Christophe murmured something and Ella bent close to hear him. He licked his lips. ‘Take me to the dunes.’
Without protesting – for what could be the point of that now? – she helped him to his feet. Wrapping a rug around his shoulders, she supported his frail frame, grown so insubstantial now, as they picked their way across the path of soft sand that threaded its way through the beach-grass, their way lit by the lantern moon. At the highest point, where the crest of the dunes opened its face towards the sea, she settled him into the cradling dip of the sand, spreading another rug for them to lie on and scooping sand beneath it to make a pillow for him to rest his head.
She lay beside him, her arms around him, and felt the faint rise and fall of his chest which, once again, seemed to echo the sighing of the waves on the beach below them.
He kissed her hair gently. ‘It has been perfect, hasn’t it, my Ella? You and me. Our love.’
She nodded, closing her eyes to allow the hot tears to spill out and run over her temples where her pulse throbbed.
‘But you know,’ he went on, ‘it has only been able to be perfect because it was never corrupted by reality. Imagine if we had got married, if you had come to live with me in Paris or here on the island. It would have been altered then, by the thousand daily demands of real life, by financial worries and worries about our children. Maybe even by loving our children more than we loved each other. All those things that you and Angus have weathered in your relationship.’
‘I don’t think he and I have a relationship any more,’ she said softly. ‘I think I broke it into pieces when I left to come here this time.’
She felt Christophe shake his head. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘He loves you, just as I have loved you. Perhaps even more so, as he has carried on loving you despite all that your marriage has had to endure. I may have been your first love, but he is your lasting love. Be brave, my Ella, as brave as I know you to be. When I am gone, return to him. Ask his forgiveness. Forgive him in your turn. For the sake of your children, but most of all for the sake of each other. You both deserve it. I know this, because I have seen his children. I remember how Rhona loved him and defended him. You wouldn’t have had to struggle to decide between us, Ella, if he wasn’t a good and loving man. Don’t give up on your marriage now, even if you feel it is broken at the moment. It’s still worth saving.’
He coughed, his face contorting suddenly as pain’s steel fist tightened its grasp.
‘Hush, there now,’ she soothed him. ‘Don’t try to talk any more.’
‘Promise me you’ll go back to him, Ella? You’ll try again?’
She kissed him gently in reply, trying to reassure him and yet to avoid saying again what she believed, that she’d destroyed her family, finally, in coming to him.
He fell silent, spent with exhaustion. The only sound was the sighing of the waves on the shore and the faint, plaintive cry of a curlew. His eyes fluttered closed and she wasn’t sure whether he was still awake. But then he whispered, ‘Talk to me, Ella. Talk to me about the beauty of this world.’
She hesitated, fear making her heart miss a beat as she sensed him slipping away from her a little further, along a path that only he could travel. She took a breath, calming herself so that her words, when she spoke, could be a steady and strong anchor for him.
‘I remember that first night, when we came here and danced on the beach. You held me in your arms and told me you would rather dance with me than with the ocean. There was a path of moonlight on the water and I told you we could step out on to it and waltz together to the far horizon.’
She felt his breathing calm and deepen a little as he relaxed in her arms.
‘I remember the second night, when we came here to the dunes after that night in the auberge with the Mona Lisa for company. How extraordinary both of those two nights were. You gave me that gift then. The gift of seeing beauty in the ordinary. The miracles that are all around us in the everyday and the mundane, if we only open our eyes to them.’
He smiled, the only sign that he had not yet fallen asleep.
‘And I remember the third night with you, here in the dunes,’ she whispered. ‘When I woke, you were drawing me. And from that drawing you have made the painting that has passed on that same gift to the whole world . . .’
She tailed off as his breath slowed and deepened, the soft kindness of sleep claiming him. And as the waves whispered and sighed on the shore, she held him to her and danced with him out on to a sea of memories.
Before sunrise, when the morning star kept its lonely vigil between the setting of the moon and the first light of dawn, a stillness woke her. She sensed it even before she turned to look at him, wrapped in the rug beside her.
