Why Noirmoutier? he wondered as the car sped on and Mélanie hummed to “Let It Be.” He had never considered himself a nostalgic person. He had never looked back. But since his divorce he had changed. Relentlessly he had found himself thinking more about the past than the present or the future. The weight of the past year, his first year alone, that dreary, solitary year, had sparked off pangs of regret, longing for his childhood, striving for happy memories. That was how the island had come back to him, timidly at first, then more powerfully and more precisely as the memories came tumbling in like mail gathering in a box.
His grandparents, regal and white-haired—Blanche with her parasol and Robert with his silver cigarette box that never left him, sitting on the shadowy hotel veranda and drinking their coffee. He would wave at them from the garden. His father’s sister, Solange, plump and sunburned, reading fashion magazines in her deck chair. Mélanie, small and wiry, a floppy sun hat framing her cheeks. And Clarisse raising her heart-shaped face to the sun. And their father turning up on weekends smelling of cigar smoke and the city. And the cobbled submersible road that fascinated him as a child and still did. The Gois passage. You could only use it at low tide. Before the bridge was built, in 1971, it was the only way to get onto the island.
He wanted to do something special for Mélanie’s birthday. He had been thinking about it since April. Not just another surprise birthday party with giggling friends hiding in the bathroom and laden with bottles of champagne. No, something different. Something she would remember. He needed to shift her out of the rut she was stuck in, her job that was eating up her life, her obsession with her age, and, above all, her not getting over Olivier.
He had never liked Olivier. Stuck-up, pompous snob. He cooked superbly. Made his own sushi. Specialized in Oriental arts. Listened to Lully. Spoke four languages fluently. Knew how to waltz. And couldn’t live up to commitment, even after six years with Mélanie. Olivier wasn’t ready to settle down. Despite being forty-one. So he had left Mélanie only to promptly get a twenty-five-year-old manicurist pregnant. He was now the proud father of twins. Mélanie never forgave him.
Why Noirmoutier? Because they had spent unforgettable summers there. Because Noirmoutier was the symbol of the perfection of youth, of those happy-go-lucky days when the summer vacation seemed endless, when you felt you were nine years old forever. When there was nothing more promising than a perfect day on the beach with friends. When school was a century away. Why hadn’t he ever taken Astrid and the children to the island? he wondered. Of course, he had told them all about it. But Noirmoutier was his private past, he realized, his and Mélanie’s, pure and untouched.
And he had wanted to spend time with his sister, just to be with her. On their own. They didn’t see that much of each other in Paris, he reflected. She was always busy, lunching or dining with some author or on a book tour. He was often off visiting a building site out of town or taken up with a last-minute deadline for a job. Sometimes she came over for brunch on Sunday mornings when the children were there. She made the creamiest scrambled eggs. Yes, he found he needed to be with her, alone with her at this fragile, complicated moment of his life. His friends were important to him, he needed their mirth, their entertainment, but what he craved now was Mélanie’s support, her presence, the fact that she was the only tie that linked him to his past.
He had forgotten what a long drive it was from Paris. He recalled the two cars—Robert, Blanche, and Solange in the lethargic black DS Citroën with Clarisse and Mélanie, and the nervous Triumph, their father at the wheel smoking his cigar and Antoine sitting in the back feeling nauseous. It took six or seven hours, including the leisurely lunch at the little auberge near Nantes. Grand-père was particularly picky about food, wine, and waiters.
Antoine wondered what Mélanie remembered of the endless drive. She was after all three years younger than he. She had said she didn’t remember anything. He glanced across at her. She had stopped humming and was studying her hands with that intent, stern expression that sometimes frightened him.
Was this a good idea? he pondered. Was she truly happy about coming back here all these years later, coming back to a place where forgotten childhood memories lingered, motionless for the moment, like the surface of untroubled water?
“Do you remember all this?” Antoine asked as the car climbed the broad curve of the bridge. On their right, along the mainland, rows of gigantic rotating silver windmills.
“No,” she said. “Just sitting in the car and waiting for the tide. And riding in along the Gois passage. It was fun. And our father getting so impatient because Grand-père got the tide schedule wrong again.”
