CHAPTER 14
PARIS
Meredith reached the top of the stairs, drew back the beaded curtain and opened the bright blue door straight ahead.
The lobby inside was tiny, so confined that she could touch the walls without even stretching out. To her left was a bright chart of the signs of the zodiac, a swirl of colour and pattern and symbols, most of which Meredith didn’t recognise. On the wall to her right hung an old-fashioned mirror with an ornate gilt frame. She checked out her reflection, then turned away and tapped on the second door straight ahead.
‘Hello? Anybody here?’
There was no answer.
Meredith waited a moment, then knocked again, a little louder this time.
Still nothing. She tried the handle. The door opened.
‘Hi?’ she said, stepping inside. ‘Anyone home? Hello?’
The room was small, but full of life. The walls were painted in more bright colours, like a day-care centre – yellow, red, green, with patterns of lines, stripes, triangles and zigzags in purple, blue, silver. A single window, right opposite the door, was covered by a curtain of transparent lilac gauze. Through it, Meredith could see the pale stone walls of the nineteenth-century building behind, with its black wrought-iron balustrade and long shuttered doors, cheered up by boxes of geraniums and tumbling purple and orange pansies.
The only pieces of furniture in the room were a small square wooden table right in the centre, the legs visible beneath a black and white linen cloth covered with circles and more astrological symbols, and two straight-backed wooden chairs either side. They had woven seats, like in the painting by Van Gogh, she thought.
Meredith heard a door slam someplace else in the building, then footsteps. She could feel herself colouring up. She felt embarrassed to be standing there, uninvited, and was about to go when a woman appeared from behind a bamboo screen on the far side of the room.
In her mid-forties, attractive, she was dressed in a fitted shirt and khaki pants, with expensively cut shoulder-length brown hair flecked with grey and an easy smile, not at all how Meredith imagined a Tarot reader to look. No hoop earrings, no headscarf.
‘I did knock,’ Meredith said awkwardly. ‘No one answered, so I came right on in. I hope that was OK.’
The woman smiled. ‘That’s fine.’
‘You’re English?’
She smiled. ‘Guilty as charged. I hope you haven’t been waiting long?’
Meredith shook her head. ‘A couple of minutes.’
The woman held out her hand. ‘I’m Laura.’
They shook. ‘Meredith.’
Laura pulled out a chair and gestured. ‘Take a seat.’
Meredith hesitated.
‘It’s natural to feel nervous,’ said Laura. ‘Most people do their first time.’
Meredith pulled the brochure from her pocket and put it down on the table.
‘It’s not that, it’s just – a girl gave me a flyer in the street a couple of days back. Since I was passing . . .’ She tailed off again. ‘It’s kind of for research. I don’t want to waste your time.’
Laura took the flyer, then recognition passed across her face. ‘My daughter mentioned you.’
Meredith’s eyes sharpened. ‘She did?’
‘The resemblance,’ Laura said, looking down at the figure of La Justice. ‘She said you were the spitting image.’
She paused, as if expecting Meredith to say something. When she didn’t, Laura sat down at the table. ‘Do you live in Paris?’ she asked, gesturing to the chair opposite her.
‘Just visiting.’
Without quite intending to, Meredith found herself sitting down.
Laura smiled. ‘Was I right in thinking this is the first time you’ve had a reading?’
‘Yes,’ Meredith replied, still perching on the edge of the seat.
Clear message – I’m not intending to stick around.
‘Right,’ said Laura. ‘Assuming you’ve read the flyer, you know that a half-hour session is thirty euros; fifty for a full hour?’
‘A half-hour will do fine,’ said Meredith.
Her mouth was suddenly dry. Laura was looking at her, really looking at her, like she was trying to read every line, every nuance, every shadow of her face.
‘Right you are, although I have no one after you, so if you change your mind we can always carry on. Is there some particular issue you’d like to explore, or is it just a general interest?’
‘Like I said, it’s research. I’m working on a biography. In this street, actually right here, there was a famous bookstore that comes up a lot. The coincidence, I suppose you could say, rather appealed to me.’ She smiled, trying to relax herself. ‘Although your – your daughter, was it?’ – Laura nodded – ‘said there was no such thing as coincidence.’
Laura smiled. ‘I understand. You’re hoping to find some sort of echo of the past.’
‘That’s it,’ Meredith said, with a sigh of relief.
Laura nodded. ‘OK. Some clients have a preference for a certain type of reading. They have a particular issue they want to explore – could be work, a relationship, a major decision to make, anything really. Others are after something more general.’
‘General is good.’
Laura smiled. ‘Right. The next decision is the deck you would like to use.’
Meredith pulled an apologetic face. ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t know anything about it. I’m happy for you to choose for me.’
