‘Oh, we enjoy the tourists,’ Madame Buissonnet commented. ‘Of course we do.’
One by one, the tables were deserted. When the waiter whom Madame Buissonnet considered stylish brought chocolates and coffee, only a few were still occupied – the one at which the girl sat alone, a corner one at which Italian was spoken, a third at which a couple now stood up. The man in the blue suit returned, his progress unsteady and laboured, an apologetic smile thrown about, as if he were unaware that the chairs he circumvented were empty. He sat down noisily and at once stood up again, seeming to seek the attention of a waiter. When one approached he waved him away but, still on his feet, filled his glass and spilt it as he sat down. The girl poured coffee. She did not speak.
‘È oritologo,’ someone said at the Italian table, a woman’s voice carrying across the restaurant. ‘Scrive libri sugli uccelli.’
The man in the blue suit stood up and again looked around him. He pulled at the knot of his tie, loosening it. He groped beneath it for the buttons of his shirt. His companion stared at the tablecloth. Was she weeping? Guy wondered. Something about her bent head suggested that she might be.
There was a glisten of sweat on the man’s forehead and his cheeks. He raised his glass in the direction of the Italians, smiling at them foolishly. One of them – a man in a suede jacket – bowed stiffly.
The waiters stood back, perfectly discreet. Amused at first by the scene, Madame Buissonnet now glanced away from what was happening. They should be going, she said.
‘Mi dà i brividi,’ one of the Italians exclaimed quite loudly, and they all got up, the women gathering handbags and shawls, one of the men lighting a fresh cigarette.
Watching them go, Guy realized that all evening he had been stealing glances at the girl who shared the drunk man’s table. Especially when she was alone he had kept glancing at her, unable to prevent himself. She was very thin. He had never seen a girl as thin. All the time he had talked about Gérard and Jean-Claude, and André Délespaul and Colette, all the time he had listened to the details of the olive harvest, while he’d shaken Monsieur Perdreau’s hand and laughed at his joke, he had imagined being with her in the little bay where he swam and at Le Nautic or the Café Vert in the village. He had looked for a wedding ring, and there it was.
The drunk man laughed. He waved at the Italians, his laughter louder, as if he and they shared some moment of comedy. The one who’d just lit a cigarette waved back.
‘Hi!’ the drunk man called after them, and lurched across the restaurant, knocking into the chairs and tables, apologizing to people who weren’t there. He stopped suddenly, as if his energy had failed him. He was confused. He frowned, shaking his head.
It wasn’t a real smile when the girl smiled at Guy; it was too joyless for that, with a kind of pleading in it. She smiled because all evening she had been aware he’d been unable to take his eyes off her. Had she really once married this man? Guy wondered. Could they really be husband and wife?
‘Thank you, Guy,’ Madame Buissonnet said, as she always did when the evening ended. The bill came swiftly when he gestured for it. He signed the carte bancaire.
‘Yes,’ Monsieur Buissonnet said. ‘Thank you.’
It was then that the man fell down. He fell on to an unlaid table and slithered sideways to the ground. Waiters came to help him up, but he managed to scramble to his feet by himself. His wife didn’t look. Guy was certain now she was his wife.
‘Hi!’ the man shouted at the Buissonnets. ‘Hi!’
He was laughing again and he shouted something else but Guy couldn’t understand what it was because the man spoke in either English or German; it was difficult to distinguish which because his voice was slurred. He clattered down, into the chair he’d been sitting on before. He spread his arms out on the tablecloth and sank his head into them. The girl said something, but he didn’t move.
Guy didn’t let his anger show. He was good at that; he always had been. It could happen like this that you fell in love, that there was some moment you didn’t notice at the time and afterwards couldn’t find when you thought back. It didn’t matter because you knew it was there, because you knew that this had happened.
‘I talked to those people on my walk today.’ It seemed hardly a lie, just something it was necessary to say. Anything would have done.
