The Lantern by Deborah Lawrenson Read Free Book Online Page A

gone cold.

Chapter 9
    A fter Pierre appeared, I found it hard to concentrate.
    Each evening, when I sat with my book, the lamp grew dimmer as I struggled to find a comfortable position and to bring my vision into focus on the pages. In the glow that makes an island of the armchair and side table, the lines blurred and seemed to imitate waves. Individual words moved and stretched themselves, until they were impossibly gigantic, then suddenly snapped back to become impossibly small and slanted.
    I would blink and close my eyes again, this time against the unbearable thought that I would lose one of my greatest pleasures. That I, too, would be afflicted like Marthe.
    Surely that was a cruelty too far.
    I have always been a reader. As a child, I loved books, though there weren’t many at home. But as soon as I went to school and was given one to look at the lovely pictures, and turned the pages to find more of the same, I was happy. Such colors and strange and vivid images! I marveled at how they were all closed up, asleep with their secrets unseen until you reached up and took the book down from the shelf.
    The teacher, Mlle. Bonis, noticed my reaction and, as soon as she thought I was ready, she gave me books that I could read on my own, books that made sense of the lessons the class was learning on the blackboard. My parents used to say they never knew where it had come from, but I seemed to be aware straightaway of the importance of books and words. The connection between the fantastical pictures illustrating the story and the images the words suggested in my head.
    By the age of ten, I was reading Dumas, de Maupassant, and abridged versions of Victor Hugo’s works. Very often, when my work on the farm was done, I would run up the path through the woods to sit reading on a hard chair in the village library in the corner of the mairie . I can still recall vividly the terrible shock I had while reading a passage by Giono, in which a man was killed by a storm. Lightning “planted a golden tree between his shoulders.” The image has been imprinted in my mind ever since, both as a picture that is as beautiful as it is horrifying, and as a monument to the immense power of words.
    I kept it quiet, but I wanted to be a teacher myself, just like Mlle. Bonis.
    I feel him here all the time now. Pierre. He is at my back, in the vulnerable hollow at the base of my spine that acts as a warning sensor.
    Why has he chosen to come back? After all these years, why now?
    So typical of Pierre.
    Always here, behind me, at my side: a presence beyond the familiars of the house, the well-known shapes and voices from the past that live benignly alongside me. Odd noises are disturbing now, and I am unsettled by voices when I know it is only the wind in the trees. My skin prickles as if a change has occurred but is not yet completely revealed.
    Finally, four days after Pierre’s first visitation, when he hadn’t reappeared, I allowed my shoulders to drop. It was when I began to relax, of course, that he returned. This time he was standing by the hearth in the kitchen, quiet as you like.
    I was making bread, which I don’t do so often now, as the girl brings me bread from the bakery every two days. But I had a sudden craving for the bread that Mémé Clémentine and Maman used to make, when there was a brick bread oven at the end of the cottages. Into the mixing bowl they’d put a fistful of dough kept back from the previous batch; they called it the spirit of the bread, so there was continuity, a link down the years and generations, living and breathing in the yeasty pillows of the new loaves.
    I was at the table, arms floured, kneading, and sad that there was no spirit of the bread to be placed inside, when Pierre strolled in again.
    He didn’t follow me this time, just stayed where he was, hands in pockets, guilty smile playing about his lips. A cut bottom lip, I noticed, as if he’d been in a scrap, which he often was. This was the Pierre