The Forgotten Summer

by Carol Drinkwater

  And then Clarisse fell silent. Occasionally her eyes opened and she glared at Jane in a troubled fashion, but without recognition.

  All that was left during the last days was the laboured breathing and then the death rattle before the eternal silence. Jane remained where she was. Seated, staring at an old shrew’s corpse. Clarisse dead. The anger and pain silenced. Her face, smooth as a peach, resembling an innocent child’s.

  Jane recalled sharply how, only a little less than a year ago, the blueness of Luc’s immobile face had bitten into her. She missed him, ached for him. She always would. She regretted deeply that he had not lived beyond his mother, that he had not been witness to the joy she and Annie were finding in one another’s company. Their half-sisterhood. He would be waiting somewhere now to usher his mother onwards to her resting place, where she might discover the first peace she had enjoyed in decades.

  And what of Luc? As Jane sat gazing at the motionless body of the woman who had caused her so much misery, such heartache, she wondered about Luc’s peace, his resting place. Was she, Jane, holding him back? Was he patiently waiting for her to let him go? The possibility decimated her. She couldn’t bear to let him go.

  When the door opened softly, Dr Beauchene found her, head bent over her knees, in tears.

  Back in November, the days following the party had remained bright but had grown cooler. The colour of the mountains in the distance had changed daily from purple-blue to white. Somewhere, not too far away, snow was falling and reupholstering the caps of the Alps. Its chill snapped at the air. Gunshots were forever resounding across the valleys. Yet more unsuspecting beasts had met their fate. Some fortunate kitchens would soon be steaming with the simmering meat.

  But not Matty’s. Not Arnaud’s rifle. Matty was in shock, recuperating, tended by Claude. She had pushed through the crush of people, cannoning forward, knocking her son’s arm, as Arnaud had lifted his weapon. Her action had caused his rifle to explode. The bullet shot skywards, thankfully trained on no one. At almost the same moment, Jane had wrested the gun from her mother-in-law and Clarisse had crumpled, as though the pistol had been holding her up, not the other way around. According to Beauchene, who was on hand, Clarisse Cambon had suffered a severe myocardial infarction, a massive heart attack.

  The evening had ended in disaster. The entire community had been witness to their family drama.

  The following day, two of the local gendarmerie – two of his hunting chums – had paid Arnaud a visit and escorted him to the police station. There wasn’t one in Malaz – crime was almost non-existent there – so they had driven him to the nearest town to interview him. Before they set off, Claude had given the men a couple of hens. ‘Good layers, the pair of them,’ he told the officers, then slapped his son on the shoulder. ‘Courage, mon brave,’ he muttered to him.

  Arnaud was obliged to give a statement. To state clearly what had been the nature of his intentions. He was a man of few words and failed to explain himself. He had been among a crowd of people with a loaded rifle, the hunting chums’ senior officer pointed out to him. Arnaud had believed his sister’s life was in danger: that was his explanation.

  Arnaud was not charged. Instead he was ferried home. Witnesses would be called and proceedings would be decided upon.

  ‘We’ll carry on as best we can.’ Claude’s firm words to Matty.

  Clarisse was laid to rest on 3 December in the family plot alongside her sister-in-law and close to her son, who had gone ahead of her almost twelve months earlier. Two women and one son lying in peace together. Jane lowered into the open grave a branch from the cherry tree in her mother-in-law’s garden. Its woody length lacked the early buds of spring, but when the spring came round again and the flowers were full upon the tree, Jane would return with a bowl of white-pink petals to scatter on the grave. She silently gave Clarisse her promise of this. She had also discreetly placed within Clarisse’s coffin a dog-eared passport photograph of Peter. Out of respect to her own mother, she couldn’t bring herself to include the larger, framed likeness.

  Annie had flown down from Paris. She and Jane prepared the funeral meal side by side and laid it in the silent dining room where Luc’s reception had taken place. There were few to attend the proceedings. Unlike Luc, Clarisse had not amassed crowds of friends and caring souls about her. Hers had been an embittered, isolated existence. She had been despised by the villageois. Nonetheless, a handful turned up, hats pressed against their breasts, as a mark of respect to the folk still residing at the grand estate.

