She had been saddened by the brevity of their lives. But Luc had assured her that they spent their entire adult existence making love and sipping nectar. ‘From the first hour beyond their caterpillar state, as soon as their wings are strong, they seek out their mate. Hundreds of them together. I’ll take you and show you. It’s a rare and magnificent sight to see.’
It was still early. The light had a pearly quality, pale rose in colour. She slid on down to the shore, let fall her shorts and T-shirt, kicked off her sandals and stepped carefully across the stones. The slap of the waves licking the patches of damp sand, then the drag and pull of the tumbling pebbles were inviting. A cleansing sound. A baptism. Gentle and appeasing. It was early in the season and the water had not yet warmed up. It nipped at her toes, her feet, her calves before she plunged fully into it and began to breast-stroke fast, out beyond the limits of the bay into deeper water. Gulls overhead squawked and circled. A fishing boat was sketched against the horizon, a marriage of blues. She heard a dog barking and turned on her back, kicking to stay afloat, peering to see who was there: an early-morning walker out with his companion, a graceful English Setter. A pang of longing for Walnut overcame her – the desire to pat his warm head, stroke his astrakhan ears. It leached the fragile cord of joy out of her. Tears sprang forth and rolled down her face. She was alone at sea. There was no one.
She was heaving mouthfuls of salt water. She was a strong swimmer – learned from Luc – but she seemed out of synch with her limbs. Kicking and spluttering. Was she going to drown? Should she let herself drown? Why not? In Paris after Christmas, she had shied from climbing the railings and plunging into the Seine because it had been her duty to bury Luc. She had owed it to him, but look at the legacy he had left her. Look at the disarray she was facing. And there was no one, not a soul, to hold out a hand to her. Why not let go? Why not sink to the seabed?
Eventually her breathing calmed, grew more rhythmic, and she regained her equilibrium, managing to splash back to the shore. Only then did she realize she had forgotten to bring a towel and was obliged to tug her clothes back on over her wet bikini.
She was in the stables, storing the bike, hair dripping salt water onto her shoulders, still shaken by her morning’s panic. A quick shower, another coffee and then the cellars. Her dungeon. As she exited and bolted the wooden door, Claude was passing behind the house with a wheelbarrow stacked high with plants, shovels and digging utensils resting across the handles. Jane waved and hollered a greeting but he didn’t see or hear her. She called again, but he was too distant now. Perhaps his hearing was less acute than it had been. He strolled on towards the walled garden, whistling, oblivious to her presence. He was in his element, possibly talking to the plants as he and Matty used to do when she was a child.
Jane felt herself begin to slide again. She wouldn’t set foot inside the cellars this morning. She wouldn’t look at that child’s face again, not yet. She refused to let ‘Annabelle’ gain power over her. Luc had loved Jane, his wife. She was getting better. She needed to heal herself, as Peter’s specialist had advised.
After a hasty shower and change of clothes, she jogged to the kitchen garden. Claude was alone there, digging and rooting. He straightened his back and gave a wave when he heard her cry.
‘I counted the broken panes in the greenhouses,’ he said, as she drew near. ‘It’d be a challenge for any bank account.’
‘How about I help you finish planting all these and then we begin our tour?’
‘What about the cellars and your work?’
‘Foolish not to enjoy this fine weather. I can clear out all those cupboards in the evenings.’
Claude handed her a trowel. ‘Do you want to visit the greenhouses after?’
‘No, let’s get going on the vineyards.’
The weed piles had grown into sizeable hillocks and the earth embedded beneath her nails would be hard to winkle out. She was perspiring, flushed from the arduous digging, back aching from extracting stumps and loose rocks. She fell into the passenger seat as Claude pulled away in the estate’s battered Renault van. He passed Jane an apple from his lunchbox, bit hard into one himself, its juice spraying like miniature stars as he crunched, and began to talk through the cycle of grape-growing in their southern region.
‘A little less than five moons,’ he said, ‘the grapes grow on the vines. From the fruit’s set, it’s approximately one hundred and forty days until it’s harvested.’
‘The fruit’s set is flowers to berries, is that correct?’
