The Lantern (6 page)

I stood at the kitchen window. A solitary magpie perched on the stone wall, then took off suddenly, a black-and-white dart. I was absurdly relieved to see another, a few moments later, coming in to land in the great ivy-clad oak farther down the garden.

Gradually, one incident jumped out from the previous day’s tangle and became my focus. The woman with the plum lipstick. There was something that had gone over my head at the time. It bothered me now like an itch. Why hadn’t the woman said anything until we were about to leave? Unless . . . It would make sense, I rationalized, if the woman was not wrong. If she had indeed met him before, a couple of years ago as she said, when perhaps he had been with another woman—Rachel—and she had been exercising some discretion, as the French always do in such matters.

Dom might simply have forgotten meeting her. Why, then, had he been so defensive?

W
hile Dom stayed in bed for most of that morning, I took direction from that disembodied stone hand and dosed my hangover with fresh air, doing a job I’d been putting off. We had drained the old green swimming pool. Wet leaves had sunk like damp brown stars into the empty basin. I climbed down into the dirt. Fat scorpions lurked malevolently as I began to clear the stew of windblown twigs and sodden tangles of ivy, rotted petals, and grit. Underneath this soggy mess, as I suspected, there were ominous cracks in the concrete, which would explain why the water had seeped out over the course of the summer.

My head improved, but pain was replaced by uneasiness.

In the kitchen, I made myself a strong tea in the English way, letting it steep.

The sun had emerged, quick and sharp. It seared into the wall, on one small patch, lifting layer after layer of surface tints, from cream to burnt brown; so mottled, hacked, knocked, replaced, corroded that the effect was of a decrepit fresco. It would be a bit of a shame to paint over it now, I was thinking; it was part of the fabric of the building’s history, like the various places in the house where the ghostly outlines remained of old doors now bricked up and plastered over. They were a fine counterpoint to the doors we found opened into new rooms that hadn’t seemed to exist.

A shadow fell across the wall. I turned and saw a dark blur pass the glass in the door, announcing an arrival. I waited expectantly, but the seconds passed and no figure reappeared, no knock came.

Sipping my tea too soon, I felt it scald the roof of my mouth. I put down the mug, went over to the door, and pulled it open. No one was there.

I stepped outside. The little terrace was empty.

“Hello? Who’s that?” I called down into the courtyard.

All was quiet. I retreated, puzzled.

Back inside the kitchen, a patch of weak sunlight flickered, making me jump. Perhaps all I had seen was the effect of sudden movement in the branches of the lilac at the entrance to the courtyard. Or a wisp of cloud, I told myself. But that did not alleviate the instinctive sense that someone was there outside, that I was being watched.

I listened closely, detecting a rattling sound that might have come from the alleyway. Perhaps one of the shutters had loosed its moorings. I went over to the window over the sink, and peered down. Nothing unusual that I could see.

I opened the back door and went out again. The courtyard was empty. Not a sound beyond the rustle of leaves. I was standing at the top of the stairs, about to turn and go in again, when a movement caught my eye farther down the garden, in the direction of the old pool. A scrap of gray-blue movement.

Wrapping my sweater tighter, I ran down the steps and out of the courtyard, keeping my eyes on the spot. When I reached the pool, nothing was there. The abandoned orchard beyond was empty, too.

I shivered again, this time with cold, and walked slowly around to the public path. The great hills were fringed by rain clouds. But there—

There was a movement and a darker, blue-gray shape.

I squinted. A figure? A woman in a long coat? I couldn’t be sure. It seemed oddly insubstantial.

A blink and it was gone. I stood staring at the vanishing point on the path where it seemed to dive into the base of the hills, waiting for the apparition to reappear along the path and reveal itself.

It did not reappear.

E
veryone wants answers and tidy conclusions, but in life they don’t always materialize. You settle for the best outcome you can manage, and accept that you can’t explain everything. The subconscious mind sometimes makes surreal connections, like the ones in dreams. Tricks of the light were all around. Look how the setting sun carved bloodred clefts in the hills that then turned to black rivulets.

