The Lantern (8 page)

My brother, at that time, was such a charming, cheeky little monkey, with a certain gift for closing sales, that the man must have reckoned that kept him ahead of the game whatever was going on underneath the counter.

Chapter 2

T
he summer was dying.

Blackberries crisped on dying brambles and fungus jutted like trays from the trunk of the big garden oak, hard to the touch and caked with dead ants. The trees farther down our hillside were in sharp relief: first the cleared terraces and then the black trees reaching down to the sea that was not a sea.

I showed Dom my dismal discovery in the old swimming pool: a gaping tear at the deep end where the western wall seemed to have broken away.

“Looks almost like the ground’s shifted,” he said. “More damage there, too.” He pointed into the corners.

“Same story with the house.”

Dom was sanguine, as always. We’d get some advice; we’d get it fixed. It was all part of life here. We’d known what we were taking on.

So we paced the garden. If we had a new pool, should it be ten or twelve meters long? How far from the semicircular walled structure that we could keep as a natural focal point? How wide should it be, and how deep?

I wonder now what would have happened if we had never decided to replace the pool at all. With hindsight, would we have gone ahead if we had known all we would uncover, and what effect it would have?

W
e made an appointment and drove down to the industrial zone at Apt to talk to the owner of a company that built swimming pools. M. Jallon had been highly recommended, and we liked him from the start. Avuncular and practical, he assured us that anything was possible. Like almost everyone we met in Provence, he seemed to combine professionalism with a laid-back manner so effortlessly that by the end of the meeting we were firm friends, partners in a glorious endeavor that would enhance not only our personal surroundings but the landscape and history of the entire region.

The first step would be for him to come and look at the old pool to see if it could be salvaged. We might then decide that we wanted a more efficient, modern version, but the correct course would have been followed. He knew the property, of course—as did everyone, apparently—and was particularly concerned that, given the openness of our land, we might want to consider a high-tech, reassuringly expensive, retractable cover for the pool.

We should also be aware that a lining of ice green–gray was in vogue for new swimming pools: it tinted water the color of glacier melt, inducing the brain to lower the body’s temperature just by seeing it, he said. M. Jallon was a wonderful salesman.

On the way home, I turned to Dom and tried to sound as light and teasing as possible. “I hope this isn’t all because you need to get your laps in.”

He gave a short laugh, letting me know he’d gotten the point. “This is the last situation I would ever want to escape,” he said.

N
ow that high tourist season was over, the streets were quiet. We discovered anew the enchanted villages of the great valley: Bonnieux, topped with a church, not a castle, opposite the bleak ruined fortress of Lacoste; Ménerbes, shiplike on its low outcrop at the foot of the range; Roussillon, perched on the edge of surging cliffs of red ochre amid green pines; Gordes, majestic in its autumn emptiness, incomparable views framed to artistic perfection by its own limestone ridges planted with candles of cypress.

Hand-in-hand, up the winding cobbles we climbed. I claimed kisses in the shadows of stone buildings and against the rough stucco of golden-baked walls. The steely purity of the midday sun, shutters closing. Lunch with wine. Always talking and talking.

Only one subject we did not talk about.

So, in the absence of being able to ask Dom or, rather, not wanting to provoke one of his black moods when everything was so lovely, I had two leads: the name of the house that the woman at the party seemed to associate with him, and the Durands, who might be able to put me in touch with the woman herself.

Yet even then, part of me was wondering what exactly I was concerned about. It was such a tiny, unimportant incident, after all. I tried to push the information to the back of my mind, but I couldn’t help myself. I was curious.

I asked Marie-Claude at the post office about the Mauger house.

O
ne morning, when Dom was visiting another swimming pool company to get a second quote—he wanted to prove, I think, that he had not entirely lost his business sense to the Provençal spell—I followed her directions and headed down the hill.

It was a pleasant walk in bright sunshine down to the ruined chapel. My footsteps crunched loudly on the gravelly, stony path. The warmer air released a scent of pine; it could have been summer but for the silence of the cicadas.

