I looked at him. “You said my father was ill,” I said clearly. “What’s wrong with him exactly?” For an instant, I saw him hesitate. “Is it his heart?” I persisted. “His liver? His lungs?”
“Mado, I don’t know the details, and frankly—”
“Is it cancer? Cirrhosis?”
“As I said, Mado I don’t know the details.” He was less jovial now, and there was tension around his jaw. “But I can call in my doctor whenever you like, and he’ll give you his balanced, professional opinion.”
My doctor. I looked down at Brismand’s gift in its cocoon of tissue paper. The sunlight lapped the fiery silk. He was right, I thought; red was my color. I could leave it all in his hands, I knew. Go back to Paris—the new season at the gallery was just beginning—work on my new portfolio. Some cityscapes this time, maybe some portraits. After ten years, perhaps I was ready for a change of subject.
But I knew I wouldn’t do it. Things had changed; the island had changed, and something in me with it. The nostalgia I had felt for Les Salants during all my time away had become something more visceral, something harder. And my homecoming—the illusions, the sentiment, the disappointments, the joy—I realized now that none of that had really happened. Until this moment I had not come home at all.
“I was sure I could count on you.” He had taken my silence for agreement. “You know, you could move into Les Immortelles until we sort things out. I hate to think of you in that place with GrosJean. I’ll give you my nicest suite. On the house.”
Even now, though I was sure he was hiding the truth from me, I was conscious of an absurd feeling of gratitude. I shook it aside. “No thank you,” I heard myself saying. “I’ll stay at home.”
16
* * *
The week that followed brought another spate of troubled weather. The salt flats behind the village flooded, obliterating two years’ reclamation work. The search for the Saint had to be postponed due to high tides, though only a handful of optimists still held out any hope of her retrieval. A second fishing boat was lost; Matthias Guénolé’s Korrigane, the oldest working boat on the island, ran aground in high winds just off La Griznoz, and Matthias and Alain were unable to retrieve it. Even Aristide said it was a waste.
“Hundred years old, she was,” mourned Capucine. “I remember her going out when I was a girl. Lovely red sails. Course, Aristide had his Péoch ha Labour in those days, and I remember their going out together, each one trying to get to the wind first so he’d cut the other off. That was before his son Olivier was killed, of course, and Aristide lost his leg. After that the Péoch went to ruin in the étier until one winter the tides took it, and he never even made a move to save her.” She shrugged her plump shoulders. “You wouldn’t have recognized him in those days, Mado. He was a different man then, in his prime. Never got over Olivier’s death. Never mentions him now.”
It was a stupid accident. It always is. Olivier and Aristide were investigating a wrecked trawler on La Jetée at low tide; it shifted suddenly, trapping Olivier underneath the waterline. Aristide tried to reach him in the Péoch but slipped between his boat and the wreck, crushing his leg. He called for help, but nobody heard. Three hours later Aristide was picked up by a passing fisherman, but by then the tide had turned and Olivier had drowned.
“Aristide heard everything,” said Capucine, chasing her coffee with a splash of crème de cassis. “Said he could hear Olivier screaming for help in there, screaming and crying as the water came up.”
They never recovered the body. The tide dragged the trawler down into the Nid’Poule before they could search it, and it sank too far too fast. Hilaire, the local vet, amputated Aristide’s leg (there was no doctor in Les Salants, and Aristide refused to be treated by an Houssin), but he claims to feel it even now, itching and aching in the night. He puts this down to the fact that Olivier was never buried. They buried the leg, though—Aristide insisted—and you can still see the grave, at the far end of La Bouche. A wooden post marks the spot, upon which someone has written: here lies old bastonnet’s leg—marching ahead to glory!! Underneath it someone has planted what looks like flowers, but which on closer examination reveals itself to be a row of potatoes. Capucine suspects a Guénolé.
“Then his other son, Philippe, ran away,” she continued. “And Aristide threw himself into the court case with the Guénolés, and Désirée, with no children left of her own, looked after Xavier. Poor old Aristide was never the same after that. Not even when I told him it wasn’t his leg that mattered to me.” She snickered with tired lewdness. “Another café-cassis?”
