by Tim Roux
So the adventure was on. I tracked down Alice and discovered that her body was buried on the elevated plains opposite the Pic St. Loup, next door to Valflaunès, give or take five kilometres. According to her, she was to be found about two-to-three metres below the surface of a tractor track which skirted a vineyard. The farmer is a friend of her father’s and her father knew that he was away for a few days, so he borrowed his tractor and dug a deep hole in the middle of the track, laid out Alice carefully and tenderly at the bottom of the pit, and then covered it all up again.
That worried me. Firstly, how exactly were we going to be able to gain access to such a public place without anyone seeing us, unless we should be so lucky that the farmer is away again? Secondly, even if uninterrupted access was possible, how was I going to dig up to three metres down? The earth around here is impossible. I have seen enormous rocks that the farmers have dug up making mountainous ridges along the edges of their fields. The stones are massive and there are tens of them to the square metre. Besides, the soil itself is like concrete, and I didn’t think that the Earl would be up for much digging. I considered asking Mike to help us, but if I mentioned it to Mike there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t pass the information onto Chloe and that would be disastrous. Despite all that, I nearly asked Mike anyway, but rare moments of integrity prevented me from opening my mouth. I owed that much to Alice.
Alice was convinced that she knew exactly where she was lying and could guide us there without the need for lights which were, of course, out of the question, but the sheer noise alone was going to be a problem. I would be there with my pickaxe (well M. Toucas’ pickaxe) for hours pummelling the soil. How can you do that surreptitiously? I then had another fear. Assuming that I did manage to dig three metres down using a pickaxe and spade, what if I drove either the pickaxe or the spade right through Alice’s skeleton? It wouldn’t hurt her, but it made me feel squeamish, especially as I realised that I would probably have to pick Alice’s body out of its grave by hand. What if parts of it were still intact? What if the earth had partially preserved it and there were strands of skin and flesh and sinews, hair, nails, even eyes. She would not be as beautiful as I saw her as a ghost. She might smell foul too. What had originally sounded a fitting gesture was rapidly degenerating into a horror story nightmare. I didn’t dare share my thoughts with Alice so I pretended to remain enthusiastic.
The Earl picked us up in his car on the next Saturday night. He chose the Saturday because there was a chance that the farmer would be gone over the weekend, or that he would be attending the village fête in Quissac late into the night. I thought he was being optimistic. It was going to take five or six hours I reckoned to dig Alice out.
The Earl had stuffed the boot with excavation tools and with night vision equipment he happened to use to watch the nocturnal animals, so at least we would be able to see what we were doing, one of us anyway.
Alice guided us to between Biranques and Rouet and turned us up a track which immediately fed through scrubland, but which opened up to reveal a small field of vines. I was looking around for curious and defensive farmers but the other two ignored all that. If we were going to do it we were going to do it, no apologies, no explanations.
“You can always buy yourself out of almost any scrape, Paul, especially around here. Consciences are cheap, life is hard.”
I simply hadn’t acquired a sufficiently aristocratic outlook yet to believe that the entire earth belonged to me and that there was a simple solution to everything.
Luckily, in this case, there really was. By some extraordinary coincidence, the farmer had been digging a ditch or something only a hundred metres away using his tractor, so the bucket was already attached at the front and the keys were in the ignition. Nobody steals much around here, I suppose, and thieving tourists don’t usually have much use for a tractor.
Faced with a gadget rather than a pickaxe and a spade, the Earl immediately volunteered like a fired-up schoolboy to work the tractor.
“I do this sort of thing on the estate in the Cotswolds. I find it so peaceful and relaxing and the workers find it ingratiatingly hilarious, so we all have a good time,” he explained. “All right, Alice, where exactly are you?”
Alice ‘walked’ to a specific position along the track and pointed down. “I am here,” she said. “Exactly here. My head’s there and my feet are there.”
“We’ll have you out of there in no time,” promised the Earl. “Warn me when I get close to you. I don’t want to mash you to bits.” So the Earl had been having the same thoughts.
“I will.”
As with previous digs, Alice remained relatively insouciant as the Earl removed the topsoil, if you can call it that, and then rapidly attacked the layers below. I began to wonder whether this would prove to be yet another body entirely unassociated with Alice, the work of a second serial killer operating in the area. However, as the Earl got closer to her body, she began to wince and to fret as if he were a dentist drilling near a nerve.
“I think you should use a spade now,” she suggested.
“I’ll go a little deeper,” replied the Earl but I’ll go more slowly. You tell me how close I am.”
“You are less than a metre away from my body,” Alice advised him nervously.
“Can’t be. We are still far too shallow. Your father would not have buried you this close to the surface .”
Alice was giving the impression that if the Earl did not listen to her she might throw herself in front of the tractor.
“Stand back please, Alice. We don’t want any accidents. No, I mean that I don’t want an accident. You are interfering with my concentration.”
“I want you to take more care.”
“And I don’t want to waste my time or give Paul here too much to do. Digging this type of terrain is the sort of job they used to give to chain gangs to break their spirits.”
