Everyone has left. I spend my days alone, endeavouring to write. The weather has grown hot, windy and turbulent. Scribbles of cloud fleet fast across the sky. Our swimming pool is turning green. This will resolve itself at some point, I have no doubt, but what is much more troubling is that the olive trees are growing jaundiced again. Many of the leaves are dull yellow and smudged with black, circular stains. As I finger a leaf, it falls effortlessly into my hand. This is the wretched Cyclocodium oleaginum or œil de paon, the malady that damages the leaves but not the fruit. It is a fungus, René reminds me again as we scout the terraces, that is difficult to treat. It was apparent last year, but not to such an extent. I thought we had handled the problem at the beginning of summer.
‘We’ll have to spray all the trees again once the drupes have been gathered. We can’t do it now, of course – it would harm the olives.’
‘What troubles me, René, is that I don’t want to spray the trees again.’
‘You have no alternative.’
‘There is one organic product …’
‘Please don’t tell me there is another solution, because there isn’t. All anyone will advise is to plant the trees a decent distance apart and prune them regularly. Well, we all know that.’
‘It’s copper-based …’
‘It’d be preventive, not curative, Carol, and it’s too late for that. There isn’t a farmer in the area who’d give a sou for your alternatives. Spray the trees or lose the foliage.’
I sigh. This is a sticky issue between us. ‘It’s irresponsible. The more we spray, the more we unsettle the ecological balance,’ I venture as we walk from one tree to the next, patrolling the extent of the deterioration. ‘Have you noticed that there are fewer swallows? I read they are being killed off by insecticides.’
‘Well, you may be right. I heard that too.’
I turn to scrutinise him. This remark is coming from a man who has always extolled the virtues of treating the trees by raining gallons of water-mixed chemicals on to them. His methods have always been in direct opposition to what he perceives as my whimsical desires to run this place as an organic farm.
‘And the fact is, René, we have treated them, against my better judgement, and the fungus has returned. There has to be another way to beat it.’
‘There isn’t. We have failed because we left it too late. You dithered. If we had sprayed in February or March, before flowering, this would not have happened. And these blasted winds don’t help anything. They’re probably spreading it.’
We are in the throes of the third mistral in as many weeks. Out at sea, white horses are chomping the waves.
What has caused these turbulences? The greenhouse effect? The depletion of rainforests? The roads blasted through the Alps, which allow northerly weather patterns to penetrate southern regions when before there was no access? Or might it be the astronomical quantities of pesticides squirted all over the countryside? I have heard, read, been given so many diverse explanations and I have no idea which, if any, to believe. But I do know that the return of the fungus has made me determined to find an alternative solution. Not only is the product we have used possibly harmful, it is inefficient.
‘I went to visit an apiarist in the Var yesterday, a gentleman who has been tending bees since he was fifteen,’ I tell René. ‘He has agreed to visit us in the spring with a view to placing fifty hives up in the pine forest.’
‘Ah, well done.’
‘He talked to me about an insecticide spray developed to protect sunflowers that has killed off millions of bees. Sunflowers are a rich source of pollen for bees. While the bees feed off the blossoms, this product attacks their central nervous system, stunning them, and the bees’ innate sense of distance and location is befuddled, destroyed by the chemical. They die of exhaustion, searching for the flightpath back to their hives.’
René shrugs. He hates these conversations.
‘After I left the bee farm, driving back through the countryside, I remembered an old codger who sat at a table next to me months ago in Nice. A man whose remarks I dismissed as eccentric. The dance of the bees; their language for communicating pollen sources and the whereabouts of their habitats. He said they danced till they were stunned.’
‘You can’t take on the world, Carol.’
We kiss goodbye and he promises to be back later in the afternoon with the long-awaited water diviner. This will not be M. Nick, but the other gentleman. M. Nick seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth since the beginning of the summer break, but we can do it without him, René is confident.
‘If this monsieur finds water, then we’ll call in M. Nick to confirm it. If he doesn’t, then you can inform the necessary parties that a dowser has made a thorough search and has confirmed that there is no accessible water source.’ He glances skywards. ‘Let’s hope this wind doesn’t bring rain, or he won’t be able to work.’
I smile. It is not something I would have given thought to, but it’s logical, of course; a water diviner cannot search for water in wet weather.