The autumn huntsmen were out, though. A red plastic sign was tied to an oak branch:
ATTENTION: BATTUE DE GRANDE GIBIER EN COURS
. I assumed the “big game” it referred to were wild boar, but possibly it meant deer, too. The guns released occasional splatters of sound farther down into the valley. I remembered what Fernand had told me at the start of the season: “If you must walk, you wear a bright coat and go before lunchtime or even at noon, while the men and dogs are eating and drinking in their ramshackle blinds. After lunch, you don’t venture out. Not far north of here, a hunter has already killed a Sunday cyclist.”

La Provence
, the local newspaper, reported that the tragic event had been caused by
une balle perdue
. The words for “stray bullet” sound almost playful to an English speaker’s ear: just a lost ball.

It didn’t take long to get to the ruined chapel. It’s hardly more than two parallel walls covered in ivy, stems as thick and twisted as trees. Oaks grow in the nave, which is open to the skies. A first glimpse of a red roof made me quicken my pace.

The house was clad in tangerine stucco, too new and too bright to be a long-term fixture in village history. My heart was thumping uncomfortably (I couldn’t understand why) as I approached the steel gates at its entrance. It was a low, modern building, fairly charmless, surrounded by a neat garden with a pool. All this was visible through the wire-mesh fence that topped a stone wall.

There was no car in the driveway. The sage-green shutters appeared to be tightly closed. The place had the air of a holiday villa, closed now for the winter.

Clearly, there was no one around to ask. I hadn’t passed a soul on the track down. The only confirmation that I was not alone on the hillside was the intermittent sound of hunters’ salvoes.

A postal delivery box on the gate pillar offered the sole indication that I had come to the right place. On a label the size of a Band-Aid was the name MAUGER in capitals, written by hand in black felt pen.

I hesitated.

Standing by the wall, unsure how to proceed, I stared into the property as if trying to see some trace of Dom, impossible though I knew that was.

Was this really a place that he and Rachel once rented for vacation? It seemed so unlikely, such an odd choice for a man who loved the time-honored quirks of Les Genévriers, its atmosphere and views. This house occupied a dull position on a lower slope of the hill, with no views. The village on its proud rock was hidden by a bank of ill-placed trees. The place was uninspiring, the kind of villa he routinely dismissed. Why on earth would he have come here?

If he had come here, I reminded myself.

Trailing along the garden walls, rooted in shallow crevices, ivy-leaved toadflax was beginning to run rampant. On the other side of the fence, the land was cut back primly, a dull, flat area of grass with few trees. It told me nothing.

I retraced my steps up the hill, feeling sheepish. Of course, Dom was right. The woman at the lunch had made a mistake.

Chapter 3

I
sleep downstairs under a vaulted ceiling, hoping the arch will bear the weight of the creaking house and protect me. In what is now my bedroom, a traditional three-person country bench stands by the window, piles of junk on its rush seats. My few clothes are folded carefully in Maman’s lovely walnut chest of drawers.

Maman always seemed to love Pierre the most.

Pierre, who laughed at others’ concerns, and whose insolent grin grew more and more a permanent feature of his handsome face as he reached manhood, though Lord knows it was better to be his sister than one of his women.

“He’s a boy,” she’d say, and the pride in her voice made it painfully clear that the fact would forever obscure his shortcomings. I didn’t understand then about mothers and sons; or about only sons and the continuation of the name, of the line, of the work on the land. At the time, I could only wonder, in abject frustration, how it was that she had not noticed his casual cruelties, his lies, and his acts of contempt.

It was all such a long time ago, yet in so many ways the circle is closing. I feel closer to the past now than I did twenty years ago. Bats have recolonized the lower rooms. My clothes are torn and patched, and I care as little as I did when I was a girl who ran all day in the hills. The generator has broken down, so I live by candlelight and oil lamps. Life is reverting to the ways I knew as a child.

