Rooms we didn't know were there

A lopsided stone arch at the end of the main house, which would once have let carts into the courtyard…

                                                     From The Lantern

Come with me, I want to show you something. Here’s the entrance arch to “Les Genévriers”, slightly askew but remarkably solid, but we won’t go through there just now. We’re walking behind the main farmhouse, heading down the alleyway which was once a centuries-old path up the hill from the town far below.



          …the alleyway between the big house and the row of workers’ cottages.

In the building on the right is the place where a dream first came true, in the most literal sense. I’m a big dreamer, in every way – a daydreamer and a cineaste by night. One scene that recurs quite often for me, in various dream guises, is that of walking through a house where I live and finding rooms I never suspected were there.

Perhaps you have that one too. I don’t think it’s all that unusual. I read once it was supposed to signify personal development and the subconscious acknowledgement of more potential if certain areas of the mind could only be unlocked. In my dreams, it’s always a fascinating and welcome discovery, anyway.

When we bought our property in France, it was the rambling nature of the buildings that appealed immediately. As described fairly faithfully in The Lantern, it is more than a simple house: it is an old hamlet. We had seen it twice before we signed the purchase documents, once inside and out with the vendor’s agent and a second time inspecting the outside only, rather less officially.

There was certainly an element of reckless folie de grandeur about our purchase of the place, but we had fallen under its spell and there was no going back. We’d half-joked for years that top of our material wish-list would be a ruined hamlet in the Luberon, and suddenly – totally unexpectedly - here it was, and what’s more, in what we considered the ideal location. If we hadn’t gone for it, we would have regretted our lack of courage for evermore.

Arriving that first July, ready for adventure, we quickly realized that the main farmhouse was well-nigh uninhabitable. There were ominous cracks right across the floor of the top storey and the remaining bedrooms were cramped and full of dead lizards and insects. So the first summer – and for a few years afterwards - we slept in the building across the alleyway. This long edifice was once a line of farm workers’ cottages but already converted into two apartments. At the end was another small locked house (with no key) that we had never seen inside.

The woodworm-y entrance door to the downstairs apartment leads into a little sitting room. A large high-ceilinged bedroom is a few steps below, and there is a bathroom with wonderful views and its own outside terrace.



We’d been sleeping in the bedroom for several nights before I thought to investigate what I thought must be another cupboard, tucked away down another short flight of stairs, that I’d never even noticed when the estate agent showed us round.

The wooden door was truly small, but on the other side was a fair sized room. It was damp and full of cobwebs, but thrilling nevertheless. If you’ve ever lived in a city, you know that rooms just don’t get missed off property details. But here it was – the room we never knew was there.

            …the doors that opened into new rooms that hadn’t seemed to exist.

As it turned out, it was only the first such discovery, as we hacked down the overgrown garden and rampant ivy and the buildings seemed to expand organically around us. The garden door that led not to a tool store but a vaulted wine cave stretching under the courtyard, still with its old – empty! – barrels, was even more exciting. The locked house at the end of the alleyway eventually yielded to force and gave up its terrible stench of drains and ancient lintels and shallow stone wash basin.

When I look back now, that time does take on a dream quality, more so because it did feel as if we were doing something more than slightly crazy. But along the way we have gained far more than extra rooms. We’ve found that a dream really can come true – maybe more than one.       



Taste of the sun

Saturday is market day in Apt. It’s hot and the streets are thronged. The locals keep to the southern end of town where the fruit and vegetable stall on the edge of the big car park gives the best value. The further north towards the Hotel de Ville you go, battling all the tourists of August, the steeper the prices and the prettier the displays.

Provence is the land of tomatoes and olives and garlic and olive oil, and if it’s possible to combine these health-giving ingredients in any way, you will find the result here. You can buy them mashed into unappealing-looking but delicious pulps, or preserved pure, like these delicious sun-dried tomatoes with whole cloves of garlic that are lightly pickled, crunchy and slightly sweet.



