say that it was too good to be true.

W
hat did Dom see in me? I did wonder sometimes. Beyond the physical attraction, was it my lack of experience, the borrowed sophistication, the unblinking adoration in my eyes? Or just that I was happy to sit and read for days on end without asking anything more of him?

In the early days of a relationship, we all pretend to be something we are not. It might be as simple as pretending to be more outgoing than we really are, or more tolerant, or feigning cool when we feel anything but. There are infinitely subtle grades of pretense. Perhaps I was pretending to be more self-sufficient than I felt, making a conscious effort not to repeat past mistakes of neediness and possessiveness, though with my family background it was obvious why I would be.

A bad marriage and a worse divorce. It didn’t do any of us any good. I still hate any kind of confrontation. As a child, I made myself believe the myths my parents spun; the collusion was necessary, especially for my brother and me. I can let myself see it now, but I won’t mock self-delusion. In the pulling together to weave the fantasy, we were achieving the impossible dream: we were fastened securely together in the teeth of financial disasters, remorseless moves, separations, and fundamental incompatibility between husband and wife.

But now, being with Dom was like being shaken awake. Everything was clearer, sharper; my senses were more acute. From the moment we met it was as though I had found the home I had always dreamed of having. I wanted to put down roots, deep and lasting ones.

T
hat summer, the house and its surroundings became ours. Or, rather, his house; our life there together, a time reduced in my memory to separate images and impressions: mirabelles—the tart orange plums like incandescent bulbs strung in forest-green leaves; a zinc-topped table under a vine canopy; the budding grapes; the basket on the table, a large bowl; tomatoes ribbed and plump as harem cushions; thick sheets and lace secondhand from the market, and expensive new bedcovers that look as old as the rest; lemon sun in the morning pouring through open windows; our scent in the linen sheets. Stars, the great sweep of the Milky Way making a dome overhead. I have never seen such bright stars, before or since.

After several abortive attempts to penetrate the arcane bureaucracy of France Telecom—including a trip to Cavaillon, where we waited hours in a store only to be told to come back with more documentation—we made a conscious decision to live as simply as possible. Not forever, but for now. With the prospect of major building work, Dom suggested, there was no point in spending weeks trying to install telephone and Internet lines only to have to jump through more hoops to replace them later. For a while, apart from a couple of cell phones that didn’t always pick up the unreliable signal, we would absent ourselves from the modern world.

And so we did, just as we embraced decrepitude, from the house’s small sighs as more plaster cracked and fell, to the dry bodies of dead insects and husks of scorpions. None of it mattered. It was a kind of release from the normal worries associated with owning a house. All would be fixed in the end; fixed but not spoiled.

Besides, the place contained a history. In the wooden lintel of the oldest part, what must originally have been a simple cottage, is carved the date 1624. A lopsided stone arch at the end of the main house, which would once have let carts into the courtyard, bears testament to its construction in 1887.

We filled the main house with relics and prizes from the local
brocantes
, the secondhand flea markets. However badly rusted, flaking, dented it was, we were charmed by each item. Castoffs, objects near the end of their life, their usefulness already given to other people in other settings, could play out their final years for us, until they crumbled finally into the dust that fell steadily from the ceilings and walls.

Baked red tiles on the ground floor—
tomettes
—stamped with incident, finger and animal prints, like fossils, told a possible tale of the playful farm dog who would not obey and came running across the earthy work while it was still wet. There were stains on some of the tiles in the kitchen that might have been there for generations. I rubbed and scrubbed and sanded, but the evidence of bygone carelessness—an eye taken off a great pan on the range, a bowl of boiling hot soup sent flying from the table—remained indelible.