“Stop! You are almost touching me.” Alice was hopping from one foot to the other with a tension which was bordering on frenzy.
The Earl eyed her carefully, calculating the margin by which she was overacting. After two more sweeps he stopped and climbed down from the tractor. “All right, Paul, you start digging and I will get the blankets.
I walked down into the hole. “Where should I dig Alice?”
“Another pace. There. Dig there, but be careful. Try to scrape the soil away. I am sure that you are very close.”
And she was right. Scraping had no impact so I had to dig, cutting the blade hard into the soil, almost immediately disclosing some remnants of a blanket.
“What on earth are you doing?” came a stern voice above me. It was obviously the owner or the manager of the land. “What are you doing with my tractor? Why are you digging up my land?” He was so astonished and agitated that he wasn’t even threatening to call the police. He was threatening us with a hunting rifle instead. “Come out of that hole, please. This instant.” The barrel was pointing directly at my head.
“I feel that I need to explain,” the Earl began, heading the farmer off so that he would not blow me to bits if his finger itched.
The farmer resisted being distracted but he also recognised the calmly authoritative air of the Earl. “I would like to tell you a story … ” Astonishingly, the farmer bought the idea and they both walked away from us down the track. I stood there wondering what kind of story the Earl could possibly come up with.
“Quick,” Alice urged me. “Carry on digging. The Earl is buying you time.”
I scraped around the blanket to reveal more blanket and then the entire blanket. Alice came to stand by my side. “That is me,” she said. She lent down. “Please open the blanket.” I did so, averting my eyes to avoid seeing what was inside. Alice gave a little scream. “That’s enough,” she said sharply. “You can cover me up again. I don’t want you to see me in that state.”
I only caught the briefest of glimpses but I got the impression that some of the body was still intact although th
ere was no real smell.
“Put this new blanket down at my head and see if you can lift me onto it before the blanket tears.”
I couldn’t quite work out whether Alice’s body was heavier than I expected or not. That would give me a clue as to how intact she was without actually looking. Pinning the Earl’s blanket down with my foot I rather inelegantly manhandled Alice onto the edge turning her and shaking her to get her lying along the blanket, feet first this time. It was not a delicate procedure. If she had still been alive she would have had a thousand bruises.
“Well done, Paul. That was very brave of you. Now you have to drag me up the slope towards the car. Don’t worry about hurting me. I don’t feel anything except an urgency to work fast.”
Getting her to the car was not so hard, but I then stood there trying to work out how to hoist her into the boot without resorting to hugging her close, an idea which made my flesh crawl.
“There are some ropes in the boot,” Alice observed. “Attach one to my feet and winch it round the boot hinge and tie it fast when my feet are touching.”
This left Alice feet-up, head-down, like a large bedraggled fish suspended from an anglers rod.
“Now you can lift my head up and swing me in.”
I still had to hold her under the back to heave her in. In the end I took a deep breath, inhaled callous determination and finished her off with my knee. I slammed the boot shut.
Strangely, Alice was breathing hard. “That was exhausting,” she complained with awe.
I wondered whether we should start filling in the hole again. It all depended on what the Earl’s story was. I lounged on the side of the road to consider my decision, and then resolved that I would. After all, manoeuvring the tractor looked fun. It took me a minute or so to master the controls, but by the time I saw the Earl and the farmer ambling slowly back towards us along the track in animated yet peaceable conversation, I had nearly repaired the damage to the track.
“Don’t worry,” the farmer soothed me. “I’ll finish off. You have had a traumatic day.”
I carried on.
“Please,” insisted the farmer, “leave it to me.” I shut off the engine and climbed down, discovering my legs to be weakly uncertain as I hit the ground. The farmer grabbed me by the elbow to steady me. “Careful, now.” He climbed onto the tractor and fired it up again.
The Earl got into the car and I staggered over to the passenger side. The farmer nodded to us.
“What on earth did you tell him?” I asked the Earl, an involuntary smirk exploring its way across my face.
“He is a very reasonable man,” he replied. “He understood our predicament.”
“What was that?” I asked intrigued, with Alice listening intently.
“I told him that we needed to bury a body and that we would pay him handsomely to keep his mouth shut.”
“And he said yes?” That I could not believe.
“Of course he said yes,” exclaimed the Earl. “He wanted the money. However, I may find the police waiting for me when I come back, not that they will find anything, naturally.”
I didn’t know what to make of it, but the farmer’s behaviour seemed to bear out the Earl’s claim, and the Earl seemed to consider that everything had gone exactly to his plan as he had envisaged it.
As I said, I could never hack it as an aristocrat.
* * *
Alice’s reburial service is dignified and simple. Only the Earl, the Countess and I attend of the living, with Alice representing her dead self.
It is a tortuous enterprise for both Alice and me. We neither know what will happen next. Alice is hoping that her reburial will release her spirit to the light. I am half-hoping that too, but also reluctant to see her go.
“You have promised to come and visit my grave regularly,” Alice reminds me. “That will maintain the bond between us. You cannot want me to linger here in this state forever. That would be very selfish of you.”