I shook my head. Outside the trailer I could hear Lolo and Damien yelling at each other in the dunes.
“He was a handsome man then,” remembered Capucine. “They were all of them handsome, I suppose, in those days, all my special boys. Cigarette?” She lit up deftly, dragging in the smoke with a growl of pleasure. “No? You should, you know. Calms you down.”
I smiled. “I don’t think so.”
“Please yourself.” She shrugged, her plump shoulders wriggling under the silk of her dressing gown. “I need my little vices.” She jerked her head at the box of chocolate cherries standing by the window. “Pass me another, won’t you, love?”
The box was new, heart-shaped, still half full.
“An admirer,” she said, popping one of the sweets into her mouth. “I’ve still got what it takes, even at my age. Have one.”
“No, I think you enjoy them more than I do,” I told her.
“Sweetheart, I enjoy everything more than you do,” said Capucine, rolling her eyes.
I laughed. “I see you’re not letting the floods get you down.”
“Bof.” She shrugged again. “I can always move if I have to,” she said. “Take a bit of doing to move this old thing after so many years, but I could manage it.” She shook her head. “No, it’s not me that needs to worry. As for the rest of them—”
“I know.” I’d already told her about the changes at Les Immortelles.
“But it seems such a small thing,” she protested. “I still don’t see how a few meters of breakwater can make such a difference.”
“Oh, it doesn’t take much,” I told her. “Divert a current by a few meters. It hardly looks like anything. And yet it can cause changes all around the island. It’s like dominoes falling. And Brismand knows. He may even have planned it that way.”
I told her about Brismand’s Siamese twins analogy. Capucine nodded, sustaining herself with several more of the chocolate cherries as she listened. “Sweetheart, I’d believe anything of those bloody Houssins,” she said comfortably. “Hm. You should try one of these. Plenty more where they came from.” I shook my head impatiently. “But why should he want to buy flooded land?” went on Capucine. “It’s no more use to him than it would be to us.”
I had already tried to inform the Salannais, in spite of Flynn’s warnings, throughout that long week. Angélo’s café seemed to be the best place to spread the word, and I went there often, hoping to raise interest among the fishermen. But there were always card games, chess tournaments, football matches on satellite television, all taking precedence, and when I persisted there were blank looks, polite nods, comical glances, which froze my good intentions and left me feeling ridiculous and angry. Voices fell silent when I walked in. Backs hunched. Faces fell. I could almost hear them whispering, like boys at the arrival of a strict schoolmistress.
“Here’s La Poule. Quick. Look busy.”
Aristide’s hostility toward me had not altered. It was he who had nicknamed me La Poule; and my efforts to educate the Salannais about the movements of the tides had merely intensified his antagonism. Now he greeted me with grim sarcasm every time I crossed his path.
“Here she is, La Poule. Got another idea to save us all, have you, heh? Going to lead us to the Promised Land? Going to make us all into millionaires?”
“Heh, it’s La Poule. What’s today’s plan? Going to turn back the tide? Sto
p the rain? Raise the dead?”
His bitterness, Capucine told me, was in part due to his grandson’s apparent lack of success with Mercédès Prossage, in spite of his rival’s setbacks. Xavier’s crippling shyness in the girl’s presence seemed to be even more of a handicap than the loss of the Guénolés’ livelihood, and Aristide’s habit of watching Mercédès all the time and scowling if she as much as spoke to any man but Xavier did nothing to improve things. I often noticed her sitting by the side of the étier when the boats came in. She seemed to pay no attention to either of her young admirers, merely filing her nails or reading a magazine, clad in a variety of revealing outfits.
Ghislain and Xavier were not alone in their worship of her. I noticed with some amusement that Damien too spent an unusual amount of time by the creek, smoking cigarettes, his collar turned up against the wind. Lolo played alone in the dunes without him, looking forlorn. Mercédès, of course, completely failed to notice Damien’s infatuation, or if she did, she gave no sign. Watching the children arrive from school in the little minibus from La Houssinière I saw that Damien often sat alone, keeping silent even among his friends. Several times I noticed bruises on his face.
“I think the Houssin children are giving ours a rough time at school,” I remarked to Alain, that night in Angélo’s. But Alain was unsympathetic. Ever since the loss of his father’s Korrigane he had been sour and uncommunicative, ready to take offense at the slightest comment.
“The boy has to learn,” he said shortly. “There’s always been bullying among the kids. He’ll just have to live with it, that’s all, the way the rest of us did.”
I said I thought that was a rather hard line to take with a boy of thirteen.
“Nearly fourteen,” said Alain. “It’s the way things are. Houssins and Salannais. It’s a basket of crabs. It always has been. My father had to thrash me to make me go to school, I was so scared. I survived, didn’t I, heh?”
“Maybe surviving isn’t enough,” I told him. “Perhaps we should be fighting back.”
Alain smirked, not pleasantly. Behind him, Aristide looked up and made flapping movements with his arms. I felt my face grow hot but ignored him.
“You know what the Houssins are doing. You’ve seen the defenses at Les Immortelles. If there had been something like it at La Goulue, then perhaps—”
“Heh! That again!” snapped Aristide. “Even Rouget says it wouldn’t work!”
“Yes, that again!” I was angry now, and several people looked up at the sound of my voice. “We could have been safe, if we’d done what the Houssins did. We can still be safe, as long as we do something now, before it’s too late—”
“Do something? Do what? And who’s going to pay for it?”
“All of us. We could pull together. We could pool our resources—”
“Rubbish! It can’t be done!” The old man was standing now, looking at me over Alain’s head with ferocious eyes.
“Brismand did it,” I said.
“Brismand, Brismand—” He stabbed the ground with his stick. “Brismand’s rich! And he’s lucky!” He gave a harsh cough of laughter. “Everyone on the island knows that!”
“Brismand makes his own luck,” I told him levelly. “And we could do it too. You know it, Aristide. That beach—it could have been ours. If we could find a way to reverse what’s been done—”
For a moment Aristide’s eyes met mine, and I thought something passed between us, something almost like understanding. Then he turned away again.
“We’re Salannais,” he snapped, the harshness back in his voice. “What the hell would we do with a beach?”
17
* * *
Discouraged and angry, I concentrated my energies upon finishing the repairs to the house. I had phoned my landlady in Paris to warn her that I was staying away for a few weeks longer, and transferred some funds from my savings account, and I spent a long time cleaning, repainting. GrosJean seemed to have mellowed a little, although he still hardly spoke; he would watch me in silence as I worked, sometimes helping with the dishes or holding the ladder when I painted or replaced the missing roof tiles. He tolerated the radio sometimes; conversation, rarely.
Once more I had to learn to interpret the quality of his silences, to read his gestures. As a child I’d had that skill; I picked it up again, like an almost forgotten musical instrument. The small gestures—inconspicuous to outsiders but filled with secret meanings. The throaty sounds, indicating pleasure or fatigue. The rare smile.
I realized that his silence was in fact a deep and quiet depression. It was as if my father had simply removed himself from the ordinary run of life, sinking, like a foundered boat, through deeper and deeper layers of indifference until he was almost impossible to reach. Nothing I could do for him penetrated that indifference; and his drinking sessions at Angélo’s only seemed to make it worse.
“He’ll come around eventually,” said Toinette, when I voiced my concern. “He gets like this sometimes—for a month, six months, longer. I only wish some other people could do the same.”
I had found her in her garden, collecting snails from the woodpile into a big pan; alone of all the Salannais, she seemed to prefer the bad weather.
