The Lantern (32 page)
Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
F
or two days after that, I stayed in bed.
There were two possibilities. Either I was in the presence of evil, and the farm was possessed; or I was losing my mind and these hallucinations were the proof. But how could the house I had known all my life be haunted like this when it had never been before?
Hour upon hour, these thoughts chased each other through my head, while in my room I watched a procession of angels with halos, halos without angels, silver mists, and golden blurs, dimming, shafts of clarity, and brilliant flashes of light.
The doctor came on the third day. I have never been so relieved to see anyone in my life.
T
hey must have drugged me at the hospital.
When I saw the doctor, he told me I had been asleep for two days and nights.
“Have I gone mad?” I asked, all fight gone.
“No, not at all.”
“Am I possessed?”
“No . . .”
“What has been happening to me, then?”
It was bad news, he said softly. He reached out and took my hand that was lying on the cover. I’d had enough of that, I replied feebly.
“I am sorry to have to tell you that you are losing your sight,
Mme.
Lincel.”
I closed my eyes and pushed my head back on the pillows. I felt more pressure on my hand as he squeezed it to show he cared.
“But all the visitors!”
“There is an explanation.”
“But they were there, completely real . . . people I knew!”
“The brain has an extraordinary capacity to evoke sensations and visions . . . a heightened reality . . .”
“But I am not crazy . . .”
“No, not crazy at all.”
“But how?”
“We don’t know everything, of course, but there is a medical condition—an optical syndrome—that might explain what you have experienced. We will need to conduct some tests, with your consent, before we can say with certainty this is the explanation.”
Wearily, I agreed.
T
here will always be those who believe that what Dom did deserves the harshest punishment. Deaths in euthanasia clinics have led to murder charges; often there is a trial, followed by acquittal and useless expressions of regret that the matter was ever brought to court.
It is against the law, as well as the natural order, even if committed out of compassion. But Dom knew that he had crossed the boundary at the very end.
“I’m not the person you thought I was,” he said.
That was only true up to a point, as he well knew. Until then, he had revealed what he chose to reveal about himself, nothing more. Reading between the lines, I found not necessarily a different man but a far more complicated one.
“Perhaps I saw the person you always were, until then,” I said carefully.
He closed his eyes, and it was written all over his face, his shoulders, his chest, that a weight had lifted. In my hands, his were trembling.
“And, the police know . . .” I went on. I saw it now. “Severan knows. When they arrested you, they must have known.”
“They checked with the clinic, made me sweat. Made me tell them over and over again until it sounded false, like a story I had made up and was failing to tell exactly as before. All night they kept on, question after question.”
“You told them the whole truth?”
He made a noise in the back of his throat. “Very nearly.”
“Does that mean yes or no?”
I waited, hardly able to breathe.
“No.”
I started to shake harder. I think it was relief. “They let you go.”
“The whole situation . . . it’s a very gray area, but so long as no one wants to make a show trial of it like they do in the U.K. . . .” He hesitated. “In the end, where is the line if the prosecutors want to draw it? It will be all right. I think the police are more interested in their own case and the pressure to get that solved.”
But there was also the incident with the police back in London, thanks to Rachel’s spitefulness, when he had been questioned about the rape. That was on record, too.
“So . . .” I was still having difficulty coming to terms with what he had told me. “All this . . . whole dreadful story, all the worry, but you didn’t think to tell me?”
“No.”
“You don’t think that maybe—?”
“It’s a terrible thing, to have killed someone. I thought, if you knew . . .”
“What, I would leave you?”
He didn’t answer.
But I was thinking of the weight on his conscience, the effort of living alone with that knowledge. In this instance, knowing that part of him wanted her gone, wanted her to die—that he killed her knowing she had changed her mind. And I wondered, from what he had told me about her, whether Rachel said what she did to leave him with one terrible, lasting wound.
