I pulled up against the narrow sand spit that lay in front of the caverne, and tied the bow rope around a rock, though it was not needed in this calm enclosure. I stepped ashore and paused.
What was I expecting to achieve?
I lit an oil lamp and delved further inside. The bowl of the cave was just as I had left it. I don’t know why I thought there would be any change. There was no tide to ebb and flow on its shore. Giuseppe’s secret lived on. His few mementos remained in place. The Marianne statue, emblem of France and of his loved one, stood petite but proud on the ledge where I had put her. How often had Giuseppe taken her down and held the cool marble in his hand? Had he stared at the fixed gaze as if she was his real wife, the young peasant girl from the south he had rescued from a life of drudgery in the northern café. She had cut and run from her family, but not escaped their revenge. That reality must have haunted him every time he visited this caverne. I felt obliged to say a prayer for her. For him too.
I repeated my tidying up of the remaining objects. It seemed irrational to do this, but respectful. One item beside the Marianne. The tin trunk with his most personal items. I noticed something I had overlooked the first time I came. There was a thin under-drawer inside the base that fitted tightly within the walls of the trunk. A drawer that was intended to be kept a secret from casual viewer.
I prised it open with some difficulty. Inside there was only one object – a stileto. I knew immediately it must be the weapon that had killed Marianne. I was reluctant to handle it, not least from the dangers of its razor-sharp blade. The handle was ornate in the traditional fashion, with swirls of decorative moulding and the word venditta, spelt in the alternative old Corse. Schioppetto and stileto. He and Marianne had achieved some life through strada, but the other two ways of Corsican revenge had brought them death in their separate manner.
I put this sad object, this terrible weapon, back in the drawer and out of sight as I repacked the other items over it. It was to lie for ever in the darkness of the caverne, a piece of evidence too late to be useful. No next-of-kin would be pursued. Giuseppe’s memorial was for him. And for me, in the conscience that I had been the only person around on the day he was killed. The storm had kept me hunkered down in the house for two days, but I still felt guilty that I had not done anything to save him. If I had, would a stileto have been used on me too? I didn’t want to think about it. I turned out the lamp and retreated to the boat. I wanted to keep Giuseppe’s caverne a secret. When I got back I said nothing to Antoine.
xiii
With Nicole at death’s door I am finding it hard to complete any of my literary critiques. I am pondering how that trio of famous authors had dealt with death in literatis.
Somerset Maugham had Strickland (Gaugin) wasting away on his Polynesian island, with the sores of leprosy (rather than syphilis) beneath his pareu - sarong, surrounded by the lumpish native women whose languorous bodies he had portrayed in such glaring colours on canvas and wood. Was the vividness of his works the mark of a penetrating eye and the profusion of colour that he could not ignore, or the result of a body fighting decay and seeking to exaggerate the brightness of life before it deserted him? Faithful Ata tendered to his final needs, the sole guardian of a man whose condition revolted the neighbourhood, its nauseous odour overpowering any who approached. Strickland took a long time to die, as a leper can, wasting away and going blind for a year before the disease took him. Even in those last days he wanted to paint, if only the house, in the same bright colours that only memory held through the fading light of his lenses. I reminded myself of the indispensability of sight, and did not envy him. Would Nicole return from her comatose darkness or would she too fade slowly and blindly to a certain end?
Lawrence Durrell had Clea, slim and beautiful, in the hotspot of Alexandria during the war. Close enough to the front, but apparently as safe as houses in the old city, she escaped death, but only just, when taking an afternoon off to sail with Darley and Balthazar in a small cutter out of the harbour, beyond the grey warships, and a short distance along the coast to a favoured anchorage, picnic basket in the stern. Yet in choosing to swim and dive for fish in a favoured pool, she had passed again the discarded corpses of drowned Greek sailors weighted to the seabed. These poor men had been depth-charged by mistake some months prior and wrapped in canvas to be buried at sea, thrown with weights that should have kept them in the depths, but currents had brought them near to this shore. She had been frightened on a previous swim by the accident of their ghostly presence, but had assumed they would have float away. They had not. Should she have foreseen the risk of her own death and the immediacy of it?
Then in a freak accident, as Balthazar prepared to cock the harpoon to fish, it escaped the safety catch and his clumsy control, firing its sharp arrow into the sea and down into the depths where Clea was swimming. The dart had struck her through the hand and anchored her arm to a wreck. Darley saw the danger and dived to her aid, finally cutting the wire and breaking her hand to release her moments before she drowned. Was this close call to be mirrored by Nicole? The suddenness of death against the slumbering decline? Or was Nicole to go quickly?
While in Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence had the spirited Gudrun and Ursula down by the boating lake, fretting about their curiosity in finding love with the bold Gerald and the unreliable Birkin, and the world opening up to life; yet at that very moment death by drowning had captured the young Diana and the doctor who tried to save her. Lost in the festival confusion of boats in the fading evening light. Love, mindful of lust growing in the women’s hearts, whilst it was extinguished in much younger lives. A quick end. Would that be Nicole’s sentence, from the darkness of coma, one moment there, the next gone forever?
