The Sea Garden (4 page)

She was tired, in need of a shower, and beginning to feel hungry. “All right.”

Meunier was as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as before. “You may have seen in the evening newspaper that the dead man has been named. Florian Creys, nineteen years old. A student from Strasbourg.”

“I haven't seen the newspaper.”

“The journalist spoke to some of the passengers who were on the ferry. One of them now says that the dead man may have been pushed.”

“I don't think that can be right. He was standing alone.”

“The witness says that he was standing with a man wearing a straw hat.”

“That is not what I saw. But I was not looking at the . . . young man all the time.”

The lieutenant squared his broad sportsman's shoulders. “So it could be possible that he was pushed.”

“That's not what I said. I am sure that I saw him climb over the rail and go over the side. He was alone then, but I suppose he might have been standing next to someone before that.”

“You were looking at him at the exact moment he went over?”

Ellie fiddled with the pendant around her neck, then stopped as soon as she realised what she was doing. “He was in my field of vision. I wasn't staring at him, but he was part of the picture in front of me.”

“You are certain of this?”

“Well, as certain as I can be.”

Under close questioning, however, the picture in her mind did not seem as robust as it had been. She judged it unwise to say so. Best to go with her instincts that her memory was true.

“Did you see a man on the deck wearing a straw hat?”

“Yes . . . there was a man in a panama hat.”

“Did you see him standing close to the deceased man?”

“No.”

“At no time?”

“No.”

“Did you speak to the man wearing the hat?”

“Actually . . . yes. I did.”

“What did you say?”

“I can't remember. No, wait . . . I think I asked him whether he had seen what just happened. He said he had—he had seen.”

“And then?”

“He told me not to look.”

“What did he mean when he said that?”

“I thought he meant that something terrible was now visible in the water. Something that I wouldn't want to see.”

Meunier wrote it down. “Do you know who this man is?”

“I only saw him on the boat.”

“Describe him.”

Ellie gazed past the policeman, feeling oddly detached from the tables and chairs under the red awning and the sparse sandy square that she recognized now as an old military parade ground. The Place d'Armes—of course.

“He was quite tall—about six inches . . . sorry, er . . . fifteen centimetres taller than I am. Dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. Good-looking. Late thirties, early forties, that kind of age.”

“Nationality?”

“French, I assumed. Didn't you interview him?”

He ignored her question. “Did you notice anything else about this man?”

She shook her head. “He wore a loose white shirt, stylish in a very casual way. That's all. I wasn't really concentrating on him at the time.”

Meunier pushed his card across the table. “If you see him again, please call me as soon as you can.”

 

S
he had intended to eat a quick supper and spend the rest of the evening working on her preliminary sketches. But once up in her room, she lay on the bed, exhausted. How could someone say that Florian Creys was pushed when she was certain he had been standing alone? Why hadn't the police interviewed the man in the panama hat while they were all still on the ferry? She tried to remember if she had seen him after he told her not to look at the water. Remembering the shouts from below made her shudder. She was looking away, as he had urged her, concentrating fiercely on the sailboats in the distance, not quite able to subdue the horrors her imagination was producing. She did not speak to him again. Whether he was still on deck after the ferry restarted, she could not recall. In that case, he probably was not.

And if someone was saying that Florian Creys was pushed—he had definitely not been pushed, unless her memory was completely false—had that person also told the police that the man in the hat was responsible?

She shut her eyes, trying to still her mind. But the gardens provided the next wave of questions. Could she work with Laurent de Fayols? Was he as affable as he seemed; were his expectations realistic? Why hadn't he employed a French designer? If she accepted the job, would she be able to give effective instructions to the landscape contractors; would they be able to source the right plants? Then there was the encounter with Mme de Fayols. What was it about the old woman and that firelit room that had made her so uneasy?

Ellie pictured the dark yew garden room and felt its green walls closing in. She trusted her instincts, and was unsettled by the implications.

Inevitably her thoughts turned back to Dan, thoughts she failed to avoid. What were you supposed to do when someone you had been closer to than anyone in the world was no longer part of your life? When his absence was ever-present in empty seats and the cold wide space in the bed, in the phone calls that went unmade, the observations unsaid, and the landscapes unshared? Two years since he passed away, and his loss seemed harder than ever to deal with.

He had come into her life with the force of an accident, and left it with equal abruptness. Four years together. Not nearly long enough.

 

S
he hadn't been looking for anyone like Dan, wouldn't have known where to start looking, but when he stopped his car—stopped dead—in front of hers and ran off into the crowds on the pavement, she had no choice but to stop too, preferably before the bonnet of her VW went any farther into the boot of his Audi. She was late as it was for a meeting with a man called Ivell, an expert in rare British plants; Dan was only just in time to save the life of a man who was having a heart attack in the middle of Chichester High Street.