W
hen I met Dom that day, a hundred years ago, on the shores of Lake Geneva, he had been back to clear out the flat and hand over the keys before the lease expired. The skiing trip with friends was true enough, but he had always intended to do this, had steeled himself to do what he hadn’t been able to face before.
Almost a year had passed.
He was in Yvoire because she had wanted to go there. It was a final farewell to the girl he had once loved very much, before all the lies and unhappiness.
“Then I met you and it was the first time I had allowed myself to think about moving on. There had been nothing—no one—until then to make me remember that the future could still be good.”
“Perhaps it was too soon.”
“I tried to let you go.”
I thought of the afternoon in Hyde Park, when he seemed to be telling me it was over, that he was moving to France. The occasional meetings in London followed by distressing silences that preceded the real beginning of our relationship, which I had airbrushed out of my version of our whirlwind romance. And now I understood the subtext, his dignity and quiet grief. How it began to eat away at his spirit, and then mine. His fear when the remains were found beneath the old swimming pool, the police investigations. His certainty of what would follow when they discovered his wife had died under suspicious circumstances. The way events spiraled to implicate him, just as he had dreaded.
Dom would look in the mirror and hate what he saw. The sadness and guilt spreading like an invisible yet fatal disease. He was already serving a life sentence. While I feared I was haunted by the house, he was being haunted by Rachel. As was I, though in a different way. In thinking it was the spirits of those who had once lived here, I was too literal-minded; it was the spirits we had brought with us.
T
he daylight is still playing tricks on me. What should be bright and clear is smeared with mother-of-pearl. It clots and breaks up my vision so that what I see is becoming more and more like van Gogh’s spirals and waves. He came south in search of color, and then went mad. I am still not convinced that I am not suffering the same fate.
Since the doctor gave me his grim diagnosis, I examine what I can see with minute attention, fear barely contained beneath the surface.
Being blind is not like closing your eyelids; that merely reduces the light entering the eye from the pupil. What is blackness and what is nothingness? Did Marthe see darkness continually or did she experience reaction to light? Did her memory of light make the empty void into a darkness she could relate to? The blackness into a remnant of vision?
T
here’s something else.
If all this was in my mind, there can only be one cause.
Who were those unknown children who came to see me, you may ask?
D
om and I stayed on in Cassis. From time to time, we thought about progressing along the coast in the direction of Nice, but in the end, we felt comfortable in
Mme.
Jozan’s white hotel. Weeks went by and still we stayed away from Les Genévriers.
Through the heat and sleepless nights, we rode out the summer. Dom was like a victim of shell shock, as if, with his confession to me and the dismantling of his emotional defenses, he was only now allowing himself to react to the police investigation and the grisly discoveries at the house. It would take months for him to come to terms with what had happened.
I stood back and allowed him to be, listening when he wanted me to listen, reassuring when he seemed to be asking for reassurance, turning to him at night when he felt for my body, wondering if he would discover the secret I still kept. When would be the right time to tell him? It seemed too demanding of the future, to risk telling him before he had come to terms with the past. Perhaps telling him would give me fewer options than not telling. I was thinking of my own independence.
As the summer faded, we found an approximation of peace. The walking helped, sometimes with Dom, more often not. Between the tumbling slopes and steep, pine-bristled ravines, the sea was a constant companion. Its dazzle lifted the letters off the pages of my walking guide until I could see precisely how each black mark was stamped on the soft paper.
At night, I dreamed of the crumbling hamlet on the hill. I sensed it always was a place of secrets. It was, in my old understanding, like a sentence hung in midair: abrupt, unresolved. Surely there should have been another page, but that was all I had, the ghosts and intimations of a half-told story.
Perhaps the house in the dreams (that was and was not itself) had come to stand for our relationship. I was afraid it might.
