H2 wanted to go to his summer house in Cap Ferret. He said we’d be more comfortable there, more isolated, better able to work. He’d have his private cook and his housekeeper, but we wouldn’t see them, and the kids and the wife were to visit only on weekends, at which point I would move into a nearby seaside hotel, mostly empty at this time of the year; which if I have not mentioned yet was November. I was sold the instant he pointed out that I wouldn’t have to see his kids again, but choice wasn’t really on the menu, me-wise, at this juncture.
The summer house was smaller than the Paris house, but it was right on the water; so that it might more properly be called a rickety sea prison. It led to a short pier where H2 docked his boat, which was plus grand than what I’d call a boat but plus petit than what you’d call a yacht. It was a sailboat of some twenty metres in length, and H2 claimed to be an expert sailor. He’d piloted his boat down the Atlantic coast through the straits of Gibraltar all round the Mediterranean as far as Turkey.
I’m not a boat person. That much should be obvious from my lack of precision when ventilating the subject of H2’s sailboat. It might not have been a sailboat. It might have been a sloop, a cutter, a ketch, a yawl, a schooner, a gaffer or a barque in a complicated metaphor about the unalterable nature of love. It might have been a dinghy. Nor could I discuss its rigging, its tack, its clew, its jib (or the cut of same), its boom, its roach, its luff, its leach or its halyard(s). This is fascinating stuff, sans doute, if you’ve a nautical bent. I’ve not.
But I don’t mind looking at the ocean. In particular the rugged Atlantic coastline near Cap Ferret, which though different in latitude reminds me of the coastline at Kennebunkport in Maine and at Lowestoft in East Anglia. Not for me tropical climes with pure white sand and placid aquamarine waters. Not for me palm trees, daiquiris and carcinogenic ozone holes. Not for me acres of bronzed flesh caked with powdered coral or the dung of horseshoe crabs splayed on technicolour polyester beach towels smeared with suntan lotion and semen. The beach is a place where a man can feel. How does the rest go? It doesn’t matter. That’s my experience of the beach – men feeling me, either literally, or with ravenous eyes.
I don’t like the beach. That’s clear. But I don’t mind the shore, especially where it’s rocky and untraversable. I am littoral-minded.
We had taken the TGV to Bordeaux, where a car had picked us up and driven us to Cap Ferret. We arrived in the afternoon, but it was so foggy and dark it might as well have been evening. November is my favourite time of year in any part of any country north of the equator. I’ll take the whole of November through February, when the nights are long and the days have hardly stretched their limbs and blinked open their sleepy eyes before twilight dims to a crepuscular flush, suffusing the landscape with violet and blue, glinting off the (ideally) rain-macerated streets, shading the green bronzes (dripping or snow-hatted or bare in the gelid air). Couldn’t see or hear much of the rickety sea prison’s exterior on arrival: the pilings of the pier disappearing into the fret, the silhouette of the boat, its surfy rasp.
The apartment in the East Village has colossal floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street, so when I heard the commotion I could easily have gotten up and walked over to the window, looked down and seen Thomas lying face down on the ground, vivid cerise blood pooling round his crushed head. But I didn’t.