The Little French Bistro

by Nina George

  On the far bank of the Aven, the left bank, was another tiny port with a short quay, squat fishing boats and a bar with a green awning.

  There was no one in sight. The only sounds were the gurgling kisses of tide and current, the irregular slap of steel cables on masts, and a woman’s quiet weeping. That woman was Marianne, and she was weeping, unable to avert her eyes, because the view of Kerdruc spread out before her was so unbearably beautiful. Every place she had visited in the previous sixty years suddenly paled in comparison.

  The feeling of having come home grew ever stronger. She smelled salt and fresh water, the air was as clear as glass, and a gleaming carpet of gold-and-blue silk lay over the river. The radiance of this beautiful scene shed a cruel light on every past horror, every insult tolerated, every unspoken retort, every gesture of rejection. Marianne was grieving, and her boundless grief made her regret every moment of cowardice in her life.

  A cat jumped out of a tree and sat down behind her. When the sobs shaking her body still did not abate, the cat got up, paced around, sat down opposite her and stared.

  “What?” cried Marianne, wiping the tears from her face.

  The cat took three steps toward her and butted her hand with its head. It rubbed itself vigorously against her palm and purred deeply and raspingly; Marianne tickled the cat under its chin.

  The shadows of the trees and the houses grew longer, and the silky water glowed ever brighter as Kerdruc sank into darkness.

  Marianne made a quick mental calculation of how much money she had left. It might be enough to take a taxi to the coast, or for a meal and a drink, but it was not enough for a room. She breathed out heavily; it had been a long day.

  There was a sudden clap of thunder. The startled cat twisted out of her hands and bounded away. Soon the first needles of rain began to darken the black asphalt. The steel cables slapped louder and louder, and the water became gray and unsettled as rain speckled the waves with foam. The boats by the quayside huddled together like shivering sheep. A cabin door rattled and slammed in the wind.

  Marianne ran to the harbormaster’s office and tugged at the door. It was locked. She dashed over to the restaurant. Locked. She banged hard on it. The rain was now coming from below too; the raindrops were hitting the ground so hard that they rebounded from it. Water was running down the back of Marianne’s neck and into her sleeves, and it was soaking her shoes. She held her coat over her head and raced back along the quayside.

  The cat galloped toward the jetty. It looked as if it was about to jump into the river, and Marianne set off after it in a flash. “Don’t do it!” she called in horror as it gathered itself to leap, and landed in the last boat moored to the jetty. Marianne managed to clamber after it over the rocking gunwale. She slipped on the wet floor, grabbed hold of the door and squeezed through into the cabin and down the steps, slamming the door behind her.

  Immediately the sound of the rain was reduced to a trickle, and from beneath the hull came a groaning and a murmuring.

  The cat was sitting on the bunk. Marianne began to peel off her sodden clothing. She washed her clothes in the cabin’s tiny bathroom, which had both a shower and a toilet. Then she wrapped herself in a blanket beside the cat and drew the curtains. She curled up to get warm, and the cat crawled into the hollow between her arms and purred into her throat. The rocking and swaying of the boat, the patter of the rain and the darkened bunk calmed her nerves. I’ll rest for a bit, thought Marianne. Just a bit.

  —

  She dreamed of the Carnac stones of Brittany. Every stone bore Lothar’s astonished features. Only Marianne could set him free, and she searched long and hard for the most beautiful Lothar stone before deciding that she would rather fly away in an oyster shell. The oyster was warm, and she sailed over the clouds. The sea below was green, and tiny lights flickered on the waves.

  It was to light that Marianne awoke, and it took her a moment to figure out where she was. The bright daylight glittering through the porthole told her that she had slept for longer than she had intended. She wound the blanket tight around her naked body, cautiously opened the cabin door—and stepped into a dream.

  She was alone on a small white boat, all around her only water.

  A sudden cry startled her. About sixty feet from the boat, a man was swimming in the waves—a man with white hair, a mustache and large black eyes.

  Marianne waved her arms for a few seconds, desperately trying to keep her balance, but ended up toppling overboard with a gasp. She sank below the surface like a rock. As the first gulp of water ran down her throat, she opened her eyes wide.

