The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  “I don’t doubt it. But why would I want to?”

  Sia sat back. “It would give you free room and board for the summer. A change of scene, which you sorely need. Time to paint, think, sort yourself out.” She smiled at me. “Look at it this way, Whittier. What have you got to lose?”

  Had it been anyone but Sia advising me to offer myself as a general factotum at a theatrical summer camp set up in a former sheep farm, I’d have handed them their head on a salver. As it was, I reminded myself that I didn’t have so many close friends that I could afford to lose one, “My dignity,” I said mildly. “My pride. A summer’s worth of work.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to work,” Sia said. “I hate to be blunt, but really, Whittier, do you have a choice?”

  That was indeed the question. I was pretty much entirely out of money. No money means no colors, no canvas, no brushes to paint with, no studio to paint in. I wrote down Peter Collingsworth’s name on a bar napkin. When I got home to Devon, I wrote him a letter inquiring whether he needed a summer bookkeeper and office manager and sent it off to La Vielle Ferme de la Source at St. Martin le Pauvre, Lot, France.

  A short time later, I received two letters. One was from Collingsworth offering me a job at La Vielle Ferme de la Source. The other was from my landlord, threatening me with eviction for non-payment of rent. As the salary Collingsworth mentioned seemed adequate and the duties reasonable, I swallowed my pride and wrote by return of post accepting his offer with gratitude.

  Thus I found myself, at the beginning of June, on the platform of the Cahors train station, where I was accosted by a short, wiry, grizzle-bearded man with dark curly hair.

  “Peter Collingsworth,” he said, energetically pumping my hand. “And you must be Desdemona Whittier. Welcome to our little family, Desdemona.”

  I winced. “Please, call me Whittier.”

  He dropped my hand as though I’d stung him. “My Christian name’s something of a trial to me,” I said apologetically. “I shed it when I went to school, and now my mother is the only person who expects me to answer to it.”

  Collingsworth smiled cautiously. “Whittier, then, by all means. Are those your traps? Splendid. You must be ravenous, but I hope you’ll last until we get home. Mme Fabre is cooking up a welcome feast—you’ve no objection to rabbit, I trust?”

  After assuring him I was completely comfortable with rabbit, I couldn’t think of another word to say. Luckily, Collingsworth seemed happy to shoulder the whole burden of conversation. In the course of the hour it took to drive from Cahors to St. Martin le Pauvre, he regaled me with accounts of Mme Fabre’s culinary genius, the excellence of her husband’s wine, his own ideas for the school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the presence on the property of a spring—“La Source” of the farm’s name—which was reputedly both haunted and sacred.

  “Of course, it’s nothing of the sort,” he said as he swerved his little green Citroen sedan around the backside of a cow calmly eating weeds with her forefeet in a ditch. “It’s very obviously man-made, with dressed stone sides and pipes and things. Ondine says there’s been a wash house there since the year dot. The structure is long gone, but we still use the basin as the camp laundry.”

  He downshifted suddenly and turned onto a tiny, unpaved lane between two sloping fields. The Citroën bounced over the rocky, rutted surface, the motor roaring in first gear as the lane plunged upward through a shady wood.

  Trees and shrubbery crowded close to the path and dragged along the sides of the car. Leafy branches overhead screened the sky and dimmed the light. In that wood there was no sense of background, only fore-and-middle ground: a wall of trunks and leaves shielding some impenetrable mystery.

  When we broke free of the trees and into the light again, I had to squint against the glare of casement windows and scarlet trumpet vines, fever-bright against the soft umber of a stone farmhouse, stolid and practical. There was an equally stolid barn across the path to its left and we drove between them, pulling up beside a courtyard flanked by the house and two more barns, all built of the same richly glowing stone.

  I clambered out of the car and looked out over the bright prospect of field and wood behind me.

  “Ah, Mlle Whittier. Bien venue to La Source!”

  I turned towards the light, silvery voice and saw Ondine Collingsworth, neé Delariviére.

