Léon and Louise (8 page)

Where Léon was concerned, the warmth of Louise's hand on his arm was enough to render him perfectly happy. It was the first time in his life he had been privileged to walk so close to a girl. That he could, if he bent his head sideways only a little, breathe in the scent of her sun-warmed hair was almost more than he could bear.

They walked along the mole to the lighthouse that marked the harbour entrance, sat on the wall and watched the steamers and sailing boats going in and out. When the sun was nearing the sea they made their way back to the little town, walked up the Rue de Paris and visited the Eglise Saint-Jacques, the town's landmark.

Just on the right of the entrance was a Madonna they stood in front of for a long time. It was a crudely modelled plaster figure with a flat face, Dutch doll red cheeks and black, boot button eyes. The Virgin's robe of gold-embroidered blue velvet was entirely covered with slips of paper rolled up or folded several times. These were attached to the garment with pins, but other slips of paper were wedged between her fingers, pinned to her kerchief, or lying on her halo and her feet. Slips of every size and hue could even be seen between her lips and in her ears.

‘What are those pieces of paper?' Louise asked.

‘They're from seamen's wives asking the Mother of God to keep their husbands safe,' said Léon. ‘I've seen them back home. They draw their men's fishing boat on a slip of paper and hope it'll come safe home under the Holy Virgin's protection. Others fold up a lock of their consumptive child's hair in a piece of paper and ask the Virgin to cure it. These days, you'll also see soldiers' photos.'

‘Shall we look at some?'

‘It's bad luck to do that. The ships would sink, the children die, the soldiers be blown to bits by a shell. And your fingers would rot off if you even touched one.'

‘We'd better not, then. Shall we go?'

‘Just a minute.' Léon took a notebook and a pencil from his breast pocket.

‘You're going to write one?' Louise laughed. ‘Like a seaman's wife?'

Léon tore the page out of the notebook, rolled it into a cylinder, and stuck it in the Madonna's right armpit. ‘Let's go, it'll soon be low tide. I'll get us some mussels from the rocks for supper.'

Léon bought two baguettes, some carrots, leeks, onions, thyme, and a bottle of Muscadet from a grocer's shop in the Rue de Paris. Then they fetched their bicycles and wheeled them down to the casino in the light of the setting sun. From there a wide boardwalk of oak planks led across the shingle beach and past a long row of whitewashed bathing huts. Behind them stood proud seaside villas with encircling verandas and white curtains that silently, airily billowed and subsided, billowed and subsided, as if they were breathing.

Léon had noticed from the lighthouse that, far beyond the villas at the southern end of the beach, quite a lot of driftwood had collected. This he planned to use as firewood. It was growing chilly now. The last of the bathers had gone home to rinse the sea salt off their bodies and titivate themselves for dinner. Léon and Louise found a dry, sheltered spot between two big boulders at the foot of the chalk cliffs. They scraped away the pebbles until the sand was exposed, then spread out a blanket and Léon lit a fire of dry seaweed and driftwood. Meanwhile, Louise sat on the blanket hugging her knees and gazing out at the orange and lilac sea as if it were the most dramatic spectacle imaginable.

‘Let's get the mussels,' Léon said, rolling up his trouserlegs and taking the saucepan from his bicycle. ‘There should be some out there in the pools among the rocks, where those gulls are strutting around. The tourists never collect them, they prefer to buy them in a shop.'

The gulls emitted angry screams and reluctantly spread their wings. They took a couple of hops and rose into the air after two or three wingbeats, were caught by the updraught and sailed up the cliff face to the green meadows above, only to dive back at once with their sharp beaks menacingly directed downwards, then go into a glide just before impact and soar into the air again.

There were plenty of mussels in the rock pools, so the saucepan was soon full. Producing two knives from his pocket, Léon showed Louise how to scrape the algae and beards off the shells. Then they returned to their spot between the boulders. He flopped down on the blanket with a sigh. It had been a perfect day; his cup of joy was overflowing. But Louise remained standing. She paced irresolutely to and fro for a bit and lit a cigarette.

‘Come here and make yourself comfortable,' he said. ‘I won't do anything to you.'

‘Be thankful I don't do anything to
you.
'

‘Are you cold?'

‘No.'

‘Like to do anything before it gets dark? Shall we go for a walk along the cliffs?'

‘I'm hungry.'

‘Supper won't be long.'

‘Shall I buy something?'

‘We've got everything,' said Léon. All I have to do is slice the carrots, onions and leeks and boil them for a few minutes.'

‘Should I get something sweet for dessert? A couple of chocolate éclairs?'

‘It's half-past nine,' said Léon. ‘I'd be surprised if the pâtisserie is still open.'

‘I'll try.'

She was back within half an hour. Meantime, the earth had rotated nightwards. The first stars were twinkling in the sky, the moon had not yet risen. Some dark clouds were drifting so low over the bay that the flashes from the lighthouse grazed their undersides.

Léon removed the saucepan from the fire. He could hear shingle crunching under Louise's feet behind him.

‘Supper's ready. Did you get the éclairs?'

She didn't answer.

He stirred the saucepan, fished out a piece of eelgrass and an empty shell. Then he felt Louise come up behind him and rest her hands on his shoulders. Her hair tickled his neck, her breath fanned his right cheek.