O
ne day, I bought a local newspaper at a kiosk and took it down to the harbor to read while I drank coffee. Three pages in, my heart lurched as I read the words “missing students” and the name “Marine Gavet,” “also known as Magie.” A grainy black-and-white photograph in the paper showed her laughing, caught on a security camera at a bank where she had recently opened an account. Her parents had arrived from Goult. Anyone who saw her should call the Cassis police.
Magie. What Francis Tully called his young model. I debated whether to call the police myself, with my feeble contribution, my hunch that she arrived in Cassis with Tully and posed for him. Perhaps she stayed on; perhaps she had caught a glimpse of another life and decided to grab it. Perhaps speculation was pointless.
I was still undecided when the call came from Severan that evening. The rocks burned below our balcony and the sea shuddered, and we were summoned to return.
I
killed her, you see.
The unknown children who came to haunt me: I did know them. Not in appearance, but in essence. I knew where they had come from.
When I returned from visiting Marthe in Paris in the months after André had left, I did not know where to turn. As realization of my situation crept up on me, I had to act quickly.
The only person I could think of was
Mme.
Musset, she who had taught Marthe and me so much. I said earlier that she was the one who helped me. The truth is, I went to Manosque and I begged for that help. She did not give it willingly.
I was carrying André’s baby.
What was I supposed to do? I had no hope of him, no longer even raged at him, felt only sadness and contempt. I could not have the baby, alone and unmarried. I would not allow my kind friend Henri to settle for a farce of a marriage.
So I went to
Mme.
Musset, who made up a tincture: parsley and angelica and pennyroyal that smelled of spearmint. I had to drink it diluted with warm water every hour, and also to take the juice of as many oranges as I could afford, to ingest high doses of vitamin C. She wasn’t happy to do it; she made some comment about me making a habit of leading men on, which made me wonder whether she was thinking of Auguste, the field supervisor, all those years before. But she did it, for Marthe. Because she thought Marthe had advised me to come to her, she gave me what I wanted.
F
irst, I had to deal with Maman.
It was only fair she should take a holiday, I insisted. After all, I had been to Paris and left her to cope. I told her Marthe had sent the fare and paid for the hotel on the coast, which was partly true. Marthe had given me some money, and we had both decided that Maman needed a break.
The day I waved her off on the bus, I took the first sip of the tincture. My cramps began on the third day after that.
I prepared a pile of clean towels, boiled water and bottled it, and waited. I was on my own, the most scared I had ever been. For hours, I thought nothing would happen, that the pain was all I had provoked. Then I started to bleed.
I must have been further along than I thought. After the spasms of pain and the blood, came the tiny form of a baby. Not an unidentifiable entity but a shocking, stillborn baby, formed more fully than I ever thought possible. A girl.
Desolation, pure and complete.
T
he next day, I lit the lantern, our lantern, for the last time, using the biggest candle I could find to keep the light alive for as long as possible. It flared into a fat crocus. Then I placed it on the ground in the old storeroom next to the arch her father had built. The crocus glow warmed the black space as I dug.
When the grave was deep enough, I anointed the baby with Marthe’s perfume, made the shape of the cross, then buried her in her own vault. It was the best I could do. When the light went out, she would sleep held safe inside the ribs of its crude wooden beams.
A prayer, and then I bricked it up, stone by stone. Next to the arch that stood for love, it was all my own work. The masonry I learned from silently watching my lover when he thought I was busy elsewhere.
So, the baby was laid to rest among her ancestral stones, though she would never open her eyes in the morning to the great curtain of blue mountain that hangs beyond the bottom of the path, or feel the soft breeze coming off the sea of hills, or taste the wild plums and the cherries dried on the tree, or smell the lavender and thyme and rosemary. But neither would she be hungry in winter, and feel the sting of ice through the holes in her boots, work hard and love with good intent only to lose it all, or know how it is to be desperate and alone.
I once thought it was better she did not know sorrow. I realize now that I can never atone for what I did. I carry her still, knowing that the greatest betrayal was mine, of her. I will never forgive myself.
And I will never leave her.
