The Lantern (12 page)

Chapter 12

D
om was bunkered in his music room the next day. I opened the door carefully. He was at the piano, his back to me, and gave no response when I told him I was going down to Apt to do some shopping. The music followed me as I backed out and walked across the courtyard and out to the garage.

Uninspired, I bought some bread, cheese, and eggs at the supermarket on the main Avignon road, threw the bag in the trunk, and looked around for Sabine. As I walked back to the entrance, a brown arm emerged from a zippy silver car, and waved me over. As arranged, I got in.

The lighting shop was slightly off the beaten track, about halfway to Avignon. She was right, though. It was exactly what I wanted. Half an hour later, I had placed an order and we were back in her car.

“Now,” she said, starting the engine. “I can take you straight back to Leclerc, or we could go somewhere more interesting. What are you doing for lunch?”

“I . . . well, nothing.”

She took me to a restaurant in Roussillon.

T
he village is perched on red ochre cliffs that surge like flames out of the valley floor and stand like an island surrounded by pines and dark green cedars. It was one of the features of the sweeping view from the terrace at Les Genévriers, but so far, Dom and I had only been there once for a summer dinner that hardly counted as a proper exploration.

Its narrow streets were notoriously thronged in high summer but now we parked easily in the square. The sandy stucco of the buildings glowed in every shade of orange, red, and pink, from faded watermelon to tangerine.

Up a pedestrian alleyway, past shops selling local wines and olive oil, scented candles, soaps, and sheaves of dried lavender, Sabine pushed open the door of the restaurant.

She was greeted as a valued customer, and it was only moments before we were installed at a corner table by the front window; wine, water, and bread in front of us.

We talked a little about our surroundings, seemingly for politeness’s sake, before she asked whether I did anything in particular with my time.

When I told her, after briefly mentioning translation, of my literary ambitions, she seemed genuinely interested. What had I in mind? What kind of book? Whose work did I enjoy reading?

Given that we then struck a rich seam of similar tastes—Pagnol and Magnan among them—it didn’t seem strange to be telling her about the ideas I had been mulling over, in which themes were rooted in a spirit of place. Maybe, I admitted, I might even collect some stories myself and translate those.

“You’ve found the right place to make a start at Les Genévriers,” she said, slightly misunderstanding me. “Plenty of stories there. You should research them.”

That wasn’t quite what I’d meant, but she was keen to offer suggestions, so I listened.

“Marthe Lincel. She would be worth researching. She lived at the farm. The little blind girl who grew up to become a famous perfume creator in the 1950s?”

I hadn’t heard of her. “Sounds interesting, though. I might see what I can find out.”

“You should definitely look her up. Marthe Lincel.”

“I will.”

T
he conversation continued pleasantly through two courses of food. Then, when the waiter had cleared our plates and I was wondering how to broach the subject myself, she said, “What happened to Rachel?”

I started. It was not just the shock of Sabine’s directness, but the way she spoke the name: Ra-ssh-el, so that the softness at its heart admitted to secrets and warnings. When I did not reply, fighting to recover my composure, not wanting to admit the extent of my ignorance, Sabine rested her chin on her hand and pressed on. “I brought her here once,” she said lightly, though on a slightly false note.

“It was a press trip I organized. The journalists stayed in one of our best houses. I took them out to restaurants and one evening the catering company showed what a wonderful dinner they could provide. During the days I drove them around to see parts of the area I thought would make interesting copy. It took place over three or four days. She sent me the piece she wrote afterward, with a sweet letter.”

I was thinking quickly.

“I’d love to see a copy,” I said.

She was watching me again, in that careful way. As if gauging my reaction to every nuance. In talking to Sabine, each new step had to be placed precisely.

“I’m sure I have it somewhere,” she said.

“That would be great.”

“It was because of that trip she came back. It gave her an idea. She wanted to do some more research, write an investigative piece.”

“So she got in touch with you then.”

“It was short notice, but I managed to get her a six-week rental at a good rate. I know a lot of people around here.”

“The Mauger house.”

Sabine made a quick gesture of acknowledgment by opening her palms.