He too remembered waiting for the tide. Waiting for hours for the Gois causeway to appear beneath the slowly receding waves. And there it was at last, cobbles glistening with seawater, a four-kilometer amphibian road dotted with high rescue poles with little platforms for unfortunate drivers and pedestrians stranded by the upcoming flood.
She put a quick hand on his knee.
“Antoine, can we go back to the Gois? I really want to see it again.”
“Of course!”
He felt elated that she had at last remembered something. And something as important and mysterious as the Passage du Gois. Gois. Even the word fascinated him. Pronounced like Boa. It was an old name for an old road.
Grand-père never took the new bridge. He grumbled about the excessive toll and how the concrete structure’s gigantic sweep scarred the landscape. So he stuck to the Gois passage despite his son’s jeering at him and the long wait.
As they drove onto the island, Antoine realized that his memories of the Gois causeway were intact. He could play them back in his mind like a movie. He wondered if Mélanie felt the same. The large austere cross at the beginning of the causeway came back to him. To protect and cherish, Clarisse used to whisper, holding his hand tight. He remembered sitting on the island shore and watching the waves dwindle into nothingness until the vast gray bank appeared like magic. Once the sea hissed away, the bank crowded over with shell searchers wielding shrimp nets. He recalled Mélanie’s little legs rushing along the sand and Clarisse’s plastic bucket soon overflowing with cockles, clams, and periwinkles. He remembered the sharp, tangy smell of seaweed, the bite of salty wind. His grandparents looking on, benign and weathered, arm in arm. And Clarisse’s long black hair aflutter. The cars would drone past along the causeway. Noirmoutier was no longer an island. He liked that idea. But the thought of the sea inching back up again, inexorable, was both thrilling and terrifying.
He had never tired of listening to gruesome Gois disaster stories. Back at the Hotel Saint-Pierre, the gardener, old père Benoît, layered on all the gory details. Antoine’s favorite story was the one about the June 1968 accident when three people of the same family drowned. Their car got stuck as the tide came up. They didn’t think of climbing one of the nearby rescue poles. The tragedy triggered headlines. Antoine couldn’t understand how a car could possibly be swept away by water and how people were unable to escape. So old père Benoît had taken him to watch the tide creeping in along the Gois passage.
For a long time, nothing had happened. Antoine had felt bored. Old père Benoît reeked of Gitanes and red wine. Then the boy noticed more and more people gathering around them. “Look, boy,” the old man whispered. “They’ve come to watch the Gois close over. Every day, at high tide, people come from far away to watch this.”
Antoine saw that there were no more cars making their way down the causeway. To his left, the immense bay filled slowly, in complete silence, like a huge transparent lake. The water seemed deeper and darker, trickling over the muddy ridges of sand. Toward the right, sudden swollen waves that had appeared from nowhere were already impatiently licking the causeway. The two separate fluxes of water came together in a strange and startling embrace that surprised him, casting a long ribbon of foam above the cobbled road. The Gois passage disappeared in a couple of seconds, engulfed by the tide. It was im
possible to imagine a road had ever lain there. Now there was only the blue sea and nine rescue poles emerging from its swirling surface. Noirmoutier was an island once more. Triumphant seagulls shrieked and circled overhead. Antoine marveled.
“You see, boy,” said père Benoît. “That’s how fast it goes. Some fellas think they can make it inland before the tide, only four little kilometers. But you saw that wave, didn’t you? Never mess with the Gois. Remember that.”
Antoine was aware that every Noirmoutrin had a copy of the tide schedule stuffed into a pocket or a glove compartment. He knew the folks here never said “When can you cross?” but “When can you pass?” He knew they didn’t measure the Gois metrically, but by its rescue poles: The Parisian got stuck by the second rescue pole. His engine was swamped. As a boy, he had hungrily read all the Gois books he could get his hands on.
