After an hour or so he sat down to rest on a lump of granite and looked out across the grey sea. Pale light shone intermittently through moving clouds onto one of the small islands ahead; below him the cliffs fell away into waves smashed white by the rocks; gulls dropped and circled. The wind flung handfuls of rain and spray in his face, and he shivered. Perhaps he should just throw the ashes in here and have done.
The rain had arrived ten minutes too late for a miracle, and even then the pelt of fat drops had scarcely ruffled the insatiable fire. No repeat for Mari-Jobig, he thought, of the story of the holy Saint Tecla, miraculously saved from burning by the onset of a storm – now that would have made a ballad. Instead at next year’s Sant Yann they will be selling the lamentable and true account of the crazy kakouzes who stole the foreign gentleman’s watch and leapt into the fire to evade capture. In execrable Breton. He would buy it, of course, for his collection, and only he would know just how lamentable, just how untrue. He stood up and shook himself. He was not properly dressed for rain.
The two doctors had left first thing, Z for Paris with Aubry in tow as far as Saint-Brieuc. Neither had said goodbye. Z had not spoken to him at all since Mari-Jobig fell into the fire, eloquent as he had been with everyone else, taking control of the situation with such grace that to interrupt or make a scene of any kind had been impossible. The victim was, as he had explained to the gendarme in the hotel that evening, a terminally ill patient of his, prone to sudden epileptic attacks – the ‘droug Sant Yann’ as you call it do you not? How sadly appropriate. He had recognised the symptoms of an imminent attack and rushed to help her, just too late. Aubry, who had seen the whole thing from his balcony, nodded his confirmation. There was admiration in the gendarme’s eyes as Z scribbled a note to Proulx in Morlaix, enclosing a banknote for the victim’s elderly mother.
The church authorities had likewise treated the incident with the minimum of fuss. A priest said a prayer over the still hot ashes in the drizzling dawn, and then let everyone back as usual to collect their stones. Le Coadic had hunted in vain for a sign, a trace of her; the little crucifix. A bone. But had settled instead for a handful of ash wrapped in a handkerchief and tucked into the pocket of his coat. He got back to the hotel in time to see Aubry and Z leaving. Over bread and coffee he realised that he could not face Élise and her sadness yet. He packed a knapsack, had the rest of his luggage sent on with a note. Expect me, he wrote, in a day or two.
He threw his apple core over the cliff. The wind caught it, held it up; a gull swooped at it and missed. As he turned to resume his path along the clifftop he felt a rush of air near his head and lifted an arm instinctively, but the bird wheeled off down towards the churning sea and did not attack him again.
Thrift, cushions of the blessed Virgin, made it easy on his feet along the coast. He would try and get round to Loquirec, and down to Plestin. From there, if he had had enough, there would be coaches on the main road to Lannion. Just now, though, he feels he should keep walking for days. It is lucky for him there are so many hours of daylight, even grey, even unreal. He pulls his hat down firmly and continues to make his way around the jagged cliff edge.
The woman in the café at Loquirec was cold. She answered him curtly in French and turned her back on him to clean glasses. He was the only person there, and felt like a stranger, bereft of his charm. He ate his soup with his head bowed, and did not look up to see how little he was reflected in the mottled mirrors. When he had done he left money on the table and bowed courteously towards the counter, but she did not turn round.
Outside the rain had strengthened with the wind; it stung the left side of his face. He pulled his hat down askew against it and took the road down towards the Corniche; less briskly now, but with his usual walker’s lope, he walked for an hour or more in the sideways push of the wind round another headland to St Efflam. Here he bought bread and sausage and strawberries, and ate them in the churchyard, out of sight of the road. Water dripped and drizzled off the eaves and the guttering; blessing, he supposed, the small souls of surreptitiously buried babies, dead before the baptism that would have seen them straight to heaven. Were they properly looked after over there, he wondered, not for the first time, were there nurses? Mothers dead in childbirth and aching-full of ghostly milk? That would be beautiful and very moving, he thought. She might like that. He hoped she might like that. He would have to have a chapter on the souls of children, of course, whatever happened.
Ahead of him stretched the Lieue de Grève, a huge half-moon of flat sand disappearing into the mist, and the grey sea beyond. It was low tide, the sand would be firm to walk on, and he could save a few kilometres by crossing in a straight line to St Michel. By then, he thought, he would perhaps have had enough, he would be able to rest, find a coach to take him to a decent hotel in Lannion. He felt better, lighter, He thought the wind had dropped a little.