The wind does not let up, but nor does it bring rain. I am in my den when the American four-wheel-drive purrs up our leafy approach. It is twenty minutes early and for a moment I am not sure who has arrived. The dogs are barking and I run to look out of the window. They quieten when they see René descending from the rear of the Ford. I bang on the window and signal that I am on my way down.
‘Hang on to the dogs,’ I call, hurrying to greet my guests.
Monsieur the water dowser is an impressive but unexpected sight. He is very elegantly dressed, in golfing cap, suede bomber jacket and exquisite leather shoes. In all my imaginings among the dramatis personae of life, this is not the character I would have created to play the role of Provençal local searching for water. The dogs jump all over him, sullying his clothes, and I am obliged to haul them away.
‘Don’t worry,’ he laughs. ‘I love animals.’ He exudes warmth and good breeding. ‘So does my wife, here.’ He glances towards the front passenger seat, and out steps a tiny woman, thin as a twig and no taller than a robin. She has dyed blonde hair, a silk scarf which is blowing into her face, and running shoes. I fear the dogs in their overexcitement to greet the new arrivals might send this Piaf figure flying, but she repeats that she loves them and declares that I am not to tie them up. Her accent is thick and I cannot place it.
René introduces us. As soon as the monsieur’s name is spoken I recognise it, and he registers that I do. He is indeed a fabled figure, a person of repute throughout Provence and, as it happens, also a native of our nearby village.
‘Right, where shall we begin?’ Monsieur looks about him, appraising the width and breadth of the land. ‘Is there a track?’
‘Yes, several,’ say I.
‘Are they suitable for trucks?’ He is digging about in the rear of his luxury vehicle for the tools of his trade.
I shake my head.
‘No point in looking, then. I’m wasting my time.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, if there is water, how will the drilling truck reach the source and dig the well?’
I had never considered that problem. The truth is, I don’t think either Michel or I have ever seriously believed that water might be found here. This house is constructed on solid rock, the hill behind us is rock and, if appearances are anything to go by, dry as a bone.
Monsieur has retrieved from his Ford a large square of black material which puts me in mind of one of my late father’s Magic Circle conjuring props: the black scarf that hid the magic wands. I smile at the memory. Carefully, the cloth is unwrapped and I see two tendrils of metal, each about eighteen inches in length and barely more substantial than cuts of wire. This is the diviner. Wrapped up with it is a chunk of coppery metal secured to a chain.
‘The pendulum,’ he declares and hands the cut of cloth, along with the pendulum, to his wife, who is being all but blown away by the wind. He then asks René to fetch his notebook, calculation list and pen from the dashboard. Madame spins off to talk to the dogs while Monsieur exits the parking and crosses the lower terrace alongside the pool. He is staring at the tiles, as though his eyes were boring through them. His expression is one of serious concentration. ‘There’s water here, no doubt about it,’ he is muttering.
‘We are above the drainage system and alongside the pool,’ I offer by way of explanation. He appears not to have heard me, or has chosen to ignore my flippancy. René hurries to keep up with us and whispers in my ear, ‘If he says there is water here, there is. He has never been known to be wrong.’
Am I being made a fool of? I am wondering. Might this be yet another example of local escroquerie?
Once we clear the house and have arrived at the tiled terrace where our wooden table and outdoor chairs live, he places the elongated, V-shaped divining rod between his two little fingers and his thumbs. He levels the apparatus directly in front of him, like a pair of dividers, somewhere around waist-height, making sure that its narrow end, the joined tip, is pointing outwards. Now he begins pacing. Long, sure strides towards the hill and then left towards the farthest reach of our land in the direction of what we refer to as the ‘second plot’, because we purchased it later. I trail along with him, holding back a polite pace or so, but surveying him like a hawk. First, I train my attention on his face, and then on his hands. I am the daughter of an entertainer, a musician, a magician; I grew up on sleight of hand. If there’s a trick in this, then I am determined to spot it.
Suddenly, and most unexpectedly, as we approach the four cedar trees that stand sentry on the passage between the two plots, the rod shoots upwards and begins to quiver like an overexcited bird.
‘Eh, voilà!’ he says, and stops. The rod continues to quiver. It looks as though it has a life of its own.
René, bringing up the rear, repeats the maestro’s words. ‘Eh, voilà.’
The wife is elsewhere, lost in her elsewhere world, shouting to the wind.
