I did not. In my mind Nicole was on the path to recovery, a process of which I had been a part. Yes, I was claiming a role after all. I did not want to accept what Girard was saying.
“You can’t get any sense out of the Marseille connection?”
“Nothing specific yet. The gangs there are heavily involved in drugs. Narcotics of course, but poisons are a different matter.”
“Nicole said that the two are often very close, sometimes simply sub-genes that can make the difference between life and death.”
“That’s the borderline she was playing with. The same threshold that gave the poisoners the chance of making it look a self-inflicted wound. It had every chance of working if only you had not been around.”
“I wasn’t at the house when they came though. I blame myself for that.”
“You can’t be everywhere. She didn’t want you as her keeper, as I understand it.”
“No. She was quite independent.” I felt like an interloper now in her life.
“It’s up to the doctors now. We can deal with the gang, shut them away for a long time, but the hospital need to get a breakthrough.”
I nodded again in agreement. Then I remembered his mention of Antoine and Angelique. “How much did Antoine know about all this? Were he and Angelique involved in some way?”
Girard gave me a knowing look, but ignored my question. “You had better ask them.”
vi
The accident to Angelique happened whilst Antoine was up the mountainside gathering olives. I was on the beach having a swim when I heard her scream, and rushed over to the taverne, to find her in the kitchen rolling on the floor in undignified agony.
She had scalded herself with hot oil from a pan that she had tipped over from the stove, the oil running across her right arm that had been holding it. I immediately turned off the gas burner and knelt down beside her, grabbing at first a wet towel from the sink and wrapping it around the wounded area. As I did so she fainted and in a panic I struggled to get her onto the couch at the back of the room. With speed I filled a bowl with cold water and began to mop her brow, unsure as to what else I could do.
“Miel,” she whispered, when she came round.
I got the honey from the cupboard and spread the soft liquid as gently as I could over the effected area. It seemed to have some calming effect on her pain, and so I wrapped a further cold towel around the arm in a feeble attempt to reduce her agony.
It seemed a long time but was probably only ten minutes before Antoine appeared at the door. He had heard the scream and clambered down the olive grove as quickly as possible. He was grateful for the coincidence of my presence on the beach.
“She could have had a heart-attack if she felt there was no one at hand to help,” he said anxiously. “Without you, who knows what might have happened.”
Between us we managed to get Angelique comfortable onto a bed in the next room, and he soothed her down until with a smile she reassured him she would survive the shock, and turning to the wall, she slipped into a restless sleep.
Antoine quickly drew a bottle of whisky from the store and filled two large glasses and led me out to the terrace overlooking the beach.
“Merci beaucoup. I owe you something.”
“No, nothing. It could have been worse.”
“What would we have done without you?”
“You’ve managed long enough.”
“But it’s been hard for too long. We’re getting too old for this.”
“Surely not.”
“It’s time to tell you that we are thinking of leaving.”
“Selling up? To whom?”
“Interested parties.”
“The yacht people. Those drunks that approached Nicole?”
“No. We don’t want to see this place developed.”
Antoine paused to reflect, gazing out over the water, surveying the cove as if something else was on his mind, that there was some weighing of events, some hidden due he felt towards me. I said nothing, as I too cast an eye over this isolated bay, the tall headlands that kept it from view to all, other than those skilled cruising yachtsmen - and the Corsair. So much had happened to me here.
I thought of Nicole and all she had been to me. Her body, so willingly given in pleasure, a passion that seemed real and unaffected, a warmth that matched the Mediterranean sun. Gifts that were not spoiled by the revelations of her diaries, the frank notations on my naivety. I couldn’t begrudge her those truthful observations. In wanting that innocence to prevail, no doubt, I had wished upon myself an idyllic interlude in the sun. Now she was at death’s door.
“I had better tell you the truth,” Antoine suddenly said. “I owe it to you, as we shan’t stay long here either now. We‘ve had enough of roughing it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nicole. It was not quite as you imagine.”
“What wasn’t?”
“The life here. It has had its complications. None of which your generous eye saw.”
“I saw everything I thought.”
“No. Only what you wanted to see.”
I wasn’t sure what Antoine meant. He paused, replenishing our whiskies, even though I had not even finished mine.
“Nicole was poisoned, because she was in the way.”
“Meaning?”
“You didn’t notice some of the odd things Nicole did, from time to time?”
“Such as?”
“When she got you a little – plastered, I think you English say?”
“On rare occasions. Perhaps only two or three times, when I slept in with a hangover.”
“Exactly. Only two times did it matter, during your time here.”
“What?”
“If you had three hangovers, the first would have been a test, I guess, to see if you could be kept out of the way for a few hours, dead to the world like an overfed pig, until the moment had passed.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, indeed you do not. She was clever in keeping you out of it.”
“It?”
“What do you think this landlocked cove offers, and to whom?”
