The Sea Garden Read online

  She met no one. The prosaic accoutrements of the garden—the lengths of hosepipe, ladders, wheelbarrow, rakes, and rolls of twine—were left scattered along the way like clues to a treasure hunt.

  The terrace was empty too. She crossed into the semidarkness of the sitting room. A flicker of movement drew her eye to a row of display cabinets to her left as she passed. Rows of exotic butterflies and moths were pinned fast to the velvet backdrops, their exuberant wings as regimented and inert in death as they would have been chaotic and fluttering in life. Ellie paused by their fragile corpses and felt a surge of irrational fear.

  She rationalized it as the aftereffects of what had happened on the crossing. In recent months her grief for Dan had lost some of its rawness; now it had broken wide again. If she were to be honest, she had felt on edge since she arrived on the island.

  A fire was burning in the grate under a stone mantel. Who would want a fire in early summer? But she saw now that it was the reflections of this fire that had made the flickering movement on the glass-fronted cabinets. She stood still for a few moments, disconcerted by her own overreaction, wondering where to look for Laurent, whether to go into the hall and call out.

  After the searing sun of the morning followed by the enclosed dark shade of the garden in the afternoon, the light in this immense room pooled around set pieces of furniture. In front of the fireplace stood an armchair, a side table, and an antique sofa. Beyond was a baby grand piano illuminated by a standard lamp. A painting was lit by an overhead light bar that spilled polished gold across a console table.

  A tap-tap-tapping echoed on stone.

  Ellie started.

  “Qui est là?”

  A very old woman was standing in the doorway, propped on a cane. Her breath came in waves of exertion, a sound like the sea breaking on the shore and receding.

  “It’s . . . I’m . . . Ellie Brooke—the garden designer.”

  The woman tapped her way to the armchair by the fire. She was thin to the point of emaciation; the legs that took her across the room and lowered her tentatively into her seat were sticklike as a crane’s. She waved away Ellie’s offer of help.

  Settled at last, she propped the walking cane against the side table. It had a striking horn handle, curving to a point.

  “I thought you were long gone,” said the woman in English. Only the mouth moved; the rest of her frail body was a statue.

  “I didn’t realise it was so late.”

  “You gave me a fright. Come closer.”

  Ellie approached.

  “Be so kind as to put that light on.”

  There was a lamp on the table. Ellie reached under the shade and found the switch. The illumination burst between them. Ellie found herself staring intently at the deeply lined face in front of her. The eyebrows were pencilled arcs, very nearly hairless.

  “Come back into the light where I can see you.”

  She narrowed her eyes as Ellie did as she asked. Ellie felt the examination, every inch of it. The breath, too close, was dry and powdery with a sweet violet note that did not quite mask the rotten whisper of dental decay. Ellie resisted the impulse to pull back.

  Mme de Fayols—for there was no doubt that was who she was—gave her a hard look, seemed to start to say something, and then decided against it. A clock ticked loudly, and the fire cracked and popped.

  “How will you get back to the mainland?”

  “I don’t need to, actually—I’m staying at a hotel.”

  “Back to the village, then.”

  Ellie hadn’t thought.

  Mme de Fayols extended an eagle’s claw from her sleeve and rang a tiny bell.

  The housekeeper came at a brisk trot. They conferred rapidly.

  “Jeanne’s husband will take you back.”

  “Is M. de Fayols here? I should thank him.”

  “No, he is gone,” said Jeanne.

  “Oh. Well, good night, then,” Ellie offered.

  The response was a dismissive raise of the hand. There was no sign of Laurent on the way out. At the front door, Ellie wondered whether the horse and cart would be brought round again. But the driver who had collected her that morning roared up on a quad bike, pulling a small trailer in which two people could sit.

  She climbed in, greeting him, but although he acknowledged her thanks, he remained as taciturn as ever.

  The noise of the engine cut crudely through the tranquil evening. They passed pale sandy tracks, some that disappeared intriguingly into pine forest, others that reached down to the sea. Gradually the grey-blue outline of the mainland melted into the twilight.

  The police officer from the ferry was sitting at one of the outside tables at the hotel. He was drinking a glass of wine and reading the newspaper. Ellie nodded to him in recognition, but it was only when he stood up and indicated the seat beside him that she realised he had been waiting for her.

  “I have to ask you some more questions about the mortal incident,” said Lieutenant Meunier, without any preamble beyond a cursory inquiry after her day. “The prosecutor at the Port of Toulon has requested more information.”

  She was tired, in need of a shower, and beginning to feel hungry. “All right.”

  Meunier was as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as before. “You may have seen in the evening newspaper that the dead man has been named. Florian Creys, nineteen years old. A student from Strasbourg.”

  “I haven’t seen the newspaper.”

  “The journalist spoke to some of the passengers who were on the ferry. One of them now says that the dead man may have been pushed.”

  “I don’t think that can be right. He was standing alone.”

  “The witness says that he was standing with a man wearing a straw hat.”

  “That is not what I saw. But I was not looking at the . . . young man all the time.”

  The lieutenant squared his broad sportsman’s shoulders. “So it could be possible that he was pushed.”