  No! No!

  She kicked out, and the knotted blanket came loose from her body and floated away. With a final effort she thrust herself out of the water and sucked air deep into her lungs.

  “Help,” she whimpered as a salty wave choked her cry.

  “Madame!” the man called. She struck out in panic toward him and caught him in a sensitive spot. He yelped and went under.

  “Sorry,” yapped Marianne, groping for the boat ladder. The man surfaced again beside her. Marianne clambered up the ladder, hiding her nakedness with both hands in shame, then ran into the cabin and locked herself inside.

  —

  Simon couldn’t work out what was going on. A woman on his boat? A naked woman? He continued to tread water.

  “Hello,” he said. “Are you still there? I’m going to count to ten before I come up. If you’re still not decent by then…well, I’m almost seventy and I need glasses, so you’ve nothing to fear.”

  He decided that he must still be drunk. He’d taken his boat out this morning without checking the cabin. He was longing for some strong coffee with a shot of Calva in it. There was no better way to get over a hangover than to carry on the next morning with the drink you’d left off the previous evening. He thought of the mysterious woman. Her eyes could knock a man dead—bright eyes the color of the fresh green buds of an apple tree in spring. The girl wasn’t exactly young, but somehow she was still a girl. That shocked look on her face!

  The elderly fisherman let the swell carry him rather than trying to swim against it. The water was cold—fourteen or fifteen degrees Celsius—but he spread his limbs and allowed the coldness to flow through him.

  Better. Much better.

  He climbed resolutely up the ladder, quickly pulled on his trousers, slipped his faded blue shirt over his tanned torso and expertly weighed anchor.

  —

  Marianne watched him through the porthole. She hadn’t understood a word of what the white-haired man had shouted from the water. His speech was full of guttural sounds in a language she’d never heard before. It must have been Breton.

  She felt the hum of the boat’s engine beneath her feet. What would he do next? She was trembling as she put her clothes on. She picked up her bag with one hand and a bread knife with the other, and opened the cabin door.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster.

  Simon ignored her until they were out of the channel where tankers plied to and fro. When his boat had reached the usual spot, which afforded a view of the whole Glénan archipelago, he throttled back the engine and studied the strange woman. He chuckled at the sight of the comical little knife as he unscrewed his thermos flask, poured coffee and Calvados into a cup and handed it to her.

  “Thank you,” said Marianne, bucking up as she took a long swig. She hadn’t reckoned with the alcohol and began to splutter.

  “Petra zo ganeoc’h?” Simon tried again. “What do you need?”

  “I’m German,” Marianne explained with a stutter and slight hiccups. “And…my name’s Marianne.”

  He pressed her hand briefly. “I’m from Brittany. The name’s Simon.” He started the engine again.

  Good thing they’d sorted that out, he thought with a sigh of relief. He was from Brittany, she was from Germany—un point, c’est tout.

  Marianne gazed out over the choppy water
s around the boat. Black and turquoise, light green and navy blue. Clara was right: if you screwed up your eyes, everything was the same. For Clara it was heaven and earth; for Marianne it was where the sky met the water at the horizon, and the land toward which they were heading at increasing speed.

  Down there, she thought. That’s where I wanted to be. Why didn’t I do it? Was I not cowardly enough? Or not brave enough?

  She was confused by herself. She glanced at Simon. Her face was a picture of anxiety and doubt.

  The fisherman wondered what this woman was afraid of. She was on constant alert, as if she were expecting a blow, yet at the same time she was drinking in her wide surroundings with thirsty eyes. It’s all right, girl. No need to be scared of me. Simon liked people who loved the sea as much as he did. He had often gone out on one of the Concarneau trawlers that went hunting for ray and cod in the North Atlantic around Iceland and Newfoundland. That took some coping with—nothing but water and sky for weeks on end.