Ellie watched as Dan ripped open the man's coat and began to pump his chest, while a knot of helpless passersby formed. “Call an ambulance,” he shouted. Her mobile was already in her hand.

He was an army medic, a surgeon, he told her as they swapped insurance details.

“Hardwired for decisive action,” she said, trying not to flirt and failing. At least the patient was coming round as the paramedics arrived.

Dan grinned. “We're a bit reckless with the machinery when we have to be. Sorry.”

Hers were not the only admiring glances, Ellie noticed. He was tall and blond, with a loosely confident stance.

“Can I buy you a coffee to apologise?” he asked.

“That would be great—oh, but I can't, I'm late as it is. It's work, and—”

“It's important, I understand.”

He was wearing a soft flannel shirt, the shade of a cornflower, which she would come to know as his favourite. Darker blue eyes crinkled in amusement.

“You've got my number,” she said.

Two months later, they moved into the cottage near Arundel together.

She twisted the ring on her finger. Rubies and seed pearls, bought in the Lanes in Brighton for her thirtieth birthday. She wore it always, along with the pearl pendant.

Even now she could hardly bear to hear the news from Afghanistan, the terrible roll call of the dead that would not stop. The dread had been ever-present that she would hear his name one day. When the Afghan shell hit the yard outside the hospital at Camp Bastion, he was coming off duty, having saved three lives on the operating table. Captain Dan Wensley, with his contagious good humour, the hair that always stuck up in odd places and the startling blue eyes, the mouth that always seemed on the point of a smile and could kiss her like no other, the broad shoulders and the manner that asserted without words that he was in charge and you would be safe with him. His life was taken in an instant. A freak incident. They happened, and they blasted the heart of families, relationships, normal life. There were still times when she felt only half alive, either too sensitive or too numbed to feel normal.

 

S
he woke at two in the morning, unable to understand where she was or why she was lying down in her work clothes. Something was wrong, but she didn't know what it was—then consciousness formed, followed by the same old heart-shiver and the leaden dread.

Dan. The boy on the boat. The garden. She was shaking slightly, just a tremor. At six o'clock she gave up on the idea of more sleep and went for a run. It was only when she was passing the empty reception cubbyhole that it occurred to her the main door would be locked and she might not be able to get out without calling someone. But it opened easily when she tried the handle.

The air was pleasantly fresh as she broke into a jog, map in hand. On the Pointe de Lequin, twenty minutes east along the coastal path, she stopped, allowed her heart rate to fall as she surveyed the strait. The hills of the mainland were sharply defined in the way the world can look after disrupted sleep. Somewhere close by was the eighteenth-century Batterie de Lequin and, farther round the headland, the Fort de l'Alycastre, built under Richelieu—two of the ten forts left that formed a defensive front along the rocky north coast against the island's many invaders over the centuries.

She resumed her run, pushing herself harder.

3

The Lighthouse

Tuesday, June 4

E
llie ate breakfast outside the hotel under the red awning, concentrating on the pleasures of perfect flaky croissants and greengage jam with strong, rich coffee.

After the run, she felt more positive about both herself and the garden commission. Five days was a reasonable time to assess the plot and the landscape and the scale of the job at the Domaine de Fayols, and to present a professional folder of preliminary sketches; whether it was long enough to get the measure of Laurent de Fayols, she wasn't so sure.

The air was already hot and close. She stuffed a swimsuit into her bag along with her notebook and papers and marched down towards the harbour and the cycle hire shop. The machine they offered her had five simple gears and a comfortably well-used saddle. She nodded, pleased to have a measure of independence from the unpredictable modes of transport offered by the de Fayols estate.

A wide path led out of the village, past signs to beaches she had still not visited. She took the long way round, wanting to see more of the west side of the island and to work out exactly how the Domaine de Fayols sat in the landscape. The bicycle tyres crunched on small sandy stones as she followed the trail between green oak and pines: the Aleppo and the parasol pine. She spotted an
arquebusier
, a strawberry tree, and pulled off the path to have a closer look.

On the southwestern side of the island the path opened out into a small bay, reinforced by jagged rocks. All seemed at peace. It was too early in the year for tourist hordes; here was freedom from the modern world, for a while at least. There was a timelessness about being on an island so small that it seemed closed in on itself; the sense of being adrift, not quite connected to the rest of the world.

She pedalled along the coast path to the Calanque de l'Indienne. It was a small bay rather than a cliff inlet. On the west side was the lighthouse; on the other, the house at the Domaine de Fayols rose above the trees and green terraces of its garden. Ellie dismounted. Small brown crickets scattered as she walked the bike across tough grass.

On the sea below a boat was tied up by the end of a steep path; the turquoise water was so clear that the hull was fully visible over the pale ghosts of submerged rock.

