Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
“D
on’t look now,” said Dom.
We were unpacking the car after a trip to the Saturday market. He’d been in an expansive mood, buying sublime venison and a walnut tart for supper, and more wine, chef’s knives, and a king-size roasting tin, which gave me quiet hope that we might entertain guests at some stage. His ebullience vanished abruptly.
“Coming our way now,” he said. “Down our path.”
Sabine was dressed in jeans and boots, so it was hardly incongruous when she stopped in front of our garage and said, “Lovely day for a walk, isn’t it! How are you?”
During an exchange of awkward pleasantries, Dom continued to pull shopping bags from the trunk of the car, head lowered. There was no doubt in my mind that he was avoiding Sabine.
“Call me,” she said airily, when it was obvious there would be no easy chatter and invitation to come inside. She turned to go, the merest flicker of amusement playing in her eyes, then a wave over her shoulder.
“What was she doing here?”
“Just dropped by on her walk, as she said. You were a bit rude, weren’t you?”
“She was trespassing.”
“Only in the way everyone else does.” I was thinking of the hunters. “Besides . . . I quite like her.” I didn’t want to be too disingenuous.
Silence.
“I don’t like the way she looks at us.”
“Dom . . .”
“So what does she want?”
“She lives on the other side of the village. I’ve run into her before along here. We got talking.”
“Why would she be interested?”
“Just curiosity, don’t you think? The house, who’s finally bought it, what will we do to it. The usual.”
I could so easily have mentioned Rachel then, and it would all have been out in the open. Why didn’t I? There wasn’t anything to hide, except for my desire to know about his life with her, and jealousy of what she must have meant to him.
It was at times like these that I wanted to go away and weep for all that we’d lost already, the innocence and ease of conversation between us, and the trust.
W
hat I haven’t told you yet is that Marthe was beautiful. Her skin was creamy and her chestnut hair was thick and wavy, and fell effortlessly into flattering styles. And her eyes! Those blind brown eyes were deep and intelligent, and the shape of almonds. I know that’s a cliché, but in her case it was absolutely true; the cliché might have been coined to describe her. If you looked at her face, there was no hint she was blind, no way of telling as there was, straightaway, with some of the other girls at her school. She had a gentle manner, she was always popular, and she was so eager to learn.
No wonder she got her chance at the perfume factory. As soon as she left the school for the blind at eighteen, she was taken on to be trained as a scent-maker. We were all delighted for her; and in that way, though not of her choosing in the first place, simply her determination to find some positive outcome from the terrible hand she had been dealt, she was the first of the line to leave Les Genévriers and find work in one of the new industries that were drawing the young to the towns.
Some years ago, I wrote to Marthe again about selling off the farm, but there was no reply. It turned out that the gentle soul had a heart of iron, after all. And as Les Genévriers can never be sold without her consent, I remain here.
M
ore snow fell, then melted into ridges of mud and water.
“We should go skiing. What do you think?” said Dom.
Skiing has never held a particular lure for me, but I knew he loved it. Suddenly, it seemed like an excellent plan. I was ready to leave the claustrophobic atmosphere of our hillside, the sense of loneliness underscored by the feeling that we were never the only spirits here. I suspect he was, too.
We had a long, enjoyable discussion about which of the small resorts only a couple of hours up the
autoroute
we should try, then he returned from the travel agent in Apt the next day and announced that we were going to Switzerland. He had booked a hotel in Davos. A few days later, we were on Thomas Mann’s magic mountain, with its menacing sanatorium above the long, ugly town.
Under clear skies, the relatively shallow runs down the Parsenn were wide, glossy sheets of pure white. Frost sparkled on the packed snow and rocks, and hard exercise in the fresh mountain air pumped optimism back into our bloodstreams. In the great, sweeping bowls, the controlled hum and intermittent clickings as chairlifts were pulled smoothly over their rollers sent a message of strength and power.
Dom was an effortlessly elegant skier, relaxed as he carved wide arcs down the drops. We had some good days.
On the bad days, snowflakes were chips of flying ice on our tight and reddened faces. The whiteout was disorienting. Sweat dried cold on my back. The gray-brown rocks of the sheer outcrops, where the snow could not grip, emerged too late for comfort, for good judgment. For me, on those days, fear of an accident hung like a premonition.
Dom skied ever faster and harder as I struggled to keep up.
I
t was a radiant day, silver-bright and warm in the sun, when he stopped half a run ahead of me on a steep, red piste on the Gotschnagrat. When I drew level, he was bending over, facing straight down the mountain. I made some joking comment about it all being too much for him before I realized something was wrong.
“What is it? Are you sick?”
He shook his head.
