The Lantern Read online

  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.

  After a while, I began to relax into it, to accept that the place would never be completely, surgically clean; that was impossible. Live with the dust. Live in the dust; call it a light dusting of magic.

  I was talking about this to Fernand, one of the village elders who came down the track one day and introduced himself. He was friendly and helpful, and had soon organized a small team of gardeners for us, led by a hardworking but lugubrious individual called Claude.

  Fernand nodded sagely. All these tiles were handmade, he said, some were perhaps a hundred years old. “Chaque tuile a son secret . . . cherchez-le!” he said. Each tile has its secret—look for it!

  And that was exactly what it felt like we were doing, looking for delicious secrets. Discoveries: not only about the buildings, but about ourselves. I don’t think I have ever felt closer to anyone. It scared me a bit, the depth of the intimacy, as if on one level it couldn’t be sustained. Maybe that tells you all you need to know about the person I used to be before I met Dom.

  As the great range of hills slumbered in evening shades of rust and indigo, we listened to soupy jazz on the CD player. We’d cook together, drinking rosé and talking in companionable murmurs.

  Sometimes we’d light the sconce on the wall outside the kitchen. It is a sinister creation: a disembodied arm emerges from a wrought-iron picture frame, extending a candle. It was left by a previous occupant; we would almost certainly not have bought such a grotesque artifact; yet we left it hanging there, and often lit it.

  Inside and out, pools of light burned from hurricane lamps, candelabras, chandeliers, tea lights, and the rusty lantern we found in the courtyard and used on the dining table on the terrace.

  During the long, gilded evenings, we touched compulsively as we exchanged our stories, raking over their import gently and unhurriedly as the tide stroking a beach of pebbles.

  “Happy?” asked Dom.

  “Very happy.”

  The glow lit a green-gold lace of our fingerprints on the neck of the wine bottle. His warm, brown hands took mine. His eyes were soft and utterly serious. “This is exactly what I’ve always wanted,” he said. “I’ve never been as happy as I am with you, here. Thank you for coming, thank you . . . for everything.”

  “It’s me who should be telling you that,” I said, leaning over to kiss him. “You’re the one who’s made all this happen. All this . . . it’s just enchanted!”

  He put a hand up to my face. “I adore you, you know that, don’t you?”

  I smiled even wider. “I love you too. More than I can say.”

  “It just feels right, doesn’t it?”

  I nodded, suddenly overcome by the magnitude of our good fortune.

  The isolated flowering of lights in the valley beyond. Nights warm as black velvet. I loved those evenings. I had never felt so completely at ease, so close to another person, so happy, so lucky, so loved and loving.

  Throughout all those evenings, he never said a word.

  Chapter 6

  That summer there was much talk of La Crise, the world’s financial crisis. It was brought up by everyone who came to the house, from the gardeners to the man who sold us the desk at the brocante market in L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, to the builders who came to estimate the cost of the renovations we needed, and naturally needed to judge whether we would be good for the considerable costs involved.

  When the local newspapers weren’t full of financial worries, layoffs at fruit-packing plants and the crystallized-fruit factories, and falling prices for the farmers, they were reporting a series of local girls who had gone missing.

  We heard the talk and saw the headlines, but we managed not to register any of it. We took refuge in our foreign status, bound up in our own little world, where nothing could touch us.

  Dom, dressed in worn T-shirts and filthy jeans, seemed in his element ripping into the overgrown parts of the garden. We both soaked up the sun, moving fallen stones, digging and pulling. I loved the way that sheer physicality meshed with our more aesthetic pursuits; it seemed a perfect balance. One afternoon, we saved Pomona, goddess of fruits and gardens. She was lying in the bottom of the abandoned, mossy swimming pool, legs broken in the green rainwater shallows.

  Dom knew who she was, because he had already been introduced to one of her other likenesses at the salvage yard on the Avignon road. He was becoming a regular there, what with his search for a mantelpiece for the main living room and his grand designs for the garden.

  Together we managed to haul out what remained of the statue (head and torso and one arm), cleaned her battered body (but not too much), and propped her up against a wall, where she slumped, exhausted, a study in survival against the odds.

  “Do you think she might preside over us?” I asked. “When she recovers, obviously.”

  He laughed, still out of breath. “I’d hope so, after all that.”

  “We could find her a nice spot.”

  “A plinth!”

  He found her one, too: a plain cube of sandstone. After a visit from a blacksmith, she was fixed in place and installed below the terrace, framed by another of the faux-Roman stone arches. She sat well there, holding her tray of petrified fruit and flowers, the coy tilt of her head drawing the eye down the grassy slope.

