The Sea Garden (9 page)

The tang of incense in the hall. Ellie looked around, half expecting to see some ghostly figure. At last Laurent met her eye. He shook his head. More flashes of light—surely this was lightning—reflected on the polished surface of the table. Through the glass doors the night sky slipped past, riding the wind.

Mme de Fayols rambled incoherently, then screamed. Laurent tried and failed to calm her. Then the cries thinned. She dipped her head. Her bony fingers plucked at the folds of her skirt. In an instant Ellie felt nothing but sadness for her. Then—

“Oh please, no . . .”

Mme de Fayols was hardly strong enough to keep the gun level. It shook in her frail grip. Was it the same gun that had been in the drawer upstairs? As if that mattered. She would drop it at any moment. Laurent was quietly making his way behind her chair. A few more seconds, and he would take it from her.

“I'm so sorry,” said Ellie with parched throat. The weapon was no doubt all for show, but she had no intention of taking any risk. “You're right. I shouldn't have come here. I've obviously upset you, and I didn't mean to. I'm sorry.” The words came out as a kind of sob that did not sound like her.

No response.

Ellie watched her. The rushing in her ears came again. Her muscles were flexed to run, but she was pinned to the ground as if in a bad dream. All I wanted was my bloody phone, she thought.

An explosion of thunder overhead seemed to crack the house open. A second later the room fizzed with an eerie brightness, and the gun fired. Her reaction was pure instinct. In the jolt of light and noise, Ellie ran. At last she was moving, throwing herself forward as fast as she could, out onto the terrace and down the stone stairway.

The garden was black. There was barely any light from the sky—no stars, no moon. The storm clouds were thickly banked. But the day's heat lay heavy on the ground, hotter now than it had been when she arrived, like the updraft of a forest fire. Another bolt of lightning plunged a shaft down into the tree line.

She veered round, trying to keep to the path. It was hard to decide what to do—was it crazy to ride a bicycle in an electric storm? Should she just keep running, or find somewhere to hide until the worst was over? More thunder rumbled overhead.

Her feet were no longer crunching on gravel but springing off grass or soft earth. Somehow she had lost the path. How could she have missed it? She stopped. Her vision was blurred.

She put her hands out. She touched foliage, a dense wall of hedge. She could smell the opulent death scent of the datura. She ran along the length of the dark wall, as if feeling for an answer. Her head felt tight. If she could reorient herself, she could find the long way round the house. Perhaps that would be safer anyway.

A rustle of movement ahead. She froze. When she moved, she sensed other movements. She was not alone. It was as though she were being tracked.

“Ellie! Stop—come back!” It sounded like Laurent.

She fled, running faster than she had ever run. Lightning cracked—or were those more shots? She ran until her lungs were bursting. The ground was sloping downhill. Her muscles felt so weak she stumbled, but kept going. Ever steeper, the path plunged downward. If she stopped, she would fall. But she knew now where she was.

The sea was ahead, the choppy blackness of the Calanque.

The lighthouse. Was that a beam of light?

She was jerked backwards. She had been caught. Hands out to push her invisible assailant away, she touched prickly branches. Her shirt had snagged on some small tree or shrub. She pulled away, tearing the fabric. Gasping for breath, she doubled over.

When she came up, she turned slowly, hardly daring to look behind. As far as she could make out, she was alone.

But then the clouds shifted, releasing enough opaque brightness to show dark shapes gaining on her. This time, she would not go back. On and on she scrambled. She was soaked through. When he caught her, his hands were slippery on her arms.

It was Gabriel.

He pulled her close with infinite tenderness. “It's over now,” he said.

“Mme de Fayols—she tried to kill me!”

“It's all right, it's all right . . . I've got you. I'm here now.”

“You came to find me? How did you—”

He stroked her hair with a warm hand, easing away the fear. “Shh . . . you don't have to worry about anything. I'm here. Whatever needs to be done, I can help you. You're safe now.”

She let herself fall against him.

 

T
hey walked away from the garden by the sea. The storm had ceased. The clouds were lifting to reveal a flame-red sky; he held her by the hand. They were bathed in the sunset. A plane soared overhead, and she seemed to be taking flight herself.

“No rush now,” he said. “We have all the time in the world.”

He was right. That was the moment she felt the past slip away, the longing for a man who was gone, along with the grief that had locked the door to her future. She could still feel the sadness, but it no longer held her down.

In this present hour, there was time for anything to happen, endless time.

So she continued slowly, with Gabriel, the man who understood the power of the past, towards the most westerly point of the island. Dark rocks stood waiting to be sculpted by the wind. Tiny seeds rode the air, waiting to fall and take root. Under the sea, corals formed and pearls hardened. Sap rose and juices fed along the vines. White trumpets flowered, and mandarins and lemons shone like drops of gold in fragrant groves.