Closer up, I saw tears streaming down his face. “What is it?” I asked, but gently this time.
Again, no answer.
Automatically, I thought, Was it me, was I the problem? The sun like a laser. Stinging glare from the slope.
“It was a mistake to come here. We shouldn’t have come,” he said eventually, his cheeks chalky in the pure, harsh light.
I reached up to his face and wiped away a new trickle without understanding that he was unraveling from the inside out. How could I have done?
The snowfields rippled out below us. Salt tears and the afterimage of the searchlight sun blurred my own vision.
Dom just stood there, silently, while I was powerless to help.
It was Thomas de Quincey who wrote that it was never possible to forget, only for a thousand accidents to serve as a veil between our present consciousness and “the secret inscriptions on the mind.” That’s a beautiful phrase, and one that we all recognize even if we could not have distilled it so perfectly into words.
We cut our week short and returned to Provence. He didn’t explain then, and later tried to shrug off the whole incident. He was quiet but didn’t seem unhappy with me. In fact, he was more loving than ever.
T
he summer I was fifteen, I went up to the mountains of Valensole for the lavender harvest. It was Marthe’s idea, she who persuaded our parents to let me go to see for myself how the ridged uplands had been transformed into purple carpets where the scent was born.
Well, not only to see for myself: to see for her.
“I want you to look really hard, just like we used to, look right into the heart of the flowers and the spiny leaves and the earth and describe it to me. Use all your senses to make the pictures come alive for me. Would you do that, Bénédicte, would you? I need to know, to put the pictures in my head, so that I’m not missing any single aspect as I try out my ideas. I don’t want to be just a blender of scents who follows set recipes, I want to follow my own instincts. I want to see it all, the whole process, and you’re the only one who will understand, who can do it in a way I can see and who won’t think I am mad!”
My immediate reaction was delight. I was so grateful to her, for handing me this chance to experience some independence, to find out for myself what had so enthralled us all from her descriptions; and, not least, I was grateful to be asked to perform this service for her, to show her in such a practical way how much I loved and admired her.
Neither was there any objection from our parents. I would be working outside the farm for the first time and earning a little money. There could be no argument raised against that.
The night before I went, as we said good night, she pressed a little notebook and pencil into my hand.
“Remember, you are my eyes now,” she said.
T
he lavender road winds eastward from our farmstead, up through the hills of northern Provence. I was conscious that I was following in her footsteps, that this was the road that Marthe took when she was younger than me, and that she had found new prospects for her life at the end of it, when all might have been so dark.
The prevalent view at the time was that lavender was work for the young, and the women, too. After the Great War, there was an effort made to increase lavender production as a way of halting the exodus of young people from the villages. Then, in 1920, the hybrid lavandin was made by crossing pure lavender with hardy spike lavender, which was tough as well as aromatic, and the ideal crop had been discovered. Little by little, the old, pure lavender was replaced by the new wonder-plants, and by the summer I arrived, it was becoming more and more established.
And it was wartime again, 1941. The men who could were fighting, underground, any way they could. Even Pierre, like all the others his age, was waiting to be called up, though in the unoccupied south, our so-called Armistice Army was playing a waiting game. It was said our boys were hiding arms in the hills, for the uprising against the Nazis when it came.
More women than men were in the fields, which may have had a bearing on our parents allowing me to go. I remember being happy at the prospect, not thinking of it as war work. I wanted to see for myself the violet waves on the hillsides, the crops planted on slopes—never on flat land, because that’s where it will attract the frost—but on slopes, where the cold air cannot settle. I was proud to be earning some extra money for the family as well as fulfilling my promise to Marthe. It was a heady feeling, that first taste of independence and responsibility, and it was with a sense of excited wonder that I reported to the lavender farm, a letter of recommendation from my sister and her teacher at the school for the blind tucked into my leather pouch.
At a stone hut, which must once have been a shepherd’s
borie
, I was directed to a field about a kilometer away. I arrived to find a field of hunched backs, the blue rows reverting to dusty green behind the women curled over like commas, cloth bags slung across their bodies.
A man in a white shirt and open waistcoat, the only upright figure in the panorama, beckoned to me. When I drew closer, the sun caught a gold tooth at the front of his mouth as he spoke, and I stared, having never seen such an ornamentation.
I was given a bag, a small sickle, and a starting place. Although he asked my name and nodded, he did not introduce himself. For several days afterward, until I got to know some of the other girls and exchange information, he would remain simply the man in the waistcoat.
“Watch out for the bees, and the vipers,” he said.
“Vipers?”
“They hide under the flowers.”
I put on my apron and pulled my cotton scarf up over my head. My eyes were already hurting from the relentless sun.
