The boy who loved rain, p.8
The Boy Who Loved Rain, page 8
She pulled open the front door to find that there had been a break in the rain. A weak sun had found a gap in the clouds, was glinting off the passing cars even as their tyres slashed through puddles. The two cases slid neatly side by side into the back of the Volvo. She covered them with a picnic blanket.
She left only the briefest of notes.
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Miriam asked. They were in the small sitting room again, the urgency in the air belying its old-English cosiness.
“I don’t think I have a choice,” Fiona said, still struggling to talk through her tears. “It’s not forever, and it’s not the end. But it’s what I need now. I don’t know how I’ve got this far, to be honest. I need space; time to think. A chance to talk with Colom away from all the pressure.”
“Where will you go? Is there somewhere you can stay?”
“That’s the part I don’t know yet. I could go to my mother’s place in Wells, but I can’t imagine how that’s going to lower my stress levels. My brother Mark has a flat in London, but I don’t want to turn up on him unannounced. I was thinking I might just book a holiday – one of those last-minute deals online. Head somewhere hot, just the two of us. A week, maybe two. I’ve packed for flying, just in case. But I don’t know. For tonight I was wondering…”
Her courage failed her. Miriam read the question anyway.
“If you could stay here? Well, I think that might be possible for a night or two. They make a charge, but it’s not very much. I can ask for you.”
“Could you?” Relief washing over her. “Just for one night, two at most, while I decide what to do? We can share a room if need be. But…”
A second time her courage left her. It had been so long since she had asked for help. She had forgotten the words, or the order they came in.
Miriam waited, her hand on Fiona’s. In time the words found their own way out.
“It’s just that, after we talked yesterday, it came to me, and I wondered – if you could talk to Colom?”
“You mean see him professionally, as a counsellor?”
“You’ve been so helpful to me already, Miriam. Just to have someone to talk to who understands. But I was thinking, with the work you do… if he could talk to you himself…”
Again she ran out of words. There wasn’t enough runway to get this plane into the air.
Miriam took charge, her voice measured, conscious of the minefield her friend was inviting her to cross. “I don’t know if that would be the right thing or not: it would need to be his choice, more than yours, and I will need to meet him at least once in order to know. I can’t even tell you right now how seriously you should take his threats of suicide. But I am willing to try, if he will allow me. You have to know, though, it won’t be easy.”
“It’s not easy now. Can it be any harder?”
“Perhaps not. But if I spend time talking with Colom – if he’ll allow me – there may be things he tells me that you don’t know and I can’t pass on to you. There may be things I do pass on to you that you’ll wish I hadn’t. I can’t help Colom if I am not free to follow the conversation wherever it leads. It may not be a comfortable journey – for you, I mean.”
“I do understand, Miriam. And I have thought about this. It’s that very fear that’s kept us for so long from facing this. But I have to do something. At the moment he isn’t talking to anyone: we’re just watching him crawl towards a sixteenth birthday he may never see.”
“And you think he will agree to talk to me?”
“I think he might. I don’t know for sure. Maybe he will need time to get used to the idea. That’s why I need this space, with just him. I need to get him to the point where he will trust someone – or at the very least trust me again. When he’s at home, with David in the house, it’s… he just won’t open up. I feel him slipping further and further away from me. And I can’t let him. I won’t let him slip away.”
Miriam heard the desperation in her voice and, under it, something else. A steely courage. Just a little of the fire she remembered.
“I really do want to help you in whatever way I can, Fiona,” she said. “I’m willing to speak with Colom and see what he wants. But there is a problem…” Could she cancel the trip? Put it off yet again? It was only three days ago she had finally booked the ferry. There were legal papers to sign; work to be done on the house. She had at last admitted to herself that she could put it off no longer.
“The thing is,” she said tentatively, “I’m due to travel in a few days, and am planning to be gone for several weeks. I don’t want to start a process with Colom that I am unable to see through to its end. Even at this stage I know that if we go ahead he will need more than a few days of my time. I don’t know how we can do this. I won’t be back here for at least five weeks, perhaps six. Can you wait that long?”
Fiona didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. Miriam wondered whether she could bear to wait a few hours, let alone six weeks. There was something boiling over in Colom that needed dealing with now, for his mother’s sake if not for his own. Her decision to leave had already brought the crisis forward; increased its urgency. It was a wonder she had held on even this long.
“I understand. I shouldn’t have troubled you. Forgive me,” Fiona said, wiping her eyes and summoning the supernatural strength she would need to walk out of the room without collapsing. “I just didn’t know who else I could talk to.”
“I’m so sorry, Fiona. Perhaps I can find you someone in the area, someone who can be available to you for a longer period? I can help you set up an appointment for when you get back. I think you’re absolutely right that right now what you need is space with Colom. It’s going to take him days to come to a place where he can talk about his own feelings, and he needs to spend those days in a place of peace, away from the pressures he feels both at home and at school. It’s such a shame you can’t…”
She stopped in mid-sentence. It was like the bolt of a lock slipping perfectly into place; the last notes of a ballet matching with exquisite beauty the graceful movements of the dancers. She knew at once that it could work. The more she thought about it the more confident she became. Two worlds; two plans; two sets of priorities, coming together in unpredicted synchronicity. She waited for an objection to arise; a compelling reason why it couldn’t work. None came. The best decisions often are those made in the moment, unburdened by extended analysis. The blink of an eye. Sometimes you just had to take the risk.
