Chapter 2

 

Not wanting to get under the Respighis’ feet, Rachel decided to explore Zaronza. It was still too early for the tourist hordes to arrive, so she had the place almost to herself. Why, she thought, do French villages – including Corsican ones – always look deserted? Most of the shutters were closed and some of the houses appeared empty. Apart from a small grocery store and the café, the tiny village had no shops. She moved the car closer to the house so she could transfer her suitcase to her room later on. After that, she could sightsee in peace.

The church glowed even more brightly in the morning sun than it had the previous evening. But inside it was dark and quiet, with the musty odour of crumbling prayer books and ancient stone. There wasn’t very much of note, just the usual images of Madonna and Child and rows of votive candles in glass holders flickering before the altar. As she advanced up the aisle, Rachel noticed a small, black-clad woman on her knees in the front pew, her face pressed to her clasped hands. She decided not to intrude and, on tiptoe, sought the heavy door and emerged into the blinding sunshine.

Where to go from here? Since it had been almost dark when she’d gone up to the château-restaurant the previous evening, she had not been able to see much. So she crossed the square towards the guesthouse again but, instead of unlatching the gate into the passage, she turned right up the steep and stony path. At the top, one pathway went to the château, while the other led to a flat esplanade. The square, forbidding watchtower stood beyond.

The place was deserted, but, from there, she had a panoramic view of the purple hills across the bay. Shadows of clouds played on the mountainsides as the sun dipped in and out, so the view was ever-changing. Rachel went up to the rail around the edge of the esplanade and looked over. The hillside stretched downwards over jagged rocks to the beach below, its strange dark sands also deserted. She turned back to the watchtower, foursquare and unadorned, standing sentinel over the bay as it had for more than two hundred years. She tried the door. Locked. She noticed that a large, flat stone had been placed as a bench next to the tower’s entrance. So she sat down and leaned with her back against the wall, hugging her knees to her and gazing at the rugged view.

The same feeling – of coming home – that she had experienced the evening before, flowed through her. Did Maria and her unnamed lover meet up here by the tower? Or would that have been too dangerous? Fragments of the letters she had read that morning came back: “your hair like a dark waterfall…why are you so cruel to me?…now I am yours and yours only…we will be together forever.” But they didn’t seem to have been destined for a happy future. The letters stopped, and their tantalising story was like something seen through a patchy mist. It was all so long ago. Nobody knew of them any more, and no one could be alive who could tell their story. Even so, Rachel had the conviction that, even if this Maria was not her own grandmother, the two Marias were somehow connected.

She had come all this way, hoping to find out more about Grandmother Maria, whom she had never known, and about her own Corsican ancestry: to piece together the family history that was still only partial. Instead, she had found a mystery to which no one seemed to have the key. It was like catching a glimpse of a secret, walled garden through a gateway, only to have the door slammed in your face.

Rachel shook her head as if to dispel these thoughts and then stood up and stretched, her body stiff from the stone bench. Well, now she was here she might as well explore beyond Zaronza and make the most of her time. Glancing at her watch, she noticed it was almost midday – lunchtime in Corsica, as in the whole of France. She made her way down the hill towards the village, passing a fig tree from which the dark purple fruits were falling onto the path. She picked one up, turning it over to make sure no wasps were lurking in it, and then sank her teeth into it, the soft flesh contrasting with the tiny, crunchy seeds. She had eaten figs before, but none like this, fresh from the tree.

Her appetite whetted, Rachel crossed the square to the small café opposite the church, which served snacks, and ordered a goat’s cheese salad.

“On holiday are you?” asked la patronne, as she brought the order to the table. Apart from an old man in blue overalls and a beret, sipping a glass of red wine, Rachel was the only customer.

“Yes. I’m staying at the guest house over there.” Rachel nodded back over the square.

“Nice couple, the Respighis. Not from here, of course. Not everyone in the village likes strangers moving in but I think the place needs a bit of life apart from the tourists. They’ve done up that old house beautifully. It needed it, that’s for sure. No one had lived in it for years. It brings me a bit of extra custom, so I’m not complaining.”

The woman sat down opposite Rachel, glad of the opportunity to chat.

“Are you from Zaronza?” Rachel asked.

“Oh yes, born and bred here. But, of course, like everyone else I left when I was young and went to the mainland – Marseille.”

