The Sea Garden (18 page)

“Any sign?” she asked weakly.

“There's another bend ahead.”

They trudged round it.

“Here! All OK!”

“Scotty's right . . .”

Marthe imagined the buildings huddled around a courtyard, small and modest perhaps, but generous in every way that mattered.

“It's here, outside!” Kenton swung her round suddenly.

“What?”

“The old truck. Monsieur's truck!”

They made it through an open door before her legs went out from under her. Through the relief, the sleeplessness and hunger, she felt Musset's arms around her and the taste of lavender dust from his jacket as she sobbed open-mouthed against his broad chest.

7

Orange Peel and Musk

August 1944

B
ack at Manosque, Kenton and Scotty were hidden again. The Mussets and Marthe showed them into the cellar at the factory. Wearily they climbed down and made a false wall with wooden packing crates.

Madame sat designing labels by the shop entrance in the room above. The girl behind the counter served the customers. Marthe stayed in the blending room, pretending to experiment with new fragrances. Wrapped in a large apron that concealed his loaded pistol, Auguste guarded the back of the premises: the storeroom where the cellar door was hidden, the distilling shed and the soap kitchen.

For four days and nights, they hardly spoke, or even moved, except to take water to the Americans, and what little food they could find. Marthe stood at the table combining orange peel and amber resin with shaking hands, unable to process any emotion except fear.

A hammering on the back door.

She heard Auguste cross the storeroom floor and ask tersely who it was, then the creak of the door that was deliberately kept unoiled. A woman's voice, and Auguste's remonstrance.

“I need your help. I work with Xavier.” She sounded desperate, repeating the name as if it were a password.

Instinctively responding to the exhaustion in that voice, all too familiar to her now, Marthe went through to the storeroom.

“Please help me,” said the woman. “Do you know where Xavier is?”

“Who? I don't know who you're talking about,” said Auguste.

Marthe could smell the woman now. Fear was palpable in the sweat and dust that had dried on her clothes. This was no Milice trick. Marthe understood exactly how she could have come to be in this state.

“When did you last see this . . . Xavier?” she asked, taking her lead from Auguste. The attempt to sound as if she had never heard of Xavier rang so false she was sure the woman must know it was a lie.

“More than a week ago. When the plane came in.”

“Why have you come here?” asked Auguste.

“The only clue I had. I know about the soap packaging.”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Marthe put her hand on his arm. “I think—”

“I am British, a wireless operator,” said the woman slowly, despair ingrained in every word. “I have been working with Xavier for months, organising operations throughout the South of France. I understand that you do not want to implicate yourselves in any activity, but I must know where he has gone.”

“I wish we could help you, but we can't,” said Marthe, kindly. “But perhaps we can help in some other way. What do you need? Fresh clothes . . .”

“Can I stay with you?”

The prospect was horrifying.

“No! Absolutely not,” said Auguste. “You've come to the wrong place. In fact, I want you to go right now.”

“Please! I daren't go back to where I've come from! I've tried sending messages asking for assistance, but my orders are always to sit tight and take instructions from Xavier. And to make matters worse—I think the Gestapo is onto me, they've tracked one of my frequencies.”

The stink of fear intensified, an animal musk, like the civet oil used in minuscule drops to add warmth to fragrance. It rose uncontrolled, overpoweringly unpleasant. Marthe could smell ammonia, too, and the iron tinge of menstrual blood.

They had to help her, somehow. “Maybe we could—”

“Please! I'm begging you!”

Auguste was resolute. “You have to go,” he said.

Marthe handed the woman a scrap of cheese she had been saving and a bar of soap. It was all she had. “We should have done more for her,” she said, after the back door clicked shut.

An odour of goat and salty dampness remained, mocking their actions.

“How could we have taken her in?” asked Auguste testily. “If the Gestapo is tracking her, we had no choice. Every minute she was here put us in more danger. She may already have betrayed us just by coming here. And a transmitter on the premises? Are you crazy? We might as well shoot ourselves.”