‘Are you telling me that we have water right here underneath this terrace?’ I ask. We are standing on a patio that we have laid using something in the region of two hundred square metres of antique hand-made dalles. If we drilled here, even if we did repair the damage later, we might never find such tiles again.
‘Yes. And what is more, it intersects right here. There are two streams: one is coming from the hill and the other is flowing in this direction. If I can find the precise junction and you drill at that strategic point you can benefit from two rivulets, both drawing from the same well.’
‘Well, we’re not digging up the terrace!’ I bark. ‘I’d rather pay the water bills. Can’t you find another stream further up the hill?’
Monsieur steps away from what he has claimed is the source and the rod wilts instantly. ‘But you have no means of accessing it up there.’ He wanders off, frowning, as though trying to solve a conundrum. I turn to René, who is occupied with Madame; she is bent double and looks as though she is going to be sick.
‘Is she all right?’ I ask.
Her husband strides past her and tells her to go and sit in the car.
‘What’s up?’
‘She’s freezing, not feeling well.’
‘Would you like me to take her inside?’ I enquire of her husband.
‘Later. First we must find water.’
‘Look, it’s really not that important.’
‘Wait, if it runs this way – the parking! Why didn’t I—?’ And with that he is off, marching purposefully back towards his stationary truck. ‘Move those cars!’ he commands.
Madame sinks on to one of the swimming-pool steps, head in hands, while I am instructed again to move the cars, which I obediently do, driving them virtually into the trees until Monsieur calls to me that I have shifted them a sufficient distance. His own monster machine he reverses halfway down the drive. And then we begin the divining proceedings again. A few paces here, turn to the left. Rather like squarebashing. I don’t know whether to concentrate on him or worry about his wife, who is at my side now leaning against me, muttering. René is taking notes. The rod is up and quivering again.
‘Look! Look!’
I am looking. In amazement. You would think it was battery-operated, the speed at which it is moving.
‘Où est la pendule? The pendulum!’
Everyone is shouting, ‘Fetch the pendulum!’ No one, of course, can find it. Who had it? Madame. This creates a petit drama because she cannot remember where she has put it.
I am bemused by the panic and the rush. After all, the water, if there is any, is not going to dry up in the next five minutes.
While the trio search for the cloth-wrapped pendulum, I ask: ‘Please may I have a go?’ Monsieur, almost without thinking, hands me his rod. I weave it carefully through my fingers, resting it against my upturned palms, precisely as I have observed him doing, and begin to pace. No one is paying me any attention. I stride here and there and nothing happens, except that my fingers begin to ache, and then, while the others are engaged in trying to find the key to their Jeep because they insisted on locking it and Madame swears that she placed the pendulum carefully on her seat in the car, I retrace his steps. I can just about recall where he found the water and I approach gingerly, pause and wait. Nothing happens. I twiddle my fingers in an effort to manipulate the rod, to give it impetus, to thrust it upwards, to spring the stupid thing into life. Nothing happens. Back and forth I step over the spot. Still nothing happens. If there’s a trick to this, a way to manoeuvre this appliance, I am hell-bent on finding it.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’
I swing round guiltily. ‘Yes of course. I just thought …’
‘It’s neither dupery nor illusion.’ He smiles. ‘Allow me to guide you, please.’ Monsieur plants himself right behind me, lays the heel of each of his hands beneath the backs of mine and negotiates me gently towards the spot. As we step towards it, the baguette swings fast with inverted gravity, pointing skywards and twitching powerfully. I feel its strength and this man is barely touching me; certainly, he is not in a position to force my hands.
‘I tell you what, let’s finish the job. I’ll use this pendulum’ – he takes it from René – ‘to measure the depth of the source and the force of the flow, the cubic metreage per hour, and then, if you are willing, we can go into the house, get my poor wife out of the wind, and discuss all this.’
The pendulum swings and whirls and the source is reckoned to be about forty metres deep which is extremely shallow, I am informed, and therefore should not be expensive to excavate. The flow is sufficient to fill our 200-cubic-metre swimming pool in two days. The only information we cannot glean at this stage is whether the water is eau potable or not. For that we will have to drill and then test but, even if it’s not drinkable, it will certainly irrigate the garden. It would also irrigate the 200 young olive trees that Michel, in spite of my protestations, is still eager for us to plant.
