Off the Wild Coast of Brittany

by Juliet Blackwell

  Their new boarder, Jean-Luc Quenneville, joined them at the door, trailing a small rolling suitcase.

  “I honestly can’t thank you enough,” he said as they walked out into the warm evening air, gentle breezes blowing in off the water. “This is jolly good.”

  Alex smiled. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard the phrase ‘jolly good’ used outside of old movies. Where did you learn English?”

  “My stepfather. He was impossibly old, and impossibly British. And where did you learn French?”

  “I didn’t,” said Alex, holding up her hands as if in surrender. “I know about two sentences. Nat’s the expert.”

  “Hardly that,” Nat said, and lit up a slim cigarette, avoiding her sister’s disapproving look. She offered one to Jean-Luc, but he declined. “But I lived for a time in Paris, in the Marais.”

  “One of my favorite neighborhoods!” said Jean-Luc. “All those crumbly ancient buildings. Just lovely.”

  “Well, if you like crumbly ancient buildings, you’re in for a treat at the Bag-Noz,” said Nat.

  They walked by a little plaza where bright overhead lights illuminated two informal teams playing a game. A dozen men and women were seated along the seawall, making teasing remarks and commenting upon the skill of the players. Children squatted and watched the progress of the ball. Three old women sat on a bench outside a house, leaning against its ocher wall.

  “I understand there’s a pétanque competition this weekend,” said Jean-Luc.

  “What’s pétanque?” asked Alex.

  “It’s sort of like bocce ball,” explained Nat. “It’s played on a dirt court, or in pretty much any available square in France.”

  “Do you play?”

  Nat shook her head. “You were the sporty one, not I.”

  They watched as a barefooted man with long white hair pitched a ball toward two others on the ground.

  “So how’s it played?” asked Alex.

  “First, you throw that white little ball,” said Jean-Luc, “called the cochonnet, which means ‘pig.’”

  “Why is it called a pig?”

  Jean-Luc looked dumbfounded, then smiled. “I have no idea. I’ve never wondered about it before! Anyway, players take turns trying to throw their balls near the cochonnet. When all the balls have been thrown, whoever is closest wins.”

  “Sounds simple enough,” Alex said.

  “Yes, the rules are very simple,” said Jean-Luc. “But there’s a lot of finesse in how to throw the ball, spinning it so it stops where it lands, that sort of thing.”

  Right then the thrower struck his opponent’s ball with his own, resulting in a loud clack and sending the other ball rolling far from the cochonnet. A raucous cheer went up from some spectators, groans from others.

  Jean-Luc explained: “And occasionally a player will try to knock the opponent’s ball out of the way, to remove it as a threat. Would you like to play? I could ask them if they’d allow you—”

  “No, thanks. Not enough light.” Alex turned and, as if on cue, stumbled over a rock that formed part of a garden border.

  Jean-Luc reached out to steady her.

  “Thanks,” Alex said tersely, and yanked her arm away from him.

  “Pardonnez-moi,” he said, tucking his offending hand in his pocket. “Reflex.”

  The tourist cafés were still packed with customers, the tchotchke shop was open despite the late hour, and more people were strolling along the seawall, enjoying the summer evening.

  As they walked past Café Brigitte, Nat raised her hand in greeting to Brigitte, who responded by shaking her head and insisting: “On a que fish et chips.”

  Only fish and chips. Ever and always.

  “I feel I should warn you again, Jean-Luc,” said Nat, “we’re nowhere near ready for guests. The bed’s not even set up, much less made. I’ll take care of that right away, of course, but it’s not too late to back out.”

  “You are doing me a great kindness by offering me a room of any sort. Silly me, thinking I could come to an island during tourist season and expect to find a vacancy.”

  “How long were you thinking of staying?” asked Alex.

  “Indefinitely,” he said, adding, “Though I don’t intend to impose upon you lovely ladies forever, of course. But I . . . I find myself at a bit of a crossroads in my life and need time to consider my options without distractions. I am thinking of possibly relocating to the island.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for a place with few distractions, this island fits the bill,” Nat said.