Book II

The Lavender Field

1

Provence

April 1944

N
ot a word should be spoken. The scent was the word.

Each week it was the same routine: the girl caught the bus coming down from Digne, no different from any other nineteen-year-old with a job to do. The bus pulled in under the plane trees in the village of Céreste, and she alighted. By a bench where she placed her baskets for a moment, she reached into her shoulder bag for the perfume bottle and carefully dabbed her wrists, applying enough fragrance for it to be unambiguous. Nothing suspicious about this, simply attention to detail; a charming advertisement for the Distillerie Musset, makers of soap and scent. A blue scarf secured her hair; tied around her waist, the lavender-print apron she wore to serve in the shop. Then she picked up her two heavy baskets and made her deliveries: one to the hotel, one to the doctor's surgery, and one to the general store. She walked purposefully but would stop for a few minutes to pass the time of day with occasional customers. Then, when her load was lighter, she went on to various houses around and beyond the village and finally arrived at the café.

She would order a small glass of weak wine, and greet the regulars. It was important to acknowledge the Gestapo officers or the Milice at the best tables. She would drink the wine, turn to leave, and then hesitate by the man reading the paper. Sometimes she went over to the Germans to ask if they had any special requests, a present for a girl perhaps. She always gave them a heart-lifting smile, just the right balance of sunny nature and shy innocence, then took a few paces back to the table where the man sat with his newspaper. He was always there, a little unkempt, smudging his glass with dirty hands. Sometimes he read, sometimes he stared into space. They all knew that his spirit had gone. He drank too much. She ignored him, let the scent pass the message. It had warmed now on her skin thanks to all the walking; her quickened pulse pumped sweet fragrances into the air between them. Lavender: Come to the farm. Rose: We have more men to move. Thyme: Supplies needed urgently.

She stood at the table, halfway between the counter and the door, making a note of any orders from the men who enjoyed their new powers so much. Smiling pleasantly, though all her instincts told her to spit in their faces.

She glanced up at the clock on the front of the Mairie to check that her watch was correct. Unwise to hang around too long at the roadside bus stop, with the eyes of the men in the café lingering on her. She thanked the café owner, then walked across the road to catch the return bus as the clock hand moved down to show half past three. A nice normal pace, all the way.

2

Wild Violet

1943

W
hen the war lowered the whole of France into blackness, everyone spoke of shadows falling, the dulling of the sun. It seemed to Marthe that she was one of the few who already had the knowledge necessary to survive. She had never seen the occupation of France, but she felt its force pressing down like a meaty pair of hands around the throat; it weakened the breath and weighted the body. On Nazi flags dripping from official buildings a sinister half-spider sat on a full moon against a background of blood, a sight surely no more peculiar to see than to imagine. Polished black boots rang on cobblestones, stamping authority to the streets, and harsh voices shouted in a language no one understood. The more Marthe heard, the braver it made her: she was no worse off than anyone else as the Germans and the despised Vichy regime tightened their hold on the south.

“Filthy collaborators!”

The insult flew at them like a hissing insect. Mme Musset and Marthe, walking arm-in-arm down the boulevard des Tilleuls in Manosque, said nothing in response. Marthe felt Madame's grip dig deep into her arm. Their pace picked up, but the older woman made no attempt to refute the accusation.

Marthe allowed herself to be steered along the street to the shop with its own small perfume distillery and soap factory at the rear. There they stopped abruptly. The morning jangle of keys preceded their entry into a calming billow of lavender. Madame opened up the shop, then oversaw Marthe's tasks for the day, providing two young girls to help her. They set to work in the shed at the back, making a fresh batch of rosemary soap.

“Is it true what they say, that we are collaborators?” Marthe finally asked Madame as they stood side by side in the shop putting together an order of
eau de lavande
. It was shaming to admit, even if only to herself, that she had never considered that they might be.

“We are doing the best we can for ourselves.”

“But when people say—”

“It's best to forget whatever you happen to hear.”

“So—”

“We all have to bend with the wind.”

“But—”

“No more questions, my petal.”

“ ‘Nothing is to be feared, it is only to be understood.' Do you know who said that?” persisted Marthe. “Marie Curie, the great scientist—the great
woman
scientist. They told us that, more than once, at school, and I have always believed it.”

“And I cannot disagree. Now, make sure these stoppers are pushed in as tight as can be. I'll not send out leaking bottles.”

Marthe pressed her thumbs harder into the cork until it stuck fast in the glass neck. In the end, she rationalized, bravery came down to faith: faith in the Mussets' kindness and calm authority; faith in the knowledge that waves still broke on the southern shores, that spring buds would unfurl into flower and fruit would ripen.