If what has been demonstrated here today really does indicate the presence of underground running water, then we have fallen upon tremendous good fortune.
Once inside and out of the gale force wind, where they will not accept refreshment – Monsieur drinks only champagne, and we have none in (I should have remembered his preference, René did tell me) and Madame is not supposed to consume anything hot or anything too strong, but she will accept a small nip of port if we have it, though when I serve it she worries that it may contain a tad too much alcohol – we settle to a long discussion. Monsieur asks me if I recognise the name Michel Rocard.
‘The former prime minister of France?’ I ask. ‘Of course.’
‘The very same.’
He tells me that Rocard’s father was an esteemed research scientist who did some studies in water divining.
‘One of his discoveries was that certain people have magnetism sensitivity at designated pressure points in their joints, and this enables them to detect unmapped water sources. Perhaps there is truth in it, I don’t know. Certainly it sounds logical, but we in Provence believe that it is not explained away quite so reasonably.’
‘What is your explanation, then?’
‘It is less tangible. One needs to have a feel for water. How can I put it? To be in tune with it. There are other similar gifts. A cousin of mine, for example – she’s dead now – had another talent that is passed on only through women, mother to daughter, mother to daughter, and no matter how hard a man tries, he can never achieve this power.’
‘And that is?’
‘The relieving of sunstroke. Someone working in the vineyards, for example, who has been weakened, made ill by too much sun, would be sent to such a woman. How does she extract the sun from the victim? She takes a glass of water, any ordinary tumbler of water, places it on the head of the patient and rests her first finger lightly against his or her forehead. The glass remains in position as though glued to the crown. Within seconds, the water in the glass begins to boil. And it boils, believe me, I have witnessed this, like a kettle on a stove. When the glass has been removed, the sunstroke has gone. You won’t read of any such talents in your guide books to Provence. These are secrets we keep close to our chest, and women who possess such gifts are regarded with a certain deference. It is not a métier, not a profession, you understand. These women have a touch, a feel. I cannot explain it any more clearly than that.’
We are all of us silent. Monsieur rises and removes his jacket, folding it neatly behind him on the chair.
‘Water divining is not a métier, either,’ he continues. ‘Though insurance companies regularly approach my colleague, Nick. If there is a lawsuit which is related to underground damp, leaking foundations and the like, they call him in to locate the flow. This is a mysterious land, a puzzling culture to outsiders, and in our language we have rich expressions that cannot be translated but they aptly describe the way we see the world. We—’
‘Your language?’ I butt in.
‘Provençal.’
‘You speak it?’
‘Of course, I was raised speaking it. As my wife here was raised speaking Corsican. Both languages were outlawed by the French government, who created statutes to enforce the use of French as the official language—’
‘Ah, I know about this,’ I rather rudely interrupt again. ‘The Villers-Cotterêts statute of 1539!’
‘How right you are. And it has taken centuries for both Provençal and Corsican – languages rooted in the psyches of their native peoples – to fight their way back. Interestingly, they are not such distant neighbours. I can understand a smattering of Corsican, just as my wife here can partially understand my mother tongue. Carol, you seem to have a passion for this area of France and for the olive tree in particular, isn’t that so?’
I nod my assent.
‘I will send you a copy of a Provençal poem, in French, of course, that recounts how we believe that the spirit of the ancient Greeks lives on in the olive tree. To a true Provençal all trees are sacred, but above all reigns the olive tree. One reads of many ancient cultures who enforced the death penalty against anyone who cut down an olive tree …’
His wife nods her agreement, as does René. I look from one to the other. There is a certain madness in Monsieur’s wife but, by contrast, he has a businesslike manner. And yet …
‘Spirits in trees,’ he laughs. ‘No doubt you are thinking that we are a little crazy, that all this is far-fetched?’
I shrug.
‘I understand the reverence given to the olive tree. All my life I worked in the world of business. Well, I believe you know what my work has been.’
‘Yes.’
‘These days, I ask myself what all those years were about. Making money, of course. Building a reputation, yes, indeed, but it wasn’t until I retired and decided to dedicate myself to my farm that I found fulfilment. I feel in tune with life now, with my olive trees. I have over three hundred and fifty and, like you, we have splendid oil and hope for an AOC.’
