Again, the soundtrack will be found at the end of the chapter.
Loïc and I exited the bus in the village square, and I hung back until the other passengers had dispersed. I didn't want anyone to overhear the question I was going to ask Loïc now.
"I guess it's not a good idea, and I don't want her to get into trouble, but is there any chance that I can … that I can see her? Where are they living? And when is the … the baby due?"
Loïc didn't answer. His eyes, totally devoid of their usual mischievous sparkle, locked with mine for a moment before he averted his gaze, staring past me, his brow knitted darkly. He was drawing the tip of his shoe through the gravel, chewing on his lip, as if he was going to cry once more.
Watching him unsettled me almost as much as his account of Nell's involuntary wedding. This behaviour was so extremely unlike him.
Finally, he spoke.
"Mick, I ... I haven't told you everything back on the pier. Thought it would be better to wait till we're ho … here."
A cold hand gripped my heart with merciless fingers of steel.
What else could there be, I thought. Wasn't everything bad enough already, just because of a letter that hadn't been posted in time? Because of a goddamn stomach bug and a fire in the engine room?
"She tried again, Mick. She tried again and this time she … succeeded."
It took a moment until the meaning sank in.
Human language has no word to express what I felt.
My head was positively swimming. The world blurred before my eyes, and I must have swayed because the next thing I realized was Loïc flinging out his arms to catch me. He led me through the familiar cobbled streets down to Jean-Luc's tiny cottage near the port.
Jean-Luc must have seen us approaching, for his front door opened the moment we came up to it and he stepped out, a somberly compassionate expression on his face.
"Mick, my friend", he said quietly. "Come on in."
I followed him inside in a daze and hardly noticed that Loïc said goodbye.
Jean-Luc took my bag off me and made me sit in one of the low armchairs by the fireplace. I heard him pour a drink and lifted my eyes wearily to watch his sparse, precise movements.
"You'll need something stronger than cider tonight, mate", he said, handing me a surprisingly elegant cut-glass tumbler of amber apple brandy.
For the first time in my life, I got drunk purposefully. Got drunk to forget.
I woke up in Jean-Luc's upstairs chamber the next morning without any memory of having gone upstairs and taken off my clothes – but there I was, slightly hungover, in the familiar bed opposite the dormer window, wearing my old blue-and-white striped flannel pajamas.
Stretching my sleep-stiff body, I thought fondly of Nell in my half-waking state, remembering how she had mended the elbow of the pajama jacket when the threadbare fabric had torn. She had always kept an eye on the condition of my clothing because she knew how little I cared about these things.
Nellie.
Her name lit a sudden blinding flash in my head, and it all came back to me in a split second. The cold hard hand squeezed my heart once more.
I had come home to find Nellie was gone. Gone for good.
This wasn't home any longer.
I'd go downstairs and thank Jean-Luc for his hospitality in all these years, give him some of that goddamn money I wouldn't need now and go straight back to Brest to sign up on the ship with the longest, farthest route ahead.
Away, far away from my broken dreams, my tarnished hopes, my hollow future.
But there was one thing I must do first, one last visit to pay.
Loïc had told me that Father Duval, the village priest, had gone out on a limb and held a memorial service and a small ceremony at the cemetery for Nell.
Fully aware of his church's harsh position on suicide, Duval, the severe-looking cleric whose sermons had had a sleep-inducing effect on me the few times I'd heard them, had boldly taken a stand in Nellie's favour. He had chosen to disregard the strict official rules and declared her death a tragic accident.
"He said it wasn't for us to judge her and that God would be loving enough to have mercy on a desperate girl who'd taken desperate measures. He said she wasn't a sinner who could never be forgiven but a victim of circumstances. I hope none of those sanctimonious gossips is going to write to the bishop to rat on him. He'd be in serious trouble then." When Jean-Luc, who had attended the ceremonies, had told me this, it made Duval, whom I had believed to be just another droning unworldly preacher, rise highly in my esteem.
Jean-Luc was already up when I came downstairs, and we shared a wordless breakfast, mine consisting mainly of a large cup of strong black coffee as I couldn't get anything solid down.