  He thought of Colette. She was one of the few attractions of dry land. He had stolen some flowers for the Pont-Aven gallery owner’s birthday and would go to Ar Mor to present them to her later—after, that was, he had dropped this spirit off. Who knows, this woman who had turned up on his Gwen II might be a wandering soul on its way to Avalon. Women: they were so damned complicated. As unpredictable as the sea.

  He remembered what his father had said when Simon complained about the wild, unruly sea: “Learn to love it, son. Learn to love what you do, whatever it is, and you won’t have any problems. You’ll suffer, but then you’ll feel, and when you feel, you’re alive. You need troubles to be alive—otherwise you’re dead!”

  The trouble in the dress before him was staring out at the water. Simon recognized the yearning in Marianne’s ardent gaze, full of wanderlust. He beckoned to her. She hesitantly got to her feet, and he guided her to the wheel, stood behind her and gently helped her to steer. They had left the mouth of the river Aven behind, and Kerdruc harbor was heaving into view.

  Paul drove into Kerdruc. It was always best to sober up and let the wind and the sun wring the night from his body. His old friend Simon had left coffee, milk and pancakes on the kitchen table that morning, along with a bottle of Père Magloire Calvados. One of the chickens had jumped up onto the table and was observing its egg. Despite a quick nap on Simon’s couch, Paul felt as if he’d been dragged through a hedge backward. Maybe he could convince Simon to let him help out in the farm shop. After Simon had stopped going out to sea to work, he had converted his fisherman’s cottage in Kerbuan into a mini-market and now lived with his chickens in the kitchen.

  He sold all kinds of stuff to gullible tourists. Ice honey, for example: collected by frost-resistant bees from flowers that grew in glaciated valleys in the Pyrenees. Oh yes. The tourists didn’t need to know that it was just tangy buckwheat honey. Then there was Simon’s scam with the menhir seeds—a paper sachet, emblazoned with a drawing of the fields of megalith stones in Carnac, containing a few crumbs of granite that had trickled from a crack in the outside wall of his house. “Menhirs grow very slowly for the first few hundred years,” Simon would explain to his deferential patrons. It would help if they used some good old Celtic soil from Brittany as fertilizer—which meant he could sell them a handful of dirt from his garden to go with the bits of stone.

  But the best thing about Simon’s little store was that there were so many women in summer, and they found everything “nice” and “sweet.” They wore short dresses and dreamed of catching a Breton fisherman and having their very own Lady Chatterley’s Lover moment. Simon didn’t really like talking to all these tourists, especially the sophisticated Parisian women, and he wasn’t keen on pretending to be a rustic hunk. But for Paul, the gathering of so many different women in one place was a delightful occurrence.

  He pulled up alongside Simon’s battered Citroën, whose hood was pointing toward Ar Mor’s terrace. “Bonjour, Monsieur Paul,” called Laurine, the young waitress from Ar Mor, as the former legionnaire got out of his car.

  Paul went over to stand next to her. “Hello, Laurine.” He peered at the mouth of the Aven, but all he could see was the Gwen II making for the quayside.

  “There!” cried Laurine. Her overexcitement made Paul feel slightly dizzy. Simon was standing on the Gwen II, as always. And next to him…

  “There!” repeated Laurine. “Yoo-hoo!”

  “A woman?” Paul gasped. How on earth had Simon managed to pick up a woman and take her on a boat trip before lunch? The traitor! Hadn’t they sworn last night that women were to play no further part in their lives? No major part, at any rate.

  —

  Simon preferred to manage the final few yards on his own. He’d enjoyed the smell of Marianne’s seawater-soaked hair. Someone should invent seawater shampoo and market it, he thought. He’d have a word with Paul later about how they could put the sea into one of those plastic bottles. He suddenly caught sight of Laurine on the quayside, and behind her, Paul, with a sour look on his face.

  —

  Marianne leaned on the railing while Simon was busy docking. She drank in the sight of Kerdruc harbor once more. Her heart clenched at the scene, and she felt as if she were returning home after a long sea voyage.

  Nonsense. Nonsense, stop thinking such nonsense!

  “Morning, Monsieur Simon!” called Laurine. Simon thought that Laurine could have been a model. He’d once suggested that she move to Paris or Milan and get rich.