“One of the most peaceful, quiet cut-off havens in the world.”
“Exactly. And who would benefit from that?”
“Nicole. Me. You and Angelique, you could live cheaply and make a living of sorts from the occasional yachts. Giuseppe had his bolt-hole and seemed content.”
“Naïve fool. We are all ‘decorations’ on this ancient landscape, features of no consequence. As long as we don’t interfere.”
“Interfere with what?”
“What other users make of the place.” He took a big slug at his whisky, and though it was beginning to dull my brain too, I felt an edge in his words.
“My English friend, despite what Girard has told you of the gangs, you can’t accept that this isolated place offers something special to them. The ideal landing spot for contraband, cigarettes, all sorts of things.”
“Including the arms?”
“Drugs of course, the curse of modern society, if you can call it society. But yes, now for the first time guns and ammunition. I told you banditry is passé, but you know there are still people around, who need guns. Liberationistes. Indépendantistes. The police are more and more tightening the ports, airports and beaches where drugs or guns – and I mean machine-guns now – can be landed by those that want to fight their cause. They are the most dangerous. This cove suits all their purposes.”
I remained silent. The clues, the evidence had built up around me, but I had chosen to look the other way, to banish from my dreamland the facts of life here, the reality that had overtaken us. Antoine was suggesting that on two occasions Nicole had participated in drugging me effectively with drink, so that these smugglers could come up the track, past the house in the night unchallenged. On their way to the Pisan church, their storage point on the route inland. The last time with
weapons.
“You were, and are, naïve in all this, but you involved yourself by coming here, and you had to be suborned into unconsciousness whilst they went about their business.”
The picture Antoine was painting became clearer.
“But why would Nicole get involved in this?”
“She too was an innocent bystander.” Antoine had read my thoughts. “But she couldn’t be suppressed in the way you could be for one night at a time. The house was on the track they had to use.”
“With your mules?”
“And their clothed feet. Yes, Angelique and I were in the mix. To the extent we too had to go with the flow, to help them tie up to the jetty, to lend them the mules, to take a generous bribe for our silence. How do you think we really manage to pay our way here. With a few yachts in the summer?”
“I thought that was sufficient.” My response drew his anger.
“Hasn’t been for some time now. When we retired a few years ago, we believed we could make it pay. We had a little money from selling the house – it’s not worth much - to Nicole, of course, and that helped blind us, like you now, to reality. To depend on passing yachts was too optimistic. It is difficult to have enough of the right food, fresh food for when they might choose to anchor. There is a lot of wastage. Giuseppe’s fish helped, because he could go out at any time of day or night – if it wasn’t rough - and bring the catch straight in. But apart from that we found it an uphill task.”
“When were you approached?”
“By the traders?”
“Did you know what they were at first?”
“Their talk was vague. I guessed it was cigarettes or drugs, and that didn’t seem too bad, as the young seem so keen on them nowadays.”
“They recruited you?”
“They didn’t need to, didn’t want anything other than access to the cove.”
“And the track up past the house?”
“The mules. Even they couldn’t carry the loads up the mountainside themselves.”
“Beasts of burden, with their padded feet?”
“Exactly. So that anyone staying in the house, a visitor like you, would not hear them at night.”
“Or could be made drunk enough not to hear.”
“A dumb Englishman wasn’t too difficult to deal with.”
“Merci pour rien.”
“Angelique and I only had to stand by and let them do their business. For that and the mules, they paid us a handsome retainer.”
“Enough to keep the place going.”
“Why not? We didn’t have to get involved. We didn’t really do anything.”
“Nicole?”
“She had to be bought off as well, of course. She wouldn’t take payment, because she didn’t want to get entangled with them. It was only now and then that the shipments came in, so it only mattered whilst she was here in the summer. As long as she didn’t interfere. Ships that pass in the night.”
“Before I came for three months, the chances were no shipments would occur during my stay?”
“Vraiment. You were a new problem.”
I was struggling to take in what Antoine was saying. I had been carried away with Nicole … seduced by her passion … which I had presumed to have stimulated, deceived by the clever twists of her botanical riddles, I had missed most of what was actually going on around me.
“Don’t blame yourself,” Antoine insisted, pouring another large whisky. “It all was going smoothly .”
“Until this summer.”
“Nicole didn’t know when the smugglers would turn up. For obvious reasons they did not announce their plans in advance. They would watch the patrols of the Gendarmerie Maritime, for instance. They must have a ‘spy’ in the Capitanerie at Calvi. Easy extra money for a lowly-paid deskman. The gang only made last minute appearances. We would only get information a couple of nights before, so we could be ready with the mules.”
“And get me sozzled and out of my mind?”
“I didn’t hear you object.”