I went out into the cool morning. It was a bright, cloudless, frosty day, and I turned up the collar of my thick fisherman's sweater against the biting breeze as I walked into the village, hands pushed deeply into my pockets, where one of them wrapped itself firmly around the small object I had carried with me carefully for months. I had been so glad that I'd managed to keep it safe throughout the journey ever since I had obtained it.
The gate in the chest-high quarrystone enclosure creaked in its rusty hinges as I opened it and entered the tree-lined churchyard with its rows of small granite tombstones or ornate wrought-iron crosses.
I looked around quickly, grateful to find myself alone. It wasn't hard to make out the fresh graves in the small cemetery.
My chest felt constricted as I approached them and found the small wooden cross whose black inscription read Gwenaëlle Dupré and underneath, in smaller lettering, 15 mars 1916 – 15 février 1937. A month to the day before her twenty-first birthday, I found myself thinking. As if that had any significance.
I dropped to my knees and touched the earth. It was so cold, so heavy, it was going to crush her.
No, it wasn't.
She wasn't there. They had not found her body.
This was just a monument, a fake grave, unoccupied, unreal.
As unreal as it felt to me that she should never come back, never laugh with me, never cry on my shoulder, never kiss me again. Never be my bride nor the mother of my children.
It all seemed so cruelly wrong, a dreadful mistake.
I read her grave marker again. The name, the date, they, too, appeared so wrong.
This should have read Nell Carpenter, beloved wife, mother and grandmother, and it shouldn't have existed for the next fifty or sixty years. The second date should have been 1987 or even later, a stone to mark a long, fulfilled, happy life, not one cut so brutally short, ending in hopeless desperation.
She might still be alive if I hadn't left her alone so long. If I had been there, I could have protected her from that bastard's advances, or he might not even have tried in the first place.
I could have saved her life if I had simply made a different decision, if I had swallowed my pride. Why had I so stubbornly insisted on putting the wedding off until we had our cottage? Why hadn't I simply married her before I left? We could have found some arrangement to avoid having to share her family's small house.
An anguished cry broke from my throat. I staggered to my feet and fled, flung open the gate that clanged shut beside me, ran and ran all the way to the lighthouse. I got out of breath, lungs stinging, but I still kept on.
Almost there, I stumbled and fell on the path that led to the memorial, skidded over the gravel, skinning both palms and wrists. Wincing, I struggled to get up and walked on, looking up at the mournful woman's face turned pleadingly towards the sea atop the granite column.
I knew without looking at it what was engraved in its base.
Disparus en mer.
Lost at sea. Disappeared. Taken by a relentless, remorseless ocean, never to appear again.
Like my Nellie.
She had thrown away her life because she couldn't bear it any more. She had bent to her father's merciless will because I hadn't been there, because she had been led to assume all my promises and all my love had been null and void, that her father had been right about unreliable strangers after all.
What had finally pushed her over the edge, I wondered. Had she given in to a spur-of-the-moment impulse, with irreversible, fatal consequences? Or had she known exactly what she was doing, had she deliberately taken this irrevocable final step, planned it even, because she had thought I'd forsaken her? Thought I would not come back to make good on my promise, to honour our engagement, to save her from a loveless, dutiful marriage entered upon for "decency's" sake?
I had come back just a few days too late to prove her wrong and to ease her worries.
How often had I dreamed of the day I'd return, had imagined how I'd produce the little box and give it to her ceremoniously, making her eyes sparkle with happy surprise.
The box sat on the nightstand in Jean-Luc's spare bedroom, but the ring was in my pocket.
On shore leave in Boston, I had spent my first wages on the narrow gold ring with a bluish opal that would match her eyes. I had planned to give her the ring as a reward for putting up with the long separation and as a confirmation of my promise to spend the rest of my life with her.
I brought it out of my pocket now and advanced to the edge of the monument's platform. The ring, unaware that it had lost its purpose, looked tiny in the palm of my hand, glittering in the sunlight, glittering like the waves below.
