All Pure Souls

by John Brooke

  It’s a Saturday in September, 1943. Ondine Duguay rides out from the port of Audierne on a slow trawler toward the light at Raz, and the Île de Sein six miles beyond. She has taken a bus from Quimper that morning and is on her way to do business with one Angélique Ménou, the woman who makes the tallest, most intricate coiffes in Pauline Brekelien’s shop, a dentellerie in the rue Sainte-Catherine. She’s almost twenty. She’s been with Pauline, at first as an apprentice, attaching and mending for her keep, since stopping in Quimper just before the outbreak of the war. She’s lonely but used to it; these Breton people are odd and it’s odder to think her mother had been one of them. She has often had to wonder why she left Georgette and came out here all alone to find an answer for her mother’s life. Because it doesn’t seem she’s found it... But she has learned the lacemaker’s trade to Pauline’s satisfaction, and has also discovered a talent for managing money. Which is the reason she is on that boat, travelling as Pauline’s agent.

  The sun is bright, but the sea wind chills and she tucks her skirt snugly round her knees. She pulls her jacket collar up and huddles on the back deck, watching seabirds swooping and squawking in a trail along the boat’s wake. Being out on the water gives a sense of freedom. At the wharf, soldiers of the occupying army had scrutinized the papers and belongings of the seven women passengers, just as they had checked every basket, sack and crate destined for the remote island community. A gunboat has escorted them to a safe channel. There are long guns couched in embankments along the shore, ready to blow them to pieces if need be. There’ll be a small garrison, guarding Sein in the name of the Reich, waiting to greet them when they land. Guarding an island of women; in June of 1940, after the defeat, the men of Sein had all — 113 of them — sailed off to England, answering the famous radio call of the exiled General de Gaulle.

  There’s a girl who’s used to boats, moving from passenger to passenger, offering apples. Back at the dock Ondine had watched her overseeing the tallying and loading of a dozen bushel baskets. She’s clad in the usual drab layering of grey skirts and an apron favoured by Bretonne women, a stitched collar and brooch her only adornment. What sets the girl apart as an islander is the black, winged, helmet-like bonnet concealing her pinned-up hair. A jibilinen. Ondine recalls the hats worn by the Papal Guard, seen once in a postcard. As she draws near, Ondine hears a tune — a girl’s soft whistle under the wind, and recognizes a song heard on Sunday afternoons in town as the men quaff ale and cider and clomp around in their wooden shoes in front of the taverns. Le Pommier enchanté...The Enchanted Apple Tree:

  Dans le mitan de mon verger

  Je possède un fameux pommier

  Qui donne tant et tant de pommes

  Lidoric lon laire

  Que tout le monde en peut manger

  Lidoric lon lé

  Lidoric lon lé

  Tout le monde en peut manger!

  In the heart of my orchard I have a special apple tree

  It gives so many apples that everyone may eat

  But when you climb this tree to taste the fruit on high

  It is forbidden to come down ‘til all the fruit is gone.

  One day inside my orchard Death came by for me

  “O Sir, try an apple while I go to make me ready.”

  Now grey Death is my own prisoner up in my apple tree

  Eating one harvest of apples while the next surely grows.

  With a modest nod, the girl proffers the fruit. For a moment Ondine glimpses her plain bronzed youthfulness hidden under her costume — and behind the reticence an outsider naturally shows. “Merci, mademoiselle.” She has heard, often during the winding, gossipy course of the day at the shop, and quite pointedly as Pauline sent her off on this trip, that the women of Sein are a strange and not so friendly lot, ferocious and cunning in their vindictiveness when it came to quarrels — “Anything you bring back is on consignment; don’t you dare advance her a single sou!” And deeply, darkly superstitious. “The only boat you’ll ever see the likes of her in is a basket, with her rake for a mast and her apron for a sail.” Meaning Angélique Ménou was a witch, probably all her sisters too. Strong words; because Ondine could not imagine any women more dyed-in-the-wool skeptical and fervent in their attachment to the “old ways” than Pauline or the others at the shop, or, for that matter, almost any woman she might meet in the streets of Quimper. They’re good women (hadn’t they accepted an orphan from Nevers?) but they’re a breed apart. The collars and bonnets worn by all the women and girls on festival days, and by some of them every day, are Pauline’s stock-in-trade...

