The Drowned Village
The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices
from ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets
T. S. ELIOT
It was mid-November. Autumn was already stripping the trees, though winter had not taken a grip on the land. Farms and market gardens were still laden with fruit and vegetables. The seas were calm enough for even the most careful fisherman to put out on the tide.
In school it was the week allotted for the award of scholarships. Only once or twice in living memory had a child from the Three Villages gained a bursary to go and study at the secondary school in the city nearly twenty miles away.
Gaston made his way to the front of the hall. The teachers lined each wall, all eyes upon him, as he climbed the three steps onto the stage. Choked by nerves, he could barely raise his head.
The headteacher spoke. ‘This day, the twenty-second of November 1912, is a very proud day for the Three Villages and our school.’
There was an immediate round of applause. It was Mme Martin who began it, Gaston was sure. She was his favourite teacher, strict without being unkind, keen on nature and science though she taught literature, considered and fair.
The headteacher held up his hands for quiet.
‘Gaston, I believe you have something to say.’
Gaston looked round at the sea of faces.
Children from the age of four up to his own classmates, eleven years old, at the top of the school.
With the teachers, about sixty people waiting for him to say something important.
He hesitated. All he could think about was his clothes – the shabby trousers with the let-down hems and his father’s patched summer jacket, far too big but the only garment his mother said would do for a day such as this.
Then, at the back of the hall, there was a commotion.
All heads turned and, to his mortification, Gaston saw his mother and father tottering in and trying to slip into the back row of chairs.
His mother was trying to put on powder even though she had her arm threaded through her husband’s, and her headscarf was crooked.
They were both flushed, eyes a little too bright, in the way Gaston recognised and hated.
He could think of nothing to say.
Mme Martin firmly turned back to the stage and raised her hand. ‘We are all very proud of you, Gaston.’
Gaston gave a small smile. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.
She quickly moved to help get Gaston’s parents seated. Silence surged through the hall. To Gaston each second lasted for ever, but though they fussed and were clumsy, finally they were seated and looking at the stage too.
‘Gaston,’ said the headteacher. ‘You have something to say?’
Gaston remembered the piece of paper – Mme Martin had suggested he should write something down rather than rely on memory – and quickly pulled it from the pocket of his hand-me-down trousers.
‘I am very grateful to everyone. My teachers helped me to study and, because of that, I was able to win this scholarship. I will do my best to make everyone in the Three Villages proud.’
He bit his bottom lip, folded the piece of paper and twisted it in his fingers.
‘Well done,’ said the headteacher, leading the round of applause.
Gaston returned to his seat, trying not to catch his mother’s eye. There were more prizes for each of the classes and a special gift for Mme Denis who was going to live with her sister in Quibéron.
When the ceremony was over, everyone lingered in the hall and Gaston had to endure the adults coming to congratulate him.
He never knew what to say, so he smiled and nodded and mouthed thank you over and again.
The men shook his hand or clapped him on the back.
The women hugged him and said how he was growing.
Finally, he realised that the only people he hadn’t seen were his own parents.
‘They left,’ said Régis. ‘They asked Maman if you could come home with me. Said they’d fetch you later.’
‘Oh.’
Gaston wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved. It was nothing new, but he thought today might be different.
‘Oh,’ he said again. ‘All right.’
The journey to Régis’s farm took a little over an hour in an old-fashioned trap pulled by two farm horses.
The boys sat on the second bench, behind Régis’s parents.
Monsieur and Mme Hélias were talking in low voices and the hooves of the horses and the clinker rattled loud in the crisp November air.
Even so, Gaston caught some of the conversation, fragments about a ceremony due to take place tomorrow in which Régis’s father, he gathered, had an important part to play.
He glanced at Régis.
‘The Feast of St Colomban,’ Régis whispered.
Gaston hadn’t heard of it, but he nodded all the same. ‘Are you going?’
‘Not until I’m fourteen, though Papa says I can help with the bonfire tomorrow night.’
‘Régis,’ his father said sharply. ‘Enough.’
‘I wasn’t saying anything out of turn, I was just . . .’
Monsieur Hélias glanced over his shoulder at Gaston. ‘It is not for everyone.’