  I recognized her at once, from the famous Avedon photo of her as Giselle. There was the broad forehead, the pointed chin, the thin, chiseled lips, the extraordinarily wide-set dark eyes. Her slight, strong, upright body was clothed in a practice dress made of some soft, green stuff that flowed over her dancer’s limbs like water. Had I been a portrait painter, I’d have been begging to paint her.

  A cloud passed over the sun. My eyes, no longer dazzled, noted that the line of her throat and chin was ever so slightly blurred, her complexion lightly veiled with tiny lines. Belatedly, I remembered that Ondine Collingsworth must be at least 70 years of age, if not more. She certainly did not look it.

  Ondine came closer, extending her slender hand. I was about to take it when Peter Collingsworth gathered her into his arms and began murmuring into her hair as though he’d just got home from the moon instead of Cahors.

  Above his shoulder, the moss-brown eyes met mine. She winked at me. Startled, I smiled, then turned away to extract my luggage from the Citroën’s boot.

  That night, unpacking my gear, I felt more cheerful than I’d felt in some time. I was full of excellent rabbit fricassee, fresh-picked vegetables and rough, young wine. My employers had exerted themselves to be agreeable, and I found myself inclined to like them. Ondine was a conversational butterfly, fluttering from subject to subject in charmingly accented English. Collingsworth, less voluble in his wife’s presence, encouraged her reminiscences. When he said good night, I thought how lucky they were to have found each other.

  My room had been converted from the farm’s old bread oven, with bed and desk and storage all built into the thick stone walls. Windows over the bed and desk looked out into the wood. I even had my own external door through which I could slip out if I wanted without anyone being the wiser.

  That first night, I stood on the threshold to watch the moon rise through the treetops and listen to the resonant hou-hou of an owl waking in the depths of the wood. Here was peace, I thought. Here I could paint something that really mattered.

  The next day, reality set in.

  After a breakfast of ripe apricots and yogurt, Collingsworth and Ondine ushered me into La Source’s basement office. It was a dank, dark room situated between the communal toilets on one side and the storage-and-wine cellar on the other. Someone—Ondine undoubtedly—had done what could be done with whitewash and framed watercolors, bright cushions and vases of flowers. A little clay plaque soaked with oil of lavender struggled against the pervasive odor of drains, stale wine, and mold.

  “Sorry about the mess,” Collingsworth said apologetically. “Sia left it shipshape last fall, but you know how it is. One turns one’s back, and entropy takes over.”

  I surveyed the drifts of unopened envelopes, the tottering pile of ledgers, the cancelled checks hugger-mugger across the desk. “Perhaps you need a professional bookkeeper,” I said.

  “We have an accountant,” Ondine said. “In Paris. He doesn’t like the country.”

  “Ring him by all means,” Collingsworth added. “He’ll fill you in on what needs to be done. Well. We’ll leave you to it, then, shall we?”

  I sank into the desk chair and turned on the desk lamp. Behind me, Ondine cleared her throat. “Chéri, tell her about the washing machine.”

  Her voice was heavy with meaning. Clearly, the washing machine was an uncomfortable subject. Collingsworth certainly sounded uncomfortable enough when he said, “Ah, yes. The washing machine. Ondine thinks we’re sadly behind the times, washing our linen as our ancestors did, in the clear, pure water from the earth.”

  “That’s not it at a
ll, chéri. As you very well know.”

  The words were innocuous enough, but the steel in her voice told me there was more going on here than met the eye. I waited, with interest, to see how Collingsworth would respond.

  He smoothed his beard nervously. “As you very well know,” he said, “it’s just not feasible. The effect on the ground water, the plumbing, the draw on the electrical system—we’ve been over it all a thousand times. It’s just not on, darling. I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t sound particularly sorry. In fact, he sounded smug. Which annoyed me so much that I broke my own rule about not meddling in other people’s business. “What a coincidence,” I said brightly. “My aunt just bought a new washing machine. It’s the latest thing—energy efficient, low-flow, ultra ecological. You can install it nearly anywhere, I think.”