“But you came back…”

The woman sniffed. “I never cared for the place. Oh, it was the big city and quite exciting to start with. I got married there, had a couple of kids who now live in Paris, and then my husband died. So I came back here. I always missed Corsica, anyway. Most people do, whatever they might say.”

Rachel tore off a piece of bread and wiped her plate. “Monsieur Respighi talked to me about some love letters they found in the attic. Do you know the story?”

La patronne shrugged. “Oh, those. Of course, I’ve seen them but I don’t know much more than that. I was born years and years after those letters must have been written. I remember Granny talking about a family that lived in the house in the twenties and thirties. But she was always close, Granny, and didn’t say much. Always good at keeping a secret.”

Rachel’s face fell.

“And I suppose your grandmother wouldn’t still be alive now.”

“Oh yes, she’s still going strong. Outlived all her children. Ninety-five last month and pig-headed as ever.”

Rachel’s heart started to beat faster. She leant forward. “And does she live in Zaronza?”

“Not since she was a girl. She married a fisherman and went to live in Santa-Lucia. She still lives there all on her own. Her other grandchildren, my cousins, who live down that way, keep an eye on her. I see her sometimes – she’s family, after all – but she and I never really got on.”

“Do you think she might be prepared to talk to me?” Rachel gave la patronne an edited version of what she had already explained to Pascal Respighi.

The woman sucked her teeth and grimaced. “Hard to say. Granny can be pretty difficult, and you won’t get anything out of her if she doesn’t feel like it. She doesn’t like strangers, so she didn’t want to talk to Respighi when she heard he had bought the house. You can try, but I don’t guarantee you’ll get a result. I suppose the fact your granny is supposed to have lived here might help. And you do look a bit Corsican.”

“Perhaps I could phone her up and arrange to see her.”

La patronne laughed. “She’s not even on the phone! She says she can’t be doing with all that modern stuff. And she’s getting a bit hard of hearing so it wouldn’t be much good to her, anyway. No, you’ll just have to turn up and hope she’s in a good mood. Morning is the best time to go. She has a siesta in the afternoon and then she goes to bed about eight.”

She wrote down the address and gave Rachel directions. Rachel had to swallow her impatience. She had hoped to go and see the old lady that very afternoon. But it sounded as if she had to be treated with kid gloves, so it would just be counter-productive to turn up at the wrong moment. Instead, she paid and wandered out into the sunshine. Since it was a Monday, there were fewer people around than the previous day. Even so, a tourist bus was heaving up the hill towards the village and knots of people were making their way up to the watchtower and the château.

Rachel spent the rest of the afternoon looking around Zaronza. Walking downhill from the village she found a long flight of stone steps leading down to the beach. An arrow pointed to the shrine of Santa Giulia. She picked her way down the crumbling staircase and arrived at the shrine. It was a cave in the rock with a neo-classical façade, flanked by two large urns. One was cracked and the decorative swags had broken off. The shrine itself was protected by a locked grille, but Rachel could peer through it and see the small altar with a statue of the saint in a niche above it. Nothing indicated who the saint had been or what her story was, so she made a mental note to ask Pascal about it.

The beach didn’t look particularly appealing, so, having exhausted the sights in the village, Rachel wandered back up the hill and climbed the alley on the opposite side of the square from the guest house. The path went around another large, stern-looking house, shuttered up and empty. The cobbled lane petered out after a hundred yards or so and became a rough track winding up into the hills above the village. Having little else to do, Rachel continued along the track, wondering where it led and taking note of landmarks in case she got lost.

The path looped up the steep hill between olive trees, rosemary and cistus bushes. That sun-baked, aromatic scent rose up again and Rachel breathed it in. How different all this was from London: another world. Sweating hard now, she stopped for breath by a pile of stones. A couple of rotting joists stuck out of the rubble. The ruined building was too small to have been a house. Maybe a shepherd’s hut? She sat down on a block of stone and looked at the toy town village far below, framed in the curve of the bay and the mountains beyond, now glowing amber in the strong afternoon sun.

Again, she felt as if a veil were hiding the truth from her. But her pulse quickened at the thought of the interview to come with the old lady in Santa-Lucia. She prayed she wouldn’t turn her away. That would be too much, having come this far.

Rachel sat there for a long time, turning over in her mind the little she knew of Maria’s story. As the sun’s rays lengthened, she got up, brushed her shorts down and started off down the hill. Going any further uphill wouldn’t be a good idea. Her skin prickled from the sun and her shins were covered in dust from the dry path. A shower and then dinner up at the château again beckoned.

