No Man Is

The biggest mistake I’ve made in my life?  I’ll tell you, although I think you already know.

I bought the house on the island in 2005 after Arnaud died.  He left me enough money to take early retirement and invest in property on the island I’d visited every year since I was a little girl.  The money didn’t make up for the years of affairs - the basic loneliness of my life throughout most of my marriage – but it went some way.  In any case, my years with Arnaud were no worse than the years with your father.

My summers were the island.  For many years staying in my grandmother’s house on its southern most point and then when she died and my father sold her house, staying in the white hotel in the old port.

If I was going to describe the island to someone who had never visited it, I would talk about the vast, oyster beds and the sea scrubby vineyards.  The stalwart, squat houses with their green shutters and vibrant, wild hollyhocks.  The whisper of the wind through the grasses of the salt marsh.  The skeleton of the Cistercian monastery on the coast road and the gaping, colourless skies pressing down on the land.  Making it flat.

The journey from our apartment in Versailles always seemed like a moving back in time.  Away from the frenzy of modern life to a routine of eating fish, sunbathing and slow, evening walks. Yes, I know we were privileged – that we could afford to leave the city and the continent, as we called it, to embrace island life from another age.  But what could we do?  You’re born into the life you lead and the upkeep of tradition matters.  It’s what makes us who we are.

But over time and you know this yourself, the island changed. It became busier, more commercial.  Less exclusive.  Filled with tourists and day trippers, taking photos and buying plastic mementos from the burgeoning gift shops.  The building of the road bridge from the continent to the island was what did for it.  The vile queues of cars filled with people and their snivelling children, swarming on to the roads that had become inadequate for the volume of traffic.

These same people filling the beaches with their noise and sweat and ignorance of the place.  They cared only for the sun, sand and sea washing their grimy bodies.  Not for the myrtle and thyme growing on the dunes.  The sharp, sweet smell of the pine trees leading to the beach. The riotous cries of the gulls on the rocks.

The tourists brought too all that is connected with visiting people at leisure.  The come and go shops, and restaurants with homogenous menus.  The circus in St. Martin with its camels, zebras and gypsy workers.

I and people like me, the people who had visited the island for years before the current influx, did our best to maintain decorum.  A hauteur, if not froideur, in the face of the alien and low class incomers.  When I bought the house, I had every intention of restoring it sympathetically and authentically in the old style.  To honour my grandmother and to create a beauty the day trippers couldn’t dream of.

As you will remember, in the summer of 2006 we were as usual summering on the island, staying in the white hotel in the old port, whilst the structural changes were made to my house.  You were twenty eight then, but your life was still shiftless enough to allow you to spend a month with your mother by the seaside.  You were once again ‘in between jobs’ and besides, I was paying for everything.  Paying for your company.

We had fallen in to a languorous groove of long breakfasts, time at the beach reading and swimming and evenings eating on the hotel’s terrace. I’m sure you remember the other part of our routine – the going to the fish market with Mathilde.  She was so beautiful.  A girl who was born on the island, employed by the hotel to take residents to the local market to choose the fish they might want cooking at dinner. We would walk along the harbour in the morning sunshine, you and Mathilde ahead of me, lobster or sea bass in the basket swinging at her side.

I remember imagining what it would be like if you married her.  She was below our class of course, but she was a native of the island and her genes would add a validity that length of time visiting the island on its own could never bring us.

It didn’t happen though because just after the middle of August, Mathilde disappeared. I was first aware of this when she wasn’t waiting, as usual, in the hotel foyer to take us to the fish market; replaced instead by a surly, young man who shrugged when I asked him to carry the basket of fish.

Over the next couple of weeks, we saw the posters around the port and the wider island, detailing how Mathilde had not been seen since the night of 17^th August when she had failed to return to her mother’s house after finishing work.  Her family appeared on national TV, saying her disappearance was out of character, but the accepting, broken look on the faces of her parents said more than any of their words. 

By the end of August, the weather had changed and become almost autumnal, and I remember we talked about Mathilde a little in hushed voices over coffee during misty, grey mornings on the balcony of our rooms.  You seemed unmoved by the fact she’d gone, asserting you were certain she’d simply moved on and would be back at some point.  But as September rolled in on high tides and our thoughts turned back to business in Versailles, the rest of the island did not seem so convinced she would ever be found.

I found the pictures of her on your camera, that you’d left on the writing desk in our salon.  You’d left it while you’d gone for a walk round the harbour on what was an unseasonably hot, early September day.  It’s not just memory that makes me recognise the increasing restlessness you were showing.  I felt it at the time – your need to keep walking.  To never stand still.  That and your increasing silence.

I don’t know what made me look at your camera.  Perhaps it was nothing more than ennui.  A space to fill between the completion of one book and the beginning of another.  The pictures were of her face, eyes closed tight, dark blood running down her face like tears.  Her hair was scraped back off her face in the style I’d often seen her wear and from her hairline, a flap of skin hung down ragged.  Like the skin of a gutted fish.

I put the camera back on the writing desk and I knew I had to go to the gendarmerie at the far corner of the port because what else could I do?  I remember the sky was mauve-violet – fabulous if it wasn’t so portentous – and there was forked lightening crackling across it in the near distance.

Of course, when I got there, I told the gendarmes about seeing Mathilde with one of the circus boys, one of the gypsy incomers.  I told them about how I’d seen them kissing by the hotel kitchen in the twilight, on more than one occasion.  About how I’d heard them arguing and saw Mathilde, crying and cowed sometime round the middle of August.

I don’t know what they thought then.  I still don’t what they thought, but they took many notes and thanked me for my time, assuring me they would follow up everything I’d said.  I do know what I’d told them appeared in the local and national papers, that it became the accepted view of what might have happened to Mathilde – the fabled running off with the circus – and that she’s never been found.

When I got back from the gendarmerie, you were still out and I remember going to bed earlier than usual.  I can still picture my dreams from that night.  Soft, comforting dreams of seagull feathers and thistledown drifting across sparkling sand dunes.

As I woke the following morning, I went to your door and saw you were asleep in bed. On your side, your face towards me, untroubled, but serious.  I remember wondering what you were dreaming about.  Something about your expression put me in mind of the lines from John Donne’s meditation:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

But I’m not sure I agree with the words. Some of us are islands; contained, insular and secret.  A piece only of ourselves.

Nevertheless, I wrote the words from Donne on the hotel stationery, vellum damp, like the morning, and left it by your bedside.

And the biggest mistake I’ve made in my life?  It was the one I nearly made.  That morning, after I’d left you sleeping, I nearly went back to the gendarmerie and told them about what I’d found on your camera.  I very nearly did, but then I recalled something that happened to you when you were only about five. 

It was a fierce, summer’s day on the island and as usual we were at the beach.  You’d only just learned to swim and like all small children, you felt you could do more than you could.  You were invincible as you ran in to the sea at high tide.  I sat on the sand, watching you, as the waves crashed over your head, the white foam on them like snarling bears’ teeth, snapping at you and swallowing you.  I ran in to the water and dragged you out.  You howling, with both indignation and fear, me holding you tight, saying, “Stay with me, stay with me” over and over. 

Remembering this, I knew I was not prepared to lose you again.

But, as the island has changed, so have I.  As I grow older, the pull of the sea is less compelling and these days, I visit the island less often.  I prefer what I hold in my head; my dream of the island.  Let the reality of it run as wild and heathen as a foundling child.

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