The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  “So who was it that she met?” he asked absently. He’d pulled the menu towards him and was studying the page with the wine selection. When he realized this, he quickly flipped over to the pasta dishes.

  Mae leaned forward a bit and lowered her voice. She acted very secretive. “You won’t believe it,” she whispered. “After all these years … First I thought she was imagining it, but she was right. It was really him.”

  “Who?” Franca asked.

  “Julien. The Frenchman. The Frenchman from back then.”

  “Who’s Julien?” Alan asked, confused.

  And at the same time, Franca cried, “That can’t be!”

  Alan ordered Rigatoni Napoli, and Franca, worn out as she was, felt she could stand to treat herself with something decadent. She chose the spaghetti with a blend of four cheeses. They ordered pinot grigio to drink, and Alan wanted to know who Julien was. Mae was torn; she had likely promised her friend at some point not to tell Alan anything about Julien, but on the other hand she was burning to be the one to fill Alan in on intimate details from his mother’s life.

  “The crazy thing is,” she said, “that Beatrice thought she’d seen him one evening last year. We were sitting in Le Nautique, it must have been late August or early September, and suddenly she claimed to have caught a glimpse of him among the people outside. I told her it couldn’t be. I thought after so long a time she’d not be able to recognize him anyway, but she was rather sure of what she saw. And today, all of a sudden, she froze up and said, That’s Julien over there! And I had to admit, I would have recognized him too. He’s a very old man, in his late seventies by now, but somehow his features haven’t changed. He looks young for his age. He’s still a good-looking man.” Mae sighed. “He was back then, too, you’ve got to admit.”

  “Would someone please enlighten me as to who this mysterious Julien is?” Alan asked. “He would certainly seem to be quite important to my mother if she’s simply forgotten about lunch with the three of us.”

  Mae lowered her gaze, and Franca thought that, with all the fuss she was making, even a man less intelligent than Alan would have realized by then what was going on.

  “A childhood friend,” she said. “From the time of the war. He worked for Erich Feldmann.”

  “I see,” said Alan. “He was Mum’s first love?”

  Franca saw no reason to deny this. “Yes. It seems that they spent a few rather romantic years together. He was able to escape and …”

  “… And my parents hid him in the attic,” Mae added. “Which of course was awfully dangerous. It could have cost my father his life.”

  “Interesting,” said Alan. “And he and Mum had their little trysts up there?”

  “I should say so!” It was clear to look at Mae that she still, even today, couldn’t get over the fact that Julien had preferred Beatrice back then. “Beatrice was far too young, of course, and it seems to me that …”

  “I think you have to look at it in light of the special circumstances of that time,” Franca was quick to say. “I think that people, young people as well, were constantly aware of the danger all around them. Everything could have come to an end in the span of a day. You didn’t wait till you’d reached the appropriate age to fall in love. You took what you got, and you took it fast.”

  “Besides that you could say that young girls nowadays are also getting quite the early start on things,” Alan tossed in. “There seems to hardly be a lower age limit anymore.”

  Mae nodded wistfully. “Oh yes, I find it rather regrettable. The young things rob themselves of any true feelings, of really experiencing such a wonderful event. I remember how horrified I was when I found out that Maya had had her first sexual experience at thirteen years old. Thirteen! In the backseat of a car. And I bet you that today she doesn’t even remember the boy’s name.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that,” Alan said drily. “For Maya to remember the names of all her lovers would be like if someone were to memorize all the different phonebooks for each of the Channel Islands. And that’s clearly asking too much.”

  Mae pressed her lips together but didn’t dare protest. She knew that Alan was right.

  “Well then,” she said and rummaged in her handbag for her wallet, “in any case, I’m not going to wait for Beatrice any longer. I find it very impolite, what she’s doing, but then in a way I’m used to it from her.”

  “Lunch is on me, Mae,” said Alan. “And please excuse my mother’s behavior. But if this man was her first love …” He put on a winning smile, but he couldn’t mollify Mae. She left the restaurant with her nose in the air, her displeasure showing all too clearly in her features.

  “I have to admit that you are far better informed about my mother’s life than I am,” said Alan, after Mae had gone. “She never told me anything about this Julien.”

  “Mothers rarely tell their sons about their love affairs, I should think,” said Franca. “You shouldn’t take it personally.”

  But apparently Alan had already dropped the subject, he wasn’t particularly interested in whatever men his mother might at some point have had a relationship with. He seemed happy that Mae was no longer sitting at the table with them.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, “that it might be best to drive over to Kevin’s and tell him our suspicions to his face. We’ll see how he reacts. I can offer him legal help. I think that would be fair.”

  “If he wasn’t the one,” Franca responded, “which I’m convinced is the case, then he’ll be very hurt. And rightly so. That’s not just any suspicion that you’re giving voice to, Alan. We’re talking about murder. And a particularly gruesome murder, too. And that,” she added, shaking her head, “is also why I absolutely cannot picture Kevin as the perpetrator. Even if everything fits together, Alan, if everything you say is on firm footing — Kevin wouldn’t go and cut Helene’s throat! Maybe he might throttle her or break a bottle over her head, in the heat of the moment, in his despair, but he couldn’t bring himself to do something so horrible. Kevin is …” She looked for a way of putting it. She knew that the word that she finally landed on was inappropriate, but nevertheless it hit the mark. “Kevin is much too prissy for such a cruel, bloody act.”

