and uninvited.
‘It’s me, Hugo! Are you there?’
There were muffled bars of music. He was sure of it. He followed the sound to the kitchen.
Then he saw it right away, over the kitchen table, big as life.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he gasped, splaying his arms involuntarily. ‘Jesus Christ!’
He looked around to make sure he was still alone and yanked out his mobile phone to hastily shoot a picture.
The music was louder. He thought he ought to turn around and leave, look at the snapshot in the morning and think things through with the sober light of day, but against his better judgement he followed the melody.
There was a door by the pantry. When he opened it, there were stairs leading to a cellar. The music was louder still, guitars, an accordion, a thumping drum – musette music, not his favourite. There was a naked dirty bulb lighting the stairway.
He walked halfway down when the light went off and he was in darkness.
‘Odile?’
FOURTEEN
Luc went to breakfast grinning. Hugo’s bunk was undisturbed. The scoundrel had clearly succeeded and undoubtedly would soon be peppering him with tales of conquest.
After Luc dispatched the first shift to the cave he embarked with Sara on an old-fashioned field trip, complete with specimen bags and notebooks. In the damp mist of early morning, they started from behind the abbey walls and hiked through a saturated pasture in the direction of the river.
Jeremy and Pierre were by the Portakabin and saw them taking off. ‘Where do you think they’re going?’ Jeremy asked.
‘Haven’t got a clue,’ Pierre answered with a wink. ‘The boss looks happy though.’
They walked in silence, inhaling the fertility of the countryside. It had rained hard for an hour or more the previous night and their wellington boots were soon shiny from the wet grass. The sun finally managed to eke out an appearance and when it did, the land began to sparkle brightly, sending both of them reaching for sunglasses.
They made their first find only a kilometre from the campsite. Sara noticed the border between the meadow they were traversing and the forest was speckled, a mixture of greens and yellows. She spotted tall yellow shoots towering above green grasses and started running for them. Luc kept pace with easy, long-legged lopes. The two of them left trails of trodden-down grass in their wake.
‘Wild barley,’ she said. ‘ Hordeum spontaneum, tons of it.’
To Luc, it looked like run-of-the-mill cultivated barley but she snapped off a spiky head and showed him two rows of kernels rather than six-rowed cereal grain.
She had pruning shears and he had a pocket knife and the two of them methodically snipped and cut a large bagful of golden heads. ‘This was probably the precursor of the domesticated species,’ she happily explained while they worked. ‘The transition to farmed grain would have happened during the Neolithic, but there’s nothing to suppose that Mesolithic and even upper Paleolithic people wouldn’t have foraged wild barley for food and even beer.’
‘Or other purposes,’ Luc added.
‘Or other purposes,’ she agreed. ‘I think that’s enough.’ She stretched her back. ‘One down, two to go.’
He carried the sack of barley and followed her as she plunged into the forest. The thin sunlight didn’t warm the woodlands much and it became chillier the deeper they wandered.
She wasn’t trying to avoid thickets and brambles; she was searching them out, which made for slow going. Luc trekked along, content to let his mind wander. She’d know what to watch out for; he knew what he wanted to watch – her hips, perfectly tight in khakis. And her shoulders were small and feminine even in that thick leather jacket. He tussled with a growing urge to grab her from behind, spin her and pull her against him. They’d kiss. She wouldn’t resist this time. He’d ask for absolution. She was always the one, he’d say. He hadn’t known it then but he knew it now. He’d pull her down. His sins would be washed away. The cool wetness of the forest floor would wash them away.
‘We’re looking for a creeping, tangled vine, climbing up small-to-medium-sized trees,’ she said, breaking the spell. ‘The leaves look like elongated arrow heads. It’s late in the season so don’t expect pink-and-white flowers but there could be some late-bloomers.’
There was a trickling sound and their boots began to slurp in mud. Luc wondered if the stream fed into one of Barthomieu’s waterfalls. Along the stream bed there was a mixed population of mostly holm oak and beech along with a thick undergrowth of weeds and prickly acacia. His jeans caught on some thorns and when he bent to free himself he heard Latin spilling from her mouth, euphonious, as if she was beginning to sing a hymn, ‘ Convolvulus arvensis! There!’
The flowerless bindweed had attacked saplings and juvenile trees just like she’d predicted. Its vines wound tightly around bark in a choking grip, spiralling high over their heads.
There was an abundance of the weed. The problem wasn’t quantity but collection. The vines were wrapped so snugly it was impossible to pull them away from the trunks. They were obliged to undertake an exercise that was painstaking and made their fingers ache – cutting and unwrapping, cutting and unwrapping – until they had a second bag filled with stems and leaves.
‘Two down, one to go,’ she declared.
She was leading again, he was following. The cliffs and the river were ahead. She doubled back towards the meadows. She had studied the topo maps and knew there was a disused train tracks nearby, a long-abandoned spur. Their last target favoured the kind of land that had once been tamed and was now fallow. They were seeking bushes. She was talking about them but he wasn’t absorbing the botany lesson. He was aching inside and becoming angry with himself for who he’d become.
His father was a petrochemical executive, stereotypical of men of his generation, with his private clubs, his drinking, his narcissistic arrogance and his insistence on keeping young mistresses despite having a perfectly lovely wife. If it weren’t for his fatal coronary, he’d still be at it, drinking and romancing, a pathetic septuagenarian Lothario.
Genes or environment – the eternal question. What accounted for Luc’s emulation of his old man? He’d seen the effect his father’s behaviour had on his mother. Fortunately, she’d been able to regain her dignity with a divorce, move back to the States and reclaim a life suspended for a quarter century as the brittle spouse of an oil company man, desiccating in the desert heat within the walled confines and country clubs of Doha and Abu Dhabi, pining for her only child who was sent away to Swiss schools.
His mother married again, this time to a wealthy dermatologist in Boston, a man with a mild manner and a soft body. Luc tolerated him but had no affection.
Suddenly, the blindingly obvious question flooded his mind. Why had he driven Sara away? Hadn’t it been the most complete relationship of his life? The most satisfying?
And why had he never asked himself why?
The old train tracks ran parallel to the river and were now overgrown. Sara pointed in the direction of a flat linear strip at the edge of a field and made a beeline towards it. Luc quietly trudged along, his thoughts percolating like hot coffee grounds.
The tracks were visible only when they stood directly over them. Sara, with the intensity of a blood hound, sensed that north was a better direction than south. They followed the tracks, adjusting their steps to land on the sleepers. On the river-side of the tracks was a wild hedgerow of hawthorn and Sara told Luc this was as good an environment as any to find what they were looking for.
The clouds blew off and the sun stayed out. Half an hour later they were still walking the rails and Luc began to fret about the excavation. His mobile phone had zero bars and he didn’t like being out of touch. They were about to pack it in and reverse direction when she began jumping like a little girl and spouting Latin again, ‘ Ribes rubrum, Ribes rubrum!’
