“Does he love you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve ever really known.” She hastily pulled on a pair of trousers and a sweater, and hid her damp hair under a beret.
“Where are you going? To him?”
Marianne didn’t reply. She had no answers to these questions; she knew only that she had to leave. Leave Yann, from whom she’d kept secret her identity and her past, hiding the fact that she was only an old woman from Celle who’d lived a dull life. Not the kind of woman a man like him truly deserved. She had led him to believe that she was free, but she wasn’t.
“Marianne. Please. Mon amour—”
She put her index finger on his lovely curving lips. The way he was looking at her, without his glasses in the bright afternoon light…My God, they had made love with ravenous desire the night before, gazing hungrily at each other, but it was clear in the hard light of day that neither of them was young anymore; they were aging. Yet their feelings were young, and old yearnings had waited to be woken inside them. Now, though, Marianne was overwhelmed with a wave of shame.
I’ve committed adultery.
And she’d enjoyed it. She would do it again if she could, but she couldn’t. She had all these conflicting emotions inside her, but they couldn’t be spoken.
She put on her jacket and slipped into her linen shoes, then reached for her suitcase.
“Marianne!” Yann got to his feet as he was, naked. He looked at her with eyes full of grief. “Kenavo, Marianne,” he said quietly, pulling her into his embrace. She threw her arms around this man who was already more to her than Lothar had ever been. Her husband had never given the slightest hint that she was special or loved. This delighted and terrified her at the same time, and the terror drove her down the stairs and out of the guesthouse.
As she emerged into the afternoon sun, she drowned in a saturated blaze of light, air and intense color all around, in the trees and in the water. She cast a glance through the open kitchen door. Jean-Rémy. She had to tell Jean-Rémy that…
She heard a murmur of voices from the terrace, and the sound of a television set. She heard her name repeated in the general hubbub and she knew that everyone had seen her. Everyone now knew that she was a fraudster, a runaway and a crazy suicidal wife.
She didn’t dare to face them. The little cat wound its way through her legs. She stepped around it without a glance, and the animal began to shriek. It didn’t meow, it didn’t hiss; it let out a shrill scream, as if it were straining its vocal cords to produce something other than a cat sound.
Marianne made no attempt to stem the flow of tears that blurred her vision as she strode up the narrow street that would lead her away from the harbor, away from Yann, away from the cat, away from everything and out of Kerdruc.
She walked and she didn’t look back. The farther she walked, the greater her feeling of being sewn into a bag and drowned. She was finding it harder and harder to breathe. She felt as if she were about to die. Only now, that was no longer what she wanted.
On his way back to Kerdruc, Jean-Rémy had made an unplanned detour via Rospico and on to Kerascoet, a five-hundred-year-old weavers’ village of renovated thatched cottages built of standing stones.
Madame Gilbert lived on the edge of the village. Jean-Rémy let his motorbike coast into her courtyard, which was surrounded by pine trees. As he removed his helmet, he heard the boom of the sea. He thought of the letters to Laurine that lay freezing in the cooler.
He found Madame Gilbert on one of the hidden terraces high above the coastal path. She was alone.
“Take off your sunglasses.” Those were the first words they exchanged once he had pulled her from her chair and pushed her before him into her bedroom. She took off her glasses, laid them on the bedside table next to a picture of her husband and placed her hand, palm up, over her eyes to hide her wrinkles.
She had blocked out the heat of the scorching sun behind the blue shutters. When Jean-Rémy’s eyes had got used to the half-darkness, and he had repeatedly moved himself against Madame Gilbert, his thoughts turned to Laurine. Then he forgot her and thought of nothing, merely feeling, as Madame Gilbert occasionally moaned in amazement at his frenzy. Only when he felt from the tension in her body that she had come did he pull back.
Jean-Rémy didn’t love Madame Gilbert, which was why he had become her lover. He hadn’t been to see her for a long time, a very long time—almost as long as he knew he had been in love with Laurine. Since then he had not slept with any other woman to save himself for Laurine. It was stupid; then again, it wasn’t.
Madame Gilbert didn’t ask where he had been for the past two years. She was experienced and she knew that the pleasure of a man twenty years her junior wouldn’t last forever.
She stroked the damp hair at the back of Jean-Rémy’s neck with the tips of her immaculately manicured fingernails. In her arms, Jean-Rémy felt as if he were bidding farewell to an idea, an alternative life. After a time on the margins, he had now returned to his homeland, where affairs flourished but nothing lasted: everything could be carried off by the wind. Beyond the border had lain love, where things had deep roots that allowed them to withstand storms and fear. Sleeping with Madame Gilbert meant there would be no more room for love in his life.
She lit a cigarette and sat up. “There’s going to be a storm later,” she said.
“Will you welcome me again soon?” asked Jean-Rémy.
“You know the times, mon cher. Don’t ring in advance, or else I start imagining what might happen when you’re here.”
“What do you imagine?”
Madame Gilbert pulled his head down until his ear touched her lips. Her lipstick was smudged from his kisses. She whispered what she imagined to him, and as she spoke, he closed his eyes. She kept speaking as he levered himself on top of her and into her again, and as she painted her arousal in words, he came for a second time.
Afterward, he gathered his clothes, the last of which—his helmet and scarf—he found out on the terrace next to the deck chair. The ice cubes in her glass had melted, turning the orange juice a milky hue.
When he bent over Madame Gilbert to kiss her, she said, “By the way, today is our anniversary. My husband thought it would be a good idea to celebrate our twenty-three years together at Ar Mor. So please reserve a table for us, will you, darling?” She peered at him through inscrutable eyes like bright marbles as cool as the sea.
—
Riding back to Kerdruc, Jean-Rémy flicked up the visor of his helmet. When his eyes began to water, he could be sure that it was the wind. It was always the wind that extinguished things and drove them away, even tears.
—