II
PORTIVY
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was raining in the small, mountainous country of Llamedos. It was always raining in Llamedos. Rain was the country’s main export. It had rain mines.
Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Thierry Delacourte stepped from his cottage with the rosy tint of the rising sun still gilding the clouds. He breathed deeply. The air was cold but pure, as stimulating to him of late as the first Gauloise of the day might once have been. Three years after quitting, the capacity was at last returning to his lungs. His head was clearer; his body stronger than for many years. He was eating well; walking more; rising and retiring early. To be older and yet fitter was an unexpected blessing. And he was producing his best work ever. The sales proved it, the canvases crated up and sent back to Seattle, but even without the buyers he would know. He had always known when the paintings of others were worth looking at, dismissing the dross with an unapologetic Gallic shrug. It was experience, not arrogance, that now told him his own work merited attention. It was a pleasure to be fifty-seven and no longer an impressionable fool.
The café wasn’t open yet, but would be by the time he had completed his circuit of the outer roads of the village and worked his way back along the beach. Some days coffee was the stimulus that gave the walk its energy; today it would be the reward that gave it purpose. He took in his simple surroundings: the village of his birth and the community he had once fought so hard to escape. He thanked his stars once more that his health had been weak enough to force a return, and his will strong enough to deliver it.
There was no frost: it hadn’t snowed all winter, but the wind blew cold here – colder still on onshore days when it bounced across the fridge-like waves before finding land. Neither was it dry. Was it ever? A breeze here was rarely balmy – more often a faceful of drizzle. He turned up his collar, pulled his scarf around his neck and headed up the hill, his hands thrust deep into his jacket pockets.
He had only one task to complete by way of interruption to his walk – to turn up the heating at the house in the Allée du Vivier. This would normally have been Sophia’s job, but she was spending a week with her daughter in Paris and had recruited Thierry as a stand-in local agent. Later, when the shop opened, he would pick up fresh milk, some bread, maybe a few pastries. For now he just needed to make sure the heating was sufficient to render the house habitable. It had lain empty through the winter; shuttered against wind and rain, the last tourists gone by October. Its owner herself had not been back for five years. It was a feeling he knew well – to never have reason enough to return; to always have too many reasons not to. He remembered the last time he had seen her. She had not been slow to comment on the condition she found him in.
He walked up the gentle incline of the harbour approach, thrilled at his capacity to do so. Gratitude was the English word that best captured his condition these days. In French reconnaissance– literally to renew acquaintance. It was a perfect description of what he had been doing these past four years – renewing his acquaintance with the village of his birth. In late middle age he was in love all over again: not with a person but a place.
Cresting the hill, Miriam’s heating duly turned up, shutters opened, the house breathing again after its long hibernation, he turned to survey the object of his affections, an artist considering the curves and contours of his muse. The pale sun was higher in the sky now, a full tide gently rocking a clutch of anchored boats. In his youth he would have known them all by name. The steady breeze stroked the skin of the water, massaging the dark seaweed floating just below the surface. His practised eye took in the details of the scene, from the etched white line of the horizon to the bobbing blue and yellow woodwork of the boats. He stood in stillness. Breathed the salt-damp air. Reconnaissance.
Portivy is the only harbour on the western side of Quiberon – a Breton peninsula extending fourteen kilometres into the Atlantic. Centuries ago this was an island, then a tidal island, until in the nineteenth century a rock causeway tied it to the world. This was now a fully surfaced road with a narrow point of entry, the sea a stone’s throw to each side. The peninsula formed one boundary of the Gulf of Morbihan, holding in its calm embrace a rocky archipelago: islands big and small laid out like a sailor’s playground. The curvature of this granite limb, cutting into the ocean like some prehistoric harbour wall, gives to the peninsula itself a unique dual climate. Gentle golden beaches run the length of the landward side making the “Côté Baie”, in the language of the property developers, a paradise for holidaying families; for shell seekers; for couples in retirement seeking an environment of kindness. Across from these calm coves, on the island’s seaward side, the cliffs and caves, the storms and surging waves of the Côte Sauvage, the Wild Coast, offer an altogether darker and more turbulent world. Between the two a hinterland of heath and forest; a sparsely populated area whose few small villages bear ancient Breton names and are linked by narrow, winding lanes – as if a neutral no-man’s-land were needed to keep the warring sibling coasts apart.
Portivy had been one such hamlet, a small cluster of peasant cottages, until the 1870s when a harbour was created – the first and only such installation on the wild side of the island. From then it became a fishing port, a wild rival to Port Maria, the more sheltered harbour of Quiberon town itself. The cliff-shadowed waters of the Côte Sauvage were rich in fish, and those brave or foolish enough to head out each day into such seas found in Portivy a rewarding base from which to operate. These days only a handful of fishing boats huddle among the leisure craft. Families that for a century or more had lived by harvesting the sea have learned to survive by other means: summer crowds in search of a holiday let; weekend walkers; Parisians ready to pay over the odds for a seafood meal eaten within sight of the waters it was fished from.
