Laurent twisted the stem of his wineglass. “It was my mother who persuaded me to try an English designer for the memorial garden—one designer in particular. Ellie Brooke. She was most insistent. I thought it was a good idea, something that would make her happy. She was not well, had not been well for many years . . . she was unpredictable . . . there were episodes of mania. . . .”
Unexpectedly, Laurent reached over the table for Iris’s hand. “I will tell you now what I think happened to your granddaughter—including what I did not tell the police while Rose was still alive.”
Time slipped as she looked into his eyes, so like Xavier’s brown eyes.
“On that last evening, my mother was very unwell. All day she had been in the grip of a manic episode. She was convinced that she was seeing Xavier, that he had come for her at last. She was screaming and shouting that she was in greater danger than before, and that Jeanne and I were the ones who had to help her now.
“She was so disturbed, gibbering about evil spirits, cowering in her chair and crying that we did as she demanded, and called a priest who agreed to come and bless the house. Whether it was a real exorcism or not, the incense and the chanting calmed her for a while. She slept that afternoon, a relief to all of us.
“Not long after six o’clock, Ellie arrived to collect her phone. I’m sorry to say that my mother had picked it up and kept it when Ellie left it in the library where she had been working on plans for the garden. We were having an apéritif, Ellie and I, when Rose appeared. She seemed improved at first, but then her mood reverted. She pulled out an old pistol. I had no idea she possessed such a weapon. Perhaps it had been my father’s. Even when she took it out, I thought it was not real, that it could not possibly be loaded, or even if she pulled the trigger, it would never fire. But it did. I was moving carefully behind her, intending to take it from her, but then the gun went off. She fired twice. One bullet hit the floor and the other hit a case of butterfly specimens. The glass shattered, but no real damage was done. Ellie ran. Not just for cover, but out the doors and down the terrace steps into the garden.
“I have to tell you, she was nervous, agitated that evening. Different from the confident young woman I first met. I tried to go after her, to reassure her that she was in no danger. My mother dropped the gun as soon as it went off—she was in shock, and Jeanne was calming her.
“But Ellie—she ran fast. A storm was breaking. It was raining. It is steep on the path down to the calanque, and slippery underfoot. You can trip over stones. It’s hard enough to walk down in daylight, but on a wet night . . . to fall . . .”
Iris stared up at the murals of coastal scenes set high on the walls, at the painted ceiling, hearing the noise of the lunch service and the conversations over white-clad tables, holding her emotions in check. Carefully, she brought her eyes back to Laurent. It was only then that she became aware of the men sitting at the next table. She recognized the way they held themselves as they sat, alert and quietly powerful. Laurent de Fayols had not come alone to tell her; he had been escorted by the police.
“There is one last thing you need to know. As I say, Rose was aggressive as well as unbalanced, and it was difficult. It was only after she died that we found out why. The myrtle liqueur she drank was contaminated with datura—a spectacular but highly toxic plant. The effects can be hallucinogenic. Perhaps her illness as well as her behaviour that night can be partly attributed to her regular consumption of it.
“It was analysed after she died, and was found to contain an alarming quantity of datura poison. I don’t believe she added it deliberately, or at least, I don’t want to believe that. That part of the garden had been neglected over the years, and the datura had spread in an extraordinary way alongside the myrtle hedge, threading itself through the place where she always picked the berries. The liqueur killed her, in the end. I’m sorry to say that it’s possible that Ellie drank some too.”
Laurent looked ashamed. “I am so very sorry. Until my mother told me exactly who Ellie was, I knew nothing of these old connections. Rose was hardly making sense by the end, but when she was lucid, it was all about the past. When she was dying, she kept repeating the name Xavier, and that I should tell you she was sorry. I gave her my word.”
There was a long pause, then he turned to the men at the next table. “Lieutenant Meunier? Thank you. It is done.”
Suzie was waiting when the Eurostar came in at Ebbsfleet. Nearly seventy years old now—unbelievable!—but she looked younger. The family resemblance was strong, particularly the height and the dark blond hair, now artificially ash blond, but she had her father’s perceptive brown eyes and olive skin. Even now, her face was not lined as deeply as that of most English women her age, but Ellie’s death had snatched away the natural exuberance and self-confidence.
She drove Iris home, concentrating on the road, changing lanes in her usual deft manner, asking no questions, aware of the undercurrents as ever; waiting until the time was right, insisting that Iris rest for a few hours when they arrived back at The Beeches.
Late in the afternoon they shared a pot of tea in companionable silence, Iris both marvelling at her daughter’s composure and concerned by it.
“Come with me,” said Iris. “Let’s take a turn round the garden.”
They went on patrol among the leaves and petals, dealing with any unwanted developments, the sooner the better. In the kitchen garden a few tomatoes had ripened, and Iris pulled them off the vine for Marion to serve with supper. Waste not, want not.
Iris told Suzie all she could, choosing her words carefully, about Rose de Fayols, and how Ellie had died. How Laurent and his loyal housekeeper had initially covered up his mother’s part in the story that night, reasoning that the firing of the gun could have been construed as attempted murder, that nothing could have been changed by the admission except for further deterioration of her mental state. After the old lady died, how the pathology examination had led to an investigation of the chemical content of the liqueur she had always made.
