Ysabel Read online

  “Like I said, way too—”

  She punched him on the shoulder again, but it was his good arm this time. He held up his hands in surrender. She gave an exaggerated sigh and they sat quietly awhile. There was a bird singing in one of the trees. The cyclists walked past, speaking German, and went out through the gate. Ned watched them unchain their bikes and pedal off.

  Looking straight ahead, behind her shades, Melanie said, “I am five feet tall, you know. That makes just over a hundred and fifty damned centimetres. Which is short, any way you look at it. Do not make a joke, Ned.”

  “No? I have at least three.”

  “I know you do.”

  He glanced at her. “It really bothers you?”

  Still looking towards the pillars, she said, “Not always. Not even usually. I mean, there are worse problems in life. But it’s a pain. It’s hard to be taken seriously sometimes. Like I’m a hobbit with a Daytimer. Just . . . cute.”

  He thought about it. “My dad takes you pretty seriously. I think Greg and Steve do. And I don’t think you’re cute, I think you’re an anal-retentive, micromanaging pain.”

  She laughed this time. “Ah! Progress.”

  “I mean, you researched jogging paths here, Melanie.”

  She looked at him. “I like my job, Ned. A lot. I’m just trying to do it right.”

  He sighed. “I know. Makes me feel babied, though.”

  She shrugged. “Don’t. You aren’t a baby at all. I checked out music stores and jazz bars for Greg and found an indoor pool for Steve, you know.”

  He thought about that. “I didn’t know, actually.”

  “Think you’re the only man in my life here, sailor?”

  His turn to laugh.

  He would remember that exchange. Another moment from when he was still young. Melanie looked at her watch and tsked, and got up, collecting her gear. Ned went with her back to the main square. The famous church was there; a tour group was just entering. Melanie walked farther along to a side entrance that led to the cloister. Another cloister, Ned thought.

  As they went in, through an arched, covered space, they saw a gendarme keeping people out so that his father could work. Melanie explained who they were; the policeman motioned them through. Ned let Melanie go ahead of him up a flight of steps.

  He felt strange again suddenly. A disorienting intrusion of that other world he seemed to have accessed. Something was approaching, a vibration in the air almost. Presences. He could feel them. Not the man in the grey leather jacket, or the golden one from the tower. But whatever this was, it wasn’t far away. Or they weren’t.

  He looked around him. He wasn’t sure why this place was shaping awareness in him, but on some other level he did know: layers and layers of the past were here. A past that seemed not to be entirely finished with.

  Was it ever finished? he wondered.

  They reached the top of the stairs and saw another arch, with a green space beyond, in shadow and light.

  He wished his aunt were here. And at the same time he was uncomfortably aware that there was something he hadn’t told her last night before they parted at the laneway. And that it might be a mistake.

  I’m going to cancel, anyway, he said to himself. It doesn’t matter.

  “You and I are still at war,” Melanie said over her shoulder just before she walked into the cloister. “Don’t kid yourself. That ringtone doomed you, Ned.”

  He couldn’t think of a funny reply in time.

  He watched as she went towards where he could see his father and the others standing in a brilliant light. From the dim, vaulted cool of the archway Ned looked in at them. He saw his father moving quickly, talking quickly, stopping to frame a view with his hands, going a few steps over to gauge it elsewhere. He saw that the brown hair was greying more now, though not yet the notorious signature moustache.

  One day, Ned understood, that hair would be grey, or thinning, or both, and his dad wouldn’t be wearing tight blue jeans and moving with such crisp, strong strides. Time would do what it did to people. Ned stayed where he was, looking at his father as from within a long tunnel.

  Edward Marriner wore a green workshirt and his favourite tan vest with a dozen pockets. He had his sunglasses pushed up on top of his head. He was talking, gesturing, but Ned couldn’t hear what he was saying. He seemed far away. An effect of acoustics, of light and shade. It frightened him, this sudden feeling of distance, of being on the other side of some divide.

