The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge Read online

  ‘Did you never go into the garden? Even when it was all overgrown? Oh, then you must come. Please do.’

  They stood up.

  ‘I will wait for you here, Madame Carpentier,’ said the Composer, settling among the bleached cushions on one of the cane chairs and apparently proposing to survey the vines. ‘The garden is Marie-T’s treasure. She will be the best person to show it to you.’

  9

  GREEN THOUGHT

  They passed into the house and down a cool corridor with silent doors to the right and left. At the far end the Judge saw an oblong square of bright light. A cool rush of air, sucked out of the dark caverns in the house, swept stealthily towards this distant white space. Marie-T held out her hand, childish, confiding.

  ‘Mind, there are always old boots and gardening tools in the corridor. Maman’s things. I can’t bear to clear them up.’

  She clasped Dominique Carpentier with a simplicity and tenderness, which startled and moved the Judge; this girl too was an Israelite in whom there was no guile, and here was her naked demand, to be recognised and loved. Together they stepped carefully towards the light. Suddenly they traversed a vast cold space. By now the Judge was used to the cavernous emptiness of the Domaine, but here she paused and looked around. The giant fireplace yawned black and void, empty of grates, logs, fire irons. The bare walls soared upwards into darkness. There were windows facing south, tightly shuttered. She felt the smooth uneven cold of the flagstones oozing through her soft leather soles. This must be the Great Hall. Her companion paused and turned; Marie-T’s face gleamed like a pale oval portrait in the gloom.

  ‘Yes, this is where my grandfather always held the New Year’s Ball. The orchestra sat up in that gallery at the other end. We still call it the hayloft. I think this used to be the barn when the mas consisted of nothing but farm buildings.’

  They stood side by side in the hushed cold.

  ‘I danced here. With Myriam.’

  ‘Would you dance with me?’ The jealous smallness of the voice emerged not from a woman, but a child. The Judge peered up at Marie-T, startled. Then she laughed.

  ‘But of course.’ The Judge bowed before the pale sad face and held out her arms.

  ‘Can you waltz? Remember – your grandfather was a gentleman. We weren’t allowed to rock and roll. We had to dance like ladies.’

  The Judge watched Marie-T smother her surprise. The girl stood ready to be placed in position, like a stiff, musical doll about to dance on top of an antique wind-up box.

  ‘I lead,’ commanded the Judge.

  And there in the cool and massive dark of the empty hall she swept the girl off in a huge silent arc beneath the bare musicians’ gallery, past the dark stacks of chairs and the great dusty drapes which rose almost to the roof, and then fell in swathes of moth-ridden velvet to the stone floor. They crossed a solid blade of white light flung down from one unshuttered square just beneath the eaves, which sliced the flagstones like a spotlight. Dominique Carpentier suddenly identified the radiance on her partner’s face. Marie-T had seen her dance before, and had longed to be chosen.

  The moment passed. They slithered to a halt, laughing, embarrassed and a little out of breath.

  ‘It’s much easier to keep time with the orchestra.’ The Judge smiled in the darkness. ‘We’ll have to practise. Now show me your garden.’

  She found herself at the top of a long flight of stone steps with large pots on either side to protect anyone descending from falling over the mossy rim. They were now at the back of the house. She felt the heat on her head and shoulders, but below her nestled a damp green space, filled with colour, small spiky palms, and the scent of syringa in blossom. The garden lay between the great medieval foundations of the old mas and the cliff itself; a narrow space, sunny but sheltered, drenched in running water and vast damp leaves, oozing green. The summer colours of Languedoc, both the houses and the earth, are hard and red: umber, ochre, burnt sienna. The greens too stand solid, full vines shading the early grapes, the dark masses of pinède rattling with cicadas, and the whisper of fallen pine needles, which form a brown carpet beneath your feet. By midday you hear nothing but the clatter of cigales, but here in the garden against the soft green silence they made a different music, a gentle rustle, proclaiming their presence like a greeting.