“Datura can have dangerous effects. Anna did some research on her computer while we were waiting for the train. It can be a soporific as well as a hallucinogen. In certain circumstances, it can induce drug trips that recur for as long as a week after taking it. Sometimes it’s enough to smell it, or even to think about it, to prompt the brain to return to an altered state. It’s not the physical effects like a racing heart that can kill, it’s the illusion that a path goes straight ahead—or that the sea is a garden where you can lie down for a little sleep. . . .”
They sat on a bench by the apple tree, noticing the dry leaves and the first copper curls on the grass. They would never know exactly what had happened to Ellie on that last night. So they talked of her vitality and the enormity of the space she had left; her drive and determination.
“What she wrote about Xavier in her notebook,” said Suzie. Too late now to call him by any other name. “Do you think that could have been what happened to him—that his plane went down over the sea?”
So many years, so many variations of the dream: the aircraft beating through the dark, the climb into the night sky. The seas of cloud, the controls that did not respond, the start of the strangest journey the pilot has ever made. The horror that habitually jolted her awake: the plane rushing onwards into the emptiness; no time left, only the beginning of time; then, afterwards, the closeness she felt to him as she lay there in the dark. Once, she felt a tender kiss on her cheek that was so warm and real she felt his presence there at her bedside. A long time ago, but vividly recalled despite having convinced herself that she must still have been on the cusp of dreaming and waking.
“I have the feeling it is.”
“And the sketch of Gabriel—what was that, a copy of a photograph?”
“Laurent swore he’d never seen one like that, and there was nothing even similar in his mother’s effects.”
“From a book, maybe.”
“The policeman Meunier said something
odd,” said Iris. “Ellie had consistently claimed there was another witness to the suicide on the ferry, but this man could not be traced. The sketch matched the description she gave of him.”
“Perhaps she was trying to be helpful, getting it down on paper the way she knew best.”
“She wrote the name Gabriel underneath,” persisted Iris.
Suzie stared out over the fields. “You understood the message, didn’t you?”
“I understood.”
“Will you tell me what it means?”
Iris considered. Thy word is a lantern unto my feet: and a light unto my path. She could not explain the miracle by which the message had been delivered, nor the picture; it was no stranger than the dreams but equally unthinkable to articulate. I have never loved as I have loved you. You have been my light in this darkness. Those were Xavier’s words in their final seconds together before he flew back to France. She had never been sure, and now she was.
“He did love me,” said Iris to their daughter. “And he would have loved you, too.”
Epilogue
In the early hours of November 4, 2013, a small fishing boat working the waters southeast of Marseille caught a twisted piece of metal the size and shape of a shark. The boat pitched in heavy rain and darkness as the two fishermen cursed the rips in the net caused by the object’s sharp teeth, and were about to cast it overboard when one of them noticed a flash of silver as he eased away the torn netting and removed knots of weed.
Closer inspection revealed a band of steel imprinted with a serial number. They took a GPS reading of the exact location. The metal shark returned to the harbour with the catch of rascasse, girelle, and snapper.
The barnacled metal was identified as part of the engine casing of a Caudron C270 Luciole, a light aircraft built in the 1930s and known as a Firefly. The remains of the plane were recovered by marine archaeologists from a deep shelf in the seabed between the Golden Isles and Marseille, where it had landed, presumably sometime during World War II, to judge from the explosive damage to the undercarriage.
Author’s Note
The area of Provence I know well was a stronghold of the French Resistance during the Second World War. It’s the kind of country place where people are proud of their past and stories are passed down in everyday conversation. The Resistance years are spoken about—to British, American, and Canadian visitors in particular—with considerable pride and a sense of shared history.
I have long been intrigued by the stories of clandestine wartime airdrops of arms and agents by the RAF, and the secret landings of planes while France was under Nazi Occupation. When I began research into these air operations, I discovered a poignant detail in the memoir We Landed by Moonlight written by one of the RAF’s finest Special Operations pilots, Group Captain Hugh Verity. On the makeshift landing strip known as “Spitfire,” close to the great lavender fields of Sault, a Dakota was flown in carrying key French personnel just before the Allied landings on the south coast in August 1944. The plan was to land, drop the passengers, and collect a group of escaping American airmen who had been on the run. But the Dakota was too heavy, and the makeshift runway too short. On the run-up to take-off, the undercarriage snagged on a wide strip of lavender that had been planted to disguise the length of the field from the ever-vigilant occupying authorities. Before another attempt could be made, some of the US airmen had to disembark. Promises were made to come back for them the following night, but it was too late. The botched operation had taken too long, the Nazis and their Vichy enforcers, the Milice, were now aware of it and took brutal reprisals. The next night, the Dakota returned but there was no Resistance reception team waiting to signal it down.