These writers had themselves defied death until their work was done. Maugham poured out a stream of storytelling that earned him a fortune, with which he could indulge his personal passions and bask in the sun of southern France, an area I knew well. Durrell’s output large, with varying success, but he too found his metier on these Mediterranean shores, on its warm islands, in its ancient texts. How can one resist this ambience, the history, this temperate landscape? The mesmerising waters of a land-embraced sea, for thousands of years sustaining the cradles of civilisations. I find myself praying for Nicole’s life, for the chance to share another summer under the brilliant blue sky.
xiv
I have been looking further into Nicole’s logbook, as if I wanted to find some counter comments on me, ones that did not reflect badly on my actions. I could not believe that our shared lovemaking was only a mythical basis for our relationship.
Perhaps I had expected too much all along. I hoped I was not justifying my self-regard. I noticed that she wrote about me in a blue ink, to separate her thoughts from those pertaining to her work – or the figure encoded as H. It was still unclear who this person was, and it did not seem possible for it to be a child, as she could not have left it under normal circumstances for the three summer months. Until, of course, my dulled mind considered the likelihood of a boarding school, if indeed it was a child.
For the present anyway, I was concerned for myself, and though I felt I was intruding on something so personal, her diary of events could be the path by which I better understood her view of me.
“Jack can be over-attentive.” Ah, had I pressed her too much? Was this a clear indication that my desire for her had reached a tipping-point? I preferred not to believe so. That day I recall was when we had lain idly around in a simmering heat that had brought our respective work to a halt. The temperature had reached such heights that nothing moved in our brains or bodies. The landscape outside also quiet. The drones of bees had passed, the goats and sheep in Antoine’s paddock were lying down in the shade. The mules even had given up braying in complaint. The harbour was empty. The sea-eagles sat on their nest, wings spread to protect their chicks from the burning rays of the sun.
“J is not getting much work done. He is
getting lazy.” Point taken, guilty once again as charged. How could I challenge such an evident fault? At least Nicole had been polite enough to not comment further on my ability. I was grateful she did not share my own misgivings about the work I was struggling to finish. Somerset Maugham had noted “there is always time to write.” I knew better than anybody the truth of these harsh words. I had begun to doubt my right to criticise his work or that of my other targets. Was Lawrence Durrell too prosaic, too embedded in Greek lore to restrain his flowery style, or was its brilliance the result of the very absorption of customs ancient and modern, of landscapes trodden with a discerning eye, of days spent in the vineyards listening to the sounds of Nature? The discontented braying of donkeys beside the Nile, the susurrus of the breeze in shimmering silver and green olive leaves in some Greek grove? Sounds that echoed on this landscape too. Corsica’s contribution to a summer ambience, scented by the maquis.
“Jack has been to Giuseppe’s grotte. He has found a friend and been taken fishing. I have had a day of peace.” Yes, and left Nicole alone, free from my advances! These small criticisms of my increasing love for her I take in my stride. No doubt I have been a pain on some days, since all guests, paying or not, intrude. But there were so many good days, when she had not objected to my presence, that I felt lucky this diary was not filled with more critical anecdotes.
“Jack has taken the initiative.” I must have solved some riddle! Which one the note does not say. Or I had paused in my work and devotedly proposed that I help her in her plant gathering? Perhaps it was the day we met at the Pisan church? Would she have jotted down this comment in pleasant surprise at my willingness to offer love in the oddest of places?
If so, I was grateful she had not riled against our intrusion of this holy ruin.
The asides on me were few, but I was content to be recorded at all. Her time was taken up so much with investigations into cures and remedies – and their applications – that I could not grumble at the slimness of my profile in this record. There were more important matters to lodge. Yet one puzzle was left on my mind. In the same way she never spoke of her life in England – and I now realised she had skipped details even when making arrangements for my visits to this island – it seemed odd that those she had left behind had not merited annotations. Nicole, once settled here for summer, seemed able to cut herself off completely from her home and matters there.
It was on reflection that I recognised I was doing the same. This cove, isolated and landlocked, had the capacity to sever one’s mind from anywhere else. I knew I had deadlines to meet, and soon, and that my editor even now would be looking at his commission sheet, wondering if I was pulling my weight and would deliver. He knew where I was in the Mediterranean, and quite probably distrusted my ability to concentrate on the task in hand. Thank goodness I was out of direct telephone reach!
I closed Nicole’s diary. The rest of the entries did not report on me, for which I was grateful, and all too soon I felt an increasing guilt at sneaking into its private world. She had been more than generous to me, I could not complain. Yet I was left with that one gap in my gratitude. I did wonder what family she had, and what motive lay behind such a dedicated obsession with her work. There were no clues in this record to those questions.
For now she lay at death’s door. It was one thing to look through her private thoughts on me, but clues, reasons why someone should want to attack her were still missing.