I shrugged and tried to regain my rationality as I went back to the house. What had happened to make me so anxious all of a sudden?

Breathing deeply, feeling embarrassed by my overreaction, I walked slowly around, checking for any signs of disturbance. Nothing was out of place.

On the kitchen table, my tea had gone cold.

Chapter 9

A
fter Pierre appeared, I found it hard to concentrate.

Each evening, when I sat with my book, the lamp grew dimmer as I struggled to find a comfortable position and to bring my vision into focus on the pages. In the glow that makes an island of the armchair and side table, the lines blurred and seemed to imitate waves. Individual words moved and stretched themselves, until they were impossibly gigantic, then suddenly snapped back to become impossibly small and slanted.

I would blink and close my eyes again, this time against the unbearable thought that I would lose one of my greatest pleasures. That I, too, would be afflicted like Marthe.

Surely that was a cruelty too far.

I
have always been a reader. As a child, I loved books, though there weren’t many at home. But as soon as I went to school and was given one to look at the lovely pictures, and turned the pages to find more of the same, I was happy. Such colors and strange and vivid images! I marveled at how they were all closed up, asleep with their secrets unseen until you reached up and took the book down from the shelf.

The teacher,
Mlle.
Bonis, noticed my reaction and, as soon as she thought I was ready, she gave me books that I could read on my own, books that made sense of the lessons the class was learning on the blackboard. My parents used to say they never knew where it had come from, but I seemed to be aware straightaway of the importance of books and words. The connection between the fantastical pictures illustrating the story and the images the words suggested in my head.

By the age of ten, I was reading Dumas, de Maupassant, and abridged versions of Victor Hugo’s works. Very often, when my work on the farm was done, I would run up the path through the woods to sit reading on a hard chair in the village library in the corner of the
mairie
. I can still recall vividly the terrible shock I had while reading a passage by Giono, in which a man was killed by a storm. Lightning “planted a golden tree between his shoulders.” The image has been imprinted in my mind ever since, both as a picture that is as beautiful as it is horrifying, and as a monument to the immense power of words.

I kept it quiet, but I wanted to be a teacher myself, just like
Mlle.
Bonis.

I
feel him here all the time now. Pierre. He is at my back, in the vulnerable hollow at the base of my spine that acts as a warning sensor.

Why has he chosen to come back? After all these years, why now?

So typical of Pierre.

Always here, behind me, at my side: a presence beyond the familiars of the house, the well-known shapes and voices from the past that live benignly alongside me. Odd noises are disturbing now, and I am unsettled by voices when I know it is only the wind in the trees. My skin prickles as if a change has occurred but is not yet completely revealed.

Finally, four days after Pierre’s first visitation, when he hadn’t reappeared, I allowed my shoulders to drop. It was when I began to relax, of course, that he returned. This time he was standing by the hearth in the kitchen, quiet as you like.

I was making bread, which I don’t do so often now, as the girl brings me bread from the bakery every two days. But I had a sudden craving for the bread that Mémé Clémentine and Maman used to make, when there was a brick bread oven at the end of the cottages. Into the mixing bowl they’d put a fistful of dough kept back from the previous batch; they called it the spirit of the bread, so there was continuity, a link down the years and generations, living and breathing in the yeasty pillows of the new loaves.

I was at the table, arms floured, kneading, and sad that there was no spirit of the bread to be placed inside, when Pierre strolled in again.

He didn’t follow me this time, just stayed where he was, hands in pockets, guilty smile playing about his lips. A cut bottom lip, I noticed, as if he’d been in a scrap, which he often was. This was the Pierre who set snares in the woods and caught rabbits and larks with sticks and twine: the clever, grinning ten-year-old boy who provided the meat for Maman’s herb-laced casseroles. The look on her face when he presented her with a fat animal or string of dead birds was beatific, like the face of the Virgin Mary at church, but she never knew that for every one he gave her, he had sold two to the restaurant at the foot of the hill and spent the money on cigarettes: real cigarettes, not the rubbish made of dried clematis rolled in leaves, which most of the village boys learned to puff on.