 

T
wo more long days and nights passed. When she heard running feet outside, Marthe had been expecting the worst for so long she had forgotten what it felt like to react normally. She shouldn't have given the woman the new bar of soap, clearly stamped with the brand: Distillerie Musset. A stupid mistake. She had cursed herself for the implications every minute since.

The thinking part of her could only observe what the body was doing, detached and surprised. Raised voices outside the shop. A rattle of gunfire and more shouting. She tensed, primed for the attack. Could she throw the acidic liquid at the aggressors, or hurl herself at them to give Kenton and Scotty vital seconds to move?

But the sounds seemed to be coming from all directions. Shouts and running, and then—unbelievably—a cheer.

“They're coming! They're coming! The Allies have landed on the coast!”

 

B
y early morning of the twentieth of August, the American advance divisions streamed down from the Valensole Plateau, heading for Digne. In their wake came the ragged figures that had been fighting for so long in the fields and farms and the shadows of small villages. They descended on forgotten paths from the hills and walked the streets with their heads held high.

Arlette was buried that day in Manosque. In contrast to the many partisan funerals where only the immediate family had dared to walk behind the coffin, officers of the Gestapo and the Milice watching hawk-eyed as the town pretended never to have known the deceased, hundreds of people turned out. Arlette's heartbroken parents led the mourners, with M. and Mme Musset behind them.

It was touching, how many tributes there were. Even those Manosquins who had never known her now knew of her courage. “There was a bunch of wildflowers and lavender in almost every window in the street leading to the cemetery,” Monsieur told Marthe. “They honoured her.”

There was more bad news, though, when he made inquiries about the woman who had come to the Distillerie Musset claiming to be a British agent working with the Engineer. If it was the same woman, she had lasted only one night in Manosque. A defensive cordon of townsfolk had watched as she left the town; the Gestapo had swooped on her as she was risking one last transmission from a field on the road up to the plateau. She was last seen being bundled into a truck. Whether or not she was still alive, no one knew. The liberators came too late for her.

“We should have shown more courage,” said Marthe.

“No,” said Musset. “You took the only course you could. It's hard to admit, but you did right, in the circumstances.”

“I smell her still—her terror,” said Marthe.

She would never be able to forget it.

 

I
n Céreste, too, the resistants emerged. They crossed themselves as they passed Christ on the cross framed in a fifteenth-century archway, giving thanks. There were women too, wearing short socks under leather lace-up shoes, raincoats over their shoulders, holding rifles as casually as handbags, and they gathered by the Mairie. A dirty tricolour hung from the flagpole in place of the swastika.

At the café, so the Mussets were told later, a large group of villagers listened openly on a radio set to the news coming in. The US Seventh Army was rapidly gaining ground, sweeping north through the Vaucluse.

Then there was screaming. They rushed out of the café to find that a young woman had been surrounded outside in the square. A crowd had pushed her until her back was to the railings, not far from the memorial for those lost in the Great War. Men and women were shouting, shouts that quickly turned to jeers. Through a cacophony of angry voices they insisted that she had betrayed resistants—they named Candide and the Actress, and others too. They spat the accusation that she was jealous of the Actress. She denied it, of course, but it was then that they recognized her as Christine, who had once been Auguste Baumel's sweetheart.

Christine tried to escape the mob, but was jostled back, cornered. She was screaming, begging for her life. Three shots were fired. There was a look of petrified disbelief on her face as she went down. Then the swarm melted away. Afterwards no one remembered who had wielded the pistol.

A less bloodthirsty mob might have shaved Christine Lachasse's head, or tarred and feathered her, as happened in other towns and villages after the Liberation, when summary justice was handed out to women who had betrayed resistants or slept with the enemy. Apparently the Poet had tried to dissuade the villagers from violence of any kind—the political situation between the partisan factions was too finely balanced to upset—but even he had not prevailed.

“It was Christine, then?” Marthe still could not take it in. “Christine who was responsible for Arlette being taken by the Milice?”

“I had my doubts about her, always,” said Madame. “You once heard us asking if she was safe, and you thought we were talking about you, do you remember?”

Marthe did, with some shame that she had jumped to such self-centred conclusions. “So was that why Auguste stopped seeing her?”

