Beatriz Williams - Along the Infinite Sea - Love, friendship and heartbreak, the perfect summer read

I repeated this to myself—a very nice tidy maxim, suitable for cross-stitch into a tapestry, a decorative pillow perhaps—as I walked down the stairs on my way to the breakfast room, where I expected the usual hours of peace until the rest of the household woke up. Instead, it was chaos. The hall was full of expensive leather trunks and portmanteaus, the rugs were being rolled up, the servants were running about as if an army were on the march. In the middle of it all stood my father, dressed immaculately in a pale linen suit, speaking on the telephone in rapid French, the cord wound around him and stretched to its limit.

“Papa?” I said. “What’s going on?”

He held up one finger, said a few more urgent words, and set the receiver in its cradle with an exhausted sigh. He closed his eyes, collecting his thoughts, and then stepped to the hall table and set down the telephone. “ Mignonne, ” he said in French, opening his arms, “it is eight o’clock already. You are not ready?”

I took his hands and kissed his cheeks. He smelled of oranges, the particular scent of his shaving soap, which he purchased exclusively from a tiny apothecary in the Troisième, on the rue Charles-François-Dupuis. “Ready for what, Papa?”

“You did not see my message last night?” His eyes were heavy and bruised.

“What message? Papa, what’s wrong?”

“I slipped it under your door. Perhaps you were already asleep.” He released my hands and pulled out a cigarette case from his jacket pocket. His fingers fumbled with the clasp. “It is a bit of a change of plans. We are leaving this morning, returning to Paris.”

“But we were to stay another week!”

“I’m afraid there is some business to which I must attend.” He managed to fit a cigarette between his lips. I took the slim gold lighter from his fingers and lit the end for him. I concentrated on the movements of my fingers, this ordinary activity, to keep the panic from rising in my chest.

“But what about our guests?” I said.

“I have left messages. They will understand, don’t you think?” He pulled the cigarette away and kissed my cheek. “Now run upstairs, ma chérie , and pack your things. Come, now. It is for the best. One should always leave the party before the bitter end, isn’t it so?”

“Yes,” I said numbly, “of course,” and I turned and ran up the steps, two at a time, and burst without breath into my room, where I stayed only long enough to snatch the pair of slim black binoculars from my desk and bolt down the hall in the opposite direction, to the back stairs.

It was now the third week of August, and the sea washed restlessly against the rocks and beaches below as I stumbled along the clifftops, sucking air into my stricken lungs. I inhaled the warm scent of the dying summer, the weeks that would not return. I thought, I don’t care, I don’t care if we leave now and return to Paris, I have my own plans, I will live in Montparnasse, I will be sophisticated and insouciant, and he can find me or not find me, he can love me or not love me, I don’t care, I don’t care.

I skidded to a stop at the familiar rock, the rock where I had sat every day and watched the traffic in the giant mammary curves of the bay, in the delicate cleavage of which perched the village of Cannes. From here, you could see the boats zagging lazily, the ferries looping back and forth to the îsles Lérins, to Sainte-Marguerite, where the fort nestled into the cliffs. I climbed to the top of the boulder and lifted the binoculars to my eyes and thought, I don’t care, I don’t care, please God, please God, I don’t care.

From this angle, to the east of the islands, it was impossible to see where the Isolde lay moored—if she still lay moored at all—behind the Pointe du Dragon. I had tried—no, I hadn’t tried , of course not, I had only dragged my gaze about as a matter of idle curiosity, but there was no glimpse of the beautiful black-and-white ship, longer and sleeker than all the others moored there in the gentle channel between the two islands. I had taken her continued presence there as an article of faith. I had watched the boats ply the water, the stylish motorboats and the ferries and the serviceable tenders, and refused to think about the honey-haired woman who had come to see Stefan that first morning, and whether she was making another trip. Whether an unglamorous nineteen-year-old virgin was easily forgotten in the face of those kohl-lined eyes, that slender and practiced figure.

My legs wobbled, and the vision through the binoculars skidded crazily about. I planted my feet more firmly, each one in a separate hollow, and set my shoulders. The sea steadied before me, blue and ancient under the cloudless sky, and as I stared to the southeast, counting the tiny white waves, as if in obedience to a miraculous summons, I saw a long yacht come into view, around the edge of the point, black on the bottom and gleaming white in a rim about the top of the hull, steaming eastward toward Nice or Monaco, perhaps, or even farther south toward Italy.

The Cinque Ports were supposed to be beautiful at this time of year, and Portofino.

My heart grew and grew, splitting my chest apart, lodging somewhere in my throat so I couldn’t breathe.

“She is a beautiful ship, don’t you think?” said a voice behind me.

I closed my eyes and allowed my arms to fall, with the binoculars, onto my thighs. I thought, I must breathe now, and I forced my throat to open. “Yes, very beautiful.”

“But you know, ships are so transient and so sterile. Nothing grows in them. So I have been thinking to myself, I must really find myself a villa of some kind, somewhere in the sunshine where I can raise olives and wine and children, with the assistance of perhaps a housekeeper to keep things tidy and make a nice hot breakfast in the morning, and a gardener to tend the flowers.”

My chest was moving in little spasms now, taking in shallow bursts of air. I said, or rather sobbed, “And what—will you do—in the winter?”

“Ah, a good question. Perhaps an apartment in Paris? One can follow the sun, of course, but I have always thought that it is best to know some winter, too, so that the summer, when it arrives, is the more gratefully received.”

I turned to face him. A tear ran down from each of my eyes and dripped along my jaw. Stefan stood with his hands in his pockets, right next to the rock, staring up at me gravely. His hair had grown a little, a tiny fraction of an inch, perhaps. I leaned down and put my hands on his shoulders.

“How strange,” I whispered. “I have just been thinking the same thing.”

He reached up and hooked me by the waist and swung me down from the top of the rock.

“Hush, now,” he said, between kisses. “Annabelle, it is all right, I am here. Liebling , stop, you are frantic, you must stop and think.”

“I don’t want to think. I don’t want to stop.” I kissed his lips and jaw and neck, I kissed him everywhere I could, wetting us both with my tears. “I have been stopping all my life. I want to live.”

“Ah, Annabelle. And I would have said you were the most alive girl I’ve ever met.”

“That’s you. You have brought me to life.”

Stefan paused in his kisses, holding my face to the sunlight, as if I were a new species brought in for classification and he had no idea where to begin, my nose or my hair or my teeth. “Tell me what you want, Annabelle,” he said.

“But you know what I want.”

He took my hand and led me up the slope, where a cluster of olive trees formed an irregular circle of privacy. He urged me carefully down and I put my arms around his neck and dragged him into the grass with me. “I thought you had gone off with her,” I said, unbuttoning his shirt.