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 from the sweet shore,
Where 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