“Of course.”

Marthe gasped. “She came to the farmhouse that day—when I heard Kenton and Scotty in the barn. Do you think—”

“I don't know.”

“But even so—shot in cold blood.”

“This is no time for taking high moral positions,” said Mme Musset.

 

T
he end of the fighting in Provence brought a bitter satisfaction. The settling of local scores began. The bludgeoning heat of high summer added to the unleashing of anger and resentment, which would continue for months and years. Others demanded patriotic celebrations. Kenton and Scotty made arrangements to leave.

On their last night, there was a victory dance in one of the tree-lined squares in Manosque. The townsfolk young and old linked arms and climbed the stones into the old town high above the plain, beckoned by the sound of a band whose players struggled, in their enthusiasm, to keep a coherent tempo. At the centre, the hubbub of excited talk, shrieks of laughter, drums, and bass competed with the stomp of feet.

“Shall we dance?” Kenton asked Marthe as the band caught its stride. He grabbed her before she had time to reply.

And she was in Kenton's arms, letting him whirl her around. The night was still hot. Her forehead was damp around her hairline. She put her head back and felt the motion lift her. Round and round, they went in time with the beat, in joy and sorrow for what had passed, and in hope for what was to come. The coloured lights would be moving around her, the other dancers, the plane trees around the square. She saw it all and more, in her imagination: The huge aircraft landing in the dark field. Kenton and Scotty walking on either side of her along the moonlit road. And Arlette, so full of life, tap-dancing across the blending room, in the café, waiting at the bus stop at Céreste.

A tear trickled down her cheek.

Kenton slowed, and then stopped dancing. He touched her face so gently, it felt like a breeze at first. Then she felt softness on her lips, then warmth and tenderness. He was kissing her, and she kissed him back.

When they arrived back at the farm, the Mussets were already asleep. Kenton took Marthe's hand and led her to her bed.

He left early the next morning.

She refused to feel sad. It was a fine lesson in love, Marthe decided. In the darkness, they had all discovered what they truly were. There were those who had flown to the light, and those who had pulled back farther into the blackest corners. They had all had to learn the architecture of darkness, just as she had once learned to read the smells and sounds and textures of constant night.

After the war, she worked harder than ever to understand the language of scent, the best marriages of disparate aromas and strengths. She used the flowers and herbs that grew all around her, blending combinations into an intimate biography of her life.

One by one, the Musset factory put the scents into production. They sold well. Buyers responded to their sincerity and their relationship with the landscape. The old steam distillery evolved into the prestigious “Parfumeur-Distillateur Musset,” and Marthe Lincel became a creator of perfumes sold throughout Provence.

“A simple scent captures a moment in time,” she once said. “A perfume tells a story on the skin.”

 

T
he letter from Kenton came several years later.

Somewhere, somehow, he had found someone to translate his thoughts twice over: into French and into Braille. The trouble he had taken spoke as much as the words themselves. “I have still never met anyone like you,” he wrote. “I think of you in your blue hills with your fragrances, as I hope that you think of me too, sometimes, in my land far away, and know that we are the same, that a part of us is together.

“I wanted to tell you that I am happy, and I am getting married. I hope you are happy too. You deserve it, dearest Marthe. I shall always be grateful to you for what you did for Scotty and me. Without you, I wouldn't be here today, and I shall always love you in my way.”

With that letter came a notice from a bank in Paris and a lawyer's letter. The Attwaters of Boston had deposited a large sum of money to be used by the Musset distillery, with the stipulation that it was to allow Marthe Lincel to continue her work as a
parfumeuse
, and in time to open a perfume emporium in Paris.

 

W
hen her parfumerie opened in the place Vendôme in Paris in 1950, Marthe sent a magazine article heralding the event to Boston. The photographs showed a slim, elegant woman with a beguiling expression. She was posed in front of a counter full of scent bottles and their fashionable striped boxes, smiling. Her dark hair was cut in a short, fashionable style, and her dress was from Dior. Another captured her sitting on a gilded chair. It wasn't possible to tell from these skillful photographs that Marthe Lincel's lively eyes could not see.