  She had looked at him with astonishment and said, “Rich? What for?” and she’d meant it. The twenty-three-year-old had the body of a woman, but her mind was often that of a child—too unsophisticated to lie, and too naïve for distrust.

  Simon gave Marianne an awkward helping hand out of the boat. “I’ll never touch another drink,” he informed Paul as he stepped off the Gwen II and wound the rope expertly around a bollard.

  “Me neither,” Paul lied, glancing at Marianne with a quizzical, charming smile.

  “Paul, this is Marianne. She’s German.”

  “Allemande, eh?” said Paul, and took her hand in his, pretending to plant a kiss on it. “Zwei brezzelle, beete.” She withdrew her hand, aghast.

  Simon nudged him. “Leave her, she’s shy.”

  Paul switched into Breton. “I thought we’d come to an agreement about women. Some mate you are. As soon as I turn my back, you—”

  “Oh put a sock in it. I was just going for a dip when she came out of the cabin naked.”

  “Naked?!”

  “With the cat.”

  “And then? Did you—”

  “Almost drowned me.”

  “The cat?”

  “Trying to rescue the girl. She fell into the water!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then don’t ask.”

  “Have you already had breakfast?” asked Paul.

  “Let’s have a game of backgammon and a coffee,” Simon replied. “The loser has to mind the shop today.”

  Marianne stood beside the two men the whole time, lost, her feet close together, her handbag clutched tightly to her chest. She felt defenseless. She could sense that they were talking about her, so she affected her most carefree smile. The cat rubbed up against her legs, and she found its presence calming. She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, I…” Her mind was suddenly empty. White noise, but no words.

  Laurine leaned forward to give her three kisses on the cheeks. Left, right, left. “Bonjour, madame. I’m Laurine,” she said with a smile.

  “Marianne Lanz,” Marianne answered self-consciously. She still felt like a bedraggled cat, and presumably smelled like one too.

  “Marianne? What a pretty name! Lovely to see you here. Did your journey go well?”

  Marianne didn’t understand a word. Laurine took her by the hand, while Simon and Paul began to lay cushions on the wooden chairs on the terrace, moving with the characteristic slowness of old gentlemen.

  “Kenavo,” Sim
on called after Marianne. That was Breton for “see you later.”

  Laurine was terribly agitated, and as always when she was agitated, she whispered. “I’m taking you to see the chef. His name’s Jean-Rémy. He’ll be delighted to meet you!”

  Marianne lingered apprehensively in the doorway as Laurine preceded her into Ar Mor’s kitchens. “I…I’m sorry, but…” Nobody was listening to her. Nobody.

  It was only when the chef looked at her, pushed back his red bandanna and smiled that Marianne’s embarrassment gave way to relief. It was him! The man with the oysters!

  “What do you think you are—a budding Hell’s Angel?” Madame Ecollier had asked Jean-Rémy two summers earlier when he dismounted from his motorbike for a trial session in the kitchen. Black jeans, red shirt, studded boots. He had earrings, and a tattoo under the dark curls at the back of his neck. A case containing his favorite knife dangled from his belt like a revolver in a holster. Each of his leather bracelets represented one of the kitchens he had worked in during the thirteen years since he’d started out as a chef at the age of sixteen.

  Nevertheless, Madame Ecollier had taken a shine to his outfit. “I’d prefer it if you resembled Peter Sellers rather than Johnny Depp, but never mind. Just cook and keep your eyes off our female guests—and your hands off my staff. And stay away from the drink, unless you’re pouring it into a saucepan. Keep it simmering, Mr. Perrig.”

  Marianne found him delightful. “Bonjour,” she said almost inaudibly.

  “Bonjour, Madame,” said the man who had offered her the first oyster of her life, as he emerged from behind the stainless-steel kitchen island. “Nice to see you again. I hope you enjoyed the oysters.”

  “This is our new chef,” Laurine whispered breathlessly. “Marianne Lance!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” gasped Laurine. “Monsieur Simon fished her out of the sea. We have no idea where she is from.”