Salt on my Skin. Benoite Groult

all sweet reason: ‘You’d only have spoiled a beautiful memory.’ That made me even crosser. Who wants beautiful memories? I hate them. What I like is beautiful prospects.

      Outside the hotel, I picked my way through the bodies lying all over the garden. Some still twitched, crooning bits of songs or raising a limp arm heavenwards to emphasise drunken pronouncements. Suddenly I was startled by a hand on my shoulder.

      ‘I’ve got to see you.’ Gauvin’s whisper was harsh. ‘Wait for me by the harbour. I’ll be with you as soon as I can. By one at the latest.’

      It wasn’t a question and he didn’t wait for an answer. His friends called him and Frédérique was waiting impatiently in the car. But I took my time. As I allowed the meaning of his words to sink in I drew a deep breath and a wave of happiness broke over me, filling me with blazing, joyous resolution.

      After the smoky dance hall the west wind blew the smell of seaweed and of sex. I went home, to establish an alibi with my parents and to collect my duffle-coat so it could cushion me on the hard ground under Gauvin’s one hundred and sixty-five or so pounds. Just in case, I grabbed the poem, the one I’d written two years earlier. Before I left I showed it to Frédérique. She pulled a face and said it was terribly schoolgirlish. I thought it was beautiful myself. You always get a bit schoolgirlish when you’re racing off to be loved, don’t you?

      There was no moon. The Isle of Raguenès could just be seen, a darker mass on the dark sea. Everything seemed poised in stillness, as if waiting for something. Correction: I was waiting for something. For nature it was a summer night like any other. From the moment I got there I was caught up in the exquisite state of passionate anticipation, aware that this was the highest experience life can offer. That evening I would gladly have sacrificed ten years of my life – well, five anyway – to ensure that nothing would now come between us and the drama we were about to play, though neither of us yet knew our lines. What are a few years of old age when you’re twenty? I was preparing for a night with no tomorrow – outside convention, outside caution, outside even hope. I felt such wild joy.

      At last he arrived. His car stopped at the top of the cliff and I heard the door slam. I could just make him out as he peered around in the darkness. He must have glimpsed me in the headlights because he started running down the rocky slope. I was sitting with my back against a beached dinghy, sheltering from the wind, clasping my arms around my knees trying to look alluring and casual at the same time. One tends to strike poses at twenty.

      Before I could say a word he took my hands and pulled me up to him, clasping me fiercely, his leg thrusting between mine and his mouth forcing my lips apart. My tongue caught on that chipped tooth and, for the first time, I reached my hand under his coat, into the warm odour of him, my fingers, under his belt, finding that touching hollow of his back where the muscles flexed and twisted.

      A silent rain began to fall. Neither of us noticed at first. We were in another world. For a moment I thought he must be crying, and drew back to search his eyes. His hair was falling in shining curls on his forehead, and drops sparkled on his eyelashes. Perhaps they were tears after all. Our lips came together again, parted for a breath and then joined, slippery with the delicious taste of summer rain. The dark air, the melancholy stretch of wet sand, the sea, pocked with rain, all surrounded and distanced us from the hot busy day, plunging us into the almost unbearable simplicities of love.

      The rain was beginning to work its way under our collars, and the south-westerly breeze was getting stronger. But it felt as if we would never again be able to let each other go. With a jerk of his chin Gauvin indicated the cottage on the island. It was a ruin, with just one section of the roof held up by a single beam. I smiled: we had played there throughout our childhood.

      ‘We’ll make it,’ he said. ‘The tide’ll be out till about two.’ We ran across the sand bank which links the island to the shore at low tide. I twisted my ankle on a clump of seaweed but Gauvin, who could see in the dark with those husky-dog eyes of his, pulled me up on to the ridge of grass in front of our cottage or what was left of it. We stood there, out of breath, our hands still clasped together, grave with the thrill of wanting so much what we were about to do together, in that place, without a thought of the past or what was to follow. Perhaps the moment of greatest, most intense joy is that one, when everything life has to offer comes together and you forget the rest.

      We made for the only dry corner on the beaten earth floor of our ruin. I congratulated myself on thinking of the duffle-coat. I found myself babbling, ‘It’s you? Tell me you’re really here. I can’t be sure in this dark…’ And he murmured, ‘I knew we’d find each other again some day, I knew it,’ stroking my face as if he were seeing it with his fingers, before gently exploring the back of my neck, my shoulders, my waist, sculpting me bit by bit in the exquisite clay of expectancy.

      No one could have described me as experienced. At twenty I had had only two lovers: Gilles, who ‘initiated’ me – into precisely nothing, given that neither of us really knew what to put where; and Roger, whose intelligence rendered me speechless with admiration and incapable of judgment. He would despatch me briskly between physics lectures on the Moroccan rug in his bed-sit (‘facilities on the landing’) with four or five quick bumpety-bumps preceded by about the same number of rubbedy-dubs for starters. I’m reminded of it, in spite of myself, every time I see a violinist plucking a string with the tip of his middle finger and then releasing it once he’s got, or thinks he’s got, the desired effect. He would manage a few considerate I love yous and I would respond ‘I love you’, mainly to convince myself that there really was something special about that quarter of an hour. I looked forward to it hopefully every time, though it must have been obvious that I never achieved even his rudimentary satisfaction. But it didn’t seem to bother him, and he wanted me the next time, so I must be OK, and this must be physical love (as I called it then). I liked the before part, he preferred the after – perhaps the well-known difference between the sexes lay right there.

      I don’t remember if Gauvin was as good a caresser then as he became later. In those days men like him didn’t go in much for caressing, nor would I have been for it. I assumed that Roger’s approach was standard. Women who were brazen enough to ask, ‘A bit higher please,’ or ‘No, not there, it hurts,’ or even worse, ‘More of that, please,’ were insatiable harpies who drove good men to nice girls, girls content to worship their magic wand and drink their sacred semen with first-communion expressions. That was the received wisdom then, and anyway I had no way of checking. There was little frankness between men and women; we simply didn’t speak the same language. One belongs to one’s sex as to one’s race.

      All the barriers came down that first time. It was as if our bodies had known each other for ever: matching passion, matching rhythms carried us across every difference that had divided us, as if our whole lives had been a preparation for this love-making, this losing of ourselves in each other, this never-ending desire. As one wave of pleasure ebbed, the ripples of the next one stirred. We were living a night without time, of which there are so few in a lifetime.

      It was the tide that recalled us. Gauvin could suddenly tell from the sound of the waves that they were rising. That man always knew exactly what the sea was up to. ‘If we don’t leave now we’ll have to swim for it.’

      We scrabbled blindly for our scattered garments. My bra had vanished. Too bad. It didn’t have my name on it, after all. Gauvin swore as he fumbled with his wet buttonholes, but eventually we were dressed, more or less, me with my stupid handbag over my arm as if I were off to a tea party, and Gauvin with his trousers slung round his neck so they wouldn’t get wet in the sea, even though they were already soaked by the rain. Hardly able to control our laughter, we ran splashing towards the narrows through which a strong current was already coursing. We clung together to avoid being swept away and, waist deep, just managed to ford across. How better to wash oneself of love?

      Gauvin’s car seemed so cosy and dry, as we struggled with our sopping clothes. Back at the village he parked in the farmyard to walk me home past the warmth of the cowshed where you could hear the animals stirring in the straw. We could have done with that warmth ourselves, but it was time to return to our normal lives. Chilled suddenly, we took refuge in our last kiss.

      ‘I’ve