That strip of lavender was the spark behind The Lavender Field, the first section to be written. It features the blind perfume maker Marthe Lincel, who appears in The Lantern, and tells the story of what really happened to her during the war when she began her apprenticeship with the perfume factory in Manosque. I should say here that the main characters and stories in my book are all fictional, even if they are underpinned by real events.
For the historical aspects of the book, visits to the Musée de la Résistance at Fontaine de Vaucluse, the Musée de la Lavande, Coustellet, and the working lavender distilleries at Les Coulets in Rustrel and Les Agnels at Buoux were invaluable.
More insights came from the work of the French poet René Char. In his secret wartime life, Char was a highly respected and successful Resistance leader, code-named Alexandre, based in the village of Céreste at the eastern end of the Luberon valley. The account by his friend Georges-Louis Roux, La Nuit d’Alexandre, is full of local detail. It might have seemed, to eagle-eyed readers who notice these things, that my mention of the trustworthy local policeman Cabot in the story was another thank-you to my literary agent Stephanie Cabot (as indeed it was), but the good gendarme Cabot did exist in real life; he was instrumental in recovering some jewels which had been stolen on their way to being sold to buy food supplies, not only for Char and his host family, but for the army of resistants hiding out in the hills for whom “Capitaine Alexandre” was responsible.
In A Shadow Life, another young woman experiences a different aspect of the war. In bomb-blasted, monochrome London, Iris Nightingale works for the SOE, Churchill’s Special Operations Executive, formed to sabotage and disrupt behind the lines in Occupied France. Iris works behind the scenes, recruiting and preparing the agents for their missions in France, and evaluating their wireless messages from enemy territory.
The starting point for this story was the real-life figure of Vera Atkins, the senior woman officer at SOE’s French Section in London (Mavis Acton in this novel). A strong woman who provoked strong reactions, Vera Atkins proved her mettle by her resolute determination to discover what had happened to those SOE agents who did not return after the end of the war, especially the women she had personally recruited. In this, I am indebted to Sarah Helm’s brilliant and gripping book, A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE.
The character of Xavier Descours was suggested by the real Henri Déricourt, a pilot (in civilian life) and wartime flight liaison officer between the RAF and the French Resistance. After the war, there were many questions about his true motives, and whether he was a double-agent for the Nazis, or triple-agent working for the Allies. It is a question that remains unresolved.
Quite by chance, I acquired another source of information and background when I was asked to join a charity fundraiser, Authors for Autistica, an auction in which authors pledge to include the name of the winning bidder in a new book—or a name of the winner’s choice. I was invited to talk about the auction on BBC Radio Kent, which I duly did, mentioning that I was researching the RAF/SOE “Moondrop” flights taking special agents into France. I didn’t give any details or character names. I had only just begun writing, though the synopsis was complete at that stage. I already had a character called Nancy, a young woman who was working for the RAF. How strange, then, that the request of the winning bidder was to give a character the name of Nancy Bateman, his mother, who was ninety-one and had worked in the wartime RAF. . . . I spoke with the family, and was sent a photo of their Nancy. I have woven some of her experiences into the novel.
The air museum at what was once RAF Tangmere in Sussex was a fascinating source of information. The clandestine flights carrying passengers into and out of occupied France operated from this airfield, and there is a large collection of artifacts from the era. The curator David Coxon and his staff took evident pleasure in telling me of ghostly sightings at quiet times, especially around the doomed Battle of Britain plane that has been reassembled from fragments dug out of the crash site. They also told me a tale of the disembodied arm clad in wartime RAF uniform that politely opens doors for the cleaners early in the morning. . . .
The late Barbara Bertram is another real-life character, the indefatigable hostess at Bignor Manor. I have not changed her name, and drew on many of the
details in her memoir, French Resistance in Sussex.
The island of Porquerolles, off the southern French coast, is the setting for the first story, The Sea Garden. Early in the summer season, before the main crowds have arrived, the diving by the cliffs and calanques is spectacular, and there are shipwrecks on the seabed that are now home to fish and corals.
Some of the wrecks date from the Second World War, when the island was occupied first by the Italians and then by the Germans. The only Frenchmen allowed to remain were the lighthouse keeper, Monsieur Pellegrino, and his assistant. In 1944, Pellegrino saved the lighthouse from destruction by the Germans, an act of heroism for which he earned the French Cross of the Legion of Honour. Although I proceeded to take liberties with the historical facts in this story, this was the starting point for this section.
What links these stories is the theme of communication, or the lack of it: coded wireless messages; torch signals; lighthouse beams; braille; the human senses, especially that of smell; information withheld; misinformation; differences in language; symbols. The novel’s structure mirrors the oblique connections between underground cells, where security is paramount and the best defense is limited knowledge of the activities of others in the organization.
Of the very many books I read while researching this one, these are the ones I found most illuminating, and recommend without hesitation to anyone who would like to know more about the true stories that lie behind the fiction.
We Landed by Moonlight, Hugh Verity (revised edition, Crécy Publishing, 2000)
Wartime Writings 1939–1944, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (translation: Harcourt, 1986)
The Resistance, Matthew Cobb (Pocket Books, 2009)
The Sea Garden Page 30