The Lantern (35 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
A
s for my own unsettling experiences here, there are some I can explain, and some I cannot.
I am fairly sure that it was Sabine who set the lantern on the path. She has never admitted it, but a few months ago, Dom and I were invited to her family house. It was a sultry night and we all sat outside under a vine canopy. On a stone wall was the lantern. I hadn’t seen it since before we left for Cassis. It was in such a prominent position, and the curlicue of a handle was so pretty and distinctive that I am certain it was the same one. I chose to interpret it as a message, an unspoken apology and reassurance that it would not appear at Les Genévriers again.
Or was that all my imagination, a creation of my craving for security? Who knows?
What Sabine did admit was that she had been shocked and disappointed when the house was sold and the proceeds donated, according to Bénédicte’s wishes, to further ophthalmological research at the university. For a decade previously, apparently, the property was the subject of a will that would have bequeathed it to Arielle and her family, in recognition of all the support they had given. Sabine had planned to renovate the farm and run it as a modern version of the holiday rental business that Bénédicte and Marthe had started. When she found out that it would not be coming to her, as she had always believed, she worked hard to raise the money to buy it anyway. But that took years, and she was ultimately outbid by Dom.
So was it spite? Did she think that we might not stay if we felt uncomfortable, that we might sell up quickly? I may ask her one day, but not yet.
As for the rest of the odd manifestations, I have no easy explanation. I know what I saw on the moonlit path below the terrace; there was no mistaking the outline of a small female figure, and she was not Sabine. If I go out there on a warm night, even now my instincts are to look steadily up into the constellations. Then, half-afraid of what I might see on the path, I quickly glance below. I have not seen her again.
Inside the house, especially in the kitchen, I still sense that we are not alone. When I stand cooking at the island, with my back to the hearth, I often turn to check behind me. A feeling, no more, no less. It makes the atmosphere no less radiant; in fact, it may even be its origin.
There has been only one unnerving incident in the kitchen. I had left some books on the table. One of these was the old children’s book I found hidden in the hayloft, the Provençal tales. I was standing by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, when I heard a crackle behind me. I turned to see the book open like a fan and its pages flip over. Now, the back door was ajar, so it was just possible that a stray wind could send a few breaths across an open book and riffle the pages. But the book had not been open. I know with absolute certainty it had been closed, because a minute before I got up to make tea, I had it in my hands. I ran my palm over the pretty design of the cover and felt the pleasure any child would have had to possess such a volume. Then I placed it carefully back on the table.
I watched as the pages turned, not too fast, not too regularly, as if a fastidious and learned current of air were flipping through them. Then it stopped. The pages stood up in an arc but with no more animation. All was still. The merest hint of smoky church incense hung in the air like a blessing.
An incident as meaningful as the imagination wants to make it. Perhaps it was a matter of physics. Perhaps it was a sudden draft from the chimney. Perhaps I fell asleep and dreamed for a minute. Or perhaps it really was the spirit of Bénédicte leaping up from her place by the hearth to seize the book I now know she lost all those years ago. Just because Bénédicte’s ghost visitors were not what she feared, does not mean that all can be explained away
T
hroughout the autumn, the police have worked doggedly on the cases of the girl students. At one time, I even wondered if Pierre Lincel might have had a hand in them, but it seems that he, too, died, a decade or so out of reach of Severan’s men. They found him in an urn at the crematorium at Orange that no one had come forward to collect. It seems his messenger lied to Bénédicte about his death in a fruit-packing plant when he handed over her brother’s supposed last effects. Just one more lie that now surprised no one.
The first girl, Marine, was found alive, well, and protesting in Cassis, shortly after we left. She had, indeed, worked as Francis Tully’s model, then joined a squat full of other young people who moved south and neglected to leave explanations.
In November, a jealous ex-boyfriend, a computer technician from Le Thor, was charged with the murder of the girl found close to Oppedette by the truffle hound. The third girl, the one who disappeared near Castellet, was the victim of a hit-and-run driver, who eventually came forward after suffering months of remorse and posttraumatic stress. The fourth had dyed her hair and joined a religious sect.
All of which goes to show how dangerous it is to assume connections where there are none, to link events that have no link, to want tidy storytelling when real life is not like that, to draw too much on the imagination when it is so often misleading.
S
o we stay, Dom and I, as another winter approaches. The hornets are gone, the spicy black figs long finished. Walnuts drop from the trees like fat, brown tears.
We have to sweep up the vine leaves out from the terrace, but the grapes are dark purple and seemingly everlasting. They hang in straggly triangles, oozing floral muscat essence over the table where we can still eat lunch if the sun shines. It can shine any day of the year here, and often does.
Dom calls me, and he uses my real name. I walk over to where he has found some new beauty in the garden and we stand together, his hand proud on the swell of my belly.
A late bud has opened on the white rose I planted by the arch on the grassy terrace below the main house. Its perfume is exquisite: musky honey and spun-sugar and orange blossom, and its petals in bloom have the soft luster of baby skin. It has taken well to this spot, where I’ve pinned a bough to the lintel of what seems to be a blocked-up store. I think it must be the vault where Bénédicte buried her baby. I hope so. This is for her.
The atmosphere around the house has lifted, and our spirits with it; we live easily again with the past and the histories here, as we add our own to the stones. Our love story is a good one, deeper and stronger by the day.