“I’ll say this for the rain,” she declared, bending so low that her spine crackled. “It brings the snails out.” She reached painfully behind the woodpile and pinged a snail into her pan with a grunt. “Ha! Got the little bastard.” She held out the pan to show me. “Best meal in the world, that. Just crawling about, waiting to be picked up. Salt ’em for a while to get the slime out. Then put ’em in a pan with some shallots and red wine. Live forever. Tell you what”—she held out the pan to me—“take a few to your father. Bring him out of his shell, heh?” She cackled delightedly.
I only wished it could be so easy. GrosJean still went to La Bouche every day, though the flooding had barely subsided. Sometimes he stayed there until nightfall, digging runoff ditches around the waterlogged graves, or most often merely standing at the head of the creek and watching the levels rise and fall.
Wet August crashed into blustery September, and although the wind veered westward again, conditions at Les Salants did not improve. Aristide caught a bad cold collecting shellfish in the shallows off La Goulue. Toinette Prossage fell ill too, but refused to see Hilaire about it.
“I’m not having that vet telling me what to do,” she wheezed irritably. “Let him see to the goats and the horses. I’m not that desperate yet.”
Omer pretended to joke about it, but I could tell he was concerned. Bronchitis at ninety can be a serious matter. And the worst of the weather was still to come. Everyone knew it, and tempers were short.
La Bouche, it was felt, was the least of our problems.
“It’s always been a bad spot,” said Angélo, who was from Fromentine and therefore had no relatives at La Bouche. “What can you do about it, heh?”
Only the older people showed real distress at the flooded cemetery; among them Désirée Bastonnet, Aristide’s wife, who visited her son’s memorial with touching punctuality every Sunday after mass. Though sympathetic to Désirée’s feelings, the consensus was that the living deserved priority over the dead.
Since my arrival I had spoken to Désirée only in greeting, and she had been barely polite in her haste to get away, although I thought her shyness came more from a fear of displeasing Aristide than a real reluctance to speak to me. This time she was alone; coming down the road from La Houssinière on foot, dressed in her customary black. I smiled at her as she passed me, and she greeted me with a startled look, then, with a furtive glance to either side, smiled back. Her small face bobbed beneath the black island hat. She was carrying a bunch of yellow flowers in one hand.
“Mimosa,” she said, seeing me looking. “It was Olivier’s favorite. We always had it on his birthday—such a cheerful little flower, with such a lovely scent.” She smiled awkwardly. “Aristide says it’s all nonsense, of course, and so expensive out of seas
on. But I thought—”
“You’re going to La Bouche.”
Désirée nodded. “He would have been fifty-six.”
Fifty-six; perhaps a grandfather. I glimpsed it in her eyes, something bright and unutterably sad; the vision of the grandchildren that might have been.
“I’m buying a plaque,” she continued. “For the church in La Houssinière. beloved son. lost at sea. I can put the flowers under it, Père Alban says, when I’m in Les Immortelles.” She gave me her sweet and painful smile. “Your father’s a lucky man, Mado, whatever Aristide says,” she said. “He’s lucky you came home.”
This was the longest speech I had ever heard from Désirée Bastonnet. It astonished me so much that I could hardly speak a word; and by the time I had decided how to answer, she had passed me by, still carrying her bunch of mimosa.
I found Xavier by the étier, hosing down some empty lobster pots. He looked even paler than usual, his glasses making him look like an academic who has lost his way.
“Your grandmother doesn’t look well,” I told him. “You should tell her to ask me for a lift in the tractor next time she wants to go into La Houssinière. She shouldn’t be going there on foot, not at her age.”
Xavier looked uncomfortable. “It’s a chill, that’s all,” he said. “Spending all that time at La Bouche. She thinks that if she prays for long enough, there’ll be a miracle.” He shrugged. “I reckon that if the Saint was going to give us a miracle, she’d have done it by now.”
On the other side of the creek I could see Ghislain and his brother by the wreck of the Eleanore. Predictably, Mercédès was sitting close by, filing her nails and wearing a hot-pink T-shirt bearing the words: get it here. Xavier’s eyes were on her all the time he spoke.
“I’ve been offered a job in La Houssinière,” he said. “Packing fish. Good money.”
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