  There was a full moon in his mind, high among stars in the midst of afternoon.

  Childhood’s end.

  CHAPTER VIII

  There had been clouds throughout the night, hiding the moon much of the time, but the last day of April dawned windy and very clear.

  A mistral was blowing, Veracook advised over morning croissants. They were sheltered here, tucked under the slope, but it would be fierce today up on Mont Ventoux, or in Avignon, or the hill villages like Les Baux or Gordes or Menerbes. Small children had been blown off cliffs, she said, shaking her head dolefully, when the mistral came down from the north.

  That same wind was, however, a photographer’s dream of light. It scoured the sky of anything resembling haze or mist, leaving it hard, brilliant, precise: a backdrop that rendered wildflowers, monuments, medieval ruins, bending cypresses electric with intensity.

  Edward Marriner had been here before in a mistral. He wasn’t about to try going up any cliffs with their gear, but he did change plans for the morning over his second cup of coffee.

  Melanie scribbled fast notes and got busy on the telephone. Greg, designated driver, carried his mug into the dining room where the maps were spread on the table and bent over them, plotting routes. Steve started loading the van.

  They were now going east, an hour or so, to some monastery called Thoronet. In this light, the stones of the abbey would almost come alive, Ned’s father told him. They were alone at the kitchen table.

  “It’s ironic,” Edward Marriner said, “and it pleases me. There are a lot of things to like about the medieval Cistercian monks, and a few not to like. They started by opposing church wealth and ostentation, but they also detested learning, study, books themselves. And even worldly beauty. Bernard of Clairvaux, who shaped the order, would have hated the idea that people find their abbeys beautiful now. They weren’t supposed to be. That would have been a distraction.”

  “From what?” Ned asked.

  “God. Prayer. Silence and work in the most remote places they could find. They came down here for the solitude.”

  “From where?”

  “East of Paris, I think. Don’t quote me.”

  Ned made a face. “As if. This isn’t an essay, Dad.”

  Edward Marriner ignored that, sipped his coffee. “Thing is, Provence has always been seen as a kind of paradise, and that attracts people. For their own reasons.”

  “The Greeks? Like he said yesterday at lunch?”

  “Oliver? Yes. In a way, everyone who’s ever come here has been a stranger trying to make it theirs. There are footprints and bones all over. Some places are like that.”

  “Isn’t everywhere like that?”

  His father looked at him. “Maybe. Even Greenland and the Hebrides have been fought over, but it’s happened in some places more than others. This is one of those. Being desired can be a mixed blessing.” He grinned suddenly, as if he’d amused himself. “This morning, my son, in this light, I am going to make an old, cold abbey look so gorgeous the bones of Bernard of Clairvaux will spin in his grave, wherever it is.”

  “Nice of you,” Ned said.

  “Damn right. Want to come see?”

  Ned realized, not for the first time, that his father loved what he did. For reasons he decided not to elaborate upon, he declined the invitation. He’d do some reading on the terrace, he said, music, a training run . . . he’d keep out of their hair and out of trouble. Might even work on one of his essays.

  Melanie, coming to report the van loaded,
reminded him that their cell numbers were on his auto-dialer. Ned came to attention and saluted. She laughed.

  He watched them drive off. The two Veras were busy, upstairs and in the kitchen. He did read for a bit outside: a novel Larry had said was really scary. Reading supernatural horror didn’t have quite the same effect after last night. Ned wondered if Stephen King had ever encountered a figure with stag horns under a watchtower. Maybe he had. Maybe that was how he got his ideas.

  Ned doubted it. He was too distracted to read, though. Kept looking up and watching the trees on the far side of the pool bending in the wind.

  He went back in and checked his email. Nothing from home, but Kate had sent him her essay.

  He read it over, decided it was perfect. Too perfect—she wrote way too well. Ned’s own schoolwork was okay, but he never took enough time to be that good.

  He opened the attachment and spent some time dumbing it down a little so Mr. Drucker wouldn’t hear alarm bells going off in his bald head.