He nodded, shifting up to third gear. As they ascended the gentle incline towards the estate’s hinterland, the car growled and bucked.
‘I don’t think I’d realized that vines produce flowers.’
‘It’s one of the best seasons of the year, Jane, and it does the heart good to see it.’
She smiled at this. Her decision to return here had been a sane one. ‘Spring flowers?’
He nodded. ‘And we have hectares of them here. It’s a splendid display.’
It occurred to Jane as she listened that she had never been there in March. As a child she had visited in the summer months during her school holidays and once or twice during autumn half-term. Since Isabelle’s death, she and Luc had also spent Christmas and New Year at Les Cigales, until the last tragic one. Still, there were several months of the year she had never experienced here. The changing colours of the leaves, the patterns of growth. ‘Do they have any perfume, these grape flowers?’
‘Each variety has its own scent when it blossoms. The differences are subtle, so delicate, but an attuned nose can identify them.’
Jane marvelled at his words. Not for the first time, she remarked that when many of these Provençal people spoke of the land, they did so eloquently, using language that was elegant, almost a poetry of the earth.
‘Can you tell the difference?’
Claude let out a hearty laugh. ‘Blindfold me, Jane, and lead me on a chase and I swear I could pinpoint where in the South of France we are and which variety of grape is growing at my feet. I wouldn’t know the varieties from the north, mind, Bordeaux and Burgundy, not those, but all along the Midi, I could pretty much identify them.’
‘That’s amazing. I’m very impressed.’
‘It’s not a great skill, but it adds up to a fair old portion of my life.’
Jane grinned. She was looking out of the window, kept closed due to the dust rising around the rolling wheels. Beyond the track, in either direction, there were acres of overgrown vineyards, pendulous with young green bunches of hard grapes. She wondered why they had been left to grow wild like this. Clarisse, the estate, needed the harvests to survive. They were driving inland. Clarisse’s chestnut mare, Rêve, was cantering free in one of the fields. Did she still ride the horse? It was years since Jane had seen her on it. High in the distance ahead of them the mountains soared towards a cloudless blue sky. Claude must be what age? Not quite retirement, Matty had said, but surely he was more than sixty-two. He was a native Provençal, born not too many kilometres from where they were now, soon after the end of the Second World War. She knew his parents had owned or rented a couple of acres of land and had managed a small tabac, where he had been brought up, living above their shop in his village about twenty miles from Les Cigales, and that he had met Matty on the estate. Aside from those few facts, she knew next to nothing about him or his wife.
During the last war, this region had been unoccupied territory, the free zone, but there had been a very active resistance movement operating down here in the south. Had Claude’s father or any of his relatives been members of la Résistance? Or might they have discreetly given their allegiance to the Vichy government? She hoped not, but she had no idea where he and Matty stood. She assumed they were socialists, but didn’t know for sure.
Who knew the secrets people held buried from their past? She sure as hell didn’t.
Claude drew the Renault to a halt, switched off the engine and stepped out onto
the dusty track. A blast of heat hit her as she followed. The air smelt sweet, of wild flowers and aromatic herbs. A whistling overhead drew her attention. She looked up, squinting into the sunlight.
‘It’s a pair of Short-toed Eagles,’ he told her, as he scrunched his eyes to follow her gaze. ‘They nest all over these parts. Fewer now than there used to be.’
When she and Luc were youngsters, they had explored, tracked, mapped, taken notes and made hundreds of nature discoveries all around here. She remembered the eagles, although she had forgotten about them till now. Luc had taught Jane almost everything she had ever learned about nature and the environment, and the discoveries had always been thrilling, but she had not pursued the passion as Luc had. Luc had been on a path of innovation all his life whereas she had been happy with the way things were …
Was that why he had required another life, the secret existence he had kept hidden? Had he been unable to settle to the conventional routines she and he had known? Had he always been impelled to go further, to challenge himself with the next experience? The next relationship? Unearthing new directions? She pushed the confusion and doubt from her mind. They were scratching at her wounds. She resolved to remain in the present, here in the sunshine with Claude, miles from anywhere or anyone. Miles from Luc’s cellars.
