Authors: Deborah Lawrenson
B
énédicte drifts through the rooms of the lower floors, into the dust of venerable scents: flecks of the lavender held in the corners of drawers; flakes of the pinewood armoire; the soot of long-dead fires; and, from the present, the deep mossy aroma from cloud formations of damp above the rose-tiled floor; the sharp white smells of late-spring flowers outside.
These visitors are new. She is sure she has never seen them before, though she closes her eyes and tries to think calmly, to count her breaths, slowing her intake of air, scouring her memory to make sure. When she opens her eyes, they are still there.
The strangeness is that they stare straight into her face, just as they look around her so intently, into the corners of the rooms, up to the cracked ceilings, the fissures in the walls, yet they don’t acknowledge her presence. All is silent, but for the tapping of the catalpa tree in the courtyard and the creak of a newly opened shutter that lets in a shifting band of brightness.
I will sit a while longer, Bénédicte thinks. Watch to see what they do next.
Breathe. Breathe deeply.
T
he property drew us in immediately. Not love at first sight, exactly, not as explosive as that: more a deep, promising undertow, as if it had been waiting for us, and we for it. It was familiar, in that it was the same sensation as when Dom and I first met: recklessness muted by instant empathy, surrounded by beauty.
Meeting Dom was the most incredible thing that had ever happened to me. A classic whirlwind romance. Deciding so quickly to throw my lot in with his was the most daring, rash, life-enhancing choice I had ever made. My friends and family wondered if I had lost my head, and of course I had. Head, heart, mind, and body. I wanted him and, miraculously, he wanted me.
D
om and I met in a maze.
It was on the shores of Lake Geneva. I’d seen a photograph of the château at Yvoire while flipping through a magazine in a coffee shop that Saturday morning. If the accompanying description was beguiling, the name of the maze in the garden was irresistible. It was called the Labyrinth of the Five Senses.
According to the waitress, it was only twenty minutes out of town, across the border in France. But it wasn’t hard to take a taxi, or even a bus. I was doing nothing else that whole weekend, staying in one of Geneva’s soulless city center hotels, sleep broken by the roar of traffic, bored already by the thought of more dull meetings on Monday morning.
So I went.
It was a picturesque little place. Golden spires thrust up from narrow alleys, catching the winter sun. The château, curiously small and homely, seemed to rise from the lake itself.
I wandered quite happily on my own, unconcerned by the maze but ever more certain with every sense that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere in life. My so-called career was in a dull phase, and, as such, a reflection of my own limitations; it was one of the reasons I accepted the job that had brought me briefly to Switzerland. As for any social life, it seemed as if high tide had receded, leaving only wrinkles and minor wreckage to show for the fun.
Then everything changed.
There, in a living cloister of hornbeam, the air richly perfumed by a line of daphne, there was Dom.
“I seem to be lost,” he said.
He spoke in French, but leaving no doubt that he was British. The atrocious accent gave it away, of course, but it was a very British thing to say, under the circumstances.
“What about you?” he asked, and we both laughed, because the eponymous labyrinth was nothing more complicated than a few low hedges that linked the gardens.
His face was tanned, and there were strands of gold and red in his bear-brown hair. A good smile, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Tall, but not towering. I had noticed him earlier. He was on his own, too, set apart somehow from the other visitors in more than the sense of not being half of a couple or part of a family. Partly it was the intense self-assurance in the way he walked, loose and confident like an athlete. I saw him take in a particularly pretty view of plants and stone set against the water but somehow remain detached. He stood still, absorbed it, and moved off. While other tourists attacked with cameras, greedily capturing the scene, imprinting themselves on its beauty, he simply looked and went on.
We started talking, inconsequential nonsense about mazes, then, imperceptibly at first, moving in the same direction until we were walking the same path together. Through the Garden of Sound, where he talked, unexpectedly, about Debussy; through the Garden of Scent, where the cold air was spring-sharp with narcissi; on through the Gardens of Color and Touch, where we discussed synesthesia, and settled on Fridays being orange and shiny-smooth. In the Garden of Taste, we stopped.
“It’s supposed to be full of edible plants,” he said, reading from a leaflet.
We looked around. It was February, not a good month for garden crops.
“You could try that ornamental cabbage,” I said.
“Tempting—but no, thank you.”
So we kept walking, out of the château gardens to a dark, warm café where we drank coffee and ate cake. We had more coffee. And still we talked. It was so easy. It became a conversation that continued and sustained and bound us as hours became days became months.
That day at the lake, I could have taken a different turn on those labyrinthine paths and we would never have met. I might have taken a taxi instead of a bus, arrived an hour earlier and missed him. I might not have agreed to attend those extra meetings on Monday and spent the weekend alone in Geneva.
But you can’t think like that. It is what it is. Either walk on, or accept.
H
e had been skiing with friends but decided to cut his losses a few days early. The winter had been unseasonably warm and sunny, and the snow had yielded early to mud-stained slush.
“Didn’t you want to stay just for the company, enjoy the rest of your time off together?” I asked him over that first coffee. Now that he had taken off his sunglasses, I could see he was older than I’d thought, a fair bit older than me. A low lamp on the table lit his eyes, so I could see they were gray-green. Lovely eyes, full of intelligence. A bit of mischief, too.
“It’s not really time off for me in the same way it is for them.”
“How so?”
“I don’t have a job like theirs. Not one I have to go back to, anyway. Sitting around drinking all day watching the snow melt doesn’t give me quite the same release it does them.”
“I see,” I said, although I didn’t.
He cut off the obvious question. “I’d rather listen to music. What about you—what do you like to do best of all?”
“I love to read.”
“What kind of reading?”
