Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  When I admit this subterranean plan my mind has been making, I recognize, that no, we do not change all that much, essentially. I’ve been an expert in stolen nights in hotels all my life; I’m only surprising myself slightly at planning one at the age I am now.

  I send out an email to all my remaining students; then I write to my head of department and the secretaries, something personal has come up, I have to leave immediately, before the semester officially ends at the end of the week, and anything important can be forwarded to me by email.

  My flight to Zurich arrives at seven in the morning and I walk about the airport with that drained, skinned-alive feeling you get from overnight flights, waiting for my connection to Charles de Gaulle. On the transatlantic plane I sat next to a woman who told me she was eighty-three, and going home after visiting her daughter in the US. She thought the US very dirty compared to Switzerland. I said that she was not the only person to think so—that yes, America was a young, brash country, that it was dirty, that our politics were appalling on the whole but that yes, Obama was an elegant young man with good ideas, and I, too, was relieved that nobody had assassinated him. My neighbor was well coiffed, even after a night sitting up in a plane with eye mask on and tray table stowed after picking at a tray of food. I’d thought—Switzerland is the place for you, if you are this fastidious. Or do we take on the attitudes and manners of the places we find ourselves in? No, I said, I do not know Zurich, I’m only changing planes, to go on to Paris. Yes, it was a good, clean airline. Yes, one had to be careful. And then she had patted her silver coiffed hair and said, “I don’t know for how much longer I can go on flying to the US to see my daughter. I’m eighty-three already. It is a great strain on the body. And I do not think she will ever come home.”

  I felt sorry for her, then, and saw her courage, under the fussy exterior. I couldn’t imagine being eighty-three, and obliged to fly the Atlantic every year—not yet. We all have our stories, and sometimes they spill out of us in bits and pieces, and we let ourselves, just for that moment, be seen. I suddenly saw an old woman holding herself together, with hairpins and lipstick and good luggage and morale, and admired her for it.

  Zurich airport is even more glossy and removed from any real world than most airports are. I pass shops of incredible glamour, with impossibly expensive watches, bracelets, rings in their windows. Everything is rich and shiny, yet discreet. I notice, glancing at it, that my watch has stopped, and no, it isn’t operating on US time, it’s simply not moving, however hard I try to make it do so. I see that one of the hands has actually become detached. There’s no way to mend it in a hurry. There is just time, as I pass one of the expensive shops, to dive in and buy myself a watch, a Swiss watch, not the most expensive but not the cheapest either; it’s a luxury, but when will I ever be in Zurich again? I whip out my American Express card and charge it, and go on, pulling my bag along on its wheels, to find my Paris flight. It’s a beautiful watch, with a flat round face and Roman numerals. The second hand is a thin gold wand, it shows today’s date, and, at the bottom, near six o’clock, it says discreetly, Swiss Made. I am in the land of marked time and precision instruments. It will be a souvenir of an hour spent in Zurich, where I may never be again. I wear it, and go on to board my plane for Paris feeling better equipped for this world than I have for a long time. It occurs to me, as I settle in to my seat for the short flight, that time stopped for me in Zurich, and I made a bargain with it: I’ll buy a new watch, that will see me into my next decade. I slip my old one into my bag; it was a present from my father when I was young, and has ticked on well into this new century; until today. My new watch gleams on my left wrist, showing me the correct time for where I am now, regular as a new heart.

  By mid-morning I am walking out through Charles de Gaulle, with no one apparently paying any attention to me; even the couple of men at Customs only look up to give me a passing smile. Then I am on to the RER and the true grime of underground Paris, to surface on a dark summer morning, the sun lurking behind clouds and streets where the garbage collectors have not yet been, streets on which people still spit and dogs pee and it all looks much as it ever did. I think of my airplane companion and what she might have said. Dizzy with lack of sleep, I trundle my bag down the street towards my hotel.

  Before calling Alexandre, I lie on the bed in the hotel, nearly fall asleep, then get up to have a shower, wash my hair, and change my clothes. There is no need for the rush and hurry of our younger days, when I would have called him from the airport if I could—no cell phones, then—and he would have been waiting impatiently at whatever hotel we had picked for our rendezvous. We would have pulled off our clothes and fallen down on the nearest bed, washed or unwashed, at that time.

