The sea around here was dangerous and the rocks around the island had claimed so many lives. Between the point where she stood now, and the Pointe du Raz, the nearby bay was named for it, la Baie des Trépassés, or the Bay of the Dead, a stretch of idyllic sand with a dark history.
Simon would wax lyrical about the region. He told her tales his grandparents had told him, which their grandparents had told them in turn. His family had once been as entwined with this place as the rocks, the sea and the sky. And she would listen, rapt in the spell of his voice as he spun stories out of places and place names, out of snatches of history and half-remembered folklore – how Sein was once home to nine priestesses with power over life and death, how the barge of the dead would ply these waters looking for the lost, how during a storm you could still hear the bells of the sunken city of Ys, or how on still days a booming echo rang out across the water signifying its destruction when the sea gates were flung open by the full force of the Atlantic.
Had he heard those sounds of legend? When the sea took him?
It wasn’t actually the most westerly point of mainland France, but it truly felt like the end of the world. That was what the Romans had called it. Finistère.
Ari walked on. This late in the season and midweek, the Pointe du Van was almost deserted. It was the gentler sister to Raz, less commercial, a wildlife preserve with carefully curated clifftop walks and the squat little chapel of St They, hugging the edge of the last place on earth.
On either side of the path, gorse, bracken, heather and countless wildflowers stretched out to the cliff edges. Little wires kept wandering feet from disturbing them.
Simon had loved it here, loved to wander and get lost on the pathways, to sit and stare out to sea. He preferred it to the busier Pointe du Raz, with its tourist buses, cafés and shops. From here, he said, he could wander home and never encounter a car. He could pretend he had travelled back in time. He knew the clifftop paths intimately, every lichen-stained rock, every drystone wall, every dip and curve. His family might all be gone from Sainte Sirène, and he might have lived away for years, but he remembered it perfectly. And every story associated with it.
Ari knew she shouldn’t have come. She hadn’t meant to. But she had reached the turn on the D7 for Sainte Sirène itself, and she’d just kept driving west until there was nowhere else to go.
A sudden tremor shook its way through her and she leaned against the rough wall of piled-up stones, closing her eyes to fight off the inevitable grief, rising like waves in the Raz de Sein behind her, that treacherous and deadly passage of water between the point and the island.
She shouldn’t have come back. This was Simon’s home. And Simon was gone.
Her phone rang as she reached her car. Jason – his photo flashed up on the screen, a few years old now, fresh-faced, grinning, the grin that always meant trouble.
Reluctantly, Ari answered, expecting the big brother tones she knew too well.
‘Where are you?’ he asked.
‘I’m on my way.’ It wasn’t exactly a lie.
‘You should have been here hours ago, Ari.’
She could argue, lie, say she’d been delayed, tell him she’d get there in her own good time and he didn’t get to boss her around anymore. But what was the point? And as for bossing her around? He’d do that anyway. He always had. And she had always ignored him.
‘Fifteen minutes,’ she told him. ‘This had better be good, big brother.’
If he heard the warning in her voice, he didn’t let on. He wouldn’t care anyway. Jason Walker was afraid of no one, least of all his little sister.
‘Oh it is. I promise you.’
Where had she heard that before? Jason’s promises. They were legendary.
She sighed, not even willing to disguise it for him. ‘I’m on the way.’
‘Where are you anyway? You aren’t driving. Are you—?’
He stopped. Perhaps he heard the wind on the line. Perhaps it was something else. But he knew exactly where she was.
‘I’m fine. I’m on the way.’
‘OK. Drive safe.’ She didn’t know that tone of voice quite so well. Chastened, worried. That didn’t sound like Jason at all. But for once she decided not to argue.
The roads rolled across the landscape, past little white Breton houses with their Atlantic blue shutters, granite lintels and slate roofs. Riots of hydrangea filled the gardens and spilled over the low grey walls, blue and purple, pink and red.
She set out across the flat, mist-shrouded landscape of rambling fields and low hedgerows. Hardly any trees here, not at the coast. She remembered Simon explaining it was to do with the soil and the stones, the salt in the air and the sea, like everything here. Everything came back to the sea. Everything here, everything, reminded her of Simon.
Because when your fiancé drowned in the place he loved most in the world it tended to stick with you. And ruin that place forever.
By the time she reached the junction by the windmills at Trouguer, her stomach was churning and she was half tempted to turn and just keep driving in the other direction. To forget she ever had a brother.
But she couldn’t do that.
