Metroland (14 page)

‘Not like …’

‘Not like Redon. Quite.’

‘Redon,’ went Dave, ‘Redon. Oxfor’, Bah-nbri, Bur-meeng’am.
Changez, changez
.’ He whistled and chuffed.

‘Why are you working on him then?’

‘It’s the grant, man, the grant. It’s got me right here … 
aaaaargh.’ He gurgled as he clutched at his heart, acting fatally wounded. Dave leaned over him, pressed his ear to his chest.

‘You gotta tell me, Doc,’ Mickey panted in a wrecked way, ‘you gotta tell me. Am I hurt bad?’

Dave pulled up one of Mickey’s eyelids, slapped him round the face a few times, and listened again. Marion watched impassively. Dave put on a frown.

‘Well, you’re an intelligent man; I think you can face the truth. It’s serious, certainly, but probably not fatal. You have a displaced bill-fold and your credit has crumpled in under the pressure. You have this draining problem, but I think I’ll be able to put in a plug.’

‘Thanks, Doc, you’re a pal. I couldn’t have taken it from anyone else.’ They stopped and looked at me. I said nothing, wondering what was going on.

‘You realise, of course,’ Dave went on, ‘that you’re suffering from acute alcohol shortage?’

‘Oh no, Doc, do you mean I could …’

‘Afraid so. It’s one of the acutest cases I’ve seen for some time. Just take a look at this.’ He held up Mickey’s empty glass.

‘No, no, no, I won’t, I can’t,’ Mickey began to shout, hiding his head in his arms.

‘You must look,’ Dave said firmly. ‘You must face these things.’ Gradually, he began to prise Mickey’s arms away from his head. He held up the glass in front of the patient’s eyes. Mickey did a faint.

I got the point. I would have done so earlier if I hadn’t been watching the play. It was my round.

4 • Beatific Couples

When I wasn’t with Annick, or wandering the streets looking to catch life on the hip – that sudden nun, the
clochard
with
Le Monde
, the monstrous sadness of a barrel organ – I was with Mickey, Dave and Marion. In a month together they had become inseparable. I made the natural comparison with
Jules et Jim
; Mickey replied, with an unsettling candour, that he had landed the Jeanne Moreau part. It was true: he was the instigator, the provoker, the one for whose attention the other two competed. Dave competed by joining in, Marion by pretending to stand apart. Uncertain of my status, I tagged along with them on rounds of cafés, return visits to the Musée Gustave Moreau (the
gardien
never recognised us), and sudden trips out of Paris to the edge of the Beauce, or to the mad, polychrome chocolate factory at Noisiel.

Marion was believed by her parents to be taking a course which the organisers – with Gallic modesty – called
Civilisation
: chunks of Descartes, lectures on the Code Napoléon, sessions of Rameau, coach-tours of Versailles and Sèvres. Marion frequently tempted herself with reasons for staying away. Lunch with me was one more easy reason.

We began meeting every few days at a little café-restaurant called Le Petit Coq near the République (Métro: Filles du Calvaire); we lunched off long, tubular sandwiches the size of small dachshunds. It wasn’t an amorous conspiracy; we met because we had time on our hands. We discussed Mickey and Dave a lot. I would practise my new-found candour and offer frowningly serious analyses of my shifting responses to them;
Marion was more reticent in judgment, but also more generous. She was, I noted, practical in her thoughts, sharp on both vagueness and pretension. She was easy to talk to; but also had an unsettling habit of asking me questions which I imagined I had escaped from, and wouldn’t have to put up with again before my return to England.

‘What are you going to do, then?’ she once asked, over our third or fourth lunch.

(Do? What was I going to do? What could she mean? Was she asking for a pass? Surely not here; though she was looking pretty today, her boyishly cropped hair newly washed, and a pinky-brown dress tightly gathered at all the nice places. Do? She couldn’t actually mean …)

‘You mean … with … my life?’ I half-giggled, waiting for her to join in.

‘Of course. What’s funny?’

‘Well, it’s funny that you’re the first person of my own age who’s actually ever asked that. It’s so … authoritarian.’

‘Sorry, I’m not meaning to sound authoritarian; just curious. I wondered if you’d ever asked yourself the question.’

