The Sea Garden (10 page)

Somehow, though, in Marthe's mind the kindly pumpkin face she had given her mentor Mme Musset was always more dominant than the face that could be seen by others. Without sight, you had to understand what was beneath the surface.

Madame was a true and generous person who cared for her. The endearment had come so naturally—“my petal”—a name not used for anyone else. The deft way she set out the essential oils for Marthe, always in the same order and same place on the table, spoke silently of encouragement. The thoughtful cleverness in the way Madame had labelled Marthe's first experimental blends by using sealing wax stamped with letters from an old printing set, so that Marthe could identify each one by touch. Later, when the quality of Marthe's nose and invention were becoming more and more apparent, she was permitted to open the tiny vials of more exotic ingredients bought in Marseille before the war—orris root, amber, patchouli—and used drop by precious drop to add distinction to the homely fragrances of the landscape.

When Marthe's widowed landlady decided to close up the house and move to Banon to live with her daughter and grandchildren while her son-in-law was held as a prisoner of war in Germany, Marthe went to live with the Mussets at the farmhouse surrounded by lavender fields, halfway between the plateau and the town.

3

Almond Blossom

1943

T
he shepherd's body was found up on the steep slopes where the lavender made its last wild clutches at the mountain peak.

Each year the sheep were moved across the high meadows above the lavender fields. Here men still adhered to the old ways: hardy men with gnarled and twisted limbs, as if they had been carved by the same winds as the rock sculptures.

One of them was the shepherd Pineau. Alone under the blue citadel of the sky, he guided his flock from one ancient stone
borie
to the next. All the farmers knew him: old Pineau in his ragged clothes had been part of the landscape when the great surge in lavender growing for the perfume industry had begun, when the Mussets and others began staining the slopes purple. The shepherd was a man who knew every stone and tree of the ridges, a man who seemed part of nature: part mountain, part stream, part animal, living his life by the turn of the seasons, solitary with his sheep, walking from rocky ledge to pasture, valley to plateau, as they fed. He sang as he went, songs that had been sung for centuries.

That summer day in 1943, when small puffs of his flock broke away and drifted in lazy clouds down the hill, the lavender farmers knew something was wrong. In the uplands men and women had always relied on one another. They went up looking for him.

 

U
rgent footsteps on the path, spitting stones, brought the news to the Musset farmhouse that evening. A hammering at the door, and Auguste burst into the kitchen, panting. “Old Pineau's had it—they got him!”

Auguste Baumel was the Mussets' best supplier, son of the farmer who had planted vast swathes of the new hybrid lavandin on the plateau.

M. Musset scraped his chair back. For a moment there was silence. Then Madame flapped into action, fetching glasses, telling him to pull up a chair, pouring from the bottle.

“I went up with a couple of the others to . . . check on him. I took my cousin Thierry with me,” said Auguste. Thierry ran a garage in town. Marthe couldn't think what expertise he might have provided up in the fields.

Auguste gulped down a drink, and it made him splutter.

“Take it easy, lad.”

The story spilled out. Looking back, it seemed to Marthe that they had forgotten she was in the corner of the room. She listened intently.

Inside the shepherds' hut, hardly more than a pile of stones with its lone chair and table, Auguste and Thierry found Pineau's tin drinking cup on the floor, abandoned. Outside, under the lone olive tree, the shepherd's last meal was still being devoured by flies and beetles. They called his name, thinking he might be injured, unable to move. They found him a hundred metres away, face-down in a stream he had used for drinking and bathing. Blowflies hummed over sweet and sickly flesh.

“We turned him over to be sure,” said Auguste.

“And was it—”

“A shot to the head,” said Auguste. “They must have found him as he washed his hands before eating.”

Silence.

Marthe didn't dare move, let alone speak. She felt the chill of the spring water as it filled the shepherd's nostrils, the stones pushed into his mouth by the flow. Twice dead, by bullet and by water. She remembered her sister describing the hills and mountains as waves on the sea, and the pictures in her head merged. Marthe told no one, but she had a dread fear of drowning.

M. Musset paced the floor, his words coming as fast as Auguste's. “Every barter is a risk. We put aside our differences for a common cause, but never forget that others have their own agenda. It is no longer possible to assume that any two people understand a situation in the same way or have the same loyalties. The natural order has gone, that is what we know.”