And so we talk on while, beyond the windows, I hear the wind whistling through the pines. As night falls and the moon begins to rise, I find myself still sitting cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, listening to these two men, friends for over seventy years. They speak of this land – ‘this land’, to them, is Provence, not France – and recount anecdotes of their childhood and adolescent days here.
Monsieur narrates us the story of a boy he knew as a child in his village, an unprosperous fellow, who took two of the spines from the skeleton of a discarded umbrella, soldered them together and found that he had the skill and all the tools needed to source water. I learn that there is a shop in Paris where you can buy pendulums and divining rods.
Monsieur asks me if I know anything about the Aboriginals of Australia, and I tell him I spent several years intermittently working in and travelling around that prodigious continent, that I have a passionate respect for what I understand of their ancient ways, and that I frequently cite examples of their thinking.
‘Australian Aboriginals,’ he says, ‘can pinpoint an underground stream with no more than an outstretched finger. They also believe, by the way, that the earth, its trees, mountains, every natural thing, is inhabited by its spirit life.’
‘Going walkabout! Singing land back into existence!’ I cry. ‘I have always fancied that we might be doing something similar here with this little farm, which was abandoned and dilapidated when we found it. Singing the place back into existence. Recreating its colours.’
He smiles. ‘Something like that. Well, we must be on our way.’
I glance at my watch and see that they have been here for five hours. ‘I am so sorry to have kept you. I ask so many questions.’
‘Not at all.’
Outside, the passage of the wind has turned the inky darkness into a glittering diorama. Its force has let up now, as it frequently does at sundown. Monsieur and I pause alongside one another, lingering an instant to drink in the beauty of the evening, the frisson of movement that stirs the perfumed air like fluttering chiffon.
From a branch in the Magnolia grandiflora – a tree which was originally discovered in the southern states of North America by the French botanist Plumier, who shipped examples of it back to France to enhance a botanical garden created for the pleasure of Louis XIV – we hear the gentle clunking of the bamboo wind chimes I bought in the market at Nice and hung there. Quashia always remarks that they remind him of his boyhood days as a goatherd in the Algerian mountains.
‘I can trace water with an accuracy of within inches, but I can’t trap the wind,’ Monsieur confides to me, or perhaps he is talking to himself. ‘Imagine if it could be bottled and administered in tiny doses as an antidote to the madness it creates in some.’
We stroll on towards the parking and I wonder if he is referring to his wife.
‘How much do we owe you?’ I ask when we reach the vehicle where René is now helping Madame into her seat.
‘Nothing at all. It has been a pleasure, and I sincerely hope that it will contribute to your enterprises here. Please come and visit my farm. I want to show you my olive trees. They are very fine. I will also show you where I found water on our land. Meanwhile, I’ll draw you a plan of your underground systems. Do have it verified by another dowser, if you are in any doubt. And if I can assist you with anything else, please don’t hesitate to call me.’
And then, as he steps into his car, he turns and, in impeccable English, quotes a line from Hamlet: ‘“There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of …” eh, Carol? Bon nuit, et à bientôt.’
* * *
Once I have waved them off, I pad slowly back upstairs. Inside, I pour myself a glass of wine, put Mahler’s Fifth on the stereo and settle back on to the cushions, peering out through the French windows at the stars. I am ruminating on the afternoon’s events, on all that has been said, when, from nowhere, I recall an episode in my twenties that until this evening I had completely forgotten.
I was a young actress following a vegetarian diet and a rather trendy, semi-Zenlike existence, meditating on a twice-daily basis, searching earnestly for Truth and Meaning in Life. I was living in a rented flat in north London and in my bedroom there was a magnificent orchid plant. I was no expert with anything botanical; I lacked green fingers altogether, but I had been given the plant with its several blossoming sprays as a present, a first-night gift, and I had placed it in an antique porcelain pot in my attic room. I watered it regularly and it seemed to thrive there, if the flowering of extra, waxy cream blossoms was evidence of health. It was extremely beautiful, very graceful. Still, the plant excited no particular interest in me until something utterly fantastical happened. I was reading in bed the first time I became aware of it: a faint but clear, high-pitched intonation, like a barely audible single note of a chant. At first I took it to be a problem with the flat’s antiquated electricity circuit. I switched off the power at the mains, but the sonar-like sound continued. I was completely clueless as to what it was or where it was coming from. It was more than a week before I finally came to the conclusion that it was the plant, laden with blossoms, that was emitting the sound. This cannot be true, I said to myself. I am going mad.
