Sea of Memories (Page 44)
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.
Without a word, he gathered her into his arms and held her tightly to him, warming her with the heat of his body, smoothing her hair back from her eyes so that he could kiss away the hot tears that she began to weep. He rocked her, as a mother gently rocks a baby, and let her cry, silently at first, but then with wrenching, guttural sobs that seemed torn from the deepest reaches of her shattered heart.
She fell silent finally, her tears spent at last. He held her still and they lay together, cradled in the dunes’ embrace with the roar of the wind and the sea all around them. But she felt warm now, safe in her husband’s strong arms, the blood in her veins beginning to thaw and flow again like the quiet, almost imperceptible trickle of the first streams after a long and bitter winter.
Her dry, cracked lips moved and he leant in close to hear her whispered words. And he smiled, hearing the wonderment in her voice as she echoed the words she’d said that night, so many years ago, in a dark and alien forest:
‘You came to find me. I was lost and you came to find me.’
2015, Edinburgh
As I read the last words I’ve written, my grandmother nods and her eyes close, a smile illuminating the soft skin of her face, as worn and fragile as the powder-blue cardigan that’s draped over her shoulders. (I’ve offered to buy her a new one to replace it, but she laughed and said, ‘You’d be wasting your money, my dear Kendra. This comfortable old friend will see me out.’)
Over the winter, week by week, I’ve untangled Ella’s story from her cache of memories, the tapes and photographs and letters, and written it down the way she wanted it to be told. When I began, I’d thought it would be a simple exercise of typing out her words exactly as she’d spoken them into her tape recorder. But as I listened and pored over the neatly ordered photo albums and shuffled through the letters from Christophe and Caroline, her story had drawn me in so that I could see it through her eyes; it seemed to be writing itself, carrying me along so that I, too, fell in love with the places and the people who had filled her life with everyday miracles.
I’ve grown far closer to her in these last months and, instead of the chore it used to be, visiting Ella has become one of the highlights of my week. It’s been a welcome escape from the realities of my own life, the draining demands of my job and the anxieties about my son and my husband. But it’s more than that too. I see her differently now that I know her story. Her past has come to life and made me see what really matters in this world. I’m proud that I’m her granddaughter and I hope that I can claim some of her courage and her sense of beauty in my own genetic make-up.
As the words I’ve just finished reading hang in the air around us, I stroke my grandmother’s age-spotted hand, the skin soft as crumpled tissue paper. I see each brown mark, each callus, each stiff, gnarled knuckle differently now. The scatterings of dark stains, which the French call ‘the flowers of death’, are reminders of summers spent on a sun-soaked island – more sea than land – where, for the first time, a young woman found freedom and love; the calluses tell of a sail-boat skimming across the lace-capped waves with sheets close-hauled, the ocean’s wind catching each breath and tossing it into the eternity of a perfect blue sky; and the swollen joints are mementos of acts of breath-taking love and courage, these hands that clasped and held and carried, a whole history of work and motherhood: an extraordinary life.
But they are hands that had to learn to let go too, just as I will have to let go soon of this frail hand that I hold in mine.