Portivy is arranged around a single street that sweeps down a hillside to the harbour before looping around to climb again a hundred metres further on. Along and around the two arms of this loop lie the lanes, alleyways and courtyards of the old village: minuscule houses huddled together for warmth and shelter. Where the road meets the mud slopes and quayside at the heart of the village, half a dozen harbour-front houses face the full force of the sea. Two café-bars, a panoramic seafood restaurant and a small refurbished hotel surround the car park that serves equally for tourists, boat trailers and community events important enough to break out the bunting for. A diving school, a fresh-fish merchant, a new crêperie, and a small surf shop make up the remaining commercial interests of the village.
The oldest of Portivy’s functioning businesses, the Café du Port, had been Thierry’s home throughout his childhood, and for the first year after his return. Beside it was the odd cluster of Portivy’s only municipal facilities: a bus shelter, public toilets, a village map and information panel. None of these were much used in the winter months. Their purpose was symbolic: to maintain a connection with the rest of Quiberon and by implication the world beyond. Thierry was no great fan of the world beyond, despite the visits he still made to it and the flow of money that came back, but he would never forget the feelings that had haunted his adolescence here. Of being cut off, a prisoner of this small world. Of longing for escape; hungering for the social interaction he was sure must be happening somewhere else. He was thirteen in 1968, listening daily with his father to the Paris radio reports: the student occupations; the marches and riots; the anarchic press conferences. He had pored over newspaper photographs of the huge crowds gathered along the Boul’Mich, the Boulevard St Michel, the Police Nationale preparing to meet them with a force that shocked the nation. He had known then that a new world was coming to birth; that he would have no part of it unless he had the strength to leave his island home. These days he would happily demolish the rock-pile road that had opened Quiberon to mainland traffic – to make of her an island once more – but he understood the desperation of those who needed that thin string of attachment.
Coming full circle, approaching the café, he saw up the hill that a white Volvo had parked beside the Allée du Vivier. He regretted that he hadn’t had time to pick up the milk and pastries, but was relieved to see what looked like bags of shopping being unloaded from the boot. He wondered who Miriam had brought with her. He couldn’t tell, at this distance and with the big coat flapping in the wind, whether it was a woman or a man.
About 150 metres up the hillside, the Allée du Vivier runs perpendicular to the main street. Car-wide at its opening, it quickly narrows to end as little more than a footpath. It is home to seven linked cottages, their styles and roof-heights varied, like a shelf of random pottery ornaments. A row of books in need of sorting.
Fiona pulled their cases out of the car while Miriam found her key and approached the largest property on the alley: a double-fronted, white-washed house with wide blue-shuttered windows either side of the canopied front door. Above this, at first-floor level, the windows of three more ample rooms. Higher still, attic roof lights.
They had seen no one as they came into the village. Apart from the one man she noticed now, looking towards them from further down the hill, the place might well be entirely unpopulated.
“We’re not sure why they called it Allée du Vivier.” Miriam was working the stiff front door open, twisting the key with one hand while throwing the opposite shoulder against it. “The actual vivier is down on the harbour-front, near the diving school. Probably the alley went down to it before it was cut in half by the newer access road.”
Fiona looked blankly at her.
“It’s how they keep the fish alive until the moment of sale,” she explained, falling into the house as the door gave in to her persuasion. “Big tanks with sea water running constantly through them. Traditionally they were outdoors, re-filled by the tide, but ours is an indoor version, with water pumped up from the harbour.”
“Maybe someone who worked there, or once owned it, lived here?”
“Could be. But not in this house. My grandfather built it in 1907 and it’s been in our family ever since. Plenty of fishermen to keep the vivier stocked, but no one involved in running it.”
Fiona ducked through the low door as she followed Miriam down three steps into the house. A single, open room covered the ground floor. The house was only around four metres deep, but it was long, perhaps fifteen metres. In one corner was a wooden staircase beside a simple kitchen, hardly more than a sideboard with taps. The floor had brown-and-white tiles, like an oversized chess board. There was a refectory-style table filling the kitchen end of the room, a long bench at each side. A settee and two non-matching armchairs occupied the far end, arranged around a stone fireplace, large and sooty and, to all appearances, available for use. On the stone shelf beside the fireplace and on the floor stretching into the corner of the room, logs had been neatly cut and piled, a promise of cosy days and comfortable nights. Fiona imagined the generations who had found security here – the shutters barred against the storms without, the fire fighting the chill within.
“This used to be three rooms,” Miriam explained, the suitcases now piled as if in a hotel lobby. “We ripped it all out about ten years ago. Through there…” she pointed to an arch of stones set into the wall at the opposite end of the room to the fireplace, “used to be a scullery kitchen. We sealed off that end of the house and were able to sell it as a separate studio, with the room above. Then we took all the partitions out of what was left, to make this.”