Nervously, I began. It was tiring work but I was keen to prove myself. The bag grew heavier and bumped against my legs. The scent was heavenly, all around in heavy fumes, so intense that after a while it seemed to pulse.
The other women ranged in age from girls of about thirteen to grandmothers. We were spaced too far apart for any conversation. We bent and cut and pulled, making sheaves as we went, tying the bunches with twine as they became unwieldy, then transferring these to our canvas bags. All was quiet save for the drone of fat bees and other insects, and the scrape of the sickle as it tore the stalks. Now and then, a mouse would cause a rustle.
When each bag was full, we took it to the end of the row, where the flowers were all laid out in the sun to dry for a few hours before distillation.
Eventually, a cart like a hayrick wobbled over to the growing piles of flowers. It was pulled by a noble horse so calm that it seemed drugged. Perhaps it was, by the mysterious olfactory properties of the flowers. It was a discovery, how much horses and donkeys, even sheep and goats, enjoy grazing on lavender. Not many years later, they would start to use tractors with iron wheels to pull the heavily laden ricks, but that summer, with petrol so scarce, the power was still provided the old-fashioned way.
Men with pitchforks were throwing the stalks and flowers up like hay. Another stood on top of the shaggy load, shouting. Then, when it seemed not another petal could possibly cling on, and the mauve tassels were dripping in every direction, the order was given to sway off to the corner where the alembic had been pulled in by a donkey.
It was a strange and primitive contraption, this double-boiler copper still. In appearance, it was like a potbellied stove with a substantial round column for a chimney. I watched (we had taken a break for a drink of cool water) as water was poured into the belly of the machine and it was set to boil over a fire. Meanwhile, the lavender blossoms were beaten from the stems and packed into the chimney above for the scent to be extracted by steam.
“How long does it take?” I was thinking, of course, of the notes I would make for Marthe, determined to remember all the details. I picked up one of the broken stems and examined the spiky end where a few minuscule petals clung feebly.
“About thirty minutes from the time the water boils,” said the man in the waistcoat.
It was a straight answer, but I realized from the tone of his voice that I might have gone too far, been too familiar perhaps. Did no one else want to understand how it all worked? Feeling I had overstepped the mark, I kept my head down and my work rate up for the rest of the day.
When the whistle finally went for the end of our shift, my back was so stiff I could barely stand up straight. Slowly, we filed to the entrance of the field, past the boss. He seemed to stare intently at me as I passed, so I dropped my eyes and hurried on. It was a walk of a couple of kilometers back to the farmhouse.
W
e seasonal workers were lodged in a group of primitive wooden huts. Meals were all outdoor affairs, taken at a long wooden table outside the dormitory hut. The food was rationed and meager. I was more interested in making friends with the others, to keep life pleasant, and the others must have shared this aim, for generally there was quite a party atmosphere, especially in the evenings.
Our beds were narrow thin mattresses on planks with sacking for sheets. Luckily, we had no need of these, as the nights were so warm, and sleep was only possible in the stuffy dormitory if you laid yourself out uncovered on top of the mattress and stayed as still as you could. Sometimes, when there seemed no breath of air to spare, we dragged the mattresses outside and slipped into sleep under the bright stars.
As a group, we were mainly girls and young women. The older women apparently came from the nearby villages in the morning and went back each evening.
It was all pretty friendly. Being one of the youngest, I wasn’t of much interest to the ones who were over twenty and wanted to talk about hairstyles and their romances with men, but I found easy company with a couple of others more my own age, Aurélie and Mariette. Aurélie was the tallest girl I had ever seen, taller even than Papa, and with long, thin shins like a giraffe I had seen in a book; her back often hurt her, perhaps because she had farther to bend. Mariette was the daughter of a cheesemaker at Banon. She would always share sharp white patties made of goat’s milk, wrapped in dry brown leaves, which she brought from her family’s farm. Her generosity didn’t make her popular, she was too awkward for that, but I liked her. I sensed we shared a similar lack of ease away from our own family land, though neither of us ever admitted it, being committed to claiming success in striking out on our own for the first time.
Among the field workers were Spanish and Portuguese, men and women, regulars at harvesttime, and paid by the task. They were polite to us, extremely voluble among themselves, and kept slightly apart. What they were doing there during the war, I don’t know. Perhaps the authorities didn’t, either, but they were obviously known and trusted by the farmers, so perhaps they had simply stayed after other harvests and been assimilated into the land, just like us.
They slept in a tent at the side of the fields and cooked for themselves on a camping stove. What they thought about sleeping so close to vipers slithering around the flowers, I never got the chance to ask.