From here, trees screened the high dark hedges that surrounded the memorial garden and the other outdoor rooms. Those gardens still puzzled her: the sense that they were the wrong structures in the wrong place persisted. Why would anyone have wanted to enclose gardens in this place of wide horizons in the first place? It didn't make sense, but perhaps she was overthinking. Perhaps there was no reason, or it was deliberately counterintuitive. Perhaps not until the reconstruction began would the answers become obvious. She had only the faded photographs to work from, and they were like looking into tarnished mirrors.

Some of the sculptural elements clearly held some past meaning, plotting the line back to the past and the doctor's passion for ancient history. But surely that could have been achieved more naturally in more open spaces, like the classical temples built on hillsides surrounded by light and air? If it had been left to her to create from scratch, she might well have chosen the same site above the sea, but the design would have embraced the elements, and announced itself proudly. As it was, the memorial garden was hidden away like a secret to be protected.

She made a few notes, a quick sketch of an arch that might frame rather than block the sea view, while alluding to the heavy original. When she looked up again, a man was watching her from the de Fayols side of the bay.

It might have been Laurent, so she waved. He did not respond.

 

T
he lighthouse was set on a great solid base, like a chimney rising from a bunker. What looked elegantly well proportioned when framed by the arch of the memorial garden was a monumental structure closer up.

Ellie pushed the bicycle towards it. Birds shrieked from high trees, among them the Wasp-eater, the Thin-Beak, and the Stormy Petrel, according to the guidebook. Giant fennel plants, showstoppers of the plant kingdom, offered globes composed of hundreds of yellow flowers; the towering stalks of these relatives of the hemlock contained a resin that could sicken grazing livestock and even kill. There was no sign of livestock here.

She walked around two sides of the lighthouse before she saw the door. The handle was rusty, but it opened easily.

Inside was a tiny museum—or rather, as there were few display cases but a considerable number of photographs and framed information sheets on the walls, a simple room offering a potted history of the lighthouse.

Ellie reached instinctively for her notebook, already scanning the walls for a complementary mirror view across the bay to the Domaine de Fayols.

The largest photograph was garlanded with a draped French flag with a plaque bearing the date: August 22, 1944. It showed the lighthouse dirty and run-down. To the left of this was a poster-size photograph, with a bilingual caption, of Senegalese troops led by General Magnan, breaching the beach defences to liberate the island under covering fire from American marines in their corvettes. To the right was another large photograph, of a line of islanders walking into the Place d'Armes led by the Abbé le Cuziat. According to the caption, they broke spontaneously into a rendition of “La Marseillaise,” the song echoing in the still air as the stout abbot hurried to the bell tower from which he raised the tricolour flag. Several houses on the left side of the square, as well as the beautiful Fournier house known as Le Château, were still smouldering in the wake of the departing Germans.

On a glass-topped table in front of these was a large, open ledger filled with rows of dates and figures, open to August 1944. A pair of well-worn gloves was attributed to Henri Rousset, the guardian of the lighthouse and recipient of the cross of the Légion d'Honneur in recognition of his heroic wartime actions.

Ellie spent a few more minutes looking around but found no connections to the domaine across the bay. She pulled the door closed after her and walked slowly to the edge of the cliff.

Patchy rock and scrub stretched out in the sun like old animals that were losing their fur. She almost tripped over a tall stone, so dazzling was the light. She looked down at her feet and saw that the stone had been placed deliberately by the path. Sunk into it was a lead plaque that read:

Angelo, bel Angelo Gabriel

Se tu non festi un angelo

Non vole resti in Ciel

Chanson

The sun pulsed ever warmer on her skin. Ellie stared down with a sudden sense of joy, which just as quickly dissipated, as if she had been on the brink of some profound understanding that fled from any scrutiny. It was the thought of war, she rationalized, like the death of the boy on the ferry. Everything led back to Dan. The loss and terror was the same, whether that war raged within the pages of picture books, fought with chariots and winged horses and pomegranate seeds against the dark powers of the underworld, or with cannonballs sent from ships to Napoleonic forts on islands, or in the searing deserts of Helmand.

She wished she believed in silent communication, in delicate signs that some spirits still burned, but she did not.

Yet something made her look back, up at the lighthouse lamp, and the words came into her head:
the light of the world
. The thought caught her by surprise. She had never been particularly religious, even less so after Dan.

The man was standing quite still, studying her.

He was about ten metres away, maybe less. His hands were pushed deep into the pockets of baggy trousers. It was hard to make out his features in the glare of the late morning sun. Her first thought was that he had something to do with the lighthouse, that he had come to ask her whether she wanted to make a donation to the homemade museum. She opened her mouth to give a tentative
“Bonjour”
but replaced it with a weak smile when he backed away. His retreat was curiously mocking, his palms held up in apology. She felt stupid, as if she had made some groundless accusation.

