The Lantern Read online

  Dom slept on, handsome and half-smiling, oblivious.

  It was a romantic fragrance, I’d say. Fruit and flowers and smoke, soft and warm, alluring. It was starting to cloy.

  Gradually it faded, and I must have gone back to sleep. In the morning, I examined every possible source but nothing came close to replicating that fragrance.

  I decided it must all have been a highly charged dream.

  After an absence of about a week, it returned, and continued to do so, though with no discernible pattern to its reappearance, and with slight variations on the ingredients of the scent. At times it carried essence of vanilla, sometimes a robust note of chocolate and cherries. It might linger only for a few minutes, but strongly, or less distinctly for up to an hour. Some nights it was carried off by a whisper of wind in the courtyard trees, an ethereal, smoky lavender.

  The first time it happened, thoughts of Rachel came stealing into my head. There was no logic to it, except that perhaps I had been associating the scent with another woman and to think of her was the obvious progression.

  But after that, despite my best efforts to change the pattern, each time this strange, thought-provoking aroma stirred from its mysterious source, I found that the unknown Rachel was there, too. I didn’t want her there, but she was locked somehow into the experience. A voice in my head kept up an insistent refrain, as if trying to remind me that I knew, that I had always known: Rachel was there with us, unacknowledged but still exerting her influence.

  I did ask Dom about her, of course I did. At the beginning, it had seemed only natural to want to know about his life before he met me, and what had happened to end his marriage. He was reluctant to discuss it, and, as all the advice to those contemplating new relationships is not to make too much of the failures of the old, I assumed he was following that tack. As we grew closer, I tried again but the result was always the same. And I knew him well enough by then to understand that the self-contained man I had first seen in the maze had a chilling capacity for detachment if I pushed him too far. It was this intensity that had first drawn me in, of course. But in the months we had been together, I’d come to recognize that what seemed like an electric charge between us when his mood was sunny could switch without warning, leaving me adrift in a cold, black void.

  “It ended badly,” he said, the first night we spent together. “If it’s all right with you I’d rather we didn’t talk about it.” Whenever I tried in a casual way to find out more, he would reach out and draw me to him, putting a stop to my questions with soft kisses.

  But that morning, after the night when Rachel had first stolen into my consciousness, the enigmatic perfume still vivid in my memory, I asked him again.

  “What did happen between you and Rachel?”

  He moved to get out of bed, offering his smooth, sculpted back to me. I could see the muscles of his shoulders tense.

  A few seconds passed.

  “I can’t talk about it. I know you want me to, but I can’t. It’s . . . very painful. I’m still . . . in fact, the one thing I’m going to ask you, very seriously, is that you respect that and don’t keep asking about it. It has nothing to do with us, here and now, and if it’s all right with you, that’s . . . the way I’d like to keep it.”

  He finally turned to look me in the eye. “Promise me that?”

  His face was strained. He seemed eaten up with sudden unhappiness and the vulnerability I sensed below his surface. A wave of guilt washed over me, and I nodded. Then I flung my arms around his rigid shoulders and held him to me, rocking gently.

  M. Durand, farmer and head of one of the largest families in the village, appeared at our door with a yellow melon. The last of the summer, he said. His leathery face creased like an accordion when he smiled.

  “Come to us for lunch on Sunday,” he said. “Now the hunting season has begun, there is every excuse to sample the excellent casserole and pâté my wife makes.”

  We accepted with a great deal of pleasure and anticipation on both sides. This was the country life we had hoped to find, the adventure of new people and customs we were part of together.

  Dom took advice at the local cave and chose some wines carefully. The Durand house was a twenty-minute walk down the track from Les Genévriers. Neither of us suggested driving the long way around on the roads.

  That morning, the silence of the hillside had been splintered by bursts of gunshots. On our own land, clearly visible thanks to the rapidly thinning trees, we spotted an illegal hunting blind, spent cartridges scattered around the damp wood. Wood smoke was rising from the decomposition of the summer’s delights. We tramped down through a grayness unthinkable back in July. Clouds hung like wisps of bonfire between the hills and the ground exuded damp, fresh, rotting smells.

  And clumps of wildflowers, I noticed. Just as Dom predicted: comfrey and meadow clary, autumn squill, watercolor-blue chicory in scrubby clumps, and scabious.

  The track of loose stones, earth, and fallen leaves wound down the hill past the ruined chapel and joined a wider farming path that had been paved with concrete. An unforeseen climb later, we arrived glowing and slightly out of breath at the traditional mas occupied by the Durand family for the past century, a longer, lower building than ours, redolent of the kind of sharp animal odors that had long since faded from Les Genévriers.

  Inside, it was darker and warmer, too, thanks to plentiful wood paneling, a log fire, and a generous gathering of guests. Mme. Durand bustled out of the kitchen, a short, well-padded woman in a chef’s apron.

  “Welcome, welcome! Eat! What will you take as an apéro?”

  Her plump face bobbed over a plate of diced salami and olives that she offered up to us immediately.

  According to Dom, who first met M. Durand at the end of our track and cemented their acquaintance at the village bar the next night, Mme. Durand had been a teenage heroine of the Resistance during the Second World War, bicycling messages between the underground cells in the surrounding hills. That put her well into her eighties, but she might have passed at first glance for a good twenty years younger.