The next time I had chums over to dinner I told them about the plant. ‘I think it’s singing,’ I said. They stared at me incredulously and so I trooped everyone up to my bedroom to listen. It was late in the evening, the hour of its ‘song’, and we all plumped ourselves down on the floor (I had no chairs: cushions spread out in hillocks was where I and my guests lolled about in those days). Everybody listened politely but with lighthearted scepticism. No one heard a dicky-bird, not even me. Frankly, I felt pretty stupid and wished that I had never mentioned the phenomenon, even to close friends such as these actor pals. Like myself, they were sometimes given to way-out beliefs or leanings, but not this one. They simply roared with laughter and accused me teasingly of hallucinating, of having consumed drugs or magic mushrooms. No amount of protestation on my part would convince them otherwise, and so I shut up about it.
Yet, when I was alone, I continued to ‘hear’ the plant. Occasionally, when another lay at my side, the orchid would begin its song, but I never remarked upon it, never mentioned it again. I chose to appreciate it silently, leaving my partner to fall asleep in peace and ignorance.
It was around this time, the early to mid-seventies, that I learned of a book that was causing a mild sensation. It was written by a South African anthropologist, ethologist and marine biologist called Dr Lyall Watson. He was a recluse, someone told me back then, living on some windy bluff in the west of Ireland, and a bit of a boundary-breaker as far as conventional scientific circles were concerned. The book, Supernature, became a bestseller and cult reading for millions. Naturally, I hurried off to buy it. The text was a revelation to me. Anyone who has read it will know that there are chapters in which Dr Watson recounts experiments carried out on plants to measure electrically their responses to human behaviour. I was astounded. Plants ‘screaming’ at the sight of a human being who had just cut a lawn? Plants responding favourably to beings who had a recent history of plant nurturing?
The point, for me, was that not only were plants living entities, but it seemed as though they might possess memories, be capable of recognising other living forces and reacting negatively or positively towards them.
I had no electric meter or graph by which to measure the responses of my orchid, but I began to silently propose the possibility that the plant was at peace in the space it inhabited, and recognised me as an ally. Was this going too far, being too subjective? Might the plant have simply been expanding to its environment, responding favourably to the lack of threat? Could it have been sufficiently unthreatened to emit contentment?
If you quizzed me tonight about whether I still believe the orchid was singing, I would answer in the negative. My interpretation was doubtless born of the world of hip romanticism I floated about in. Even so, I cannot dismiss the experience entirely. So, what did I hear? Dr Desmond Morris, when discussing the early stages of human sexual courtship in his book The Naked Ape, talks of the ‘highly specialised and symbolised sound signals of speech’ courting couples use with one another. ‘A courting couple is often referred to as “murmuring sweet nothings” and this phrase sums up clearly the significance of the tone of voice as opposed to what is being spoken.’ Might such a form of contact exist, on occasion, between man and plant? Might my plant have been emitting electrical impulses, electromagnetic signals? And if so, is it possible that I picked up those impulses, as one might be aware of another’s heartbeat or a loved one’s sweet murmurings? I was not plugged into singing exactly, but is it conceivable that I was ‘in tune’ with the only other living energy force in the flat? I do not have answers, and these are probably far-fetched notions, but listening to Monsieur praising his beloved olive trees, to his claim of being in tune with them, has recalled this unfathomed incident.
Beyond the valley, in front of our olive farm and to the right, there is a hill wooded with arcane and venerable pine trees. Each stands a good twenty metres high and has been growing on that hill for many decades. There are no buildings, no constructions of any sort over there, and from our upper terrace it is a green and bosky sight, a round shoulder of greenery. I have always understood the hill to be, as our land is, a designated zone verte, written into the council records. After all, it is an extension of the conservation area in which our farm is situated. So it comes as a shock to me when I am disturbed in my work by the sound of chainsaws. Not one, but several. I rise from my table and walk out on to the terrace to see who is creating the noise. To my horror I see one of those ancient pines being felled, then another and another; decades-old trees falling in quick succession. I run in search of Quashia, who is repairing one of the drystone walls brought down in the night by the wild boars.
‘What’s going on over there?’ I ask him.
‘They’re cutting trees,’ he replies. ‘I told you a while ago.’
