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“Who looks after your grandfather when you work?” I asked, as the tractor engine idled. I had nine salt piles still outstanding but an impressive heap of salt building in the trailer. Feeling sorry for me, Florian hopped down and joined in with a second shovel, tossing each load into the trailer as if it weighed nothing at all. Maybe my lily-white, untoned body would resemble his if I spent a summer doing this. I hadn’t realised quite how much people stopped and stared and took photographs until I stood on this side of the cycle path. Likening it to being on a stage and putting on a show wasn’t wide of the mark. I had no interest inviting comparisons with Florian’s honed lean physique, so despite the heat, my shirt stayed on, pasted to my chest and back with sweat, like a second skin.
“No one looks after him.” His handsome features twisted into a slight grimace. “Not yet, anyhow. Some days, he’s perfectly fine, and I wonder if I’m making up the whole memory loss thing. The next, he’s telling me about his friend Paul’s bad shoulder, for the fifth time in as many minutes. Or informing me he’s off to chat to my grandmother—his wife. She’s been dead four years.”
“Was she called Beatrice, by any chance? He mentioned her to me when I met him.”
Florian rolled his eyes. “Let me guess, he said he was going to visit her?”
“He did, actually. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He blew out a long sigh. “In his head, he goes to visit her every day. It’s quite a new thing. I never know what to say when he adds it to his list of daily activities, because if I point out she’s dead, he might not remember, and it might upset him.” He lifted a shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “I suppose there’s no harm in it if it makes him happy.”
We shovelled another pile and Florian inched the tractor a few more metres forward. “Do you have any other family?”
“Oh yes.” He smiled broadly. “There are a few of us, dotted all over the island. Although my dad buggered off years ago—I don’t have anything to do with him. And my mum has moved down to Bordeaux for a few years, to help my sister until her kids are older. She’s a nurse, a single parent. It’s given my mum the chance to experience big city life for a change.”
He laughed at this, making quotation marks with his fingers around big city life. “She will come back thinking she’s Brigitte Bardot.”
“You didn’t fancy joining her?”
“Mon dieu, non,” he scoffed, as if it was the most absurd of suggestions. “Like the péquenaud who taught you that appalling French accent, I’m a country boy at heart.”
I had no idea what a péquenaud was, but I knew enough to know he was taking the piss.
“I have cousins and uncles, too,” he carried on. “We have another couple of salt marshes up towards Les Portes that my cousins farm. But there is only me and Papi in Loix. I used to rent a small place with my friend Nico, but it made sense for me to move back in with Papi after my grandmother died. Especially with my mum moving away. I grew up living with him anyhow.”
“Did he used to farm?” Farming seemed a strange word to use for salt, more a word I tended to associate with cows and lush green fields. But I guessed I held a spade in my hand and Florian drove a tractor, so there was that.
“Yeah, right here. Our family has owned this salt flat and the one next door forever.” His tone was proud and his silver glowed as he waved his implement around at the large overgrown pond next to his neat, harvested tiles. I’d hardly given it a second glance, the tourists ignored it too. In my humble opinion, it could do with some serious weeding.
“Why don’t you farm that one too?”
He huffed out another sigh. “Someone needs to listen more carefully when Florian explains the intricacies of salt harvesting! It’s my reservoir. I can’t farm this tile without a reserve of water next door. We rely on the wind and the sun’s heat to evaporate the water in the tiles, in order to harvest the salt. But too much, and the tiles dry out, and all there is to rake is salt mixed with dirt. So I use the reservoir to top them up. In a few years’ time, I will swap them over, and then swap them back. And so on.”
I frowned. The land around here was flat as a saucepan lid, and the neglected-looking tile had steep sides, about the depth of a lido, and was strangled with weeds. “So how does the water get from that one to this one?”
“Écoute:” Florian adjusted his Panama. “Listen: I will explain. There are pipes burrowed between the two ponds that I turn on and off. A hydraulic system. The water in this one doesn’t sit still and stagnate; it is pumped around all the tiles. My fallow reservoir has a drainage basin which sits slightly higher than the rest and is about this wide.” He propped his shovel up against his chest so he could make a shape with his hands, holding them out about foot or more apart. “And it channels into a narrower section, so the water can flow from that basin into this one, controlled, like so.” He brought his hands down and closer together, “And then it flares out again, rounding like this.” His hands formed a classic hourglass, almost in a sensual manner.
“Shaped like a curvy woman’s body,” I acknowledged.
He shrugged. “I’m gay. I don’t study women too closely. Mais, voila, you see my ugly pond over there is ugly for a very good reason.”
He gave me a gentle smile and climbed onto the tractor to chug forwards another few feet, so I wouldn’t feel awkward. And I didn’t especially, because apart from his sexuality being accidentally brought into the conversation, a level of intimacy neither of us had expected or sought, the fact he was gay was neither here nor there. Given I was quite inward-looking these days; whether he was, or not, hadn’t crossed my mind.
With Florian helping, we loaded the remaining pyramids onto the trailer, and I watched with satisfaction as he trundled to his salt mountain, tipped the trailer, and added the day’s harvest to it. This was the coarse grey salt, he explained, the bulk of his harvest. At the end of the season, it would be weighed then added to the island’s collective produce, housed at the cooperative building in Ars, and sold on. The salt he harvested in the evenings was the prized fleur de sel, but that lecture would have to wait for another day, as already a few tourists had gathered for his afternoon tour.
I had already slipped back into my shoes and was ready to leave when Florian returned after parking the tractor. “Thank you, Charles.” Gracefully, he looped his arms through his T-shirt and eased it over his head.
“No, I should be thanking you.” I hesitated. “Helping you, doing this… it’s the best I’ve felt in a while.” I blew on my sore palms then held them up to show him. “And look, I’ve acquired a whole host of new friends.”
Circling my wrist with his finger and thumb, Florian inspected the raised sore blisters before rubbing the pad of his thumb along my palm. A slow smirk spread across his face, his sea-glass eyes flashing with amusement. Tonight, I should have a crack at trying to draw him, although I wasn’t sure I could ever do him justice. My green rippled. “It’s put your head in a better place, working with me?”
I nodded and he gave them a final tender rub before letting my hand drop. “Then those aren’t blisters, Charles, they’re trophies.”
In the distance, the solitary Loix church bell chimed three o’clock. We both became aware of it at the same time, and he glanced over to the shimmering salt tiles and the people gathered there. “I mustn’t keep my loyal fans waiting. Come join me for a drink tomorrow at L’Escale. I’ll cook for you afterwards.”
CHAPTER 8
FLORIAN