M
y ambition may have been to become a teacher, just like
Mlle.
Bonis, but my first taste of a career was altogether less glorious. I unwittingly became a criminal.

Pierre came to find me, where I was reading in the shade of a plum tree, and ordered me to take something into the woods for him.

“Put it in the blind, under the dog rose.”

I knew the place he meant. I had paid for that knowledge, several months earlier, when I stumbled upon him by accident, crouching down and smoking. He tried to put out the cigarette and hide the evidence in the hollow under the bush, but it was too late.

“You’re too young to smoke,” I told him. “You’re only twelve.”

He said nothing, but dug his long thumbnails into the flesh of my bare leg with the kind of gleeful ferocity he usually reserved for killing and skinning small animals.

“You don’t ever tell,” he hissed. A warm, acrid trail of smoke escaped from the side of his mouth, the nails embedded sharper. “If you don’t want this every day.”

I struggled but it was no use. “Are those Papa’s? Have you stolen Papa’s?”

He laughed. “Why would I need to do that? I have my own money.”

The need to boast overrode his discretion, as usual. He never realized that was his true weakness.

Somehow, it turned into a situation where he won, and I lost. I did his bidding from that day on, never quite understanding how it had come to that.

B
ut that time, when he asked me to go to the dog rose hiding place in the woods above the sheepfold, I planted my feet and crossed my arms. “No,” I said.

“No?”

“No.”

He walked around me, as if observing me closely for the first time. He was carrying a long twig he had stripped of bark, and switched it through the air as if he were practicing a rapier thrust.

“I think you will,” said Pierre. “Because I’ve asked you nicely.”

I knew that meant he would not ask so nicely the next time, so I seized the initiative. “I will—if you promise to leave the swallowtails alone!”

“The swallowtails!” He said it as a teacher would, like M. Fabre, who liked to make an example of pupils who gave stupid answers. “And would you care to explain what you mean by that?”

“You know very well what I mean. Leave them alone—it’s cruel.”

He continued walking around in a most disconcerting way, now rubbing his chin like M. Fabre, who, it was said, was a relative of a famous learned man and liked to live up to it.

I was wishing I hadn’t started this, when Pierre gave one of his nasty laughs. At least it started as a stage version of a nasty laugh, but quickly became genuine. Like the pleasure he took in pulling the wings, those beautiful wings like arched gothic church windows, off the butterflies.

“Your face!” he said, when he eventually stopped.

I said nothing.

“All right, all right. If the swallowtails mean that much to you . . . You do this for me, and I’ll leave off the butterflies—though if you think that will see off the real predators you’re living in dreamland.”

He told me what to do and, feeling quite pleased with myself, I set out on his errand, imagining I was learning at last how to get something back in return from him. At the time, I had no idea what he was up to, of course, nor of the significance of the heavy object in the sacking that I carried. Following instructions, I placed it carefully in the root-veined hole underneath the dog rose and covered it with the biggest stone I could move.

Chapter 4

D
ays of crystal brightness opened with cold that cut the morning air and stung our cheeks.

We huddled close as the temperature dropped. Inside: reading, cooking, eating; the scent of herbs steeping and piano notes rising from the music room. Outside: purposeful pacing around the garden, happily engrossed in discussing stone surrounds, screening, and pump systems.

Dom decided the new swimming pool would be sited nearer the odd semicircular structure built of stone, which sprouted rosemary bushes, a dead cherry tree, and other spiky clumps of scrubs I didn’t recognize. That way the old pool would be demolished and the hole it left would form part of the new, larger one.

“Excellent decision,” said M. Jallon, at his well-ordered office at the pool construction company. “If you like, I can arrange for you to see a pool we built at a property quite near to you—it’s the kind of design that would work well at your place, but also might give you some more ideas, and show you our work.”

We accepted without question.

D
om was right. There were days in October when it was like being imprisoned in a cloud. In the library we made upstairs I read the Brontës.