Black olive paste - tapenade - is the staple to eat on tiny crispy toasts as an accompaniment to the first drink of the evening. Or there’s anchoïade, a purée of preserved anchovies, olive oil and garlic, to eat with crispy raw vegetables. There’s a stall about halfway down the Rue des Marchands that offers the best you will ever taste.

I’m trying to relax and eat well in the sun this weekend. What do you mean, “try!?” you’re asking. Well, I get very nervous before big events, and next Tuesday is one of the biggest of my writing life: The Lantern is published in the USA and Canada. It’s been going pretty well in Britain, and over the past few weeks the Italian and the Croatian rights have been sold to add to the other foreign territory sales. But this is the big one, the first time I’ve been published in America.

The thousands of free ARCs sent out by HarperCollins to introduce a new author into the book marketplace have produced some lovely reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and some not so good. Some readers don’t know what to make of it: too descriptive; too frustrating to have dual timeframes. Not the easy, genre Gothic read they were expecting. Fair enough. I’m very at ease with the idea that no book will work for everyone: that’s the magic of reading. I don’t enjoy every book I open and neither does anyone else.

But Oprah’s organisation likes it (yes, the legendary Oprah!) - here – and yesterday it reached the dizzy heights of a mention in the Short List in the Wall Street Journal - here. So cross your fingers for me, and hope there aren’t too many rotten tomatoes next week… 

Reading under the fig tree

This is the life…a very comfortable seat in the shade of the fig tree in the courtyard, a pile of lovely books, some wild plums from the hillside and nectarines from the market for when you can’t be bothered to move.

The sun beats down, releasing a heavenly scent from the fig tree: sweet and rich and slightly musky. A cooling breeze ripples the leaves, and all is quiet. Above, the fruit is still green, late this year after the cold weather and rains of early summer.



When a change of scene is required, there’s another lovely place to sit and read under  the shade of a vine canopy over the dining table that looks out over the garden with the blue Luberon hills beyond.

For those who are curious about which books are in the piles of eclectic summer reading at hand, these include:

Mary Ann in Autumn by the incomparable Armistead Maupin - I loved this, as I’m a long-time fan of his Tales of the City novels. Once you get to known the lovable characters in this series, you always want to know more about how life is treating them, and this book hits the mark in every way.

A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan – really enjoyed this, especially the way the short stories joined to make a whole, while each chapter stands alone and answers some of the questions posed by earlier teasers. As someone who is endlessly interested in the tricks and possibilities of time in literature, I thought this was a rollicking good read and very well executed.

Shelley’s Boat by Julian Roach – I’ve long been fascinated by Shelley and Byron and the Italian adventure that ended in tragedy for so many of the entourage. This is a lovely lyrical mixture of romance and inexorable disaster in the weeks preceding Shelley’s death by drowning in the summer of 1822.

Rosé en Marché by Jamie Ivey – my favourite of Jamie Ivey’s fun books about France and wine. In this one he takes us behind the scenes of all the famous Luberon markets as he and his wife Tanya become wine merchants, selling their selection of bottles on stalls throughout the region, and trying to make a life and a living in Provence.

Une Maison dans le Luberon by Adrienne Borrelly with photographs by Eric d’Hérouville – full of interiors and exteriors of exquisite style, the latest in my collection of gorgeous picture books, for inspiration and lazy day-dreaming.

Bliss...

Tonight's scorpion...

Found ten minutes ago by daughter on the wall outside bedroom door. Not the sharpest of photos - there were what might be diplomatically termed "urgent family discussions" about whether the taking of a photo was really the priority here, whether the flash was going to work, and who was going to jump in which direction if the scorpion decided to make a break for it...

  

Scorpion!

Fat scorpions lurked malevolently as I began to clear the stew of wind-blown twigs and sodden tangles of ivy, rotted petals and grit.

                                                             From The Lantern

The first time I saw a scorpion in the house, I was chilled to the bone. A scorpion, surely the most dangerous stinging insect there is! How could this be, in a country so close to England? I’d been brought up on terrible tales of the scorpions in the Middle East where my parents lived when I was born, of the gardener who put his foot into a shoe without looking and was stung so badly he died of the poison in the scorpion’s tail.