  ‘Peter should be present.’ Annie smiled.

  Jane had contemplated the possibility but such a journey was far too arduous an undertaking for him. In any case, he continued to have no memory of Les Cigales or of Clarisse. And he had not been told that Clarisse had borne him a second daughter.

  ‘I would like to meet him one day, though. My father.’

  It was not the first time Annie had made this request.

  ‘My next trip to England, we could go together, but you must be prepared for …’

  ‘I just want to touch him, look at him, hold his hand, to know that just once I met my father.’

  ‘Then we’ll do it.’

  The winter nights were exquisite, no clouds, starlit, unrelentingly chilly. During the short hours of daylight, the sky was a starched blue, hard as ceramic but clear and sun-filled. Berries hung heavy on the bushes. Birds gorged.

  Jane spent her time alone, gazing at the flames in the hearth as they galloped over last year’s pruned olive branches. The hatred, fear and violence that had crippled her and Clarisse were melting away, softening within her … As Claude had taught her in the vineyards, after the bleak, leafless months of winter, we pull out the weeds and dig the ground until it has been cleared. Then we till the soil, turning it, loosening it, making it easier for the earth to breathe, to feed the vines. But first, essentially, we must pluck out all that grows wild and chokes the good growth. It’s important to keep the vines’ root systems healthy, well-drained. Important to root out the poisons that choke them.

  Can a person’s life be shaped, its direction altered, by an early trauma? We start out one way and then life changes us? Even if the answer was affirmative, redemption was surely a possibility? Regeneration. It was Nature’s smartest trick. We damage the soil with toxins, burn it, poison the plants … Still, Nature will find her way back through the earth, will reshoot vigorously, rarely defeated. There is no reason, thought Jane, why we should not be the same. Why should we not follow this universal DNA pattern?

  ‘Who doesn’t have blood on their hands? We all have. Including you, Jane,’ her mother-in-law had once barked at her.

  After the loss of Peter, the door to Clarisse’s heart must have finally snapped shut, or had that already taken place before Jane had met her? Might Peter have been Clarisse’s redemption and Jane, full of adolescent self-righteousness, have derailed a journey of love? Jane would never know the answers. To so many questions, she would never know the answers.

  ‘I couldn’t keep the girl. How would it have been possible in this region of prejudice? Imagine for one moment Annabelle’s life at the local school. She would have been ostracized, without friends, judged. What I did, I did for her sake, and I never told your father of Annabelle’s existence. I never forced his hand. All my life the paysans here have hated and despised me for being a colonial from Algeria. They will never know the sacrifice I made. No one knows. Only Isa. She was there.’

  Clarisse had spoken these words to Jane during her fading days.

  When Jane began to empty Clarisse’s house – yet another house clearance – she had found her mother-in-law’s safe tucked away in her wardrobe, hidden by glittering evening dresses and more pairs of dancing shoes than Jane had owned in her entire life. Clothes and furs and outfits that must have dated back to her Algerian days. She called in the bearded locksmith, Monsieur Tassigny, to unlock the safe. There was not a great deal within it, apart from some rather valu
able jewellery and a few large envelopes. In the envelopes she found the details of several bank accounts, mainly in France for the estate, and one – a jackpot – in Switzerland, which had been opened by Monsieur Adrien Luc Cambon, Clarisse’s long-deceased husband. Within it sat a fortune that had been accumulating interest for more than half a century; a deep, untouched pot of money that Clarisse had hoarded or hidden or, Jane preferred to think, that in her dotage she had simply forgotten about. Either way, the funds would be withdrawn, the accounts closed and the cash would be fed into the estate.