As we stayed on, glorying in not having to pack up and leave for a city winter of work, the fig trees yellowed. I had never seen the seasons turn in a southern country before. I only ever thought of these places close to the Mediterranean in their summer form, hot and bright and lush. Now, before my eyes, purple spears of buddleia transformed into rotten corn kernels. Walnuts dropped.

It was wetter and darker than we had anticipated, but we counted ourselves privileged to be there to witness it, adding another layer to our understanding of the land. I had all the time in the world to read, and was keeping a notebook of colloquial phrases that might, just might, come to fruition if I ever found the right book to try translating. In a burst of insane optimism, I wrote to an esteemed publishing house in Paris, and a smaller one in Marseille, putting my name forward, but I suspected I would be better off finding an appealing book myself and simply playing around with words to see what came of it.

I had every chance to do so. Dom was often at his piano and filled page after page with notes on staves. One early evening, he took me down to the music room, sat me on the sofa, and played an evocative romantic piece I had never heard before.

“It’s lovely—just gorgeous,” I said as the last chord died and he looked up expectantly, perhaps even a little shyly. “One of yours?”

“For you,” he said. “ ‘Song for Eve.’ ”

I
spent hours wandering around the buildings, trying to decide how best to use the rooms. We scarcely went up to the top floor of the main house, but at the end of the winding stairs were two interconnecting bedrooms under the eaves to one side, and to the other, a bare attic room with warped wooden floorboards. A hayloft, perhaps. The only item of furniture in the room was a lopsided cupboard. It creaked as I opened it, but it was empty.

Where the roof leaked, the floor was stained. In places, the boards were so riddled with holes they were like planks of Emmental cheese. Mice? I wondered. Without thinking, I pulled up a board to see if I could. It gave easily, revealing a small, dark emptiness that released a moldy dampness. I left it out and pulled at some others.

One of the cavities right over by the wall was different. It was packed with straw, and under that I felt a smooth surface. I drew it out and saw it was a book. I sat back on my heels, marveling. It was a volume of Provençal tales, written for a child, with a pretty dust jacket, much damaged by age and moisture. I opened the title page. Thick, black print, dated 1935. The badly spotted pages crackled as I turned them. A silverfish darted into the tight cleft of the binding. What was the book doing under the floorboards? Was it hidden, and if so, why? I felt inside the cubbyhole again, but it was empty.

Once again, the house had given, but with these gifts came mysteries. With each one, the echoes of the past resonated ever stronger. The longer we stayed, the less it seemed to belong to us.

I showed the book to Dom, wondering aloud about the children who must have lived in the house. “Why would one of them hide this? Was it to keep it safe? Perhaps one of the others wanted it for themselves . . . and they wouldn’t have had many books like this, would they—too expensive . . .”

Dom smiled and raised his eyebrows. “You do know, you have the most extraordinarily overactive imagination,” he said. But his tone was affectionate.

T
he October mist was thick as fog as we bumped down the track from Les Genévriers, negotiating new ruts and potholes gouged by the rain. During heavy cloudbursts, there was a stream running between the main house and the row of tenants’ cottages.

We turned up to the village, and then took the road into damp whiteness toward Viens. The plateau flattened on either side of the empty road—fields and trees, the occasional house. In the passenger seat, I consulted the map spread across my knees. Tucked into tightly packed contour lines not far away, I noticed for the first time the words L’Homme Mort, the dead man. What was that, I wondered: a hamlet, a memorial at the site of a tragic accident, perhaps?

The whiteness in the air had begun to glow pale amethyst as we progressed, and as the cloud lightened, the sun finally broke through. The Luberon range was an irregular black smudge above the line of cloud. Only a few kilometers away from where we had started, and it might have been another country.

“This isn’t far from the place where the mysterious black boar is supposed to roam the high escarpment,” I said.

“What?”

“M. Durand told me. There’s a great black boar up here somewhere, which foretells disaster for those who are unlucky enough to see it, or so they say. Now and then it materializes to shepherds and walkers.”

Dom said nothing, so I lowered my voice and leaned closer. “It is a dreadful sight to behold . . . for it means soon they will be faced with their . . . doom . . .”

