‘Where is the quotation from?’ she asked Caroline, who had taken two roses from the posy she’d picked from the garden to lay on Christophe’s coffin and placed them beside her parents’ stone.
‘It’s from the Cantique des Cantiques. The Song of Solomon. It’s the first line of one of my mother’s favourite verses. In English it would be something like, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come with me!” Even though Maman does not lie here, we wanted to commemorate her alongside Papa.’
‘It’s perfect for them.’ Ella brushed the palm of her hand over the soft moss that cushioned one corner of the stone. ‘I’m glad he’s here beside them.’ She nodded towards Christophe’s grave.
Caroline shook her head suddenly, vehemently. ‘He’s not here!’ She picked up the bunch of flowers that she’d laid to one side to be placed on Christophe’s grave once the earth had been piled back. ‘Come on, Ella. Let’s go! Let’s sail with him, one last time. That should be our goodbye, not here, not with mud and stone like this, but out on the sea, where he was most alive.’
She pulled the hat from her hair and let the curls spill over the collar of her black coat, then seized Ella’s hand and the two of them ran, stumbling slightly in their formal funeral shoes, past the small crowd of mourners who were filing back towards the gate, to where the car waited beyond the graveyard walls.
They drove straight to the harbour, not bothering to go back to the house first to change. In Saint Martin they attracted a few bemused glances as they boarded Bijou in their funeral clothes, Caroline in a long coat with silver filigree buttons and Ella in a black shift dress and matching jacket which she’d borrowed from her friend for the day. They made ready and Ella cast off from the quayside. Caroline steered the little boat through the harbour entrance and, instead of turning westwards to follow the island’s coastline as they usually did, she headed straight out towards the open ocean.
Wind-driven clouds scudded across the sky above the swell of their sails, and the waves danced about the hull, sending sparkling necklaces of spray into the air alongside them. The late-September sun illuminated their faces and painted the sea-scape with a wash of soft light that made every drop of water, each foam-capped wave and every line of the island’s receding form stand out with astonishing clarity.
Ella turned to Caroline in wonder. ‘You were right. He wasn’t there, in the graveyard. But he is out here, all around us!’
She nodded, the anguished lines of her face relaxing into something more like her usual expression of gentle calmness. ‘We are dancing with him, one last time. This is how he wanted to say goodbye. Not in a sad, muddy hole in the ground; and not weak and wasted, lying on his bed. But here, now, like this. Celebrating the beauty of life, celebrating the freedom of the ocean. Celebrating love.’
When they were far out, where the waters surrounding them were deeper and the swell of the waves became slower but more profound, they dropped the sails and let Bijou drift. Caroline untied the ribbon that bound the posy of garden flowers together and handed half of them to Ella. ‘Let’s scatter them here for him.’
And so the two women strewed the last summer flowers from Marianne’s garden on to the ocean as the little boat bowed and curtsied to the waves. And as she threw the last white rose petals to the wind, Ella felt she was giving Christophe back to the sea: letting him go to be with that beautiful dancer, that other love of his life, who was drawing him into her arms.
2015, Edinburgh
Today, of all days, I want Ella to be awake. But she sleeps deeply, her breath so light that I stoop to hear it, the covers scarcely rising and falling over her heart.
‘Come back,’ I whisper. I want to lay my head on the crisp, white sheet and let it soak up my tears. ‘Don’t leave me all alone.’ But she is sailing far out now, where the ocean is deep. I wonder whether she’s dreaming of Angus and Christophe, reliving the memories which seem to elude her more and more in her fleetingly brief waking moments. I think of the two men, picturing Christophe’s youth and vivacity and my grandfather’s handsome solidity.
So now I know. Now I understand why my mother has refused to see my grandmother, unable to forgive her. But I also understand why the full story needs to be told, so that Ella can, at last, let her daughter know how much she has loved her; how she has protected her all these years; so that she can be forgiven in the end.
1970, Île de Ré
Caroline was preoccupied with work. Upon the news of Christophe’s death, the art world had grown even more interested in the body of work he’d left as his legacy and she was inundated at the gallery in Saint Martin with enquiries from collectors and art galleries around the world who all wanted a Christophe Martet original to hang on their walls.
‘Non,’ she repeated time after time, into her constantly ringing phone ‘je suis désolée. The work entitled Neptune’s Locket is not for sale. But I will send you the catalogue of the other works that we have available.’
Left alone at the house, Ella felt washed up, like flotsam, by the tide of emotion that had brought her here and then receded with Christophe’s death, leaving her high and dry, discarded and unloved.
She wandered the deserted rooms of the white house with the mist-blue shutters, searching for comfort in Marianne’s furnishings and Christophe’s paintings, in the family photographs and the familiar creaking of the floorboards as she walked. But she felt no traces of the spirits that she sought in the emptiness. The curtains hung limply at the windows, stirred listlessly now and then by the faint drafts that found their way through the wooden frames whose paint was cracking and peeling here and there after the onslaught of summer sun and salt air. Marianne’s garden was bare now, the flowers dead, leaves falling in flurries as the Atlantic began to muster the first winds of winter and hurl them at the little island, buffeting the sea-birds, which shrieked and banked against the gusts before soaring off to find shelter elsewhere. The stark, grotesquely contorted stumps of the vine stocks in the vineyard alongside the house mirrored the way her heart felt – deadened and bleak, twisted into a hard, lifeless knot of despair.
When she’d exhausted herself with her endless walking, Ella wrapped herself in a quilt and slumped on a sofa in the drawing-room, or lay motionless on her bed gazing at the blank ceiling above her, for hours on end. Her heart and her mind felt as empty as the house, filled only with sadness and the dull ache of loss.
Caroline left to go to Paris for a week, to see the lawyer for the reading of Christophe’s will and to oversee the delivery of another consignment of paintings.
When she returned, she was pained and shocked to find Ella in a state of collapse. She had clearly hardly eaten in Caroline’s absence and her hair hung in lank, dirty strands about her pale face. Her eyes were deadened, and seemed sunk into their sockets, which were underlined with dark half-moons of exhaustion.
‘You must try to eat something,’ Caroline urged, as they sat at the dinner table that evening. ‘Please, Ella, just try a little, for my sake?’
But the life force, which had always burned so brightly in her friend, had been extinguished and an expression of panic crossed Caroline’s face suddenly, as she registered the depth of Ella’s despair. And so, the next day, she made a phone call from the gallery.
Ella sat in the dunes amongst the bowing marram grass, her hair whipped by the wind, gazing out to sea. White-capped rollers surged in from the west, crashing on to the sand before falling back, dragging dark trails of bladder-wrack in their wake.
She imagined walking out to meet them, letting the water lift her off her feet and gather her body, washing away the hurt and the sadness with its numbing chill until she would feel no more. She could see herself there, pictured the waves enfolding her in their icy embrace, but was unable to summon the energy to rise to her feet and take those final steps towards oblivion. She scarcely heard the roar of the sea, and hardly felt the chill that seeped into her numbed limbs: they were no match for the white noise of pain that rang in her ears nor the stony coldness of loss that saturated her body.
And so she didn’t hear Angus until he was there, suddenly, beside her.