Throughout the war the Distillerie Musset had continued to manufacture and distribute basic lines of soap and antiseptic cleaning fluids, and small amounts of scent. In most parts of France, a soap made of wood ash and clay was a luxury permitted only to those who had the dirtiest employments. In Provence, where olives still produced oil, and soap could be made from the most basic of local plants, the wartime mix was easily improved; the authorities demanded they continue, allowing Victor Musset to negotiate favourable terms for the supply of any excess.

“What's the alternative?” M. Musset always said. “Without work, we will all starve. With produce, we can at least barter. And if we do not work, what are we? We are dead trees, or fruit that falls unripened. If we have no respect for the land and the crops, respect for the olives and almonds and vines, then we have no respect for ourselves.”

Following their lead in this as in everything, Marthe allowed herself to embrace this comfortingly simple philosophy of life in the foothills close to the great lavender fields on the Valensole plateau. She had already left one home and found another, faced both her fears and then the terrible reality that they were not unfounded. This was the place where, against the odds, the loss of her sight had opened up a world she might never have known without her blindness.

The Mussets were clearly fond of Marthe, and she was so grateful to them for her apprenticeship at the Distillerie Musset that she never thought to question what they told her. They were a second family, and with that came absolute trust and acceptance.

 

T
he war had not yet begun when Marthe Lincel went to the perfume factory for the first time. It was a visit organised by the school for the blind in Manosque. If anyone were ever to ask her, she would tell him without hesitation that it was the day that changed her life.

She was eighteen years old, almost ready to leave the school, when she took her first careful steps towards the long table in the blending room at the Distillerie Musset, her hands in the hands of other girls, one in front and one behind. The girls walked in concert down from the school, through gusts of dung from the stables, past the ramparts of the ancient teardrop-shaped town, on past incense from the church and into the tree-lined boulevard des Tilleuls. At the door to the shop, a bell tinkled, and moments later they seemed to enter the very flowering of lavender.

The scent was all around them; it curled and diffused in the air with a sweet warmth and subtlety, then burst with a peppery, musky intensity. The blind girls moved into another room. There they arranged themselves expectantly around a long wooden table, Mme Musset welcomed them, and a cork was pulled with a squeaky pop.

“This is pure essence of lavender, grown on the Valensole plateau,” said Madame. “It is in a glass bottle I am sending around to the right for you all to smell. Be patient, and you will get your turn.”

Other scents followed: rose and mimosa and oil of almond. Now that they felt more relaxed, some of the other girls started being silly, pretending to sniff too hard and claiming the liquid leapt up at them. Marthe remained silent and composed, concentrating hard. Then came the various blends: the lavender and rosemary antiseptic, the orange and clove scent for the house in winter, the liqueur with the tang of juniper that made Marthe unexpectedly homesick for her family's farming hamlet over the hills to the west, where as a child she had been able to see brightness and colours and precise shapes of faces and hills and fruits and flowers.

Afterwards, as the pupils filed past Mme Musset, each nodding her thanks, Marthe found she was speaking before she had even decided to. “Could I come again, please?”

“You enjoyed this, my petal?”

“Very much, madame. I can't tell you how much.”

The line of girls was pressing into her back now, warm and softly solid.

“I will talk to your teacher.”

The movement of other bodies carried her along past the lilting voice that Marthe could have listened to all day, telling her so much she wanted to know and making sense of the world in a way that she understood instinctively.

“Till the next time, I hope,” said Marthe.

She could not speak on the way back. It was as though her senses had fully opened and the smells of the town were not only distinct but living, complex but delicious puzzles to solve. Waves of vanilla cream from the patisserie danced with iron from the blacksmith's forge. As they waited to cross a road, she picked up powdered sugar and spring woodland.

Voices of young children sang out: “Gathered today! Wild violets—only a centime a bunch!”

Marthe dropped the hand she was holding and plucked a centime from her pocket.

 

M
me Delphine Musset, wife of Victor Musset, owner of the small perfume distillery, also held the title of potions manager, which denoted a higher calling than the production of homespun fragrances. She was a mixer of country tonics and medicines. In a more southern, less industrialised country she might have been known as a wise woman, the kind who dispensed natural cures and used her powers with compassion.

She kept her word to Marthe. Over the following months, she arranged for her to come back a couple of hours one afternoon a week. Marthe washed bottles and stirred soap mixtures with the workers in the sheds of the courtyard factory behind the shop. She was there when deliveries of other essences were made from the farm: the grass-green herbs of spring and winter infusions of cardamom and ginger. But in the course of the many tasks there was always time to talk about which aromas combined successfully and why the addition of one could deepen the impact of another; and the more Marthe asked, the more she was allowed to do. When the time came for her to leave school, she had impressed the Mussets enough with her nose for fragrance to be offered an apprenticeship as a scent maker.