Even as winter comes, mornings are crisp, and the big, blue sky seems to hang newly washed over the sea of hills.
A
sudden ripple of descending piano notes makes me start.
It comes from the other side of the courtyard.
There it is again! Tinkling like the cascade of a waterfall.
For such a long time, there was no music here. Now there are always soft bursts of piano music. It comes from the visitors, but I don’t mind. I have gotten used to them. Hearing this music is delicious. It releases me, makes me feel like a girl again.
She looks very like me, the woman. She is younger than the man—about the age I was when I was in love with André. I think, after all, I am pleased they have stayed. They are kind to each other, and they care for the house, bringing it back to life, mending it stone by stone, tile by tile.
And once more, the house has a child. Such a sweet little cherub, who watches me with endless wonder.
I
say that the young woman looks very like me, but I mean what I looked like then, not now. I have no idea what I look like now. Pierre took Maman’s mirror. I would feel for the wrinkles and deeper crevices on my face, but I can feel very little. Perhaps my fingertips have lost their sensitivity. The pads are hardened. I can pick up hot pans from the range and never feel pain.
Some tasks I can still manage, but many elude me. I have to relax and breathe and draw on all my inner resources. The other night, I managed to strike a flame quite easily, though.
I had been thinking of André, of how, when I was alone and scanning the seascape of the mountains, I told myself: “This is my ship now, and I am sailing on.” But then, the waves banked higher and the winds convulsed the sky, and I was clinging on alone in the tempest, the first mate deserted, the cargo lost. Where was he now? Was there a chance he might be within reach at last?
So I lit our lantern and set it on the path.
Then I watched the candlelight dance as it sent the signal: I am waiting for you. You are not alone in the dark.
T
he hardest words to write are the really heartfelt ones. So it has taken days and days to craft adequate thanks to Stephanie Cabot, my literary agent. Without Stephanie’s steadfast belief in me and wise counsel this book simply would not have been written. Throughout every meeting in London—lunches at La Poule au Pot for French atmosphere—and all the transatlantic phone calls, Stephanie was at her brilliant best: calm and pragmatic, sensitive to every nuance in the text, and above all, as fiercely determined as a lioness on my behalf.
Huge thanks also to her colleagues at The Gernert Company in New York, especially Rebecca Gardner, Will Roberts, and Anna Worrall.
It has been a real privilege to work with Jennifer Barth at HarperCollins. I could not have asked for a more empathetic, incisive, and measured editor. Thank you, Jennifer, for taking such infinite care. Jason Sack and Olga Gardner Galvin have also been marvelous.
In London, Araminta Whitley at Lucas Alexander Whitley came in and gave us some more firepower—and a crucial tweak to the manuscript—before closing the deal with Orion. I’d also like to thank Harry Man at LAW.
A great big thank-you to Kate Mills at Orion for being so enthusiastic, warm, and in tune with this book, and for being such a generous editor, and to Susan Lamb and Jon Wood for immediately making me feel it was in the best possible hands.
At home, Robert and Madeleine allowed me, as always, to disappear upstairs to my desk for whole days at a time without ever making me feel I was being selfish. Joy, Stan, and Helen Lawrenson let me drone on about Provence without too often showing an excess of France-fatigue. My mother, Joy, and Robert were, as ever, the highly valued first critical readers of the draft manuscript.
For encouragement and continuing support in various ways while I was writing, I thank Felicia Mockett, Josina Kamerling, Louise Piper, Lucy and Jonathon Hills, Tanya Alfillé, and Juliet Gowan. Judy Barrett not only designs lovely websites, but was there at the desk as I made my first tentative posts as a blogger.
Merci to our friends in Provence and those who have been there right from the start of our French adventure: Ann de Boismaison White, William Bris, Julie Beauvais, Fernand Constan, Françoise Vuillet, Olivier Buys, Gérard de la Cruz, and Roger Allard, bighearted plumbing boss who investigated the mysteries of our missing water and electricity while we had to spend a week back in the UK that first summer, leaving the hamlet a daunting, overgrown, and very dry place.
I would like to acknowledge that the idea of writing about a blind perfumer came from the realization that there were strips of Braille on the packaging used by beauty product brand L’Occitane en Provence. In 1997 the company created the foundation Provence dans tous les sens (All the senses of Provence) to introduce visually impaired children to the world of perfume creation. In the novel, Marthe finds her true talent as a perfume “nose” after a visit to the Distillerie Musset in the 1930s. The Distillerie Musset is entirely imaginary but the scenes at the modern plant owe a debt to my visits to L’Occitane’s factory shop at Manosque. And, of course, just like Marthe, they create wonderful natural fragrances inspired by the scented landscapes of Provence.
Thanks finally, and very importantly, to Brian Rees for inviting me to his house in Viens all those years ago, and for being so pleased and excited for us now.
D
EBORAH
L
AWRENSON
spent her formative years moving around the world with diplomatic service parents, living in Kuwait, China, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Singapore. She studied English at Cambridge University, and has worked as a journalist for various publications in England, including the
Daily Mail
, the
Mail on Sunday
, and
Woman’s Journal
magazine. She is married, with a daughter, and lives in Kent, England. She and her family spend as much time as possible at a crumbling hamlet in Provence, France, the setting for
The Lantern
.
The Lantern
is her first novel to be published in the United States.
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