We asked them what they missed most about England. Cheddar cheese, they said, and bacon, and cream that isn’t sour, at which point my wife — who, forewarned, had a quantity of cheddar still in the deep-freeze — invited them to dinner. They were an odd-looking pair, younger than us and a trifle “New Age“: he tall, spare, and bearded, she with long braided auburn hair and voluminous skirts. I suspected we would have little in common other than language.
Le Coisel is a haven for a writer. There is nothing exceptional about the house itself. It is typical of the area — large, sturdy, built of the local stone beneath a steeply pitched slate roof, although it does have a rather ornate central dormer of carved stone which gives it an air of rural grandeur. It was the situation rather than the house that we fell in love with.
One thinks of Normandy as a vast tract of horizontal dullness, and indeed much of it is, but the area of southern Calvados known as the Bocage is more engaging, with gently rolling hills and lush valleys, a rich farming land not unlike the Gloucestershire countryside where I grew up. Le Coisel is situated where Bocage and Bessin meet, not far from...
But forgive me if I do not reveal its exact location. I bought it for peace and seclusion and have no wish to be overrun by people deeming to satisfy a morbid curiosity. Suffice it to say, Le Coisel faces south along a wood-enclosed valley from which no human habitation can be seen, and through which runs the gentle Ruisseau de la Vierge on its way to meet the Drome.
It was summer when we first saw it, one of those glorious hot weeks in July. The sun had turned the car into a furnace, so the tree-shaded track offered a welcome relief. Before even entering the house we walked down to the stream and stood in quiet contemplation amongst a carpet of bog iris, their yellow heads thigh-high, holding out our bare arms to let damsel flies in iridescent blues and greens alight upon our hands, whilst at our feet the water burbled and the hot air pulsated with the songs of birds. Paradise. The pressures of London seemed as remote as Mars and we did not need to speak to know we would buy it.
The house itself, shuttered and unlived in for many years, felt like a tomb when Gabrielle finally turned the great iron key and creaked open the door, but both Stella and I immediately recognised its potential. Massive fireplaces, beams the size of buttresses, exquisite floors of handmade hexagonal pave were enough to make an interior designer swoon. It had suffered from its period of abandonment, but only through damp. In England, it would have been vandalised. The whole came with five hectares of land, which included the valley and the surrounding woodlands.
In truth, I would have preferred something farther south, where the weather is hotter and summer more reliable, but my wife, a keen gardener, preferred more northern climes. That’s where she was that morning, at a garden near Bayeux, conducting her research. She had just received the go-ahead from her publisher for a second coffee-table tome with the provisional title The Gardens of Northern France.
She returned in late afternoon, cold and exhausted (there are no damsel flies in March!), and huddled beside the woodburner to thaw, whilst I, still an Englishman at heart, made a pot of tea. Had I remembered to ask Gabrielle about Friday, she wanted to know, and I told of the strange refusal.
“Haunted?” said Stella. “Le Coisel?”
“Has she not said anything to you?”
“Nothing. Not a word.” She thought for a moment. “Did she say what form the haunting takes?”
I shook my head. “I thought you might ask her. You’ll have more chance of understanding what she says.”
She nodded. “I’ll ask on Saturday. Assuming I’m still able.”
I raised my eyebrows and she laughed. “If we haven’t been scared to death the previous evening.”
A cold draught seeped under the door and I moved closer to the stove.
There was a frost that night. The valley next morning was powdered with a fine white dust and icicles hung in sabre-toothed clusters along the banks of the stream. I put on my thickest jacket and went out for a walk. Thursday was not one of Gabrielle’s mornings and Stella was already in her study typing up the previous day’s notes.
I let myself out the back door and walked briskly, feet crunching, my breath wafting in clouds before my face. I went first through the orchard, where cider-apple trees sagged beneath huge balls of mistletoe, and from there up into the woods. I love the woods of Le Coisel. They are old as time, deciduous, suffocated by undergrowth so dense that in summer they are impenetrable to all but the creatures that inhabit them. But they fill me with a strange sense of pride. I can only attribute such feelings to the “lord of all he surveys” syndrome and confess it has taken me by surprise. How well, I wonder, do any of us truly know ourselves?
But I digress. In the winter months, when the undergrowth had died down, I was able to forge my way in and from then on walked there most days, regardless of weather — alone, mostly: Stella was usually too busy — and it was on one of these early forays that I discovered the etang. To be precise, I almost fell into it. As is usually the case on my walks, my mind was elsewhere, and although I was vaguely aware of a clearing ahead of me I had no reason to suspect it contained water. Only by grabbing a young ash branch was I able to prevent what could have been, in such temperatures, a fatal accident.
The pond was twenty meters across, dark and still, its surface broken only by rotting leaves and the occasional drip of water from the rock face rising some thirty feet above it. The slow drip-dripping was the only sound, and echoed around the clearing like a death knell. I stood at the lowest part of the rim, where the water was no more than a foot below me, and leaned forward. My reflection stared up at me, the decomposing body of a shrew hovering at my right ear. I gave a cry and leapt backwards, then turned and hurried away. The clearing smelt of rotting wood, humus, and death, and I had no wish to linger.
Later I told Stella of my find.
“Is it natural or man-made?” she asked.
“I’ve no idea. It could be an old quarry.”
“Deep?”
“Probably.”
She resumed her typing.
“Don’t you want to see it?”
“Haven’t time,” she said, fingers flying over the keys, so I went out and closed the door. I’d hoped she would be excited.
The pond had a name, I learned later from Gabrielle. The locals called it l’Etang du Diable. When I asked why, she was unable — or unwilling — to enlighten me, though eventually, with much apologetic gesturing, she admitted that it is by this ominous name that Le Coisel itself is known. It seems I wallow daily in the Devil’s Pond.
On the morning of the dinner party no water dripped into the l’Etang du Diable. Instead, swords of ice stabbed downwards from the rock face, aiming their points at the frozen skin on its surface. It looked magnificent — the pool of the mountain king; the Snow Queen’s bathtub. I walked to the edge, obliterating with my hefty footprints the delicate tracery of birds’ feet feathering the frost, but did not bother to lean forward. Ice gives back no reflection.