“And she brought her husband,” I said.

“Yes, she did.”

“But then—?” I stopped myself going on before I had my thoughts in order. But then, how on earth could he have pretended he’d never seen Sabine before? He must have known that denying it would look strange when they were each well aware of who the other was. It was her job, for God’s sake, to take note of the people she was putting in her clients’ houses.

But Sabine seemed to read my mind. “I only saw him once. Mostly she was there on her own. As far as I can remember he only joined her for a day or so.”

“When was this?” Trying to make it sound casual.

She made a little grimace. “Two, three years ago? A few months after the press trip.”

I felt it again, the way she seemed to be evaluating my reactions. “It seems a strange place to rent—just for one person, I mean.”

“She was— Well, she was doing me a favor by taking it. She wanted to be in this area; the owner wanted someone there while he was absent. We came to an arrangement that suited everyone.”

“Une bonne affaire,”
I said. A nice deal.

There was a long pause while I considered the possibilities. On balance, the chance of finding out more about Rachel seemed to outweigh the embarrassment of admitting that I knew nothing about her and was avid to know more. What that said about the state of my relationship with Dom was a powerful brake, but it still didn’t stop me.

“So—did Rachel find what she wanted, did she write her investigative piece?”

“Yes, she certainly did her research. But as for writing about what she found, I don’t know. I don’t think so somehow.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“She said she would keep in touch, and for a while she did. There were other avenues to explore, questions she knew that I could help her answer. I helped her a lot.”

The searching look again, the quiet attentiveness to my smallest reaction. I stayed as still and as steady as I could.

“But, then—nothing.”

Involuntarily, I shivered. Steady.

“But . . . if you were helping her like this—it sounds like you’d become friends. You must have had ways of contacting her.”

“I did. There was a mobile phone number—that stopped working. I called the newspaper that published her article, but no one there had heard from her for a while.”

“A home address?”

“No reply to my letter. Nothing.”

Her words fell like a cold shadow.

Outside, it had started to rain. The patchwork trunks of the plane trees were quickly darkening. I noticed how rusty the metal of the window frame by our table was, like the rind of mature cheese.

“What was Rachel like?”

There was no point in pretending that I either knew more than I did, or was uninterested. In any case, it seemed that Sabine knew very well from the start of this game that she held all the good cards.

She thought awhile. “She was intense, driven—she wanted to understand, maybe even to make a difference. But she had a side of her that was a party girl; she could be frivolous, humorous, and confident. Sometimes people didn’t know what to make of her. She was daring and determined, serious one second, flippant the next. That could be unsettling. I could see that others found her difficult. But she was a good journalist. And very attractive—obviously.”

I had always assumed that she was. “Which newspaper did she write for?”

Sabine closed her eyes, apparently trying to recall. “It began with ‘T’ . . .”

“
Times
,
Telegraph
?
Travel
-something?”

“
Telegraph
, perhaps.”

Her name now.

I took a flyer. “Rachel . . . ? What was her surname, again? She didn’t use her married name, did she?”

“Summers.”

Trying to nod as if I had always known that, and she had simply reminded me, I asked, “What was it she was working on?”

I was aware that I was bombarding her with questions, and knew, too, how much I was revealing in the process about myself and Dom. I should have backed off then, but I couldn’t leave it.

“I could show you if you like. Or rather, I can show you what she saw, what gave her the idea before she began to work. It was not what the story became. That was something quite different from how it started out.”

How could I not have been intrigued?

Chapter 13

I
t was bad enough when Pierre’s ghost appeared, so silent and unsettling. He was still lurking around as his younger self, insolent of expression, in the kitchen and my bedroom in the morning. So far, he had done nothing to harm me, but I knew Pierre. It could only be a matter of time.

In the interim, while the precise reason for his reappearance remained unclear, like a cloud hanging over the mountains, a nebulous, dark threat, I had found a way to block him out: I’d close my eyes and pretend everything was normal, and once or twice, when I opened them again, he would have slunk off, or vanished, vaporized, whatever it is spirits do when they have no active mischief to detain them.

