Marianne wondered if she deserved to be so happy. Since their excursion, she and Yann had seen each other every day. He came for lunch to Ar Mor, waited until her shift was over and then spent the afternoon with her until it was time to go back to her pots and pans. On the days she visited Pascale and Emile, either he would accompany her and sit on the terrace to draw, or he would wait until late evening when Jean-Rémy let her leave work. Usually, though, he came to see her twice a day, in the afternoon and the evening.
Marianne learned French from him more quickly than from anyone else, which might have been due to the warm, two-toned timbre of his voice. She loved driving around the countryside with him in his Renault, visiting a fishing village or one of the many castles and remote chapels. She also loved watching him walk away from her, admiring the powerful shoulders better suited to a carpenter than to a painter.
They were like two addicts, diving recklessly into each other and drinking in the other’s presence as if there would soon be nothing more to drink.
She got used to the man with the marine eyes drawing her. He never showed his pictures, but for now his gaze contained everything she needed to see: how he saw her.
He filled pad after pad with sketches of Marianne’s face and hands as she went about whatever she happened to be doing at that moment: cooking or gardening, sitting still so as not to disturb the cat curled up on her lap, or singing gently as she peeled vegetables.
So far they had not shared a single kiss. Marianne was in no hurry: she knew it would mark the dawn of a new era. One kiss would become two, and two a flood. They would not want to linger for long on the other’s mouth, and their kisses would move tentatively downward. And that scared her.
She quivered inside at the thought of Yann undressing her, seeing her naked, aging body: the skin, the folds and pleats, the bays and other offensive peculiarities the aging process held in store.
And yet…at the same time her yearning grew to feel Yann’s hands not just on her cheek, arm and lips. But how horrible and terrible it would be if she did not please him! No, there was still a lot of time for kissing.
On a Monday, traditionally the quietest day at Ar Mor, Jean-Rémy gave her some time off. She and Yann drove east toward the magical forest of Brocéliande. As they traveled along the winding roads to Paimport, twenty-five miles west of Rennes, Yann broke the already familiar, cozy silence. He shut the road atlas on Marianne’s lap.
“The grove of Brocéliande doesn’t feature on any ordinary map: it is only to be found in our hopes and dreams. In our world it is known as ‘the wood at the bridgehead,’ but in the world of magic it is the enchanted forest of Merlin, a realm of fairies and the bridge into the underworld.”
“The underworld? Is that the same as the other world?” asked Marianne.
Yann nodded. “The Holy Grail of Arthurian legend is buried in Brocéliande, and it is there that the spring of eternal youth rises. Anyone who drinks from it will live forever. It is said that through the fairy mirror—a completely smooth lake—lies the path to Avalon, where King Arthur waits for Brittany’s call. Another legend says that at the bottom of the water-lily pond lives Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, in a crystal citadel.”
Marianne listened and reflected on these words. The Lady of the Lake. She had never heard that name before, but as Yann spoke, she had the feeling that this lady had merely slipped her mind. “Who is she?” she asked in a low voice.
“She was the one who took away all Merlin’s magic powers, offering him her eternal love in return. She pulled him down into the depths for a never-ending banquet that lasts to this day.”
Marianne saw in her mind’s eye a glass castle, surrounded by water and shifting shadows.
Silvery shreds of mist greeted Marianne and Yann as they made their way under tall, ivy-clad trees, through the drooping foliage of oaks and birch thickets, into the enchanted forest. It was silent. An expectant silence. Another twenty minutes and they reached the Fontaines du Barenton.
“This is where Merlin and Viviane first met,” whispered Yann, as if he feared disturbing the creatures of the forest. Marianne noticed bubbles rising gently through the crystal-clear waters from the gravelly bottom.
“The spring is laughing,” said Yann. “It doesn’t always, only when it sees two people like Merlin and Viviane who…” He didn’t finish his sentence.
Who love each other.
Marianne looked down into the water. This was exactly how it felt in her chest: delicate bubbles sparkling up from the underground spring, then gently bursting. Inexplicable. Wonderful. Her heart laughed like this spring when she was with Yann.
Hand in hand they wandered through the silent woods, which seemed to Marianne to be exactly as they must have been a thousand years ago. Dense, bewitched, gloomy. Moorland, bogs and lush green grass. Paths that no forester ever leveled. The wind murmured in the mighty oaks, and the sun cast light-green shadows on the soft ground. Marianne felt as if their every step were dissolving time and space. Eventually they came to a circle of standing stones, surrounded by hawthorn trees. “Merlin’s grave,” whispered Yann. “His beloved banished him here.”
He must have accepted this imprisonment joyfully, Marianne thought. An amazing man, who exchanged his powers for a woman’s love. Merlin’s grave was girded with megaliths, into whose many chiseled cracks rain-soaked slips of paper had been inserted. Marianne didn’t dare pull one out.
“Wishes,” Yann explained. “This is a nemeton—a place of gods. Sometimes they look kindly on the secret wishes we put to them.”
Marianne stared at the grave, then tore a strip of paper from the yellow notebook she used for vocabulary. She glanced at Yann more intensely than she had ever done before. Enquiringly, determinedly and yet so distant.
She jotted a few words on the slip, folded it carefully and pushed it into a crack alongside some others. Yann didn’t ask what she had wished for from the gods, and in any case she would not have told him. Yet something inside him hoped that he might be able to make her wish come true.
They took a break beside the lily pond, not speaking, rapt with indescribable emotions. Marianne turned her face to the warm sun. Her features were relaxed as she sat there as if filled with a profound sense of peace, and Yann thought she looked like a dreamy sprite.
“When a fairy falls in love with a mortal man, she often worries that he will forget her the moment he leaves the magic realm,” his mother had said when she told him fairy legends as a boy. “Fairies die if their beloved no longer remembers them. That’s why a fairy always attempts to bind a man to herself. However, it is only if the fairy gives the man a dark, lethal kiss that she can keep him forever. In this world he dies, and he can therefore remain by his fairy’s side in the other.”
A sweet death awaits every Celtic hero in fact, thought Yann. It doesn’t matter what he was before—a king, a hero or a simple painter. In the hands of a fairy, he is nothing but a man. A man who has given up everything he once held dear in life: fame, honor, money, power, recognition.
Yann observed Marianne again. Her face, the play of the light on her hair, her hands that were always warm. Yes, he decided, the smartest move for any man was to forget his foolish hankerings for power, put his fate in a woman’s hands and let himself be absorbed by her.
Marianne held his gaze. More strongly than ever, Yann had the impression that he was facing a lady of the lake, and he was ready for her to confer immortality on him with a kiss. Now that he was an old man, he fully understood the legend of Viviane and Merlin. Women loved, and their love was so much greater and so much more lasting than power or manhood would ever be. He imagined how wonderful it would be to be loved by Marianne beyond his death.
Getting to her feet and covering the short distance between them in two strides, she felt as she stretched out her hand to Yann that he was offering his entire being to her as humbly as if she were a queen.
The two shadows on the banks of the pool merged into one.