A Sand Archive

by Gregory Day

  They returned then to sit at their table and sip their wine. FB could see how perfectly happy Lacombe was in the conducive environment of the Loup Garou, and now, with a sweep of his arm that took in the view through the large window, the professor simply said: ‘Voila.’

  It was true enough. There in front of them were the passes themselves, with the tide visibly rushing in, and pleasure boats and fishing boats and even the bright red ferry to Cap Ferret negotiating its vicissitudes.

  †

  An hour later Professor Lacombe and FB had moved to the dining room and, over oysters followed by seafood cassoulet, Lacombe began elaborating further on the more general history of dune stabilisation, augmenting what he had been able to illustrate about the movement of the sands with the help of the morphological charts and the living view out the window.

  ‘It concerns both land and sea,’ said Lacombe. ‘Houses that have been buried by the creeping giant that is the Dune du Pyla, land that has been colonised by westerly winds full of sand, and channels that must remain navigable for the families who rely on them for fishing and, these days, for tourism. You will see how, as far back as the 1700s, we have been attempting to control the march of sand in the bassin. On Cap Ferret we planted Ammophila arenaria as long ago as the 1700s to try to hold the dunes together so the northern channel did not fill up with sand. We laid cypress branches upwind of each planting for the sand to coalesce. I will show you tomorrow. Then we built the Gascony palisades, the slat fences you have already seen pictures of in Paris, and we still do. All this has an effect, but the most effective is the gourbet, the marram grasses, the Ammophila arenaria. I do believe that without it the charts for 1829, 1912 and so on would be significantly different. How is your cassoulet?’

  FB nodded enthusiastically. ‘Delicious, thank you.’

  †

  After dinner they took a glass of cognac on a small open terrace which overlooked the steep hotel garden. Now they were staring directly into the treetops. It was a warm spring evening and Lacombe was in the mood. His high pale forehead shone with the plenitude the Loup Garou was once again offering him. He had a captive audience and as he talked seemed unwilling to notice how increasingly distracted his pupil had become.

  ‘Human beings are quick to forget the conditions which give them their breath of life,’ the professor said. ‘The bassin is a case in point, precisely because the power of nature here resists abstraction. You cannot live here, you cannot work or raise a family on these shores, without taking into account the tides, the winds, the sand. For that reason,’ he concluded, ‘it is an emblematic environment.’

  An emblematic environment. This remark resonated with FB, but not only in the way Lacombe intended. The student took the opportunity to concur emphatically with his mentor, as much to mask his interior excitements as anything else. There had been a long build-up to this trip in their tutorials, Lacombe had been impressed enough by FB’s work to deem the excursion warranted, and FB didn’t want to let him down.

  ‘Yes, it does seem to be a remarkable area,’ FB said. ‘And the charts here are such a helpful illustration to have in the field, as it were.’

  Lacombe’s face grew serious. ‘Francis, to transfer this knowledge to your situation in Australia is an opportunity for us both.’

  But FB felt far from ambassadorial at that moment. So he simply nodded in a bashful way, and said nothing.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Lacombe continued, ‘we will spend the morning at Pyla and the afternoon at Cap Ferret. By the time we are sitting out on this terrace again in the evening you will have learnt as much in twenty-four hours as in the whole time you’ve been in Paris.’

  ‘Well, I’m grateful,’ FB replied. ‘Though I feel I’ve learnt an enormous amount in Paris, and not only through my studies.’

  Lacombe nodded. ‘There is a fundamental difference between what you can learn here at the bassin and the events you have been involved in on the streets of Paris. You know the slogan I saw written on a wall before we left? Sous les pavés, la plage.’

  Once again the professor had his student’s full attention.

  Sous les pavés, la plage. Under the cobblestones lies the beach.

  †

  Cycling back to the mill in the dusk, tears began to fall down FB’s cheeks in the most unexpected way. Was it all too much, this quickening convergence of his heart and mind? Perhaps. Was he suddenly homesick for the astringent and slightly defensive version of existence which he led in Australia? Taking his mother-made sandwiches to work every day, putting up with her moral frown, her loving control, and also the mediocrity of Gibbon and co. at the CRB. Even his involvement in the Moorabool Chamber Orchestra was only half satisfactory, what with the slipping tempos and the off notes. He had made do but had always longed for the kind of fullness he was now experiencing. Professor Lacombe at the top of his game. Mathilde, in her own magnetic way, at the top of hers. So why the tears?

  As he cycled through the curling avenue of pines which led him back from Arcachon through Anguillon to the port of La Teste he saw how the boats previously marooned at their moorings were now being floated once again by the incoming tide. He felt as if the tide itself was rushing through his own body, pushing him back towards the salt pastures and Mathilde, flushing out of his heart a complex arterial emotion of saltwater, lust, inspiration and knowledge. Such was this whelming, after the austerity of his former life, that it had to become vocal. He groaned loudly as he pedalled. The tears were simply not enough.

  He kept to the shoreline, as Mathilde had instructed, and by the time he reached the grass path which ran back along the salt pastures to the mill he did actually stop for a moment and gather himself. He couldn’t show up in the state he was in.

