and, before anyone else had a chance, settled me in his arms as firmly as he would grasp a trawlerstay. I was aware of each finger of the hand on my ribs. Proper hands, I told myself. They wouldn’t let you fall, not like the pale, distinguished hands waved around by the pale, distinguished young men I knew in Paris. He danced like a man of the people, like one of Zola’s workers, with a swing of the shoulders pronounced enough to seem common to my bourgeois code of etiquette. Not once did his eyes meet mine and neither of us said a word. He wouldn’t have known what to say and I couldn’t think of a single subject of conversation. ‘Do you like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet?’ (even I knew that wouldn’t do) or, ‘How’s the fishing going?’ (that wouldn’t do either). What does a student of classics and history say to a young man who spends most of his time on a trawler on the Irish Sea? I stayed speechless, dumb with shyness and the unexpected sensation of being in Gauvin’s arms. But it didn’t matter, since he kept his arms round me between dances, waiting for the music to begin again. He still smelled of sunshine and wheat, and I thought he handled me with the same serious concentration he had given the sheaves earlier that day. In any case, what words could have expressed the absurd, incongruous feeling of recognition between our bodies, the sense that our souls – for it certainly wasn’t our minds – were striving towards each other, regardless of worldly obstacles. Naturally Plato came into my head. At that age I channelled all my thoughts and emotions through the words of poets and philosophers. And Gauvin had recklessly surrendered to the same spell. I was sure of it somehow, sure that feelings like these are always mutual. The spell held through a waltz and two paso dobles and swung us along in a sultry tango, while reality blurred and receded. The voices of the Raguenès boys reached me as if from a distant planet. They were getting noisier and more facetious to hide their growing lust for the girls they were trying to soften up with drink and hopeful fumbling. When the lights suddenly went out Gauvin and I found ourselves outside by silent accord. Selfish with happiness, we decided that Yvonne and the others could find their own way home, and, like a pair of cowards, drove off in the 4CV.
He took the road to the sea, of course. You head for the sea instinctively at times like this. The sea absolves any need for talk. It enfolds you like a mother, wraps you in indulgent silence. But we were checked at le Cabellou, la Dument, Trévignon and the beach at Raguenès, There was no through road along the coast then, only dead ends, emblematic of our own situation. The less we spoke, the more the silence swelled. Gauvin kept his arm round my shoulders, brushing my cheek with his temple now and again.
At Raguenès the tide was out. The spit of sand which joined the island to the shore at low water shone in the moonlight. To the east, where there was shelter from the prevailing wind, we could just make out the line where the sea met the sand. It was smooth as glass. To the west a breath of wind ruffled the silver expanse with its frilled, phosphorescent edge. It was still, so pure, so like us. We got out of the car to walk in that silent water.
‘Why don’t we take a midnight swim?’ The notion came to me all at once. It was the first time we had ever been by the sea together. In those days Bretons hardly ever went to the beach; swimming was a crack-brained trippers’ fancy. Sailors and fishermen, they had gone down at sea too often, for too many centuries, to think of it as a place for fun and games.
We undressed at a discreet distance from each other, careful not to look. I had never taken my clothes off in front of a boy before but that didn’t stop me feeling disappointed that Gauvin didn’t even glance at me. I was beautiful in the moonlight, I felt sure, less truly naked than in the glare of electric light. As much to hide my ‘front’ as to avoid looking at his, I raced into the sea first, joyously splintering the bright mirror. I didn’t go far. Almost immediately I guessed that Gauvin couldn’t swim. ‘What’s the point? Only makes it worse if you’re swept overboard at night in a freezing sea.’ I realised then that Gauvin’s sea was a different person from mine, and that he knew the real one.
We played around in the icy water for ages, laughing and brushing together like a pair of happy whales, delaying the moment when we would have to get out. On dry land we knew we would don our social differences along with our clothes. It was one of those unreal nights when a sort of phosphorescent plankton comes to the surface, when each stroke, each splash causes luminous ripples, and sends sparks flashing into the darkness. A wave of sudden sadness engulfed us, quite disproportionate to the transitoriness of that moment: it was as if we had experienced a lifelong passion and were about to be separated by something as inexorable as war. That something was dawn, as it happened. The sky was lightening in the east, bringing the world back to its rightful proportions.
Gauvin dropped me off at my door. A light was still on in my mother’s room. He kept a respectful distance as he said in his normal voice, ‘Well, ‘bye then.’ And after a pause, more softly, ‘See you again, maybe.’ I replied just as flatly, my arms clamped to my sides, ‘Thanks for bringing me home.’ As if he could have done anything else! Our houses were next door to each other.
Two days later he was to rejoin his Vaillant Couturier, and I wouldn’t see him again that summer. My family and I were due back in Paris in September. How is it possible to imagine life on the winter seas from the warmth of a city room? What sort of gang-plank can be thrown between the deck of a trawler and the lecture theatre where my professor analysed the protocols of courtly love?
Gauvin’s car set off towards the farm and was soon swallowed up by darkness. I went inside, shaking my wet hair. Saying goodnight to my mother robbed the occasion of all its romance. Everything I had lived that night started to slip away, to vanish like those dreams which fade so fast as you wake no matter how hard you try to hold on to them. But, till the very end of that summer, I felt that my steps faltered a little, that a fine mist lay over my blue eyes.
These feelings came to a head on one of those soft Breton evenings which mark the turn of season, and became a poem, a sort of message in a bottle for Gauvin which I didn’t dare throw in the sea for fear of ridicule. What would his friends say? With them he might snigger at the qualms of the city girl. ‘You know, them that has the thatched house at the end of the village…’ ‘The daughter’s not bad…’ ‘Nah. D’you reckon?’ These fears prevented my sending Gauvin the poem, the first love poem of my life.
So innocent, by the ocean,
So innocent, we two.
You a child-man, diffident,
Who would never read Gide.
And I cold as the first woman,
In the night as tender as night.
We halted on the brink of time,
At the brink of passion.
You a man, I still a girl,
But rigidly calm, controlled –
A pose one’s disposed to at eighteen.
Often I return to Raguenès,
I who have read Gide,
To recapture your fleeting eyes
And the trembling fierceness of your mouth.
Today I am tender as the first woman,
But the nights are as cold as night.
If I could but kiss you now,
With the taste of salt on our skin,
You who sail the Irish Sea,
Who ride the bucking waves,
Away from my twenty years,
Away