She unlatched the gate into the passage and pushed open the heavy front door, which caught, as usual, on the flagstones. A natural anti-burglar device, Rachel thought. Sure enough, a door opened and Pascal appeared.

“Had a good day?” he asked.

“Yes, fine, thank you. I had a good look around the village and I’ve got a number of questions to ask you about some of the sights. But that can wait, since I’m sure you’re busy.”

“Yes, good idea. Breakfast is usually the best time.”

Rachel decided not to mention her proposed visit to the café owner’s grandmother the following day. After all, the old woman had refused to have anything to do with him for her own reasons and she didn’t want to offend Pascal. If he asked, she would just say she was going to Santa-Lucia for the day.

***

Pascal was even more voluble at breakfast the next day and Rachel was itching to get away. But he had promised to answer her questions about the village, so she couldn’t complain. Even so, she swallowed her coffee as fast as possible and cut off some of his longer descriptions, looking at her watch and explaining that she was hoping to spend the day sightseeing.

The drive down to Santa-Lucia was not quite as hair-raising as the journey up to Zaronza the previous Sunday. Rachel began to get the hang of driving on the switchback Corsican roads and appreciated the scenery, if not some of the other drivers’ disdain for the dangers of overtaking on blind corners.

Pascal had told her she mustn’t miss the Cathedral of the Nebbio, one of the only Pisan cathedrals on the island, with its embalmed Saint Flor on show in a glass-fronted coffin. It was not in Santa-Lucia itself but down a narrow country lane a mile or so outside. But that could wait. She drove into the centre of the town and parked at the yacht marina. Once a port, Santa-Lucia was now a haven for pleasure-boats, whose jumbled masts rose up like the trunks of some blasted forest.

With a dry mouth and a tingling in her stomach, Rachel made her way up the busy main street towards the citadel and the old town, passing the thronging tourist cafés and the clusters of chatting residents. At the citadel she stopped and consulted the rough sketch map the café owner in Zaronza had drawn for her. It would be all too easy to lose herself in the muddle of backstreets that straggled down the hill towards the old port. Even so, she had to ask directions from an unsmiling young man with black hair and an almost Moorish face. He pointed towards one of the narrower alleys, festooned with washing slung on lines between the balconies. It reminded Rachel of streets she had seen in parts of Italy. Two elderly women sat on rush-seated chairs on the pavement, not conversing, just watching the world go by. Rachel bade them good morning as she walked past. They nodded and smiled, gap-toothed.

Number fifty-four was at the other end of the street, a tall, narrow building with a row of buzzers beside the door. Taking a deep breath, Rachel pressed the one marked Santoni and waited. Nothing happened but she figured that it might take the old lady some time to get to the door. She pushed the buzzer again. Still nothing. Her heart plummeting, she looked around. At the next house, a woman in a flowered apron-cum-dress was washing her front step.

“Excuse me, Madame, I’m looking for Madame Santoni. I’ve tried the bell but there’s no reply.”

The woman stood up, easing her back, and looked Rachel up and down.

“No, well, you’ve just missed her. She’s gone out to do her marketing. She still does it all herself. But she should be back in about half an hour. I should give her forty-five minutes or so. She doesn’t like being rushed.”

Rachel thanked her and set off back along the street. She had noticed a small café in another side street on the way and decided to wait there, rather than go back to the crowded and overpriced tourist cafés overlooking the harbour. Settling herself at one of the small tables outside on the street, she waited for someone to come and serve her. What seemed like a violent argument was going on inside the café with raised voices and hands slapping table tops. A small, dark man came out and noticed Rachel’s unease.

“Don’t mind them,” he said. “They’re just commenting on today’s news.”

He brought her a small coffee in a chipped cup with a couple of paper-wrapped sugar lumps in the saucer. It was bitter and very hot. She sipped it, checking her watch every couple of minutes. Why does the time always drag when you want it to do the opposite? Rachel thought. Her coffee finished, she left some coins on the table. The men inside were still arguing. She was a little early but couldn’t wait any longer.

She retraced her steps along the street where Madame Santoni lived and stopped again in front of the door. This time, after a minute or so, the door opened a crack. A wizened face peered out and then opened the door wider.

The old lady put her hand to her throat.

“Maria,” she gasped.