  If I’d pulled the machine itself out of the pocket of my shorts, I couldn’t have gotten a more dramatic reaction. Collingsworth’s lips thinned to nothing and his cheeks flushed a deep and angry scarlet. Ondine, who had been looking every minute of her age, dropped thirty years in a second. She smiled, a crescent moon of pure joy. Her eyes sparkled, her cheeks glowed. She clasped her hands in front of her breast like a girl. “Quelle merveille!” she breathed. “What a marvel! Peter, do you hear?”

  “It’ll cost the earth to bring in and hook up properly,” Collingsworth grumbled. “Some German machine, I’ll be bound, finicky as an old maid, forever breaking down and needing parts that no one stocks.”

  “You don’t know that, Peter,” Ondine snapped. “You just want it to be so. Mlle Whittier will find out the truth of the matter. Will you not, Mlle Whittier?”

  Collingsworth glared at me. “You do that, Whittier, by all means. Just keep in mind that we keep this place going on a shoe string. A thickish shoe sting, but not one to take an undue strain. I’m not running the risk of losing all we’ve worked so hard to build because my wife wants a washing machine, forsooth!”

  Astonished by this sudden squall, I simply nodded. Ondine brought her hand to her mouth in the attitude of a woman betrayed. Her husband reached out to her and she bolted past him out of the office.

  “Damn and blast,” Collingsworth said ruefully. “The cat’s among the pigeons now. You should have held your tongue.”

  “I didn’t know I had to,” I said. Having no desire to be sacked my first day on the job, I tried to keep my tone neutral.

  “I’m just trying to protect her,” Collingsworth said defensively. “Research the damn thing, by all means, now you’ve got her hopes up. Just remember when you discover it can’t be done, you’re the one who will have to tell her.”

  I had intended to begin research on the washing machine question immediately. Instead, I spent the day separating bills, business letters, receipts, and checks for tuition from photographs, letters from former students, newspapers, dance and theatre magazines, old programs, masks, and notes for old productions pulled for reference from the careful files Sia had made last summer and left to compost on the desk and the floor with sprays of leaves, sun-whitened bones, curiously-shaped stones, and feathers. By evening, I’d unearthed both the telephone and the accountant’s name and phone number, and counted it a good day’s work. I hardly knew what to say to my employers at dinner, but they were so full of lesson plans and set designs for The Dream that I doubt they noticed my silence.

  The next day the students arrived—thirty artistic adolescents of both sexes and a spread of ages from 12 to 18. Classes began the following day, effectively separating me from the Collingsworths except at meals. My mornings were spent in the basement office among the receipts, bills, and bank books. I sorted, I filed, I added and subtracted. I spent hours on the phone to the accountant in Paris.

  In the afternoons, I sat in my bread oven retreat, listening to Ondine teaching ballet in the barn next door.

  She was indeed a brilliant teacher, if not a kind one. She teased, she ridiculed, she exhorted, she goaded. Girls were always running into the bathroom that faced my door in floods of tears, bathing their faces, and emerging, scarlet-eyed, to try again. Sometimes I crept up to what had once been the hayloft and looked down on them bending and tossing and unfolding their slender bodies in solemn unison while Ondine wove among them, tapping here a wrist, there an outflung foot or knee into an attitude of greater grace, greater strength, greater fluidity. What she was looking for, I realized, was a kind of controlled abandon, and she was not, on the whole, finding it.

  Neither was I.

  Midsummer in the Lot means enough light to paint by until nearly midnight. I set up my easel outside my private woodland door and tried to capture my impressions of La Vielle Ferme de la Source in paint. I had a composition in mind: a still, bright center (that was Ondine), embraced, upheld, perhaps confined by something darker, more active (that was Collingsworth), surrounded by a series of shapes, colors, movements that both were and were not the trees, the fields, the students, M. and Mme Fabre and all the glorious rest of it.

  And once a week, on Saturday mornings, I stripped my bed, bundled my towels and dirty clothes into a pillowcase, and hauled it down to Ondine’s spring for washing.