  Pinned down by sturdy oak furniture and our curious neighbors—almost every guest was a village inhabitant, it seemed—we sipped pastis cautiously if respectfully, and drank in their stories.

  “There’s an underground river, flowing right under the property,” they told us, though the real estate agent hadn’t.

  “You should read the village newsletter,” said a man who introduced himself as Patou, a big man with wild, dark hair and a beard. “There’s an article about the great freeze of fifty years ago. The children from the outlying hamlets—including those from the five families at Les Genévriers—were unable to attend school for almost a month. A month! It’s only a ten-minute climb up the hill. Only fifty years ago.”

  “Five families . . .” I said.

  “At Les Genévriers? Sometimes more. It depended.”

  “On what?”

  “Times of plenty. Times of need. War. Charity.”

  “There’s treasure buried at Les Genévriers,” added another bulky man who came to join us.

  “And this is the man with the machinery to dig for it, too,” said Patou.

  The man mumbled his name but gave his profession clearly as terrassier, the village excavator and landscaper.

  Dom smiled indulgently. “Seems odd that no one has found this treasure yet, after all these years and so many people living there.”

  “That’s the legend.” They drained their glasses in a fluid movement that elided drinking and shrugging.

  “And watch out for the spirits!” said Patou.

  There was laughter at that, as if everyone knew the stories and assumed that we had heard them, too.

  “What spirits?” I asked brightly, but the moment had passed.

  Around a great oak table, afternoon became evening as course after course appeared: pungent braised meats and herbs, exquisite vegetables with oil and garlic, and full-strength cheeses. Bottles of
red wine appeared and were quickly emptied. Talk grew louder, of memorable games of boules, curling roots, many vintages, the drought, sun flares, the local soup-making competition, and hunting.

  At one point, M. Durand filled my glass yet again, and leaned in conspiratorially. “Do you want to hear a Provençal story?”

  I nodded eagerly, mouth full.

  “In the next village there is a high escarpment. They say there is a great black boar there that portends disaster for those who are unlucky enough to see it. It appears to lone walkers, or farmers rounding up errant sheep. It is a terrible sight, for they know that soon they will be presented with a situation that can only end badly.”

  He paused, maintaining eye contact. Was there a twinkle there or was it the lamp that was now blazing?

  “Does it really exist? people ask themselves. Those who believe say that there is proof. The escarpment is formed of a special kind of rock. It is hard as steel, but, inexplicably, up there set into these stones are the footprints of the beast.”

  Like the tiles on the ground floor of Les Genévriers.

  “Could the footprints be the remains of fossils, perhaps?” I suggested.

  “It’s why we need to hunt,” said M. Durand emphatically.

  “So you think the story must be true?”

  “We need to hunt,” he repeated slowly.

  I became aware that other conversations had stopped and that he had a wider audience as he added, turning to Dom now, “We have always hunted on this hillside, it’s traditional. We will continue to hunt, no matter who nominally owns the land.”

  There was a pause, before Dom asked, “What do you go after?”

  “Pheasant, partridge, rabbits and hares, a boar if we find one.”

  I missed the point, at the time. I asked Durand if there was a good collection of these stories I could buy, but he did not know. He supposed they must be written down somewhere, but he had only ever heard them spoken from memory.

  “Shepherds’ tales,” he said dismissively.

  We were about to leave, rummaging for our jackets in the hall, when the woman came up to us. She had been sitting farther down the table, and we’d not spoken.

  “It is you, isn’t it?”

  She was in her mid-thirties perhaps. Her wide mouth was glossy with newly applied plum lipstick, which was a striking combination with her well-cut auburn hair. The kind of Frenchwoman who maintains a slim figure and immaculate grooming at all times as a demonstration of national pride. She was smiling and nodding, looking Dom directly in the eye.

  Very charmingly and in much-improved French, he explained that she must be mistaken. He seemed genuinely puzzled, amused even. There was no reason for me to think he was holding anything back.

  “But—a couple of years ago, no?”

  He smiled but shook his head.

  “The villa down the hill—the Mauger place . . .”

  Sadly, he assured her, she was mistaken.

  Outside, clouds were thickening, now rising, and creeping up between the trees like spirits. The sun hung low and pink-tinged above fields of muddy sheep, streaking the dead sky lupine, mauve, and apricot.

  Dom strode ahead. As I hurried to keep up, I realized he was furious.

  “We’ve been given fair warning,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The hunters.”

  He explained angrily, as we walked, that we had been drawn in and firmly informed that we should not attempt to interfere in local life. Any complaints if the hunters appeared on our land would be futile.

  Dom was still sleeping upstairs the next morning when I crept down for coffee and some pills for my headache. Wine-induced, most likely. My thoughts were racing, as they always do the morning after too much alcohol. Scenes from the previous day ran on a self-lacerating loop through my mind. Had I made a fool of myself? Were M. Durand’s words really a threat? Had Dom understood correctly?

  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?

  While 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 bas
e of the hills, waiting for the apparition to reappear along the path and reveal itself.

  It did not reappear.

  Everyone 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

  After 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.