A cold wind whipped my hair across my face as I stood by the wall in the garden.
A granite pineapple and a severed hand.
I had assumed Dom had bought them at the reclamation yard. Rachel’s words played and replayed in my head. Could they possibly be different ones, bought by Dom, not by coincidence (that would be impossible) but after remembering the ones given to Rachel?
I dismissed that idea in seconds. Surely it would require a great deal of luck to find such specific and odd ephemera.
And yet—what did it matter if she had left them with her ex-husband? Perhaps she had given them to him, knowing how much he would like them. There was nothing sinister in that.
“Why don’t you come and sit here?” asked Dom when I went inside. “You keep scurrying away like a little mouse, always disappearing off to new corners where I can’t find you.”
He had lit a fire, only semi-effectively, in the sitting room off the kitchen and had pulled a couple of chairs and a low table closer to the hearth. Normally, this room was so bare and chilly we tended to keep to the natural warmth of the kitchen.
I shook off my coat and said I’d bring us some coffee.
“It’s made. What have you been up to?” he asked.
“Oh, just . . . nothing much. Looking around the garden.”
“Well, come and warm up here.”
So we sat together, sipping coffee in near silence. The fire popped and emitted small belches of smoke. After a while I fetched my book. Dom went off to bring in more logs.
Despite the spitting flames, the room was still cold. Flakes of plaster floated down from between the narrow lath beams of the ceiling. More fell on the pages I was reading. After a while, it seemed like snow coming through the roof. I shifted my chair and suddenly wondered why Dom was taking so long.
A long, creaking sound made me jump. A sound like a door forced from the position it had been stuck in for years. Was it Dom somewhere else in the house? I craned my head and listened. Nothing, only the fire. Then another, louder creak. I thought of sailing ships in tempests, and shivered. Another larger lump of plaster came down.
I was almost on my feet when the room erupted. A roaring sound, followed by a huge crash as I was suddenly pulled with some force into the kitchen doorway. The noise of falling masonry and wood shattering on the stone floor was earsplitting. Then a scream, which had come from me. At the moment it happened, I had no idea what had jerked me out of danger.
Then my face was against Dom’s chest, and he was swearing and shaking as hard as I was. Only feet away, the ceiling had collapsed onto the chair where I had been sitting. A cloud of gray dust hung over the heap of rubble. Above was an ominous black space. We were both choking.
“Oh my God,” Dom said, over and over again. “Did you not realize?”
“I heard some creaking noises, but I didn’t think—”
“If I hadn’t got back when I did—”
“Don’t . . .”
We clung to each other, hearts pounding. I concentrated on breathing, willing the panic to recede. If anything, Dom was trembling more violently than I was.
Upstairs, in an unused room, I stashed the printout of the Francis Tully interview in a box containing files and papers of my own. Even as I did it, I felt guilty. Though that did not stop me thinking obsessively about what I’d read.
Rachel had written herself prominently into the interview. She was there on the page as a character alongside the subject in a way that—ordinarily, at least—only seasoned journalists were. Did that say anything about her, or was that simply the required form of this particular piece?
It was pretty clear that the interview with Tully had been a tricky one, and yet it seemed that they had ended by warming to each other. She came across as patient and resourceful, confident in the manner in which she bearded the lion in his den. He had enjoyed her company enough to give her the stone hand and the pineapple.
Francis Tully must still be living at his house in the Alpilles. Who knew, perhaps—just perhaps—I would go up to his village and hope to find him in the café. I could tell him I remembered reading a newspaper feature, and ask about the woman journalist who had written it. What if they really had got on well after the sticky start, and they had kept in touch?
Then I stopped myself. This was pure fantasy, clutching at straws. Don’t tie everything into knots and conspiracies, he had said to her, and I, too, would do well to heed the warning. There didn’t have to be a common thread; for all that I was doing my best to spin one out of nothing.
As it transpired, I never had the chance to test my nerve, because when I did go back down to the Internet café in Apt, waiting until the friendly man at the counter had no other customers before being admitted to make a rapid search for references to Francis Tully, I found myself reading obituaries. The old man had fallen down dead in his beloved garden some six months earlier.
It was around then, at the time the ceiling collapsed and I found out more about Rachel, that Dom started retreating more into himself during the days, leaving me to my own devices.
He began taking long, solitary walks whatever the weather. He would set off in the car, while I stayed behind, reading and cooking and thinking. When he returned, he was full of stories and small observations, though, and wanted to share them. I rationalized that this was all for the good, that it never seemed we were living together too closely, that it was a way of ensuring boredom would not set in.
If ever I did start to worry, I persuaded myself that this was normal in such a relationship, given that we spent so many hours in close proximity. There were plenty of times when he was attentive and concerned that I was happy; it was my oversensitivity and lack of confidence that made me misread the situation. I was so in love with him that the thought of our life together slipping through my fingers was unbearable.
And we always came together at night. He would put winter’s wild offerings from the garden in a vase by my side of the bed: sprigs of evergreen rosemary and pine, translucent dried circles of honesty. He always asked me if I needed anything, and bought me an electric heater for the bare, cell-like room on the ground floor where I liked to sit reading.
One book in particular I kept returning to at that time: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It has none of the intellectual cachet of Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or Crime and Punishment, but for me, its modesty is the point. The story has an emotional pull and a truth all its own. Dom’s wife was called Rachel, another of Daphne’s heroines; was it that coincidence that drew me to Rebecca rather than any other novel about a woman haunted?