Sometimes you can tell all you need to know about a person just in the way they ask the question: politely, or with genuine curiosity, denoting a fine understanding of all it might reveal—from a rich inner life to a point of compatibility between strangers. It was also a hard question to answer, its simplicity lethal as a narrow blade.
“Anything that makes me think, and dream a while, and make connections,” I said at last, as the incoming rush of a hundred thoughts pooled into coherence. “Modern fiction, some classics, biographies, travel books, some poetry occasionally. Beautifully written cookbooks . . .”
I watched his face. “Don’t ask me my favorite author,” I said quickly, not wanting to be disappointed too soon. “I can’t bear that question. I can never think how to answer it, which gives the impression that I hardly read at all, or that my tastes never change, or I never make new discoveries, when nothing could be further from the truth.”
He smiled. “Understood. So long as you don’t ask me for the title of the best book I’ve read recently.”
There it was again, the ease between us.
“Never,” I said. “I can hesitate over that one so long because I’m trying to find a match for whoever’s asking, to think of something I’m sure they would think was perfect, that it leaves me tongue-tied . . .”
We both laughed, and I felt a tightness inside me loosen for the first time in a long time.
“I
’m American,” I said, when he asked.
“You don’t sound it. I couldn’t place your accent, but I wouldn’t have guessed American.”
“I’m kind of a hybrid.”
“Meaning?”
“My dad’s a New Yorker. My mother says she’s from Sussex, but her father was French. They met and then married in Paris. I went to school in France and England, college in the U.S., but I’ve lived in London for years.”
“You live in London now, or here?”
“In London. I’m just working here for a few days.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a translator.”
He didn’t say, “Love of words again,” or some other trite comment.
“What kind of translating?”
“A very ordinary kind. Commercial stuff mainly—advertising and promotional brochures, contracts.”
It was hard to resist telling him how bored I was with the vapidity of it all; the false premises of product desirability; the ugliness of urban life; the hot rush of the subways; the jostle of the intent, white-faced crowds; the dirt; the sirens ripping through the nights. I almost did, then stopped myself, not wanting to sound negative or petulant, both of which I felt too often for comfort when I was overwhelmed by the city. I was only a few years out of college but already it felt as if I had taken a wrong turn and trapped myself.
Did he sense some of that in my tone? “And if you weren’t translating?”
“If I didn’t have to work, you mean?” I asked, reminding him there was still an explanation due.
“If you could do whatever you wanted every day.”
“Apart from reading, obviously. I would love to translate books if I could get a commission. There are some fantastic French writers, like Pierre Magnan and Chloé Delaume, who aren’t often translated into English. I’d love to have a try myself, and really do them justice in my own way.”
“Making the books into your own, partly?”
“Well, you can’t do that, because you must always be faithful to someone else—to the details and the spirit of their work. But you’re right in a way; you can be subtly inventive and the joy of it would be to achieve that special balance.”
“You’re a faithful kind of person, then?”
“Always. It’s important.” Then, realizing what he meant and how naïve that sounded even though it was true, I laughed and said, “Are you, though? I suppose you’re married?”
He shook his head very slowly, looking into my eyes. “No.”
I failed to find an adequate response.
“It will come, what you really want to do,” he said, breaking the sudden awkwardness. “You’re still young.”
“I can dream.”
“Of course it can happen.”
My face must have betrayed the skepticism I felt.
“Why not?” he asked. “It happened to me.”
D
ominic is a writer—of music. After college, he and a friend started a geo-technology business with one computer and a clever idea. Dom thought it might give him some kind of income while he worked on his music. He didn’t do much music for the next twenty years but the business did better than anyone could have predicted. And, as they sold just before the downturn, he’s considered doubly lucky—or astute, depending on your point of view. I could vaguely remember reading in the business section about his company, although it wasn’t so high-profile that I could have put his name to it. In any case, he would far rather people knew his name for a piece of music than as someone who made a pile of money.
At Les Genévriers, he would disappear for hours into his music room. Notes floated out into the courtyard from the new piano he bought in Cavaillon, followed by expressive silences that suggested the transference of sound to paper, or computer screen, or the inner process of composing, or sometimes a siesta on the plump cushions of the sofa he installed there.
That first summer, like the deepening love and understanding between us, the property kept growing. Armed with a fistful of medieval keys, we discovered new rooms, hidden chambers revealed below and beside the rooms we thought we already knew.
The attached stone barn in the courtyard was the first surprise gift. When we finally managed to unlock it (a feat of strength the real estate agent had not managed), we found it was a large, light, and well-proportioned room with a tiled floor, plastered and whitewashed walls, and an enormous fireplace. Dom knew immediately what it was: his music room.
Underneath this room was a flaking, splinted wooden door accessed from the sloping garden. We broke the obsolete lock, expecting to find a tool store or some such. Inside was a paved antechamber to a warren of caverns and Romanesque vaults. In the row of cottages, crudely modernized, then abandoned, we found semi-underground chambers by opening a cupboard door.
And in these hidden places were the discarded objects we claimed as gifts from the house: a bad painting of a peace lily, a hoe, a vase, a set of ramekins pushed deep inside a kitchen cupboard, a pair of rubber boots, an iron birdcage, much rusted and with a broken catch.
Dom’s laugh rang under the curved ceilings of the half-open cellars of the lower ground floor. Down there we found pillars and arches, and under these ribs of the main house, drifts of wine bottles, glass frosted opaque by long use. Up in the kitchen, where the units were ingeniously formed of cast-off wardrobe and cupboard doors, waited the spicy Vacqueyras wines celebrating both our territorial expansion and the happy expansion of ourselves.
Outside, our northern pores sucked in the warm blue sky, the astringent bracers of rosemary and thyme, the dust of ages, and we looked at each other and smiled. A home of our own—and what a place!