Maw

Fear at midday

Delphine has gone to the beach.  It’s just after twelve o’clock – the time when most people leave the sands for lunch.  But Delphine is old and so she doesn’t feel she needs to follow the laws of others.   If she wants to go to the beach at midday, she will.  Besides, it will stop her thinking about Édouard.

Their house by the sea is cluttered and tired, but she and Édouard like it that way.  It smells of wood polish and apricots being cooked to make jam.  Mathilde says they should tidy the house up.  Paint it, sell it.  But what her daughter doesn’t appreciate is the house’s heritage.  It contains the shape of all their childhoods.  The ghosts of a thousand summers.

Mathilde rarely visits them in their seaside house any more.  She’s always too busy working, or networking, or doing whatever she does.  When Édouard hears Delphine’s tone of choked back disappointment on the phone - as she reassures Mathilde it’s ok, she knows she’s busy, she’ll see her soon - he always tells her it shows how well-balanced and grounded Mathilde is that she doesn’t feel she needs to visit her parents.  Delphine isn’t so sure this is the case.

By the sea, Delphine is smoothing out her towel and taking off her sundress. At seventy, she still wears a bikini and still feels comfortable in it.  Yes, her body is older, but it’s her body and it’s served her well over the years.  She still has muscle tone and definition and although she knows her breasts no longer get the admiring glances they did when she was younger, women especially look at her and smile as though her enduring physique offers hope for everyone.

The beach where Delphine is sitting joins on to the nudist beach, the start of this dictated by a metal sign, high on a pole in the sand.  Delphine used to sunbathe on the nudist beach and she smiles when she remembers the first time she’d been on it. 

It had been a cool, grey day over thirty years ago.  She’d sat on her towel in shorts and a sweater, talking to the friend she’d gone with.  An older man had come up to her and politely, but firmly told her this was a nudist beach, which meant no clothes were allowed.  Delphine remembers the embarrassment and then annoyance she felt at his edict.  But her natural conformity had kicked in and she had meekly taken off her clothes, folding them neatly, ashamedly into her bag.

Delphine has been reading about the banning of the birkinis on the beaches of le Midi and something Mathilde had said about their country the last time they were together comes back to her.  “That’s the trouble with our nation.  We’re a series of contradictions.  Look at us - the rebellious, rule-bound French!”

Certainly, everything is changing.  The ways of generations are becoming lost.  Delphine knows of so many of her friends whose families won’t keep on their holiday houses by the sea.  Who instead, will sell them for whatever money they can – the houses like elderly, decrepit relatives families are only pleased to see the back of. Although they have never dared voice it, Delphine is certain Mathilde won’t want to keep their house when she and Édouard are gone.

In the white sunshine, fear suddenly pins Delphine flat to the sand.  It’s an undefined fear as fear often is.  Made up of many grasping tentacles nevertheless.  Fear of loneliness. Of big crowds.  Of invasion.  Of what she doesn’t understand.  Of who she doesn’t understand.

For what feels like minutes, she can’t breathe properly. Horror and fear are choking her and she wishes she was back in the safe, rainy anonymity of Bayeux where she lives for the rest of the year.

Then, as quickly as it appeared, the undefined fear gains shape and solidity.  It becomes the real fear of where Édouard is.  On one level, Delphine isn’t over-worried.  He’s been gone for a day or so before.  “It’s my time”, he says.  “I need it for me.  I don’t ask you where your head is when you’re painting.  If I need to spend time on my own, then that’s what I’ll do.”

Delphine tries to respect what he says he needs, but it’s not what she feels.  What she feels is that he’s a selfish, old bastard and that comparing her time spent painting in a known room in their house is not the same as his complete disappearance from their world at times of his choice.

The heat is beginning to tire Delphine and she decides that where she really wants to be is in her chair on the balcony back at the house. The beach is becoming busier again as people come back after lunch, dragging sun umbrellas, windbreaks and children.

The sand on her feet is burning as she walks up over the dunes and Delphine stops to put her sandals back on. The dunes are being managed so they can regrow and she marvels at the abundance of samphire, teasel and marram grass. The smell of pine is heady.

At the house, she hangs her towel over the first floor balcony and waves down at her neighbour walking by with her terrier. The towel flutters and gives off the smell of the sea. Both salty fresh and thinly sour. She looks at Édouard’s chair, empty opposite her; the throw he wraps over his knees in the evening folded precisely. The chair is full of his absence and Delphine senses a little shift towards autumn in the wind blowing off the sea.

*

Fear in the middle of the night

Delphine wakes at three’o clock.  The loneliest hour. The suicide hour. The time when nothing makes any sense or has any solution.  The dark is suffocating and Delphine feels a swell of panic, but also a kind of wild electricity.  She knows instantly¸ overwhelmingly Édouard isn’t here.  She’d gone to bed at her ordinary hour of ten, she’d followed her normal routines, refusing to give in to the panic of her imagination. But still he isn’t here.

Through the bedroom shutters, she can hear the kids coming back from the local club, shrieking along the seafront. They’re crying, laughing.  To Delphine, it sounds the same.

It crosses her mind, Édouard may have just left her. Gone after all these years. Sick of her mind, no longer beguiled by her body, could this have happened and she hadn’t even realised?  Could she have missed this development, like you might miss a stain on the bottom of the bath that grows, or a loose thread on the bottom of a dress that hopelessly unravels?  Delphine can’t really believe this though. She knows what’s in Édouard’s head, like he knows what’s in hers.  Besides, where would he go? 

She thinks she won’t be able to go back to sleep, but through thoughts of getting up and making coffee and of going to listen to the waves in the half light on the balcony, she surprises herself – if her subconsciousness is capable of being surprised – by closing her eyes and falling back to sleep.

*

Fear at dawn

The crying of the seagulls wakes Delphine early.  It’s the strangest of sounds, the saddest of sounds.  Through the slats in the shutters, Delphine can see the colourless light of morning and opening the shutters, she goes out on to the balcony.  The day is dawn-chilly and looking out over the beach, she sees the tide is right out. The sea is merely a strip of harsh gunmetal and the sand is naked, exposing its rock pools and breakwater posts.

Delphine leans over the balcony, thinking about everything the sea hides.  All the things it’s best you don’t think about when you’re paddling or swimming in it. All the things it takes and doesn’t give back. The lost fisherman, the lost children.

She feels herself falling into the mouth of fear again.  She looks over at the beach, in the same way you might look at the horizon to minimise seasickness on a boat, and she sees something that surprises her.  Édouard, written large in looping script, on the sand.  She wonders what this can mean and goes back in to her bedroom to get her glasses, so she can be sure about what she thinks she’s seen.  But when she looks again, there is nothing at all marring the sand's perfection.

Delphine sits down in her chair on the balcony, placing her glasses on the table to her left. She’s remembering an afternoon in the previous week when she and Édouard were looking at old photos on his computer.  She found one from years ago when his hand was outstretched towards her, offering his straw hat to protect her from the sun.  She’s wondering now at what point he’d decided she no longer needed protection.  His protection as beautiful and useless as the decommissioned lighthouse on the far point.

Her fear is dense, heavy, and Delphine gets up from her chair to look out at the sea again. She knows what it will look like at full tide. It will look like a mouth. Wide open.  Crashing waves on the shoreline like gnashing teeth, tearing everything.  She sits back down, thinking of the certainty of the sea.  Its monstrous duplicity.

*