  FB dismounted amongst trees where the path ran north along an embankment which joined a dyke not far from the mill. No-one could see him from there. Breathing loudly now through his mouth he leant the bike against his hip and wiped his face. Then, looking about just to make sure, he pushed the bike in against a tree and pissed into the bushes.

  Walking the bike through the trees along the embankment path he heard music up ahead. The sound of a drum kit and bass floated over the salt pastures, also a voice, and strings. It came as a surprise and extracted him from his own whelmings. It was recorded music, and after a few more steps he began to recognise a tune. His face broke into a smile as he realised he knew what it was and also where it must be coming from.

  Quickening his pace in a gloaming light which, like the saltwater, seemed to be descending onto the prés salés, he began to feel ridiculously light and happy. Suddenly the light became beautiful, the pastures to his left fecund and roseate with the late solar glow. A few minutes more and he felt cleansed, transformed, as if those tears and that groan had been the very last dregs of a former self.

  As he moved closer to the mill he was convinced the music was coming from there. The song ended and the next one began, ‘Fixing a Hole’. She was playing Sgt. Pepper’s.

  †

  In the dark, with only a kerosene lantern on the garden table, they drank her father’s wine and smoked next to the vegetable patch beside the mill. They ate white asparagus and Belgian chocolate. They kissed, and kissed again. Whenever FB queried whether or not they should turn the music down, or whether her father or mother might want her to go inside to bed, she just laughed. ‘Vous êtes tendu, trop tendu,’ she would tell him. You are tense, too tense. It was an admonition he’d carry around for the rest of his days.

  ‘My parents have always wanted to be free,’ she told him. ‘Free from the Nazis, from prudery, from the guilt of colonialism, from de Gaulle’s patriarchy, from ignorance, from too much knowledge. It may surprise you, given all the books in his house, but I remember my father setting fire to books right here in the garden when I was a child. Sartre. The Stalinist. Reaction, and counter-reaction. He wants to be free, but really
he just wants to be real. Like Maman.’

  FB stared at her in the glow of the kerosene lamp on the table. He felt thrilled by her words, by her lips, the way she sat, and laughed. Her confidence, her sincerity.

  He tried to explain how different life had been for him. In the past. The past not so much of Sartre or Camus but of Fletcher Jones suits and St Joseph’s. How narrow and shrill his upbringing had been.

  ‘But that is not you,’ she said. ‘And my parents are not me. Otherwise we would not be sitting here together listening to Ringo’s ridiculous voice.’

  They laughed, she was keeping it light, ahead of the darkness to come. She drank her father’s wine.

  13

  Tuft and Rib

  Before FB had got back to the house that night, Mathilde had had her own turbulent evening, talking with her father in his kitchen.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘This is not just about your generation you know. Have you heard about what is happening in Nantes?’

  ‘I know about that.’

  ‘It is not only about students.’

  ‘Well, talk to Francis – he was handing out leaflets at the Renault factory on Île Seguin.’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I will talk to him; I immediately liked him. Why weren’t you there?’

  There was silence for a time. Mathilde pictured herself back in her apartment, with her Coca-Cola and Nathalie Sarraute. It wasn’t the only reason, but she didn’t want to talk about her period with her father. And anyway, as she told FB, if a book existed on the great things women had achieved while they had their periods her father was sure to know about it. He would thrust it before her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ was all she said.

  ‘You should.’

  ‘Well, maybe that’s why I am here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘So this is where you come when you’re not sure.’

  ‘Is that a crime?’

  ‘Look, my dear, you are an adult now. To leave is to collaborate.’

  ‘This is not 1943.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  There was another pause, until Mathilde made as if to leave. Her father raised his hand, motioning her to stay. She sat.

  ‘So then, you are an émigré,’ he said in English. ‘To your own home.’

  She shook her head. ‘It seems you don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘Either that, or you are confused.’

  ‘I am. But still you don’t understand. How can you? It’s 1968 and you live here in this backwater.’

  †

  Alain Soubret was offended by Mathilde’s implication that his life was no longer relevant to contemporary politics but, as fathers do with their daughters, he laughed it off. She had got up from the table, kissed him on both cheeks and left the house. So while FB had been inspecting the morphological charts of the Bassin d’Arcachon with a glass of orange wine in his hand, she was sitting alone on the shore by the oyster sheds just north of the mill, smoking, thinking.

  She respected no-one more than her father and it hurt her deeply when he disapproved of her actions. Part of that respect was due to the personal liberty he had always given her, and how he had fought on her behalf when her mother wanted to curtail her freedoms and have her live a more traditional, even Catholic, life. But she had also travelled the coast and up through the Médoc into Brittany with her father when she was a girl, visiting his old compatriots from the days of the Resistance. She had picked up on what those people shared, the depth of their bond and how it was born out of what was good and right, out of risk and sacrifice. Every one of them had risked their life on more than one occasion. And so, when her father accused her of collaboration, it had stung. Her response was to lash out.