She could make no sense of it.

Perhaps one of them noticed her then, as she sat scarcely breathing in the chair by the window. Whatever prompted them, the two men headed for the door and went out.

Marthe's skin prickled. She wondered whether Madame would say anything, either to them or her, but she only clattered some pans and ran the tap.

 

T
he shock of Pineau's murder fused with the aroma of burning onions and garlic as Madame turned away from the stove. Insults in the street and the herbal astringency of rosemary soap. Memory and scent, so closely entwined. It can't have been long after that Arlette came to live with the Mussets, bringing a tin of real ground coffee beans. For years they had drunk only a bitter brew of acorns. The rich coffee fragrance was so intoxicating, so redolent of lost freedom, that it brought a tear to the eye. Rosemary, burnt onion, and coffee; the lavender harvest; all combined and gave coherence to Marthe's memory of those precise few weeks in July 1943.

Arlette was Mme Musset's niece, daughter of Madame's sister who lived in Lyon. Her parents ran a drapery shop, but since the Germans had crossed the demarcation line and eradicated the
zone libre
, Lyon was considered as dangerous as Paris. Arlette, nineteen when she moved south, had a smile so wide it could be heard in her speech and made others smile in return. She was resilient and optimistic, and she was going to be an actress one day, though quite how she was going to achieve her dream in Manosque rather than the great city of Lyon wasn't altogether clear.

The first time Marthe heard Arlette's voice, it was singing. The song ended, but even when her chatter took over, it had a musical quality that seemed to brim with confidence and joie de vivre, the words barely able to contain the giggle that might erupt at any moment. Marthe had pulled herself back into the corner of the room, as if she might make herself invisible, fearing disdain from the laughing voice, steeling herself for resentment at her position as a cuckoo in the nest.

But Arlette bounded over to her. “You must be Marthe—I've been longing to meet you! Aunt Delphine sent me some of your lemon balm scent for my birthday, and do you know, I've had women stop me in the street to ask what it is!”

Marthe could only stutter her thanks for the compliment.

“Your ears must be terribly singed.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My aunt and uncle talk about you all the time—heaping the praise! Your ears must burn on a regular basis.”

“Well, I—that's very good to know, thank you.”

She might not be sincere, Marthe reminded herself.

But over the following months Arlette proved herself not only enthusiastic but practical and a hard worker too. She rolled up her sleeves to make soap alongside the other employees, as well as helping with the deliveries and going out with Monsieur to drum up more business. At the farm too she took on any job that had to be done.

Along the way she and Marthe became firm friends. The war was horrible, but they both agreed it was never a good idea to worry about anything you couldn't change.

“You can't go around asking ‘What if?' What is, that's the only thing that matters,” said Arlette.

“I had to learn that lesson too, but it was hard,” admitted Marthe. She had surprised herself by confiding the story of how she became blind to Arlette. How, as her eyesight worsened, she had focused—closely, unbearably closely—on what she could still see and feel: the heliotrope flowers on the slope outside the barn; the meadows; the smooth iron of the banister rail under her hand, the half-moons of stone stairs worn away by centuries of use; the tiles on the floor, which still bore the imprints of dogs' paws like fossils. The passages and steps and rooms of her childhood home were safe in her memory, the bedrock and template of all that came after. And then her parents had sent her away, to a new place she had never seen.

“Tell me. Tell me all of it,” Arlette said. Often that first summer they lay in a grassy dell by a group of wild plum trees, gorging on crisp fruit.

“I've never told anyone this before.”

But Arlette would wait for her to find the words. The hum of bees in the background intensified the tart honey of the plums as they sucked the stones clean.

And so Marthe would talk. She told how she had been taken to Manosque when she was eleven years old. Her parents explained that they had brought her to a school for girls like her, and then they left her there alone, struck dumb by the realization that her worst fears had materialised. At the school for the blind everything around her was alien. Had her parents any idea what it felt like to be surrounded by emptiness, swirling and roaring?

“Were you very angry?”

“Yes. For a long time. I threw myself down the stairs once, furious because I didn't know what that stairwell looked like. I hoped my parents would understand and come and fetch me. But they never did.”