  It’s coming up four o’clock as they skirt the shore from the south-east. Sein is flat and treeless, hardly two miles long and less than one mile wide. “We call that one Nerroth...” The apple girl is beside her, grey eyes shot with a brilliant silver as she squints into the angling sun.

  “Excuse me?” says Ondine.

  “Those rocks.” Pointing to a formation. To Ondine it looks vaguely like someone reclining, reading perhaps...with her knees folded up. Then the girl points to the next clump at the tip of the next cove. “That one’s the Pig. And over there...” pointing to the north, “the Cat’s Tail.”

  Ondine squints hard but the stone creatures elude her. So she points at the big light. “What about that light: is it on the island? Maybe I’d like to walk to it.”

  “Ar Men? Mais non, madame...” with a gruff chuckle, not very girlish at all; “Ar Men is as far as the moon. Between the light and our island there are a thousand dead men and boats.”

  Ondine shields her eyes and looks again, but the tip of Sein and the stretch of sea are impossible to separate. “It’s hard to tell distances out here.”

  “It’s true,” agrees the girl. “But it’s a nice thought — to walk out on the sea...”

  A small crowd waits as the pilot brings the vessel to berth against two huge tires slung along the wall of the quay. Several women are wearing the odd cylindrical headpieces, the coiffe, some more than a foot in height, miniature towers of the most exquisite lace patterning, pristine and medieval. Most of the others wear the sombre jibilinen. The mail is distributed before anything else, directly from the gangplank. Two of the women — standing, strangely, right beside each other and both of them wearing the high coiffe — begin to wail in despair, one...then the other, as they open their sad notices. Everyone, including the two German soldiers, pauses to watch.

  Ondine feels a tug on her arm. She looks into heavy-lidded, sun-washed eyes. The woman is stocky, maybe forty or forty-five, and one of those wearing the more practical black bonnet. Beneath its brim is a broad spoony face built around thick lips and a wide mouth. “You’ve come from Pauline Brekelien.” Stated in a flat tone that conveys no trace of welcome.

  “Oui...Madame Ménou?” Extending her hand. “My name is Ondine Duguay.”

  But the woman glares, somehow affronted. “You know the Holy Mother sees all the way from Paradise to Sein. She knows my work is the best in all the Finistère. You won’t get one piece of it without hard cash — first!” With that, she turns and walks off.

  Ondine grabs her bag and hurries after. “Madame...in this war economy it’s very difficult for a retailer like Pauline to have a lot of cash on hand. We go from month to month... Pauline has the best reputation in the biggest market! She gets the best price... You get the best percentage!”

  Angélique Ménou stops, sizes her up again, looks away and spits on the cobblestone. “She owes me a thousand francs.”

  Ondine takes bills from her purse and hands them over — efficient, honest, and with a smile. With another smile, not quite as certain, she says, “Now you’re liquid.”

  The woman scratches at her nut-brown nose, snorting crudely. “I haven’t been liquid for thirteen years...since the eve of Pentecost, when my dear ignorant François decided to go out fishing.”

  “Something happened?”

  “Of course. He was caught in a storm and lost.”

  “I
’m sorry.”

  Her heavy mouth juts, her thick lips press and curl, ironic. “Oh, he’s out there somewhere.”

  Ondine is not sure how to respond, but at least now she knows she’s welcome, more or less. She follows Angélique Ménou off the quay into a street barely broad enough for a wagon to pass. They proceed in silence, turning tiny corners, passing in and out of the dimming light till they come to a door in rue Paul-Goardan. The house is clean and deceptively large, two levels, built in an L shape. The door hiding the back stairs fools Ondine — until she is shown through it and up to her room. Another oddity is the bed set partially into the wall, like a berth on a boat or a crypt in a tomb. The room faces west and a ray of evening sun highlights the heavy, well-oiled woodwork. Charming evidence of her host’s creative hands can be seen in the curtains, the doily under the basin, the bedspread and pillow case.

