Yann had spent until his thirtieth birthday getting over his first great love. Thinking of Renée hurt a little less each year, and it took him a long time until he could finally feel angry about her affairs, which for her were as natural and necessary as breathing. He then began to forgive himself for loving her.
But did that other love really exist—the everlasting, golden, everyday love? Toujours l’amour was the term used for red wines of which you didn’t expect much. Damn, thought the painter, I miss love, being loved, a face looking at me and smiling simply because I’m there, a hand searching for mine in sleep. Someone with whom I am fully me. Someone whose face I’d like to be the last thing I see before I go to sleep forever. Someone who’s my home.
“All right then,” he said after a while. He put his glasses back on. Yann Gamé felt like painting something he hadn’t yet seen—the face of a woman who loved him. He couldn’t imagine what this woman might look like who was silly enough to fall in love with a shortsighted painter.
When he glanced up, Pascale was studying him anxiously, obviously confused. “Who the hell are you?” she asked.
“I’m painting you,” he answered, trying to find some cheerful words to conceal the pain her confusion caused him.
“That’s right, mon coeur, Monsieur Gamé is painting your portrait,” said Emile. He had just got back from shopping, a task that exhausted him now that Monsieur Parkinson had moved in and the three of them lived with Madame Dementia under one roof.
Pascale began to weep. “Madame Bouvet the housekeeper keeps shouting at me because I get everything mixed up.”
Emile brushed some strands of hair into place behind his wife’s ear. She was over seventy, but she looked younger every day. Her face was that of a young girl and her eyes were clear, the color of water. One couldn’t tell that those eyes sometimes saw the world differently from how it was in reality. Right now they were looking back to their sixth housekeeper, who had been utterly overwhelmed by Pascale’s symptoms and mood swings. Tomorrow Madame Roche would arrive: number seven. Emile hoped she was made of sterner stuff.
“Do you like me?” Pascale asked her husband.
Emile sat down beside her, took her hand and nodded. “I love you.”
Pascale looked at him with momentary surprise. “Oh! Does Papa know?”
Emile nodded again.
“I don’t think much of women who shout,” Pascale declared, and braced her hand on Emile’s knee to lever herself into a standing position. When she entered the kitchen and caught sight of the baskets of shopping, her hand flew to her forehead like a startled bird.
“I must tidy up!” she said to the two men. She reached for the straw hat hanging next to the fridge, then walked over to the tap, held the hat under the running water and began to use it to wipe the stains from the windowpanes. Emile hobbled toward her and laid his hand on her bare arm.
“Mon coeur,” he whispered, lacking the strength to say anything else.
Pascale turned to face him. “Oh yes,” she said, beaming, “how silly of me,” and put the hat on her head. Water streamed down her temples and cheeks as she picked up the sponge and rubbed the window with it while humming the “Ode to Joy.”
Yann glanced at Emile, who shrugged and joined in with Pascale’s humming. The couple began to dance slowly around the kitchen.
Yes, it did exist, this everyday love, toujours l’amour, and it took the sting out of pain.
Her doomsday didn’t come the next day or the day after that. For the past eleven days Marianne had woken shortly before sunrise and set off through the misty woods to die in the sea. But each day she grew stronger, shedding her world-weariness. The sun began to tan her skin, and the sea made her eyes brighter. Her knee seldom hurt her now.
Every morning she walked barefoot into the foaming waves, but the urge to surrender to them was always washed away by a defiance she couldn’t fathom. Once it was the pumpernickel she was desperate to bake for Jean-Rémy during one of their evening French lessons. Another time she had promised to go with him to the organic market in Trégunc. Then there was one of the weekly Wednesday concerts that Laurine wanted to take her to on their evening off. And if she was already there, she might as well take a look at the island off Raguenez, at the northern end of Tahiti Beach, which one could reach on foot at low tide. This was where the two lovers in Beno?te Groult’s novel Salt on our Skin had first slept with each other.
“I need a word with you,” Marianne said to Jean-Rémy on the twelfth day. He was tying up dough in linen bags, which he tossed into the simmering kig ha farz casserole, a traditional dish whose ingredients were pancakes, oxtail, flank of beef, cured pork, savoy cabbage and celeriac.
Marianne pushed the cauliflower florets to one side; the kaolenn-fleur came from a field directly by the coast. She started reading from the small order pad she used as an exercise book.
“This silliness. With you and Laurine. Stop it. Send her flowers every day. Be a man, not a…tri?schin…an, umm, cabbage-head!”
“Not sorrel?!” Jean-Rémy said with irritation before spelling out Marianne’s tasks to her. “First, mix the pig’s blood with flour, sugar, raisins, salt, pepper and a little chocolate. Paul’s twins are celebrating their birthday tomorrow and they’ve ordered silzig—blood sausage.”
Marianne collected herself. “Jean-Rémy. I was talking about Laurine!”
“Second, clean the morgazen—the squid. Remove the skin, the spikes, the beak and the suckers.”
At a sign from Jean-Rémy Marianne passed him a bowl filled with bottle corks, which he poured into the pot with the washed calamari tubes. The corks were intended to neutralize the proteins that made the calamari so chewy, and render the white flesh exquisitely tender.
“How about flowers?” Marianne continued to beseech him.
“The potatoes need peeling too!”
“Write her a love letter, will you?”
Jean-Rémy fled into the cooler. “Madame, tomorrow is the first day of the summer holidays, and the next day half of Paris will have moved to Brittany. The sleepy villages suddenly become frantic beehives, with tourists swarming in and out of this place, hungry for mussels and lobster. We won’t have a day off until the end of August. When do you want me to write letters?”
“At night?” Marianne said, then more gently, “You little tri?schin.”
—
Catching Marianne’s words, Madame Geneviève smiled to herself behind the bar. She was making an inventory of bottles, polished cutlery, glasses and cruet sets. She thanked every god in Brittany for this woman. Marianne had cleaned the guesthouse and washed and ironed mountains of bedsheets, pillowcases, tablecloths and curtains. The German woman was bringing the guesthouse to life.