Geneviève checked the buttons of her black dress and pulled her hair back until her temples hurt. Fate had done her proud: this Marianne had a heart so big that a supertanker could do a U-turn inside it. The guesthouse owner wished she had that much room in her own heart.
Yes, there had been moments. There had been that one man, that love, laying existence bare in a way that made everything else pale into insignificance, swelling her heart to bursting point and making it big enough to hold the entire world. But then fate had unleashed its fury upon her.
Geneviève sighed and walked out of the restaurant and along the quayside. Gardeners were transplanting seedlings into pots on the terrace and removing the tangled weeds from around the front door of the guesthouse.
Laurine was sweeping Ar Mor’s terrace with a broom. “Mon amour, oh, mon amour,” she whispered to the broomstick, “je t’aime, sleep with me, right here and now.” She closed her eyes and began to waltz.
“Laurine!” The startled young woman dropped the broom, which clattered onto the polished planks. Her face went dark red under her bangs. “What’s wrong with you? Are you daydreaming?”
“Yes, Madame. I was dreaming that this was my lover and we were naked and he—”
“Silence!” thundered Geneviève.
Laurine picked up the broom and pressed it to her bosom.
“Go home and dream!”
“But there’s no one there.”
“There’s no one here either.”
The girl dumbfounded Geneviève. Nature had created her to make legions of men unhappy, and what did she do? She made herself unhappy.
Just as Madame Geneviève grabbed the broom from Laurine’s hand, an old Renault came coasting down the slope toward the harbor. Geneviève turned pale and clung to the broomstick.
A man got out of the Renault. Tall and wiry, wearing jeans, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up. He must have been handsome as a young man, and that handsomeness had matured into an expressive, virile, vigorous demeanor.
“Isn’t that…?” Laurine blurted out, eyes widening.
“It is. Go into the kitchen. Immediately,” Madame Geneviève ordered, and Laurine obeyed her.
“What do you want?” Geneviève Ecollier asked the man, who approached her as tentatively as a wild animal.
“To see where my guests will soon be heading,” he said in a voice that thrummed like a D major chord. “It looks as if you’re reopening the guesthouse soon.”
“Well, now you’ve seen it. Kenavo.”
“Genoveva…please.” His imploring gaze brought about no change in her impassive face.
Madame Geneviève pressed the broom to her chest and walked back into Ar Mor, her back ramrod-straight and her head held high.
“Genoveva,” the man called after her, tenderly, beseechingly.
—
Marianne retreated from the corner by the back door. She hadn’t intended to eavesdrop, and she hurried to bring the bunch of thyme from the vegetable patch to Jean-Rémy.
“Have you said something nice to Laurine today?” she asked casually. Jean-Rémy handed her a bucket of mussels and signaled to her to remove their beards.
“I told her she’s beautiful.”
“No you didn’t, tri?schin.”
Jean-Rémy mumbled something unintelligible as he stirred another pan of washed mussels that were bubbling away in a mixture of white wine, butter and shallots.
“There was a man outside. Do you know him?”
“Hmm,” Jean-Rémy growled. “Alain Poitier. From the other side. Rozbras. He’s our competitor.” He tipped the mussels into a large dish, picked out the unopened ones, poured the liquid through a sieve into a smaller pot and dusted the sauce with flour. Marianne passed him the saffron, the cream and the sour cream, and he added them to the mussel stock before boiling it down.
She reflected on what she had just seen. Nothing is colder than a heart that once blazed.
Alain Poitier wasn’t merely a competitor, she thought. He was also the man who had shaped Geneviève’s experience in such a way that her face only betrayed emotion at night and never in front of anyone.
Marianne wondered what kind of expression she herself might have had, how her body language might have changed, had she succeeded in making her husband love her, respect her or give her a flower, just one flower, once.
A few weeks later, on her morning walk along the seafront, Marianne recited every word for “gray” that she had so far learned. Sad, holes-in-the-laughter, plain, rooty: the Bretons had hundreds of names for the gray shades of sky and water. Their country made you want to keep on walking until you’d forgotten what time it was and where your car was parked, and you eventually forgot your old life and never went back to it.
Marianne couldn’t get enough of exploring Finistère’s footpaths, hiking through its dense woods, along its beaches and through wildflower meadows on the edge of pink cliffs. The roads were narrow and winding and the granite houses old and storm-beaten, their windows generally pointing inland. As she passed the hamlet of Kerambail shortly before Kerdruc, she saw a menhir rearing up from a field of ripe golden wheat, the stalks undulating around it like waves in the blustery westerly wind. She remembered what Paul had told her about these enchanted man-sized standing stones: at the first stroke of the clock at midnight on Christmas Eve, the menhirs would glide toward the coast to drink from the sea. In the dips they had deserted lay hidden treasures, and one had to remove them quickly to avoid being buried under the stone when the clock struck twelve.
Marianne heard a shot as she was approaching Kerdruc through the woods. It rang briefly in her ears before giving way to a deathly silence.
—
When Emile Goichon, Pascale’s husband, heard the sharp crack in the kitchen, he knew that he had lost yet another housekeeper. He took the last match from the box, scraped it across the rough surface and raised it with a trembling hand to the Breton brandy. The library door slammed against the shelf containing Montesquieu’s complete works. The match fizzled out.
“Outrageous! That woman tried to shoot me!” shouted the new housekeeper.
“That was my last match.”
“And all I did, monsieur, was make plum pudding and say to her, ‘Could you please pass me the cinnamon, Madame Pascale?’ And what does she do? She tries to gun me down like a stray dog!”
“How am I supposed to drink this brandy?”
“How can you put up with all these tangle-haired, flea-ridden animals, monsieur, these three-legged mongrels and one-eyed cats. They eat off your best china plates. It’s disgusting!”
“Do you have a match, Madame Roche?” he asked, staring at the source of these loud vociferations. A young woman’s beauty makes up for her lack of intelligence; an old woman’s intelligence makes up for her lack of beauty. But in Madame Roche, nothing made up for anything.
“This house is a den of iniquity! A den of iniquity, I say!”
“Piety is a sign that a person will do anything to be important in the world,” Emile remarked, at which Madame Roche’s mouth snapped shut like a mousetrap. Not a drop of warmth clouded her sharp brown eyes.
“I quit!” she blurted out.