  “That’s not what I said. I am sure that I saw him climb over the rail and go over the side. He was alone then, but I suppose he might have been standing next to someone before that.”

  “You were looking at him at the exact moment he went over?”

  Ellie fiddled with the pendant around her neck, then stopped as soon as she realised what she was doing. “He was in my field of vision. I wasn’t staring at him, but he was part of the picture in front of me.”

  “You are certain of this?”

  “Well, as certain as I can be.”

  Under close questioning, however, the picture in her mind did not seem as robust as it had been. She judged it unwise to say so. Best to go with her instincts that her memory was true.

  “Did you see a man on the deck wearing a straw hat?”

  “Yes . . . there was a man in a panama hat.”

  “Did you see him standing close to the deceased man?”

  “No.”

  “At no time?”

  “No.”

  “Did you speak to the man wearing the hat?”

  “Actually . . . yes. I did.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I can’t remember. No, wait . . . I think I asked him whether he had seen what just happened. He said he had—he had seen.”

  “And then?”

  “He told me not to look.”

  “What did he mean when he said that?”

  “I thought he meant that something terrible was now visible in the water. Something that I wouldn’t want to see.”

  Meunier wrote it down. “Do you know who this man is?”

  “I only saw him on the boat.”

  “Describe him.”

  Ellie gazed past the policeman, feeling oddly detached from the tables and chairs under the red awning and the sparse sandy square that she recognized now as an old military parade ground. The Place d’Armes—of course.

  “He was quite tall—about six inches . . . sorry, er . . . fifteen centimetres taller than I am. Dark hair, dark eyes,
olive skin. Good-looking. Late thirties, early forties, that kind of age.”

  “Nationality?”

  “French, I assumed. Didn’t you interview him?”

  He ignored her question. “Did you notice anything else about this man?”

  She shook her head. “He wore a loose white shirt, stylish in a very casual way. That’s all. I wasn’t really concentrating on him at the time.”

  Meunier pushed his card across the table. “If you see him again, please call me as soon as you can.”

  She had intended to eat a quick supper and spend the rest of the evening working on her preliminary sketches. But once up in her room, she lay on the bed, exhausted. How could someone say that Florian Creys was pushed when she was certain he had been standing alone? Why hadn’t the police interviewed the man in the panama hat while they were all still on the ferry? She tried to remember if she had seen him after he told her not to look at the water. Remembering the shouts from below made her shudder. She was looking away, as he had urged her, concentrating fiercely on the sailboats in the distance, not quite able to subdue the horrors her imagination was producing. She did not speak to him again. Whether he was still on deck after the ferry restarted, she could not recall. In that case, he probably was not.

  And if someone was saying that Florian Creys was pushed—he had definitely not been pushed, unless her memory was completely false—had that person also told the police that the man in the hat was responsible?

  She shut her eyes, trying to still her mind. But the gardens provided the next wave of questions. Could she work with Laurent de Fayols? Was he as affable as he seemed; were his expectations realistic? Why hadn’t he employed a French designer? If she accepted the job, would she be able to give effective instructions to the landscape contractors; would they be able to source the right plants? Then there was the encounter with Mme de Fayols. What was it about the old woman and that firelit room that had made her so uneasy?

  Ellie pictured the dark yew garden room and felt its green walls closing in. She trusted her instincts, and was unsettled by the implications.

  Inevitably her thoughts turned back to Dan, thoughts she failed to avoid. What were you supposed to do when someone you had been closer to than anyone in the world was no longer part of your life? When his absence was ever-present in empty seats and the cold wide space in the bed, in the phone calls that went unmade, the observations unsaid, and the landscapes unshared? Two years since he passed away, and his loss seemed harder than ever to deal with.

  He had come into her life with the force of an accident, and left it with equal abruptness. Four years together. Not nearly long enough.

  She hadn’t been looking for anyone like Dan, wouldn’t have known where to start looking, but when he stopped his car—stopped dead—in front of hers and ran off into the crowds on the pavement, she had no choice but to stop too, preferably before the bonnet of her VW went any farther into the boot of his Audi. She was late as it was for a meeting with a man called Ivell, an expert in rare British plants; Dan was only just in time to save the life of a man who was having a heart attack in the middle of Chichester High Street.

  Ellie watched as Dan ripped open the man’s coat and began to pump his chest, while a knot of helpless passersby formed. “Call an ambulance,” he shouted. Her mobile was already in her hand.

  He was an army medic, a surgeon, he told her as they swapped insurance details.

  “Hardwired for decisive action,” she said, trying not to flirt and failing. At least the patient was coming round as the paramedics arrived.

  Dan grinned. “We’re a bit reckless with the machinery when we have to be. Sorry.”

  Hers were not the only admiring glances, Ellie noticed. He was tall and blond, with a loosely confident stance.

  “Can I buy you a coffee to apologise?” he asked.

  “That would be great—oh, but I can’t, I’m late as it is. It’s work, and—”

  “It’s important, I understand.”

  He was wearing a soft flannel shirt, the shade of a cornflower, which she would come to know as his favourite. Darker blue eyes crinkled in amusement.