  She was standing on a stone path in the marbled light beneath a cherry tree spangled with ripe fruit. Marie-T reached up and plucked a handful of dark-red cherries. They stood side by side, sucking the fruit and spitting the stones into their palms; the Judge examined each façade in turn. There was apparently no way out other than the way they had just come. To her left she noticed an old stone wall, taller than a man, with several pear trees carefully tended and pruned on espalier, stretched out in full sun. Two smaller apricot trees, more recently planted, the golden fruit small, still unripe, pushed outwards away from the wall. Where did it end? A giant mass of wild acanthus masked the point where the wall encountered the cliff. The leaves spread out like dark green skirts, clinging to the red earth and the rising rocks. They walked forwards into the lush, damp world. The Judge heard water, and the sound of water falling into water; all the foliage appeared to breathe, as the garden reposed in the midday heat, animate, sleeping. The huge cherry tree dominated the core, but the Judge recognised olives, lemons, mandariniers, shimmering in the sun. To her left was a small white summer house, governed by a mature wisteria, whose serpent trunk had reclaimed the fragile wrought-iron structure and engulfed its decorated trellis. The flowers were long over, and a drifting mat of dried petals shimmered on the floor. Whoever had planted the garden loved white blooms and strong scents. They sauntered through an archway of opulent jasmine and white roses. The jasmine blotted out every other fragrance for a moment, but once they were clear of the pergola another scent dominated the air, sweet, stifling, odd.

  ‘What’s that scent?’ asked the Judge, curious.

  ‘Datura. Don’t you have these in your garden? They do so well in the Midi.’

  The long flowers drooped in massed bunches, extended tubular blossoms, like an orchestra of trumpets at rest. Many were ivory white, but others were painted in strong colours, yellow, orange, gold. Marie-Thérèse gently lifted one of the flowers and the scent flooded upwards into their faces.

  ‘The other name is Trompette du jugement. Isn’t it strange to think of Judgement Day as colourful and beautiful? But Maman said it would be so. The painted sculptures in the church are all bubbling vats of damned naked people. I used to find them horrible and frightening.’

  So this was her mother’s garden: a quiet, overflowing paradise of drenched white scents. They approached the cliff and a small pool into which the stream dropped. Tiny ripples undulated outwards against the green rocks. The bamboo planted round the pool on the shady side had begun to proliferate out of control. The Judge noticed new shoots pushing up into the rough grass. A giant bank of arum lilies, odourless but intense, clustered on the sunny side of the pool; their leaves formed a massive green darkness against the white. The women sat down on a stone bench amidst the shadowy bamboo. The Judge removed her glasses for a moment; all that she could see was hunched masses of green and white. Marie-Thérèse leaned forwards and stirred the pool, the angel churning the waters. As she did so the Judge noticed a small golden oval on a fine chain that escaped from her dress collar. This was the moment to speak, exploding in sunlight before her. She reached out and caught the shining necklace in mid-air.

  ‘Marie-T, is that the gift your mother left for you last Christmas?’

  She had no idea what reaction to expect, but the girl smiled, undid the chain and handed the trinket to the Judge with the same ardent candour that characterised her every gesture.

  ‘Yes, it is. It opens like this. Look, here’s the catch. And that’s the last photograph I have of Maman. It was taken in November, on my seventeenth birthday. She looks so happy, don’t you think?’ The girl leaned over the open locket in the Judge’s hand
and peered at the lost, laughing face. The Judge dared not decipher the tiny inscription. ‘At first I couldn’t wear it. It was as if the thing burned my throat. I was too angry and unreasonable. But gradually I understood that I couldn’t own her. I couldn’t decide for her. Friedrich is a great help. I talk to him all the time, every day. I try to see things as he does, but I don’t always succeed. He loved her so much, as much as I do.’

  The Judge sat very still, cold all over, in the unimaginable space that had opened up before her. She had no need to win this girl’s confidence or manipulate her trust. Marie-Thérèse simply opened her heart, artless, confiding. The Judge tensed on her cold seat, shifty and culpable; for the first time in her life she doubted her own ethics of interrogation. Her interpretation of justice required her to occupy the moral high ground with irreproachable integrity at all times. This meant that there was never any room for doubt; she was the white knight with the drawn sword who galloped among the heathen dispensing light, justice and righteousness. Now she had joined the fantastical duke of dark corners, who spent his time conning gullible maidens into intimate confessions. She went on, never raising her voice.