  I liked the way the roughness of surfaces was a part of the setting, the wide, descending terraces held up by broken stone walls. Nothing was overdone—the reverse, in fact; it all looked as if it had been thrown together, weeds and dying plants all part of the whole.

  Inspired by Pomona, Dom was back at the reclamation yard as soon as the bones of the garden were laid out. A Greek boy, pox-ridden with lichen, cast an anguished look back at the house from the parterre; what should perhaps have been a parting glance had it not been petrified into a stare. Fragments of old stone pillars and pediments were placed to amuse: a granite pineapple; a hand that seemed to beckon as it rested on the low wall leading t
o the pool, a leaking basin of green water.

  For about five days that first August, the hills bruised purple under black clouds. The wind whipped up and temperatures plummeted.

  The gardeners were downcast. “We never know what to do with ourselves when it rains in the summer,” said Claude.

  We reminded them that there had been no significant rainfall here for five years, and the water-storing bassins and underground reserves needed replenishment. Everyone had told us that. The architect had been particularly keen to explain how the drought had worsened the fracturing of interior walls.

  The men shrugged. It was true, of course, but that didn’t make the loss of sunshine any easier to bear.

  Dom pointed down the valley. “That’s full of cloud and mist on autumn mornings. It looks like snowfields.”

  He could have left it there and I would have assumed he was just speaking generally.

  “And the garden is full of wildflowers again—the moisture must bring them out,” he went on.

  “How do you know?”

  He barely missed a beat. “Rachel and I came up here.”

  It seemed an odd way to phrase it. As if he was using simplicity to cover a great deal more information.

  “You brought her here, to this house?”

  There was a pause, as if he had given himself away. As if he hadn’t thought before speaking and wished he had. “Sh-she brought me, actually.”

  “Why didn’t you say?”

  “Does it matter?”

  I knew about Rachel by then, of course I did. She was Dom’s wife—his ex-wife, rather. She was one of the reasons we would definitely not be getting married any time soon, no matter how well our relationship worked out, and it was all fine, really. He had no desire to get married again, and I respected that. It was a golden time; what we had was so precious we were happy just to be.

  Looking back though, there had been clues.

  The day we saw Les Genévriers for the first time. I remember asking that day, sensing there was a clear difference emerging between me and his ex-wife: “Did Rachel not like Provence?”

  And he laughed. “What makes you say that?”

  “It just seemed—”

  “She loved Provence,” he said. “Never wanted to leave.”

  “Where does she live now?” I asked, aware suddenly that I knew very little about her present circumstances and had never thought to wonder.

  But the real estate agent was approaching again, urging us toward another door he had managed to open with the great ball of rusty keys, and the question was lost through another sequence of stone-flagged rooms and their echoes.

  And now that we were immersed in each other, in the landscape and the house, Rachel was the one subject we never discussed.

  Chapter 7

  Bénédicte has never believed in ghosts.

  Yet the house is full of spirits. Wherever she looks, in every corner is the outline, in her mind’s eye, of a person who once occupied it, of an object that once stood there, right back to Grandfather Gaston, leaving his hunter’s pouch at the door and threading small birds on skewers to cook over the fire, and Mémé Clémentine in her dusty black skirts, busy chopping vegetables or kneading dough at the kitchen table. Maman and Papa, Marthe and Pierre; the Poidevins, the Barberoux, and the Marchesi, the tenant families. Old Marcel, who lived out back by the sheepfold, who worked here man and boy, jack-of-all-trades. Bénédicte’s great friend Arielle Poidevin, who was the same age.

  Only Bénédicte remains.

  She takes a deep breath, and then speaks clearly and slowly.

  The haunting began . . . one afternoon in late summer.

  It was one of those days so intensely alive and aromatic, you could hear as well as smell the fig tree in the courtyard. Wasps hummed in the leaves as the fruit ripened and split; globes of warm, dark purple were dropping, ripping open as they landed with sodden gasps.

  I remember it all so vividly. The pulse that pumped out the sweet, heady scent was quickening as I bent down to pick the fallen figs, then pulled them apart to find insects already drunk on their scarlet hearts.

  For nearly three weeks, the heat had not abated, dense heat that sends you to sleep between the hours of three and five in the afternoon. But it was coming to an end. I could feel it in the air, the sky was subtly changed, closer down to earth, the light was flattening. Soon it would become heavy and begin to press down. Then the first drops of rain would come, splashing the wounded fruit; then the first flash of lightning.

  For now, though, the full trees swayed in the remaining sun, taking the wind. The light in the courtyard dipped and dappled across the ground, painting underwater scenes on the patchy grass and earth.