An absence.
She held his cold body to hers.
The darkest hour.
As the first rays of warmth stole across the beach, she lay there still, holding his lifeless body in her arms and watching the waves wash in.
Caroline came to find her. She knelt and wept warm tears into Ella’s hair as she enfolded them both in her arms.
But Ella couldn’t cry. Her own tears were frozen somewhere inside, buried deep. Because she knew that if they ever began to fall, they might never end. She would weep a salty river that would carve its way across the beach and flow into the waters of the Atlantic, cold and indifferent as they engulfed her pain, her loss, the tragedy of her life. She had lost everything. Christophe, Angus, her children, her home – because how could she go back now, having made the choice to come and be with Christophe? Rhona’s parting words rang in her ears: ‘Don’t expect me to be here when you come crawling back – if you ever do. I never want to see you again.’ Was that how Angus would see it too, if she went back? That she was using him, skulking home now that Christophe was gone and he was the only refuge she had left?
She felt so tired all of a sudden. Defeated. Grief wrapped her in its heavy blanket, a thick fog which saturated her body and mind with its dull, cold ache. She grieved not just for Christophe and the relationship that they had never been able to have, but for Angus too: for what he had taken on in loving her, for the years he had suffered, being married to her and knowing she could never love him completely, wholeheartedly, as he deserved, while Christophe lived. He was a good, brave, loving man, but she had inflicted terrible pain on him, she knew, and so guilt added its unbearable weight to her grief until she could endure no more. She was overwhelmed and empty.
Lost.
After the funeral, once Christophe’s coffin had been lowered into the ground, Ella paused to read the inscription on the headstone alongside the freshly dug grave.
‘A la douce mémoire de Philippe Christophe Martet et sa femme adorée, Marianne. “Lève-toi, mon amie, ma belle, et viens!”’
‘Where is the quotation from?’ she asked Caroline, who had taken two roses from the posy she’d picked from the garden to lay on Christophe’s coffin and placed them beside her parents’ stone.
‘It’s from the Cantique des Cantiques. The Song of Solomon. It’s the first line of one of my mother’s favourite verses. In English it would be something like, “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come with me!” Even though Maman does not lie here, we wanted to commemorate her alongside Papa.’
‘It’s perfect for them.’ Ella brushed the palm of her hand over the soft moss that cushioned one corner of the stone. ‘I’m glad he’s here beside them.’ She nodded towards Christophe’s grave.
Caroline shook her head suddenly, vehemently. ‘He’s not here!’ She picked up the bunch of flowers that she’d laid to one side to be placed on Christophe’s grave once the earth had been piled back. ‘Come on, Ella. Let’s go! Let’s sail with him, one last time. That should be our goodbye, not here, not with mud and stone like this, but out on the sea, where he was most alive.’
She pulled the hat from her hair and let the curls spill over the collar of her black coat, then seized Ella’s hand and the two of them ran, stumbling slightly in their formal funeral shoes, past the small crowd of mourners who were filing back towards the gate, to where the car waited beyond the graveyard walls.
They drove straight to the harbour, not bothering to go back to the house first to change. In Saint Martin they attracted a few bemused glances as they boarded Bijou in their funeral clothes, Caroline in a long coat with silver filigree buttons and Ella in a black shift dress and matching jacket which she’d borrowed from her friend for the day. They made ready and Ella cast off from the quayside. Caroline steered the little boat through the harbour entrance and, instead of turning westwards to follow the island’s coastline as they usually did, she headed straight out towards the open ocean.
Wind-driven clouds scudded across the sky above the swell of their sails, and the waves danced about the hull, sending sparkling necklaces of spray into the air alongside them. The late-September sun illuminated their faces and painted the sea-scape with a wash of soft light that made every drop of water, each foam-capped wave and every line of the island’s receding form stand out with astonishing clarity.
Ella turned to Caroline in wonder. ‘You were right. He wasn’t there, in the graveyard. But he is out here, all around us!’