“Homesick?” Alain asked. She nodded. He followed her gaze across the water to the far bank. It was a harbor that Alain was condemned to see, but where he wasn’t welcome. Yet something was different over there today.
It was tempting him. It seemed to be quivering. In the blue-tinged light of dusk, sparks were dancing—though in actual fact they were merely the lights of a host of swaying red lanterns. Among them shadows shifted, gathering for the night’s festivities. Suddenly Alain caught sight of a red shadow. He recognized that red. From his breast pocket he took a pair of opera glasses, through which he had spent so many nights peering desperately for a glimpse of Geneviève.
“Genoveva,” he whispered. She was wearing her engagement dress, the dress in which they had fallen in love with each other.
Was that the sign he had been waiting for these thirty-five years? Or was it merely mockery. Look, I’ve managed to forget you, Alain, and who I was when I loved you.
Laurine observed her new boss. He was good to her, gentle and clever, but the view through those binoculars had brought out something in his face that only a woman in love could comprehend: Alain Poitier was no more at home on this side of the Aven than she was. She took his hand, but it wasn’t clear who was clinging to whom—Alain to Laurine, or she to him. He belonged over there in Kerdruc, where two things were happening at that moment. Through his binoculars he could see that a van was rolling down the slope to the port and letting out four nuns and a priest; and from a taxi stepped a gray-suited man, who looked around with an expression of disbelief that he had washed up in this place at the end of the world.
—
“Is it normal to feel so sick?” asked Marianne, glancing from the gavotte players to Grete and back again with a pained expression.
“It’s called stage fright, and it’s completely normal. Everyone gets it.” Grete burst out laughing. “Come on, Marianne. There’s no water lily in your lungs, stealing your breath. Breathe out. All of us should breathe out more often anyway.”
They were sitting in the guesthouse dining room. The bandleader beckoned to Marianne. Her knees felt like jelly as she listed the pieces she was intending to play. Right then, a flock of nuns came swarming through the door.
“Sister Clara!” Marianne cried happily. Behind her were Sister Dominique and Father Ballack. They walked toward Marianne, their robes swirling, and clustered around her. They had come to Kerdruc to thank her for rescuing Sister Dominique and had planned their trip to coincide with the fest-noz party.
“I’m so pleased,” Sister Clara whispered as she hugged her. “So pleased that your journey has had a happy ending.”
—
Alain didn’t know what to do. The vibes on the other side of the river appeared to have intensified. That was no ordinary Breton port hosting just another fest-noz: it looked like an enchanted forest.
Laurine was looking through the opera glasses. Alain had fetched his jacket and hung it around her shoulders. “That’s Madame Geneviève. She’s bringing out the racks to support the casks of wine. And that’s Padrig helping her. And that’s…” She paused and cleared her throat. “Monsieur Paul is dressed up to the nines. Claudine: dear me, she’s so pregnant, she’s going to burst soon! Ah, they’re pointing to Marianne!” Laurine was ecstatic now. “She looks so beautiful!”
“Can you see Jean-Rémy as well?” asked Alain.
“I don’t want to see him,” said Laurine, passing Alain the glasses.
He scanned the far shore, and suddenly caught sight of Geneviève leading the man in the gray suit up the stairs to the guesthouse.
—
It was when the man had written his name on the guest form and passed it to Madame Geneviève that she started to tremble. She read his name a second time. She hadn’t recognized him in the lift, and even the creases stabbing down sharply from the corners of his mouth to his chin bore little resemblance to the man who had appeared on French television searching for his lost wife. It was Lothar Messmann.
“Where’s my wife?” he asked in French, or what he believed to be French. For the first time in her life, Geneviève Ecollier decided to adopt the default French attitude: never understand anyone who wasn’t French.
“Pardon?” she said in a blasé tone of voice.
How I would love to chuck you in the river, you little gray rabbit. You booked under your own name, of course, not Marianne’s maiden name, and stupidly I only realized too late.
“My wife, Marianne Messmann,” he said, raising his voice.
Geneviève shrugged and walked around the reception desk to guide him up to his room, giving the dining room a wide berth.
These French people, thought Lothar. Such an arrogant lot. Throughout his journey to the tip of Brittany, they had all refused to understand him. He had been forced to eat things he hadn’t ordered. In the bus from Rennes to Quimper, two toothless old men had spat on his German army sticker; and in Quimper he had repeatedly been sent in the wrong direction as he searched for a taxi. He had several times passed a crime bookshop, whose saleswoman had observed him distrustfully.
He remembered the letter he had received ten days ago from a teacher called Adela Brelivet, who had informed him in turgid school German that she regarded it as her civic duty to respond to his TV appeal for information and notify him that she had picked up the aforementioned Marianne on a minor road outside Kerdruc and given her a lift to Concarneau. She had immediately realized that the woman had given her a false identity. Despite this, she was absolutely certain of her identity, and Monsieur Messmann should enquire at Ar Mor in Kerdruc, because she had heard that there was a foreign woman working in the kitchen there.
He wanted to find out how Marianne could prefer life without him. Why was she so unwilling to put up with him any longer? Oh, and how annoying it was that this women in the tantalizing red dress should refuse to tell him where Marianne was! She must be at the party, at which he would bet that they didn’t even serve beer, only champagne and frogs’ legs. Lothar hated this country. At least the room was all right, and he could look out of his window onto the lively quayside below.
Out of the corner of his eye, he had spotted a woman in a blue dress, with an amber bob, shielded by a group of nuns. No, that couldn’t be Marianne. Marianne was smaller and not as…attractive.
He left his room and took some Breton lager that a gloomy-looking young man with black hair and a red bandanna passed him across the counter of the bar outside. The breakwater had filled with excited women, laughing men, teenagers, and children chasing each other underneath the tables around the dance floor.