  “We’ll confront him with what we’ve been thinking about,” Alan persisted. “Maybe he can tell us something that’ll resolve everything. It’s better than going straight to the police, and making him then have to defend himself to the detectives.”

  “I feel rotten about it,” said Franca. She pushed her half-empty plate away, she wasn’t hungry. The panic lay in wait once more. It’ll take hold of me before the day’s up, she thought, depressed. Sometime, at some impossible moment. Maybe at Kevin’s.

  Alan pushed his plate away as well. He also seemed not to have any real appetite. “I’m sure,” he said, “that soon the police will have the same idea and set their sights on Kevin. They’re not just sitting around doing nothing. They’re making inquiries, piecing things together … And it’ll become clear to them that there are certain things that don’t add up. It’ll take a while, because they don’t know a lot of the facts that we do: They don’t know about Helene’s money, don’t know that Kevin was constantly borrowing from her, that on the day of her funeral he tried to search through her room, and so on. But believe me, they’ll get wind of it all, and then he’s in for it. Basically, we’re doing him a favor by getting to him before the police do.”

  His words made sense to her, but she still had a bad feeling. She made an effort to ignore it. Maybe she was just feeling miserable because she hadn’t taken her pills.

  “Ok fine, let’s go then,” she said, and stood up.

  The small harbor cafe had a terrace that lay right on the water. A simple floor of wooden planks, simple tables and chairs, a few ragged sun umbrellas. The building was positioned such that it blocked any hint of
a breeze, and so the patio had become very hot by then.

  Beatrice had long since removed her rain jacket and was now pulling her sweater over her head as well. Underneath she was wearing a white T-shirt with a print of a horse’s head. She tried with both hands to get her wild hair under control. “God,” she said. “Who would have thought that it would get so warm today!”

  Julien looked at her and smiled. “You’ll take this for a dumb compliment, Beatrice, but you haven’t changed very much at all. You’re older, naturally, same as I am. But your mannerisms, your laugh, the way you turn your head … it’s all stayed the same. You have nothing of the old woman about you. You could be the young girl who sat with me in that garret in Le Variouf and read Victor Hugo.”

  “Now you’re going too far,” Beatrice disagreed. “There are light years between me and that young girl. An entire life, even.”

  “Have you ever read the story of the bell-ringer of Notre Dame since then?”

  She looked at him and weighed how much of her sentimentality she was willing to own up to. “I’ve read it many times since then,” she said finally. “There are memories bound up in every line. And it’s probably got something to do with old age, that one begins to wallow in memories.”

  “I have also read it often since, and I’ve thought a lot about us.” He took out a cigar, made to offer Beatrice one as well, but she shook her head. She had never liked cigars.

  “In hindsight, some things become transfigured,” he went on. “For me, the time back then has come to seem increasingly romantic. I keep having to tell myself that it was everything other than nice. It was dangerous and cruel, and I was in despair. The Nazis stole years of my life from me. I sat up there in the attic, stared at the blue sky through the window and wished that I could cry out against my fate. But of course you know that. I’d say I did enough whining back then.”

  “But I think that you’re absolutely right to use the word fate just now,” said Beatrice. “It was our fate. Yours as well as mine. If we both see a romantic side to it today, we shouldn’t deny that to ourselves. It also means that we’ve accepted what was given us, that we’ve become reconciled to it. And it’s good that way. Anything else would lead to bitterness, and that’s bad for your blood pressure.”

  He waited a beat, then he laughed. “You’ve still got that wonderful, practical way of yours. That’s bad for your blood pressure! I know no other woman who would have made that association.”

  She stirred her coffee. As she did so she continued to look at Julien, her gaze as intense now as it had been for hours. He was almost eighty years old, but she would have taken him for seventy. What he had said about the vitality and youthfulness of her mannerisms was also true of him. There was nothing of the old man about him. His once dark hair had turned white, his once smooth, youthful face wrinkled, but his eyes were still clear and shining. And wide-awake.

  He had told her that he’d been divorced from Suzanne, way back in the mid-’60s, that since then he had been married two more times. His second marriage had ended in divorce in the ’70s. His third wife had died of cancer in 1992.

  “I was truly happy with her,” he had said wholeheartedly. “We understood each other, gave each other a lot of space. Maybe, though, it also had something to do with the fact that we were both no longer young. That we were more settled. She didn’t try to change me, and I wasn’t always turning around and chasing other women anymore. At some point it starts to seem ridiculous, don’t you think? At the latest when the gray hairs clearly outnumber the dark ones. I also didn’t have the need to make up for things anymore. I felt I’d made up the lost time again — if you can even say that. Because every lifetime is something unique. Irretrievable, irrecoverable.”