Before this trip for Mélanie’s birthday he had hunted those books down. It had taken him a while to remember that they were in a jumble of cardboard boxes in his cellar, boxes he’d never bothered to unpack since his recent divorce and move. His best-loved book was there: The Extraordinary History of the Gois Passage. He had opened it, smiling, remembering how he would spend hours poring over the old black-and-white photographs of wrecked cars poking their bumpers out of seawater under a rescue pole. He decided to take the book with him, and as he closed it, a white card came fluttering out. Intrigued, he picked it up.
To Antoine, for his birthday, so that the Gois passage no longer holds any mysteries for you. Your loving Maman. January 7, 1972.
He hadn’t seen his mother’s handwriting for a long time. Something pricked the back of his throat. He had quickly put the card away.
Mélanie’s voice bought him back.
“Why didn’t we ride in on the Gois?” she asked.
He smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Forgot to check the tide schedule.”
The first thing they noticed was how Barbâtre had thrived. It was no longer the small village overlooking the beach that they remembered, but a bustling place boasting modern bungalows and malls. The island roads were thick with traffic, another nasty surprise. The summer season was at its peak for the long weekend of August 15, but when they reached the north end of the island, they saw to their relief that nothing much had changed. They entered the Bois de la Chaise, a green stretch of pine trees and holm oaks strewn with curiously different styled houses that used to amuse Antoine so as a child: nineteenth-century Gothic villas, logwood summer chalets, Basque-like farms, English manors, all bearing names that came back to Antoine like old friends’ faces: Le Gaillardin, Les Balises, La Maison du Pêcheur.
Mélanie suddenly exclaimed, “I do remember this!” She swept her hand toward the windshield. “All this!”
Antoine could not make out whether she was happy or nervous. He felt a little anxious. They turned into the hotel gates, wheels crunching on white gravel. Strawberry bushes and mimosas lined the alley. It hadn’t changed, he thought, slamming the car door. No, it hadn’t changed at all, but it looked a good deal smaller. The same thatch of ivy creeping up the façade. The same dark green door, the same blue-carpeted entrance, the stairs on the right.
They went to stand by the large bay window that looked out to the garden. The same hollyhocks, the same fruit trees, pomegranate trees, eucalypti, and oleanders. It was shockingly familiar. Even the smell lingering in the entrance was familiar. A musty, humid odor enhanced with beeswax and lavender, with fresh, clean linen and vestiges of good, rich food. The particular smell that old, large houses by the sea carry year after year. Before Antoine could mention the wonderfully recognizable smell to his sister, they were greeted by a buxom young lady sitting behind the reception desk. Rooms 22 and 26. Second floor.
On their way up, they peeped into the dining room. It had been repainted. Neither of them recalled that lurid pink, but the rest was exactly the same. Faded sepia photographs of the Gois, watercolors of Noirmoutier castle, of the salt marshes, of the Bois de la Chaise regatta. Same wicker chairs, same square tables covered with starched white tablecloths. Nothing had changed.
Mélanie whispered, “We used to come down the stairs for dinner. You had your hair plastered down with eau de cologne, and you wore a navy blue jacket and a yellow Lacoste shirt . . .”
“Yes!” He laughed and pointed to the largest table in the room, the one in the middle. “We used to sit there. That was our table. And you wore pink and white smocked dresses from that posh shop on the avenue Victor-Hugo and a matching ribbon in your hair.”
How proud and important he used to feel as he came down those blue-carpeted stairs in his blazer, his hair combed like a petit monsieur, and from their table, Robert and Blanche looking on fondly, a martini for Blanche, a whiskey on the rocks for Robert. Solange, sipping her champagne with her little finger in the air. And everybody used to look up from their dinner and admire the entrance of these beautifully groomed children, cheeks pink from the sun, hair smoothed back. Yes, they were the Rey family. The wealthy, respectable, impeccable, proper Rey family. They had the best table. Blanche gave the biggest tips. She had seemingly endless supplies of rolled-up ten-franc bills in her Hermès purse. The Rey table demanded constant, careful attention from the staff. Robert’s glass always had to be half full. Blanche wanted no salt whatsoever because of her blood pressure. Solange’s sole meunière had to be perfectly prepared, without the slightest, smallest fish bone, or she’d make a fuss.
