“Sorry,” yapped Marianne, groping for the boat ladder. The man surfaced again beside her. Marianne clambered up the ladder, hiding her nakedness with both hands in shame, then ran into the cabin and locked herself inside.
—
Simon couldn’t work out what was going on. A woman on his boat? A naked woman? He continued to tread water.
“Hello,” he said. “Are you still there? I’m going to count to ten before I come up. If you’re still not decent by then…well, I’m almost seventy and I need glasses, so you’ve nothing to fear.”
He decided that he must still be drunk. He’d taken his boat out this morning without checking the cabin. He was longing for some strong coffee with a shot of Calva in it. There was no better way to get over a hangover than to carry on the next morning with the drink you’d left off the previous evening. He thought of the mysterious woman. Her eyes could knock a man dead—bright eyes the color of the fresh green buds of an apple tree in spring. The girl wasn’t exactly young, but somehow she was still a girl. That shocked look on her face!
The elderly fisherman let the swell carry him rather than trying to swim against it. The water was cold—fourteen or fifteen degrees Celsius—but he spread his limbs and allowed the coldness to flow through him.
Better. Much better.
He climbed resolutely up the ladder, quickly pulled on his trousers, slipped his faded blue shirt over his tanned torso and expertly weighed anchor.
—
Marianne watched him through the porthole. She hadn’t understood a word of what the white-haired man had shouted from the water. His speech was full of guttural sounds in a language she’d never heard before. It must have been Breton.
She felt the hum of the boat’s engine beneath her feet. What would he do next? She was trembling as she put her clothes on. She picked up her bag with one hand and a bread knife with the other, and opened the cabin door.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” she said with as much dignity as she could muster.
Simon ignored her until they were out of the channel where tankers plied to and fro. When his boat had reached the usual spot, which afforded a view of the whole Glénan archipelago, he throttled back the engine and studied the strange woman. He chuckled at the sight of the comical little knife as he unscrewed his thermos flask, poured coffee and Calvados into a cup and handed it to her.
“Thank you,” said Marianne, bucking up as she took a long swig. She hadn’t reckoned with the alcohol and began to splutter.
“Petra zo ganeoc’h?” Simon tried again. “What do you need?”
“I’m German,” Marianne explained with a stutter and slight hiccups. “And…my name’s Marianne.”
He pressed her hand briefly. “I’m from Brittany. The name’s Simon.” He started the engine again.
Good thing they’d sorted that out, he thought with a sigh of relief. He was from Brittany, she was from Germany—un point, c’est tout.
Marianne gazed out over the choppy waters around the boat. Black and turquoise, light green and navy blue. Clara was right: if you screwed up your eyes, everything was the same. For Clara it was heaven and earth; for Marianne it was where the sky met the water at the horizon, and the land toward which they were heading at increasing speed.
Down there, she thought. That’s where I wanted to be. Why didn’t I do it? Was I not cowardly enough? Or not brave enough?
She was confused by herself. She glanced at Simon. Her face was a picture of anxiety and doubt.
The fisherman wondered what this woman was afraid of. She was on constant alert, as if she were expecting a blow, yet at the same time she was drinking in her wide surroundings with thirsty eyes. It’s all right, girl. No need to be scared of me. Simon liked people who loved the sea as much as he did. He had often gone out on one of the Concarneau trawlers that went hunting for ray and cod in the North Atlantic around Iceland and Newfoundland. That took some coping with—nothing but water and sky for weeks on end.
He thought of Colette. She was one of the few attractions of dry land. He had stolen some flowers for the Pont-Aven gallery owner’s birthday and would go to Ar Mor to present them to her later—after, that was, he had dropped this spirit off. Who knows, this woman who had turned up on his Gwen II might be a wandering soul on its way to Avalon. Women: they were so damned complicated. As unpredictable as the sea.
He remembered what his father had said when Simon complained about the wild, unruly sea: “Learn to love it, son. Learn to love what you do, whatever it is, and you won’t have any problems. You’ll suffer, but then you’ll feel, and when you feel, you’re alive. You need troubles to be alive—otherwise you’re dead!”
The trouble in the dress before him was staring out at the water. Simon recognized the yearning in Marianne’s ardent gaze, full of wanderlust. He beckoned to her. She hesitantly got to her feet, and he guided her to the wheel, stood behind her and gently helped her to steer. They had left the mouth of the river Aven behind, and Kerdruc harbor was heaving into view.
Paul drove into Kerdruc. It was always best to sober up and let the wind and the sun wring the night from his body. His old friend Simon had left coffee, milk and pancakes on the kitchen table that morning, along with a bottle of Père Magloire Calvados. One of the chickens had jumped up onto the table and was observing its egg. Despite a quick nap on Simon’s couch, Paul felt as if he’d been dragged through a hedge backward. Maybe he could convince Simon to let him help out in the farm shop. After Simon had stopped going out to sea to work, he had converted his fisherman’s cottage in Kerbuan into a mini-market and now lived with his chickens in the kitchen.
He sold all kinds of stuff to gullible tourists. Ice honey, for example: collected by frost-resistant bees from flowers that grew in glaciated valleys in the Pyrenees. Oh yes. The tourists didn’t need to know that it was just tangy buckwheat honey. Then there was Simon’s scam with the menhir seeds—a paper sachet, emblazoned with a drawing of the fields of megalith stones in Carnac, containing a few crumbs of granite that had trickled from a crack in the outside wall of his house. “Menhirs grow very slowly for the first few hundred years,” Simon would explain to his deferential patrons. It would help if they used some good old Celtic soil from Brittany as fertilizer—which meant he could sell them a handful of dirt from his garden to go with the bits of stone.
But the best thing about Simon’s little store was that there were so many women in summer, and they found everything “nice” and “sweet.” They wore short dresses and dreamed of catching a Breton fisherman and having their very own Lady Chatterley’s Lover moment. Simon didn’t really like talking to all these tourists, especially the sophisticated Parisian women, and he wasn’t keen on pretending to be a rustic hunk. But for Paul, the gathering of so many different women in one place was a delightful occurrence.