Chapter Twenty-seven
Port Cros
The hotel was quiet in the morning, and I realised I’d overslept, padding down to a silent kitchen and no background of French giggles. I wandered about the eating area, unlocking the door to the courtyard on the wall to the ancient church, feeling as though I was staying in a summerhouse owned by friends.
Eventually, the man came downstairs, stretching and full of apologies, and brewed coffee for us both to have our morning bowl.
‘Du café,’ he said drowsily, placing a large pot on my little table. But then — the loud ring of the phone upstairs, chatter in French, the woman now at my table, a piece of paper before her.
‘Ah — so — I spoke with the — how you say — boat? — and there is one leaving in ten minutes, from Le Lavandou.’ She tapped her watch. ‘It will take you too long to walk along the path. I can drive you?’
I threw my delicious untouched baguettes and assorted cheeses in a bag, rushing upstairs for the rest of my things.
‘You have cream?’ said the woman as we walked to her car. ‘For your face?’
Was she checking that I’d moisturised?
‘And a towel, for swimming? And some money to buy lunch? And swimsuit? And a bottle of water?’
‘Oui —’ I raced back to get the towel.
We were halfway to Le Lavandou when I realised that by cream she meant sunscreen. It didn’t matter. I was in France, where they still have an ozone in the sky above, and the bright sun isn’t the cancerous threat it is back in Australia.
Besides, I pictured a quaint little cafe on the water, where I’d sit with my journal under the shade. I set off for my trip wearing leggings, a T-shirt, and ballet flats. A strange outfit, certainly. The woman from the hotel pointed at my ‘dancing shoes’ with a look of confusion.
At the little jetty, we all loaded up onto a large ferry, soon speeding across the water. Bronzed French and Italians clad in white surrounded me, and, when we stopped at Île du Levant, there were giggles and talk of the ‘nudists’ who lived on the island.
Four cats languidly wandered up the jetty to greet the handful of visitors.
It took almost an hour to cross the blue expanse and make it to Port Cros, and as we slowly docked in the little port I saw a few men painting the exteriors of a shop, but no movement besides.
I’d never been to an island on my own before, but I wasn’t afraid. Just excited.
Port Cros was the island where Aldington had holidayed with D.H. Lawrence for a fortnight in 1928, returning numerous times after, particularly with dad. Dad had, it seemed, travelled many times to the island with Aldington and Al and the Duttons and others in those summers in Saint Clair in the 1940s, even though he got seasick.
Raphaël, just a day before, had identified the small rowboat in many of our photos. ‘Monsieur Gigonet’, as written in dad’s diaries, would merely examine the sky before deciding if it was safe to leave Plage de Saint Clair.
A fishing boat. The waters had been choppy in my luxury high-speed ferry, and I’d had to cling to the seats in front of me, sometimes, just to avoid a fall. Dad had come here in a rowboat. And he got seasick.
It would have taken hours.
The first thing I noticed, as the ferry docked in Port Cros, was an ancient fort, up a steep hill.
There was a post office, a tourist information office, and a strip of magasins being painted or built, I wasn’t quite sure — but all looked très fermé.
The ferry wouldn’t come back to collect me until five that evening. I had my notebook and pen, and bathers for a swim, and I pictured lots of nice slow saunters in the sun between delicious delicacies.
I set off to find coffee in one of the shops.
My favourite photo of dad from the island, I’d first found in Geoff Dutton’s memoir, Out in the Open. Head back in laughter, two friends across, all sitting at a wooden picnic table with two jolly-looking fishermen serving wine and soup from a giant breadboard, the background was a forest. It was a bouillabaisse picnic described in dad’s French memoir.
I’d reread the passage in my hotel room the night before.
I’d since found a matching set of picnic photos, almost as though photos were taken with every bite of the feast. In one, Monsieur Gigonet, with his scarf and his fishing cap just so, is grinning widely and clutching wine in a carafe, as dad dishes himself up more bread.
As I centred myself on the island, which was quiet except for the sounds of a few men hammering nails onto a wall somewhere close, I looked around for the cafe I’d hoped for. A Frenchman with a paintbrush in one hand and a cigarette in another wandered towards me, curiously.
‘Ah … je cherche une café … ?’
‘Ah, non.’ He looked désolée. ‘Tous fermés.’ He shrugged and turned as if to display.
‘Pas de magasins?’ I double-checked, repeating quietly to the growing gathering of curious and désolée locals now walking to meet me.
‘Je cherche du café?’ I made a motion for drinking coffee.
‘Ah-ah.’ A chatter of French. Some pointing. A shout.
‘JOELLE!!!!’ a man bellowed, shattering the quiet (for all the men had stopped hammering to look). A small, suntanned woman emerged quickly from a cottage, marching across.
‘Oui?’
More chatter in French, some pointing and talk of coffee. I gathered I was to follow her. Soon, we were at the doors to her cottage, in her immaculate kitchen; I was ordered to asseyez vous, so I sat down at her table.
A plate of biscuits was placed in front of me, a bowl of sugar cubes, and a steaming hot cup of espresso.
‘Êtes vous américain?’
‘Ah, non. Je suis australien.’