The war came, but life in the unoccupied south went on. For the first few years of learning her craft, Marthe lodged in a room of a house belonging to a friend of Mme Musset. It was close to the shop-factory, and her landlady would take Marthe's arm for the five-minute walk along the pavement under the plane trees to her workplace.

When Mme Musset spoke, it was in the true accent of the southern mountains. Every vowel proclaimed her ancestry in these rocky slopes. To Marthe, whose only physical contact with her was the guiding touch of her hands, Mme Musset was a stout person, with a wide, red-cheeked face. It was several years before Marthe was given a description of the strong bony features that gave her a touch of the witch, one of those elderly women in fairy tales who might be good, or might be evil.

“The kind who sets a trap,” said Bénédicte.

By the time Bénédicte told her this, Marthe was engrossed in the alchemy of perfume and the infinite possibilities it offered. Bénédicte, her sister, was fifteen years old, with little experience outside the farming hamlet where they had been brought up. She had loved to read from an early age; Marthe remembered her bent over an illustrated book of folk tales, the grotesque coloured plates showing wild creatures and wilder humans with distorted features, and she understood where this disconcerting image might have sprung from.

“That's not like you, to be unkind,” said Marthe.

“You told me that's what you wanted me to come for, so that I could describe to you what you couldn't see for yourself.”

“That's true. But—”

“I'm not being unkind. I'm doing my best.”

But Marthe felt her certainties fracture. Here was her sister, usually so good-hearted and loyal, speaking out of turn about the Mussets, her saviours. Mme Musset had seen something special in her. She had kept her word, and they had chosen her. More than that, Madame had given her a purpose in life, and a future she could scarcely have imagined but for the lucky chance of a school visit to the distillery.

“And Monsieur Musset, what do you think of him?”

Bénédicte gave a nervous laugh. “He's the boss, and he acts like one.”

“He can be a bit distant when he's at work. And short-tempered, sometimes, when people make silly mistakes. ‘He doesn't suffer fools,' that's what Madame says. It took me a while to gain his acceptance. But—oh, Bénédicte!—when he is with his family, he is the kindest man. You should hear the terrible jokes and how affectionate he is to his wife.”

She didn't need her sister to tell her that Victor Musset was a wide tree of a man—Marthe could sense his bulk and hear where the rumble of his voice started deep in his chest. When Marthe offered the Mussets her ideas for new perfumes, he might suggest a touch more refinement, but there was always expansive praise for her efforts. Madame's small sigh after an inhalation told her all was well. But Monsieur's heavy arm came around her narrow shoulders, and she would shine in his encouragement like a star in the firmament. She had had to work hard to earn his approval.

“He works harder than anyone, always on the move all day between the fields and the production line, the shop and the customers. At least three days a week he's out on the road in the old trap delivering the basic lines in soap and cleaning products. He says he likes to do it himself. He loves to eat, and talk and read, too. In the evenings he reads the essays of Montaigne, makes notes and reads aloud from them—so you see he is a man of culture. The pages of his book turn slowly, and his pencil scribbles. You can tell he is thinking deeply.”

Gradually she had relaxed in his company. The Mussets had no children, but there were always people around at their farmhouse up in the hills above Manosque—in many ways spending time there, as she soon did, was like coming home to the farmstead where she grew up. She missed her family, naturally, but what she was learning at the perfume factory was so absorbing that any misgivings or homesickness passed.

“I'll never forget the day Monsieur called me over to the chair where he was reading by the fire. ‘Here are some words for you, little one, from the wisest man I know,' he said. He meant Montaigne, of course. ‘A straight oar looks bent in the water. What matters is not merely that we see things but how we see them.' And ever since then . . . well, I've known he is thoughtful of others. He is a good man.”

Bénédicte took her hand and squeezed the fingers affectionately. “It's obvious you're happy here. Maman and Papa . . . it'll make them happy too when I tell them.”

“I am, yes.”

It was true: despite everything, she was happy. Sometimes it was hard to put such an elemental feeling into words. How was it possible to capture in words what the essence spoke for itself?

After her sister's visit, Marthe's head was brimming with new pictures: the fields of lavender at Valensole, all the subtle grades of blue and purple; the way twilight melted them all into one; the precise hues of the liquid distilled from each plant, the shape and colour of the bottles, and a new understanding of the surroundings where she was learning her craft. Just as plant variations were bred together to create new hybrids—like the lavandin from the delicate wild lavender—this was what she did with the descriptions her sister had supplied; she grafted them on to the sights she remembered from childhood and reinvigorated them.