The rain had emptied the Lieue de Grève of the usual June crowds of English and Parisians come to paddle and play. A few scattered figures could be seen near the top of the beach, walking or busy with nets; others had baskets for cockling. Mist blurred the far end of the bay but Le Coadic was on familiar territory by now; days out as a child, collecting shells; now he sometimes came looking for stories and songs from the cockle-pickers and fishermen and women mending nets. He might, he thought, meet one of his favourite informants out there. He felt that he would not mind a little company now.
He cut down from the road, through bracken and over the little rocks and pebbles and the crunch of the gravel to the firm-packed silky sand, patterned with wavy ridges and the sheen of water. The sea itself was a long way out, dissolved in mist; he picked out the spire at St Michel and set off towards it. The clouds were definitely brightening. His stick made a line of vanishing dints in the wet sand to his right; had he looked behind him he might have noticed that his boots left barely a trace.
Iou, Iou. The gull cry was strangled, weird, somewhere ahead.
Iannik an Aod, said a voice inside his head. The voice was Fañch Riou, he decided, a lobster and crab fisher from up near Plougrescant: played the fiddle, sang very badly. Hush, Fañch, he thought, not now.
Iannik eo, ah ya, said the voice again urgently. Klevet peus?
Gouelan, retorted Le Coadic briskly. It’s a gull. Meus klevet, ya. I heard it. He kept walking.
Iou, Iou.
To his left, he thought, this time, although seagulls were not good indications of direction at the best of times. Iannik, drowned and angry, would at least emerge, he supposed, from the sea.
Fañch had never actually seen him, of course, only heard him a few times when he was down on the beach hauling up nets after dark in bad weather. His grandfather had, though, or so said his grandmother, a few days before he went to the bottom of the sea and two weeks before he washed up as a tattered grey body on the shoreline at Plougrescant. Holy Virgin be blessed, his gran had said, relieved to have a body to bury.
Poor Iannik, thought Le Coadic. But not now. Not yet. Leave me be.
And then there was water sloshing around his ankles and a darkish shape in the whiteness of the fog ahead of him like a person. But the crying was definitely that of a gull. He was walking straight into the sea. Something white swooped at him; he put his arms up to protect his eyes and heard a man’s voice, a voice he knew, shouting horribly for help. He turned full about and ran stumbling into the fog.
His fingers had blood on them and he picked at the wet knots of his boots, tipping seawater out onto the bracken beside him. He felt again, more gently this time, for the cut on his face. He had fallen over rocks coming off the beach, cutting his hand and scraping his cheekbone. He felt for the handkerchief in his breast pocket, remembered the ash, and wiped his hands clean on the wet cushion of thrift instead. Damp moss cleaned his face, and he stood up to get his bearings. The thick fog hung a hundred yards away, but here at the land’s edge it was clearer, a thinnish mist dissipating with a new breeze. It still took him a long moment to understand where he was, his mind struggling to recognise the ghost of a spire rising further down the coast to his left. If that was St Michel he was much further up the coast than he expected, and he still felt baffled at how sea and fog had conspired to rub out his infallible sense of place. But he had the sun now, weak and oddly lacking in warmth, and the faint curve of the bay and the spire: he would go inland, pick up one of the small cart roads to take him back to the Lannion road. He would not refuse a lift, if one came his way. He had done his penance. He would find a decent hotel.
Encouraged, putting aside his recent shock, he pushed his way slowly through a coastal belt of gorse and bracken and brambles, all dripping wet and laced with shivering webs that he left torn and hanging in his wake. At last he reached the banked-up stone hedge, the kleuz, the talus, of a field and pulled himself onto it, snagging in hawthorn and gorse. The mist was almost gone here, but the fine drizzle blanked everything beyond the middle distance. No houses that he could see, but now that he was in farmed land the network of hedges and tracks would pull him in towards buildings and the main road. As he clambered awkwardly down the other side a small branch of hawthorn snapped off in his hand, releasing a scatter of water drops and a handful of souls. He thought again of the woman’s ashes in his pocket and, having located the gate at the far end of the field, set himself to thinking what best to do with them.