  I remember going inside, my senses heightened.

  Breaths of basil and mint and rosemary rose from the pots outside the kitchen door. The wandering cat that came by from time to time brushed by my legs, releasing hot, dry earth and animal rankness in musky gusts. The scents made me think of Marthe, of course.

  The shutters in the kitchen were closed, but I do recall that the room seemed strangely light. The upholstery on my mother’s old chair by the black iron stove was starkly defined so that the green-and-red pattern seemed to spring renewed from the shiny gray sheen of long use. I sat down in it and half-closed my eyes.

  For a few moments, all was drowsy calm. Then a shadow fell, calling me back to consciousness.

  A small figure had stolen in. It was my brother, Pierre. He was standing, waiting expectantly in front of the hearth, silent, as if his intention was perfectly clear. That was so typical that I simply took no notice. You had to play it like that with him, or you would give away more than you had intended, and he would get the better of you, as usual.

  I raised myself reluctantly and went to the larder, taking out the basket of vegetables I had cut to cook that evening. It was never a good idea to give Pierre the impression you had time on your hands.

  “You can help if you like,” I said sleepily. “About time you did something to help me, for a change.”

  He didn’t reply but followed me over to the worktable and stood by, leaning insolently against the wall, still in silence, eyes large and dark in a muddy face under matted hair, bony bare knees badged with their usual bruises and gashes from boys’ adventures in the woods.

  I put tomatoes on the chopping board, unable to shake off the afternoon torpor. The whir of cicadas outside intensified. A few minutes must have passed before a jolt returned me to reality.

  There was no Pierre. How could there have been?

  I blinked hard and turned around. The wall was blank. The kitchen was darkened by the shutters. In front of me, the tomatoes on the board were rough, red shapes in a mess of seeds. Slowly, shakily, I put down the knife. I was alone, as usual. A rumble of thunder raked the air overhead.

  That was the day it began.

  It upset me greatly. What was I to make of a vision of Pierre, more than fifty years after he had been that muddy ten-year-old boy? Pierre, after all these years.

  There were three siblings in our generation of the family: a family that had lived at Les Genévriers for so many generations that no one knew how many. Marthe was the first, born in 1920; Pierre followed three years later; and I was the youngest, arriving on the last day of 1925.

  For hours after Pierre’s visitation, my heart beat too vigorously. I felt light-headed yet my limbs were like lead as I moved slowly through the rooms on my usual round, from the kitchen to the little sitting room where I now have my bed, through the hall to the bathroom. I was aware that I was holding my head rigidly, staring straight ahead, not wanting—not daring—to look into the periphery of my sight, into the corners of the rooms. When the light flickered, as it always did when the wind shook the leaf shade in the courtyard against the clear, bright sky, I jumped and had to clasp my chest and stop, the breath caught in my throat.

  He was there, or so I imagined, in every sudden shadow and burst of sunlight th
rough the glass above the big door into the courtyard. At any moment, the ever-shifting patterns of brightness and dark I had always known and loved, which gave this place such life, might bring him back into view, as he once was: Pierre in his child form, the boy with the wild, demonic streak. The capacity he had for coming out ahead no matter how unpropitious the circumstances. The glee with which he would torture stag beetles with lighted sticks, or hook ever-larger objects on to their pincerlike antlers to see how much they could pull. His pinches that left dark stains on my arm. What if . . .

  No, I could not think it. I am the sensible one. I don’t think that way. My imagination is poor, with none of the inventive associations of his, or Marthe’s. I take after my grandmother, Mémé Clémentine: hardworking, frugal, and practical, with no time for silliness.

  Chapter 8

  By August we were sleeping with all the windows thrown open. That was why, when I became aware of the scent, I assumed it had come from outside.

  It was a voluptuous scent: vanilla with rose and the heart of ripe melons, held up by something sterner, a leather maybe, with a hint of wood smoke. The first time it stole into my consciousness, I was half-wakeful in the early hours, in the act of coming around from one dream before settling into another.

  I allowed it to envelop me, this pleasant, slightly heady aroma. It was a lovely sensation, as if my reverie was so sensuous that it had a tangible perfume. Warm and content in the bed with Dom sleeping beside me, I was wrapped in this delicious concoction.

  Then, as minutes passed, I became fully awake. These were real thoughts, and I was breathing real scent, and my mind was trying to make sense of it. Was it rising from the garden outside our open window? Had shower gel spilled in the bathroom? A bottle broken in a handbag? There was nothing I could recall that might explain it, yet the scent was all around us.