Salt on my Skin. Benoite Groult

a bit tricky. I’ll be living with Marie-Josée’s family while I study for my diploma. But I’ll send you a card as soon as I get to Concarneau.’

      ‘Oh sure. With your best wishes, I hope.’

      Wounded silence. He wasn’t one to shout ‘bloody hell’ down the telephone.

      ‘Right then. I must be off now,’ he said with finality, and hung up. The black receiver went back on the wooden wall of the farmhouse.

      -

      4 The Next Ten Years

      -

      For the next ten years I was far too busy getting on with my life to indulge in nostalgia for my first love. That comes later, when the second love, the one you stake your life on, starts foundering. That’s when lost opportunities get irresistibly attractive. Meanwhile, I was moving imperceptibly from girlhood to womanhood, approaching that threshold of thirty when there are several different routes to choose. And whichever I chose I would find myself wondering if this was the final, fixed path, if something of real importance could still happen to me.

      People who’ve turned sixty smile at the callowness of the young. They shouldn’t. It wasn’t until I had passed the thirty mark that I lost that most priceless of youth’s attributes, lightheartedness. Until then I lived my life as though I were immortal. It would have appalled me if I had realised how precarious life is, how my body, instead of being my servant, would become a tyrannical master. Until I was thirty, everything I experienced, even grief, had the charm of novelty.