My arguments were useless. His face closed sullenly. He looked dogged, but he couldn’t control a quiver at the corner of his mouth. Christ, how I loved that contradiction in him, between the vulnerability and the fierce impulsiveness of his nature. Seeing his pain made me love him even more. I deserved a beating for that.
As we left the restaurant I tried to put my arm round his waist, but he pulled away brusquely.
‘If that’s how you feel, best I be off tonight. No point in paying the hotel another night,’ he said flatly.
For me, giving up even one night was an insult to life, a rejection of the gift we had been offered. But I could not convince him of that. Lozerech was going back to his own kind, filled with bitterness against city girls who fucked up your life, then went off with a clear conscience. He was constructing a version of events which would fit his own world-view.
‘You’ll be sorry, maybe, that you turned down my offer,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re too complicated to be happy.’
He didn’t look at me. He never looked me in the eye when he criticised me. He reckoned that in a year – well, five at most – he could catch up to my level. He thought you could catch up on anything. He had no idea of the unfair advantages you get from a prosperous upbringing and a privileged education. He thought one got places simply by hard work. And he wasn’t one to shirk hard work. What was the point of being brave and industrious if you couldn’t conquer obstacles like those? He wouldn’t have believed me if I had told him that it isn’t just books and hard work which make the difference. It would have seemed too cruel, too unjust.
So I chose lesser arguments, more petty, more acceptable, which reassured him in a way. But the one who reasons is the one who loves less. Gauvin already knew this.
The last train for Quimperlé had gone. What joy! Now he would have to come and lie beside me one more time, this brute, who was getting more hostile by the minute. Back at the hotel he asked for another room, but they were all taken. I tried not to let my satisfaction show. As soon as we got to our room he started flinging things into his suitcase, the way they do in films. Then he undressed in silence, hiding his sex to punish me. In bed, I had once more that warm wheat smell of him, but he turned his back on me, that white back of a seaman who has neither the time nor the desire to sunbathe. His brown neck looked quite different, like a game of Heads, Bodies and Legs. I brushed my lips where the brown and white met below childlike wisps of hair, but he didn’t stir. An icy force field of rejection emanated from him, paralysing me, and I lay there, sleepless, as close as I could get without touching him.
In the small hours, sensing that he had dropped his guard, I couldn’t stop myself pressing my belly to his back and laying my cheek on his shoulder. In that silent half-sleep, I felt our deepest beings embrace, refusing separation. Outside our will, or, rather, beneath it, our sexes were signalling one to the other. Gauvin tried to ignore the message, but it was too powerful for him. He turned suddenly and threw himself on to me without any preliminaries, thrusting into the place that was calling him. He came immediately, hoping to humiliate me, but his mouth stayed glued to mine, and we fell asleep breathing each other in until the cruel break of dawn.
At 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