  It was good to have something ordinary to think about. He stayed at the keyboard till he had the thing shortened and simplified enough to read like an essay Ned Marriner would do while on holiday in France. He added a couple of typos and misspelled some proper names.

  Almost as much work, doing it this way, as it was writing a paper, he thought. Not quite, though. He was going to have to write the other two essays properly. He’d promised, and he personally doubted Kate Wenger would give him another essay without expecting something in return.

  He wondered what that might be. She was cute, in that skinny, runner, ballet-student kind of way. Her being so geeky didn’t bug him as much over here, with the guys not around to needle him about it.

  The guys were where Mr. Drucker was. Let them suffer.

  He downloaded the Arles pictures and sent a couple with emails to Larry and Ken, pretending to feel sorry for them.

  It was too windy to go in the pool. Below the house, away from the sheltering slope, he could see the mistral ruffling the water and swaying the cypresses. He checked his watch. Not even noon yet. Time to kill. He wasn’t due to meet Kate till after five.

  His father’s weren’t the only plans changed, however. He would meet her, but they weren’t going up to those ruins. Not today.

  He’d made that decision in Arles. It was one thing to be adventurous, another to be an idiot. He’d figure out something Kate would go for: they could tour that studio where they were meeting, then have pizza or Chinese in town. She could tell him all about Cézanne, she probably knew all about Cézanne.

  He’d tell her about what had happened last night. Maybe.

  A part of him was torn about that. Kate was in on this, had been from the beginning, but she hadn’t been around when the dogs attacked, and what he’d seen later with Aunt Kim by the tower was so outside whatever you wanted to call normal that Ned wasn’t sure how to talk about it.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her. Kate Wenger was a “trust me” kind of girl. He’d already decided that. But Ned was the one with the burden of whatever was going on inside himself, that strangeness near Sainte-Victoire, sensing people as an aura inside his head, knowing things he should never have known . . .

  In a way it felt like some kind of honour demanded he keep silent about what he seemed to have found. Aunt Kim had talked that way about her own experiences, whatever they were. It wasn’t a word—honour—that you heard people use a lot any more.

  There was also the considerable possibility that if he tried to talk about this with others, people would think he was flat-out nuts. That was B-movie stuff, of course. The guy who sees the aliens land, or the mutant giant killer spiders, and everyone thinks he’s drunk or stoned.

  Kate Wenger wouldn’t think that way. Ned knew that much.

  He just didn’t know for certain what, or how much, to say.

  He’d play it by ear, he figured. Sometimes planning too hard messed you up. His father had had plans for today and had shifted them with a gust of wind. You needed to be able to do that, Ned thought. React, be on your toes.

  He decided to go for a run. He was under orders from his coach to keep to his routine and log it, anyhow. He went up to change, kept his phone with him. Aunt Kim had told him to do that. She was someone that still needed figuring out.

  She’d said her hair had gone white—the way it was now—when she was young. As much as anything she’d said or done, it was that hair, the absolute whiteness of it, that made Ned feel certain she’d really gone through whatever it was she’d hinted at. She was another “trust me” kind of person, he thought.

  She hadn’t told him what it was she’d done back then. That had to do with the honour thing, he guessed. Partly being fair to his mother. He made another guess: it sounded like she’d told Ned’s mom, her sister, before going away to England. And everything in their relationship had gone to hell.

  Maybe you got careful after that. Maybe you learned a lesson.

  He clipped on a bottle of water, put some euros in his pocket, grabbed a couple of power bars, and waved goodbye to Veracook. At the end of the drive he pressed the gate code and went through. He did his stretches there, getting used to the wind, then started jogging down the slope of their road, loosening up.

  Halfway down, where the trees on the left opened out to a long, flat meadow beside the road, Ned stopped.

  There was a boar, a really big one, in the middle of that field.