Her guide had crossed the track now and penetrated a field of vine stock. He was barely visible within the overgrown rows, each out of alignment and scruffy. No pruning had taken place this year. The weeds shooting up in the alleys between the vines would soon be as tall as the fruit-bearers themselves. They were threatening to strangle the grapes. Denied sunlight, the fruit of their future harvest would fail to develop or ripen. If there was no opportunity for air to circulate, diseases such as mould and leaf rot would set in. Even to her inexperienced eye all this was evident. She could see the warning signs, the dangers.
Jane crossed the track to the edge of the field where Claude was bent low, probing with his fingers around thick roots, nosing like a truffle dog, picking off leaves and rubbing at them, surveying stems, studying and assessing. She stepped in among the foliage, nudging branches aside to approach him.
‘They are suffering,’ he said. The comment was not addressed to her, more to the land itself.
‘Will we lose our crop?’ she asked, surprising herself. We. Our crop.
Did she have a responsibility to these acres that she had never acknowledged before, let alone taken on board? ‘These fields need serious work, eh?’
‘I’ll say. Usually in March, after the winter’s growth and the spurt of early spring weeds, we clean all these grounds up. We begin back here with the terraced fruit and then we move down towards the sea, beyond the road, to the flat soil fields. After the weeds have been dug out, the earth between the rows is ploughed. That makes the soil looser and lighter, enabling the plants to breathe, better to produce. Our method is labour intensive, bloody hard work, in fact, and expensive, but it paves the way for the finest vintages. Everything that can be achieved by hand is done so. The estate is organic. No pesticides. Luc and Madame Isabelle instigated that change themselves and he was proud of it.’ Claude fell silent. Then: ‘That boy’d turn in his grave if he saw the wretched mess we’re in.’
They dropped their heads, remembering him.
‘Why didn’t the work get done this year, Claude?’
He rubbed his lips and chin with the palm of his hand, but made no response.
She became aware of the bush crickets and grasshoppers, dozens and dozens of jumping creatures buried among the crops, all trilling away in the heat. ‘Surely you could’ve overseen the programme even without Luc. And the others, the local men who are always here to lend a hand with the harvest: Jean Dupont, Michel Lonsaud and Arnaud, of course. And there are others living in the villages all about here. They know what needs to be done.’
‘I’ll say they do. We taught those two women everything. Isabelle was willing but …’ He shook his head.
‘There’s no shortage of experienced hands and I bet more than a few of them would be very glad of the work.’
Claude let out a long sigh. ‘She …’ He coughed and began again. ‘Madame Cambon said there’s no money in the kitty to pay anyone. Said the loss of the crop last year –’
‘Oh, come on!’
‘As well as the poor yield … She says it’s done for the estate.’
‘I don’t –’
‘Anyway, that’s what she says. Who am I to argue?’
‘And now we have nothing. The fruit will be choked and diseased, right? It’s a tragedy.’
‘Listen to me, Jane,’ his tone grew more insistent, ‘we could still save a few parcels of the fruit and set ourselves on course for a vintage. It’ll be a lean one, but look at the growth everywhere. We’d need to begin clearing the fields now. Right now, Jane.’
‘Otherwise how will anyone get in here to do the picking?’
He nodded gravely, but was there a glint of trickery in his eye? Did he know how susceptible she was? How she craved a guiding hand, the certainty of the seasons, the rhythms of nature and the oblivion of punishing physical labour if she were to start to heal? And might he be using that to win her over?
Jane spun a slow circle in the sunlight. The heat was agreeable, not yet raging, and the song of the grasshoppers was pleasing. Her gaze reached far in all directions, over carpets of young-leafed fields and tall flowering weeds. In the distance, clinging at angles to the stony slopes, the silver-hued olive groves were visible. Beyond them, there was fragrant scrubland, with its sea of wild thyme, rosemary, sage and briar roses growing alongside dozens of other soft-leaved shrubs Jane could not identify. These were the ground-cover for the mountains, climbing to the altitudinous pines. God’s own southern belt beneath a sky that stretched for ever and kept secrets beneath its canopy.