‘Ah! Le kangaroo!’ she said cheerily, running off to answer her phone in a nearby room.
So I sat in this sweet little kitchen on an ancient island and sipped Joelle’s espresso. It wasn’t the cafe I’d pictured, but it was somehow better.
What do you do on an ancient island all day when the ferry apparently won’t be back until five o’clock and nothing is open?
I just walked and thought.
Walking alone to remote places gives one a feeling of ownership, dad had written.
I walked and walked in my ballet flats, up forest tracks and down cliff edges to secluded inlets. I swam in the ocean in a little beach on my own and ate my breakfast baguette filled with delicious cheeses from the shade of a tree overlooking the cliff edge to the deep blue. It was my island, that day, and I didn’t meet a soul once I’d wandered a few paths away from the harbour.
I climbed to the edge of the island, which overlooked a rocky point that made me dizzy with its drama, dramatic cuts of cliff on the windy side of the island contrasting wildly with the softness of the protected bays. The vertigo I felt, standing on the edge of endless blue, feeling I’d never be found if the wind blew any stronger, had me dancing in my ballet flats back to the known path.
I followed path after hidden track to hidden path. Signs in French warned that le forêt est inflammable, and I stumbled upon a deep ancient well. It was a storybook walk, through a land I’d only ever imagined belonged in fairytales and picture books, and as my blisters started to hurt I saw another sign for a historic fort up ahead — a different one to the one where Aldington had stayed with D.H. Lawrence.
This one seemed more sombre, quite scary. I approached as though it was a sleeping giant, for something gave me pause. I didn’t want to turn my back on it, as though a full battle of troops might start shooting me — it seemed so full of recent drama. Yet it was pre-Napoleonic, built hundreds of years ago. A castle, a moat — grown over with grass and vines, but just as forbidding — and dark, closed gates. There was even what looked to be a working drawbridge.
As I walked the periphery of the fort, unwilling to cross the moat for the strong feeling of fear, I wondered at the history and dramas that once unfolded, while the space gave me an increasing sense of foreboding. That something created in the sixteenth century, and unused since World War II, could still elicit such a powerful response in my physical body surprised me. I wondered at dad, driving across Europe a mere two years after World War II had ended, sleeping in country homes that once housed fleeing families, the Gestapo, even the Resistance.
And, even though it scared me a little, the sense of everything being so interesting and full of stories in France had me wanting to return, before I’d even left.
I wandered down from the fort to find a tribute to American allied forces during World War II.
I found a seat by the water near the ferry dock and wrote in my little notebook, sitting on the shore with my toes in the water, perhaps the same water where dad’s fisherman had cooled his wine.
I didn’t feel bored, or hungry, or frustrated. I filled my notebook with thoughts and phrases. I napped under the shade of a shop, and I refilled my water bottle from a tap that warned that drinking water was only a recent addition to the island’s amenities.
An entire day stuck on an island in the South of France was perhaps the perfect period of integration for the momentous shifts in my world view that had taken place over the last few weeks. I took the occasional photo on my walk, but mostly I just let my eyes take it in.
Every path I took, every track, seemed to hold remnants of ages past, relics and monuments that laid tribute to all that had gone before. The French honouring of history, their sense of occasion and announcement, their love of food and life, such that a fisherman was concerned that I get my espresso and Joelle had even offered to make me lunch, demanding to know what I had to eat, only letting me go once I’d produced my stale baguette as proof.
No wonder this was dad’s peace after the war.
They knew what had gone before, but they also appreciated the present day and the simple necessities of human connection, food, beauty, and service.
When I’d walked so much and for so long that blisters formed on my toes, I found a shady spot back at the village, passing the same men who had greeted me that morning.
As the ferry steamed me back across the water over the course of an hour, a familiar figure came into view at the harbour. It was Raphaël. He explained, in French, that the tourism office where he worked looked out to the ferry station.
He, too, seemed concerned by my footwear. ‘Dancing shoes?’ He stared at my feet. He was insistent on delivering me back to my hotel.
In my room, I peeled off my sweaty clothes and looked in the mirror. After spending all day in the sun, I wasn’t even burned.
There’s a word I learned in Saint Clair, because I was searching for a way to explain how I felt when I stayed there.
Nepenthe is a medicine for sorrow, literally a ‘drug of forgetfulness’, mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey and other ancient texts that dad loved. It means: something so beautiful that it takes away all feelings of sorrow, depression, or grief.
In the depths of my grief for both my parents, I’d sometimes wondered if amnesia might be the only way to lose the pain. Amnesia of all they were to me and could have been, forgetting all the unfinished stories it pained me to never know.
But when I’d woken in Saint Clair that first morning, after a sleep so long and so deep I was momentarily unsure where I was or when, I knew the search for amnesia was over. It was like the closing of a circle. It was more than the end of a journey to understand where dad’s letters had come from.
Dad was in everything that I loved about Saint Clair, and in every part of me that took the risk to search for it. The kind of person who journeys across the world because of a letter.
The kind of person who — no matter what’s gone before — leaves the door open to joy.
To have that feeling of kinship — with dad, with the French, but most of all, with myself — was worth risking everything.
I remembered who I was, in Saint Clair.