He had lectured Marianne on the importance of food and its effects on the soul, even though he knew that she barely understood a word. He talked about how he loved to go shopping, and how true gastronomy began with hunting down the freshest, choicest produce. He spent his days off in low season visiting distilleries and mussel farms, or strolling along the Aven and Belon rivers or around the Bay of Morbihan to find patient retired anglers reeling in wild fish. These men still understood the rhythms of Brittany’s coastline. They knew that they had to be there at the right time, according to the dictates of moon and tides. High and low tide arrived a little earlier every day—two to four minutes earlier—and so they needed to be as swift and stealthy as foxes to catch the best moment for the fish to bite.
As the first steak orders began to come in, Jean-Rémy beckoned Marianne to his side. “No sear marks in my kitchen! That’s the kind of torture housewives and barbecuing husbands inflict on steak. It’s barbaric! Watch me. An oval pan. A little amann—butter. Medium heat, not too much tomm-tomm. That way, the butter stays close to the steak instead of spreading out, messing around with the shallots and getting burnt. Do you understand?”
Marianne watched him with fascination. He didn’t wear the meat out; he caressed it. Soon he lifted the steak out of the pan onto a hot plate and pushed it under a three-level grill set to eighty degrees. He left it there to cook a little longer and then gave it another minute on the warm plate before arranging the trimmings around it. “Voilà! Any other way of cooking and the steak curls up and dies. So if all you’ve ever done until now is toss meat onto the grill, forget it. Try it even once, and I’ll kill you.” He drew his hand across his throat like a blade. Marianne blushed.
He fetched a chopping board with squid tentacles on it and set it down among the shadows near the doorway. Seconds later, the orange-white cat emerged from its hiding place near the herbs. It waggled its backside in the sun as it gnawed away at this little delicacy.
Next, Jean-Rémy tossed the eight kilos of mushrooms that Marianne had washed into a deep pan of boiling water. He planned to reduce them until all that remained was half a liter of concentrated stock. A teaspoonful of this in a sauce was one of the little secrets that gave his food so much more flavor than other chefs’.
By now, Madame Geneviève and Laurine were constantly rushing into the kitchen and slapping order slips down on the counter. The young chef barked one-syllable instructions—“Non,” “Ja,” “Tomm-tomm!”—and then pointed to an aquarium containing lobsters and crabs.
“Choose a crab, Marianne,” he called, gesturing at the lobsters and crabs staring back with their long-stalked eyes. He pointed to one of the cooking pots and to the clock. “Put it in the fish stock, for fifteen minutes.”
“Put the poor thing in boiling water? But—”
“Allez, get a move on!”
“I’d rather not.”
Jean-Rémy impatiently grabbed a crab from the aquarium. As he was about to drop it into the seething water, the hot steam caused him to jerk his arm back.
Marianne said, “Jean-Rémy, please don’t. Not like that.” Her tone was beseeching. They stared each other in the eye, and he flinched first.
She took a deep breath, carefully picked up the crab and set it down on the polished steel table. It scrambled around a bit as she searched among the bottles on the sideboard before reaching for the cider vinegar and pouring a few drops into the creature’s mouth. The clatter of its pincers on the steel surface grew fainter before suddenly ceasing altogether.
“This may sound odd, but you can kill animals humanely too,” Marianne explained to Jean-Rémy, who was still standing in the center of the kitchen with raised hands and a disbelieving expression on his face. “Vinegar sends them to sleep, you know.” She cupped her hands to her cheeks, cocked her head and closed her eyes, then lowered the crab into the boiling water. “It’s bathtime. See, it doesn’t hurt so much.”
Jean-Rémy noticed that the crab didn’t recoil from the hot steam as the others who had accomplished this final passage had done.
Under Jean-Rémy’s guidance, Marianne cut up the crab and prepared a sauce of onions, garlic, butter, sour cream and herbs, which he then flambéed with a little Calvados and deglazed with a splash of Muscadet. He tried a bit of claw meat: something was different. A tiny difference. It tasted of the sea. Marianne’s little vinegar ploy had returned the taste of the sea to the crab.
“Nice trick, savior of sea creatures!” said Jean-Rémy. “Right, now let’s get on with everything else, or there’ll be a riot out there.”
After an hour, Marianne felt as if she’d spent her whole life moving around a Breton kitchen among hissing gas flames and bright, shiny pots and pans. When the rush was over, Jean-Rémy poured some Muscadet into a couple of water glasses, cut up a lobster and waved to Marianne to take a dinner break with him on the sun-bathed doorstep in the backyard. The sun was dancing with the leaves of the trees, and the air was thick with the scent of rosemary and lavender.
“You’re a good cook,” Jean-Rémy remarked and raised his glass. “Yar-mat.”
Marianne had hardly ever drunk wine in the daytime, let alone eaten lobster. She observed Jean-Rémy out of the corner of her eye, and when he unashamedly used his fingers, she followed his example. For one delicious moment, life felt better than ever before.
—
Jean-Rémy had given her an advance on her wages at the end of her shift. The restaurant was closed the next day. Marianne had gone upstairs to the Shell Room and taken a bath, enjoying the weariness that suffused her body. The cat had sat on the side of the bathtub and licked itself clean. Now Marianne was lying on her bed, gazing at the banknotes she’d propped up against the tile. Her very own money.
She turned over onto her back and realized that she was squashed up against the left-hand edge of the bed, as if Lothar’s body still occupied most of the space. She inched over into the middle and slowly spread her arms.
The cat made a daring leap and settled down between her calves. He needs a name, thought Marianne as she stroked him gently. But…if she gave him a name today, nobody would call him by it after tomorrow. For tomorrow she planned to say goodbye.
She got up again. She wanted to get a glimpse of Kerdruc at dusk. She switched off the light and opened one side of the window. All she could hear was the gurgling of the river, the soft slapping of the steel cables against the ships’ masts, and the chirping of the crickets. At first the colors appeared to intensify, as if they were blossoming once more in the bluish twilight, but then they began to fade and dissolve into countless shadows.
A silhouette was moving toward the breakwater, and Marianne stepped back from the window as if she’d been caught red-handed. She saw Madame Ecollier stop on the quayside and raise a glass of champagne. Her entire body radiated defiance—defiance and anger. It was like gazing into a living diary.
Madame Ecollier was toasting Rozbras on the other side of the river. It looked neater, more elegant and more expensive on the far bank, like a model village, thought Marianne, her gaze following that of the restaurant owner. Kerdruc was an untidy, weathered relic in comparison.