  We have a history of hotels, he and I. Cheap, even grungy hotels; rue de la Bûcherie, rue Magenta, rue Gît-le-Coeur, rue Saint-Marcel, rue Saint-Lazare, when Paris hotels were not what they are today. All over the city, wherever we could rent for the afternoon; and the rooms, wildly wallpapered, with bidets or tiny bathrooms where we could not both fit in the shower, with sagging overused beds and, once, even someone else’s condom left behind. The younger you are, I now think, the less you mind about such things. The urgency of desire, of the flesh, of coming together like this over distance and time, the romance of it all quite covering up the details. I would not dream of going to such a hotel now. The one I have chosen is in the 6ème, behind Odéon, near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, three-star, touristique, and the rooms are clean, and now it is not a question of renting by the hour. But, as I say, we have this history behind us, and so whatever hotel we find ourselves in for the meetings of our mature years, it is one in a long line, a link on a chain of memory, a chapter in a history we have shared between us over more than forty years.

  I put in my earrings, turn away from the mirror, think briefly of the students I left behind me only yesterday, in the US. Another life. How we invent lives for ourselves, spinning from one to another with such ease, such apparent insouciance. My eighty-three-year-old neighbor, resolutely crossing the Atlantic to meet her daughter in some grim American city where nobody understood her. Myself, professor at an American university, waiting in a Paris hotel room to meet my long-term lover, a man in his late sixties with a shaky heart and thinning white hair. I imagine one of the students, puzzled, asking “But what it the point in falling in love with someone if you don’t get together in the end?” The marriage plot—beginning, middle, end. Alexandre and I have had no such plot—he was married to someone else, a couple of someone elses, for so many of these years, and now, well, there is no longer any need for it, it seems. I live in the US, he in Paris. We meet like this, migrating birds flying in to settle for a brief time on a cliff-face. And part, these days, without pain. Or nearly without pain.

  He is downstairs in the lobby, waiting. I’ve come down in the elevator, to avoid him coming up to my room immediately. We practice these politenesses, these little thoughtful adaptations to our age and station. I see his white head from above, hair thinned across his scalp, and it gives me a pang. Once, it was so rich and brown, thick and down to his shoulders. But like this we forgive our own physical changes, in not noticing each other’s. The eyes don’t change. The parts of the body that are usually covered by clothes remain pale, unmarked, curiously young.

  “Ah,” he says, coming towards me. And “Ah,” I say too; and we kiss on both cheeks, and then he briefly, almost surreptitiously, takes my hand and squeezes it. We are the same height; he isn’t a tall man, but compact, with only a slightly perceptible gut. The desk clerk looks away. They must spend a lot of their time looking away, or at their computer screen, these days. I remember, in our early days, the fierce stares of concierges who parked their bosoms on their desks, watching us and everybody else come and go. So many rooms, so many meetings: and then, so many departures. I walk out through the glass door he holds open for me and on to the street, where the sun has come out and traffic
flashes and lunchtime crowds hustle and the long green buses follow each other down rue de Rennes.

  “Tu veux manger? We can have lunch.”

  In fact, I am very hungry, after not eating anything at the Zurich airport—nothing since bad coffee in a paper cup and what they call a continental breakfast at 33,000 feet. These days, it is all right to admit it. I don’t have to pretend, and listen to my stomach rumbling, and try to stop it. We will have a good lunch, although it’s early for lunch, in France. Neither of us will be insulted by putting off the removal of clothes, the rush of body to body, the relief of skin. In fact, probably both of us are glad of it. When you are our age, you need time, and food, and to sit on a comfortable chair in a good restaurant and know that everything is coming to you, all in its own good time.

  “Nice watch,” says Alexandre. “Is it new?”

  3.

