Montparnasse, under the livid light which seems to be the bane of railway stations, we just couldn’t kiss. All he did, as he climbed into the carriage, was put his temple against my cheek, like that first time in the car. Then he turned away immediately to hide his orphaned face, and I made for the exit, my heart full of tears, my mind full of logic, as if they belonged to two different people.
No one spared me a glance. Bereft of the raving desire which I had inspired a few short hours before, I wandered in an indifferent world. Trembling with loneliness I cursed not being able to live our lives according to our desires – my not being able to for sure, and Gauvin probably, once he recognised the implications. I knew I was still imprisoned by the prejudices I’d been taught since childhood. And this rigidity of mine, which in those days substituted for character in me, was appalled by his lack of culture, the way he swore all the time, his mottled windcheaters and plaited sandals worn with socks, his sniggering at abstract art. Only the day before he had annihilated an abstract painting with a few annoyingly sensible words. Nor could I forgive him his favourite singers – Rina Ketty, Tino Rossi, Maurice Chevalier – whom I despised, and had annihilated with a few curt words myself. Nor the way he sliced bread towards himself, and cut up the steak on his plate into pieces. Nor the poverty of his vocabulary which cast doubts on the quality of his mind. It was all too much to remedy. And how would he have taken it? Culture inspired a vague mistrust in him. Fancy words were what ‘sodding politicos’ used to fool ordinary people, ‘the lot of them’. Nothing could persuade him that not all politicians were corrupt smooth-talkers – except for the Communists perhaps, for whom he voted automatically, less from conviction than professional solidarity. Aboard their boats trawlermen form a kind of commune, sharing the proceeds of every catch. Gauvin took pride in not being a wage slave. Where he came from, what counted was doing one’s work well, being honest and having guts. Good health was important and feeling tired a weakness, not far removed from skiving. The value of work lay in its usefulness, not in the time or effort it took.
For Parisians like us who flirted with the avant garde (my father published a modern art magazine), honesty was a rather ludicrous virtue, except in a cleaning lady. Idleness was cheerfully tolerated, so long as it was allied with wit and style. While we despised the village drunk, we felt a certain fondness for the society alcoholics. It might have been amusing to parade my fisherman at a party – after all, my parents were mad about sea shanties and those plaited leather belts with anchor-buckles made by sailors. They admired the Breton berets and clothes in the traditional red or blue sailcloth, carefully faded to look authentic, which only summer visitors still wore. They used the Breton farewell, Kenavo, when they left the village shop, and were charmed by the Breton name of the village baker, ‘Corentin’. My father even wore the local wooden clogs for ten minutes a year, and the spotted socks that went with them. ‘Nothing more practical for gardening,’ he would proclaim, almost prepared to stuff in the traditional handful of straw – ‘so much healthier’.
However, real live fishermen, all hairy and brawny, anywhere but on a tuna boat or trawler, noble though they be in their yellow oilskins and thigh boots – ugh! ‘I really take my hat off to those men,’ but on the oriental rugs of a Paris apartment, with their dirty fingernails and mottled windcheaters – ugh! In 1950 class barriers were impenetrable, and I knew I didn’t have the strength of character to acclimatise Gauvin to these surroundings, immerse him in my culture. And I didn’t want to transplant myself into his. He had no idea of how cruel my family could be to someone like him, what he would suffer if we were to get married, nor did he realise how intellectually isolated I would feel with him.
‘Why do you have to be so complicated?’ he had demanded the night before, making no secret of his hostility. ‘Why can’t you take things as they come?’ Well, I did have to be complicated, actually.
He had promised to telephone before he rejoined his boat, and the thought of that, bleak though it was, made separation less brutal. But the telephone flummoxed him. I should have thought of that. Theirs had been installed only recently, in the draughty front hall of the farmhouse where everyone could hear. For him it was a diabolical contraption, good only for cancelling appointments or announcing deaths. He spoke loudly, articulating each word clearly as if I were deaf He didn’t use my name once. It had been bad enough asking the operator for Paris, knowing she would be wondering what business young Lozerech had there.
‘You haven’t changed your mind then?’ he asked at once.
‘It’s not a question of changing my mind, Gauvin. It’s… well, I just don’t see what else I could do. I wish you’d understand…’
‘Oh, me! I can’t understand anything.’
Silence. Then I asked, ‘You’re off tomorrow still?’
‘That’s how you wanted it, isn’t it?’
He was right. It was impossible to communicate through this horrible instrument. I felt incapable of saying ‘I love you’ into it. Terrified he would hang up, I blurted the first thing that came into my head.
‘Write to me, won’t you? And tell me where I can write back.’
‘It’s a bit tricky. I’ll be living with Marie-Josée’s family while I study for my diploma. But I’ll send you a card as soon as I get to Concarneau.’
‘Oh sure. With your best wishes, I hope.’
Wounded silence. He wasn’t one to shout ‘bloody hell’ down the telephone.
‘Right then. I must be off now,’ he said with finality, and hung up. The black receiver went back on the wooden wall of the farmhouse.
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4 The Next Ten Years
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For the next ten years I was far too busy getting on with my life to indulge in nostalgia for my first love. That comes later, when the second love, the one you stake your life on, starts foundering. That’s when lost opportunities get irresistibly attractive. Meanwhile, I was moving imperceptibly from girlhood to womanhood, approaching that threshold of thirty when there are several different routes to choose. And whichever I chose I would find myself wondering if this was the final, fixed path, if something of real importance could still happen to me.
People who’ve turned sixty smile at the callowness of the young. They shouldn’t. It wasn’t until I had passed the thirty mark that I lost that most priceless of youth’s attributes, lightheartedness. Until then I lived my life as though I were immortal. It would have appalled me if I had realised how precarious life is, how my body, instead of being my servant, would become a tyrannical master. Until I was thirty, everything I experienced, even grief, had the charm of novelty.
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