you took me to find the fabulous beast,
Which never did appear.
And you?
Do you ever return to that meeting-place,
To lament the love we never made?
Soon it was time to shut the house up for another winter, to leave my eighteenth summer behind. I abandoned the poem to my weed garden holiday clutter in a drawer, together with a bronze kirby-grip still fastened to its yellowing card, a pink sea urchin shell, a solitary sock whose pair might yet turn up, an ear of corn I’d hoarded from that evening of harvest. When we returned the next summer I didn’t throw the poem away. I still hoped it might reach its addressee one day and recall to him the unforgettable taste of first desire.
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2 Yvonne’s Wedding
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It was two years before I saw Gauvin again. He had chosen the sea as his work for good and become second mate, which meant he was never in Raguenès for more than a couple of days every fortnight, waiting on the tide. In the autumn he planned to go to the Maritime College at Concarneau to study for a captain’s certificate. He had mapped out his life on predictable lines. For instance, he’d just got engaged, ‘because a bloke can’t live with his parents for ever’. At least that’s what he said to me, as if excusing himself. His fiancée, Marie-Josée, worked in a Concarneau factory. They weren’t in any hurry, he said. They still had to build themselves a house at Larmor, on a plot of land left to him by his grandmother. They had mortgaged themselves for twenty years even before the first stone was laid. He and I avoided one another, not wanting to seem stand-offish or to hurt each other’s feelings. Or, it should be said, he avoided me. While, if we did meet, I quite liked making that gorgeous young man lower his eyes. On the other hand, if I ever met him in a shop he would lapse into broad Breton, just to show me I didn’t belong.
It was at Yvonne’s wedding that he was compelled to look me in the eyes again. She had insisted on my being her witness, while Gauvin had promised to be the groom’s witness. The groom was a sailor too, but in the Navy rather than a fisherman. Yvonne had been determined to marry away from the land. She loathed it. She loathed looking after the farm animals, she loathed the permanently chapped, red hands in winter, the clogs caked with mud even on Sundays, the whole relentless rhythm of farm life. But she knew she didn’t want an offshore trawlerman, a homebound creature like her brother Robert, who was there every evening, his hands reeking of bait, and who woke her at four in the morning when he went out to sea. Nor did she fancy a long-distance trawlerman like two of her other brothers. No, what she was after was someone who barely knew what a fish looked like, someone with a uniform, someone, above all, who would be away for months on end – months which would count double for his pension. She had already worked that one out. He should be able to give her the chance of a year or two in Djibouti, Martinique or even, if she got lucky, Tahiti. And the rest of the time she would have her nice little house. And peace. Peace was Yvonne’s real goal. For the whole of her life so far she had scarcely been allowed to sit down except at meals. And even then she and her mother would be constantly up and down, waiting on seven boys and the father and the gormless yokel who was their only farm hand. Every time Yvonne pronounced the word ‘peace’ she had an ecstatic smile on her face. Peace was never again having to scurry to endless shouts of ‘Yvonne, where’s the bloody cider? We haven’t got all day,’ or ‘Yvonne, get yourself down to the wash house! Your brother can’t go off without clean clothes,’ or ‘Yvonne! Stop dreaming. The cow can’t calve on her own.’ Marriage seemed to offer a haven of tranquillity and she grabbed the first man who fitted the bill. The fact that he was a weedy specimen didn’t seem to worry her in the slightest. He was so short he had needed special dispensation to join the Navy – short in the head as the local backbiters put it. None the worse for that: she would find his absences easier to bear.
The difficulty was finding a date for the wedding. It had to be a time when all three seafaring brothers were at home, trickier now that they were all on different ships. It had to fit in with the holidays of the brother who was a teacher at Nantes, and with my own time in Raguenès. Yvonne was the Lozerechs’ only daughter, and they were bent on a grand wedding, with three bridesmaids all rigged out in almond-green organza and guests ferried in by coach from all over south Finistère.
And I meant it to be a grand wedding for Gauvin and me too. Celebrations seemed fated to be our downfall. Indeed, we were side by side at nine o’clock in the morning, sipping our first glass of muscadet, and I knew we should have to be more or less together the whole day, part of the night, and again the following day for the traditional ‘bringing back the bride’. Gauvin looked like a performing bear, almost unrecognisable, in his Sunday best, his unruly curls glued down with some sort of hair-cream. I knew I was maddeningly cool and elegant, very much the sophisticated Parisienne in a manifestly expensive creation of palest beige wild silk and matching ankle-strap shoes which made my naturally good legs look even better, and had that air of unruffled self-assurance, the privilege of everyone who has never dreamed of being born elsewhere than in the soft cradle accorded them by fate. That morning I was the embodiment of everything that Gauvin most hated. It simply made me more determined to crack that tough shell of his and get to the vulnerable core which I was certain lay within. That night on the beach lingered in my mind, like a door too quickly slammed on a barely glimpsed vista of light. Could I have imagined those feelings which still had the power to pierce my heart? And had Gauvin felt them too? Had I been mistaken about the intensity of his mood that night? I certainly wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in frustrated nostalgia. I would get to the truth that day if it killed me.
There was nothing to be done while we hung around interminably for photographs in front of the tiny chapel in Saint-Philibert, where the weedy specimen had been born. A spiteful breeze fluttered the bonnet ribbons and the Breton ruffs worn by the mothers of the bride and groom and a few other diehard traditionalists. Another gust made my exquisitely set ‘natural’ curls droop round my face in limp hanks.
When at last the photographer folded his tripod and covered his camera with a baize cloth we all trooped off to the Cafe du Bourg for drinks and dancing. But as soon as we got in, the men all clustered round the bar and the lads round the pinball machines, leaving the women to their own concerns. It was two o’clock in the afternoon before I found myself next to Gauvin at the top table. He was already a bit drunk but it was clear that the poor innocent was all set to work his way through the muscadet, the bordeaux, the champagne and the liqueurs which are obligatory at affairs like these. Mind you, I was counting on this for Operation Truth. Even before the inevitable ox tongue in madeira sauce, which would mean changing from white wine to red, I was acutely aware of Gauvin’s body, so close to mine. My father always quoted, ‘White on red, clear head. Red on white wrecks your night’. He ignored me completely. I told myself that it was because his fiancée was on the other side, looking prim in a pink dress which swore at her sallow complexion and the not-quite-blonde-enough hair, frizzed into one of those desiccated perms all the rage in Concarneau. She paraded a Queen of England bosom, a sort of single breast slung across her front like a bolster. Poor Gauvin, I thought, having to settle for that cushiony bulge. The wine was getting to me and I longed wistfully to feel his hand, both hands, on my breasts, soon, before the day was out. But how to make it happen? I concocted approaches so crude that he would have had to be even cruder to resist them – my sensitive soul could wait to reveal itself later. But like all the improper gestures I’ve ever thought of making in my life, the one that would have roused Gauvin from his irritating indifference escaped me. My body is obviously better brought up than my imagination.
As the hours passed, Yvonne’s wedding-feast slowly ran out of steam. Everyone sank into torpid repletion among the crumbs and stains and overturned glasses. Under the table the farmers’ wives undid their belts and kicked off the clumping court shoes bought from market stalls which had tortured their feet all day. Men queued
