The Secret of Provence House

by Aubrey Rhodes

  ‘It’s been good for me to get away from it,’ she said. ‘I’m very grateful to you for that.’

  ‘Perspective is rarely a bad thing,’ he said.

  An awkward silence ensued. He took one of the curtain cords in his hand and began to roll it back and forth between his fingers.

  ‘So, what have you been thinking then?’ she finally asked.

  ‘That I admire you,’ he said.

  This was so unexpected it made her blush.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That means a lot to me.’

  ‘I live out here, far from my roots, in this artificial, golfer’s paradise,’ he said. ‘I try not to think about it too much because it’s very comfortable. But when I do, I realize how withdrawn from the world I am now.’

  ‘You don’t seem unhappy.’

  ‘No. No I’m not,’ he said. ‘But I’ve lost what little edge I had once upon a time, and you still have it. You are living in the world. You are doing interesting things. I admire you for it.’

  She stopped her packing and looked at him.

  ‘Much of what I do and how I’ve been able to get to do it, is thanks to you. I’m very aware of that too.’

  He smiled, pleased, but waved her gratitude away. The gesture reminded her of Camilla.

  ‘It sounds like you found something very extraordinary. Something that would have catapulted you into significant fame in your work. And then it was taken from you. And look at you. Still on your feet, working it through, thinking it through, figuring out what to do next. I’m very proud of you.’

  His words caused her eyes to swell with tears.

  ‘How I wish that were true,’ she said.

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘Take it from an old hand. I can see it.’

  Internally, she chided herself for having put this man into a box so quickly since her arrival there, a sterile container devoid of introspection. The overly manicured, dry-cleaned, almost Disney-fied surroundings, and the hyper-American quirks and style of his life there had blinded her, had let her off the hook from having to make an effort to engage with him. She realized that what she had said to him a minute earlier, trying to please him, that this time away from Cornwall had been good for her, was true. And that she had taken his protection for granted. As he stood and came over to her and embraced her, she caught a glimpse of the man her mother had fallen for. Though the hug he gave her was American as well, light, quick, keeping his body back from hers, it was heartfelt.

  ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he said.

  She rang in the New Year back in New York on her terrace, sharing a bottle of champagne with a girlfriend and a grinning Jean-Paul Bonnerive who sat in one of her Adirondack chairs wrapped in a blanket. After the girlfriend left to attend a party, Laura told the French nonagenarian all that had happened, believing him to be one of the few people she knew who would believe her and appreciate the wonder of what she had translated. And he did. He comforted her and suggested that as a former graduate student at Columbia, she let him explore the possibility of having her hired there. He also told her to apply right away for a residency at the American Academy in Rome, something he could help her get admitted to as well.

  A week later, on a sunny, wintry morning, a wave of relief swept through her as the Alitalia Airbus landed at the Falcone Borsellino Airport in Palermo. She rented a car and drove to the southern coast. She stopped to stretch her legs and have a coffee at a little bar on the shore where the beach was deserted. Finding the Pietro Griffo Archaeological Museum near the Valle del Templi was not difficult, and it was there she met the short, slim, and handsome head archaeologist, Nicola Carati.

  ‘Would you like to go to your hotel first, or directly to the site?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you think?’

  He drove a green Toyota jeep and she followed him. It took half an hour to reach the site. She had worried it might be unrecognizable or jammed up next to modern structures and was relieved when they left the highway and began to drive up into hills on a rural road made of dirt. They came to a stop next to three other vehicles and a large area cordoned off with plastic tape of the kind used at crime scenes.

  She got out and breathed in the Mediterranean air. The sun felt good. A light breeze blew. Nicola watched her and didn’t say anything. He just waited and smiled and then led the way up a narrow path until they reached what remained of the villa. There wasn’t much to see, mostly broken columns, but there was the patio, the one described by Joseph of Arimathea in 34 AD and by Professor Aoyagi in 1988, the ‘much damaged black and white mosaic depicting Neptune with a trident standing on a dolphin.’

  ‘My goodness,’ was all she could think to say. But what was pounding away inside her head was, ‘They were here, they were actually here.’ Of all the locations described in Joseph of Arimathea’s text, this was the one she felt closest to. As she had translated the codex, it was Joseph of Arimathea she most identified with. The strength and humanity of his prose had reached across the centuries and bent her sympathies toward him and caused her to regard his nephew with the same ambivalence he had. And here, she thought, at this villa, is where he was buried, and where Daphne, Octavius, and David were probably buried as well.

  ‘Come,’ said Nicola, saying it gently. ‘Come see the remains of the temple. It’s going to please you.’

  She had also formed her own mental picture of Daphne’s temple, and had imagined the climb up to it from the villa as arduous and steep. She had imagined it far above, white and pristine, and commanding a spectacular view of the Mediterranean. But following Nicola she hardly broke a sweat. The hill was low and much closer to the main structures of the villa. She wondered, even hoped, that perhaps the ground had contracted or settled during the intervening centuries.