Madame Buissonnet displayed no surprise, accepting Guy’s claim without a knowing smile. A man of the world in such matters, Monsieur Buissonnet said the key to the farmhouse would be where it always was when it was left outside: in the dovecot. ‘Madame must have her beauty sleep,’ he added, tucking his wife’s arm into his.
‘It is no trouble.’
Again Guy imagined being with her in the little bay, and telling her in Le Nautic or the Café Vert why he was on the island, explaining about the Buissonnets, explaining why it was that he had been in the restaurant when first they saw one another, how he had told the Buissonnets a lie, how they had guessed it was a lie, and how that didn’t matter.
‘Madame,’ a waiter murmured, offering help, repeating what Guy had said – that it was no trouble – pretending that nothing much had happened.
The man in the blue suit was awake and on his feet, squeezing his eyes closed, as if to clear what was faulty in his vision, blinking them open again. Guy and the waiter helped him across the restaurant, across the foyer to the lift. The girl who had been humiliated whispered her gratitude, seeming not to have the confidence to raise her voice. She looked even thinner, even frailer, when she was on her feet.
On Sunday, on the last of the evening ferries, Guy would leave the island, his visit over. Even sooner she might go herself, first thing in the morning, hurrying off with her companion because of the shame they shared. In the lift there was no embarrassment when they touched, her shoulder pressed on Guy’s because the lift was small. He felt panic spreading, affecting his heartbeat, a dryness in his mouth. Yet how could she go so swiftly when she had pleaded so? Where had the pleading come from if not from their being aware of one another? Alone at her table when her boorish husband left her to fend for herself, she had been disturbed by a stranger’s gaze and had not rejected it. Why had she not unless she’d known as certainly as he? Even before they heard one another’s voices, there had been that certainty of knowing. All intuition, all just a feeling across a distance, and yet more than they had ever known before.
‘Voilà!’ the waiter murmured, producing the key of the couple’s room from one of the man’s pockets. A moment before there had been consternation when it could not be found.
Love was conversation: Gérard had said that, and Guy had never understood until tonight. They would sit on the rocks and their conversation would spread itself around them, their two lives tangling, as in a different way they had already begun to. Club 14, Gérard, Jean-Claude, Jean-Pierre, Colette, Michelle, Dominique, Adrien, the walk from the rue Marceau to the Café de la Paix after a badminton game, his mother, and all the rest of what there was: tomorrow and Saturday were not enough. Well, of course they did not have to be.
She gave the waiter a hundred-franc note when the man had been dumped on the bed. The waiter put the room key on the writing-table. When he went he did not seem surprised that Guy did not go also, perhaps sensing something of what had come about. Only once in a whole lifetime, Guy thought, fate offered two people this. ‘How much a visitor you are!’ Michelle said once, and truth to tell he had always felt so, not quite belonging in the group, not even with his mother. And with the Buissonnets, of course, he was a visitor too. All that would come into the conversation; everything would in the end.
‘Thank you,’ she said, speaking in English, and then in French in case he had not understood. But he could manage a little English, and wondered if these were Americans or English people. On the bed the man was snoring.
‘Please,’ she said, opening the minibar and gesturing toward its array of little bottles. ‘Please have something.’
He wanted to say s
he mustn’t feel embarrassed. He wanted to reassure her absolutely, to say that what had occurred downstairs was of no possible consequence. He wanted to talk of all the other matters immediately, to tell her that years ago he had guessed that Monsieur Buissonnet was his father, that he was certain he owed his position in the Crédit Lyonnais to Monsieur Buissonnet’s influence. He wanted to tell her that nothing was ever said – not a word – by Madame Buissonnet about his mother, or by his mother about Madame Buissonnet, that he had long ago guessed his mother had been a woman in Monsieur Buissonnet’s life before his marriage. It would have been before his marriage; it was not Monsieur Buissonnet’s style to be unfaithful.
‘Oh, then, a cognac,’ he said.
It was not ever said that the farm would one day be his. That was why Monsieur Buissonnet talked so often and so much about it, why Madame Buissonnet asked if this was right, or that, when she chose the colours for a room she wanted to have repainted.