But then one afternoon, when Pierre had stayed away for a week or so, and I had stopped tensing at the slightest change of light or shadow on the wall, the haunting started again.

T
his time, it was Marthe. And that’s when I knew I was in real trouble. She wasn’t a child, you see. She was a woman of means, standing straight and powerful, seeming far bigger than me, although in life we were a similar size. If anything, I was a finger’s-width taller. Not then, with me sitting down and her standing, so still.

“What do you want?” I cried out. My outburst was entirely involuntary, and of course I did not expect an answer. Pierre had never answered a single question, even with a gesture.

Marthe did not move. She was a cold statue with hollowed features. If ever a person could represent stillness, she was doing so. Standing barely two meters from where I sat.

Wrenched from my doze by the hearth, I was frozen to my seat. The wind made the catalpa pods click outside the window. A loose shutter banged. Inside the room, the silence began to hum.

Marthe did not react. She remained the embodiment of stillness. For long seconds, I stared, hardly breathing.

Still no movement. Then—and I swear this happened just as I tell you—her eyes began to glow until they blazed red. Her sad, pretty, blind eyes that so rarely seemed to be sightless turned on mine and burned red like coals. Then the skin around them grew a crust of dried blood.

She did not speak, her mouth did not move, but I swear it was her voice I heard inside my own head.

“You thought you’d got away with it, didn’t you?” she said.

Chapter 14

I
t was only a matter of time before I went into the Internet café, the modern equivalent of the magic eye on the world. It felt disloyal, secretive, and wrong. But I rationalized that it was for the greater good, for my peace of mind. I would find out what I wanted to know and that would be the end of it. Wrong again, of course, but how could I have known that as I pulled up in Apt, locked the car, and walked along the embankment to the café?

Inside, it was full of young North African men. It had the air of being run by and for them, but the man behind the counter was not unfriendly when I asked to sign in.

I
typed her name into the usual search engine. My heart skipped a beat as the screen promised several thousand entries relating to her name. Unable to stop myself, I clicked on “Images” to see if a photograph came up. None of the faces or scenes that filled the screen seemed right. Either they were too young or too old, or clearly belonged to a Rachel Summers in a soccer uniform.

I went back to the original search page and scrolled down rapidly, impatient to get the measure of what was on offer. Among the entries listing the Rachel Summers on team sport lists and schoolgirl social networking sites, a scientist featured prominently, and a musician and an environmentalist. At last, I found a couple of articles from five, six years ago, one from the
Daily Telegraph
and one from the
Traveller
. Then a short piece from a women’s magazine. She must have worked freelance, maybe with regular assignments from some of them. But I was only guessing.

As I searched quickly, wondering whether I might get lucky and find a picture of her included with one of the pieces, I had the first sense of unease, as if my subconscious had spotted it first, while my conscious self, doggedly jotting down dates of the more recent articles as they came up, was still struggling to catch up. There was nothing more recent than two years earlier. An interview with Francis Tully in Provence, from the summer of 2008, was the last in the line.

I was so absorbed that it took me longer than it should have to register the argument that had started at the counter. When I looked up, an elderly man in traditional Muslim robes was pointing at me, while the man who had taken my money was clearly asking him to calm down. After a few minutes, during which I did my best to concentrate on the screen, the younger man approached me apologetically.

“I am truly sorry, Madame, but I have to ask you to leave.”

“But— I haven’t . . .”

It seemed that the elder customer objected to my presence as a young woman alone, and especially one wearing a skirt that did not cover her knees.

“I am very sorry.” I thought I detected sympathy in his manner, and a plea not to make a fuss. There was nothing to do but to leave gracefully and hope I might return another time.

“Could you just print this out for me, please?” I asked, indicating the Francis Tully article on the screen as I gathered my bag and papers with a show of uncomprehending dignity. “Then I’ll leave.”

I
n hindsight, that day marked the start of it: the sense of a separation from Dom. It had crept up on me that we were no longer quite so bound up in each other; that in trying so hard to remain self-reliant and avoid seeming needy and jealous of his past, I had locked a vital part of myself away. Now the realization was like a plunge into icy water.

The idyllic summer was well and truly over.