“I don’t think he should call us magpies,” said Soeur Extase. “They’re a bad-luck bird.”
“We came here,” said Désirée. “And the Saint spoke to us.”
Behind us, necks craned. Eyes slitted against the gritty wind. Slyly, fingers flicked out in the sign against disaster. I could hear the sound of breath being caught, kept, held close.
“What did she say?” asked Omer at last.
“She wasn’t very saintly,” said Soeur Thérèse.
“Nono,” agreed Soeur Extase. “Not very saintly at all.”
“That’s because she’s a Salannaise,” replied Désirée. “Not a mealymouthed Houssine.” She smiled and took Aristide’s hand. “I wish you’d been there, Aristide. I wish you’d heard her speak. It’s been too long since our son drowned, thirty years too long. Since then, there’s been nothing but bitterness and rage. You couldn’t cry—you couldn’t pray—you drove our other son away with your anger and your bullying—”
“Shut up,” said Aristide, his face stony.
Désirée shook her head. “Not this time,” she said. “You pick fights with everyone. You even pick on Mado when she suggests that life might go on instead of stopping here. What you really want is to see everything go down with Olivier. You. Me. Xavier. Everyone gone. Everything finished.”
Aristide looked at her. “Désirée, please—”
“It’s a miracle, Aristide,” she said. “It’s as if he’d spoken to me himself. If only you’d seen it . . .” And in the rosy light she raised her face toward the Saint, and at that moment I saw something falling gently down toward her from the high dark alcove, something like scented snow. Désirée Bastonnet kneeled on Pointe Griznoz, surrounded by mimosa blossoms.
At that all eyes turned to the Saint’s alcove. For a second it seemed that something moved—a jumping shadow, perhaps, cast by the lamps.
“There’s someone up there!” snapped Aristide, and snatching the rifle from his grandson’s hands, he took aim and shot both barrels at the Saint in her alcove. There was a loud crack, shocking in the sudden silence.
“Trust Aristide to fire at a miracle,” said Toinette. “You’d fire at the Virgin of Lourdes if you could, you halfwit, wouldn’t you?”
Aristide looked abashed. “I was sure I saw someone—”
Désirée had stood up at last, her hands still full of flowers. “I know you did.”
The confusion lasted several minutes. Xavier, Désirée, Aristide, and the nuns were at the center of it, each trying to stem the wave of questions that broke upon them. People wanted to see the miraculous flowers, to hear the Saint’s words, to inspect the signs on the wall of the chapel. Looking beyond the Pointe I thought for a moment I saw something bobbing against the waves far below, and in a lull of the turning tide I might even have heard a splash, like something hitting the water. But that could have been anything. The figure in the alcove—if it had been there at all—was gone.
3
* * *
A round of drinks in Angélo’s bar—reopened for this exceptional occasion—did much to calm us. Apprehensions and suspicions were forgotten, the devinnoise poured freely, and half an hour later the scene had swung into what was almost a carnival mood.
The children, delighted at this excuse to stay up, played at pinball in one corner of the bar. There would be no school in the morning, and that was in itself cause enough for celebration. Xavier eyed Mercédès shyly, and for the first time was eyed in return. Between drinks, Toinette cheerily insulted as many people as she could. The nuns had finally persuaded Désirée to go back to bed, but Aristide was there, looking oddly subdued. Flynn came in at the tail end of the crowd, wearing a black knitted cap that covered his hair. He winked briefly at me, then settled himself discreetly at a table behind me. GrosJean sat beside me with his devinnoise, smoking a Gitane, smiling incessantly. From being afraid that the strange ceremony might have distressed him in some way, I realized that for the first time since my return, my father seemed truly happy.
He remained by my side for over an hour, then left so quietly that I barely saw him go. I did not try to follow him; I didn’t want to tip the delicate balance between us. But from the window I watched him as he made his way home, only the glow of his cigarette faintly visible above the dune.
The discussion went on; Matthias, sitting at the largest table with the most influential Salannais gathered around him, was utterly convinced that the appearance of Sainte-Marine had indeed been a miracle.
“What else could it be?” he demanded, sipping a third devinnoise. “History is filled with examples of the supernatural interceding in daily life. Why not here?”
Already there were as many variations to the story as there were witnesses. Some declared they had actully seen the Saint fly to her perch in the ruined tower. Others had heard ghostly music. Toinette, given pride of place alongside Matthias and Aristide and greatly enjoying the attention, sipped her drink and explained how she had been the first to notice the signs on the church wall. There was no doubt it was a miracle, she said. Who could have found the missing Saint? Who could have carried her all the way across to La Griznoz? Who could have lifted her to the niche? No one human, certainly. It simply wasn’t possible.
“Plus there’s the bell,” declared Omer. “We all heard that. What else could it have been but La Marinette? And the marks on the chapel wall—”
Certainly, it was agreed, something supernatural had been at work. But what did it mean? Désirée had taken it as a message from her son. Aristide did not speak of this but stayed unusually thoughtful over his drink. Toinette said it meant our luck was on the turn; Matthias hoped for better fishing. Capucine left, taking Lolo with her, but she too seemed subdued, and I wondered if she was thinking of her daughter on the mainland. I tried to catch Flynn’s eye, but he seemed happy to let the discussion take its course. I took my cue from him and waited.
“You’re losing your touch, Rouget,” Alain told him. “I thought you at least would be able to tell us how the Saint flew up La Griznoz on her own.”
Flynn shrugged. “Search me. If I knew how to work miracles, I’d be off this dump and drinking champagne in Paris.”
The tide had dropped, and the wind with it. The clouds were dispersing, and beyond them the sky was red raw with the approach of dawn. Someone suggested we go back to the chapel and inspect the scene in daylight. A small group volunteered; the rest made their way back home, swaying a little, across the uneven road.
But after close inspection of the marks on the chapel wall, we were still no more enlightened. They looked scorched, somehow, burned into the stones; but there were no letters that anyone could make out, simply some kind of primitive drawing and some numbers.
“It looks like—a sort of plan,” said Omer La Patate. “Those could be dimensions written there.”
“Maybe it has some religious significance,” suggested Toinette. “You should ask the sisters.” But the nuns had gone with Désirée, and no one wanted to be the one to miss out by fetching them.
“Perhaps Rouget knows,” suggested Alain. “He’s supposed to be the intello, isn’t he, heh?”
Heads nodded in agreement. “Yes, let’s have Rouget here. Come on, let him through.”
Flynn took his time. He looked at the burned marks from every angle. He narrowed his eyes, squinted, tested the wind, walked out to the edge of the cliff and looked out to sea, then returned to touch the marks again with his fingertips. If I hadn’t known better I would have believed he had never seen them before in his life. Everyone watched him, awed and expectant. Behind him, the dawn.
At last he looked up.
“Do you know what it means?” said Omer, unable to control his impatience any longer. “Is it from the Saint?”
Flynn nodded, and though his face remained serious, I could tell he was grinning inside.
4
* * *
Aristide, Matthias, Alain, Omer, Toinette, Xavier, and I listened in silen
ce as Flynn explained. Then Aristide exploded. “An ark? You’re saying she wants us to build an ark?”
Flynn shrugged. “Not exactly. It’s an artificial reef, a floating wall. Whatever you call it, you can see how it works. The sand here”—he pointed to a far point out on La Jetée—“instead of being pulled away from the coast, returns here, to La Goulue. A plug, if you like, to stop Les Salants from leaking away into the sea.”
There was another long, astonished silence.
“And you think the Saint left this?” said Alain.
“Who else?” said Flynn innocently.
Matthias concurred. “She’s our Saint,” he said slowly. “We asked her to save us. This must be her way of doing it.”
More nods. It made sense. Obviously the Saint’s disappearance had been misconstrued; she’d needed the time for research.
Omer looked at Flynn. “But we don’t have anything to build a wall with,” he protested. “Look what I paid just to bring over the stone for the windmill, heh? Cost me a fortune.”
Flynn shook his head. “We won’t need any stone,” he said. “This has to be something that floats. And this isn’t a seawall. A seawall might stop erosion—for a while, anyway. But this is much better. A reef—properly positioned—builds its own defenses. Given time.”
Aristide shook his head. “You’ll never get it to work. Not in ten years.”
But Matthias looked intrigued. “I think you could,” he said slowly. “But what about materials? You can’t build a reef out of spit and paper, Rouget. Even you can’t do that.”
Flynn thought for a moment. “Tires,” he said. “Car tires. They float, don’t they? You can get them for nothing at any junkyard. Some places even pay you to take them away. You ship them over, chain them together—”
“Ship them over?” interrupted Aristide. “What with? You’d need hundreds—maybe thousands—of tires for what you’re suggesting. What—”
“There’s the Brismand 1,” suggested Omer La Patate. “Maybe we could hire it.”
“Pay through the nose to an Houssin!” exploded Aristide. “Now that would be a miracle!”
Alain looked at him for a long time in silence. “Désirée was right,” he said at last. “We’ve lost too much already. Too much of everything.”
Aristide turned on his stick, but I could tell he was still listening.
“We can’t get back everything we’ve lost,” went on Alain in a low voice. “But we can make sure we don’t lose anything more. We can try to make up for lost time.” He was looking at Xavier as he spoke. “We should be fighting the sea, not one another. We should be thinking of our families. Dead’s dead; but everything returns. If you let it.”
Aristide looked at him without speaking. Omer, Xavier, Toinette, and the others watched expectantly. If the Guénolés and the Bastonnets accepted the plan, then everyone else would follow. Matthias looked on, inscrutable behind his chieftain’s mustache. Flynn smiled. I held my breath.
Then Aristide gave the brief nod that passes as a mark of respect on the island. Matthias nodded back. They shook hands.
We toasted their decision under the stony gaze of Marine-de-la-Mer, patron saint of things lost at sea.
5
* * *
It was morning by the time I got home. GrosJean was nowhere to be seen, and his shutters were still closed, so I assumed that he had returned to bed and followed his example. I awoke at twelve-thirty to the sound of knocking at the door, and stumbled half-asleep into the kitchen to answer it.
It was Flynn.
“Rise and shine,” he urged mockingly. “This is where the hard work really starts. Are you ready?”
I looked briefly at myself. Barefoot, still half-dressed in last night’s damp and crumpled clothes, my salty hair dried stiff as a broom. He, on the other hand, seemed as cheery as ever, his hair tied back neatly at the collar of his overcoat.
“No need to look so pleased with yourself,” I said.
“Why not?” He grinned. “I think it went well. I’ve got Toinette going around collecting donations, plus I’ve commandeered some crates from the fish-packing factory to build the reef modules. Alain’s getting in touch with the garage. I thought perhaps you could supply some cables and chains for the anchoring. Omer’s going to make the concrete. He’s still got some supplies left over from the windmill. If the weather holds out, I think we could finish by the end of the month.” He paused, seeing my expression. “Now then,” he said carefully, “something tells me I’m about to get my head snapped off. What is it? D’you need a coffee?”
“You’ve got a nerve,” I told him.
His eyes widened in amusement. “What now?”
“You could at least have warned me. You and your miracles. What if it had gone wrong? What if GrosJean—”
“Now I thought you’d be pleased,” said Flynn.
“It’s ridiculous. Before we know it there’ll be a shrine on the Pointe—people coming to see the site of the miracle—”
“Good thing for business if they did,” said Flynn.
I ignored him. “It was cruel. The way they all fell for it—poor Désirée, Aristide, even my father. Such easy conquests, all of them. Desperate, superstitious people. You really made them believe in it, didn’t you? And you enjoyed it.”
“So? It worked, didn’t it?” He was looking rather hurt. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? This has nothing to do with the Salannais and their dignity. It’s because I did what you couldn’t. A foreigner. And they listened to me.”
I suppose it might have been true. I didn’t like him any better for pointing it out.
“I notice you had no objections last night,” said Flynn.
“I didn’t know what you were going to do then. That bell—”
“La Marinette.” He grinned. “Nice touch, I thought. A tape loop and some old speakers.”
“And the Saint?” I hated to add to his conceit, but I was curious.
“I found it the day I found you at La Bouche. I was going to tell GrosJean, remember? You assumed I’d been poaching.”
I did remember. The theater of it must have appealed to him; the poetry. The Saint’s festival: the lanterns, the hymns; the Salannais love of the picturesque.
“I took the ceremonial robes and the crown from the vestry in La Houssinère. Père Alban nearly caught me at it, but I managed to get away in time. The nuns were a pushover.”
Of course they were. It was what they had been waiting for all their lives.
“How did you get the statue up there in the first place?”
He shrugged. “I fixed the boatyard lifter. Drove up onto the wet sand at low tide and winched her into place. Once the sea was in it looked impossible. Instant miracle. Just add water.”
It was obvious, really, once I thought about it. As for the rest, a bunch of flowers, a few distress flares—climbing crampons hammered into the back of the chapel wall, his canoe moored close by for a hasty exit. Everything was so easy when you had the solution. So easy it was almost an insult.
“The only tricky bit was when Aristide spotted me on the wall,” he said, grinning. “Rock salt won’t do much harm, but it stings. Lucky most of it missed me.”
I didn’t return his smile. He already looked far too pleased with himself.
He wouldn’t speculate about the result, of course. It was a tricky enough business already. By rights there should have been calculations to make, complicated mathematical formulae based on the falling speed of sand grains and the angle of the shore and the phase velocity of the breakers. Most of it would have to be guesswork. A few meters in the reef’s position might change everything. But it was the best we could do at such short notice.
“I’m not promising anything,” warned Flynn. “It’s a stopgap. Not a permanent solution.”
“But if it works—”
“At worst it should slow the damage for a while.”
“And at best?”
“Brismand has been harvesting sa
nd from La Jetée. Why shouldn’t we?”
“Sand from La Jetée—” I repeated.
“Certainly enough for a castle or two. Maybe more.”
“More,” I said greedily. “More.”
6
* * *
It must be difficult for a mainlander to understand. After all, sand is not usually a metaphor for permanence. Writing in the sand is washed away. Lovingly built castles are leveled. Sand is stubborn and elusive. It scours rock and swallows walls beneath its dunes. It is never the same twice. On Le Devin, sand and salt are everything. Our food grows ready-salted in a soil barely worthy of the name: from grazing on the dunes our sheep and goats have a delicate, salty flesh. Sand makes our bricks and mortar. Sand builds our ovens and our kilns. This island has changed shape a thousand times. It staggers on the brink of the Nid’Poule, shedding pieces of itself every year. Sand restores it, washing from La Jetée, curling around the island like a mermaid’s tail, moving imperceptibly from one side to the other in curds of slow foam, turning on itself, sighing, rolling over. Whatever else may change, there will always be sand.
I say this so that mainlanders will understand the excitement I felt during those few weeks and afterward. For the first week it was planning. Then work, and more work: we woke at five in the morning and finished late into the night. When the weather was fine we worked solidly into the next day; when the wind was too strong, or when it rained, we brought the business indoors—into the boat hangar, Omer’s windmill, a deserted potato shed—rather than waste time.
Omer went with Alain to La Houssinière to hire the Brismand 1, claiming to need it for deliveries of building materials. Claude Brismand was willing: it was out of season, and barring emergencies, the ferry was only used once a week for food deliveries and collections from the fish factory. Aristide knew a tire yard on the road to Pornic, and arranged delivery to the Brismand 1 using the same haulers who normally delivered the tins of mackerel from the plant. It was decided that Père Alban should be in charge of the accounts—he was the only person to whom neither the Bastonnets nor the Guénolés had any objection. Besides, said Aristide, even a mainlander might think twice about cheating a priest.
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