Antoine wondered if anybody here remembered the Rey family. The girl at the reception desk was too young. Who recalled the patrician grandparents, the officious daughter, the gifted son who only came on weekends, the well-behaved children?
And the beautiful daughter-in-law.
All of a sudden, the precise memory of his mother coming down those stairs in a black strapless dress hit him in the chest like a blow. Her long black hair, still damp from the shower, twisted up into a chignon, her tiny, slim feet in suede slippers. Everybody watching as she glided into the room with that dancer’s step she had passed on to Mélanie. He could see her so clearly it hurt. The freckles on the bridge of her nose. The pearls in her earlobes.
“What’s wrong?” Mélanie asked. “You look peculiar.”
“Nothing,” he said. “Let’s go to the beach.”
A few moments later they were heading on foot toward the Plage des Dames, a couple of minutes away from the hotel. He remembered this little jaunt too—the thrill of getting to the beach, and how slowly the adults used to walk, and how aggravating it was to have to linger behind with them.
The path was packed with joggers, cyclists, teenagers on scooters, families with dogs, children, babies. He pointed out the large brown red-shuttered villa that Robert and Blanche nearly bought one summer. An Audi van was parked in front of it. A man his age and two teenagers were hauling groceries out of the trunk.
“I wonder why they didn’t buy it in the end,” said Mélanie.
“After Clarisse died, I don’t think anyone came back to the island,” he said.
“I wonder why,” said Mélanie again.
Antoine pointed one more time across the road.
“There used to be a little grocery shop right there. Blanche would buy us candy. It’s gone.”
They walked on in silence for a while. Then the beach appeared at the end of the road, and they both grinned, memories rolling in like waves. Mélanie pointed to the long wooden pier on the left while Antoine gestured to the uneven row of beach cabins.
“Remember our cabin—that rubbery, woody, salty smell?” Mélanie laughed. And then she cried out, “Oh, look, Tonio, the Plantier lighthouse! It looks tiny all of a sudden!”
Antoine couldn’t help smiling at her enthusiasm. But she was right. The lighthouse he had so admired as a child, which used to tower over the pine trees, seemed to have shrunk. That’s because you’ve grown up, buster, he thought to himself. Yup, you’ve grown up. But how he longed, all of a sudden, to be that kid on the beach again,
that kid building sand castles, running along the pier and getting splinters in his feet, pulling on his mother’s arm for another glace à la fraise.
No, he wasn’t that kid anymore. He was a divorced, lonely middle-aged man whose life had never seemed emptier, never seemed sadder than today. His wife had left him, he despised his job, and his adorable kids had morphed into sullen teenagers. He was pulled away from his reminiscences by a bloodcurdling whoop. Mélanie, no longer by his side, had stripped to a daringly brief bikini and was flinging herself into the sea. He looked at her, flabbergasted. She seemed incandescent with joy, her long hair hanging like a black curtain down her back.
“Come on in, you noodle!” she yelled. “It’s divine!”
She pronounced divine the way Blanche used to, dee-vine. He hadn’t seen his sister in a bathing suit for years. She looked good, taut and firm. Certainly better than he did. He had put on weight in that initial dreary year of his divorce. Those lonely evenings in front of the computer or the DVD player had taken their toll. Gone was Astrid’s healthy, wholesome cooking, a perfect balance of protein, vitamins, and roughage. He now lived on frozen food and takeout, rich stuff you could heat up fast in the microwave, and it had nicely added on pounds during that first, unbearable winter. His long, lanky build had grown a potbelly, like his father’s, like his grandfather’s. Going on a diet had been too much of an effort. It was bad enough getting up in the mornings, gearing up to try to keep up with the workload piling up. Bad enough living alone, when he had just spent the last eighteen years married and raising a family. Bad enough trying to convince everyone, most of all himself, that he was happy.
The thought of Mélanie’s eyes on his pale, flabby stomach made him wince.
“I left my bathing suit at the hotel!” he yelled back.
“You dope!”
He went to stand on the wooden pier that reached far into the water. The beach was filling up steadily with families, old people, sulky teenagers. It had not changed. Time had not altered a thing. It made him smile, but it also made tears come to his eyes. He brushed them away angrily.