  Along with the bank accounts there was a folded, disintegrating, yellowed newspaper cutting displaying a black-and-white photograph. It was the same snap but full-length of the lean young Adrien Cambon Jane had found among Luc’s belongings. In this fuller shot, Jane saw he was posing in high leather boots and khakis, one foot on the running board of a sleek Citroën. The family Citroën. The vehicle that had ferried Clarisse and Luc to France. Dark hair, moustache, tanned skin, thirty or thirty-five, perhaps. A cigarette was smoking between his fingers and he was carrying a pistol. The same Colt Jane had found in Luc’s drawer? Jane examined Luc’s father’s face, with its air of arrogance. There was a resemblance. Luc had spoken so rarely of him. Jane wondered what had become of him. The newsprint beneath the photograph was in Arabic. Jane would post it to one of her linguist chums and ask them to translate it for her.

  From a fraying white envelope, she withdrew the contract Clarisse and Isabelle had signed with Matty and Claude. The gift of Annabelle to the Lefèvre couple, in return for discretion and silence. It included the clause confirming that Annabelle had no claim on the estate. There was just one copy as Matty and Clarisse had both stated. Jane took it to the fireplace, struck a match and was about to watch it go up in flames – once gone, no one would ever know that a contract had existed that barred Annie’s right to Les Cigales – but then she held back. Her reflex was foolish. This and Luc’s letter to his mother were the sole pieces of evidence to prove that Annie was not Matty’s progeny, that both Annie and Patrick had a legitimate claim on the estate.

  Without the papers Jane, bizarrely, was the last remaining family member, albeit by marriage, in line to inherit the land, all properties and all bank accounts. She smiled to herself at the arrival of such riches. Riches beyond any she would have dreamed of. She tossed the burned-out match, singeing her thumb and fingers, into the fireplace, set the matchbox on the mantelpiece and went to search Clarisse’s bedroom. On hands and knees in a room that smelt foul, head shoved under the bed, she stretched and reached for Luc’s letter to his mother, scrunched into a tight ball.

  Back outside in the weak January sun, Jane unfolded the letter and ironed the creases against the flat of her hand pressed into her trousers.

  Back at the manor house, she telephoned Annie in Paris. ‘I have a surprise for you.’

  Annie gave up the lease on the flat in Vincennes. Along with Patrick, who was soon to be twelve – the age Luc had been when Jane had first met him – she moved into Clarisse’s cottage. The cherry blossoms were opening into tight white-pink flowers when Annie bounced along the potholed lanes in an old car packed to bursting with their possessions.

  ‘Where’s Pat?’ asked Jane, puzzled.

  ‘He’ll be along shortly.’

  Later, from out of the horizon of vines, another car appeared. An Espace. One of those large people carriers. It pulled up in front of the gate behind Annie’s jalopy. Out stepped Patrick and Dan. Dan, sunburned and Australia-blessed, had never looked more handsome. His shy daughter, with her delicate deer-like features, was the last to emerge.

  ‘Sissy, say bonjour. You haven’t met Sissy, have you? It’s good to see you again, Jane.’

  It took some seconds for the penny to drop. When it did, she offered Annie and Dan the manor house. She would have been equally content to live in the ancient miller’s abode, but Annie stubbornly resisted. ‘The manor is your home. It was yours and Luc’s and you must stay there. Pat and I are happy with “my mother’s” house. During the brief spells when Dan’s not filming and he comes to visit us, there’ll be plenty of space for us all.’

  When there was a moment’s calm from the furniture unpacking, Jane took Dan aside and led him to the petit salon where Luc’s work was stacked in boxes. Lying on the table was the Arabic newspaper cutting. Dan picked it up and stared at it.

  ‘Luc’s father?’ Jane asked.

  Dan nodded slowly. ‘Sous-chef for one of the branches of the OAS, the APP section.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Action-Psychologique-Propagande. Psychological Warfare and Propaganda. They were renowned for their use of torture, bombings and murder. In April 1962, one month after de Gaulle had signed the Évian Accords to end the war, an Algerian school in the suburbs of Algiers was blown up. Close to two hundred Algerian children and staff were massacred. Adrien Cambon is believed to have masterminded that exercise.’

  Jane closed her eyes. ‘French right-wing terrorism. How utterly appalling. Did Luc know?’

  ‘He learned it while we were filming.’

  ‘What happened to Adrien?’

  ‘The official report states that Cambon went into hiding at the end of the war and was never captured. Most of his comrades went to the firing squad.’