  Ned held his breath and wished he were better hidden. Not from fear—the animal wasn’t that close—but so he could watch it without scaring it away. They were morning and evening feeders, Veracook had said. They slept through the day. This one was a contrarian, it seemed.

  On impulse, he reached out with his mind. He’d encountered a few animals lately that weren’t what they seemed. He sensed nothing, however. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected but it did seem as if what he was looking at here was just a really massive, grey-white boar, rooting for food in an open field in the middle of the day.

  On the other hand, today wasn’t an ordinary day, if Ned understood anything of what he’d been learning. He’d become suspicious of coincidences. And while he was thinking this, standing quietly in the roadway, the animal lifted its head and looked at him.

  Boars were supposed to be nearsighted, relying on smell and sound, but this one sure did seem to be staring at Ned. Neither of them moved for a long time. Ned thought he’d feel foolish, holding the gaze of an animal, but he didn’t.

  Then the boar turned, not hurrying, but as if determined, purposeful, and went into the woods on the far side of the meadow.

  Carrying a message? Had it been waiting here for him? Or was that way, way too paranoid a thought? Did everything have meaning today out here in the woods and fields, or would you go a little crazy—or a lot—if you let yourself think that way?

  He shook his head. How could you sort out what had significance when you didn’t understand anything? The answer was: you couldn’t. And because of that, he told himself, you stayed out of it.

  That was why he was going to tell Kate Wenger that they weren’t going up to the ruins of Entremont today. Not on Beltaine eve, when the Celts believed the gates between the living and the dead lay open after the sun went down.

  An artist’s studio and a walk and wonton soup in town sounded just fine to Ned, thanks very much.

  He watched the space at the edge of the woods where the boar had gone in, but there was nothing to see. He shrugged, and started jogging again. At the bottom of their road, without even thinking about it, he turned left and then right, heading towards Aix. There was traffic, it wasn’t nearly as pleasant a run, but he couldn’t handle Mont Sainte-Victoire to the east, and he was not going back up to the tower again.

  Melanie had told him about a stadium and track on the edge of the city. A street sign pointed left to the “Stade” before he reached the ring road. It wasn’t far. A track would be ordinary, familiar, uncomplicated. You went around
and around, no surprises.

  There were a few older guys running there, in blue T-shirts and shorts. Ned joined them, doing laps in the wind. His shoulder was still sore. It turned out they were from a military school down the way. Ned thought of a bad joke about French armies and learning how to run, but decided it wasn’t a smart idea to tell it.

  A couple of them were moving pretty well, and Ned fell into stride with them. He wasn’t sure they were pleased that a younger kid was staying with them. They probably thought he was American, too, which would make it worse, he guessed, so he grunted a few things in French about the weather and trying to keep up his training while over here, and that seemed to help some. They didn’t try to sprint away—or jump him and beat him up, for that matter.

  Most of the students peeled off across the field when the teacher’s whistle blew, but one of them did two extra laps with Ned and waved a goodbye when he ran after the others.

  It felt good to have even that simple gesture of connection.

  What he had to think of as normal life was still going on. He had essays to write, mileage to log, he would email more jokes and jpegs home. Maybe he’d find these guys here again, or different ones. Maybe he’d skateboard—he could see ramps south of the track. Later maybe he’d download some new songs from iTunes. In fact, he should do that today: he had a monthly download allowance from his mother, not used up yet, and this was the last day of April.

  You could treat the fact as dark and mystical, full moon and spirit stuff, or just remind yourself that you had four songs owing to you, in the life you actually lived.

  He was stretching and walking to cool off, drinking water from his bottle, when his phone rang.

  He checked the number on the readout and flipped it open.

  “Hello, babe,” said Kate Wenger. “Watcha doing?”

  Ned blinked. Babe?

  “And whom might this be, please?” he said. “Nicole? Mary Sue? Marie-Chantal?”

  She laughed. “Screw Marie-Chantal,” she said. “Not literally, though. She’s got two zits on her chin today, anyhow. Gross. How are you?”