‘You told me that they were pruning the trees, not cutting them.’
‘The trees are dangerous.’
I am horrified. ‘Dangerous? In what sense dangerous? To whom?’
‘The council says they can be cut down.’
‘Who has the council given this permission to, and why?’
‘They could fall on the foyer and damage the roof if these strong winds continue.’
I cannot believe what I am hearing. This reasoning is preposterous. The trees are a perfectly reasonable distance from the building which was constructed in the sixties to house foreign labour on land compulsorily purchased by the local council from the previous proprietors of our farm.
I hurry back into the house and telephone the Mairie, the town hall. The young woman I speak to informs me that she knows nothing about the trees. I leap into the car and hurtle down the hill to the appropriate office, determined to find out what is going on before the entire hillside has been denuded. Eventually, after being sent from one office to the next, from pillar to post, I learn that the French société that owns the land on which the foyer is built have put forward plans to extend this housing estate. They have applied for planning permission once and were refused on the grounds that you cannot obtain planning permission to build on land that is classified as boissé classé, where the trees themselves are listed. On top of which, it is public land. They do not even own these plots. Their only hope, and a damned cunning ploy it is too, is to register the trees as dangerous, cut them down and then put in their request for planning permission on land now free of trees, worthless as parkland and which can be purchased for a sou.
I am incensed. Locked in my own loss, I have not been paying attention. I should have noticed what was going on weeks ago.
The felling continues. Not every day, and not at such a dramatic speed as on the day I first noticed it, but discreetly, so that the surrounding neighbourhoods are not alerted. Nevertheless, every few days one more tree disappears.
I telephone the council again. They inform me that we must put our complaints in writing. When Michel comes home on Friday, he sets to work. He writes not only to the council representative to whom I have spoken but to several different departments at their local offices, as well as their land registration people in Juan-les-Pins. These he copies to a frankly rather hopeless local organisation we subscribe to whose raison d’être is the protection of the local village and its surrounding green areas. He writes to the Department of Environment in Nice and to anyone else he can think of. All to get someone to take notice of the fact that these protected trees are being felled like sticks. I walk down the lane and glare miserably at the stacks of trunks. I behold lorries arriving to load and cart them away. I return to the council, visit some of the same individuals and then fall upon a tall, bearded man who agrees to pop by within the hour and find out what is going on.
This he does, and then he calls on us. He has warned the manager of the residence that the felling is an illegal act. He assures us that he intends to make immediate contact with the owners of the housing estate, a company operating out of Marseille, and will notify them by registered letter that they are liable to a hefty fine and that replacement trees must be planted immediately.
Le pin. Pine. Highly scented trees. Evergreen, coniferous. There are numerous species, and many grow around the Mediterranean basin. One of the most popular is the Aleppo pine. Originally from the ancient Syrian city of Aleppo? No, but it grows everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean.
Its tiered, oval cones are the pine’s means of reproduction. The female cones are the larger of the two. The egg cells in the female are fertilised by the pollen from the males.
Pines are cultivated for the resin and wood.
I stand on the terrace and look out across at the hill, at the space where the pines used to grow. For the moment the felling has been halted, the damage contained. But who can say for how long? Bribes have the power to change laws down here and escroquerie usually wins the day. And I see no signs of replacement planting.
Arabs crouch there now, out of the heat, in the shade. Resting on their haunches, they smoke cigarettes and watch time passing, the way Bedouins do in the desert. I have no problem with those men sitting over there on their hams, idling away the hours. What I cannot get to grips with is the space itself.
I scrutinise that newly created emptiness, and it troubles me. Profoundly.
I read a while back that a scientific experiment set up by botanists in New Hampshire has found that certain trees give off pheromones, airborne hormones that are carried on the wind like alarm signals when dangers to the trees’ health or survival are close at hand. Bodies of scientists are beginning to support the possibility of a level of environmental awareness being transmitted between living organisms. From tree to tree of a like kind, for example, in a forest.
I find myself, as I stand out here on our terrace, asking what if such ancient philosophies as the Provençal or Aboriginal philosophies are not entirely wacky? What if trees do possess a spirit life? If they do, what happens to that spirit when the tree dies or is chopped down? If the tree dies naturally is the spirit’s departure different, more prepared perhaps, than if the end is more violent? If Dr Watson walked the hill I am staring at now and measured the responses of each of the remaining trees in the surrounding wood, what might he read on his electrical meter?