When I told the first person I saw – the electrician – of this terrible discovery, he smiled and shrugged in the way the French do. “C’est normal,’ he said. There were always scorpions in old houses where there were lots of stone walls, he explained, but there was not much harm in them. The sting from these Provençal breeds was not much worse than a wasp’s.

That isn’t as comforting as it might seem, as there are some pretty heavy duty wasps around here in summer: as August wears on, great hornets imbued with the same dark threat as military helicopters appear. But we’ve learned to live with the scorpions, and developed our own way of dealing with them. Nature has her ways too.

One hot night a few summers ago, I was in the bathroom getting ready for bed when I noticed that a battle was raging under the basin between a scorpion and a spider. The scorpion was a reasonable size, about an inch and a half long (about average: the other night we found a fat three-incher, but there are also tiny ones of less than an inch; the one photographed here on an outside wall was about two inches long). The spider was rather smaller, and it seemed only a matter of time before it lost the fight. But on and on went the two adversaries.

I stayed watching for over an hour, unable to leave without knowing the outcome. In the end, the spider triumphed by patiently continuing to spin sticky web while avoiding the scorpion’s nipping pincers. Very good to know, and I am always most respectful of spiders now. 

The blocked-up doorway

One afternoon, idly looking down over the lower terraces at the stone walls, my eyes fastened on a wooden beam in the wall attached to the first stone arch. Moments passed before it occurred to me that what I was seeing was a lintel, and that there had once been a door underneath it. It was there, very faintly, in outline. Another room, possibly, blocked up with stones.

                                             

                                                     from The Lantern

When I’m writing a novel, I really enjoy describing what is really there. The story comes from the imagination, but what will make it vivid and plausible is being rooted in a real landscape and setting. So, although these words are supposedly written by Eve in The Lantern, they are my experience of being at “Les Genévriers”, our property as it features in the novel.

And it’s also possible to present a photograph of the place itself, just as I first noticed it a couple of years ago, and as it remains today. What was it used for, once upon a time? No doubt, it would have been something quite prosaic: for storing farm equipment, or just possibly for sheltering animals. The chamber cannot have been very big – at the most, only a few yards square – but why, and when, was it blocked up?



We took out the top row of stones to see if it was possible to re-open the entrance, but it seems not. There is another layer of stones, and rubble behind it. This is where those of us with over-active imaginations start to guess at all sorts of explanations. Of course, I couldn’t resist writing it into my story, and I hope those you you who read the book will be interested to see what might have formed other pictures in the mind, as it really exists. 

Lavender country

The summer I was fifteen I went up towards the mountains for the lavender harvest. It was Marthe’s idea, she who persuaded our parents to let me go to see for myself how the ridged uplands had been transformed into purple carpets where the scent was born.

                                                             from The Lantern

The lavender harvest will begin in the next few weeks, so the end of July is the perfect time to see fields of purple. As the hills rise into mountains, the checkerboards of colour are grow more dense against the green and pale stone. The warmer the day, the more heavily the air is perfumed.



Ask anyone about lavender, and the chances are they won’t be able to give you a description of its aroma. But more often than not, they can give you some visual reference. Lavender is color, waving fields of purple, rich blues and faded mauve. It is the essence of blue and of the warm winds of summer, opulent against the yellow of the cornfield, mysteriously shadowed under the olives that are sometimes planted as its companion.

These fields are in Sault, in the great lavender-producing area of the north-west of Provence. This small town, built on a rocky outcrop overlooking the narrow plateau where the crops grow, seems almost entirely dedicated to its industry. Even the shutters and doors of many of the buildings are painted mauve:

Local produce in the butcher's shop includes pork with lavender honey:

There are lavender biscuits, and lavender teas...

And just look at the sumptuous purple of this tablecloth:

And shops entirely devoted to lavender and sunshine...