Tatiana de Rosnay: A Secret Kept

Antoine slowed the car.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just, you know, to celebrate your birthday. We did your sixth birthday there, remember?”

“No,” she said slowly. “I don’t remember a thing about Noirmoutier.”

She must have realized that she was acting like a spoiled child, because she swiftly put a hand on her brother’s arm.

“Oh, but it doesn’t matter, Tonio. I’m happy. I am, really. And the weather is beautiful. It’s so nice to be alone with you and to get away from everything!”

By “everything,” Antoine knew she meant Olivier and the wreckage their breakup had left behind. And her fiercely competitive job as a publisher at one of France ’s most famous publishing companies.

“I booked us into the Hotel Saint-Pierre. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Yes, I do! The old, lovely hotel in the woods! With Grand-père and Grand-mère… Oh, God, so long ago…”

The Beatles sang on. Mélanie hummed along. Antoine felt relieved, at peace. She liked his surprise. She was happy to go back. But one little thing niggled at him. One little thing he hadn’t taken into account when the idea of going back had occurred to him.

Noirmoutier 1973 had been their last summer with Clarisse.

Why Noirmoutier? he wondered as the car sped on and Mélanie hummed to “Let It Be.” He had never considered himself a nostalgic person. He had never looked back. But since his divorce he had changed. Relentlessly he had found himself thinking more about the past than the present or the future. The weight of the past year, his first year alone, that dreary, solitary year, had sparked off pangs of regret, longing for his childhood, striving for happy memories. That was how the island had come back to him, timidly at first, then more powerfully and more precisely as the memories came tumbling in like mail gathering in a box.

His grandparents, regal and white-haired-Blanche with her parasol and Robert with his silver cigarette box that never left him, sitting on the shadowy hotel veranda and drinking their coffee. He would wave at them from the garden. His father’s sister, Solange, plump and sunburned, reading fashion magazines in her deck chair. Mélanie, small and wiry, a floppy sun hat framing her cheeks. And Clarisse raising her heart-shaped face to the sun. And their father turning up on weekends smelling of cigar smoke and the city. And the cobbled submersible road that fascinated him as a child and still did. The Gois passage. You could only use it at low tide. Before the bridge was built, in 1971, it was the only way to get onto the island.

He wanted to do something special for Mélanie’s birthday. He had been thinking about it since April. Not just another surprise birthday party with giggling friends hiding in the bathroom and laden with bottles of champagne. No, something different. Something she would remember. He needed to shift her out of the rut she was stuck in, her job that was eating up her life, her obsession with her age, and, above all, her not getting over Olivier.

He had never liked Olivier. Stuck-up, pompous snob. He cooked superbly. Made his own sushi. Specialized in Oriental arts. Listened to Lully. Spoke four languages fluently. Knew how to waltz. And couldn’t live up to commitment, even after six years with Mélanie. Olivier wasn’t ready to settle down. Despite being forty-one. So he had left Mélanie only to promptly get a twenty-five-year-old manicurist pregnant. He was now the proud father of twins. Mélanie never forgave him.

Why Noirmoutier? Because they had spent unforgettable summers there. Because Noirmoutier was the symbol of the perfection of youth, of those happy-go-lucky days when the summer vacation seemed endless, when you felt you were nine years old forever. When there was nothing more promising than a perfect day on the beach with friends. When school was a century away. Why hadn’t he ever taken Astrid and the children to the island? he wondered. Of course, he had told them all about it. But Noirmoutier was his private past, he realized, his and Mélanie’s, pure and untouched.

And he had wanted to spend time with his sister, just to be with her. On their own. They didn’t see that much of each other in Paris, he reflected. She was always busy, lunching or dining with some author or on a book tour. He was often off visiting a building site out of town or taken up with a last-minute deadline for a job. Sometimes she came over for brunch on Sunday mornings when the children were there. She made the creamiest scrambled eggs. Yes, he found he needed to be with her, alone with her at this fragile, complicated moment of his life. His friends were important to him, he needed their mirth, their entertainment, but what he craved now was Mélanie’s support, her presence, the fact that she was the only tie that linked him to his past.

He had forgotten what a long drive it was from Paris. He recalled the two cars-Robert, Blanche, and Solange in the lethargic black DS Citroën with Clarisse and Mélanie, and the nervous Triumph, their father at the wheel smoking his cigar and Antoine sitting in the back feeling nauseous. It took six or seven hours, including the leisurely lunch at the little auberge near Nantes. Grand-père was particularly picky about food, wine, and waiters.

Antoine wondered what Mélanie remembered of the endless drive. She was after all three years younger than he. She had said she didn’t remember anything. He glanced across at her. She had stopped humming and was studying her hands with that intent, stern expression that sometimes frightened him.

Was this a good idea? he pondered. Was she truly happy about coming back here all these years later, coming back to a place where forgotten childhood memories lingered, motionless for the moment, like the surface of untroubled water?

“Do you remember all this?” Antoine asked as the car climbed the broad curve of the bridge. On their right, along the mainland, rows of gigantic rotating silver windmills.

“No,” she said. “Just sitting in the car and waiting for the tide. And riding in along the Gois passage. It was fun. And our father getting so impatient because Grand-père got the tide schedule wrong again.”

He too remembered waiting for the tide. Waiting for hours for the Gois causeway to appear beneath the slowly receding waves. And there it was at last, cobbles glistening with seawater, a four-kilometer amphibian road dotted with high rescue poles with little platforms for unfortunate drivers and pedestrians stranded by the upcoming flood.

She put a quick hand on his knee.

“Antoine, can we go back to the Gois? I really want to see it again.”

“Of course!”

He felt elated that she had at last remembered something. And something as important and mysterious as the Passage du Gois. Gois. Even the word fascinated him. Pronounced like Boa. It was an old name for an old road.

Grand-père never took the new bridge. He grumbled about the excessive toll and how the concrete structure’s gigantic sweep scarred the landscape. So he stuck to the Gois passage despite his son’s jeering at him and the long wait.

As they drove onto the island, Antoine realized that his memories of the Gois causeway were intact. He could play them back in his mind like a movie. He wondered if Mélanie felt the same. The large austere cross at the beginning of the causeway came back to him. To protect and cherish, Clarisse used to whisper, holding his hand tight. He remembered sitting on the island shore and watching the waves dwindle into nothingness until the vast gray bank appeared like magic. Once the sea hissed away, the bank crowded over with shell searchers wielding shrimp nets. He recalled Mélanie’s little legs rushing along the sand and Clarisse’s plastic bucket soon overflowing with cockles, clams, and periwinkles. He remembered the sharp, tangy smell of seaweed, the bite of salty wind. His grandparents looking on, benign and weathered, arm in arm. And Clarisse’s long black hair aflutter. The cars would drone past along the causeway. Noirmoutier was no longer an island. He liked that idea. But the thought of the sea inching back up again, inexorable, was both thrilling and terrifying.