  “Will you be looking for a job here?” asked Alex.

  “I have taken early retirement. It is—what is the expression?—a long story. I am—I was—a fonctionnaire for many years,” said Jean-Luc.

  Nat explained: “A fonctionnaire works for the state, like a civil servant.”

  “Yes, precisely.” Jean-Luc nodded. “That’s the term in English: a civil servant. I spent nearly thirty years working in an office that issued contracts for the procurement of items needed in government-sponsored projects. It was . . . well, I don’t mind saying it was rather tedious. I spent days, weeks, months auditing line items and cost estimates, reviewing legal contracts, fielding calls from irate officials, contractors, and suppliers wondering why the approval process was taking so long.”

  “That sounds tough,” said Alex, searching for something polite to say.

  “Oh, it was,” Jean-Luc said. “You see, to them, I was an obstruction, the annoying bureaucrat who stood between them and whatever it was they wanted: a new bridge, a public park, a housing development. They did not understand that I was a part of the process, what you call in English a ‘cog.’ This is correct? I heard it in a documentary about World War Two. I was but a cog in a wheel of a vast government that counted on its many cogs to keep itself rolling along.”

  Silence followed this declaration as they passed Pouce Café, jammed with tourists. Children were still playing on the beaches, their parents watching as they built sandcastles in the dark, under a canopy of stars.

  Jean-Luc let out a long, loud sigh. “I take by your silence that I am boring you. Indeed, the more I try to explain this, to my wife, to my children, the more boring I seem to become. A self-fulfilling prophecy, no?”

  Nat and Alex shared a look. He was their guest, after all.

  “Not at all,” Nat said. “You say you have children?”

  Jean-Luc nodded. “A girl and a boy, though they’re adults now, out of college and living their own lives. They are beautiful, and smart. I do not hear from them often, which I believe must mean they’re happy.”

  “Will your wife be joining you on the island?” Alex asked.

  He shook his head. “We divorced many years ago.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “It is water under the bridge, as they say. Do the Americans say that, or is that a British bit as well?”

  “We do say it, yes,” said Alex.

  “Some of us say it a lot,” Nat concurred.

  “Our divorce was a happy enough occasion, as far as divorces go. The lawyer said he’d rarely seen a divorcing couple agree on so many things, so I suppose that was good. And now, years later, what is the phrase? I ‘bear her no ill will’? Only occasionally do I get annoyed, as when I remember a certain cigar box I unearthed in my stepfather’s garage after his passing. . . . I spent days sanding and refinishing it to a soft mahogany sheen. . . .”

  “What happened to it?” Nat asked.

  “Odile—my ex-wife—kept it. She stores her tea in it.”

  “That doesn’t seem very fair,” said Alex.

  “No, no, I suppose it doesn’t. But as I say, it was a long time ago. And I was able to get a cat when I moved out. Odile doesn’t care for animals—doesn’t like hair on the furniture.”

  “Where’s t
he cat now?” Nat asked.

  “She died. Just last week.” His voice caught and he cleared his throat. “That was one reason I felt the need to get away, to search for something new. I am quite intrigued by the history of World War Two; I have been to all the Normandy beaches and that sort of thing, and I found the story of the men from the Île de Feme fascinating. Then I remembered Odile’s sister married a man from the Île de Feme, and the next thing you know, I filed for early retirement and came here without so much as a hotel reservation.”

  “That was brave of you,” said Natalie as she paused at the iron gates in front of the Bag-Noz.

  “I daresay no one expected it of me,” said Jean-Luc, a note of wonderment in his voice. “My supervisor thought I was making a joke when I told him. I had never even contemplated such a thing before.”

  A short silence passed.

  “Well, no time like the present to jump in with both feet, right?” said Nat. “Speaking of which, here we are: home sweet home.”

  Jean-Luc gazed up at the stone building’s faded façade, which gleamed silver in the moonlight. “Oh, this is charming.”

  The iron gates screeched as they pushed them open to enter the courtyard.