Worst of all I had found nothing of use to pass on to the gendarmes or hospital. If her family was to be found, it would have to be done the hard way, through airline records.
xv
I wandered down to the taverne to console myself with a chat and a tot or two of whisky with Antoine. He did not seem disposed to greet me and clearly had something on his mind. As Angelique was out in the back tending to her potager, I sat myself down on a bench and began to spell out my woes to Antoine as he retired to the kitchen. So obsessed with my own thoughts and the likely imminent death of Nicole, I hardly noticed Antoine carrying on with his work and the fact that I might as well be talking to thin air, so little attention did he pay to me.
If I had not pursued the whisky so much perhaps I would have realised that he was uncomfortable with me being there, but ignorant of his feelings, I pressed on with a long diatribe about the dreadfulness of life – and more significantly death.
“We are facing two deaths,” I volunteered.
“Three, if you count the man on the buoy,” his terse reply from inside.
“Too true.”
“And what about the dog?’
“Four.”
I pondered this fact and rambled on, trying to analyse how so much death had come to this tiny cove, a community that had been of only four people, when I came across it. I was left with Antoine and Angelique, and the haven had lost its heavenly touch, was a prison for them as well as me. The gendarmes had been withdrawn. We were alone. It was unusually quiet.
The afternoon light began to fade as the sun fell behind the western headland and dark shadows spread around the cove. The night seemed to be arriving early, with clouds forming and Antoine became more agitated as I dallied and plied myself with more from the whisky bottle he had generously left as my companion. He had fallen silent and I knew I was drunk. At last he came out.
“You mustn’t go back to the house, now it’s dark. You must sleep down here.”
This insistence annoyed me. Yes, I was drunk, but my hackles were raised at him ordering me about. I wanted to be with Nicole’s spirit, not on some straw mattress in the shack.
“I’ll be all right.”
“No, you won’t”
“I will.”
“I’ll give you something to knock you out, then you won’t mind the bed.”
“It’s not a bed, more a bench,” I found myself arguing, though to what purpose I couldn’t say.
Antoine came and gave me a new glass of some other liquor. Very strong liquor, which seemed to be almost fizzing with proof alcohol. I took it rashly and downed it in one go, burning my throat as I did so.
“What ever was that?”
“It doesn’t matter, a local speciality. I put a knockout pill in it, so you will sleep like a lamb, down here.”
This further ‘order’ angered me once again. I was in a bad mood, and resistant to being pushed around, even by him. I found myself in a heated argument with him.
“I’m going to go back up to the house.”
“You’re foolish. It’s not safe.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Yes, I will.”
“Do you want to get killed too?”
The significance of this remark completely failed to register with me. My blood was up and I was determined to clamber up the hill path with what energy I had left.
But I found Antoine taking an arm and holding me firm in his grasp. In the fog of the whisky I heard him slanging me off, and Angelique shouting in the background, but I fought on.
“I want to go and lie in her bed, where …”
Antoine gave me a clip around the ear, but it was not sufficient to stop me twisting and turning in his grasp until I wriggled free from the old man’s clutches. Now the pair of them were screaming at me and Antoine had a wooden club in his hand as if to knock me out for good. But even in my stupor I managed to duck his blow, and we fought like a couple of alley cats in an insane battle of wits, until I stole the club from him and without thought struck him on the side of the head with it. Angelique screamed again as he fell to the ground.
With anger still in my twisted mind, I dropped the club, turned and stumbled over to the start of the path, and began a staggered clamber up the steep incline, sliding and slipping from time to time on the moist stones, as complete darkness surrounded me. Somehow I fought off the effects of the whisky – and whatever potion Antoine had intended should put me to sleep. I had escaped their clu
tches. I would sleep in Nicole’s bed, feel again the slight fold in the mattress that I had learnt to share, when our combined weight made its softness yield. I wanted to be ‘with’ her, share what might prove to be a last night – should she never come back from the hospital, should she never come back to life.
xvi
It must have been the middle of the night when a slight noise crept into my consciousness. My head was throbbing and the whisky had numbed my senses. But not entirely. The effect of Antoine’s potion had worn off. I knew I was right, there was something or someone moving outside on the landscape, and as I was in Nicole’s room, at the front of the house, my hearing was not deceiving me.
The darkness was profound, and I had not bothered to leave any candles on as I had slumped fully-clothed onto her bed with the last of my energy. The house was in total darkness too, and outside the moon was eclipsed by scudding clouds, revealing little.
The sound that came to my battered brain was, I slowly realised, familiar. The muted footfall of mules, whose shoes were padded against the sharp stones of the path. I was immediately going to light a candle, but equally quickly some instinct told me not to. I brought to mind Antoine’s efforts to stop me coming up to the house this night, how we had fought over the issue, how he had pumped me with liquor I really didn’t want – or need. Why? ‘You’ll kill yourself’. Did he say that? Or was it ‘You’ll get killed’?
I lay quiet as the mules came closer, silent except for snorting occasionally with the effort of the steep climb, and no doubt some burden. At this time of night?
None of this made sense, not even in the fog of alcohol. It wasn’t a dream either. I crouched down beneath the window, behind the curtains drawn in Nicole’s absence. I was out of sight and the little light that came in would have showed the room as empty. Then they came abreast of the house.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 20