She imagined what it would be like to sleep with Yann Gamé. Yet she soon forgot about it when she caught sight of Laurine, who was balancing two trays and was therefore unable to protect herself from the persistent groping of a drunken guest. Marianne strode toward the man and pushed him away. The stunned man spun around.
“Try that again,” she announced, “and I’ll chop your mitts off.” The man turned pale and vanished into the swirling crowd.
—
Paul spun Rozenn out of her rapid dance step to face him. It was just as it had always been: their bodies understood each other blindly; there was no need for their limbs to negotiate.
Initially, though, Rozenn had been completely defensive.
“One last dance, the last of our lives. I love you, Rozenn, but I’m going to let you go. Let this be my kenavo.”
Only then had she stepped into his arms. Paul had asked the musicians to play her favorite song, discreetly slipping them a few banknotes to encourage them to do so immediately.
Rozenn was a cat, egotistical and devoted and yet wolf-like, brazen in her ingenuous passion and as elegant as a queen.
“Does he treat you well?” asked Paul, when she had completed a twist and two locksteps and was once more spinning within his ambit.
“He treats me like a lady.”
“Oh, and how did I treat you? Like an Indian elephant?”
A surge of rage made her strut even more proudly and outrageously around Paul. She pushed him away; he pulled her to him.
“I felt like a heap of nothing after our divorce,” he hissed into her hair as he steered her mercilessly backward through the other dancing couples.
“Then it served its purpose,” growled Rozenn, slipping from his grip and scissoring her legs to the left and right of his thighs. He evaded them with a quick sideways movement and snapped her body backward until she lay in his arms with her head dangling.
“Is divorce forever?” he said, allowing himself to be sucked into the dark tunnels of her eyes. “Like marriage, until death saves you from one another?”
Rozenn flicked herself upright again, and Paul pulled her so tight that their lips were only a butterfly’s wingbeat apart. He could smell her perfume, the soap she always laid in her underwear pile, and the cider that was the last thing she had drunk. Her fingernails impaled themselves into the flesh of his back. “You good-for-nothing bastard,” she spat.
Their dance was a battle, in which passion deployed its full arsenal of weapons: humiliation and spite, yearning and torture, a faint echo of tenderness that caused equal offense.
Rozenn noticed Paul’s manhood pressing against her hip. She gazed into his eyes, and he saw triumph, desire and deep despair in that look. They were like two magnets that switched poles as they clashed, and were forced apart before gathering for the charge, colliding again and again, recklessly, shamelessly, obsessively. It was lust. They wanted each other so badly.
Paul didn’t need to look at Serge for confirmation that the younger man didn’t like what he saw. Serge could see how Paul shook something deep inside Rozenn that he himself would never be able to touch. He was clasping his hands together so tightly that his knuckles went white. He couldn’t stand up, even as Paul danced away from the breakwater with Rozenn and into the night; he just couldn’t.
—
Colette couldn’t tear her eyes from Sidonie’s face. She felt like a pinball balancing on the quivering tip of the final flippers above the drain.
“What is it?” she had asked, and with those three words she had thrown everything into question, including her life. Especially her life. It could have all been so different.
“Do you still not know?” Sidonie said, waves breaking in her eyes. Tears.
“Is it too late?” said Colette.
Before Sidonie could answer, she was startled by the sound of glasses shattering on the asphalt, followed by shrieks and a furious man’s voice. Serge had upended the table after watching Paul lead Rozenn off the dance floor and into the sheltering shadows.
Jean-Rémy, Simon and Laurent the butcher wrestled the raging man to the ground and locked him into the cooler with the cold-eyed mullets and half-baked baguettes.
The musicians onstage urged all the dancers to join in with a gavotte, the Breton circle dance, which only worked when everyone danced with everyone else: a grandfather with his niece, sporting copious piercings; the mayor with the village’s scandalous widow; her lover with the vicar’s wife, only joined by their little fingers. The men skipped on the spot as the women circled them with a mixture of flirtatiousness and diffidence.
Pascale found herself next to a boat mechanic from Raguenez, who asked her if she couldn’t lend him the white witch she was obviously training, just this once for his garden. Pascale presumed that he must be talking about her rake, and accepted, although of course she would have to ask her husband first. From behind the bar, Padrig was handing out miniature bottles of chouchen, while Jean-Rémy watched Laurine bending down to talk to one of the Parisians who spent every July lounging in their expensive holiday homes in Port Manec’h. A civil servant in ironed jeans. The chef could hardly bear to watch her smiling and nodding while the eyes of the Parisian in his smart jacket bored into every part of her anatomy. He nudged Padrig. “Go and ask that ugly Parisian what he wants to drink.”
“The only one I can see is very cute,” murmured Padrig, as he minced away.
Jean-Rémy thought of all the flowers he had secretly bought for Laurine. They were lying in the cooler alongside the letters he had written her and the compliments that had never made it past his lips.
—
Colette laid her hand on Sidonie’s, and the latter’s fingers enclosed her old friend’s. The sight of the two women, whose faces expressed what their lips had never uttered, deterred Simon from asking Colette for a dance. He carried the present he had wanted to offer her, along with his feelings, onto the Gwen II, which was nearby. He now knew with desperate certainty that Colette would never be his. His heart shattered like an anchor chain snagged on the rocks.
—
The ball broke up soon after the midnight firework display. The breakwater lay there like an exhausted lover who cannot decide whether to pull the sheets over her repeatedly caressed skin. Marianne scoured the bushes and the quayside for abandoned glasses. Yann had helped to put away the chairs and was now sitting in the kitchen having a glass of Calvados with Jean-Rémy.