“No, I don’t want that. I want you to be here and not be here.”
“That is how I will always be,” Alice assures me, without explaining herself.
The Earl backs the car up to the grave while the Countess guides him imperiously lest he inadvertently drop a wheel over the edge. “That’s enough, Constance. That’s enough,” she calls out, rapping the car frame pre-emptively.
We haven’t ordered a coffin (how could we?), but the Earl knows enough to realise that we need ropes to lower Alice into her new resting place. We carry her body out of the boot to lie across the ropes positioned in parallel on the ground. I then take hold of the two rope strands on my side, the Earl and the Countess grasp the opposite ends, and we lift Alice until she hovers over the grave.
“Extreme care here,” the Earl orders.
The Countess is straining to be ‘game’ in pulling on her section of the rope but it is obviously a struggle for her. Alice seems to be holding her breath as if nervous at being in the hands of an tottering pallbearer. She is lowered unevenly and unsteadily but she arrives as planned.
Alice claps us with genuine appreciation. “Well done. I am home.” She really is so pleased that the Earl and I burst into a laughter which confuses the Countess who, neither being able to see nor hear Alice, is oblivious to her reaction.
The Earl holds out his hands affectionately, almost longingly, towards the real Alice, the ghost standing beside me. “Alice, what do we say … ?” He allows his question to linger. “We owe you so much. You have been the most extraordinary experience of my life.” I glance at the Countess but she remains respectful with her eyes lowered. “You have solved a puzzle for me. You have relieved me of a most terrible burden that has plagued me since I was a small child – the burden of seeing what absolutely no-one can see, until I ran into young Paul here. Those who see too much have an affliction as crippling as those who see too little. I genuinely believe that. You have redeemed me.” The concept of redemption is clearly of great significance to him. “And I now appreciate your suffering, the suffering endured by all your kind who cannot leave the earth. I pray to God that that never happens to the Countess here or to me.”
(And to me?).
“To Paul too, of course,” the Earl qualifies his statement hastily, “but he has a long time to go.”
(Not so long).
“I am only sorry that we never knew each other while you were alive. It makes me realise that I live like a pearl in the midst of a community I know absolutely nothing about. That realisation is humbling. How could I accept to be among so many people whose lives are unknown to me, even incomprehensible? That is a truly terrible thing to recognise in myself – my single-minded focus on myself. So many people pass me by like ghosts when they are still alive, and only come alive once they are dead. You have taught me all of this. Is it too late for me to change? Outwardly I can only appear the same, but in my heart I will be different, paying penance for what I now realise I should have been.”
The Earl remains standing there with arms outstretched like a distressed sleep-walker which is maybe as he has felt his entire life. The Countess moves over to him and cuddles her arm around his back. “Come on, Dear. There is no need to torture yourself so. You have a kind heart and you have always made us happy. That is not so bad, is it? If God had wanted you to be God, He would have abdicated, wouldn’t He? Accept, Constance, the frailties of humanity.”
I feel compelled to contribute something too, however awkwardly. I didn’t want to make a speech for the sake of it but the challenge has been passed over to me by default.
“Alice, it is a beautiful place to be here for eternity. At last I think you are lucky.” I stop. It is a short speech.
There is a pause.
“I would like to sing something at my funeral,” ventures Alice.
“Certainly,” says the Earl. “What would you like to sing?”
“She would like to sing something?” inquires the Countess.
“Ave Maria.”
“Sing
anything you like, Dear,” the Earl encourages her.
So she sings Ave Maria exquisitely in a sexy French accent topped by vibrato. The Countess simply stands there, head bowed, until someone tells her it is over.
Alice continues, word perfect:
«Je crois en un seul Dieu, le Père tout-puissant, créateur du ciel et de la terre, de l'univers visible et invisible. Je crois en un seul Seigneur, Jésus-Christ, le Fils unique de Dieu, né du Père avant tous les siècles ; il est Dieu, né de Dieu, lumière, née de la lumière, vrai Dieu, né du vrai Dieu. Engendré, non pas créé, de même nature que le Père ( même si la traduction "consubstantiel au Père" serait plus précise ), et par lui tout a été fait. Pour nous les hommes, et pour notre salut, il descendit du ciel; par l'Esprit-Saint, il a pris chair de la Vierge Marie, et s'est fait homme. Crucifié pour nous sous Ponce Pilate, il souffrit sa passion et fut mis au tombeau. Il ressuscita le troisième jour, conformément aux Ecritures, et il monta au ciel; il est assis à la droite du Père. Il reviendra dans la gloire, pour juger les vivants et les morts; et son règne n'aura pas de fin. Je crois en l'Esprit Saint, qui est Seigneur et qui donne la vie; il procède du Père et du Fils. Avec le Père et le Fils, il reçoit même adoration et même gloire; il a parlé par les prophètes. Je crois en l'Eglise, une, sainte, catholique et apostolique. Je reconnais un seul baptême pour le pardon des péchés. J'attends la résurrection des morts, et la vie du monde à venir. Amen.»