I’d never needed to, that was part of the trouble – I was always getting asked it by others. When I was a child, the question always came down at me vertically, from above, along with orange ten-shilling notes at Christmas and Boots tokens and strange powders and scents and the occasional swipe. When I was an adolescent, it came from a different (but still downward) angle, from concerned masters armed with pamphlets and the word ‘life’, which they pronounced as if it were an item of Corps uniform. Finally, when I was a student, the question came horizontally, from parents sharing a bottle of wine, from tutors sharing a manly sex joke, once from a girl who thought that it would act as an anaphrodisiac. When, I wondered, would the angle change; when would I find myself looking down on the question?

‘Well, I suppose my problem’s always been the short term. There are quite a lot of jobs I wouldn’t mind ending up with. I wouldn’t mind running the BBC, for instance, and I’d like
to have my own publishing firm and an art gallery on the side while of course always leaving time to lead the RPO. Then I wouldn’t mind being a General in a sort of way, and there’s the Cabinet, though I think I’ll keep that up my sleeve in case all else fails. I’d
quite
like to run a cross-Channel ferry, and architecture is definitely a possibility, and you think I’m joking but you’d be surprised that I’m not really.’

Marion just looked at me, half smiling, half impatient.

‘I mean I am up to a point, but then again I’m not. One problem is, I sometimes don’t feel I’m quite the right age. Do you have that?’

‘No.’

‘I mean, you may happen to think I’m rather immature, but actually I often don’t feel quite at ease with the age I’ve got. Sometimes, in a funny sort of way, I long to be a sprightly sixty-five. You don’t have that?’

‘No.’

‘It’s as if everyone has a perfect age to which they aspire, and they’re only truly at ease with themselves when they get there. I suppose with most people it’s between twenty-five and thirty-five, so the question doesn’t really arise, or if it does it’s in a disguised form: when they’ve passed thirty-five they assume their disgruntlement comes from being middle-aged and seeing senility and death on the way. But it also comes from leaving behind their perfect age.’

‘How very odd. Fancy looking forward to bed bottles and tripping over paving stones.’

‘I said a sprightly sixty-five.’

‘Oh, so it’s going to be all country walks and reading Peacock by the fire and having adoring grandchildren making you muffins?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t have a specific fantasy image. I just have a feeling. But only sometimes.’

‘Maybe you can’t face the struggle to make a living.’

‘Why do you think there is a struggle?’ (Hah, not letting her get away with that one too easily. Just because she wants to be a civil servant or something.)

‘Well, how are you going to support your wife and children?’

‘Where, where?’ I did the panicky, over-the-shoulder look. I could see nothing more realistic than two kids in Start-Rite shoes, satchels on their shoulders, gazing at the long road ahead. Certainly no wife, no picture of a wife. What did Marion think she was up to? She could lay off, you know, if she wanted to. ‘Give me time, give me time.’

‘Why?’ (The funny thing was, her manner wasn’t hectoring at all; it was quite amiable – but just fucking persistent.)

‘I’m only twenty-one. I mean, I’m still …’

‘Still what?’

‘Well, still having relationships.’

‘In the plural?’

‘Well, not simultaneously, of course not.’

‘Why not?’ (Why could I never predict the way the conversation was going?)

‘Well, I suppose I may have discarded Christian sexual ethics, but I do believe in being faithful to one person at a time.’

‘That’s a funny statement. Anyway, isn’t marriage a relationship?’

‘Of course. So what?’

‘Well, you said that you were going to have relationships and then you were going to get married.’

‘I didn’t say I
was
going to get married.’

‘Technically I suppose you didn’t, no.’ (Actually, I bloody didn’t, either)

‘But?’

She had put her head on one side and was pushing the crumbs of her lunch around the plate. Then she looked up. Why can you always tell when people are going to say nasty things to you?

‘But you’re not odd enough not to.’

‘Anyway, it depends on …’

‘The right girl at the right time at the right price?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Don’t you believe it. I daresay it happens sometimes, and I
daresay that’s what it looks like, or what you make it look like in retrospect. It’s usually other things, though, isn’t it?’

‘…?’