  The first week, Collingsworth mustered the whole camp in the courtyard and led us in procession to the spring. We’d never have found it on our own. The path looked no different from any of the other paths that snaked through La Source’s little patch of woodland. Clutching my pillowcase, I picked a rather unsteady way around rocks and over moss-slick roots and fallen branches nobody’d bothered to clear away. The artistic adolescents crashed through the undergrowth until we came to a rocky bottleneck, through which we squeezed single-file, emerging into a park-like glade studded with trees. Off to one side was a grassy bank topped with trees and ferns and thorny bushes, studded with the mossy ruins of a stone building: La Source de La Vielle Ferme.

  I can’t say I thought it particularly beautiful or haunted. The fountain itself was a hole, perhaps three metres square, flanked by two semi-circular pipes through which clear water trickled into a small square basin. A notch in the rim fed the long pond where we were to wash our clothes. The water was murky and spotted with vivid green duckweed.

  Collingsworth demonstrated how to pound the soap into the cloth, rinse it in the pond, then wring out the sopping, clinging sheets in pairs. He helped me wring my sheets, and I helped him wring his. There was laughing and splashing and semi-accidental dunkings. Ondine was not present.

  That evening, I dug out my sketching block and drew La Source, minus the screaming adolescents and the laundry. Then, as if compelled, I drew the view from the window over the desk and the lavender bush planted by the back door. From then on, I divided my free time between my abstract oil—my real work—and sketching. Telling myself that it couldn’t hurt for me to keep my hand in, I sketched everything: the students hanging sheets in the drying yard or practicing combinations in front of the flyblown mirror in the barn; Ondine teaching, presiding over dinner in the long barn, sewing straightbacked on the veranda, ignoring her husband, who sat beside her in a deck chair and watched her with hungry eyes.

  I both loved and hated these sketches of Ondine. On the one hand, I thought they caught something of her grace, her mischief, her calm, even (taken in series) her trick of looking old as the hills one moment and young as a flower in bud the next. On the other hand, they were useless. They were old-fashioned, sentimental. They weren’t art. And yet I couldn’t stop making them.

  And every morning, I doggedly continued to organize the office, research washing machines, and exercise my A-level French on every appliance dealer, electrician, and plumber within a 100 kilometer radius of St. Martin le Pauvre. When I’d amassed a collection of brochures, estimates, and proposals, I put them together with the balance sheet I’d prepared, plus an article or two on the ecological benefits of a properly-drained low-flow washing machine, and presented the whole to the Collingsworths one evening after dinner.

  “But this is wonderful!
” Ondine exclaimed, turning over the glossy pages of one brochure. “So beautiful and so economical! You will order one immediately.”

  Collingsworth snorted. “You will do no such thing, Whittier. Things are just hotting up with the Dream. I don’t want the kiddies any more distracted than they already are.”

  “It will not be a distraction, chéri.” Ondine’s voice was pure seduction. “See here, where M. le Plombier estimates two days of work only, to set everything in place.”

  “Two days!” Collingsworth laughed. “Add a week and 100 euros at least, and you’d be nearer the mark.” He turned a ferrety gaze on me. “You seem like a sensible sort, Whittier. Surely you know these estimates are fairy tales?”

  I protested. Ondine coaxed, then sulked. Collingsworth would not be moved. At the end of a solid hour of fruitless discussion, he picked up his empty glass and rose. “We’ve scheduled the readings for Titania/Hyppolita tonight, my dear,” he said. “Doesn’t do to keep the kiddies waiting. Bad for discipline.”

  For a moment, I thought she’d tell him where he could put his discipline, and perhaps the play as well—she certainly looked angry enough, all flushed and bright and stiff-backed. But she simply folded her lips tight and swept past him.

  The lines of battle were drawn.

  As A Midsummer Night’s Dream was cast and rehearsals began, the young actors had ample opportunity to observe the disturbance that permeates a kingdom when its rulers are at daggers drawn.

  Nobody knew what the fight was about, exactly, but they took sides anyway. The dancers supported her; the actors supported him. The students in charge of lights and tech called a plague on both their houses and showed disturbing signs of making up to me. It was all profoundly uncomfortable.