  “You’ve got my number,” she said.

  Two months later, they moved into the cottage near Arundel together.

  She twisted the ring on her finger. Rubies and seed pearls, bought in the Lanes in Brighton for her thirtieth birthday. She wore it always, along with the pearl pendant.

  Even now she could hardly bear to hear the news from Afghanistan, the terrible roll call of the dead that would not stop. The dread had been ever-present that she would hear his name one day. When the Afghan shell hit the yard outside the hospital at Camp Bastion, he was coming off duty, having saved three lives on the operating table. Captain Dan Wensley, with his contagious good humour, the hair that always stuck up in odd places and the startling blue eyes, the mouth that always seemed on the point of a smile and could kiss her like no other, the broad shoulders and the manner that asserted without words that he was in charge and you would be safe with him. His life was taken in an instant. A freak incident. They happened, and they blasted the heart of families, relationships, normal life. There were still times when she felt only half alive, either too sensitive or too numbed to feel normal.

  She woke at two in the morning, unable to understand where she was or why she was lying down in her work clothes. Something was wrong, but she didn’t know what it was—then consciousness formed, followed by the same old heart-shiver and the leaden dread.

  Dan. The boy on the boat. The garden. She was shaking slightly, just a tremor. At six o’clock she gave up on the idea of more sleep and went for a run. It was only when she was passing the empty reception cubbyhole that it occurred to her the main door would be locked and she might not be able to get out without calling someone. But it opened easily when she tried the handle.

  The air was pleasantly fresh as she broke into a jog, map in hand. On the Pointe de Lequin, twenty minutes east along the coastal path, she stopped, allowed her heart rate to fall as she surveyed the strait. The hills of the mainland were sharply defined in the way the world can look after disrupted sleep. Somewhere close by was the eighteenth-century Batterie de Lequin and, farther round the headland, the Fort de l’Alycastre, built under Richelieu—two of the ten forts left that formed a defensive front along the rocky north coast against the island’s many invaders over the centuries.

  She resumed her run, pushing herself harder.

  3

  The Lighthouse

  Tuesday, June 4

  Ellie ate breakfast outside the hotel under the red awning, concentrating on the pleasures of perfect flaky croissants and greengage jam with strong, rich coffee.

  After the run, she felt more positive about both herself and the garden commission. Five days was a reasonable time to assess the plot and the landscape and the scale of the job at the Domaine de Fayols, and to present a professional folder of preliminary sketches; whether it was long enough to get the measure of Laurent de Fayols, she wasn’t so sure.

  The air was already hot and close. She stuffed a swimsuit into her bag along with her notebook and papers and marched down towards the harbour and the cycle hire shop. The machine they offered her had five simple gears and a comfortably well-used saddle. She nodded, pleased to have a measure of independence from the unpredictable modes of transport offered by the de Fayols estate.

  A wide path led out of the village, past signs to beaches she had still not visited. She took the long way round, wanting to see more of the west side of the island and to work out exactly how the Domaine de Fayols sat in the landscape. The bicycle tyres crunched on small sandy stones as she followed the trail between green oak and pines: the Aleppo and the parasol pine. She spotted an arquebusier, a strawberry tree, and pulled off the path to have a closer look.

  On the southwestern side of the island the path opened out into a small bay, reinforced by jagged rocks. All seemed at peace. It was too early in the year for
tourist hordes; here was freedom from the modern world, for a while at least. There was a timelessness about being on an island so small that it seemed closed in on itself; the sense of being adrift, not quite connected to the rest of the world.

  She pedalled along the coast path to the Calanque de l’Indienne. It was a small bay rather than a cliff inlet. On the west side was the lighthouse; on the other, the house at the Domaine de Fayols rose above the trees and green terraces of its garden. Ellie dismounted. Small brown crickets scattered as she walked the bike across tough grass.

  On the sea below a boat was tied up by the end of a steep path; the turquoise water was so clear that the hull was fully visible over the pale ghosts of submerged rock.

  From here, trees screened the high dark hedges that surrounded the memorial garden and the other outdoor rooms. Those gardens still puzzled her: the sense that they were the wrong structures in the wrong place persisted. Why would anyone have wanted to enclose gardens in this place of wide horizons in the first place? It didn’t make sense, but perhaps she was overthinking. Perhaps there was no reason, or it was deliberately counterintuitive. Perhaps not until the reconstruction began would the answers become obvious. She had only the faded photographs to work from, and they were like looking into tarnished mirrors.

  Some of the sculptural elements clearly held some past meaning, plotting the line back to the past and the doctor’s passion for ancient history. But surely that could have been achieved more naturally in more open spaces, like the classical temples built on hillsides surrounded by light and air? If it had been left to her to create from scratch, she might well have chosen the same site above the sea, but the design would have embraced the elements, and announced itself proudly. As it was, the memorial garden was hidden away like a secret to be protected.

  She made a few notes, a quick sketch of an arch that might frame rather than block the sea view, while alluding to the heavy original. When she looked up again, a man was watching her from the de Fayols side of the bay.