Laura gestured to a row of different decks of cards, all face down, set along the side of the table. ‘I appreciate it’s confusing to start with, but it’s better if you choose. Just see if you like the feel of any of them in particular, OK?’
Meredith shrugged. ‘Sure.’
Laura picked up the deck closest to her and fanned the cards across the table. They had royal blue backs with long-tailed golden stars on them.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Meredith said.
‘That’s the Universal Waite Tarot, a very popular deck.’
The next pack had a simple white and red repeat pattern on the back. ‘This one is, in many ways, the classic deck,’ Laura said. ‘It’s called the Marseille Tarot. It dates from the sixteenth century. It’s a deck I occasionally use, although truthfully it’s a little plain for contemporary tastes. Most querents prefer modern packs.’
Meredith raised her eyebrows. ‘Excuse me, querent?’
‘Sorry,’ Laura grinned. ‘The querent is the person having the reading, the person asking the questions.’
‘Right.’
Meredith looked along the line and then pointed to a deck that was a little smaller than the rest. The cards had beautiful deep green backs with filigree lines of gold and silver.
‘What’s this one?’
Laura smiled. ‘That’s the Bousquet Tarot.’
‘Bousquet?’ Meredith repeated. A memory snaked across her mind. She was sure she’d run up against that name someplace. ‘Is that the name of the artist?’
Laura shook her head. ‘No, the name of the original publisher of the deck. No one knows the artist or who commissioned the cards in the first place. Pretty much all we know is that it originates from south-west France towards the very end of the 1890s.’
Meredith felt a prickling on the back of her neck.
‘Where, precisely, in the south-west?’
‘I can’t recall exactly. Somewhere in the Carcassonne area, I think.’
‘I know of it,’ Meredith replied, picturing the map of the region in her mind. Rennes-les-Bains was right in the middle.
She suddenly became aware that Laura was looking at her with sharpened interest.
‘Is there something . . . ?’
‘No, it’s nothing,’ Meredith said quickly. ‘I thought the name was familiar, that’s all.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry, I interrupted. ’
‘I was just going to say that the original deck of cards – or at least some of it – is much older. We can’t be sure how authentic all the images actually are, since the major arcana have characteristics that suggest they were added – or at least modified – later. The designs, and the clothes of the characters on certain of the cards are contemporaneous with fin de siècle styles, whereas the minor arcana are more classical.’
Meredith raised her eyebrows. ‘Major arcana, minor arcana?’ She smiled. ‘I’m sorry, but I really know nothing about this. Can I ask a couple of questions before we go any further?’
Laura laughed. ‘Of course.’
‘OK, very basic to start. How many cards are there?’
‘With a couple of minor contemporary exceptions, there are seventy-eight cards in a standard Tarot pack, divided into the major and the minor arcana – arcana is the Latin word for “secrets”. The major arcana, twenty-two cards in all, are numbered one to twenty-one – the Fool being unnumbered – and are unique to the Tarot deck. Each has an allegorical picture and a set of clear narrative meanings.’
Meredith glanced at the picture of La Justice on the brochure.
‘Like this, for example.’
‘Absolutely. The remaining fifty-six cards, the minor arcana – pip cards as they’re sometimes known – are divided into four suits and resemble ordinary playing cards, except that they have an extra court card. So in a standard Tarot deck we have King, Queen, Knight, then the additional card – the Page – before ten. Different decks give the suits different names – pentacles or coins, cups, wands or batons, and swords. Broadly speaking, they correspond to the suits of standard playing cards of diamonds, hearts, clubs and spades.’
‘Right.’
‘Most experts agree that the earliest Tarot cards, those that resemble the decks we have today, date from northern Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century. The modern Tarot revival, however, began in the early years of the last century, when an English occultist, Arthur Edward Waite, produced a new deck. His key innovation was to give, for the first time, an individual and symbolic scene to each of the seventy-eight cards. Before that, the pip cards had only numbers.’
‘What about the Bousquet deck?’
‘The court cards in each of the four suits are illustrated. The style of painting suggests they date from the late sixteenth century. Certainly pre-Waite. But the major arcana are different. As I said, the clothing of the characters is definitely 1890s European.’
‘How come?’
‘The general consensus is that the publisher – Bousquet – didn’t have a full set of cards to work from, so either had the major arcana painted or else copied them in the style and character of the extant cards.’
‘Copied them from what?’
Laura shrugged. ‘From fragments of surviving cards, or possibly from illustrations of the original deck in a book. Like I said, I’m not an expert.’
Meredith looked back down at the green-backed cards shot through with gold and silver. ‘Someone did a good job.’
Laura made a fan of the suit of pentacles, facing Meredith on the table, starting from the ace at the beginning to the king at the end. Then she dealt a few cards from the major arcana at the head of the deck.
‘See the difference between the two styles?’
Meredith nodded. ‘Sure, although they’re pretty similar, the colours in particular.’