  Only now, hours after they had almost collided with one another on the promenade and had stared at one another in disbelief, only now did he ask, “What about your — what was his name — Frederic? Are you still together?”

  She shook her head. “Not for a very long time now. We’ve been divorced for over forty years. We’re not in touch at all anymore. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.”

  “That’s why you’re back on Guernsey,” he surmised. “I thought you had stayed in Cambridge for good. Back then you seemed so determined to turn your back on the island forever.”

  “Things turned out differently,” was all she said, and her tone broadcast that she didn’t wish to probe the subject any further. “I was on Guernsey for practically my whole life.”

  The look he gave her was thoughtful and intent, but he said nothing.

  “I’ve been here a few times,” he said. “Most recently in March. And before that, last year, in August. I came over from St.-Malo this morning. I’ll be staying for a few days.”

  “You never tried to get in touch with me when you were here. Never, in all these years.”

  “But I thought you were in Cambridge,” he said feebly, and she shook her head. “You couldn’t have known that for certain. It would have been worthwhile to try, even once.”

  “You’re right. It was … it just didn’t fit somehow.”

  She understood what he actually wanted to say: There had no longer been any place for her in his life. She wouldn’t have fit in there anymore. She had belonged to another era, and he hadn’t been willing to integrate her into his new life. It would have meant mixing old and new elements, and obviously he’d wanted to have a clean break.

  But he did read Victor Hugo, she thought, and within her there was an almost childish rejoicing. He read him and thought of us. He has never completely gotten over me. There was no strangeness between them, even though they hadn’t seen each other in almost half a century. They sat together in the sun as peacefully as an old married couple, who can be silent together because they understand each other without words. Each of them could have laid out for the other everything that had happened over the many years and decades, but neither of them felt the need. They had exchanged a few facts, but for the most part they had been silent. Now Julien was asking, “Is she still alive? You know, Feldmann’s widow. She remained in your house after the war.”

  Beatrice was surprised; for two weeks Helene’s death had been the topic of conversation on the island, and for a moment it confused her to be sitting across from a person who inquired about her in all innocence. But then she remembered what Julien had said: He had just come over from Brittany that morning.

  “Helene is dead,” she said. “She was murdered two weeks ago. We found her on the path right below our house. Someone had slit her throat.”

  She almost became ill as she said it. It sounded so monstrous, so horrible. It should have been: She passed away. Gently, in her sleep. Or: She was very sick. Finally she was released. That was what you generally said about elderly women who had died. You didn’t say: Somebody slit her throat.

  Oh God, she thought.

  “Oh God,” said Julien, stunned. “That can’t be! Who did it?”

  “They don’t have the murderer yet. The police are completely in the dark.”

  Julien looked shocked and for a few minutes seemed at a loss as to what he could say next. Silently he puffed at his cigar. Beatrice lit a cigarette and considered whether she should order two drams of liquor. Her gaze went out to the shore, and she saw Franca and Alan, who were just then walking by.

  She jumped up and waved. “Alan! Franca! Come over here!”

  Both looked around in bewilderment, but then discovered where the cry was coming from. Two minutes later they were standing on the terrace.

  “My son Alan,” Beatrice introduced them. “Alan, this is Julien. An old friend.”

  The two men shook hands. Julien smiled very openly at Alan, Alan seemed rather more reserved.

  Father and son, thought Franca, fascinated. And neither has any idea.

  Beatrice introduced he
r as well, and Julien greeted her with charm. He must have been an uncommonly good-looking man, Franca decided, with a phenomenal effect on women. Even as an old man you could clearly see that about him.

  What a handsome man, she thought, and how hard for a woman to be with him.

  “Mum, we’re driving back home,” said Alan. “Would you like to come with us? You can’t count on Mae any longer, she went off in a huff after you left her sitting alone in the restaurant for so long.”

  “You go ahead,” said Beatrice. “I’d like to stay here with Julien a while longer and chat about the old times. I’ll take the bus afterwards.”

  “Or I’ll drive you,” Julien offered. “I’ve got a rental car anyway.” He turned to Alan. “I’ve just come over from France.”

  “I see,” said Alan. Something seemed to be bothering him about Julien, but Franca couldn’t make out what it was. “If you could take my mother back home, that would of course be very friendly of you.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing at all,” said Julien.

  He remained standing until Franca and Alan had left the terrace.

  “You didn’t tell me you had a son,” he said to Beatrice.

  “There’s a lot I haven’t told you,” she replied.

  7

  “That worked out that we don’t have to drive Mum home first,” Alan said once they were sitting in the car. “This way we can go straight to Kevin’s and don’t have to think up an explanation to give her.”

  Franca rolled down the passenger side window to grab a bit of fresh air. She knew how desperately she needed a pill. Obviously Alan had completely forgotten that he’d meant to go to a pharmacy to ask for a similar kind of medication. He was on the hunt for a criminal now, wanted fervently to get to Kevin and talk to him. Franca didn’t want to remind him, especially since she thought it was pointless anyway: she was convinced she couldn’t get her medication anywhere without a prescription.