Something for the weekend

The priest left through a small side door, and Lucy came over and gave me a hug.

"Well, that was interesting. He came in and found me crawling around on the floor. I thought he was going to go off on one, but actually he was quite friendly, and completely not paranoid, which is a nice change."
"Did you tell him what you were looking for?"
"I asked if he knew anything about the Guthlac connection, but he's fairly new here. He said that some of the locals were a bit... oo er about it, a little bit supersitious, but he doesn't hold with that kind of stuff."
"Ironic for a priest to be against superstition."

"I know. Anyway, we talked about the area. There are quite a few towns round here that used to be islands. And there was a lot of salt production, which they still do on Noirmoutier Island, as well as things like oyster catching and fishing. But you'll find pine forests and dunes now where there used to be sea, and the main industry around here, according to him, is the selling of holiday homes. So. Let's look at this inscription."

She took the torch and wiggled her way sexily along the benches, shining it down at the floor. When she found what she was looking for, she stopped and bent lower down, peering at the faint lettering carved into the stone.

"Bugger," she said. "It's all in Latin or mediaeval French or something."
"Can't you tell?"
"Not easily. I don't suppose you remember much Latin from school?"
"Caecilius," I said, in my best English accent. "Nihil durare potest tempore perpetuo."

She looked at me blankly, the beginnings of a smile in her eyes. "You are so bad," she said. "Have you been seducing women with your Latin all these years?"
"Nah. Somebody I knew a long time ago. It was their motto."
"Meaning?"
"Nothing lasts for ever, including my knowledge of dead languages."

She laughed. "Oh well. I'll have to come back with a dictionary or something."
"Why don't you take a photo of it?"
She paused, another smile growing on her face.
"Well, duh. Why didn't I think of that? My camera's in your car."
"Use mine," I said. I pulled it out of my shirt pocket. "It's tiny but it'll take a good picture."

She spent some time crawling around and under and over the benches, taking photos occasionally, starting to sing to herself again.

When she'd finished, we headed back to the car. On the way, a strange thing. We saw the Guy Who Nobody Knows from the party the night before, stepping out of a boulangerie and turning quickly to go up a narrow alleyway. I don't know if he saw us or not.
"Who is that guy?" said Lucy.
"Nobody knows."

We bought some bread and ham, some bottled water, and drove to the beach at Bretignolles-sur-Mer. Ironically, the old village of Bretignolles is very much no longer sur-Mer, but a little way inland. On the sea were hundreds of nearly new holiday homes, built in the dunes, many of them probably illegal according to building regulations. We found a wide, almost empty, sandy beach and sat for the afternoon letting the sea breeze blow through our hair. As the sun got lower we walked, found some rock pools and spent a happy hour looking for crabs and taking photos.

Just before we left, I picked up a piece of driftwood from amongst the detritus on the beach and wrote "NIHIL DURARE POTEST TEMPORE PERPETUO" in the sand.

"Arty," she said. "Let's go and find a bed for the night."