We finished the whisky. I didn’t want a second bottle. Drunkenness was a label I no longer wanted attached to my actions. I gathered my battered wits and rose from the table. Without further words, I turned and set off up the track. As I plodded my flagging way up I took pauses to recover my breath, and to look over the cove, the landscape that had given me so much pleasure. There seemed a shadow over it, though the sun reminded me of its dazzling brilliance whenever I took my sunglasses off. Darkness and light played equally on this haven that had held so many secrets. Events that I had stumbled through, as if I was fighting my way across the maquis, eyes down, not seeing the wood from the trees.
vii
Robert has come to the cove to see Nicole’s house – and me. I have done my best to collect her things into properly marked boxes, and have bunched the plants she was working on in rows by species and genus. This has taken days and my application to the work has been half-hearted. Each plant has taken on a significance that its humble form had not always suggested. Some were new to the catalogue I had come across in our shared work.
I drew Robert’s attention to them and he nodded gravely with the simply expressed comment, “I am not a doctor. Nicole has tried so many things to help Harry. I have learnt not to take a view, when things are discussed at home. For years she has conducted her search, both with the societies that help the condition, and when her own initiative takes her in different directions. You must understand she never gives up. The pain his condition causes her, will ensure she never does.”
“Unless it kills her in the process.” I regretted this observation as soon as it had left my lips. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Don’t say anything,” Robert quickly arrested the tack I had unwittingly taken, “better to keep one’s own counsel. You will only make matters worse.”
He was right, of course, the worse still hung over us and it was foolish to guess what outcome there would be.
As Robert looks at my dutiful collection of her cornucopia, I acknowledge it has a different importance to him. A lesser significance.
“Nicole,” he informs me again with a strange lassitude, “has worked on these sorts of plants for so long. I am not sure she has ever achieved a breakthrough that can be applied to medicine today. She has struggled on, but it is difficult to see the benefits.”
He spoke as a witness over the years to a trail of ambition that had become less and less interesting to her family and friends in the absence of success.
“Did she find something that would alleviate Harry’s condition?”
“That was the goal, I’m sure. But we have not seen evidence for that. The medical profession knows a lot about the workings of the brain in epileptic fits and how to mitigate its effects, but not really what causes it. Meningitis, as Harry had, is one; damage to a child’s brain at birth another, but for many effected it seems either genetic or unclear as to the origin of the condition. Fortunately much of it can be controlled now by medication and fits are seldom dangerous, unless the person hurts themselves falling down. Typically those falling do so forwards and can crack their head, creating a secondary injury. Most fits pass quickly and recovery is instant without assistance.”
“But not in Harry’s case?”
“No. That is what has been so harrowing for Nicole. His condition is at the serious end of the scale. An ever-present concern that comes and goes with high regularity. As you can imagine it is very distressing for her as his mother.”
“Does she blame herself?”
“Inevitably at bad moments, but she shouldn’t.”
“How serious is serious?”
“Harry’s condition could be worse. Some children have Dravet’s Syndrome. They can have up to fifty fits a day.”
“Is there any treatment for that?”
“Not one that’s clinically tested. Some parents are so desperate that they are trying an oil from marijuana. T
hey say it has reduced the frequency by fifty per cent. But there has been no peer-to-peer research.”
“So they are taking a risk?”
“Of course, but what would you do in that extreme situation?”
“Try anything.”
“Harry’s condition is not as severe as that, thank goodness, but it is in that middle area, where Nicole does not know when to expect a fit. Because it is not so frequent there is an irony in that it is milder, but all the more of a shock when it does. Can you see how wearing that is, even though we can be grateful to some degree?”
“I can. It must be frightening.”
“You have to get used to it, but that doesn’t make it any better.”
“How can she come out here for the three summer months, with him in that state?”
“Because she has nine unremitting months of anxiety. She needs a break, as you can imagine. She has earned it the rest of the year.”
“So you look after Harry then?”
“We do. They live in the same village. We take the strain. We’re used to it now. Sarah does the burden of the care.” Ah, the R&S in Nicole’s diary. Robert and Sarah. With Harry on his birthday. He will know he is protected on that day too. Perhaps he understands as well that his mother must have a break.
I thought that Robert had been dismissing Nicole’s work here too lightly, but now I had to reconsider. Through the fatigue of years they had all been adapted to Harry’s situation.
Robert turned his attention away from the plants and went into the kitchen, nodding at the crude tools and materials with which Nicole conjured up delightful meals within the Mediterranean diet on which she prospered. He entered her bedroom and looked around the simple space, her clothes cupboards, the rough bed, the bedside table with the small prayer-book in it, the glass vase with a cleverly selected spray of dried flowers, the linen curtains that filter the harsh sunlight. I watched him absorb everything but said nothing. My mind and heart were racing with the moments of joy and sheer pleasure this room had brought me. I had no wish to share these memories with her brother-in-law. They were part of our secret life, the hidden gems of existence here, that like so much else in the cove, were isolated from the real world in which Robert, the family and everyone else lived.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 25