Guy took the glass that was held out to him and for a second his fingers brushed the fingers of the girl he had fallen in love with. He had not known until tonight that it was something you could tell in minutes, even seconds, when you first loved somebody.
‘You have been kind,’ she said. She sat in a low armchair beside the minibar and Guy sat by the writing-table. She flattened the skirt of her white dress over her knees. So much about her was like a child, he thought: her hands as they passed over the white material, the outline of her knees, her feet in high-heeled shoes. Her fair hair fell tidily, framing an image of features in which he believed he could still detect the lingering of the hurt she’d suffered. Her eyes were blue, as pale as the sky there’d been that day.
‘Are you American?’ he asked, carefully speaking English, translating the question from the French.
‘Yes, American.’
It was awkward, the man being there, even though he was asleep. His mood might not be pleasant if he woke up, yet it did not seem to matter; it was only awkward. Guy said:
‘I have only been in the restaurant of the hotel before. Not in a room.’
‘You are not staying here?’
‘No, no.’
She went to the bed and pushed the man on to his side, exerting herself to do so. The snoring ceased.
‘I come every year to the island,’ Guy said. ‘The Buissonnets have a farm.’
‘The people you were with?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have never been here before.’
‘People find it tranquil.’
‘Yes, it’s that.’
When she sat down again the gaze they held one another in was as bold as for each of them it had been downstairs, as open and as confident. Guy hadn’t realized then that this confidence had been there, and the openness. He wondered if – until she smiled – he had assumed that in the unobtrusive lighting of the restaurant she had failed to notice his obsessive interest. He couldn’t remember what he had assumed and it didn’t seem to be important. He wondered what she was thinking.
‘We came by chance here,’ she said. ‘To the island.’
‘Yes.’
‘Please don’t get up and go.’
He shook his head. She smiled and he smiled back. He would show her everything on the island, and when the moment for it came he would tell her that he loved her. He would tell her that never before had he loved a girl like this, had only been attracted in the more ordinary way. That could be because he was what Michelle had called a visitor, always a little on his own. It could have to do with the circumstances of his birth, so little being said, nothing whatsoever really. Who can tell? Guy wondered. Who can tell what makes a person what he is?
‘May I ask your name?’
‘It’s Guy.’
She didn’t give hers. Guy was nice, she said, especially as it was said in France. It suited him, the French way of saying it.
‘Some more?’ she offered.
He had hardly drunk a drop. He shook his head. She reached out to close the door of the minibar, shutting away the light that through its array of bottles had been falling on the thin calves of her legs. They would have a marriage like the Buissonnets’; in the farmhouse it would be like that. Slowly she reached down and took her shoes off.
The jaw of the man on the bed had fallen open. An arm hung down, fingers trailing the carpet quite close to where they were.
‘Guy,’ she whispered, her white dress in a bundle on the floor, one of her shoes on its side. ‘My dear,’ she whispered.
There was an urgency in her resistance to his drawing back from the act that was pressed upon him. There were no whispers now, and no caresses. Instinctively Guy knew there was no pleasure for her. She laughed when it was over, a soundless laugh, different from her husband’s yet it echoed that.
The room was stifling, the air gone stale, infected by the rank breath of the man who slept. Naked, she stood above him, looking down at his slumbering features, at the stubble that was beginning on his chin and neck, a dribble running from a corner of his mouth. She touched his shoulder, and for an instant his eyes opened. She said nothing, and he slept again. For all this – for what had happened, for what was happening still – she had returned a stranger’s gaze. Destruction was present in the room; Guy was aware of that.
She turned away, from the bed where her husband lay, from Guy. The drink she’d poured herself had not been touched. Guy watched her cross the room and close a door behind her. He heard the running of her bath.
He dressed, separating his clothes from hers. He might go to her, now that these minutes had elapsed. Tomorrow, he might say. In the Café Vert at half past ten, ten if it suited better. He would show her the island, he would show her the farm; she would tell him about herself. It could not be forgotten, what had happened, there could be no pretence; yet when they talked, when their conversation began, what had happened would not belong in it.