  ‘Did you know what was going to happen?’

  ‘No, or I would have begged her not to leave us. But the people who died with her were her closest friends. Her inner circle. I knew them all well. So did Friedrich. They were always here. Visiting. We went on holidays together.’

  ‘And did you know that they were all members of the Faith?’

  The girl shuddered a little, then, twisting the golden chain in her hands, she caught the Judge’s arm and drew closer.

  ‘No, no, not exactly. Or at least I did know that they were part of – or maybe shared – something important and enormous. That’s what hurt most.’

  The tears were overflowing now.

  ‘She shut me out. I was excluded.’

  The Judge put her arm around Marie-T’s shoulders and squeezed her gently. The girl fished out a tissue from a hidden pocket in her dress and blew hard.

  ‘I’m sorry. It really is better now. I don’t mind talking about her.’

  ‘When did she give you this gift?’

  ‘Christmas Eve. At the chalet. We always have the presents with champagne before dinner on Christmas Eve.’

  She can’t drive. She doesn’t have her permis de conduire. How did she leave the chalet? And when? Why isn’t this in the dossier? How could we have overlooked this detail? According to Schweigen’s record Marie-Thérèse was never at the chalet. She was with the Composer in Berlin. And she couldn’t explain her mother’s card, abandoned in the waste-paper basket. So either Schweigen’s initial report is inaccurate; and this girl was lying then – or is she lying now? But, knowing André Schweigen as well as she did, Dominique Carpentier suddenly saw him, four months earlier, dogmatic and overbearing, bullying this frail feather of a girl, insisting that she talk about her mother’s suicidal lunacy, when the child was gazing up at him through the deep waters of a well, fathomless and cold, knowing that her mother’s corpse still lay frozen in a walled slot, labelled and suspended between death and burial. No wonder she had simply capitulated to grief. And he got nothing out of her but tears. How do I pursue her now? Don’t react. Prompt. But push gently.

  No caution was necessary; Marie-Thérèse overflowed with information. ‘We went off on Christmas Day. Maman looked radiant then. We had soup and jambon and she sat beside me. Bad weather was forecast. She insisted that we set out early.’

  ‘We?’ The Judge hardly dared to breathe.

  ‘Friedrich, of course. He took me with him. I adored his New Year concerts. I went to as many as I could. We caught the afternoon plane from Strasbourg to Berlin.’

  The Judge forced herself to relax and finger the fresh segments of bamboo. A belligerent hostility towards Schweigen spilled into her mouth. She felt her neck redden. Am I to do all my own judicial investigations from now on? Every single procès-verbal? As well as the paperwork?

  ‘So Friedrich – Monsieur Grosz – was with you for Christmas?’

  ‘Oh yes. He’s always there. Every year. He has no family of his own. We are his family.’

  Cécile. Ring me today. I beg you. Ring me as soon as you can.

  ‘We kept ringing when we saw the storm on television. They were directly in its path. That’s why we were so worried when we didn’t hear. They rang on Boxing Day to say that they were fine. Many trees down, but they still had electricity when many other people didn’t. But then – then we didn’t hear. Maman sent me a text. Bonne Année. And the lines are always saturated at New Year. But Friedrich seemed to have a presentiment that something was amiss. He kept trying. Up to the last minute he kept trying.’

  There was a long humming silence. If the Composer had known about the planned departure surely he would not have kept ringing and ringing? But if he was as close to the Faith as she believed him to be how could he not have known? The Judge could no longer construct the emotional jigsaw before her eyes. The snowy mountains of the Jura seemed far away in the past; they leered at her like apparitions from another world, already extinguished, only faintly remembered.

  ‘Marie-T, look at me. What did your mother mean when she gave you that gift? Suis-moi? Why did she say follow me?’