  Left alone, the traveller peers out the window. For the second time she sees the tall figure of the Ar Men light, and now its flat twilight glow. She hears a clank and a lowing. A white cow, a healthy size, stands in a makeshift stall of straw fashioned under the eave in one corner of the yard. A small vegetable garden is doing well in the centre of the yard. Now the girl from the boat appears at the gate, followed in by the old pilot pulling a stevedore’s cart containing the baskets of apples. Angélique emerges from her kitchen and greets the girl with a brusque kiss. As Ondine watches the unloading of the apples, the girl goes in and out of the house in obediant response to Angélique’s commands...it becomes clear that the girl is Angélique’s daughter. Then, the unloading done, the pilot and cart departed and her hosts having gone back inside, Ondine rests in silence, save for the sporadic clank of the cow’s bell and the soft hum of the wind. The wind: she realizes she has been hearing this sound from the moment the boat’s engine stopped and she set her foot on Sein.

  The girl’s name is Dorise. Without her cap, her black hair is thin and shapeless, parted at the side like a boy’s, hanging just above her collar. She’s fifteen. “She has her father’s face,” says Angélique.

  Supper is a potato-and-barley broth, a flat bread with fresh butter — which is a treat — and a glass of milk. They eat in silence, for which Ondine feels responsible. “How did you manage to get all those apples?” she finally asks.

  “I trade my tickets and save them till the harvest... The Germans allow them at harvest.”

  “But all for you?”

  “That’s none of their concern.”

  “What do you trade?”

  “Butter and milk.”

  “We’re lucky,” adds Dorise, “we have Céleste. We don’t need much else from the mainland.”

  “Céleste...” repeats Ondine. “She’s pretty.” Because neither Angélique nor her daughter are.

  Mentioning the mainland reminds Dorise that she has brought mail along with the apples. Fetching the opened envelope from her jacket pocket, she lays it by her mother’s plate. Angélique wipes her bread in the last of her soup as she reads.

  Dorise begins to clear the table. “My brother Yann. He’s older than you. You’re...?”

  “Twenty in December.”

  “Oh. Well then, you’re twins. He went with the rest of them.”

  “Now he’s in the British navy,” mutters Angélique, rueful, as if it were the most absurd and unreal thing that could have happened. She lets the letter slip from her fingers. Sits staring into her empty bowl.

  “Very brave,” ventures Ondine.

  Brave? Angélique grunts. Brave has no meaning on a flat piece of rock called Sein. “I would like Herr Hitler to come over here for a brief stay before he conquers the rest of the world. I would sit on his face and show him what was what, and I think everything else would be fine after that.”

  Dorise is filling the sink. Ondine sees her cheeks grow red from her mother’s remark...and she feels her own doing likewise. Blasé, Angélique rises from the table. She offers no coffee or sweets. Not even an apple. Beckoning her guest to follow, they leave Dorise with the dishes and go through the dark hall to the salon.

  The room is dimly lit by lamps on side tables. The walls are a white brick, enhanced against the dark wood of the furnishings. In one corner stands a blue cloaked Virgin, almost life-size, her sorrowful eyes at a level with the wainscoting. Ondine sees pictures of the two men: the dead husband, and that must be Yann, in his sailor’s suit, with his mother’s thick mouth and concave features. Brilliant sunny eyes...Yann is handsome; she’s happy to be his “twin.” Other photographs show older people and babies, Dorise with a group of staring girls and a stolid priest on their Confirmation day, and a younger Angélique dressed for her wedding. But to business. The merchandise is laid out across the divan and two side-tables: four dozen new coiffes all in the tall style that is Sein’s trademark, but with varying patterns in the needlework, and with delicate single, single-split or double lace tails attached. Ondine puts her fingers on each item, marvelling at the work and wondering how to get safely back to the subject of money. Angélique, meanwhile, takes a bottle from the cabinet and two thimble-sized glasses. She pours one for herself and one for Ondine, takes a sip from hers, then sits like a bishop, waiting.

  Ondine, polite, wets her tongue. She’s not much of a drinker. Had she been, she might have recognized something akin to a diluted Canadian rye buffered by a taste of apple. It’s the hint of apple flavour that allows her to dip her tongue a second time...and then a third. She can’t say she likes it, but it’s important to be gracious.