  There was honesty also in what she had said to her father. There was something different about what was going on this time, she just couldn’t quite articulate what it was. From my own distance, this far away and all these years later, it would seem to have something to do with irony. Something to do with theatre, imitation, with a sense of everything just going through the motions. Something also to do with mindlessness, with boredom and the mob. Hadn’t this whole story been told before, wasn’t it always the same?

  I imagine Mathilde looking down at the gnarled and brindled oyster shells scattered at her feet, thinking of the way they clung for dear life to the structures the farmers created for them. Did the fierceness of that adhesion strike her then for the first time? The structures that gave the oysters life also killed them. Yet their grip on the structures was more powerful than the tides. What gave them this intensity? It wasn’t loyalty, and it had nothing to do with courage. She wouldn’t have even been sure if she could attribute it to instinct. It just was.

  And so perhaps the domination of the state just was, the structured hierarchy of the university just was, the domination of Renault over their workers just was, the certitude of de Gaulle just was. Was it possible to break their grip? Would she be working with, or against, the tide if she turned away and didn’t even try?

  She knew that in her father’s world this question was impossible. She knew without doubt that his political stance was as imperviously powerful as the grip of the oysters. And that she was weaker.

  14

  Time Heaped: The Organic Hourglass

  Mathilde and FB played the album all night long, also Marie Laforêt. They talked, she told him her thoughts, told him about her talks with her father. They smoked, they ate, they made love. They both had cause for a certain desperation in their lovemaking, and they didn’t hold back. There were feelings they could articulate and feelings they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find words for. They spoke in both French and English. There were moments when they felt as one, other moments when they were like creatures from entirely alien habitats.

  At six o’clock in the morning FB was woken by gunshots. He was alone in the upper storey of the mill. He lay back, disorientated, listening. The shots seemed close, but not too close. They were coming from the prés salés.

  He looked over to where Mathilde had lain beside him on the bed. He could still smell her and was glad she’d returned to the main house before the dawn. How could he ever go in for breakfast with her parents after sleeping with her all night?

  Making his way downstairs he found the arm of the old gramophone still butting against the end of the record’s groove. He gently lifted it back into its cradle. He noticed the gramophone brand – Radio Anjou – and the black Parlophone label of the disc itself. On the table were the remains of the chocolate they’d shared and an empty packet of Marlboros. He made his way over to the tiny washbasin to splash his face.

  How he would cope with a full day on the Dune du Pyla and at Cap Ferret with Professor Lacombe after the night he’d had he was not quite sure. Through the fleur-de-lis in the glass of the mill door he could see it was bright, even glorious outside. But he was hungover and sore.

  At breakfast inside the house it was explained to FB that the shots he had heard were duck hunters. Over coffee and croissants Alain Soubret was keen to hear what Francis had to say about the events at the Renault factory. FB went back out to the mill to get the leaflet he’d saved concerning the two hundred Algerians killed near the Pont Saint-Michel.

  Mathilde sat quietly at the table as her father read the leaflet and passed it to his wife. The mood at the table darkened and Alain wanted to know how Francis had come to be handing out such material. After FB told him about the man who’d appeared out of the crowd, Alain spoke rapidly to his wife and daughter at great length. Eventually he apologised to FB and explained in English that he and his wife had known two of the people who were killed near the bridge. Mathilde’s mother nodded gravely.

  As
FB attempted to express his condolences Alain waved him silent with his hand. Instead he smiled. ‘But you must be surprised by what you encountered?’ he suggested. ‘You were not expecting a revolution when you arrived in Paris.’

  FB smiled too, and agreed. But then he asked: ‘Do you think this is a revolution, Monsieur Soubret? Is that the right word?’

  Alain Soubret shook his head slowly. ‘I cannot tell,’ he said, ‘whether everything is changed or nothing at all. But the demonstrations are now spreading. Even to Bordeaux, I think. And so, the next few days will reveal to us what France, at this moment, is capable of. For certain there are a lot of changes that need to take place. There is a lot of unhappiness. The fact that students and workers have come together to create a pause is, in itself, remarkable. What happens from here will depend on the force of the government, the strategy they adopt.’

  ‘And what do you think they will do, Papa?’ asked Mathilde.

  Alain thought for a moment, then turned to his wife. ‘Madeleine?’ he said.

  Madeleine Soubret smiled at FB. It was the first time he’d seen her smile and he was struck by how alike she and Mathilde were when she did so. ‘If they are stupid,’ she said, ‘which of course they are not, they will continue with the violence, the suppression. If they are clever, they will leave it to the people to exhaust themselves with their own internal fighting. And, as Mathilde has shown, before long the students will want to take their holidays.’

  At this Mathilde shot up out of her chair and left the room.

  †

  On their walk from the Hotel Loup Garou to the Dune du Pyla, Professor Lacombe, in tennis shoes, slacks, sports jacket and yellow tie, explained to Francis Hershell, in Dunlop Volleys, grey Fletcher Jones slacks and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, how his beloved hotel got its name. By the time they arrived at the Grande Dune, less than an hour later, FB’s understanding of it had changed once again, and so had the weather.