His mouth twitched.

“They say that . . . set into these rocky ledges . . . are the hoofprints of the beast . . .”

We both laughed.

I
t was a modern house, built in the style of a Provençal
mas
. Substantial, attractive, but strangely lacking in atmosphere. The pool was neat and clean, with an impressive electronic cover. The bearded man in a hunting jacket, who gave us a tour, was not the owner but the caretaker of the property. The owners were Belgian.

In the garden, a shaggy maturity ruled. Bushes were studded with vermilion beads, berries beginning to glow against the season’s premature browning.

A winter chill pinched the air as Dom asked about electronic pool covers and infinity effects. I wandered off when it became clear Dom had no need of me as a translator. What he could not say in French, he made up for in sketches. It was interesting to see how other people had ordered their surroundings, even if they weren’t to my taste.

On the way home, clouds were finally rising from our hillside, curling up between the damp trees.

A
few days later, Dom returned with another purchase. It was a shifty-looking monk in highly polished wood, half life-size. Dom installed him just inside the door of what passed as the hall of the main house, which had a medieval atmosphere that probably had as much to do with the pervasive damp as our spiritual sensibilities. I could see why Dom thought the monk was an appropriate addition.

“Another sinister figure,” I only half-joked.

I hadn’t told Dom about the incident on the path. I didn’t want him questioning my rationality. Privately though, I’d been thinking a lot about the objects we’d chosen to surround ourselves with: the chipped plates and bowls; the secondhand mirrors and scratched paintings; the crazed broken statues. The way they spoke of a history that didn’t belong to us, even in their inanimate state, the way they blurred the distinction between the living and the dead.

Absently, I stroked the fine rosewood of the monk’s arm, trying to find something to like about the piece.

“Might be nice to see some living people up here,” I murmured.

Then I glanced up and saw the anguish on Dom’s face.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked. His voice sounded different, as if he was struggling to keep it under control.

“Nothing! It was just a— We don’t just want to surround ourselves with dead old statues, that’s all . . . What’s wrong?”

There was no answer. He had walked away.

I
t was all too plausible to think about ghosts, or spirits at least. It hadn’t occurred to me before that I was uncomfortable. But I must have been, subconsciously. How else was it that I had been spooked by some shifting play of light and shadow on the wall, and made it into a frightening presence in the garden? My overly active imagination, Dom would say.

All those people who had once lived here—naturally, there would remain vestiges of their stories, joys, and sorrows as well as the dull drudgery of daily life. This was a land of plenty, but it had been created by hard toil. Think of the shepherds and the tales they told as they wandered, how many hundreds of miles each year was that to keep the flocks fed and healthy?

The next time he came, I asked Claude the gardener, “What is L’Homme Mort, the place marked on the map over there?” I pointed vaguely north across the edge of our land.

“It’s a hamlet—like here.”

“What’s there? A farm?”

“Yes, I believe so. It’s still a farm.”

It was up to me to volunteer why exactly I wanted to know. He scratched the side of his face and waited.

“It’s just the name. I wondered why it was called that.” I made a face I hoped he understood: simple, light curiosity, but an interest, too, in the history held in these hills.

“I don’t know,” said Claude. “I’m not from around here. I’m from Apt.”

I smiled, then realized he was serious.

“Have you heard?” he went on. “They’ve found the body of one of the missing girls.”

“Which one?”

“Amandine. The one from near Roussillon. A man with his truffle hound, out over by Oppedette, came across her remains in the forest.”

“Dreadful . . .”

“It’s bad news and good news,” mused Claude. “The worst for her family, and the families of the others breathe again. They still have hope.”

“I guess, but still . . . it must be awful.”

“The man who’s doing this . . .”

“I know . . .”

But I didn’t know. Like everyone else, I wanted these events not to be happening, for our fantasy of a new life to last a while longer.

“Everyone’s talking about it. The truffle hound was the brother of one of the dogs bred here by the Millescamps at Les Peirelles.”