What a shame, he thought again, that the fire had not left even a tiny chip of bone. He rummaged in his memory for the details; the squint-eyed seamstress from Plougasnou who had explained with some satisfaction how to unmask a murderer by wrapping the victim’s smallest fingerbone in your handkerchief and then ‘Excuse me,’ you say, ‘I think you may have lost this’ and clenching it in your fist like an amiable grandparent playing hiding games with a little child you pass the bundle unseen right into your suspect’s hands and – if you have the right person of course – wait for the cry of pain, the curse, the astonished guilty face gazing at the red welt blistering across the palm. His olive-skinned musician’s hands, branded. Oh, he killed her, the devil, I was only trying to save her. A small packet of ash through the post, perhaps, unwrapped over breakfast. But at the best it would give him a rash, he supposed, and scorch his linen tablecloth; it would not mark him as he deserved.
He was in a sunken lane which must lead to the farm. The trees had grown up high on either side, forming a tunnel. Big-boned beeches curved in to meet above his head, their green, usually too intense, muted by the drizzle which they were holding off him. Where was everyone? Tregor at midsummer, where were they all? No sign of cattle in any field, and the hoofprints in the still solid mud did not look fresh; it was too quiet, the birds were not loud enough and all he could hear were rustling noises overhead as a breeze he could not feel made the leaves whisper. Once there was an old woman, and an old man, and they died and became beech trees, and because she had not given enough to the poor in her lifetime she was cold, cold; but because he had, now and again, and because he made sure their children did too he had a dispensation for them both to go and warm up by the fire at their son’s house, now and again; and there was nothing more pathetic and more frightening than the sound of those two huge trees shuffling and rustling towards the warmth. He was cold now, and this beech tunnel seemed to have no end. It grew darker as the rustling trees blocked out the grey light and the fine drizzle. Every minute he expected to see signs of settlement, an opening out; he expected, at least, to hear the sounds of daily life, but it was all his own breathing and the faint hiss of leaves and the curiously distant birdsong. And the further he walked the more it seemed that this track, of all the paths in Brittany, was the only one to resist the hardening drought, that the further he went, the muddier it got. Soon there were puddles in the cart ruts and runnels of brown water along the edges, and late celandine and moss in a vivid poisonous green, and the going was increasingly difficult for him. The lane appeared to be without end. With the sun hidden his sense of direction began to fail him again, and he could feel a new edge of anxiety nudging at his mind, telling him that again, in the heart of his childhood country, he was out of place, dépaysé. All he could do was push on, knowing that there was no cart track in the whole of Brittany that did not have some sense to it, and that this one would come to its senses in the end.
Le Coadic thought less about the old woman now and more about Élise. He would go straight to Port Blanc from Lannion; that evening if he could, but certainly tomorrow morning, and by the quickest means he could find.They would eat a long meal together and then if she were well enough they could walk down to the harbour and he would tell her the story somehow, though that would depend on her. He had been away collecting nearly five weeks and she would know by now if this pregnancy had made it beyond the fourth month. After so many losses he was resigned to one more. His sisters would be there, he thought, if it had happened again. Perhaps his brother-in-law would come too, that would be some comfort, to talk to a friend. He was glad of their affection, their concern, but afraid that the women would keep her from him, fussing, protective.
The salt-water in his socks had given him a blister and the longer he walked in the muddy tracks the more the pain of it pushed away all other thoughts. The rough wool rubbing on the patch of raw skin forced him to change his stride; soon he was limping. The hole felt deeper, redder, more gouged out with every step, and he thought of the bloodied women in the ballads shuffling penitentially, absurdly, on their knees thrice round the church, or all the way to Rome or Compostela to die a good death absolved by their scraped-away flesh. But he had had enough of his guilt by now. It did not brace him.
At last the pain halted him and he sat down at the edge of the track and impatiently unknotted the muddy boot again, peeling off the thick wet wool. He packed green moss around the sore and forced his foot back in. As he was tying up the laces he heard a noise ahead, a creaking grincing noise; a cart. He hurried up towards it and found that at last the tunnel had opened onto a broader crossroads; approaching from his left, slowly, was a large cart loaded with sacks, pulled by a small dirty horse.
‘Mad an traoù?’ He lifted a hand in greeting and smiled at the carter with huge relief. The cart stopped a few paces beyond Le Coadic and a yellowish face looked back over a shoulder and motioned him to climb in among the sacks.
‘Da Lannuon?’ said Le Coadic, though he did not much care where he ended up.
‘Ya.’ The man clicked his tongue and the short horse set off again, very slowly, jolting and creaking into a now tangible drizzle. Le Coadic twice tried to talk to him, to find out the name of the nearest farm, but the man would say nothing further. It was like being in a foreign country, he thought again, baffled, but he made himself as comfortable as he could among the knobbly hessian sacks, pulled his hat down over his face, and slept.