  Where the hill levelled off the ruins were scant, but the view did not disappoint her. The sea, vast and glittering, was plainly visible below, and though she didn’t say so, looking to the southwest in the clear January light, she would have sworn she was seeing some part of the Algerian coastline.

  ‘I pictured it differently,’ she said.

  ‘The amazing thing is that it is here at all. We only found it thanks to you,’ he replied.

  She made a face.

  ‘I was just the translator.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he said.

  ‘Have you been able to find a statue of the goddess?’

  ‘No. And I doubt we shall. Most likely that was stolen or taken away a long time ago. But come, look over here.’

  She followed him into a ravine. Some of it had occurred naturally after two thousand years of erosion. Nicola’s crew had dug out the rest. They walked along a long section of a white marble wall until they came to a narrow entranceway. She followed him inside.

  ‘I’m fairly certain this is your Daphne’s sleeping chamber.’

  He turned on a small lantern. A mosaic of Minerva covered one of the walls and there was a raised slab right next to them. As she reached down and touched it, tears came into her eyes. She couldn’t help it. She looked at him.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ she said, ‘but I’m very moved.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said, handing her the lantern. ‘I’ll let you be.’

  ‘Grazie,’ she said.

  She did know why. Everything that she had been trying to repress and forget came back to her with full force. All of the work she had done. Its magical importance. The extent of the loss. She sat on the slab where Yeshua had ceded his virginity to Daphne’s half-awake body. As far as she was concerned, this was where William Blake’s ‘arrows of desire’ had worked their magic, not as arms for battle, but as slender darts awakening the pleasures of lust. It had happened right there, long ago, when they had been young and beautiful. And it was here that Christ’s mummy had been stored for a decade at least before it was taken to England.

  And it was then that she remembered the word written in Ancient Greek that was unknown to her, the one on the vellum sheet that was hidden
inside the scroll core – ‘μέγας’. She would have to look it up.

  The archaeologists took her to lunch nearby and one of them, a woman from Turin, said she was so in love with the site that she had come close to buying a home there. But, married and with two young children in school, she knew she would hardly ever get to use it. ‘Most of the land here is protected from development,’ she said. ‘It’s against the law to build a house from scratch. But I found an abandoned shepherd’s cottage on some property nearby, with the roof caved in, another ruin really, but it qualifies as a pre-existing structure that one could renovate.’ After coffees and a shot of limoncello she took Laura to see it. It had a view of the villa and the sea and Laura was entranced by it. The woman, somewhat reluctantly at first, told her how much they were asking and who to call.

  She dined alone at her hotel, The Villa Athena, texting James to work out a time they could speak later that night. Opening her new laptop, she looked up the word in Greek and saw that it meant ‘megalith’ or possibly ‘trithillion’, which is to say, a dolmen. They had buried the mummy case in Cornwall at the shore of a pond next to a dolmen. The word for pond could also signify a lake. An involuntary pressure slammed her solar plexus. Could it be? She quickly reviewed all of the dolmens listed in Cornwall, and though some overlooked the sea, not one of them appeared to have been placed near a body of still water.

  She felt many things at once. She felt great excitement, the kind that had accompanied her during all the weeks of her translation. She felt a great temptation to shout it to the world, to justify her tale that no longer had any texts to back it up. Then she felt caution, and resignation, as she considered the wisdom of keeping such a discovery to herself. She knew that Finn and Bidelia’s actions were but the tip of an iceberg. There was something to be said for leaving things as they were, for leaving the millions of believers with the comfort of their illusions, and, for what it was worth, leaving Christ’s message of love intact and free from distraction. She went to the mini-bar and poured herself a glass of vodka, toasting herself in a mirror, content for the time being with the wonder of it all. When James called, she was in bed.

  ‘I didn’t wake you I hope.’

  ‘I’m too excited to sleep.’

  ‘About seeing me?’

  ‘About that too.’

  ‘What else then?’

  She decided, suddenly, not to say anything.

  ‘Seeing the villa,’ she replied, ‘and the remains of the temple. It’s been overwhelming. And I found a little house I’m thinking of buying, right next to it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. Though it needs a lot of work.’

  ‘Really,’ he said again. ‘How often would you use it?’

  ‘Who knows? But if I accept the invitation from the American Academy in Rome this spring, I can start to fix it up.’

  ‘Sounds promising. And you’d be closer by.’

  ‘I thought of that too.’

  ‘How’s the hotel?’

  ‘Very comfortable. Fancy. Expensive. But I figured, just one night. Also, what with its name, I couldn’t resist.’

  ‘Athena – after Athens? Was the goddess named for the city or the city after the goddess?’

  ‘The goddess was named for the city. As the patron of wisdom and warfare she was worshipped in many Greek cities, but particularly Athens and her name came from there. But the Etruscans absorbed her, transformed her to their liking, and called her Minerva.’

  ‘Ah-ha. Now I get it.’

  ‘So, I had to stay here, right?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Do you know the story of Minerva?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘Nothing would please me more. I find these lessons of yours very sexy.’