Laura tapped one of the cards. ‘Here’s another unique modification in the Bousquet Tarot. As well as the names of the court cards having been changed – Maître and Maîtresse, for example, instead of King and Queen – there are personal touches in some of the major arcana too. This one, for example, card II, is usually called the High Priestess. Here, she has the title La Prêtresse. The same figure appears here in card VI too as one of the lovers – Les Amoureux. Also, if you look on card XV, Le Diable, it is the same woman again chained at the demon’s feet.’
‘And that’s unusual?’
‘Many packs link cards VI and XV, but not usually II as well.’
‘So some person,’ said Meredith slowly, thinking aloud, ‘either independently or on instruction, went to a lot of trouble to personalise these cards.’
Laura nodded. ‘In fact, I’ve sometimes wondered if the major arcana of this deck might actually be based on real people. The expressions on some of the faces seem so vivid.’
Meredith glanced down at the image of La Justice on the front of the brochure.
Her face is my face.
She looked across the table at Laura, on impulse suddenly wanting to say something about the personal quest that had brought her to France. To tell her that in a matter of hours, she was heading for Rennes-les-Bains. But Laura started speaking again and the moment was lost.
‘The Bousquet Tarot also respects traditional associations. For example, swords is the suit of air, representing intelligence and intellect, wands is the suit of fire, energy and conflict, cups is the suit associated with water and the emotions. Finally pentacles’ – she tapped the card of the king sitting on his throne surrounded by what looked like gold coins – ‘is the suit of earth, of physical reality, of treasure. ’
Meredith scanned the images, concentrating hard as if committing each to memory, then nodded to let Laura know she was done.
Laura cleared the table, leaving only the major arcana, which she dealt into three rows of seven cards facing Meredith, lowest number to highest. Le Mat, card 0, the unnumbered Fool, she placed alone at the top.
‘I like to see the major arcana in terms of a journey,’ Laura said. ‘They are the imponderables, the big issues of life that cannot be changed or fought against. Laid out like this, it’s clear how these three rows represent the three different levels of development – the conscious, the unconscious and the higher consciousness.’
Meredith felt her sceptical gene kick in.
This is where the facts run out.
‘At the start of each row is a powerful image: Le Pagad, the Magician, at the beginning of the first row. La Force at the beginning of the second. Finally, at the head of the bottom row, we have card XV, Le Diable.’
Something stirred in Meredith’s mind as she looked at the image of the twisted demon. She glanced at the faces of the man and woman chained at the devil’s feet with a spark of recognition. Then it faded.
‘The advantage of laying the major arcana out like this is that it not only shows the journey of the fool – Le Mat – from ignorance to enlightenment, but it also makes explicit the vertical connections between the cards,’ Laura continued. ‘So, you can see how Strength is the octave of the Magician, and the Devil is the octave of Strength. Other patterns also leap out: both the Magician and Strength have the infinity sign above their heads. Also, the Devil is raising his arm in a gesture reminiscent of the Magician.’
‘Like two sides of the same person.’
‘Could be,’ Laura nodded. ‘Tarot is all about the patterns, about the relationships between one card and another.’
Meredith was only half listening. Something Laura had just said bugged her. She thought a moment, before she got it.
Octaves.
‘Do you usually explain these principles in terms of music?’ she asked.
‘Sometimes,’ Laura replied. ‘It depends on the querent. There are lots of ways to explain how Tarot can be interpreted; music is just one of them. Why do you ask?’
Meredith shrugged it off. ‘Because it’s my area of work. I guess I was just wondering if you had somehow picked up on that.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t remember mentioning anything about it, that’s all.’
Laura gave a slight smile. ‘Does the idea bother you?’
‘What, that you somehow picked it up, no,’ she lied. Meredith didn’t like the way it was making her feel. Her heart was telling her she might learn something about herself, about who she really was. So she wanted Laura to get things right. At the same time, her head was telling her it was all nonsense.
Meredith pointed to La Justice. ‘There are musical notes around the hem of her skirt. Weird, huh?’
Laura smiled. ‘Like my daughter said, there’s no such thing as coincidence.’
Meredith laughed, although she didn’t think it was funny.
‘All systems of divination, like music itself, work through patterns,’ Laura continued. ‘If you’re interested, there was an American cartomancer, Paul Foster Case, who came up with a whole theory linking particulars of the major arcana to individual notes of the musical scale.’
‘Maybe I’ll check that out,’ Meredith said.
Laura gathered up the cards and tidied the deck. She held Meredith’s gaze, and for one clear, sharp moment, Meredith was certain she was seeing right into her soul; seeing all the anxiety, the doubt – the hope too – reflected in her eyes.
‘Shall we make a start?’ Laura said.
Even though she knew it was coming, Meredith’s heart lurched.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Why not?’