“That must have been terrible.”

“It was, but funnily enough it was the start of better times for me. The two girls who found me at the bottom of the stairs and took me to the matron became my good friends. Renée and Elise. They were so kind, but I'd been so wrapped up in my own worries, I hadn't even noticed before that they were there.”

“Friends make all the difference, always. And something good came of your pain.”

“You're right. But it was the fury at my situation that spurred me on. I had to learn how to read a new darkness by using all my senses. I had to identify each sound—think of listening to an orchestra and trying to work out which instruments are playing and in which patterns. I had to interpret the way the air felt on my skin and taste the seasons as they changed. If I thought of myself as anything, it was as a young dog exploring new worlds carried by smell.”

That was why, when they listened to the news on the radio or heard talk about the occupation, Marthe felt no different from the others. She heard what they heard. None of them had seen the events described. The most appalling acts of cruelty and inhuman barbarity were carried out unseen, experienced in absences and abstracts.

 

A
s autumn turned to winter that year, they gathered around the wireless each night, forswearing the propaganda of the Vichy government to listen illegally to the BBC broadcasts through storms of interference. From London, patriotic exiles sent out morale-boosting bulletins of Nazi reversals and relayed the stern growling drama of Churchill's speeches. And messages would come through, snippets of trite-sounding news from the exiles to their compatriots across the Channel, “The French Speak to the French.”

By then Auguste often joined them for dinner first. He had taken to bringing pamphlets printed by the underground resistance, from which he was keen to read aloud.

“ ‘The Vichy prime minister Pierre Laval is so desperate to keep his deal with the Germans on track, to place France at the right hand of the victor at Europe's top table, that he is sacrificing the country's young men in ridiculously unbalanced numbers: eight young French men pushed over the borders to work in German factories for each prisoner returned.'

“I tell you, the Germans obviously hold Laval in contempt, but it's as nothing compared to the contempt I feel for the bastard. And as for Maréchal Pétain, don't get me started on that dangerous old fool! What the hell do they think they are doing? It's unbelievable . . .
unbelievable
! And people still think that he saved the country once before, in the Great War, so no one can doubt his patriotism! He may have been a patriot once, but he is no patriot now.”

A murmur of agreement went round the table. When the occupation began and the Germans assumed control of the northern half of the country, Pétain told the French people it was a pragmatic arrangement; that the French government at Vichy was protecting its people in the wider interests of the country. If France cooperated, he claimed, they would emerge stronger, in partnership with Germany, after this war was over.

A bottle of apricot liqueur was being passed around. Its fiery trail burned Marthe's throat, and she had only managed a few tiny sips.

Arlette was speaking now. “My father says there are those who want to believe it, that they welcome the invaders because they fear factions of our own people more—the radicals and the Communists. They are secretly pleased that the Germans are stamping out all the disorderly factions.”

“It always astonishes how many different views and interpretations of the same facts there can be,” commented her uncle bitterly.

A guttural sound of derision from Auguste. “So we're all supposed to read this, and then roll over and let them walk all over us? We must all do what the Germans tell us to do because Pétain did the right thing once? It beggars belief! He and his stooges are just as fascist as the Germans. Have you seen the posters they've put up all over town? Smiling boys leaning out of train windows on their way to work in German factories. They make it look so benign! They're all in it together, and I can't stand it, I tell you.

“And actually, I want to talk about what the hell we are doing, still selling soap to those bastards who are stamping all over us. I mean—”

“I agree with all your political sentiments,” cut in M. Musset. “But we have to hold our noses and do what we have to do.”

“And sleep the sleep of the just and the ignorant each night?”

“We do it in order to survive. And it's not so black and white! Sometimes it's the ‘collaborators' who are keeping people safe—have you thought about that? The clerks working at the town hall who try to intervene on the behalf of others, they are the ones to put themselves on the line, negotiating and trading with the regime.”

“Is that what we're doing?”

“Yes. The Distillerie Musset is open for business so that we and many others can eat.”

This measured response was met by another snort from Auguste. “When my father planted the first lavender fields on the plateau after the last war, it was to build a better life, to safeguard the people and their livelihoods here. He was not doing it to surrender the fields of the south to the old enemy.”