  “I’ll fix that tomorrow,” Alex murmured.

  Nat led the way into the house and gave Jean-Luc a quick tour of the main floor. “The dining room is unfortunately out of service at the moment.”

  “Is this where the restaurant will be, then?” Jean-Luc asked as he poked his head in. He stopped in front of the framed newsletter article, peering at the photograph.

  “Yes,” said Nat. “Just a small capacity. Eight tables. François-Xavier is in Paris scouting for—”

  “Attends. Do you mean the François-Xavier Olivier? The chef?” interrupted Jean-Luc. “Now I know why the name sounded familiar! But he is opening a new restaurant in the dixième arrondissement, is he not?”

  “He’s . . . what?” Alex glanced at Nat. “Isn’t that a neighborhood in Paris?”

  Her little sister appeared ashen, even in the golden light of the hallway sconces. Nat stood absolutely still, like a deer in the woods sensing the presence of a hunter. “When faced with danger, there are three possible responses,” The Commander had lectured them as small children. “Fight. Flight. Or freeze. I strongly suggest the first two.” Alex and Charity had fought, and Hope and Faith had flown, but Nat had always frozen.

  “Perhaps I am mistaken,” Jean-Luc said, apparently realizing he had said the wrong thing. “I believe I must be mistaken.”

  “Nat, why don’t I show our guest up to his room since I’m up there as well?” Alex said. “You go on to bed, if you like.”

  Nat nodded, wished them a quiet bonne nuit, and walked stiffly down the hall toward the kitchen.

  Jean-Luc trailed Alex silently as they mounted the stairs to the third floor.

  “This is just lovely,” Jean-Luc said as Alex showed him the bathroom and his bedroom.

  Together they assembled the bed frame and settled the mattress on it. Then Alex left Jean-Luc to unpack while she searched the second floor for the bedsheets. Unlike the rest of the house, the linen closet was tidy, filled with stacks of neatly folded sheets and scented with lavender.

  Alex chose a pair, along with towels and a washcloth, and brought them up to the third floor.

  “I would like to apologize if I said the wrong thing earlier,” said Jean-Luc as they made up the bed. “This is not unusual for me, I am sorry to say.”

  Alex shook her head. “It’s not you, Jean-Luc. I have a feeling the situation with my sister and François-Xavier is . . . complicated. So, tell me what you know.”

  “Only that he and the celebrated restaurateur Celeste Peyroux announced a new endeavor in Paris. My ex-wife, Odile, is very fond of the restaurant scene, and the site for the new restaurant is not far from where she lives. She mentioned it when I told her I was coming to the Île de Feme, since he is from here.” Jean-Luc’s voice was low and earnest as he added: “I certainly won’t mention it to anyone. But, Alex, if this has been announced in Paris . . .”

  Alex nodded. They might be on an island, but they weren’t isolated from the world.

  It was only a matter of time before the islanders heard the news.

  * * *

  • • •

  After wishing Jean-Luc a good night, Alex went downstairs and knocked softly on Nat’s bedroom door. No response.

  She hesitated. Should she push it? Or give Nat her space? She tried once more. “Nat? Talk to me.”

  After a long moment of silence, Alex went back upstairs. She and Nat had never been especially close, but childhood habits died hard and Alex felt her protective instincts kicking in. Once, during one of their childhood rock climbing drills, Alex had scaled a large rock with ease and was waiting at the top while The Commander barked orders from the ground. Nat made it halfway up, then froze, her knuckles turning white as she clung to a fissure in the rock, unable to move. “C’mon, Nat. Give it a try,” Alex called to her. “Nowhere to go but up, Nat. You can do it. Listen to the sound of my voice, don’t look down, and climb.” But Nat couldn’t, or at least she didn’t, and so Alex climbed back down and guided her up, one tense step at a time. The Commander swore at them both from below: at Alex, for being a softy, and at Nat, for being useless.