  Dorise does not join them... But they never do get around to money. Ondine’s questions about Angélique’s facility in the craft of lacemaking turn, easily and inevitably, into snippets about herself: Pauline, the shop and her life in Quimper...then to shy, muted thoughts about her mother’s death...her father’s less than honest life. All the while Ondine carefully samples the apple-tinged liquor. Soon she’s talking too much but there’s much to be told. About her sister Georgette: how she was as tall as Georgette — had matched her year for year, but everything else was slightly less so, from her breasts to her hips to the shine in her hair...how Georgette’s had an auburn sheen that glowed almost red after she washed it, but her own’s this chestnut colour, a little finer and it does not blow around her face in the extravagant way she would like...and Ondine hears herself telling Angélique Ménou how she and Georgette had argued bitterly about the things their poor mother had believed, and how she’d left her doubting sister and travelled to the Finistère. “All alone...I came all alone, because it can’t be true that she has to be in hell. That’s not fair. It’s not her fault she lost her hope and died... Could it be?”

  But why would she know — this tough, crude woman from Sein?

  But Ondine cannot stop spilling out her heart that night. Nor can she take her eyes away from the image of Yann the sailor. Thinking, He looks so good to me...strong!

  “He was a virgin when he left here,” murmurs her host.

  And thinking, Did I actually hear her say that?

  When Angélique announces, “You will wear one of my coiffes when we go to mass tomorrow,” and standing, signals the end of the day, Ondine goes to her room feeling as if she’s been stopped in mid-flow. Mid-dream! There’s much more in her heart. Sitting on her bed looking out at the night, bemused, enjoying the lingering effects of her drink... A sliver of moon glides north amid countless stars. Sein’s own light is down, by order, but the beam from Ar Men is long and bright, swinging through its rotation, filling her face for an instant, then moving on, leaving dappled waters behind it. She hopes the British Navy can see it. She closes the shutters.

  Another dull clank...clank of a cow bell. Céleste is stirring in her straw bed in the yard below. Ondine wishes her good night, rolls into her pillow and drifts off to the hum of the endless wind.

  Clank, clank...clank. It comes through her sleep. Dorise is standing by the door holding a lantern. Ondine pulls her jacket on over her nightdress and slips on her shoes. “
It’s the men,” whispers Dorise. Ondine thinks, But aren’t the men all gone to the war? But as they go marching into the night, she’s feeling something like a soldier herself, following Céleste. Céleste has been given the lantern and it swings from her horn... Clank, clank...clank, out past the end of the road and along the path by the seawall, down to the beach.

  The Ar Men beam is down now too. A veil of emerald glows in the sky, woven in patches through the rolling mass of cloud, its reflection glittering on the black face of the waters. Dorise stands in the edges of the surf, looking out to sea — anxious, expectant. Ondine is delighted to see that Céleste has been joined by friends of her own kind, all carrying lanterns and bells, moving in random patterns, bells clanking, sporadic, noisy, their lowing blending with the wind. Ageless menhirs are scattered in the shallows, pointing to the heavens, saluting the magnificent light. Then Dorise waves into the darkness and the wind seems to rise. Ondine feels her hair lash and dance like it’s never done as she moves along the foamy steps. Now Dorise is waving frantically and running to the point. The wind whips the sea into a beautiful chaos. There! ...A boat is approaching!

  A small boat with a single light swinging from its spar rocks into view.

  Ondine can see the outline of a man...one man alone, and he’s afraid and confused.

  Ondine wonders, Who could be fearful at such a moment? Look at Céleste and her friends: a marvellous sliding twinkling configuration! What could a sailor possibly fear approaching such a sight? It must be even more beautiful for him, out there...like stones on the necklace of a giant seductress, refracting rays and glints of colour as she turns in her bed, beckoning calmly through the rising wind, the running clouds, the leaping spray. But the closer he comes the more she understands. Strong and brave — or feckless...he needs to know and is coming to find out. He needs to...he must! Even as the rocks rip his vessel and the boards below him begin to crack apart, he comes ahead, compelled, a man without choices, jumping desperately for the shallows, his tattered shirt tails flying like wings.