  In the middle of the last century—a date that now looks like old history—Hannah and I were at boarding school together for five long years. It felt like a lifetime; when you are a teenager, you have little capacity for the long-term prisoner’s resignation. Our minds and bodies were impatient, our souls cowed. When I first knew Hannah, she had long fair hair, usually plaited in two braids, and wore those National Health glasses. It’s a look that nobody has now: the underfed myopic English schoolgirl of the 1950s. She was small for her age so I felt like a beanpole beside her. Our school was a well-known girls’ school in the deep west country of England, a mile outside the nearest town, far enough someone had thought from the temptations of shops and boys. Though we were probably both equally unhappy, we never told each other this. At our school, we never told anybody anything that had to do with feelings. When we cried, it had to be under the bedclothes or in the lavatory, or at the far end of the games field, and even that was never safe. Girls who cried were scorned and mocked, probably because everybody wanted to cry at some point, and so those who gave in were derided mercilessly. I remember a girl who cried openly when her father left her at the gates and drove away in his Alfa Romeo; her name was Daphne, which we thought a wet name, and she was thought wet, for crying, and in my mind that connected with the car, that made it look as if her father was enjoying himself rather too much to care about her. So nobody wanted either to have too flamboyant a parent, or car, or to be seen to cry. We clenched our fingers around hidden wet handkerchiefs, and bit our lips, and stifled thoughts of home.

  The effects of boarding school on my later life have been varied and mostly inconvenient. I can’t bear having to share a room with anybody else, after years in a dormitory. So, no marriage bed—although I have several times been tempted. Also, since we had to use each other’s dirty bathwater, the prefects getting the clean water, in our twice-weekly baths, I am obsessive these days about clean bathrooms. The men in my life, particularly the Americans, have been curiously interested in all the details of boarding-school life that I find most ridiculous. Uniforms, knee socks, strict mistresses. One of them was particularly fascinated when I told him about the knicker inspection. This ritual was to ensure that nobody was wearing anything frilly or insubstantial; we were supposed to wear green wool knickers over white cotton “linings,” hence the periodic lineup in which we whisked up our skirts to put our underwear on view. I can see the possible erotic connection, yes. But Alexandre, being French, sniffs at all that and simply calls it “histoires de bonnes femmes” and irremediably, ridiculously English. Knickers and uniforms and rigid routines apart, our school was a nest of incipient lesbianism, according to him, although I don’t think many of us knew the word. I’ve told him, it simply isn’t possible to be in an environment like that and not to long for someone to love. So crushes and pashes were “in” but I don’t think many of them blossomed into full affairs; partly because the rules around who was allowed into one’s cubicle or dormitory were so strict, partly because we were all so ignorant.

  Hannah was a little younger than I was, and in a lower form, as they were called; so we didn’t meet often during school hours. Neither of us was good at games, or involved in any school activities. Did she ever join a chess club? I don’t think so. We didn’t do clubs, or join the choir, or feature on any team. She wasn’t easy to get to know; perhaps that was why I wanted to know her. She had a self-containment about her that was rare. It was as if she lived somewhere else, inside her head, and all the school noise, the rules and punishments, hardly touched her. I noticed that soon she began to avoid doing anything that would result in her having to wait outside our housemistress’s door after lunch, where the miscreants, usually including myself, had to line up. Or perhaps she simply didn’t get caught. I was always being accused of something, usually accurately: I lost my possessions, scattering them across the school, I was late for class, missed prayers, was caught talking, borrowed someone else’s cloak without a thought when I couldn’t find my own. I existed in a state of permanent rebellion, not deliberately, but by default: I couldn’t understand what was being asked of me, or was simply incapable of doing it.

  As in prisons, I imagine, some inmates are perpetually in trouble; others get by. When I was tired of all the trouble, I reported sick to the matron and earned a few days’ solitary confinement in the Sanatorium, where our school doctor was, we thought, rather too fond of examining girls’ chests. We called him The Quack and sat shivering as we waited our turn, topless and goose-bumped, for his inspection and the cold touch of his stethoscope. If you could get past him, cough convincingly or complain of stomach pains, you were ushered away to the San. There, you could cry out your homesickness without anyone hearing, because nobody came near you anyway except to bring congealing meals on trays. It was a retreat for a time from the demanding world of school to a place where you could truly feel the depths of your misery.

