The silky southern air streamed through the car. Jean had wound down all the windows of the clapped-out Renault 5. Gérard Bonnet, Brigitte’s husband, had lent him this one after they had dropped off the rental car in Apt.
The right door was blue, the left one red, and the rest of the old banger was a rusty-beige colour. Perdu had set out in this car with a small travel bag. He had driven via Bonnieux to Lourmarin, and then via Pertuis to Aix. From there he had taken the fastest route south to the sea. Marseilles was resplendent and proud, spread out on the bay down below – the great city where Africa, Europe and Asia kissed and did battle. The port lay like a glittering, breathing organism in the summer twilight as he came out of the hills on the motorway near Vitrolles.
To his right the white houses of the city. To his left the blue of sky and water. The view took his breath away.
The sea.
How it sparkled.
‘Hello, sea,’ whispered Jean Perdu. The view tugged at him as though the water had pierced his heart with a harpoon and was slowly reeling him in on strong ropes.
The water. The sky. White vapour trails in the blue above, white bow waves on the blue below.
Oh yes, he was going to head into this boundless blue. Along the cliffs, and on and on and on. Until he shook off the trembling that still plagued him. Did it come from abandoning Lulu? Did it come from abandoning the hope that he had emerged from the sorrow?
Jean Perdu wanted to carry on driving until he was sure. He wanted to find a place where he could hole up like a wounded animal.
Heal. I have to heal. He hadn’t known that when he’d left Paris.
He switched the radio on before he could be overwhelmed by the thought of everything he hadn’t known.
‘If you were to describe one event that made you who you are, what would it be? Give me a call, and tell me and everyone listening in the Var area.’
The woman presenter with the friendly mousse-au-chocolat voice gave a phone number, then she put on some music. A slow track. Like rolling waves. The occasional melancholy sigh of an electric guitar. Drums murmuring like surf on the shore. ‘Albatross’ by Fleetwood Mac: a song that made Jean Perdu think of gulls wheeling in the setting sun, and of driftwood fires flickering on a beach at the edge of the world.
As Jean drove along the motorway through the warm summer air above Marseilles, and wondered what his event might have been, ‘Margot from Aubagne’ told listeners about the moment when she began to become herself.
‘It was the birth of my first child, my daughter. She’s called Fleur. Thirty-six hours in labour. Who’d have thought that pain could bring such joy, such peace? I felt an incredible sense of release. All at once everything had a meaning, and I wasn’t scared of dying any more. I had given life, and pain was the path to joy.’
For an instant Jean could understand this Margot from Aubagne. Nonetheless, he was a man. What it felt like to share one’s body with another for nine months remained a mystery to him; he would never be able to understand how part of himself could be passed on to a child and leave him forever.
He entered the long tunnel under Marseilles’ cathedral, but he had radio reception anyway.
The next caller was Gil from Marseilles. He had a rough, hard, working-class accent.
‘I became myself when my son died,’ he said falteringly, ‘because grief showed me what’s important in life. That’s what grief does. In the beginning it’s always there. You wake up and it’s there. It’s with you all day, everywhere you go. It’s with you in the evening; it won’t leave you alone at night. It grabs you by the throat and shakes you. But it keeps you warm. One day it might go, but not forever. It drops by from time to time. And then, eventually … all of a sudden I knew what was important – grief showed me. Love is important. Good food. And standing tall and not saying yes when you should say no.’
More music. Jean left Marseilles behind.
Did I think I was the only one grieving, the only one knocked sideways by it? Oh, Manon. I had no one I could talk to about you.
He thought back to the trivial event that had caused him to cast off from Paris: seeing Hesse’s Stages made into novelty bookends; that deeply personal poem of human understanding … used for marketing purposes.
He vaguely grasped that he could not afford to skip a stage in his mourning. But which one had he reached? Was he still in the end stage? Had he already reached a new beginning? Or was he falling, losing his footing? He turned the radio off. Soon he saw the exit for Cassis and got in the lane.
He left the motorway, still deep in thought, and reaching Cassis a little later, he wound his way noisily up its steep streets. An abundance of holidaymakers, inflatable plastic animals; elsewhere, ladies in evening dresses and diamond earrings. A large poster in front of an expensive-looking beach restaurant advertised a ‘Bali buffet’.