She looked away. Could he be the man she had waved to across the bay? She tried to recapture the scene in her mind, but it refused to materialize.

When she looked up a moment later, he had gone.

 

I
had another idea last night. It came to me after you left,” said Laurent de Fayols. “What do you think about a garden landscaped to be seen from the air?”

They were in a book-lined library, mercifully cool and softly lit after the harsh morning sun over the sea. Her photographs and sketches of the memorial garden were spread across a table.

“It would be a piece of fun, with a serious purpose,” Laurent went on, obviously enthused. “You have heard, I imagine, of Jacques Simon? No? OK, so since the early 1990s he was involved with what they call land art. Jacques Simon planted fields so that their designs and pictures could be visible from the air. Mainly these fields were on land close to airports, so they came into view when the planes took off and landed.”

This was so different from what they had previously discussed that she was at a loss. “You think you might want to try a design like that here?”

“There are many pleasure flights around here—it might even be a clever way of getting publicity for the wine we make.”

Ellie hesitated, feeling blindsided. He seized on her bewilderment to usher her out of the room, onto the terrace, and down into the grounds. “Come, come! You'll see what I mean.”

Instead of taking the wisteria walkway towards the memorial garden, he led her through orchards of apricots, peaches, nectarines, and almonds, trying to explain his vision for this set piece as they approached the vineyard.

It would have to be cleverly done, she thought, with reliable plants, but why not? If it was done well, it would be the talking point of the garden, and would generate good publicity for her as well as the vineyards at the Domaine de Fayols. It would be a unique modern creation. As a commission it had some distinct advantages over the historical restoration.

“All right . . . I'm just thinking out loud here. . . . If you want to dream up the kind of picture you'd like, then I'm very happy to discuss the practicalities, how it might be achieved. You want this as an alternative to the memorial restoration?”

“No, in addition of course. I'm not sure yet how I want it to look. It's just the beginning of an idea at the moment, you understand.”

“Of course.”

As she looked up, a small plane passed overhead. A white scratch opened across the dense blue of the sky.

“Gardens have always been about history and symbolism,” said Laurent. “The earthly paradise, the enclosed retreat from a cruel outside world.”

“I agree. That's the fascinating dimension—”

“I knew you would see it that way!”

“But”—she struggled to find a way of putting it diplomatically— “this is completely new . . . not at all what I was prepared for.” Only a day into the project, and Laurent was already revealing himself to be one of those maddeningly indecisive clients who constantly change their minds.

“But I believe in you, Miss Brooke. I have no doubt that you could achieve anything you wanted. And it is not impossible, is it?”

She pulled a face. “It can certainly be done,” she said when she saw how optimistic he was. So it could be, though it would require considerable extra work. “Can you describe what you have in mind?”

He rattled off ideas. He took her through the types of vines planted on the estate:
monistel, grenache, queue-de-renard, clairette-pointu, cinsault, rosé d'Aramon
. He proposed they taste the wines; she could study the subtle differences in their colour; it would be an amusement that she would enjoy.

But before they even reached the vineyard, Laurent veered off on yet another path. “Come, I want to show you what remains of the Greek wells. . . . That part of the estate opens up some most interesting possibilities. . . .”

 

S
he left that afternoon with an aching head. Whenever she had tried to discuss the memorial restoration, Laurent had quickly reverted to his new agenda, to advertise the vineyard from the air. His vision involved a river of red and pink to represent the abundant flow of wine. An interesting idea, but Ellie had to consider the practicalities. Rivers of lavender had been done. Waves of red, though—planted with what? Roses, pelargoniums, dark red oleanders? The best designs were all about patterns and playfulness, though there was a line between creative ingenuity and silly excess. And what about the labour-intense maintenance each year, and the poor longevity of such a scheme? Even a river of lavender would only last for a decade or so without careful tending.

Close to the most northwesterly point of the island, the wooded path sloped gently to meet the tideless sea. The beach was empty. She swam at last in the sea, feeling herself revive in water that slipped around her limbs like satin sheets.

Birds pecked at the shoreline. At one point someone else came down to the sand, then a dog ran past. The next time she looked back, both dog and owner had gone.

Her arms felt strong as she made for the rocks at the arm of the bay. The water was so clear it was like a discovery of a silent new world of cave entrances and subterranean flowers. A deeper dive, and she would be able to touch the bed. A few kicks, and she went down. She was almost there when, from nowhere, the thought welled up that she might never make it up again. She stroked harder, watching her own pale arms draw closer to a constellation of starfish, a night sky above a coral garden.

A dull pain in her chest intensified. The water darkened all around her, and she panicked. If she didn't act now, she would lose consciousness. She turned back, in a sunlight-shattering, froth-churning, choking rush for the surface. As she broke the water, the thought came to her: You nearly drowned.