Gaston flushed. He knew what people thought of his family, how they tattled about them.
Régis’s mother put her hand on her husband’s arm.
‘Joseph,’ she murmured.
From the set of his shoulders, Gaston realised Régis’s father was still angry, but he said nothing more. He clicked the reins and the trap jerked forward. Régis looked sideways at Gaston and shrugged, as if to apologise.
The rest of the journey passed in silence.
Gaston’s parents didn’t come.
After waiting up until nine o’clock, Monsieur and Mme Hélias finally went to bed, leaving the boys sitting by the fire and telling them not to be too late.
The only sound was the ticking of the kitchen clock and the floorboards creaking upstairs.
As soon as the house was quiet, Régis put down his book and gestured for Gaston to follow him.
‘Come on,’ he said in a whisper. ‘I’ll show you.’
‘But if my . . .’
He stopped, the look on his friend’s face making it clear Régis no more expected his father to show up now than he himself did.
‘But what if your parents wake up and find we’re not here?’ he said instead.
‘They won’t. They’re both up so early for the cows, they sleep like logs. Come on.’
The cold pinched at their cheeks as the boys made their way across the fields to the rocky gully that ran down to the beach of St Colomban.
The ground was damp, but they perched on the rocks beside the narrow stream for a while, without speaking. Listening to the sea rolling in between the headlands.
Then, suddenly, Régis’s head snapped up. He turned to Gaston, his eyes bright in the dark, his voice brimming with excitement.
‘There,’ he said. ‘Can you hear them?’
Gaston frowned. ‘Who do you mean?’
‘Them,’ Régis said, dropping his voice. ‘The dead who live beneath the sea.’
‘You can’t believe . . .’ he began, then stopped. Gaston could see his friend was serious; this wasn’t an old Halloween story.
Aware of Régis watching, he leaned forward and listened more intently.
This time, above the slide and drag of the shingle, he could hear a low moaning sound.
In the wind through the rocks, sculpted and pierced by countless tides, shrill voices, plaintive and lost. The nerves he’d felt standing in front of the whole school earlier came back, a sharp tug in the pit of his stomach.
‘What’s that noise?’ he whispered.
‘Did your parents never tell you the story?’
Gaston shook his head. They had, in truth, taught him next to nothing.
‘Many thousands of years ago, or so it’s said, there was a causeway there that led to an island.
With every generation, with every high tide, it was eaten away little by little until, finally, there were only a few inhabitants left.
They refused to go, though everyone here begged them to leave.
Finally, when the highest of the spring tides came, the village was flooded and the island disappeared beneath the waves. ’
Gaston stared, not sure what he was supposed to say.
‘That’s why there is a light beneath the water,’ Régis continued in the same, low voice.
‘They keep it burning for the drowned souls who live there. They eat limpets and blue mussels and seaweed and live in the caves with giant crabs. Fish swim around their heads and through their ribcages in great silver shoals.’
Gaston wanted to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. He looked out to sea.
‘I can’t see a light,’ he said.
‘Over the year, it fades and goes out. That’s what happens tomorrow on the Feast of St Colomban: they light it once more so the drowned village can been seen.’
For a moment, Gaston was silent. ‘Your parents believe this old fisherwife’s tale?’
‘They talk about it when they think I’m not listening. It’s true.’ He paused. ‘I believe it too.’
The boys fell silent, locked in their own thoughts. Gaston gazed out over the sea, pretending he wasn’t looking for the glow of a lamp beneath the waves. He felt Régis had shared something important with him – even though it was a fairytale – and felt he ought to give something in return.
Gaston considered showing Régis the cave he’d discovered and the special things he had hidden there. Before he could suggest it, his friend was on his feet.
‘Come on,’ said Régis, ‘I’m cold. Let’s go back.’
Back in the farmhouse kitchen, the boys warmed themselves by the embers of the fire, eating bowls of rice pudding, then went to bed. When he slept, Gaston’s dreams were filled with creatures of the sea, blue and green and transparent white. The image of a single lamp fading beneath the waves.
Despite the awards ceremony the day before, there was school on Saturday morning as usual.