Head down, eyes almost closed, I scuttled past him down the few steps to the hall and into the sitting room, scrabbled in the drawer next to the bed, and drew out my rosary. Holy Mary, Mother of God. Bless us and keep us.

The third time he came, he was the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes in the morning. I was still bleary, emerging from sleep. But there he was, standing by the side of the bed, waiting for me to rouse myself.

I knew for certain then that Pierre, in the guise of the unsettling child he once was, had come back for good. He was staring at me mockingly, wordlessly, as if to make sure I had understood that there should be no mistake about it. His fingers were playing with the smooth twigs and the twine he used to make his most effective traps.

Chapter 10

A
t that stage, it was only a wisp of suspicion, but it was the first time I had ever had reason to feel it about Dom. There had been bad times with other men, but never with Dom. He was different. I trusted him absolutely, in every way. Obviously, there was an element of disappointment in this small intrusion of reality. But at this stage, it would be more accurate to call it a dread of disappointment rather than the fact of it.

So, when I started asking questions, it was in the spirit of wanting to be proved wrong. I knew that in pressing him I risked one of his cold moods, but it wasn’t fair of him to expect me never to be curious about his ex-wife. She was part of who he was, for better or worse.

“Are you still in touch with Rachel?”

It was a few mornings after the lunch at the Durands’. The hilltop lay on the cloud like a lushly vegetated island, long and low on a spumy sea. On the other side of the valley a village high on the Grand Luberon emerged in golden light from the same cloud waves, so that the great fortified walls appeared as seafront buildings.

The question clearly irritated him, as I had known it would. “In touch with Rachel? No.”

I searched his face, the frown, the eyes, which avoided mine, staring past me at the floor, at the wall, and only then finding the great vista on the other side of the window.

I couldn’t help but pursue it. “No, not really . . . or no, not at all?”

Again, a beat lost.

“No, I’m not in contact with her.”

“But you know where she is?”

Just the tiniest fraction of a second. “Yes.”

“What does she do?”

“What is this?”

“Just . . . curious.”

“But why are you asking?” A flash of anger now, with a sarcastic bite. “Have you overheard me phoning her, found some texts between us, or—God!—perhaps you think I’m still in love with her!”

“Of course not.”

There were so many other questions: How long were you together? How did you meet? What’s she like? Is she anything like me? Why did you split up? Whose fault was it? What was so bad that it has hurt you so much?

But the look he gave me before he walked out of the room ensured they would remain unasked. Don’t go there, it said. I asked you not to. You promised.

B
efore the incident with the woman at the Durand party, it never occurred to me that I might be jealous. I thought I knew as much as I needed to about Rachel, and accepted that she was a part of Dom’s past, without wanting to know more.

But from that day on, it seemed Rachel was constantly there: hiding unacknowledged in the background of stories Dom told me; beside him in the pictures that reinforced his memories; informing his opinions; smiling inside his silences.

I brought her on myself, of course. I alone allowed her into my mind; I can’t blame Dom for that. Dom did not talk about her. It was not as if I had moved into the house they shared. I was not living surrounded by her old belongings, or even their shared household items. Her hands had probably touched his books and pictures, but that was the extent of it. (Her hands on him, though; that was a different, altogether trickier, matter.)

But it was not as though I was condemned to sleep on sheets or walk on rugs that she had chosen, or wonder at her taste in wallpaper. There was no eating from her forks, taking food from her plates, sipping from her glasses and cups that would have underscored how far I had come in and taken her place.

Surely, though, it was only natural to want to know their story. It was precisely because he would not talk about Rachel that I found myself wondering more and more about her.

Who was it who said that what is hidden or cannot be said grows more powerful? “I told my wrath, my wrath did end . . . I told it not, my wrath did grow.”

I remember now: Blake. “A Poison Tree.”