‘You tricked me.' Her right hand released his shoulder, slid beneath his armpit and pinched his nose. ‘You did it deliberately – you played me like a fish.'

‘Your fingers will rot off in the night.'

‘Is it true, what it says on that slip of paper?'

‘Absolutely. For ever and ever,'

Léon freed his nose from her grip, turned round and gazed into her green eyes, which were shining in the firelight. And then they kissed.

L
éon couldn't have known that, at the moment when he was woken by a steamer's foghorn, half a million exhausted German soldiers were lacing up their boots in readiness for a final assault on Paris. If he had, he might have lain still at Louise's side and not budged from the beach; then everything would have turned out differently. The air was cool and damp, the sky pale and misty. The tide had come in and gone out again, the shingle was glistening wet, the blanket fluff beaded with drops of dew. The spars of a sunken ship were jutting above the surface beyond the breakers.

Léon looked up at the white chalk cliffs in which gulls were roosting in their nests and warming their beaks in their plumage, then higher up at the thin fringe of turf at the very top, above which leaden grey rain clouds were drifting in the wind. It would remain cold and damp on the beach until the warming sun appeared there towards midday. The longer he looked up, the more vivid his sensation that the clouds were not scudding past above his head, but that he himself and the beach and the cliffs were gliding along beneath the clouds.

He propped himself on his elbows and studied the outlines of Louise's slight form, which was rising and falling in time to the surf. Her dark, tousled hair resembled cat's fur. He left her side and got up to fetch wood and kindle the fire again. When the fire was well alight he walked along the tideline, looking for things the sea might have washed ashore during the night. At the eastern end of the beach he found a red and white float, on the way back a plank two metres long and four scallops. He put them all down beside the fire. Then, because Louise was still asleep, he went down to the sea and stripped to his underpants.

The water was cold. He waded out, dived under a breaker, and swam a few strokes. He tasted salt on his lips, felt his eyes sting in the familiar way, and turned over on his back, submerging his ears and letting himself be gently rocked by the waves. And all this while, at the same moment on the Chemin des Dames, the cloying bananalike scent of phosgene gas was creeping along the trenches for the first time in many months and turning into hydrochloric acid in the soldiers' lungs. Tens of thousands of young men were literally coughing up their lungs while the survivors, unless artillery shells had blown them to bits, were fleeing in the direction of Paris with their eyes starting out of their heads and burnt, poisoned skin falling in strips from their faces and hands.

Léon rocked on the waves, enjoying the sense of weightlessness, and gazed up at the sky, which was still wreathed in dark clouds. After a while he heard a whistle. It was Louise, who had sat up and was waving to him. He let the next wave carry him back to the shore, pulled on his shirt and trousers over his wet body and sat down beside her near the fire. Louise cut last night's bread into slices and toasted them over the flames.

‘You snored a bit in the night,' she said.

‘And you whispered my name in your sleep,' he said.

‘You're a bad liar,' she said. ‘Some coffee would be nice now.'

‘It's starting to rain.'

‘That's not rain,' she said, ‘just a cloud flying too low.'

‘The cloud'll make us wet if we stay here.'

Louise rolled up the blankets while Léon scoured the saucepan with sand. Then they pushed their bicycles back into the town. In the harbour there was a bistro that had already opened. It was called the
Café du Commerce
like Léon's regular haunt. Three unshaven men in crumpled linen suits were standing at the counter sipping their coffees and studiously avoiding each other's eye. Léon and Louise sat down at a table beside the window and ordered
cafés au lait
and croissants.

‘Oh, we've got into bad company.' Louise indicated the counter with her half-eaten croissant. ‘Take a look at those chumps.'

‘Those chumps can hear you.'

‘Who cares? The louder we speak, the less they'll think we're talking about them. Typical Parisian chumps, they are. Parisian chumps of the first order, all four of them.'

‘An expert on the subject, are you?'

‘The one with the blue sunglasses, who's hiding his face under his hat, thinks he's at least as famous as Caruso or Zola, when his name's Fournier or something similar. And the one with the moustache, who's reading the financial paper and frowning – he thinks he's Rockefeller because he owns three shares in a railway company.'

‘And the other two?'

‘They're just high-class chumps who never say hello or talk to people in case they grasp what bores they are.'

‘People do get bored,' Léon retorted. ‘I do sometimes, don't you?'

‘That's different. When you or I get bored it's in the hope that something'll change sometime. They get bored because they're always hoping that everything will stay the same.'

‘To me they all look like perfectly normal family men. They've slunk out of the house on the pretext of going to the baker's. Now they're treating themselves to fifteen minutes' peace and quiet before going back to their villas and rejoining their nagging wives and petulant children.'

‘You think so?'

‘The one in the blue sunglasses spent all night quarrelling with his wife because she doesn't love him any more and he could happily have dispensed with that information. And the one with the newspaper is dreading the interminable afternoons on the beach, when he's expected to play with his children and hasn't a clue how to go about it.'

‘Shall we go to the fishermen's café?' asked Louise.

‘We aren't fishermen.'

‘That doesn't matter.'

‘Not to us, maybe, but to the fishermen. They'll think we're Parisian chumps, just because we aren't fishermen.' Léon drew the curtain aside and looked out of the window. ‘The wet cloud's gone.'

‘Let's go, then,' said Louise. ‘Let's go home, Léon. We've seen the sea now.'