I swung back my arm to hurl the small golden band into the water and then simply stood there, stunned, lost, alone, murmuring her name between dry sobs.
It just went to show that happiness wasn't for me, obviously. That it had been so close at hand plunged me even deeper into hopelessness.
If there had been a remnant of trust within me that things would turn out well for me this once, it had died along with Nell.
I climbed over the low enclosure of the platform and scrambled down the face of the cliff, turning towards the choppy sea when I came to a very narrow ledge.
If all I ever seemed destined for was hurting and disappointing those I loved, or getting hurt and disappointed myself, what was I good for? What was I here for?
Life, it appeared, was random and pointless.
I might as well end it here and now, end the futile quest for that ever-elusive happiness, end the senseless hoping for things to improve that was always in vain in the end.
All it took was a leap off this ledge.
Or not even that. Waiting until a particularly strong gust of late-winter wind made me keel over or I got too tired to hold on to the rock and keep my balance was all I had to do.
It would be a safe bet, plunging from this height to either the jagged rocks at the bottom of the cliff or the white-crested waves whose undercurrents would drag me down and out in no time if I yielded to their force without resistance.
I wanted to do it, and yet I found I couldn't.
I couldn't even move for a while.
Panting, shaking all over, I gripped a pointed bit of rock eventually and tried to breathe easy until the trembling had subsided enough so I could clamber back up. I managed to take a few steps away from the abyss before I collapsed into a heap of misery, my back against the low wall, my legs drawn up, my forehead on my knees, so exhausted that I couldn't even shed a tear.
Then, five minutes or three hours or seven years later, a hand on my shoulder. I ignored it at first, then I heard Jean-Luc's voice call out, "He's here. Come over!"
Footsteps, a thud as if someone had vaulted the wall, and I slowly raised my head after all to find Jean-Luc cowering beside me and Loïc standing over us.
"Been a bit worried about you", Jean-Luc said gruffly. "You never know what such a thing does to a man, what it might drive him to do. Glad you're still there, mate. Better get up now, that ground's too cold to sit on." He stretched out his hand and I listlessly let him pull me to my feet. "Come, let's get you warmed up."
I was grateful that neither of them spoke a lot on our way to the village or asked any questions.
Back at his cottage, Jean-Luc made hot tea for all of us, pouring in generous shots of rum, and said, "Loïc's been coming here to give you something."
He put two steaming mugs in front of me and the boy who would have been my brother-in-law and retreated into the back of his kitchen-cum-living room, busying himself with the chaos of dirty dishes in the sink.
Loïc pulled a little envelope from the breast pocket of his shirt. "This is for you. It's the only new one we had, but I'm sure she'd have wanted you to have it. So she'll be with you, in a way, and you won't forget her."
"As if I ever could", I said in a choked voice and ran my thumb over a photograph of my beautiful girl, smiling shyly into the camera, her lovely hair loose around her face as I had liked it best. "You sure I can have it? I don't want you to get whacked by your father for taking it."
He shook his head. "We have some other pictures from when she was younger, that's enough. Must be enough. You need to have something."
I said goodbye to Jean-Luc with heartfelt thanks for his kindness. Casting aside his usual aloofness, he embraced me affectionately and patted me on the back. "Goodbye, my friend. Take care. I guess you won't be coming back this way any time soon, but if you do, you know which door to knock on."
"I will, Jean-Luc. You take care too. I'll be on my way now."
And on my way I went, to whatever shore the waves of life would carry me, blowing where the wind would take me.
I wouldn't fight them. I would build a fortress around my heart to protect me from further grief and pain, putting aside any plans or hopes or wishes that would account to nothing in the end anyway, and just go along with the flow to see where I'd land.
I have always thought that the Mick Carpenter at the beginning of the movie is so much like the man described in Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock". This is my song for him in these dark times he's going through now.
I've built walls
A fortress deep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
Its laughter and its loving I disdain
I am a rock
I am an island
Don't talk of love
Yes, I've heard the word before
It's sleeping in my memory
I won't disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved I never would have cried
I am a rock
I am an island
I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock
I am an island
And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries