They gathered the dishes and the plates from the table and took them to the kitchen. He washed up, as he always did at weekends. She put things away. The tired dog lay sleeping in his kennel. The downstairs lights were one by one extinguished.
The past receded a little with the day; time yet unspent was left to happen as fearfully as it would. Night settled, there was no sound. Tranquil 1950 was again a haven in Ireland’s dark.
Le Visiteur
Once a year, when summer was waning, Guy went to the island. And once a year, as his visit drew to a close, he took Monsieur and Madame Buissonnet out to dinner at the hotel. He had not always done so, for he had first received the Buissonnets’ invitation to visit them when he was seven. He was thirty-two now, no longer placed by his mother in the care of the ferryman for the journey from Port Vevey and by Madame Buissonnet for the journey back. For thirteen years there had been the tradition of dinner at the hotel, the drive from the farm in the onion truck, Madame Buissonnet in her grey and black, Monsieur Buissonnet teasingly not taking off his boatman’s cap until they were almost in the restaurant, then stuffing it into his pocket. Loup de mer: always the same for both of them, and as often as not for Guy also. Soupe de langoustines to start with.
‘Well, now,’ Madame Buissonnet said, as she always did when the order had been given, the Macon Fuissé tasted. ‘Well, now?’ she repeated, for dinner at the hotel was the occasion for such revelations as had not yet been divulged during Guy’s stay.
‘Gérard married,’ he said. ‘Jean-Claude has gone to Africa.’
‘Africa?’
‘Maybe for ever. I miss him.’
Monsieur Buissonnet listened less intently than his wife did, his eye roving about the restaurant, lingering occasionally on a beautiful face. Sometimes he softly sighed. ‘Your mother?’ he had enquired in a private moment on the first afternoon of Guy’s visit, as every year he did. As far as Madame Buissonnet was concerned, Guy’s mother might not have existed.
‘And you are promoted a step higher, Guy?’ she asked now.
‘It is once in three years, that.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘My dear.’ Monsieur Buissonnet placed a hand over one of his wife’s, his endearment gently reassuring her that it didn’t matter if she had forgotten promotion did not come every single year.
‘How agreeable it is here,’ she murmured, turning her palm upward for a moment and smiling a smile she reserved for such moments. Guy felt not included in this occasion of communication between the couple, even though he was responsible for their presence here. A silence fell, then Monsieur Buissonnet said:
‘It was nothing once, this place.’
‘It has made a milliard since,’ his wife reminded him. Or two, he agreed. A man who knew how to make money was Perdreau. Yet every dish you ate in his restaurant was worth its francs.
White-haired, a shock still falling over his forehead, Monsieur Buissonnet possessed the remnants of handsome features, as his wife did of beauty. Nothing would be regained by either of them; the disturbances of time and sun were there for ever. Yet the toll was softened: the whiteness of their hair, and its abundance, was an attraction in old age; that he was leaner than he had ever been brought out in Monsieur Buissonnet qualities of distinction that had not been evident before; his wife’s fragility complemented the slenderness she had never lost.
‘And now what else?’ she enquired when les amuse-gueules were finished.
Guy talked about Club 14 because he could think of nothing else. It was odd, it always seemed to him, what was said and what was not; and not just here, not only by the Buissonnets. His mother had never asked a single thing about the island, or even mentioned the Buissonnets except, in his childhood, to say when September was half over that it was time for him to visit them again. Once he had tried to tell her of the acre or two Monsieur Buissonnet and his labourers had reclaimed for cultivation during the year that had passed, how oliviers or vines had been planted where only scrub had grown before, how a few more metres had been marked out for irrigation. His mother had never displayed an interest. ‘Oh, it is because they have no children of their own,’ she’d said when he asked why it was that the Buissonnets invited him. ‘It is so sometimes.’
Not that Guy objected to being invited. He was as fond of the farm and the island as he was of the Buissonnets themselves. He delighted in the dry, parched earth, the crêtes, the unsafe cliffs. Dust coated the vegetation, the giant cacti, the purple or scarlet ipomoea with which the villagers decorated their walls, the leaves of brambles and oleander. It invaded cypresses and heather and the rock roses that Guy had never seen in flower. Only the huge stones and well-washed pebbles of the little bays escaped its grey deposit. Only the eucalyptus trees and the plane trees rose above it.
The accompaniments of the soupe de langoustines came, the waiter unfamiliar, new this season as the waiters often were. He placed the dishes he brought where they might easily be reached by all three diners, then ladled out the soup. He poured more Macon Fuissé.
‘What style!’ Madame Buissonnet whispered when he had passed on to another table, and then, ‘How good you are to take us here again, Guy!’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Oh, but yes, it is, my dear.’
The restaurant of the hotel had views over a valley to a lush growth of trees, unusual on the island. A carpet of grass, broken by oleander beds, formed the valley’s base, far below the level of the restaurant itself. This was shadowy now in the September twilight, the colour drained from its daytime’s splendour. The lengths of blue and white awning that earlier had protected the lunchtime diners from the sun had been rolled in, the sliding glass panels closed against mosquitoes. Thirty tables, a stiff white tablecloth on each, were widely separated in the airy, circular space, a couple of them unoccupied tonight. Monsieur Perdreau, the hotel’s proprietor for as long as Guy and the Buissonnets had been dining in its restaurant, was making his evening tour, pausing at each table to introduce himself or to ensure that everything was in order.
The Buissonnets knew him well, and by now so did Guy. He stayed a while, receiving compliments, bowing his gratitude, giving some details of his season, which had, this year, been particularly good, even if the restaurant was not quite full tonight. The hotel itself was, he explained: it was just that at the moment there were fewer yachts moored at the harbour.
‘You are getting to be my oldest client, Guy,’ he said, shaking hands before he went away.
It was then that Guy noticed that the girl two tables away had been joined by a companion. She was in white, fair-haired, slight; the man was bulky, in a bright blue suit. Guy had noticed the girl earlier and had thought it singular that being on her own she should want to occupy so prominent a table.
‘Splendid!’ Monsieur Buissonnet exclaimed when the waiter returned with the soup tureen.
The evening advanced, pleasurably and easily, as in previous Septembers so many others had. The loup de mer was as good as ever; glasses of Margaux accompanied the cheese. Madame Buissonnet’s disappointment that Guy had been unable to report a new relationship in his life was kept in check. She asked about Colette, who for a time had been Guy’s fiancée, and bravely smiled when she heard that Colette had become engaged to André Délespaul. Monsieur Buissonnet talked about the olive harvest, the coldest November he could remember on the island because of the bitter wind, how it had suddenly got up and remained for weeks, a mistral out of season. But none the less the harvest had been a good one.