  Jane frowned, lifting her eyes to Dan’s. ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Luc and I interviewed a veteran living inland of Marseille, a Pied-Noir who’d had dealings with Cambon. The old fellow has dedicated his life to compiling a list of undeclared members of the OAS. Some of them went on to work in the French government. If the list had gone public it would have caused an outcry. Adrien Cambon’s name was high on that list.’

  Jane listened in silence, wondering how much Clarisse had known of this. And the shame Luc must have felt when he discovered the truth about his father, the man he had longed to cross the sea to find. ‘Finish the film for him, please.’

  At her side, Dan lowered his eyes and sighed slowly. ‘It’s incendiary, Jane. Roussel was convinced Luc’s death was an assassination but his team found no proof.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘He was pushing himself too hard and the discovery of his father’s OAS involvement nearly broke him. He shoved himself over the edge.’

  ‘Suicide?’

  ‘No, no, never. He was desperate to complete the film. He was exhausted. No, it was an accident.’

  ‘In memory of Luc, finish the film, please.’

  Dan shook his head. ‘For Annie’s sake and Pat’s, I prefer to bury the past. It’s already cost too much.’

  Lying on her bed that night, her new family installed down at Cherry Tree Lodge, Jane replayed her conversation with Dan in her mind. Something about the story was not clicking together. Had the old man in Marseille been mistaken? Was that why Clarisse had argued so hotly against the film? Had she believed in her husband’s innocence? Yet she had described him as ‘cruel’.

  And then Jane recalled a summer from many years earlier. She was about nine. She and Luc had been snorkelling together. Stretched out in the dunes, their hair and burned skin matted with salt, she’d asked him, ‘Don’t you sometimes long to go back to where you were born?’

  ‘Only if I could bring my father here to live with us.’

  ‘Why didn’t he come with you?’

  ‘He was shot.’

  ‘Shot?’ Jane’s eyes had widened to the size of the abandoned gull’s egg they had just discovered in the nearby marram and beach grasses. Luc was rolling it to and fro in the palm of his hand. ‘By who?’

  ‘It was an accident. I think. I don’t know. Maman says we’re never to talk about it.’

  And Luc had been true to his word. Even once they were married, the loss of his father and their flight from his homeland had remained a forbidden subject.

  5

  Two women and a boy

  Jane took a flight to Geneva to meet with the director of Crédit Suiss
e where the Cambon estate deeds and bank account were held. She learned that over several decades until 1962 large sums of money had been transferred from Algiers. The account had been held in the Cambon family name since its inception in the 1920s. Madame and Madame Cambon, once their French property had been purchased from the invested Swiss francs, had never touched their capital or its interest again. Clarisse Cambon, the last to survive, had written to the bank stating that she had no further use for the money and requested that the account be closed. The bank had responded that, without the lodged monies being withdrawn, the account could not be closed. The director confirmed that Crédit Suisse had never received a response.

  Jane signed the forms to close the account. The bulk of the funds were to be transferred to a recipient whose identity she would furnish at the first possible opportunity.

  She and Annie chose not to touch the capital but to keep a portion of the interest that had accrued over the decades since Les Cigales had been purchased. It was more than sufficient for the estate’s needs.

  They were two women and one boy to run the estate. Two ‘sisters’ and a son. As it had been in the days of Clarisse, Isabelle and Luc, aided by Matty, Claude and Arnaud.

  Their portion of the money from Switzerland was transferred to an estate account, to be managed by Jane. The greater sum, close to sixteen million euros, was transferred to Marseille to inaugurate a private initiative foundation for the construction of the Luc Cambon Film School, which would specialize in regional documentary-making. Any sums remaining were to be invested to offer scholarships for underprivileged students. All Luc’s professional files and films were destined for the film school’s library.

  ‘I hope he’d be proud,’ mused Jane, brushing a photo of Luc as a small boy. She and Annie were in the small salon, kneeling beside one another on the floor, sifting through the stacks of family albums, tears of laughter or sadness, cries of surprise, accompanying their discoveries.