  The green girl seemed to rise up stronger in her mother’s garden when she turned to face her Judge. She drew a huge tight breath.

  ‘Maman? What did she mean? Ah – that I couldn’t say.’

  Her eyes were red and shining. The Judge registered at once the ambiguity of this reply. For the first time Marie-Thérèse was not being entirely frank; something was being withheld rather than concealed. And now her manner seemed prim and restrained, the good little Catholic girl, entertaining an important guest.

  ‘I’m so pleased that you saw my mother’s garden. Shall we go back to Friedrich?’

  10

  CONSEQUENCES

  There were consequences, of course. The Judge was not the only person bristling with indignation and reproaches. Gaëlle sulked all the way back to the office in breathtaking heat with a ferocity at once disconcerting, unprofessional and just. A dim cloud hung around her heavy metal ears and the Judge was forced to ask every question twice. She rang Schweigen’s mobile from the office. He pulled off the motorway, ignored her attempt to describe her private interview with Marie-Thérèse Laval, and began screaming.

  ‘I don’t understand you. You sleep with me the night before and then dismiss me as if I meant nothing to you and you don’t need me. You go on and conduct your own damned investigation. You aren’t kind, Dominique, you aren’t fair, you aren’t even rational.’

  She froze him out.

  ‘When you have remembered your manners, André, send me an e-mail. But don’t, I repeat, don’t try ringing me back.’ And she slammed down the phone. Gaëlle, who had listened in to every word, strolled off to the photocopier, whistling.

  The high cool of the office enfolded the Judge as if she were an exhibit in a cabinet, mummified and arranged in orderly calm. She sat very still. This must be Schweigen’s first and only affair with another woman; he was possessive as a husband, and as potentially unhinged. He now rang her at least twice a day; his voice clanging down the lines like a distant chorus of howls. The Judge flicked the phone into silence and began to write out a chilly factual account of her encounter with the Composer and his god-daughter, a report so bald and disengaged that the business might as well have been conducted in her office. The judicial narrative was therefore not entirely accurate. Like an old-fashioned anthropologist, lost somewhere on the Dark Continent, she wrote herself out of her research, and ceased to be a presence, influencing her own findings. The occupants of the Domaine Laval emerged as foreigners in their own land, a race observed. But in the days following this encounter, just as the holidays immersed them like a great wave, the supposed foreigners were also on the case.

  Marie-Thérèse sent her a brief, warm note, longing to see he
r again soon. The plea was formal, ardent, heartfelt, as if two currents struggled in the young girl’s heart. The Judge read them correctly: the need for secrecy and the longing to tell.

  The Composer sent her flowers.

  A purple twisted installation of orchids, with copious instructions on their needs and welfare, arrived at her home, arranged on twigs, with their roots sunk in a solution that kept them alive for all eternity. She inspected the strange, exotic shapes with curiosity and suspicion. How had he discovered her private address? Yet, after all, she had seen where he lived in Northern Germany, and perhaps the source was innocent enough – her uncle, Myriam, even her parents could have provided the information. But living flowers? Orchids, whose very shapes appeared obscene? The gesture seemed too intimate. Here she was, trying to inculpate this man, for, at the very least, non-assistance à personne en danger, or at the worst, moral corruption, fraudulent diversion of funds and being an accessory to murder. Yet he courted her with orchids. Their colour, livid and suggestive, took up residence on the kitchen table. She tried not to look at them.

  Then the second letter arrived; the second letter addressed exclusively to her.

  Dear Madame Carpentier, he wrote formally in English,

  Please forgive me for not writing to you in your language. My French, as you know, is very stiff and limited to arguing with singers and musicians. I will return to the Midi for the Avignon Festival within a week and hope very much to see you again. I realise that our initial meetings have taken place within the strange, sad context of the loss of my friends. But I do not wish this relationship to remain constrained by the legal boundaries of your investigation. I have not ceased to think of you since I saw you standing in my theatre with the tears flooding your face. I could not bear it if our connection were to cease now. I must see you again. Chère Madame, please allow me to visit you, speak to you, face to face.