Would he be deafened by screaming? Screams of anger, outrage? Loss or pain? If we, living and going about our daily lives in the surrounding neighbourhoods, could but hear the reaction of the forest I am preoccupied by now, would we be forced to prick up our ears and listen? Would it make any difference?
The girls’ school I attended was set in rolling grounds with many arcane trees and encircled by a small oak forest of its own. From the age of ten or eleven, that turbulent time, when I was caught up in the web of misery at home and had few allies I could confide in because I felt sure that all homes were normal except ours, I spent a great deal of time alone in that wooded park. Trees became my friends. I talked to them, or simply hugged them, pressed my cheeks hard against their grainy surfaces, ears glued to their trunks, musing with them as though they were people. And if I could not, for whatever reason, hide away outside, I would find wooden beams to hang on to: they were my life rafts. The material itself was reassuring. My dreams were of flying and of living in tree houses.
I remember an occasion when I had been witness to a scene at home. The words spoken, the information revealed were so distressing to me that I fled the house. I ran up the hill the mile or so to school, locked myself in the cloakroom and would not come out. No amount of rapping on the door or threats of punishment would budge me. When the afternoon classes resumed, I escaped into the grounds. I was shivering, weeping, clinging to an ancient oak. It took classmates to report me and several members of staff several hours to coax me away from – what? An object of stability, reassurance, intimacy? What did those trees offer me that I couldn’t find in the human world? There must have been some communion taking place there, but I no longer know what. I have long since lost touch with whatever it might have been; ‘reasons of the heart of which the reason knows nothing,’ was the observation made by Pascal.
Now, sitting alone out here on the terrace, long past the gloaming light of an autumnal evening, in the stillness of the falling night, Schubert’s Quintet in C Major for Two Violins, Viola and Two Celli playing on the stereo, I dig about for an inkling of reasoned comprehension. In the teachings of Zen, students are trained to work towards inner harmony, balance; to be so at one with themselves, so in tune with the universe, that they can hear a blade of grass growing. Might there have been a quintessence of life, a core energy in those trees, that I, the child, sought out and plugged into? The healing power of nature? Might those trees, along with my scribblings and play-acting, have fed me with the strength to survive?
The first side of the record has finished. I rise and walk slowly inside to flip it over, but instead make for the telephone. I am not clear what spurs me to call Rome, but I do. A desire to speak to Barbara? Not especially, but an urgent need to know how she is. I have been vaguely intending to do it for a few days but other matters have kept me occupied. It is Jacob I fall upon, blubbering and bemoaning the fractured future he is about to face.
Barbara was taken ill during the Venice Film Festival. Her jaw locked. She could not speak or swallow. When they returned to Rome, he took her to the hospital, where she was kept in for a series of tests and diagnosed with advanced leukaemia. Three weeks later, which is to say three days ago, she was dead.
I am speechless. Eventually I mutter some mindless and fairly meaningless condolences and hang up. In my thoughts, aside from the shock I am feeling, is the knowledge of those photographs. I make my way to the drawer in my den and dig them out with the intention of destroying them and then I hesitate, and don’t. I sit in semi-darkness, staring hard at them. Staring into them. Four pictures taken by me and in every one Barbara is bleached out. For whatever reason, whatever technical cock-up or fault on my part, she is simply not there. I think back to those warm, early-summer gatherings, to the loneliness I picked up on, and I cannot dismiss the questions spinning in my head. Why is she not in these photographs? Is it utter madness, or even vaguely feasible, to wonder whether her spirit was already departing, moving on elsewhere? Going on ahead, to seek out her next spot? A kinder one, I pray.
Suddenly, her soft, tobacco-scratched voice replays in my mind. The Englishness of her, in spite of her bohemian manners, and the words: ‘You are lucky to be having a baby.’ And in our kitchen: ‘I’d really love a kid.’
I wipe away a tear, slip the photos back into the drawer and wish her bon voyage.
I return to the telephone and call Michel. The rush in my voice must alert him. ‘I have been a fool.’
‘Is everything all right?’ he asks.
‘We must plant our trees. It is the way forward.’
‘Splendid. I’d hoped you’d come to it,’ he says, and kisses me, long-distance, goodnight.