He laid her dress, with her underclothes, on a chair, arranged her shoes one beside the other on the floor. He drank the cognac, leaving none of it, wanting it because she’d poured it for him. Then he tapped on the door she’d closed.
Her voice came at once, harsh and loud, as it had not been before.
‘I’m having a bath. You’ll have to wait.’
She spoke in English. Guy understood the first sentence, but had to think about the second, and in thinking realized that it was the sleeping man who was addressed, that he himself should already have gone away. About to reply, to correct this misunderstanding, he hesitated.
‘Look about you while you’re waiting.’ Mockery was added to the other qualities that had come into her voice. ‘Why not do that?’
She would have liked it better had he woken up properly when she touched his shoulder; it was second best, her clothes thrown about, the two glasses where they’d been left. It was second best but even so it was enough. And the room’s impressions of what had taken place still hung about it.
Guy’s footsteps were soundless on the carpet as he moved away. He glanced as he passed the bed at the man in the bright blue suit, some spillage of food whitening a lapel, cheeks and forehead florid. He wondered what his name was, hers too, before he left the room.
The night air was cold, already the air of autumn. Slowly progressing on the dusty track, Guy wondered what the Buissonnets had said to one another. They might mention the incident in the morning, or might have decided that they should not.
The sea lapped softly over the pebbles of the bay where he swam. He sat down among the rocks, wondering if he would ever tell anyone, and if he did how exactly he would put it. It was how they lived, he might say; it was how they belonged to one another, not that he understood. In the cold bright moonlight he felt his solitude a comfort.
The Virgin’s Gift
A gentle autumn had slipped away, sunny to the end, the last of the butterflies still there in December, dozing in the crevices of the rocks. The lingering petals of the rock flowers had months before faded and fallen f
rom their stems; the heather was in bloom, the yellow of the gorse had quietened. It was a miracle, Michael often thought, a summer marvel that the butterflies came to his place at all.
Feeling that he had walked all Ireland – an expression used often in the very distant past that was his time – Michael had arrived at Ireland’s most ragged edge. He knew well that there was land to the north, and to the west and east, which he had not travelled, that no man could walk all Ireland’s riverbanks and tracks, its peaks and plains, through every spinney, along every cliff, through every gorge. But the exaggeration of the expression offered something in the way of sense; his journey, for him, had been what the words implied. Such entanglements of truth and falsity - and of good and evil, God and the devil – Michael dwelt upon in the hermitage he had created, while the seasons changed and the days of his life were one by one extinguished.
The seasons announced themselves, but for the days he kept a calendar - as by rule they had at the abbey – his existence shaped by feast days and fasting days, by days of penance and of rest. Among the rocks of his island, time was neither enemy nor friend, its passing no more than an element that belonged with the sea and the shores, the garden of vegetables he had cultivated, the habitation he had made, the gulls, the solitude. He sensed the character of each one of the seven days and kept alive the different feeling that each inspired, knowing when he awoke which one it was.
When the fourth day in December came it was St Peter Chrysologus’s. There was more dark than light now, and soon rain and wind would take possession of the craggy landscape. At first, in winter, he had lost his way in the mists that came at this time too, when all that was familiar to him became distorted; now, he knew better than to venture far. In December each day that was not damp, each bitter morning, each starry night, was as welcome as the summer flowers and butterflies.
When he was eighteen Michael’s vocation had been revealed to him, an instruction coming in a dream that he should leave the farm and offer himself at the abbey. He hardly knew about the abbey then, having heard it mentioned only once or twice in conversation, and was hazy as to its purpose or its nature. ‘Oh, you’d never want to,’ Fódla said when he told her, for ever since they’d first embraced he had told her everything. ‘You’d go there when you’re old,’ she hopefully conjectured, but her dark eyes were sad already, a finger twisting a loop of hair, the way she did when she was unhappy. ‘A dream’s no more’n a dream,’ she whispered in useless protestation when he repeated how the Virgin had appeared, bearing God’s message.