  ‘She was the daughter of Jupiter, the Roman equivalent of Zeus, the greatest of all the gods. He had lusted after a goddess called Metis, had raped her and got her pregnant. But then he worried she might give him a son who’d become more powerful than him. So he tried to capture Metis and get rid of the fetus. She did all she could to escape until Jupiter tricked her into turning herself into a fly that he promptly swallowed.’

  ‘A fly.’

  ‘That’s how the story goes. Anyway, she survived and lived inside his head. Some believe, and I like this interpretation, that Jupiter’s wisdom came from Metis buzzing about his brain. As her pregnancy progressed, he got tremendous headaches and to relieve the pain he ordered Vulcan, the blacksmith god, to take a hammer and open a hole in his head. As soon as that happened Minerva was born, emerging as a fully formed adult wearing armour.’

  ‘Where did they come up with this stuff?’

  ‘Hey, they were good storytellers, like the evangelists.’

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘Now what’s interesting is that when the Romans inherited Minerva, they didn’t make her a patron of war like the Greeks, but of wisdom, science, and the arts.’

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  She was clad in flannel pyjamas and socks, because the room was freezing.

  ‘Who says I’m wearing anything?’

  Chapter 45

  James rarely mentioned Carmensina to Laura anymore. She noticed that he was avoiding further conversation about when or whether he would seek a divorce. And to his relief, Laura had given up asking. She saw no point in nagging him when the opportunities they had to spend time together were so rare. In theory at least, putting two days at risk, or, in this case four days and nights of good restaurants and sensual pleasure, wasn’t worth it to her. More telling perhaps, as her plane approached Venice’s Marco Polo Airport, she realized that his marriage was bothering her less and less.

  As she stepped off a vaporetto into his arms on the Hotel Excelsior’s pier, she put the whole issue out of her mind. Here they were, together again and in Venice, fulfilling a dream that had surfaced in New York on the night they first slept together. The opportunity had come about thanks to a small conference he was attending, a gathering of publishing firms that had chosen the luxurious venue as an ideal place at which to grumble about their scant profits and declining influence in the world. His only obligations to the event were that day’s inaugural lunch, a few hours of morning meetings on the following day, and the final evening’s farewell dinner. She knew all of this before she arrived and was fine with it. Having time to wander about and grab a meal on her own was as appealing to her as the time she could spend with him.

  The hotel, a classic five-star behemoth, evinced a Moorish theme, six floors of elaborate, Alhambra-esque window frames and arches overlooking a heated swimming pool and the Lido beach. Their room, predominately beige and brown, was a Junior Suite on the third floor. The bed was enormous and overflowing with shams and pillows. She was disappointed not to see a bathtub, but the walk-in shower was cavernous and fitted with a marble bench to sit on.

  James wanted to have sex right away, before his lunch with the publishers. She was not especially turned on by the idea but gave in anyway because it conformed to the fantasy both of them had entertained about how this rendezvous would begin. It was fine, rushed and perfunctory, but it left her troubled. She was actually glad when he hurried out of the room. She tried to minimize its importance, but the taste of it stayed with her. During his all male lunch where he drank too much, she bundled up and took a walk down the deserted beach and ate sparingly at a pizzeria. Exhausted from her travels she was asleep when he got back to the room. They made love again and though it went better this time, for the first time with James, she felt during some of it that she was outside of herself, like she was with a stranger. They showered together and caught up with each other’s lives over dinner, again without getting into any details about the state of his marriage. Finally, she felt better being with him until, back in the room and with his phone turned off, just as they had got into bed, a call from Carmensina to the hotel was put through.

  She
was obviously checking up on him, listening for the slightest sound that might confirm her worries. Laura rolled over and covered her head with a pillow. Then she silently slipped away into the sitting room. She could tell he was doing his best to sound cheerful to Carmensina but, for Laura’s benefit, not too cheerful. She stepped out onto the room’s slender balcony. Down below the pool was lit up. The beach was dark. Music drifted up from a restaurant somewhere. It was cold and smelled of a winter sea that was calm and black with little lights here and there coming from boats. She went back inside and sat in an armchair trying to resist admitting to the absurdity of the arrangement. She tried to resist getting angry, tried not to listen to him. She didn’t want to hear him saying anything affectionate, even if it was just to put the woman at ease.

  When the conversation ended Laura stayed where she was. He went into the bathroom for a robe and then came out and found her sitting in the dark.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

  She didn’t reply at first. She looked at him standing there in front of her.

  ‘I suppose it’s to be expected,’ she said.

  ‘She’s suspicious of course.’

  ‘And with reason. I wouldn’t like to be in her shoes. Then again, maybe she just misses you and wanted to hear your voice.’

  ‘Maybe. But I don’t think so.’

  She looked down at the floor.

  ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ she said. It just came out of her.

  ‘I said I was sorry.’

  ‘It’s just too vulgar. I shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Laura.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re going to leave her.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I don’t think you will, and do you know what’s worse?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t think I care anymore.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know if it would be worth it at this point. It doesn’t feel right. I’ve been so excited about this trip, about seeing you again, Venice, the whole thing. But the reality of it feels very different.’