‘And another thing. Without wanting to worry or frighten you –’
‘What’s that, Claude?’
‘The fire risk in the overgrown fields and groves is very serious indeed. Once the heat sets in …’
She cast her eyes from left to right.
‘You’ve never been down here during a forest fire, have you, Jane?’
She shook her head.
‘Nor would you want to be. It can be terrifying and very distressing to see the charcoaled wildlife. Do you know that further over in the Var, the Hermann’s tortoise, a rare breed, has become almost extinct because its habitat was burned out by the fires? It’s the law here to keep the vegetation cut back and safe. We have to manage the land with respect. That’s what Luc always drilled into us. It’s what we taught him when he was a kid.’ He chuckled. ‘Even if we didn’t give a whistle for the vines and the crops, the maintenance of the grounds is another matter altogether. And there are heavy fines levied against those who don’t.’
This was no job for an amateur. It needed dedication, devotion and some serious investment. Was this why Claude had suggested the tour? Had he and Matty discussed their fading prospects at home in their kitchen, at table with Arnaud? Were they gambling on the fact that when Jane was faced with all this disarray, with what was at stake, with the dangers and loss, that for Luc’s sake, Luc’s memory, she would be unable to turn her back? They were calling on her sense of responsibility towards the estate, and towards them, its caretakers. This was their livelihood. Their retirement prospects. If all this went to Hell, they had everything to lose.
But where did Jane’s future lie within all of this?
‘Why would Clarisse tolerate such an asset falling into ruin? There must be another reason besides her financial predicament, surely.’
‘She has passed the responsibility to no one, Jane. She refuses to. All this would have been Luc’s if he’d lived, but without him … It’s as if she wants it all to rot rather than entrust it to others, as if she’s punishing us or herself or Lord knows who for the past. Matty says grief and loss have done her in. The loss of Luc has brought the past flood
ing back in on her.’
The eagles were still circling overhead, spiralling higher without effort on the slipstream until they were floating flecks of brown feathers against a silken sheet of cobalt. Their haunting whistle reverberated, an eerie cry echoing into the hot silence. It was like a phantom from on high beckoning to her. Or forewarning her.
‘She’s all knotted up with regret and grieving, Matty says. When people suffer too much, they get mean and they behave ugly. Something dies in them and they resent others enjoying life. So Matty, with her church ways, says. Our local curé, he says the same. Loss is eating at her innards.’
The loss of Luc has brought the past flooding back in on her.
Jane listened, measuring Claude’s words. ‘Aside from Luc, what else is Clarisse grieving for, Claude?’
The old gardener’s head hung low. He made no response. Jane thought he hadn’t heard her and repeated the question.
‘No use asking me. I’ve never fathomed women. Them’s all Matty’s opinions, not mine. All I know about is out here on the land, the ploughing and the digging and the picking. I live by the seasons. Women’s troubles are beyond me.’
What in Clarisse’s past had come flooding back? Was Claude keeping something from her?
He picked off a vine leaf and scratched at its petiole, at a black pebbled disease or collection of minuscule flies on the stalk as though trying to remove the rot, as though avoiding Jane’s question. ‘All I know is that after all these years of building this domain up into something to be proud of, after all Isabelle’s hard work and Luc’s and ours, it’s a bloody tragedy to let it go. That’s my opinion.’
Later, reflecting on her conversation with Claude, Jane concluded that he must have been referring to the Cambon family’s flight from war-torn Algeria. Clarisse cited it frequently. They had never been welcomed here. Their relocation had involved much sacrifice. They had bartered their home for freedom. They had been obliged to abandon their magnificent estate, a vast property that had been in Luc’s father’s family for four generations. It included lucrative vineyards from which, every autumn, they had loaded thousands of tons of grapes onto tankers bound for southern France for winemaking. All had been planted by Luc’s great-grandfather. Clarisse must have grieved for the loss of such wealth, of her privileged colonial existence, as well as the death of her husband, Luc’s father, Adrien. Luc had been Clarisse’s final thread to the life she had left behind. Those must have been the sorrows that Clarisse had hidden deep and was still grieving for.
The Forgotten Summer Page 22