  I don’t know if Hannah ever went to the Sanatorium deliberately, as I did; but there was that one time, later in both our careers, when she was effectively made a prisoner there. Neither did she take part in the violent games of hockey and lacrosse that we had to play every afternoon in the winter mud. How had she got out of them, I wondered? Then I discovered that she was always in the library, during the afternoons, and that being in the library, deep in some book, turned out to be an almost acceptable alternative to games. I saw her there one day when I went to get a book for my history essay—I’d never thought about just sitting there for hours—and whispered, “How do you manage it? Are you off games?”

  “I just say I have to work,” she whispered back. “My parents wrote a note. It was easy.”

  I knew I couldn’t rely on my own parents writing a note, since they were annoyingly keen on fresh air and exercise, but I did get them to say that I needed extra study time if I was to get to university and that perhaps all this hockey and lacrosse was rather excessive. I don’t know if they wrote the second part, in spite of my prompting. So Hannah and I sat in the library on those dark winter afternoons of our adolescence, instead of clashing hockey sticks red-kneed in the mud, and read. We had a French literature teacher who told us in a whisper one day about Proust (he was not on the syllabus so she was not supposed to mention him), and we embarked on him secretly, passionately, travelers setting out on a long-haul journey. We also read Hakluyt and Marlowe and Melville and Restoration comedy and surprisingly sexy books about Mary Queen of Scots—allowed because they were historical?—and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and all of Conan Doyle. We read hungrily and at random and quite uncritically, just gobbling up the literary world. If anyone ever asked me later how I got my education, I said it was because I got off games at my school, and read instead.

  We were also, Hannah and I, the girls with the unusual names. Claudia and Hannah were odd in the nineteen-fifties, when everyone was called Jennifer or Elizabeth or Jane. Yes, as I’ve said, we have nearly the same names as the women in Antonioni’s film L’Avventura. But it was a long time later, when we saw the film together at the Cambridge Arts Cinema, that we discovered
this and glanced at each other, amazed, in the smoky dark.

  4.

  I don’t talk much about my schooldays to Alexandre. As I have said, he isn’t turned on by stories of schoolgirls—all lesbians, as he will say, as dismissively as he still does of feminists—and apart from some vague hygienic worry about our bathing practices—you mean you actually had to get into dirty water? And there was no lock on the door?—he finds nothing there but a slight historical interest. So I don’t reminisce, or make up stories about it; it’s an unfortunate part of my past to him, as if I had been a nun, or in jail. A past that was typically Anglo-Saxon, bizarre in a word, and not worth discussing from a rational French point of view. He is really only interested in the Hannah-Claudia saga when it starts to include him.

  I’ve told him several times that he’s an old-fashioned French sexist, and that times have changed and left him behind. But now—that is, at the moment when we are together again in a comfortable bedroom in a hotel in the sixième—there is no scoffing or accusing. We’ve found, once again, the alignment of bodies that we’ve trusted and returned to over so many years. We have our heads on the same pillow, his hands are spread across my body, I breathe in the reliable scent of him that does not change over time. Other things have changed, of course. He gestures to his penis that no longer can be relied upon. “You have no idea,” he tells me, “how upsetting this is for a man. We count on it our whole lives, and then all at once it is over. Or, not over, but not, you know, responsive. Not like before.”

  I say that I am not like before, either, but we both know that though I’m just as wrinkled and slack in places as he is, I can always be reached sexually. Orgasm, as far as I know, goes on for women for the whole of life, if approached right. I lie back and let him give me what he knows so well to give, and stifle the thought that this is purely selfish, because he has told me often enough that this is pleasure enough for him. I have never known anyone who has made me feel as he does in bed, that I am perfect in every way. Even in my sixties, even lazily lying here letting him do the work, even when I laugh with the renewed pleasure of it, and his penis only shifts a little against his thigh. He doesn’t believe in Viagra—bad for the heart, and anyway, do you want to make love with an automaton? My pleasure is his, he says on occasions like this, and I believe him.