‘Opportunity, meal ticket, desire for children …’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘… fear of ageing, possessiveness. I don’t know, I think it often comes from a reluctance to admit that you’ve never in your life loved hard enough to end up married. A sort of misplaced idealism, really, a determination to prove that you’re capable of the ultimate experience.’

‘You know, you’re much more sceptical than I thought I was.’

It was extraordinary. To hear a girl saying things like this, coming out with men’s tough talk, the sort of remarks in which you only half believed yourself, but which were called for on various occasions. (Annick never spoke like this, and I thought she was uniquely honest.) But Marion talked without any bravado; she behaved as if she were making simple, incontestable observations. She was smiling at me again.

‘I don’t think I’m being cynical, if that’s what you mean by saying sceptical.’

‘But you’ve been reading La Rochefoucauld.
“Il y a certains gens
…” ’

‘I know it. No, I haven’t; I’ve been observing.’ (She looked at me closely; she was nice to be looked at by) ‘Before I came out here, a friend of mine got married. She was my age, he was about thirty. A week before the wedding, we were meant to be going to the cinema, the three of us, but she had a cold or something, so I went with him. We ended up talking about marriage. He said how he was looking forward to it and how he supposed it would be all right in the end, and you were bound to have your ups and downs – the usual stuff they all come out with; and then he said, “To be honest, it’s obviously not the greatest love in the world”.’

‘How did you react?’

‘I was shocked at first, partly because he was marrying my friend, but mainly because I found it hard to believe anyone
could go into marriage without first persuading himself that no one had ever before loved as strongly as he was doing.’

‘Did you tell your friend?’

‘No. Because after I’d thought about it, I realised I wasn’t shocked at all, that his remark was rather admirable. And that my friend probably had some similar reservation, but wasn’t letting on. Anyway, they were both reasonable people and neither was feeble-minded or weak-willed, so I thought I didn’t have the right to interfere.’

‘Quite.’

‘But it struck me later that, as they looked like any other beatific couple on their wedding day, other beatific couples probably had similar reservations.’

‘The logic isn’t faultless, you know.’

‘No, but the observation is.’

‘Yes, I suppose it may be.’

I didn’t really have any grounds for dissent; I didn’t even have any evidence of my own to offer.

There was a silence, as if there had been implications in the conversation which we hadn’t admitted at the time, but which were now percolating through. I looked at her, and noticed the colour of her eyes for the first time: they were dark slate-grey, the colour of French roofs after rain. She wasn’t smiling.

‘Don’t start reading things into this conversation,’ she suddenly said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if you’re starting to feel threatened, you might just decide I fancy you.’

‘…’

‘What’s she like, just out of interest, the girl you’re having a relationship with, as you put it?’

‘What’s odd about putting it that way? Annick.’

‘Annick.’

What could I say? I felt that any description I gave would be a sort of betrayal; yet not to say anything would make it seem as if I were ashamed of her; even hesitating made it look as if I was doing a quiet mental cover-up.

‘You don’t have to tell me – it’s none of my business after all.’

‘No, no, I want to – or at any rate, I don’t mind telling you. She’s … very direct, and … um, emotional, and …’ (Christ, what else?) ‘… and I don’t lie to her.’

‘It’s OK.’ Marion had got up, and was reaching into her purse for her share of the lunch bill. ‘Don’t bother, I won’t embarrass you.’

I had, I realised, been blushing energetically. When asked to describe Annick, I could somehow only see her in the privacy of orgasm, with me plugged into her. Also I suddenly found it hard translating my time with her into unfamiliar English.

‘I’m not embarrassed, I just …’

She dropped a few francs on the table and left. I attacked my remaining slab of bread – a large, damp, unsalted, open-pored slice. Then I tried to skim off the last quarter-inch of coffee, but tangled with the grounds. Why was I so upset? Did I fancy Marion? Why had I felt I didn’t want her to leave? That’d be something – fancying two people at once. And what about them fancying you? Though did she fancy me? Nice tits, I murmured nudgingly to myself; though, to tell the truth, I didn’t really know whether they were nice or nasty. Yes I did, of course I did. They were nice because they existed. They were nice because they lived in a bra with hooks at the back and secret bits of elastic and straps you could occasionally glimpse. They were nice because they would probably turn out, if you were good, to have nipples at the end.