  Alex washed up in the bathroom, then went into her bedroom, locking the door more out of habit than concern for the guest across the hall. She left the lamp on, unwilling to lose the light, shrugged off her clothes, and crawled into bed with a grateful sigh. The mattress was supremely comfortable, the sheets lusciously soft. Must have cost a fortune, Alex thought.

  There was a reading lamp by the bed, but Alex turned on her heavy Maglite with the high beam. It reminded her of how Nat used to read under the covers while pretending to be asleep.

  When they were children, Alex thought Nat was lazy, preferring an imaginary world to the hard work of real life. But when the grown-up Alex began to read for pleasure, and not just how-to manuals, she came to realize that books had been Nat’s lifeline. Reading must have offered her access to other worlds, alternative lives, ways of being that did not include the nonstop search for food or the perpetual threat of the end of the world. Alex remembered Nat showing her recipes from the cookbooks she checked out of the library. Neither of them was familiar with most of the ingredients, so the exercise seemed pointless to Alex, but it was precisely the unknown elements that made Nat’s eyes light up.

  Alex opened Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, flipped through the pages, and skimmed a few passages. One in particular struck her:

  Life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

  Alex got out of bed and gazed out the window into the darkness. The sea was a black void, but a full moon silvered a shimmering slice of the water. From down on the quay below she could hear the clacking of pétanque balls, spectators cheering and booing. The sweet coos of a night bird—or was it an owl? The squeak of a charette, its wheels rumbling as it rolled along a stone pathway.

  Woolf’s words came to her: Was Nat caught in the curled wave of life, and on the verge of being dashed upon the beach? Just as Alex was?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Natalie

  The next morning Natalie was awakened by the whine of a circular saw, and in the strange twilight of being half-awake, she thought the work crew had taken pity on her and returned to finish the job.

  She lay there for a moment, embracing the idleness, not ready to release her vivid dreams and the priceless escape they offered. Natalie listened for the other sounds typical of island life: children laughing, the slap-slap-slap of thongs on bare feet, the incessant call of the gulls.

  Her jaw ached from cle
nching it at night, from grinding her teeth. She opened wide to stretch her jaw, rubbing the sore joint.

  Above the sound of the saw she heard a woman speaking and a deferential, upbeat man’s voice in reply.

  Alex. And the new boarder . . . what was his name? Jean-something. Luc, right? Jean-Luc Quenneville.

  And then she remembered.

  After Jean-Luc’s revelation last night, Natalie had poured herself a generous portion of pastis and gone online, looking for more information.

  It wasn’t hard to find. A newspaper article about François-Xavier Olivier, photographed strolling along the Seine with a beautiful woman, both smartly dressed and reeking of Parisian sophistication. Below the image was a gossipy story about how these two “culinary legends” would be opening a “first-class” restaurant in the dixième. With a flick of her fingers Natalie had enlarged the photograph so that all she saw was her apparently ex-boyfriend’s face. Those beautiful eyes. The larger-than-life charisma that filled a room and commanded attention. That glorious smile that had once shone so brilliantly on Natalie. That sensual mouth that spouted lies: that he loved her, that the two of them would create a life together, on this island, in this community, in this house.

  Her jaw tightened; her gut fluttered. She tasted something acrid in her mouth and could not tell if it was fear or rage. Tears surged and she collapsed onto her bed, allowing the sobs to rack her body.

  She had sunk so much into this place, not just money but her self—and it hadn’t been enough, not nearly enough. She wasn’t enough and never had been, not for her family, not for François-Xavier, not for his family, not for her publisher, not for her readers. Porquoi Pas? had obviously been a fluke. She was a fraud, a one-trick pony, a one-hit wonder. Face it, Natalie, she thought bitterly. You’re pathetic.

  Her carefully curated world was coming apart. The bedrock turned to sand.

  And now what was she supposed to do, with not one but two guests sharing her not-ready-for-guests guesthouse?

  All Natalie was sure of at the moment was that she was in serious need of caffeine. Normally she would slouch out to the kitchen in the T-shirt she had slept in to make herself a mug of crappy instant coffee because anything else was too much bother. But . . . was that fresh brew she smelled?